This is Ruth Jarvis, but everyone calls her Ruby.
The girl glances up. She has a long pointed nose, but her eyes are large and blue and beautiful. I can tell she’s not interested in me. She shrugs and goes back to writing in her notebook.
Is this really what happened the first time I saw Anne? Was she writing in a notebook? In the thinning of the light that soon will be morning, I think I may have woven the whole scene out of fragments gathered over the eight years I lived at Brad’s house.
Fragments perhaps, but I’m certain of one thing. Anne hadn’t been afraid of me then.
*
After a night mostly spent relearning the Chopin E Minor Prelude, I’m blear-eyed when my alarm goes off. Bathing my eyes in cold water helps a little. I shower and pull on my office clothes and feel my way downstairs, hoping not to meet Mrs. Pence and worry her with my obvious lack of sleep. At least I’m in luck there—she’s already warming up with scales in the piano room with the door shut, and I go through the kitchen and out the back door to unlock the Pontiac.
The early sun hits me in the face, and I shut my eyes and watch red and purple blotches swim under my eyelids. When I can open my eyes again, I’m looking down at the little garden of carrots and onions that somebody tends along the side of the garage. The little plants have been freshly watered this morning, a thriving green border along the shriveled backyard grass. On impulse I follow the rows around the garage to check on the contraband and find the marijuana plants also well watered and burgeoning.
Somebody in the neighborhood, thinking no one would ever look behind Mrs. Pence’s garage for an illicit crop? A somebody who also grows carrots and lettuce and onions?
I shake my head and instantly regret it. When I unlock the Pontiac, the sun blinds me. I can stop at the shopping mall on my way home and buy sunglasses, but meanwhile I’ll have to squint my way down from the Orchards to campus. Being half-sightless and brain clouded from lack of sleep isn’t blotting out Anne Roscovitch. Anne Albert, as she is now.
Catina comes to work in worse shape than I’m in. When she takes off her dark glasses, it’s clear that her liquid makeup isn’t enough to hide her black eye. She flounces over to her station and drops her shoulder bag and glares around the office to warn off Jamie and me from asking, but I see from the set of Jamie’s shoulders as she reaches up to water the hanging philodendrons that we’re in for another storm.
Even for her, Catina blazes with color: a bright-green silk shirt with brilliant turquoise pants and turquoise sandals and a rose silk scarf wrapped around her waist. I have a vision of myself on a bandstand in fringed red leather, but my bandstand days are over, and Catina is young and beautiful, even with a black eye.
I drop my eyes to my computer keyboard before Catina catches me looking at her, and just then the outer door opens and Anne walks in.
Anne Roscovitch Albert.
Her eyes fall on me, and I straighten from my keyboard as I promised myself to do, and I look back at her until her eyes move on to Jamie with her watering can and Catina in her defiant colors.
“Jamie. I’ll see you in my office.”
She’s wearing the blue stiletto heels that attack the carpet as she strides to her door and unlocks it.
Jamie shrugs, taps on Anne’s door, and disappears after her.
I find my place in yesterday’s lists and search for my numbing rhythm, but my fingers seem only to draw static from the keyboard. Something’s about to be torn apart. Anne has always known how to protect herself. Always. She can’t fire Catina for having a black eye or Jamie for—whatever she might dream up—because they’re classified staff and can be fired, as Jamie has explained, only after a lengthy documentation of cause. But I think it’s likely she’ll make Dr. Brenner so miserable that he’ll do anything for peace, just the way Brad did, to get Anne to cuddle with him and charm him all over again.
Not that I can picture Dr. Brenner cuddling with Anne. But maybe she can get him to fire me.
A small sound behind me, a muffled sob.
“Catina?”
“Just never mind! Just never mind!”
She has buried her face in her computer screen. I try to concentrate on mine, but it is filled with blurred letters and numbers. For nearly a month I’ve been keying numbers and letters into the database with no idea what they mean, but now, in this gray office where the shadows of hanging plants fall across gray desks and computers and carpet, I’m no longer safe.
Anne’s voice, indistinct and savage, rises from behind her closed door.
