by T. Greenwood
She is completely alone.
She’s not sure where to go, now that she knows her mother is, indeed, gone. Or at least no longer living in that apartment. She hasn’t really thought beyond this. Like most runaways, she has not considered much beyond the leaving. Her thoughts, her body, have been focused on departure rather than destination. Driven only by a vague, but urgent, need to return to the place where it began, or rather where it ended.
In her pocket, she touches the slip of paper. When she left Portland it had given her a sense of safety. But she wonders now if this too was foolish. What if it is like so many other broken promises? One made in haste, sincerity as ephemeral, as fleeting, as the night, as she herself seems to be. Still, it is all she has. She needs to find him.
If someone would just stop to offer her a ride, she would hand them the paper, ask them to help her. But she has been walking for hours now, and no one has stopped. Not one person has even slowed down. When she was in town she had felt as though all eyes were on her, but now, out here, she feels like a ghost: invisible. Haunting these desolate roads.
She continues to walk up the road, thumb jutted out into the darkness, walking backwards the way she has watched hitchhikers do on TV. She tries to be cavalier; she tries to be fearless. But the deeper she goes into the night, the more frightened she becomes.
When the pavement turns to dirt, her ankle twists and she falls to her knees. The backpack slings forward and knocks her in the head. She is down on all fours, like an animal, and scrambles to her feet as though she is being watched, even feels herself blushing a little with embarrassment. She is transported back to high school before she dropped out, anticipating the jeers, the catcalls, the hisses. But there is only the sound of the wind in the tops of the trees, the sound of crickets and bullfrogs. The sound of her own breath as she rises again to her feet.
She is not used to the wilderness anymore. The forest. She has slept on bus station benches and with her head resting on tables in coffee shops. Once, she dozed inside the cold fluorescent stall of a bathroom. But in the city there is always someone else awake, and there is always light. There is the semblance of life in a city. The illusion that you are not alone in the world.
For now, she just needs to find a place to sleep. To figure things out. She has not had a bed to sleep in in over a week; on the bus she slept sitting up, chin to her chest or cheek against the glass window. She forgets what it feels like to fully recline. And she is tired. So tired. So she keeps walking, determined now only to find a place where she can lie down. The baby begins its restless rolling again, and she feels the sting of tears in her eyes.
She walks and walks and walks, trusting that this road will take her somewhere. And finally, she sees a faint yellow glow in the distance. A house? It’s far away, but it is like a beacon. Like a lighthouse welcoming, or warning. Nessa is smart enough to know there can be a fine line between hazard and haven.
Still, she walks toward the light, drawn, as she is always drawn, by the certainty of human kindness and sympathy. Trusting, as she always has, that people will want to take care of her. She knows this is what she inspires in people. No matter how filthy and ragged she may get, she knows that she has an innocent face, a harmlessness about her that people respond to. And now with the baby, she is almost always met with pity. She has fought it her entire life until now. Now she depends upon it.
And so she walks toward the light glowing in the house, and soon she is standing in the driveway. Or what might have once been a driveway. There is gravel, but the grass on either side is waist high. There are no cars. The mailbox post has fallen, and as she walks closer to the house she can see that all of the shades are drawn, furniture is pushed up against the windows of the porch. The one small light seems to be coming from the side of the house, and suddenly she is terrified. This is not the city. She doesn’t know who might be living inside this ramshackle house, what sort of fairy-tale witch. She is Gretel without her Hansel, and the simple enticement of four walls and a roof is not enough. But she is also exhausted. She cannot walk another mile down this road that seems, right now, to lead to nowhere.
So, quietly, she walks around the side of the house where there seems to be an unfinished project underway, a skeleton of timber. She can hear the river in the distance, and it reminds her that she is thirsty. She emptied her water bottle over an hour ago. As quietly as she can, she makes her way around to the back of the house, following the sound of the river. But just as she steps gingerly past what looks like a garden, a light fills the backyard, and she thinks, for a moment, that she has been struck by lightning. But there is no rain, no storm. She drops to the ground, again on all fours, and scurries across the grass until she is in the shadows again. She nearly tumbles into the river, which is actually more like a creek, and she peers back up at the house, waiting for someone to come out of the back door. To hunt her like the animal she has become. To kill her.
She crouches at the river’s edge and waits until the light finally clicks off again before she cups her hands and dips them into the icy water to drink. It is dark again now, but she is left with the bright impression of the water, and she uses her memory of it to cross to the other side. And then she is running, running toward whatever shelter she can find.
Ruby is startled awake by the sound of something outside her window. At first she thinks it’s just the wind, just rain. But it isn’t raining. The moon is bright through the window; there are no clouds, and the sky is almost violet. She moves the pillow away from her ear and strains to hear. It sounds like rustling, like branches and leaves being crushed. An animal maybe. She thinks of the raccoons on the porch. She considers her mother’s birds. When she opens her eyes, the owl peers at her intently. Twigs snap. And then the whole backyard is illuminated. She hates the motion sensor. It doesn’t take much to set those lights off. Bats, birds, even chipmunks can fill the whole world with light with the slightest movement. And every time it goes on, it’s like lightning just struck the house.
