by T. Greenwood
She tries to remember the last time she used the phone to call Gloria, the last time she reached out to her. She is amazed when her fingers recollect the numbers, the pattern across the keypad. She clicks them rapidly before she has time to change her mind. And then she presses the cold receiver to her ear. Her entire body is trembling.
“Hello?” It’s Gloria, and it sounds like she’s eating something.
Sylvie pictures her sitting at the counter with the girls, maybe eating some homemade oatmeal cookies with them. Suddenly the kitchen smells not only of the wood fire but also of brown sugar, raisins.
“Hello?” Gloria repeats, a tinge of irritation in her voice this time.
“Gloria, it’s me. Sylvie.”
A pause. “Sylvie! Hi! Holy cow, do you hear the rain out there? Are you sure you guys don’t want to come into town and stay with us? I can come get you. It’s not too bad out yet, but it will be.”
“Um, no, we’re okay. I was actually calling because I was wondering if Ruby is with you. I was napping, and I think maybe she went into town?”
Another longer, deeper pause. An awful pause. And in this terrible moment, Sylvie anticipates exactly what Gloria will say and everything that will happen next. In a fraction of a second, she is able to envision the next thirty years of her life. Ruby has disappeared. She is lost; she is gone. Someone has taken her, or she has run away. The only certainty is this uncertainty. This is the beginning of a nightmare from which she will never wake up.
“Syl, Ruby hasn’t been here. I’ve been home all morning. Izzy’s been here too.”
Sylvie begins to rock back and forth, her body remembering the strange primitive motion of motherhood, that instinctual soothing of a body in motion. Only now her children are gone; her arms are empty. She is soothing a memory. She is pacifying a ghost.
“I’m coming over,” Gloria says. “We’ll find her, Syl. It’s going to be okay.”
“No,” she starts. But what is she saying no to? No, don’t help this nightmare to end? No, I am not standing alone in a dark kitchen rocking on my heels like a mental patient? No, I don’t need you?
“The truck’s dead, and Neil’s run out for a minute in Grover’s car. But as soon as he comes back, I’ll come get you.”
“Okay,” Sylvie says. It is this easy. “Thank you.”
Outside the wind moans, but she doesn’t know anymore if it is a warning or a lament.
Ruby knows that she needs to go get help. That if she cannot get Nessa to her mother, perhaps she can get her mother to Nessa. But even though she knows that this is the logical, the simple answer, she also knows that it is illogical, impossible. Her mother has not left the house in a year and a half. Why would she leave now to help some girl she doesn’t even know? For some figment of Ruby’s imagination?
Ruby paces around the small wooden shack, listening as the rain pounds against the roof. Water now pours through the collapsed portion of the roof, spilling into an old sap bucket that she has placed here. Nessa is lying on her side, her knees curled up, as though she is only a child with a stomachache. Ruby remembers her mother instructing her to do the same on the nights when her belly roared and complained.
Outside the sky is strangely dark. It is only twilight, but there are low, ominous clouds moving in from the east. They look like illustrated clouds in a child’s picture book. The world looks like a painting. The rain is insistent but also strangely soothing. It is a storm without thunder or lightning. Only wind and this incessant rain. She wonders how much this shack can withstand, how much it would take for the entire roof to collapse.
The sounds that Nessa makes are not human sounds. There are no words, only guttural complaints. Glottal pleas.
Ruby is terrified. She tries to give Nessa water, and as she drips the water from the bottle onto Nessa’s dry lips, she thinks of the baby raccoons. How this thirst, this impulse is the same. She can do this. She can help her. But then Nessa is rolling over onto her hands and knees, swaying, and vomits up all the water she has given her. There is a slick pool of water and bile on the roughhewn floor. Ruby takes the rest of the water and splashes it on the puddle, trying to wash it away. Nessa rocks back and forth, her belly grazing the ground, and vomits again.
“I need to go get help,” Ruby says, articulating exactly what she’s been thinking. Waiting for Nessa to either affirm this or reject it. Should she stay here or should she go?
Nessa’s eyes are rolling back in her head. Ruby and Izzy stayed up late one night and found a horror movie on one of the cable channels. It was about a girl who was possessed by the Devil. This is what she looked like. And she realizes that Nessa, the girl she found cowering in the woods a few days ago, is gone now. She has been consumed by pain, withdrawn into it. She has disappeared. All that remains is the body, this aching, rocking body. And Ruby knows that the choice is hers alone to make.
“I’ll be back,” she says, touching a tentative finger to Nessa’s forehead. “I’m going to get help. I’ll get my mother. She’ll have to come.”
Nessa’s face relaxes a little, and in the second before she is overtaken by pain again, Ruby can see her answer. Her Yes. Please. Help.
