by T. Greenwood
She wonders if the puzzle she’s been trying to solve is simply like one of these conundrums. If the answer is somehow there, obvious, in front of her. She tries to come at the question from all directions. To sneak up on it rather than tackling it head on. She tries to think of the least obvious answer. She thinks of it as something solvable, something with a solution. The idea that it might not have one is more than she can bear.
The baby slips farther down. She feels it this time. It plummets and lands heavily on her pelvis. It nearly takes her breath away with its sudden certainty. She doesn’t know what this means, but she can only imagine that there isn’t much time left. That it is readying itself. Like someone jumping from an airplane. She imagines the baby strapping on a tiny little parachute, miniature goggles, a harness. It is fearless, this little one. She thinks it might be a girl, a girl who is unafraid of anything. For whom the conundrums are obvious. Who never complicates the simple things, but simply dives headlong into life.
Sylvie considers hiding. But the man in the truck has already seen her sitting on the steps. It’s too late. She thinks of running, of scurrying away like an animal, disappearing into the trees. But, as always, she is paralyzed.
“I got a call about some raccoons?” he says, leaning out the open window of the truck.
She crosses her arms over her chest, keenly aware how strange it must seem that she is wandering around outside in her nightgown.
“Ma’am?” he says.
“Yes,” she nods. “They’re here on the front porch.”
He gets out of the truck and goes around the back to get a cage, and she stands up. He lumbers up the walkway, and she feels her skin grow hot with shame as he looks away from her, embarrassed that she is outside in only her ratty nightgown. She looks around frantically as though her robe will suddenly materialize.
She thinks for a minute about telling him that she’s locked herself out. Any normal person would just explain the situation, ask for help. If he’s anything like Bunk or Robert, he’s got tools in his truck that could dismantle the lock on the back door. But as he averts his eyes and walks past her, she thinks maybe it would be better if she just lets him do what he has come to do. Ruby will be home soon with the key.
She follows him onto the porch and looks around furtively, registering what it is that he must see: the stacks of junk, the empty plastic bins. The drawn shades and the wild animals who have made a home there. They stir as his feet fall heavily on the sagging floor of the porch.
“You seen the mother?” he asks.
It feels like an accusation. She shakes her head. And she thinks about the mother’s skin stretched across the plywood. About what it is that she is trying to do. Trying to preserve.
The baby raccoons chatter loudly. They wriggle and cry.
Within a couple of minutes he has gathered them into the cage. He still won’t look at her, even as he shakes her hand and says, “All set. If you see the mother around, you give us a call.”
And then he is in the truck, lighting a cigarette, and backing up. Soon he is gone, and the beating of her heart slowly settles back into its steady rhythm.
Inside the house, the phone rings again. Sylvie looks desperately at the locked door and wonders if she should break a window to let herself in. But that would mean she’d have a broken window to contend with, an easy way in for vandals, for animals, for thieves. And so she watches the closed door and wills the ringing to stop. She doesn’t have an answering machine anymore. The last one broke, but because she never leaves, she hasn’t had a need for one. She thinks of Robert, wonders if the storm has reached his brother’s house. The radio had said that it was a slow-moving storm, and that the Carolinas and mid-Atlantic could expect sustained winds and a lot of rain.
She wonders if it is him. She wonders if he is okay. And then she thinks it might be Ruby. God, what if something has happened to Ruby? What if she is trying to reach her and can’t?
She doesn’t know what to do. She circles the house as though there is a secret door she has forgotten existed. When she gets to the backyard, she looks at the broken fence. If there hadn’t been this hole, then the mother raccoon would never have found her way in. And she wouldn’t have shot it. Ruby wouldn’t be so furious with her, and she wouldn’t have taken off again like this. And so she pulls the fallen board back up. It is cracked and splintered, but she is able to right it, to close the entrance. She searches for something to use to attach it to the other piece of plywood. She sees the pile of hardware that they had assembled from the mishmash in the shed. But the hammer is inside the house. She grabs a long nail and then searches for something to use to pound it in. She finds a rock and attempts to nail the plywood sheets together at the seams. But there is nothing to hold them together as she pounds, and the broken sheet falls down again, followed by the sheets on either side of it. She is sweating and breathless, and even as she understands how ludicrous all of this is, she cannot help but feel like her entire world is crashing down around her. That her life is no different than this miserably constructed fence. She has tried to do a job that she is not equipped to do. And this is the result: a faulty house of cards. A pathetic attempt at a fortress. An ineffectual citadel. She is a fool.
