by T. Greenwood
But every now and then, there will be a bright memory that presents itself to her: just a flash that floods her entire body with that strange longing that is grief. Jess wrapped up in the towel that looked like an elephant, the one with the hood that had a trunk and ears and button eyes. He used to run through the house after a bath, making wet footprints on the floor. Of the way he always asked her to tie his shoes, and how he tickled the back of her neck with his tiny fingers as she bent over, again and again, to show him how to make two bunny ears. Or the way he said pan-a-cakes instead of pancakes, even after he knew better. Usually she tries not to think of Jess. Because thinking of Jess makes her entire heart hurt like something bruised in her chest. But now here she is, back in the room they shared. She grabs his baseball cap and puts it on her head.
She hasn’t eaten since last night, but she’s still not hungry. She knows her mother is cooking for her, though, and so she leaves the bedroom and goes to her in the kitchen.
Mickey Mouse pancakes. There is a stack of them on a plastic Cat in the Hat plate from when she was little. It embarrasses her, makes her feel sad. She’s not hungry, but she mumbles, “Thanks,” and sits down. As she eats, her mother hovers at the counter like she’s waiting for her to do or say something. But Ruby doesn’t know what to say that will make any of this okay. She’s not hungry, but she nods when her mom offers her another one.
“So I’ve been thinking that maybe you could help me with the birds,” her mom says, sitting down across from her at the table. Ruby notices for the first time that her robe is threadbare at the elbows, that her cheeks are hollow and her bones sharp. She reminds her of the swallow. Tiny, dark. “I mean, if you’re interested at all. I could teach you.”
Ruby nods.
“I know you’re busy with swimming lessons. And with Izzy. Daddy says you still play with Izzy a lot?”
The word play crushes her. She is talking to a little girl. She is feeding a little girl. She thinks she’s the same kid she was the last time she sat and had breakfast at this table with her. But she’s not the same little girl. She’s not a little girl at all. And the fact that her mom doesn’t realize this suddenly makes her angry.
“Yeah, I’m going to be pretty busy,” she says, pushing away the unfinished pancake. The ears are gone, the chocolate chip eyes smeared across the face.
Her mother nods hard and fast as she stands to take away the breakfast plates. Ruby looks down at the Cat in the Hat, the illustration worn, the plastic scratched.
“You know, I’ve been feeling a little under the weather. Didn’t sleep well last night,” her mother says with her back to Ruby. “I think I might need to go back to bed for just a little bit. Will you be okay if I take a little nap?”
“Yeah,” she says. “I have stuff to do.”
Nessa gathers her things and gets off the bus. She is the only passenger to disembark here. And she is keenly aware of the driver’s eyes on her as she descends the steps. Keenly aware of the eyes that follow her as she makes her way down Quimby’s main street. Keenly aware that invisibility might have been possible in Portland, but that here, she is as invisible as a blood stain on clean white sheets. And so she lowers her head and tries to walk with purpose, as though she belongs here.
It has only been a week since Nessa left Portland, but already the city and her time there feel like a dream. Three thousand miles away now, Portland is like this mist, hazy and dissipating. It is only rain against a window, gritty sheets, incense. It is the bare knob of Mica’s shoulder. It is ancient bootleg cassette tapes playing in a boom box perched on a rotten windowsill. It is weed and stolen library books and strangers in and out of the house. Dirty dishes. Dirty feet. Dirty linoleum on the kitchen floor. It is the smell of curry, sickening and thick. No matter how hard she tried, Portland was never home.
She left on the Greyhound bus a week ago, with only this backpack on her back, a wad of stolen cash, and a name and a phone number scrawled on a piece of paper. In the warm glow of the reading light over her seat, she had spread it across her lap, smoothing it like a love letter, touching the script with her fingers, tracing the deep slants and shivery loops. By the time she got to Burlington, the paper was worn thin and soft like a baby blanket, rendered fragile with her constant worrying of it. It’s the only thing she has, in case her mother is, indeed, gone.
