The Search for Baby Ruby

by Susan Shreve

  “Pathetic,” Delilah said.

  Teddy had mixed feelings about her parents, more bad feelings than good ones she had realized when she was dispatched to the Harrisonwood Reform School to be reassembled as an ordinary, normal fifteen-year-old girl. Or the Home for Girls with Problems, as Teddy and Jess called it.

  Of the two, she preferred her father.

  “No reason,” she told her counselor at the Home. “Except he can’t help being who he is and my mother can.”

  The counselor had given her a journal, black with a hard cover and lined paper.

  “You are to keep a record of your feelings during the time you’re with us,” the counselor had said.

  “My feelings?” Teddy asked, alarmed.

  “Any feelings just as they come to you,” the counselor said.

  “I’m not going to be doing that,” Teddy had said. “I’m not interested in a book about my feelings.”

  Instead, she used the black journal for lists of food she missed from home, like artichoke hearts and dark chocolate with salty almonds and Starbucks chai lattes. Or places she would go when she was released. New York, maybe California, the beach. And boyfriends. She had had so many of them ever since kindergarten, when Dylan Fry kissed her on the lips.

  But the first list in her journal, the one she wrote during the week of her arrival at the Home, ranked the members of her family in order of her affection.

  Jess was number one — Teddy’s favorite from the start, when her mother brought Jess home wrapped in a pink blanket with a pointy pink hat and dotted red cheeks. Your new baby, Delilah had said, and while Teddy was young, she liked to pretend that was true.

  My child, my daughter, my little girl, she’d think to herself.

  Delilah was opening her purse, scrounging for a safety pin.

  “I’m afraid the skirt of my dress may have a little tear.”

  “No kidding!”

  “It’s not that tight, Teddy. It’s supposed to be stretchy. But could you go to the ladies’ and check if this hotel supplies safety pins?”

  “I may need to go back upstairs,” Teddy said.

  “Upstairs?”

  “To the room.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because I’m probably going to throw up on the white tablecloth, Mom.”

  “Please don’t, Teddy,” Delilah said. “This is your sister’s wedding.”

  “Thanks, Mom. I’ve picked up on the wedding program.”

  “Then for once, be normal.”

  “I’m not normal,” Teddy said. “I’m a kleptomaniac.”

  “But today we should be so happy,” Delilah said. “So happy because of Whee and Victor and all of us together on this lovely night.”

  “We should be happy but we aren’t.” Teddy pushed her chair away from the table. “As soon as Whee’s speech is over, I’ll find you a safety pin.”

  Teddy began shoplifting in the eighth grade. At the time, she didn’t call it shoplifting. She called it taking, and the things she took — clothes, mainly, and cosmetics and jewelry and especially scarves — were things she needed. Not that she needed to have them. She needed to take them.

  She developed a system. She would walk into a shop in Larchmont, wander from front to back, looking at pants and tees, checking the earrings hanging on the metal trees on the front counter. She began with scarves, often at the front of the store in bins, and she’d shuffle through the bins, pick one scarf in particular, glance at the checkout clerk, look around to see if anyone had spotted her, and then stash the scarf in her backpack. Scarves were the easiest, scarves and jewelry, because they didn’t have sensors. But as she got better at taking during the summer after eighth grade, she took clothes, trying them on behind the dressing room curtain, politely asking a clerk did they have a ladies’ room and, once the door was locked, taking out the scissors she kept in her backpack and cutting off the sensor attached to the clothing so an alarm wouldn’t sound when she walked out of the store. She’d drop the censor in the container for feminine hygiene installed in the ladies’ and walk cheerfully and not too quickly out of the store, calling Good-bye and Thank you, and head home with a tremendous sense of relief.

  At home, she’d stuff her stash in the back of her closet at the bottom of a small trunk that held her childhood toys and stuffed animals and treasures she collected.

  “I can’t help myself,” Teddy told her parents when the manager of the Banana Republic called Delilah to report the shoplifting — just a warning, she said, we won’t call the police this time.

  “I go into a store and I have to take something,” she said.

  “If you have to take something, don’t go into stores,” her father said.

  “I could promise you I won’t, but I know I will,” she said. “I can even promise I won’t take anything, but I will and I do and I don’t think I’ll ever stop.”

  On Saturdays, after soccer, Teddy would walk downtown alone, leaving her friends at the coffee shop on Main Street, thinking about what she’d take that day — maybe a dress or a T-shirt or a necklace, nothing too expensive.

  Things got worse. She began to wake up in the morning wondering where she would go after school that day. Maybe Tweens and Teens on Main Street. Maybe Lateda. Would she slip it into her backpack in full view of the salespeople, or would she go to the ladies’ room or a dressing room? Would she get caught?

  She had only been caught twice. The second time was at the drugstore, taking a packet of pens. But the police had never been called and the merchandise had been returned and she’d apologized to the manager.

  By the time Teddy was in high school, she was skipping her afternoon classes, heading downtown. She especially liked Lateda, where the clothes didn’t have sensors but there was still an element of danger because the shop was small and it was easy for the salesperson to see her drop a skirt or tunic or scarf in her backpack.

  Shoplifting required skill, and she was very good at it.