It is sprinkling now, just a little bit. She wonders how much of the storm they’ll actually get up here. And when the real rain will start. What she does know is that she is still wearing her nightgown, and the wind is tearing through the worn nylon.
“What’s going on?” Ruby asks.
It startles Sylvie, and she stumbles backward; she feels like she’s knocked the wind out of herself.
“I locked myself out,” she says. And she feels like a child.
“I have my key,” Ruby says, fumbling in her pocket. A slip of paper falls out, and Ruby looks nervously at Sylvie as she scrambles to pick it up.
“What’s that?” Sylvie asks.
“Nothing,” Ruby says and then slips her key into the deadbolt, letting her back in. She practically falls into the house, as though into a warm bath. She is safe again. Safe.
But Ruby is still angry with her. She barely looks at Sylvie as she walks into the kitchen, opens the fridge, looking for something.
The phone rings again. And again.
“Aren’t you going to get that?” Ruby asks, her eyes wide and angry.
And so Sylvie picks up the receiver. It is as heavy as a brick in her hand. An anvil. An anchor.
“Hello?” she says, her voice barely above a whisper, waiting.
But there is only the staccato buzz of the dial tone on the other end.
They are out of milk. Ruby sees the empty plastic jug on the table, next to her mother’s coffee mug. The babies wouldn’t drink it out of the bowl, but earlier that morning when she dipped her finger in the milk and dropped it into their open mouths, they sucked greedily at her. She thinks about them out there on the porch, completely unaware that their mother is dead. That she is never coming back.
She grabs her backpack again and throws it on her shoulders.
“Where are you going?” her mother asks.
“Up to Hudson’s,” she says. “We’re out of milk.”
Her mother dips the tea bag in and out of her mug, rhythmically, like a metronome. When she looks up, Ruby can see dark circles under her eyes. And for a strange moment, she imagines that she too is a mother raccoon. It’s a ridiculous thought, one of those odd things she thinks sometimes. That the world is upside down, and that they are really walking on the sky. That if she were to try hard enough she could will herself to fly. She thinks of it as dream-thinking, those thoughts that make no sense when you’re awake, but have a certain logic when you are half asleep. And for this tiny moment, she imagines her mother transforming, growing a coat of prickly brown and gray fur. The sad tired circles under her eyes expanding until they make a mask. She imagines her ears pricking up to the top of her head, a tail pushing its way out of her body. She imagines her dropping to all fours and scur
rying away into the forest.
“Do we need anything else?” Ruby asks.
Her mother shakes her head, and so she heaves the heavy backpack up onto her shoulders, and starts toward the door.
“Ruby?” her mother says, and she turns to her again. She is remarkably grateful to find that she has not transformed into an animal but is still her mother. Still just a woman with tired eyes.
“Yeah?”
“I’m sorry about the mama raccoon.”
Ruby nods; she doesn’t know what to say. How to respond.
Her mother stares back down into the steaming mug of tea. It’s the one she and Jess gave her three Christmases ago. It says World’s Best Mom.
“It’s okay,” Ruby says. “It was an accident.” And that word, accident, is like a sliver under her skin, surfacing, stinging.
“I could have hurt you,” her mother says, and her voice hitches, like fabric snagging on a barbed wire fence. “I thought I did hurt you.”
“But you didn’t,” Ruby says. “I’m fine.”
“I know.” Her mother nods and smiles, but the smile is weak, a broken sort of smile.