My eyes meet Catina’s. Her mouth has dropped open.
Jamie walks out of Anne’s office. Before the door closes behind her, I get a glimpse over her shoulder of Anne’s office walls in decorator blue, blue curtains at the window, blue armchairs, and a framed painting of flowers over Anne’s desk.
Jamie sits at her computer, studies her screen for a moment, riffles through the pages of a manual on her desk, and underlines something without looking up.
Anne’s door wrenches open a second time, and Anne runs out on her killer heels. She blunders into a file cabinet in her haste, slips, and catches herself.
The outer door closes behind her.
“What is going on?” Catina breathes, but no one answers.
Nothing for Catina or me to do but go back to work. Jamie’s rigid shoulders make it clear she’ll allow nothing else.
Just before twelve Dr. Brenner opens his office door, and we all look up from covering our computers.
“Jamie. Catina. Ruth.”
He pauses to look out the window. The strong light picks out the outlines of his skull and the granite furrows of his face.
“Mrs. Albert. She’s getting a divorce. It’s a hard time for her.”
Another pause. “Jamie? Your hearing is set for tomorrow?”
Jamie nods. “I’ll need the morning off.”
“Take the day off.”
He nods and is gone.
“The way I heard the story yesterday,” says Jamie into the silence, “he’s the one divorcing her. Francis Albert, I mean. Maybe he finally got sick of her and found a new friend.”
She closes her manual and pushes back her chair. “Ruth and Catina, go to lunch. I have an appointment to keep.”
11
The shortened summer lunch break means we either bring a sandwich to work or we walk across the courtyard to the campus food court, where we can get quick salads or pizza slices or burgers. I dislike the food court for its noise and its echoing enormity of a hundred plastic tables, each with its set of four chairs, spread across a tiled floor under a thirty-foot ceiling. But today any distraction will do.
The various grills and pizza counters and salad bars run along one side of the food court, and a freestanding cement staircase rises toward the skylights and a railed balcony. Only a few of the tables are occupied today, mostly by classified staff women with voices that rise and echo as shrill as birds.
Between the air-conditioning and all this space, I always shiver here. I hadn’t slept, and I’m not hungry, but I take a tray and a bowl and go through the motions. Once I’m seated with my back against a solid wall and Catina sitting opposite me like a friendly shield, it’s hard not to slip into time traveling. I look down at the bowl of salad I scooped from one of the salad bars and see chopped iceberg lettuce. I’d forgotten to pour dressing on the lettuce, but I’m not going to walk back through the tables of chattering women to the salad bar.
“I know,” says Catina. “All this noise. But just wait until you hear the noise the students make when they come back in the fall. It’s sort of quiet now, believe it or not. It’s just staff like us and a few schoolteachers come back to grab some credits.”
I stab a chunk of dry lettuce and put it in my mouth and chew. I need to act like a normal person and stay in the present and not embarrass Catina, but I don’t know if I can pull it off.
“I don’t mind having no Jamie for once.”
Catina
lowers her voice and glances around, even though we’re twenty feet from the nearest occupied table. “It’s just that she’s at me about Dustin all the time. I can enjoy a little peace and quiet.”
“In our office?”
“Well—not recently.”
She takes a large bite of pizza. With her cascade of maroon hair and her piercings and her fading black eye, she looks like an unhappy teenager.
I try another bite of lettuce and watch two guys who have just come in through the big glass doors. Guys are a rare sight in this enclave of women, and these two are dressed like students in hoodies and jeans, but they’re my age or a little older.
Something about the dark man draws my eyes, something loose limbed in the way he walks, something familiar. He’s laughing about something his friend said as they passed our table, when suddenly he stops.
He turns, stares at me.
Skin the color of cocoa, hair a silky black mass of curls.
Isaiah.
“Ruby?”
Isaiah. Not a face from my dream nor from my fever-borne hallucination but Isaiah’s actual face, where surprise is changing to pleasure. Why is Isaiah glad to see me? Why is Isaiah pulling out a chair and sitting down beside me?
