Ruby

by Francesca Lia Block

  We were both out of breath and your pupils were dilated so your eyes looked black, like a horse’s, like Night’s. You ran your hands up my torso and I arched my back, driving my breast into your hand. We were both burning up. The thin fabric of my clothes felt heavy and hot. You began to undo the buttons of my blouse and I moved my shoulders so it slipped off. Then I pushed you back and stood up, sliding my skirt off. When you pulled your shirt over your head, I gasped out loud without meaning to. I had never seen anything as perfect as that torso. And there was the sun tattooed on your abdomen. Blazing, burning me. I reached out, trembling, and lightly touched the very center of that sun. I looked up and saw the same sun burning in your eyes.

  You took my hand and pressed it full and flat against your chest. With your other arm you drew me to you.

  “Is this too soon?” you whispered.

  Was it too soon? Of course not. This is all I had ever wanted. Wasn’t it? Then why did I want to run? What was I afraid of?

  But it was too late to answer. Your mouth was covering mine while you unfastened my bra and pressed your body to me so my nipples pierced your chest, answering your question. As if they already knew my body inch for inch, your hands slid down my waist and pushed my panties off my hips. They were soaking wet with the rest of your answer.

  You stopped kissing me and loosened your hold for a moment. I still had one more chance. I am Ruby, I told myself, named for the stone that chases away evil spirits. But what demons would be released if I stopped fighting against them, even for a moment?

  I’D ALWAYS HAD A KNOWING. I’d know things when I entered a room, know things before they happened, know things I shouldn’t know.

  And there was the worst knowing. That day. Because the hairs stood up on the back of my neck and I knew, I knew but I couldn’t stop it from happening.

  I AM TWELVE. Summer vacation. My mom tells me that she and Opal will be gone most of the day. I am to stay home and clean the bathroom, set out and clean up my dad’s lunch.

  My father, who works in a completely different town, never comes home for lunch.

  I eat my cheese sandwich and go into the bathroom to clean. I lock the door. I don’t know why. Something wicked this way comes, I think. But it doesn’t make a difference.

  I hear him come in the back door. A few moments pass while I sit there on the floor, holding the toilet brush, smelling the chemicals. There isn’t enough air in here, I think. I should open a window. But I don’t.

  There’s a knock on the door.

  I don’t answer.

  The doorknob jiggles. Then the question:

  “Why’s the door locked?”

  “Oh, just habit, I guess.” My voice sounds like someone else’s. Someone who doesn’t know. Someone who is only surprised.

  From behind the door: “Well, unlock it.”

  I do what he says. He is standing there with his pants down and an erection.

  He is smiling.

  He leads me from the bathroom to the bedroom floor. He leads someone. Not Ruby. Where is Ruby? Ruby, named for the jewel that is thought to glow darker when illness is coming or the owner is in danger.

  All I remember after that is his voice.

  “I’m teaching you. What is okay to let a boy do or not do to you.”

  When he is finished, this is what happens:

  He eats the lunch I made for him and leaves.

  I finish cleaning my bathroom.

  When my mother and sister return and ask why I am crying, I tell them I got bathroom cleaner in my eye. The stuff that smelled so bad, you know? I thought I was protecting them by not telling them.

  A FEW DAYS LATER, when he is having one of his tantrums, Mom insists that I go downstairs into the basement (there is always, in every house we move into, a basement) and watch TV with him after dinner.

  “No,” I say. I am Ruby again.

  She threatens to ground me for two weeks. There is a school dance coming up that I will miss.

  I glare at her. I can feel my eye sockets burning with it.

  “If you knew everything you wouldn’t make me go down there with him,” I say.

  My mother named me for a precious stone. One that opens the heart to love, grows darker when the owner is in danger or illness is coming, chases away evil spirits. I know she loves me. I know she doesn’t want to hurt me.

  That same mother never asked me. She never asked me what I meant.

  The second attempt. A few weeks later. Middle of the night. I fight. Mom is sleeping just across the hall. He gives up, hits me, and leaves.

  Third and final attempt. Five years later. Different town. Different house. Another basement. My sister is away at school, so her room is not the one at the most remote part of the house.

  Mine is.

  It is the middle of the night again. I fight and fight. He’s really angry. Too bad. I don’t care what happens. He’s not doing it again.

  He gives up, cursing. He doesn’t hit me this time. I tell him he’s never going to win. I’ll never let him do that to me ever again.

  IT IS THE SMALLEST TOWN we have lived in, the most removed and the least sophisticated. Now I understand why he chose it.

  At school the next day I have an appointment with the counselor. He looks at me with this pity that makes me sick to my stomach. I don’t want pity, his or anyone else’s. I can tell he doesn’t know what to do with me, so he sends me back to class.

  It is in the middle of an algebra test when they come for me—the counselor and two police officers. They take me to the jailhouse, to the room where they question accused criminals. I suppose they are trying to scare me in case I am lying. They question me with a psychologist for two hours. Then they bring my mother in.

  She sits across the table from me. The look on her face is disbelief mingled with fear. She asks me if I am telling the truth or if I am just angry at Dad for something.