She didn’t sleep well on the bus. The smell of exhaust and gasoline and whatever it was they used to keep the bathrooms clean assaulted her. She was fortunate enough to have an open seat next to her for most of the trip, except for a stretch between Minneapolis and Chicago when a woman wearing a hijab sat next to her. They didn’t speak for four hundred miles. At first she felt offended, that the woman didn’t feel compelled to ask her when the baby was due, whether she was having a boy or a girl, or any other of the myriad questions she was asked a thousand times a day. That she wouldn’t even get the opportunity to greet the woman’s barrage, her curiosity, with the wall of silence she’d been building. But then, as the landscape outside the window changed from pine trees to corn to ramshackle houses, Nessa felt relieved by her companion’s reticence. It was as though the woman also understood the power and beauty and honesty of silence. Perhaps she too enjoyed the freedom from chatty superficial niceties inevitably followed by painful, uncomfortable pauses. Instead they sat side by side, together but completely alone for four hundred miles. Respectful of each other’s aloneness, not falling for the myth of fellowship, for the false intimacy created by such situations of proximity.
For years now, she’s bought into that lie. Believed in the hollow promise of communion. Trusting that two bodies could forge an alliance. That it was as simple as flesh. As simple as whispers skipped across skin like a pebble across water. She’s wanted so desperately to believe that attention (to lips, to hips) was the same as home.
But people lie. And people steal. And people leave.
This is something else her mother taught her. People always leave. But she is not running away anymore. She will prove her mother wrong. She will make all of this right.
It’s been two years, but it could be twenty. This place feels like a distant dream, both familiar and strange. If she’s remembering correctly, the apartment she and her mother shared is not too far from the bus station, and so she walks, purposeful if uncertain, ready now for whatever awaits her. But still, tears sting her eyes.
She approaches the brick building, sees herself reflected in the salon window, and thinks about how she used to check her hair in this same glass each morning on her way to school. She barely recognizes the girl in the window now. Tattered, filthy clothes, dreadlocks. Swollen face and feet and a belly as large as a small moon. It stuns her. Who has she become? She peers closer, as if she can find an answer to this, but instead her reflection disappears, and she is not staring at herself anymore but at an old woman sitting under a hair dryer, her lips pursed in disdain at what she sees outside the window.
Startled, she steps away from the glass.
Her stomach rumbles with hunger.
Nessa studies the mailboxes along the wall by the door, searches for her mother’s name, but the label on her mother’s box has fallen off, leaving only its sticky ghost behind. And so she opens the door and climbs up the narrow stairs to the second floor. Her legs remember the depth of each tread, the steepness of each rise. The scent of cigarette smoke and the salon chemicals fill her with an odd nostalgia. Her heart beats hard in her chest, but the baby is motionless.
The hallway is longer than the one in her memory. Darker. She walks to the end.
And then she is at the door. Her mother’s door. She presses her forehead against the wood and takes a deep breath. Her stomach contracts; it nearly takes her breath away. Her entire abdomen tightens like a fist.
She tries to imagine her mother’s face when she opens the door, the look of relief and surprise. It’s been two years since Nessa slipped away, two fugitive years. Of course, she’s thought of her mother often
. Dreamed herself inside these walls, tried to imagine her mother’s worry, her fears. She used to think that her disappearance might actually help turn things around for her mother. That maybe it would be the one thing that would, finally, make her get clean. On the darkest days in Portland, when she was hungry and alone, she even imagined that she was somehow doing this for her mother. As though her running away was some sort of sacrifice instead of the most selfish thing in the world.
But now, as she curls her fist to knock, she thinks about the day she and her mother returned to Quimby, when her mother told her to stay in the car when she walked up the long path to Nessa’s grandfather’s house. How she had watched her mother open the screen door, and how a stranger had stood in the doorway shaking his head. Her mother must have known that this was a fool’s errand.
Nessa holds her breath, but hope is slipping away.
The door cracks open, and an elderly woman in a housedress peeks out at her.
“I got my own church,” she says. “And I ain’t buying nothing.”
And Nessa is only surprised by how little this surprises her. She must have known all along that her mother was long gone.