“Okay, I really should go,” Ruby says and shrugs the strap of her backpack that has slipped a bit.
“I’m going to make an appointment,” her mother says as she heads toward the door. And for a minute Ruby thinks she means Animal Control. To have them come out and get the babies. To take them away. She has forgotten to tell her that she already did. But then her mother says, “For help. I know I need some help.”
Ruby turns to look at her mother, at her earnest face full of promises. And Ruby is silenced again. It’s as though she is reaching into a bag looking for the right item to pull out, the one that her mother is looking for. The one that she needs. But the bag is empty, and she gropes futilely in the abyss. She has nothing to say because she knows that this promise, as much as her mother believes she can keep it, is as hollow as a reed.
She walks out onto the front porch, and it is strangely quiet. Eerily quiet. She pushes the innards of the cushion aside, but the babies are gone. They’re gone.
“What did you do?” she says to her mother. “Where did they go?” But strangely the rage that had filled her like something hot and liquid has cooled. It pools in her shoulders. And the sorrow and disappointment is worse than any sort of anger. Ruby can still smell the wild, gamey scent of the mama raccoon in her sweatshirt. There is a bit of the mother’s blood on the cuff.
“The man came,” her mother says. “You called him . . . he said he got a call.”
The phone begins to ring again and they both look at it, hanging on the wall like some sort of foreign object. When it is obvious that her mother isn’t going to answer it, Ruby lunges for it. “Hello?”
“Ruby, it’s Daddy. Listen, I can’t talk long. Can you put your mother on please?”
She doesn’t want to pass the phone to her mother though. What she wants is for him to be back here. She clings to the phone, clutches it like a life preserver holding her afloat.
“Honey, I’ve only got a little bit of juice left. I really need to talk to your mom.”
And so she reluctantly passes the receiver to her mom. “It’s Daddy.”
Her mother takes the phone and slips around the corner, the cord curling behind her like a tail. Ruby listens.
“You can’t drive in a storm like this,” she says. “That’s crazy.”
She watches as her mother starts to pace back and forth across the kitchen floor, and Ruby remembers the day after the accident. When the phone wouldn’t stop ringing. All day long her mother walked back and forth across this same floor, muttering, Thank you, I’m okay. We’ll be okay. No, we don’t need anything. She remembers that her mother wore herself out, walking miles across the same ten feet of linoleum. How finally, she couldn’t walk another inch and just left the phone sitting on the counter and went to bed. That she didn’t get out of bed after that for almost a whole week.
“Robert?” she says, stopping. She looks at the phone again, as though it’s a piece of technology she’s never seen before. “Hello?”
“Where is he?” Ruby asks, forgetting about the raccoons, concerned only with her father now. With his safety.
Her mother looks at her as though she’s forgotten she’s here. “They’re leaving early tomorrow, they want to get on the road before the storm hits. It could take a few days though, if they have to stop.”
Ruby is overwhelmed with relief. Bunk and Daddy are coming. By Monday morning, this whole week will be like some sort of strange dream. But then she thinks about Nessa and realizes that she needs to get her out of the shack before her dad comes back. Once she’s back at her dad’s house, she won’t be able to help her anymore. She heads to the front door. She can’t help the raccoon babies, but she can still help Nessa. Whoever that guy, George Downs, is doesn’t matter anymore. Izzy had never heard of him; he was nobody she knew. He is just a name on a piece of paper. But Ruby is here. She is real. And she can help her.
“Actually, I think you should stay here,” her mother says. “Daddy says the storm is heading up the coast, and we’re going to get a lot of rain. I want you to help me get those sandbags up against the back of the house. He says the wind might be bad too and that we should board up the windows.”
Ruby looks at her mother in disbelief. Incredulous. “It’s not even sprinkling outside. The storm isn’t even supposed to get here until Sunday.”
“I’m sorry. I need your help. I promised your father I would do this.”