“How long have you been back in town, Ruby? What are you doing on campus?”
Isaiah’s eyes, so warm and familiar that I can barely meet them. Catina stares with her mouth full of pizza, and I know I need to say something, I need to act like a normal person, but the best I can do is mutter something about Not all that long and I’ve got a job on campus.
Isaiah seems hardly to hear me. He reaches over and takes my hand. My pale hand in his dark hand.
“Same old piano-playing hands. You still play?”
“Sometimes.”
“So do I.”
His big-knuckled hands, dark and battered and pale palmed. His square-tipped fingers lace around mine, the way he took my hand in my hallucination, if that was what it was, outside the Alibi the night I came back to Versailles.
Catina swallows her pizza and recovers herself. “Her name is Ruth. Why do you call her Ruby?”
“Doesn’t everybody?”
“Well, no!”
He’s still holding my hand as he takes in Catina’s piercings and the makeup over her fading black eye. She knows it too, knows what he’s seeing, and she’s obviously getting riled.
“So who are you?”
“I’m her brother,” says Isaiah. At my sharp breath he adds, “Well—foster brother anyway.”
*
After I’ve been fostered with Brad Gilcannon for a few days, I learn that Isaiah is almost exactly three years older than I am. That first night I only know he is bigger than me and skinny and scary, with cocoa skin and a mop of black curls. He gets up from the floor, grins at me, and does a complicated spin and slam dunk with an imaginary basketball.
You’ve got truth issues!
Ruby, don’t you pay any attention to that ornery little devil. Isaiah, if you can’t act like a stand-up white kid, you can go and turn the TV off. Ruby, you come over here and talk to me, says Brad.
When I obey, Brad smiles and pulls me onto his lap as Anne looks up from her notebook. I think she’s going to object, but she doesn’t, not this time. Brad has a thin lined face with a brush of brown hair and brown eyes behind dark-rimmed glasses. He’s not in uniform tonight. I would have been frightened of the uniform. Tonight he’s wearing ordinary blue Levi’s and a blue denim shirt with a faint peppermint scent. Later I’ll know that the scent comes from the sugar-free gum he carries in his pocket. Tonight he gives me a stick of the gum and puts his arm around me and asks me what my favorite songs are and whether I ever play them on the piano. After a while I snuggle into his warmth and stop shaking.
That’s what my bones tell me happened that first night at Brad’s. His face and Isaiah’s and Anne’s shine as though from a strip of color film with darkness at both ends. Did he give me a stick of sugar-free gum that night? Never mind. The scent of peppermint. His warm arms. It happened.
Three children in fosterage with Brad. Anne, Isaiah, Ruby. It happened. Something is happening again.
*
Old houses gossip at night. I can hear them. Up and down the darkened streets, on currents more subtle than the stir of air, past the shadows of lilac hedges and the curbs where cats keep watch from under parked cars, around the circles of light cast by the streetlights, from one house to another, travel the creak of floorboards, the settling of attic joists, the whisper of leaves brushing against shingles: We’ve got her! Her! She’s here!
I’m awake in Mrs. Pence’s second-floor bedroom. The walls have settled back where they belong. A dark rectangle on the mirror where I stuck him is the sullen young man in his Polaroid. Was he in my dream? The sheet hangs halfway off the bed, crumpled from my throes. The window’s faint glow is from the streetlight at the other end of the block. I’m hearing the ordinary sounds of the summer night, an air current moving through the front yard cottonwoods, a touch of leaves on the glass panes, a sigh of old shingles. The lighted numerals on my digital alarm shows 4:45 a.m., still a couple hours until I need to shower and dress for another day of work. But I can’t sleep.
Finally, I pour a little water from the carafe into a glass and carry it to the cushioned bench under the window, where I look down through the cottonwood leaves and the patterns of their shadows on the silent street and try an old ruse on myself, imagining that I have merged with the shadows of the leaves. I’m erased, with nothing to feel, nothing to fear, as flattened as the glass between me and the shadows. Sometimes the ruse tricks me into going back to sleep, but not tonight, not this very early morning with the light just beginning to turn transparent, not with my mind busy with then and now.