It’s Sunday so Ruby doesn’t have swimming lessons. Thank God. She promised her dad she’d call the phone company, but she doubts she’ll be able to get through to anyone on a Sunday. She figures she’d better call anyway so that when he checks in with her later she can at least say she tried.
She goes to her mother’s bedroom door and knocks. “Mom?”
“Yeah, honey?” she says from inside the room. Her voice is too bright.
“I’m going to go into town to call the phone company. I might go to Izzy’s house too. If that’s okay. Do you need anything ?”
Silence.
“Mom?” she says, feeling a flutter in her throat. Ruby hears her slippered feet, and then her mom opens the door. There are shadows under her eyes.
“There’s a storm coming,” she says.
Ruby is confused. The sky is bright blue. It’s already warming up outside. It looks like a beautiful day.
“I mean, when you talk to your dad. You should tell him to listen to the news. I worry about him and Bunk driving in bad weather.”
“Okay,” she says and shrugs. “Do you want anything from in town?”
Her mother shakes her head, and for one moment Ruby gets the strange sensation that she is the child. Ruby is nearly as tall as she is now. Her mom’s hair is messy like a little girl’s. Without makeup, she looks younger.
“Are you riding your bike?” she asks.
Ruby nods. How else would she get all the way into town?
“You have your helmet?”
She nods again, though she never wears her helmet.
“Are you sure it’s not too far?”
“It’s like four miles, Mom,” she says, fearing suddenly that she’s going to expect her to hang out here with her for the next week.
“You go the long way,” she says, and her eyes grow wider. “Don’t go over the bridge.”
Ruby swallows. Nods.
At Bunk’s house, she comes and goes as she pleases. She has her own key to the house, and she can get everywhere she needs to go on her bike. Her dad’s only rules are that she be home by supper time, that she answers her phone if he calls, and that she doesn’t cross the covered bridge. This last rule is the single thing he and her mother seem to agree on anymore.
She makes sure she’s got her backpack, her helmet (her mom is watching from the window), and then she just puts her head down and goes. The dirt road her mom lives on is a little bit dangerous. Her bike is a ten-speed, so the tires are narrow; the smallest rock could throw her off into a ditch. But luckily, after a mile or so, the dirt turns to pavement, and then it’s just big trucks she needs to worry about. Even going the long way, it only takes twenty minutes to ride into town, and it’s downhill most of the way. She’s barely even out of breath when she pulls up to Izzy’s driveway and drops her bike on the gravel next to Grover’s car.
Izzy lives in one of the big Victorian houses on the park in Quimby. She calls it “Miss Piggy” because it’s big and pink and fussy. In her room there’s a bell that used to be for the maid. There’s also a dumbwaiter, which is like a tiny little elevator they use to bring up snacks from the kitchen. It’s got three stories and a fake door in the library. Her dad says that her great-grandpa was a bootlegger, and he used to hide liquor in there. Now it’s just filled with boxes of stuff they can’t seem to get rid of. It’s easy to win at hide and seek in her house because there are so many good places to hide. Ruby hid in the old ice chest in the pantry once, and Izzy couldn’t find her for forty-five minutes.
Izzy’s great-grandpa used to own the sawmill, which meant he basically owned this town. He built the house back in the eighteen hundreds, so it’s been passed down through her family for two hundred years: grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins. But now it’s just Izzy and her parents. And Grover. The mill closed down a long time ago. They’re not rich, not anymore anyway.
Izzy’s father, Neil, is a science teacher at the high school, and her mother, Gloria, is a potter. She makes bowls and plates and coffee mugs, which she sells at crafts fairs and at the artists’ collective in town. Her pottery has sandy-looking bottoms and colors swirled like sunsets. A long time ago, Gloria made an entire set for Ruby’s mother as a birthday gift. Her mom still eats and drinks out of these dishes every day. Ruby noticed she was using the mixing bowl this morning for the pancakes. To bring in a little extra money, they rent a room on the first floor out to an old man named Grover who, even though he’s almost ninety years old, still drives a car. It’s a big yellow station wagon, and it takes up the whole driveway, so Ruby’s mom and dad have to park their cars on the street out front. Grover is a professor emeritus at the college. He almost won the Nobel Prize like fifty years ago, Izzy says.