She tries not to think of Nessa out there in the woods by herself. She’ll need to wait until tonight, she thinks. But then she remembers what happened the last time she snuck out at night. She tries to blink away the image of her mother standing in the yard with the gun. She’ll have to go to her in the morning. She prays she won’t try to leave, that she won’t disappear. That she won’t think that she’s left her.
She helps her mother drag the sandbags up against the back of the house. The fence they made is broken now, the plywood sheets lying in heaps. When she sees the raccoon hide pinned to the board, she feels bile rising in her throat and tears coming to her eyes. At first she considers ignoring it, leaving it like that. Just forgetting whatever it is that her mother is trying to do. But instead, she gets a hammer and tears the nails out of the wood, ripping the pelt from the board. She carries it down to the river and hurls it with every ounce of her strength into the water. It bobs and dips, snagging for a moment on a rock, and then it is gone.
She takes the plywood boards that her mother spray painted and drills them against the windows, turning them so that the lettering faces inward rather than outward. But she realizes when they are done and back inside that now the words are screaming at them through the windows. NO TRESPASSING! KEEP OUT! The house even darker now without the benefit of even the sunlight, normally filtered through dark curtains. Now there is nothing but darkness.
Nessa slips in and out of sleep inside the shack all afternoon. She feels feverish, almost ill. She wonders, vaguely, if somehow her toe has gotten infected and that the infection has spread to her blood. She wonders if it is possible to die from this. If she might just slip into sleep and stay there. Delirious, she waits for Ruby to arrive. But as the sun passes across the sky, changing the shadows inside the dark cool shack, she does not come. What if she never comes?
When the first pain arrives, like a shiver across her abdomen, she recalls the first time she bled: the wrecked feeling of her body, the way the pain gripped her. She remembers being alone in the apartment, the aching, empty feeling of it, her mother out again. Some nights her mom wouldn’t get home until the sun was beginning to rise. Some nights she didn’t come home at all. Nessa had squatted over the toilet with its cracked seat and rust-ringed bowl, touched the damp place between her legs, and thought that she was sick. That she was dying. She was eleven years old, and no one had ever taken the time to tell her that this would happen and not
to be afraid. That this terrifying grip of her uterus was just her body’s way of readying itself. She remembers a pilly pink bath mat and the dark, nearly black blood that dripped across it as she crawled to the bathtub where she ran the water so hot that steam filled the bathroom like ghosts. She remembers that she wanted her mother then, more than she had ever wanted her before, this longing the most pure thing she’d ever felt. The need as sharp and exacting as a sword. That when she sank into the tub, the water turning cloudy and pink, she had wished her mother home.
She wonders about her mother now, as her body recollects that first pain, that precursor, that prelude, to this. And then she tries to imagine her mother carrying her like this, about her mother’s body being consumed by her. But it is impossible. Like imagining the future. Or like trying to remember the deep, deep past.
Her mother could be anywhere now. Or nowhere at all. By the time Nessa left Quimby, her mother had lost her job again, and she and Rusty were talking about moving back to the city. But all these months later there could have been a dozen cities, a dozen jobs, a dozen other men. She had been a fool to think she’d find her here. That she would have waited for Nessa to come home.
She lies on her side on the cold floor, studies the green of leaves through the hole in the roof. She cups her hand underneath the swollen flesh of her belly, but the baby does not respond to her touch. And while her body tenses and contracts beneath her fingers, the baby does not stir. Not even a bit. And when the wave of pain washes over her, Nessa wonders if somehow, she has killed her.
Sometimes, unless Sylvie takes the pills, the only way to make herself sleep is to count. As a little girl, her grandmother, exasperated by Sylvie’s insomnia, suggested that she count sheep. But there were no sheep to count, none outside her window in the pastures beyond their house. There were houses and lowing cows, but not a single sheep for miles and miles. And none inside her imagination. What lived inside her imagination were animals of a different sort. They were faceless, nameless, bleating creatures. She couldn’t bring herself to count them; the numbers didn’t go high enough. Far enough. And counting them, acknowledging them only seemed to make them multiply. There was no lullaby here.