“We got to get together, Ruby,” Isaiah had said in the food court. “Now you’re back, we got to catch up. I’ve got a little band going. You’ll have to sit in with us. Play some keyboard with us, okay?”
And I noted his fingernails, a guitarist’s nails.
Three kids in fosterage, Anne and Isaiah and Ruby, and now here we are in Versailles again.
Seeing Isaiah in the food court today must have set off my dream, spinning it and casting off broken bits of memory and invention. So. Easy explanation. Wouldn’t happen again. If I ran into him again, it would be: Hey, Isaiah. How’s it going?
Good, and you?
Good.
But I still can’t sleep, and finally I steal down to the piano room and take up the Chopin Prelude in E Minor again. My fingers are getting stronger and more certain, but for some reason the E minor key is transposing itself to a plangent G major.
He promised to love me and call me his flower—and I have floated out of the piano room to a retaining wall outside an Anchorage motel, where a man sits beside me with his guitar and plays “Wildwood Flower.”
*
It’s a warm evening for Anchorage, and I’m grateful there’s no drizzle. The concrete retaining wall along the courtyard of the motel has stored a little of the day’s weak sunshine, and I can sit on the wall and bear the pain in my side and wait until the door to the room with the elk wallpaper finally opens and I am let in. After a while a door does open, and I look up, but it’s not my door—it’s Bill the Drummer’s.
Bill’s got his acoustic guitar slung over his shoulder, and he’ll have to walk past me to reach the van where it’s parked, so I look down at the sidewalk, but he stops.
Waits until I raise my head.
Bill glances from me to the door of my room, and I know that he knows what’s happening there and why I’m sitting on the retaining wall, but he says nothing, and I’m grateful. Instead, he unslings his guitar and sits down beside me, not touching but close enough that I can smell something lemony in his freshly laundered shirt. Bill does his own laundry, never asks me to do it for him.
A lock of dark hair falls over his forehead as he tunes his guitar, cocking his head to listen to the p
ings and adjusting the pegs. Maybe he’s not as good on his guitar as on his drums, but he’s good enough, and there’s something real and solid in the warmth of his heavily muscled drummer’s forearm that occasionally brushes my shoulder as he searches out the chords he wants.
After a minute or two I realize that he’s playing the old Carter Family tune “Wildwood Flower.” Not singing, not speaking, just playing. He sits by me as the evening settles, and “Wildwood Flower” wends its plangent way and contains me in it until, at last, the door to my room opens.
What Bill the Drummer might ask if he were sitting beside me in this second-floor bedroom: Why do you think your memories are coming back, Ruby?
I don’t know, Bill.
12
In the morning I’ve turned into the parking lot behind the administration building before I realize I’ve driven all the way to campus with my mind in another time and place. I pull Mrs. Pence’s Pontiac into a slot in the shade of the firs and start to shake. If I don’t stay in the here and now, I’m likely to run over somebody.
I rest my head on the steering wheel and concentrate on details. The scratch of upholstery, the faint ping of the Pontiac’s motor shutting down, the Indian on the horn button cutting into my forehead. The glitter of sunlight shafting through the boughs of firs and hitting the windshield. When I finally look up, I see neat bungalows on the other side of the street, student rentals for the most part. On a lawn, a child’s swing set, the kind with a ladder and a slide at one end. A sidewalk and steps lead to a green-painted door, all so normal, and yet who knows the thoughts, the fears, behind the closed door.
*
At a police-sponsored conference Brad Gilcannon learned all about satanic rituals and how to ferret out the Satanists who were living among us in plain sight, and his investigation is making newspaper headlines. He’s a local hero for the work he does. Now he leans forward as he drives, peering at street addresses. His car smells of the pine refresher that hangs from his rearview mirror and sways on its little green string whenever he hits the brakes. Anne sits beside him in the front seat and tells him where to look. From where I’ve been stuck in the back seat, I can’t see her face, only her blonde ponytail that sways like the pine refresher when Brad brakes at the next house.
Ruby Dreams of Janis Joplin Page 6