Ruby has known Izzy since she was born. Literally. Ruby’s mom was the one who drove through a snowstorm to bring Izzy into the world. Ruby was exactly one month old then, and her mom brought her with her because her dad was working that night too. Before the accident, he was a volunteer EMT. Her mom said Ruby slept through the whole thing, at least until Izzy was finally born, screaming bloody murder. Their moms liked each other right away, which is crazy because they probably wouldn’t ever have met each other if not for Izzy’s mom needing a midwife. But even though they didn’t have anything but babies in common, that was enough. They became best friends. And it feels like she and Izzy have always been friends. Izzy is like family. Like a sister. And after the accident, it sometimes felt like Izzy’s mom was her mom too.
Izzy answers the door wearing a tight pink T-shirt and a short denim skirt, wedge sandals. Ruby barely recognizes her.
“What are you all dressed up for?” Ruby asks her.
Izzy looks down at the skirt as if noticing it for the first time. She blushes a little and shrugs.
Usually Izzy lives in that stupid Yankees shirt she got a year ago, the only Yankees fan in the entire state of Vermont as far as Ruby knows. She just does it to be contrary. Izzy’s always hated everything that most other kids like, especially other girls. She hates pepperoni and chocolate ice cream and jumping rope. She even hates Harry Potter. And she hates skirts. What Izzy does like are computers. But not video games and stuff like that. Someday she says she wants to be just like Steve Jobs. She wants to be a famous inventor. She’s the smartest kid Ruby knows. Even smarter than Mark Blume in their class. That’s why Ruby needs her help designing the bridge for the bridge building contest. Ruby’s got a zillion ideas, but Izzy’s the one who can turn those ideas into something real.
Mrs. McKnight told them about the contest at the end of the school year. Signed them up for it and even paid the entry fee. She told them their only job was to design the best bridge they could design over the summer, and she’d make sure they had the supplies they needed to build it in the fall. The contest is in October, but
Ruby can’t seem to get Izzy as excited about it as she is.
“You stink,” Izzy says, and Ruby lifts her arm and sniffs. She’s right.
“Sorry,” Ruby says, and Izzy pulls her into the house.
“There’s a hurricane coming,” Izzy says.
“Here?” She remembers her mother mentioning a storm.
“Well, not Vermont. But up the whole East Coast. It’s going to hit the Carolinas first.”
Ruby thinks about her dad and Bunk. About North Carolina. About her Uncle Larry, about the fishing boat.
“It’s been all over the news,” Izzy says.
Ruby’s mother doesn’t have a TV anymore.
“It’s going to be bigger than Katrina,” Izzy says.
“Who’s Katrina?” Ruby asks.
Izzy’s eyes get wide and she sighs. “Katrina? The hurricane in New Orleans?”
Izzy gets exasperated with Ruby a lot. With the things she doesn’t know. Izzy knows everything about everything, or at least it seems like it lately.
Ruby remembers now. Though it was so long ago, they were just little kids then. Kindergartners. “We were like five when that happened,” she says.
“My parents went down there to help,” Izzy says, still irritated beyond belief. “I stayed at your house for a week?”
“Oh yeah,” Ruby says.
“You want some Wheat Thins?” Izzy asks then, and she notices that Izzy’s socks match. Izzy’s socks never match. And when Izzy turns around, she can see that her blond hair is brushed smooth. It’s shiny, like the silky stuff inside a cornhusk. Normally, there’s a big knot at the back, a permanent tangle that Gloria stopped fighting at the beginning of the summer. “A rat’s nest,” is what Ruby’s mother would call it. And she gets a picture of her mother combing Izzy’s tangles out, sitting outside their house back when they were just little kids. Maybe this was when Izzy came to stay with them. When her parents took off to Louisiana to volunteer to help all those people after Katrina. Ruby does remember, of course she does. It’s just that sometimes she keeps memories in a locked box in her mind, pulling them out only when she needs them. This is one of them.