Ruby has left her now, and Nessa doesn’t know if she will ever come back. There is the definite possibility that she will have to deliver this baby alone. She wonders at the stories of teenage girls who have given birth in high school bathrooms, in fast-food restaurants. Closing themselves behind the clean white doors and delivering their own infants without anyone hearing them. Without anyone suspecting anything. Who are these girls and their painless labors? Who are these children who are able to somehow exist outside their pregnancies? She has always been baffled by the stories of girls who manage to hide their swollen bellies from their families. How sometimes, they don’t even realize they are pregnant themselves until the baby is screaming in their arms. It seems like something made up. How could anyone be oblivious to such incredible transformation, to their body’s own miraculous violence?
She doesn’t really know anything about birth. These were the chapters she only skimmed in the library books. Because when she was reading them, this hour seemed impossibly far away. A speculation, a distant dream. She knows nothing of what to do. What had she been thinking?
Her logic has never transcended the moment. Not really. She has never been one to think beyond the immediate impulse. She wants something, she takes it. She feels something (hunger, lust, anger), she feeds it (with food, with sex, with fists). Even with the baby inside of her, she has still lived in this moment-by-moment way, hoping that when this moment finally came, she would simply react to it in the same way she has responded to any other problems.
But now here she is, and she is both gripped and paralyzed by the enormity of what is about to happen. Though the pain seems endless, limitless, boundless, she knows enough to know that it will not go on forever. This baby will come out eventually. And with its release, the pain will be released as well.
She needs to trust that Ruby will come back. That she will not have to do this alone. She is bringing her mother. The midwife.
Pain is a time machine. It transports her. She is reeling backward, removed from her body. Removed even from this rain, from this dark forest, from the storm that is gathering outside. She is at once inside and outside. She is body, and she is ethereal. She is the rain, beating against the roof. She is the aching moan of the wind.
She returns to the position on her side, with her knees drawn up as far as they can go, her belly pressing against the thick flesh of her thighs. And waits for the next wave of pain to come. And when it does, she slips away, out of this body into another body. Another time.
Ruby forgets the lies she has told. The fabrications come undone as she runs through the rain back downstream to the place where the river is usually narrower, but she is disoriented in the dark, in the storm. Has she gone the wrong way? She wonders as she stares at the wide expanse of rushing water. As she hears the roar of
an angry river, rushing toward some unknown destination.
She stands, bewildered, on the bank and peers at the backside of her mother’s house, at the broken fence and the sandbags lined up along its edge. She needs to get across the river and get to her mother. To convince her, somehow, to come with her to Nessa. She knows Nessa doesn’t want her to call an ambulance, but she will if she has to. She will do whatever it takes to make sure she and the baby are okay.
Ruby knows she’s just going to have to leap. It’s not that much deeper and wider than it was; it just looks that way in the rain. And so she backs up and runs headlong into the storm, eyes squinted against the rain, and holds her breath as she jumps.
She lands on the opposite side of the river, and it feels as though the river is inside her body now, as though her blood has been replaced by this angry, muddy current. She can barely feel her legs anymore as she runs toward the house. The entire fence has collapsed now, and the remaining boards are scattered about the backyard like playing cards, leaving the back of the house exposed.
She runs to the backdoor and reaches for the handle. It is locked. She bangs and bangs and bangs. The lights are on, and she can see her mother moving around inside, but then the lights go out and everything is dark. She is filled with rage. Is her mother hiding inside? Is it possible that she is simply pretending she isn’t home so that she won’t have to answer the door?
She runs around to the front of the house, up onto the porch, and smashes the door with her fists until they ache with pain. She wonders if she has broken her bones. If she might just bang until they are all broken and she is just a pile of dust.
A voice swims to her through the rushing water in the gutter. “Ruby?”
And then the door opens and her mother’s shadowy face swims out of the darkness, a strange, ghostly white, disembodied face.
“Mom, you have to come with me,” Ruby says, breathless.
“Where have you been?” her mother says, her voice changing from relieved to angry. “I called Gloria and she said you weren’t there. I’ve been worried sick,” she says, her voice trembling and furious. “God, Ruby. Why are you doing this to me?”
Ruby stands in the doorway, incredulous. “Why am I doing this to you?” she says, almost laughing. She thinks then of Nessa on the floor of the sugar shack, the sounds coming from her throat. All of the agony in the world concentrated in her body.
“I need you,” she says, and she realizes that she is crying now. Because these three words are the ones she’s been waiting to say for so long. The words she’s been most afraid of. The ones she fears will go unheard. “I need you,” she says again, only this time more firmly. She is giving her mother one last chance, an ultimatum. If she says no, if she shakes her head in the way that she always does, if she slips away from her, hiding in her cowardice, lost inside her fear, she will walk out into the storm alone. She will let her mother go. She will walk away and never, ever look back again.
“I need you,” Ruby says.