On the other side of her wall she hears her mother jolting out of bed. Ruby knows this sound. She also knows the sound her mother’s nightstand drawer makes when it opens. She knows what she keeps in there, and the understanding makes her heart pound harder in her chest.
“Mom,” she whispers, but her voice is too quiet for her to hear. “Mom?” she says again, louder. And whatever is outside the window stops moving. Stops making noise. She leans over and peers out the window, but there are only shadows: the dark outlines of trees against that indigo sky. Her mother’s garden illuminated by the moon. There is only the river beyond this.
She lies back down and feels her heart slowing, returning to normal. And on the other side of her wall, she hears the drawer close. But her mother doesn’t sleep. Ruby hears the light click on, and knows that she will stay like this: prone, alert, awake for the rest of the night, listening for trespassers and startling awake with each flash of imaginary lightning.
This is how it begins. It doesn’t take much. Light. Sound. Something out of place. Simple discord is the trigger that detonates the explosion. That sets into motion the series of reactions that occur again and again, the dominos click click clicking in a beautiful, organized, and systematic destruction.
It is an illness, they tell Sylvie. Generalized anxiety, panic disorder, PTSD, agoraphobia. The labels meaningless, useless to her. And all of it, incurable. It is simply something she must learn to manage. To control. But what they don’t realize, these doctors with their bald spots and diagnoses, is that she can no sooner control this than she can control a speeding bullet. Or they can control a mutating cancerous cell. It has a life of its own. Her fear is a breathing thing.
It may be a mental illness, but its manifests here: here in the hollow of her throat, in the sinews of her neck. In her gut. Sometimes even deep inside her breasts. It can feel like pain. It can also, sometimes, feel like desire. Like hunger. It’s as though every yearning of the body, every extreme physical re
sponse is happening at once, hot and cold becoming one new sensation, a frigid incalescence that makes her sweat cold beads and shiver even as her limbs burn. When she tried to explain this feeling, one doctor suggested it was hormonal, only the early onset of menopause.
“I’m thirty-six years old,” she had said.
And he’d smiled, condescended. “You’d be surprised.”
She didn’t bother to go on. To tell him about the way it feels like her heart is a train, a puffing, accelerating locomotive that is racing, but that there are no tracks beneath it. It has derailed inside her body, crashing inside her chest. She didn’t talk about the vertigo that follows, the complete upending of her world. That once, one of the last times she went out in public, she had to lie down in the middle of the grocery store and even then the world would not stop turning. A broken carnival ride, the centripetal force not quite strong enough to keep her from being thrown off. There are not enough metaphors for what her body is doing to her. And despite what they say, it is her body that is defying her. It is not her mind; her mind is the only thing that seems to remain calm when her body is failing. It is her mind that saves her, that rights her. That is able to talk her body off the ledge. Her mind is the great hostage negotiator, convincing Madness into relinquishing her body. Into releasing her. She understands that this sounds insane. She is aware that this is not normal. But sadly, in this knowledge is no power.
When the floodlights click on outside, she is jolted from sleep, disoriented for only a moment before the first domino goes down. She knows what to expect. Even as her body begins its panic dance, her mind quietly waits. Stands at the edge of her body holding the megaphone, promising that it will all be over soon. Assuring everyone inside that if they remain calm and listen and do what it says, no one will be harmed.
Harm. Every inch of her body is informed by the possibility of harm.
She reaches into the drawer only when the locomotive Tilt-A-Whirl fever dream becomes too much, when she fears it has brought her, at last, to the end. When she believes, truly, that her heart will simply cease to beat. That it will retreat. That it will, at last, just shut down, systems overloaded, nuclear meltdown.
Here is the drawer. Here is the gun. Her grandmother’s pistol passed down, like a recipe for strudel. Like brown eyes. Like mental illness. The gun.
The object has ceased to be what it is. It is no longer the symbol of safety it can be for some. It is not an instrument of destruction, a weapon. It is just cold comfort in her palm. The metallic shiver that cools her entire body down to a low simmer. It is just a symbol. An abstract. It is calm. It is calm. It is calm.
MONDAY
In the morning, her mother offers her cereal, and Ruby is grateful that she has not made pancakes again. It is as though the absence of pancakes signifies a new understanding between them. Yet still, they sit across from each other at the table and she chews silently while her mother simply stares into her tea.
“Did you hear something outside last night?” her mother asks, softly, finally.
“Probably just the raccoons, Mom,” Ruby says, and tries not to think about the drawer. About the way it made her feel. Sort of tender and vulnerable, like a new bruise.
Her mom nods, but Ruby can tell she doesn’t believe her. Her eyes have that scared wild look they get sometimes. Like they got the last time.
“Really, Mom. It’s nothing. Bunk set the traps. We’ll catch the mama soon.”
Her mom nods, agreeing with her, but she’s still wringing her hands. “You know, I read in the paper that people are going around stealing copper. Ripping pipes right out of people’s houses,” she said. “Wires.”