  “Oh, yeah, Mom, I get my jollies out of making up horror stories for the police. You don’t believe me? Well let me think. I’ll give you an example. Do you remember that time you forced me to go downstairs with Dad and I told you you wouldn’t make me if you knew everything?”

  She turns the color of sheets. I have heard that expression before but I have never seen it. We always bleach the sheets in our house.

  My mother and I are taken to the county courthouse where my father is waiting. He is in the judge’s office. Why didn’t they have him in handcuffs? He cries and says he is sorry. He wants to hug me but I recoil. Then they send him home with Mom and I am put in a foster home where I stay for three weeks I don’t remember much about those weeks. I just kept wondering, why am I the one who is being punished?

  Opal calls. She is away at college in the next town, and when my mom told her what happened she didn’t say anything. But now she wants to talk. She wants us to come see her.

  When we get to her apartment, she is wearing her nightgown and squatting over the heater, the way she and I used to do on cold nights when we were little. She is mumbling and rocking back and forth. My mother and I sit down on the floor too, and my mother puts her arms around her. I don’t wish that my mom would do that for me. Somehow I understand that Opal needs more comfort than I do now.

  “What is it?” I say finally. “You have to tell us everything.”

  Opal tells us that it has been going on since she was ten years old. She tells us about the time he “taught” her to play tennis and the time in the basement and the time in the bathroom and the time in the middle of the night. Something is familiar about each one, and I realize that Opal has told me these stories before, but they were about her and boys from high school or college. Then she tells us about how before she moved away she finally put a lock on her door in the house we live now. Her old bedroom is in the basement. He took the doorknob off. She put another lock on and barricaded the door with a heavy wooden dresser. He took the door off its hinges.

  “I wanted to protect you, Ruby,” Opal says. “I bel
ieved that if I didn’t tell anyone he wouldn’t hurt you. I just wanted you to be safe.”

  I thought I had fought him my whole life and now I know that I have deceived myself. But he is not going to win. We go back to the judge and file a report.

  The judge takes me aside and says under his breath, “Ruby, are you aware of what you are saying? Do you know the severity of these charges?”

  He ends up dropping every charge against my father. It is only later that I think about why my father was in the judge’s office that day, what he was doing, how he was bargaining. My father, the banker.

  I am allowed to go back to my mother. We move into an apartment. My father stays in the house.

  Opal drops out of school and Steven helps us move her in with her boyfriend even farther away. We never let my father know where she is.

  It is over. But in some ways it isn’t.

  THE SUN DIDN’T ONLY kiss me. I refused to wear sunscreen. I lay out under him for so long that he seared my skin. Blistered bubbled up. The burns were so bad that we had to get cream from the emergency room, the kind for burn victims, not worshipers.

  WE WERE LYING in the bathtub together. You got out, wrapped a towel around your hips, and left the room. When you came back, you had your camera. I resisted the impulse to cover my body, hide under the bubbles. Your Ruby would not do this. Your Ruby would smile and lie back, enjoying your eyes on her, enjoying the water, the bubbles, the warmth, the feeling of being watched.

  You snapped some pictures and then knelt beside the tub.

  “Ruby, there’s something I have to talk to you about.”

  I smiled at you but the knowing was starting. I pushed it away.

  “I have to go on location. I got a movie. It’s because of you! They can’t believe how I’ve recovered and it’s because of you. I don’t want to leave you but I have to go. Maybe you could come visit me there, in L.A., when I’m settled. It would be so great to have you there.”

  Those are not the actual words you said. But that was the idea. I hardly heard you. All I could think was that you were leaving. And you didn’t know who I was.

  When I was five years old, my dad took my picture when I was getting out of my bathtub.

  “Look at that body,” he would say. “Ugly already.”

  I was five years old.

  I want to smash Orion’s camera lens. I want him to leave. I am not Orion’s Ruby.

  my father always

  AFTER ORION LEFT, Isabelle and Phillip were kinder than ever to me. Isabelle said she needed me to spend more time at the shop, although there were very few customers. She invited me over for dinner every night and talked about all sorts of things—flowers and baking and spells for abundance but never about her son.

  Phillip wanted to talk to me about writing. He asked how it was going and if he could help me in any way. I thanked him but I didn’t want to get too into it; I didn’t want him to find out what I had been working on.

  “Maybe you’d like a few exercises?” he said. “My students enjoy them.”

  One of the exercises Phillip suggested was to fill in the rest of the sentences “My father always…” and “My mother never…” He said that when he used this in a writing workshop, the students read their work through their sobs; it was very effective, he said.

  “I had Orion do it once,” he told me. “As a kind of therapy, really, more than anything.”

  It was the first time he’d mentioned his son to me since he’d left; I knew that Phillip, like Isabelle, was being protective of my feelings.

  I tried not to show any emotion on my face.

  “He said, ‘My father never was my father and my mother always thought it was all right to lie.’ He was very angry at us at the time, obviously.”

  Then Phillip told me the story of how he and Isabelle had conceived their son when she was married to the man Orion believed to be his father.