And Sylvie feels her entire world starting to cave in. It’s as though the weight of these words, the impact with which they strike, are the same as the car hitting the side of the bridge. Of the car with her family nestled inside as it smashes into the bridge and that other car backs away, leaving them to bear the impact alone. As she stands on the porch with only inches between her daughter and her impossible demands, she is once again hurtling inside the car, free-floating like an astronaut as they crush through the bridge and tumble down into the water. She is watching as the steering wheel comes down on Robert’s lap, crushing his legs before the door swings open, releasing him into the night. She is sitting in the front seat, holding her mascara in one hand as she watches the glass shatter, as the current tugs her and Jess into its arms, as she watches Ruby hurled like a ball toward the shore. She is pulled into the rush of dark water, blinded and deaf to anything but Jess’s cries. She can see his one pale arm, his sweet small face illuminated by the headlights that are still, miraculously, shining like a spotlight on the scene in the river.
“Mommy!” he cries, and she tries, she tries so hard to reach him, but the closer she gets the harder the river pulls, and then, in only moments, his head dips under the water, and then, a moment later, that pale white arm is gone. A recollection. A memory.
After this moment, there was nothing left but this crippling fear.
She remembers almost nothing of the hospital that night, of the days and weeks after the accident. There were pills and sleep. Robert was in the hospital for nearly a month before he came home. They’d had to amputate both legs. There was no way to save them. There was a funeral, outside, a cold sunny day before Christmas, a casket that looked as though it were made for a doll. There was Ruby sitting on the couch watching cartoons and eating cereal. There was Bunk lumbering around the house fixing whatever he could fix. Gloria with her sad eyes sitting at her kitchen table like an odd guardian. And there was her fear. The fear she had lived with since she was a little girl, the fear she kept quiet in the back corner of her mind. But now the fear lived inside her. It controlled her hands. It maneuvered her eyes and mouth. It spoke through her. She was only a marionette, she realized, and Fear her puppeteer.
“I need you,” Robert had said, with his worried face as he learned to navigate this strange new world. I need you to help me, to love me.
“I need you,” Gloria had said as she waited and waited and waited for her to get better. I need your friendship, your company.
“I need you,” said all the mothers. To bring my baby into the world, to take care of me, to make us safe.
“I need you,” Ruby says. “I need you.”
It takes everything she has to go to the closet. She is resisting every impulse, defying every instinct.
She hasn’t worn this coat since the night of the accident. When the paramedics found her, she was a mile downstream, clinging to a rock, screaming Jess’s name; her bright red coat ultimately saved her. She reaches into the pockets and feels something inside. It’s an envelope. She pulls it out now; it has long since dried and hardened. It is stiff as she unfolds it. The kids’ report cards. The reason they’d been headed toward the school during the storm. As Ruby waits in the other room, Sylvie unfolds the fragile paper, studies the assessment of her child. Her eyes scan the paper and go to where the teacher has handwritten her notes, which, despite the river, are miraculously preserved. Jess is a hardworking and sweet boy, but he is easily discouraged. It is difficult to get him to participate in class, but only because he lacks confidence. He is shy and somewhat fearful of new things. And while he does not test well . . . Here, the last words written about her son. This odd obituary. This strange eulogy. She remembers being frustrated when she first read this. She’d been a little angry, even, with Jess. Why don’t you raise your hand in class? What are you afraid of? As though she herself had not been tentative like this. As though he wasn’t exactly like she had been as a child.
She sets the report card on her bureau and unfolds Ruby’s. Ruby is such a bright child. She is eager to learn, kind to others, and a joy to teach. I feel lucky to have her as my student. This, more than the note about Jess, feels like a blow: these observations by someone who had only known Ruby for a few months, who had not seen her take her first steps or listened to her sing or watched as she helped Jess put blocks in the shape sorter; someone who didn’t know she liked plain donuts and meatball grinders and that her favorite color was orange; someone who didn’t know she talked in her sleep or that she broke her arm when she was three. And still, this woman felt fortunate to know her. This stranger counted Ruby as one of her blessings. She feels oddly jealous and then just filled with remorse. How could she have let things go so wrong? How could she deny herself what she has left? How she could have deprived Ruby a mother all this time? What kind of mother was she? And what has she become?
Ruby leads the way through the house, grabbing things along the way and stuffing them into her backpack. She has
heated up water and poured it into her Thermos. She has towels, scissors. She’s talking rapidly about a girl in the woods, a runaway. Sylvie has no idea what she is talking about, but still she listens. She tries to understand.
“There’s a girl in the woods, Mama. And she’s having a baby.”
Sylvie’s eyes widen.
“Just come,” she says. “Please. She needs us.”
Nessa has become the pain now. She has ceased to exist as anything but this throe. Her entire body is burning up. She is fever. She is heat. She is not a body but an element. Volcanic. Molten. She feels as if a fire is starting; her flesh burns so badly. It recalls the first time, when the boy whose name she can’t remember but whose hands and eyes she won’t forget, kissed her until her face was sticky with his saliva, an ineffectual balm for the searing pain he’d caused. It is a memory of other times, when the men were too rough. When they cared for nothing but their own pleasure, even if it caused her pain. It is the memory of fire that lives between her legs now. A sort of primordial remembrance. She could be the first woman ever. She could be Eve.