Ruby tries to imagine someone coming to steal the house’s innards. It’s ridiculous. The last time she was here, the time when the ambulance came, started this way too. Her mom had convinced herself that somebody was trying to break in then as well. The whole time Ruby was there, she kept talking about vandals, about trespassers. When she misplaced her good scissors, she had made Bunk install motion lights on the back of the house. Never mind Ruby found the scissors under the bathroom sink a week later when she was looking for Q-tips; her mother still insisted that somebody had an eye on the house. That they had to be vigilant unless they wanted to lose everything. Ruby didn’t remind her that everything was already lost.
“It might just be the wind,” Ruby says. “Maybe from that storm everybody’s been talking about.” Ruby has noticed a shift in the air, and it’s not just autumn coming on. She’s sensitive to that sort of thing since the accident. They lost a lot of things that night: Jess, her daddy’s legs. And even her mom too in a way, though not right away. But Ruby was the only one who seemed to gain something. Because instead of getting numb to things the way people sometimes do, her senses seemed to get all fired up. Raw. In the fifth grade last year, Mrs. Lawson brought in a book written in braille. She made them close their eyes and run their fingers across the bumpy pages. The world is like that for her now. Textured. She can feel it, and, sometimes, if she pays close enough attention, she can even make out what it’s trying to tell her. Last night it was telling her that something is coming, but it isn’t burglars. It isn’t as easy as thieves.
Her mom nods into her tea, but Ruby can still tell she’s not convinced.
“I think maybe we need to build a fence.”
“A fence?” Ruby says, and for some reason she thinks about the fence around Izzy’s house in Quimby. It’s a storybook fence, like Tom Sawyer, like Dick and Jane, protecting a storybook house. Going to Izzy’s house is like heading right into the pages of a book. Even the sky in town is a fairytale sort of sky with cotton candy clouds, a bright yellow sun. Sometimes she half expects the grass itself to feel like paper under her feet. That somebody could turn the page, and Izzy and she would just disappear.
“Mom, I really don’t know anything about building a fence.”
“Oh, come on,” she says, smiling. “Remember that time we helped Daddy build that fort for you and Jess?”
Jess. This is the first time she has heard her mother say his name in a long time. It stuns them both.
Ruby nods, thinks of Jess giving their dad instructions (It needs a roof and a trap door and, and, and . . . ). She remembers her mother standing in the woods with them, watching, blowing warm air into her hands. It was fall, and the leaves were gone from the trees, lying in scattered heaps on the ground. Every step they took into the woods was so loud. Each crush and crumble amplified. And something about this memory, something about the recollection of that sound, and the memory of her mother making hot chocolate for all of them afterwards, the way their hands were chapped and pink from the cold, makes her nod.
“Okay.”
“I think there are some sheets of plywood in the shed,” her mom says, clearing the dirty dishes, carrying them to the sink. She turns her back to Ruby and says, “It can’t be hard. We’ll figure it out. Maybe after swimming lessons.”
Swimming lessons. All summer long she’s been spending five mornings a week at the town pool, but what her dad doesn’t know, what her mother doesn’t know, but what every other kid and all the teenaged lifeguards at the pool do know, is that Ruby has not once gotten into the water. For the entire summer, she has ridden her bike to the pool, gone to join her classmates, and then sat on the cold concrete edge, her feet dangling into the water, shivering, teeth chattering, boys jeering, teacher coaxing and then pleading and then finally retreating. Defeated. All of them. Whispers swirling in the chlorine-scented, cold-water mornings, Her brother . . . I heard she almost drowned too . . . For an hour every single weekday morning for the whole summer, she has watched the other kids, most of them at least four years younger than she, jumping and splashing and swimming. Blowing bubbles and floating on their backs and clinging to the edge of the pool while kicking their feet gleefully. And when the hour finally ended, she’d stand up, wrap her towel around her, meet Izzy, who is in the Junior Lifeguard class, and they’d go to the l
ocker room where they would both stand under the weak spray. As long as she came home with wet hair, her dad didn’t ask questions.
Today, she goes through the motions again, arriving at the pool just before the lesson is about to start. She leaves her bike with all the others on the grassy area outside the pool gate. She wraps her towel around her waist and goes to the entrance where some pimply teenage boy who smiles too much finds her name on the checklist and then says, “Have fun!”
She can see Izzy at the deep end of the pool. The Junior Lifeguard class all wear red Speedo bathing suits, but even from here she recognizes Izzy by her long blond hair. Today they are learning CPR; she can see the dummy lying at the edge of the pool, the line of students waiting to revive it.
Marcy Davidson is in the class too, though until today Ruby hasn’t thought twice about her. The best policy, the only policy that works with Marcy, is to pretend she doesn’t exist. To acknowledge her at all is to make yourself vulnerable. Both Ruby and Izzy have learned that the hard way. But today, instead of ignoring Marcy, Ruby watches her. She watches the way Izzy and she lean into each other, bare shoulders touching, heads touching, as they whisper.
Ruby walks as quickly as she can to her spot with the other Tadpoles and takes her usual seat at the edge. Her teacher, Nora, walks over to her and tickles her feet, as though she were seven (like the rest of the class) instead of eleven.