  “It took him a long time to forgive us,” Phillip said. “Sometimes I’m not sure if he has, completely. It’s made him very sensitive to any kind of untruth or betrayal.” Phillip paused, watching me, as if he were deciding how much to share, how much I needed to hear to feel reassured. Unfortunately, it didn’t reassure me at all.

  “That’s why he feels so strongly about you, Ruby. He trusts you more than anyone, I believe.”

  It was hard to hide the wincing; all my body parts seemed to be contracting with shame.

  Everything was a lie. There was no way I could even share the answers to the exercise with Phillip, let alone Orion.

  MY FATHER ALWAYS had his hand in his pants. Whatever he was doing—talking on the phone, watching television, having a beer—he’d absently be playing with himself. No one ever told him to stop. It made me sick to my stomach. When I told a school counselor about it once, she said it was normal, just something men do. She didn’t ask any more questions.

  My father always chose homes with basements.

  My father always screamed and threw things.

  My father always abused animals.

  My father always put my sister in the room farthest from the rest of the rooms.

  My father always raped her.

  MY MOTHER NEVER asked questions.

  My mother, who had two girls more precious to her than any jewels, more precious to her, she said, than her own life, never forgave herself for not protecting them.

  I HAD FORGIVEN HER but I never would forgive my father.

  If I were to be truthful, as, Phillip said, all writers must be, I always wanted to see the man dead.

  threefold

  BY THE TIME I’D FOUND THE SPELL I was looking for, the candles I’d lit were only inches above their holders and the room was filled with the smell of pooling beeswax. My eyes were aching down to the sockets and my mind felt muddled with all the incantations I had read in the huge old leather-bound book without a title, only the tree of life embossed on its cover. But I had found what I wanted: “Harnessing the Fates.” Strangely, it had a star drawn beside it and the words “black wooden box with silver fasteners, corner bookcase, third shelf.” I recognized Isabelle’s elegant hand.

  The box was where she had said it would be. I wondered why Isabelle had this potion already prepared. Then I noticed some more of her writing on the page beneath the spell. It was as if she had heard my question and was answering.

  “This is to be used only in the most dire circumstances. Crafter: remember the threefold law!”

  I had read about this before in other witchcraft books. It meant that the spell and its intentions would come back three times stronger upon the one performing it.

  Now that Orion was gone, I didn’t care anymore. I would accept whatever came to me. I would pay the price.

  I slipped the bottle of potion into my pocket and, holding the leather-bound book like a baby, I left Isabelle’s shop and was enveloped by the night.

  It felt so natural for me to be wrapped in a dark cloak on my way to this forest that I wondered if I had done it in another life. And had Orion and Isabelle been part of that life? Of course I knew about reincarnation, but Isabelle had told me about something else—“soul circles,” when a group of people continue to find each other again and again. That thought gave me confidence as I neared the edge of the woods.

  I came to a small circular clearing about half a mile in through the dense growth. That is where I set up my altar with the objects in my pack. I lit the bundle of dried sage, held it above my head and spun slowly clockwise three times, spiraling out to the circle’s edge. Then I moved the sage around my body, also three times. Was it that easy to purify myself? With a bunch of dried leaves and smoke?

  I extinguished the burning sage in a small cauldron on my altar and set out the quarter candles. Green for north, red for south, yellow for east, blue for west. I lit each one and then, in the candle flames, lit the four sticks of incense I had brought. The smell was all the elements combined, not only the minerals of earth and the smoke of fire but water and
wind.

  I stood in the center of the circle, my feet spread apart and firmly planted, and raised my athame staff to the sky. Then I lowered it and pointed it at the ground at the east quarter. I moved to the yellow candle and walked slowly around the circle, ending where I had begun. I returned to the altar and placed my athame’s wooden tip into the salt, then the water, blessing them. I mixed three pinches of salt into the water, stirring three times after each addition. Again I moved around the circle, sprinkling the water as I went. I repeated this with incense, waving the stick so the smoke curled up into the air. My circle was cast.

  I moved to each quarter with my athame in my right hand and drew the pentagram with its tip. Then I lowered my right hand, pointed it at the quarter candle, raised my left hand toward the east, and received the element. I did this for each quarter and returned to the center of my circle. I took out the potion and held it above my head.

  “Fates, join me in my circle and bless me with your power. I am fearless and will do your bidding. My eyes are your eyes, my hands are your hands, my heart your heart.”

  I consumed the fiery liquid in one gulp, shuddering as I felt it burn through my body. The spell book told me that next I must walk “widdershins” around the perimeter of the cast circle. Like everything else that night, this did not seem strange. The soul I had once been and the person I was becoming knew to walk counterclockwise. The Ruby who had lived in her father’s house had ceased to exist.

  AS I WALK, I SEE a few drops of water bubbling out of the ground in the center of the circle. They come faster and faster until a clear, shallow pool forms, with flowers growing around it that I hadn’t noticed before. I hear a stirring; young animals come out of the trees to gather at the water. There are birds, squirrels, chipmunks, and a raccoon. Even a young deer on shaky legs bats her eyelashes at me from the edge of the circle. I bend down and see my reflection in the water, lit by the flames of my four colored candles. A ten-year-old girl with red hair, round cheeks, and a freckled nose looks back at me. There is another figure standing behind the girl.