  The stores in Larchmont began to expect Teddy O’Fines. She’d saunter in the front door, and since the town was small and people knew one another, she’d wave to the salesladies, call the ones she knew by name. By her sophomore year of high school, she had lost interest in Larchmont. Mid-October, after Columbus Day weekend, she left school at noon, just after Spanish and before lunch. She got on the train from Larchmont to New York City, walked to Saks Fifth Avenue on Fifth Avenue between Fiftieth and Forty-Ninth Street, and took a diamond bracelet from the top of a jewelry counter while the saleslady’s back was turned.

  She was caught before she could get to the end of the counter.

  “I don’t dye my hair, if that’s why you’re looking at me, Teddy,” Delilah said.

  “I wasn’t looking at your hair,” Teddy said. “I was looking at your necklace with the big red stone. I’ve never seen it before.”

  “Do you like it?

  “Actually, no. It’s pretty ugly.”

  “It was Grandma’s and it’s fake,” Delilah said. “Costume jewelry, so never mind stealing it.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of stealing it, Mom,” Teddy said, tears welling in her eyes. “How could I steal it if it’s around your neck?”

  “That shouldn’t stop you.”

  Teddy turned her head away, squeezing her damp eyes shut, wiping her cheeks with the back of her hand.

  “I’m having a terrible time at this dinner.”

  She was trembling.

  “Shhh, Ted. Whee’s about to speak.”

  Whee was thanking Aldie for his beautiful toast. She thanked her mother for her energy and optimism, and Danny for his loyalty.

  “And thanks to my little sister Jess, who can’t be here,” Whee said. “And to my next little sister, Teddy.”

  Thank you, Teddy, for being my little sister.

  My troubled little sister, Teddy thought.

  “I don’t want to shoplift,” she had told her parents so many times she couldn’t count them.


  “Just quit,” her father said, while her mother shook her head sadly, as if there had been a death in the family. “Pretty easy solution.”

  “I try to stop and it doesn’t happen. I just do it again.”

  “Then maybe you should try harder,” her father said.

  “Like The Little Engine That Could. ‘I think I can, I think I can, I think I can….’ ” Delilah had said.

  Sometimes, Teddy simply hated her mother. She couldn’t help it.

  The waiters were serving the first course. Cold green soup with a curl of lemon on the top.

  Something about the greenness of it, the fact that it was cold, made Teddy gag. She pushed it away.

  “I might throw up right now,” Teddy said, and she did feel clammy, her body cold and damp. “Truly.”

  “Well, don’t,” Delilah said.

  At the Home for Girls, no one paid particular attention to Teddy. Everyone there had problems, big problems, and Teddy O’Fines was nothing special. She didn’t have to worry about shoplifting at the Home the way she used to worry that she would be caught. She had nowhere to go.

  Whee was walking around the tables kissing everyone now, her eyes red from all the crying she’d been doing in the last weeks as her wedding day approached, her smile broad, lipstick on her white, white teeth.

  Teddy cringed. Everything about the evening was beginning to feel artificial. And Whee — perfect, brilliant, beautiful Whee — was smiling and kissing through her tears, as if this night was her last free night before she was locked in prison until “death did part her and Victor Treat.”

  Danny was getting up to give his toast, a little drunk. Danny was often a little drunk, not every night but every party, and there had been a lot of parties in preparation for Whee and Victor’s wedding. Teddy, sequestered in the Home for Girls with Problems, had not attended these parties, but Jess had and wrote to her about them.

  Hi Teddy, was the note Teddy kept under her pillow. Thinking about you all the time day and night while Whee Whee is the center of the universe, party after party, last night at the Gordons. Cocktails. They asked me did I want a Shirley Temple. If I’d been YOU, I would have said, “No, thanks, I actually drink champagne.” But I’m not brave enough to be you, so I just said, “No, thank you.”

  You are my idol. You have always been my idol because you tell the truth.

  Love forever and ever and ever and ever, Jess, the save-the-marriage baby.

  Danny raised his hands for quiet.

  “Hello,” he said. “Welcome, everyone, to the celebration of my beloved sister Louisa’s marriage to Victor Treat.” He raised his glass of champagne and drank. “To the two of you. Good luck, Victor, my friend, the brother I’ve never had. Welcome to the O’Fines family — we’re a high-spirited, noisy, joyful, outspoken family, and We Love You!”

  “I don’t love him,” Teddy said to her father, who was resting his chin in his hand, a thoughtful expression on his face. “Do you?”

  Aldie gave Teddy a wink.

  “Love him? Sure. He’s about to be family.”

  “He isn’t family yet,” Teddy said, folding her legs under her, lightheaded. Maybe she would faint.

  She had never fainted before and it was possible she would now, tonight, in the Bay Room of the Brambles Hotel. She tried to concentrate on her father as he poured himself a glass of wine.

  “What is family anyway?” Teddy asked.

  “Family? Well, family is what we have.”

  “I mean, what is our family?” she asked. “As opposed to other families.”

  “Our family is like most families. A lot of good times. Loving and loyal. And a couple of problems.”

  “You mean me, I suppose.”

  He put his finger to his lips.

  “Shhh. Danny’s speaking.”

  “I wish you the happiness that Beet and I have,” Danny was saying, “and the joy of a baby like our Ruby, who at this very moment is in the care of the best little sister in the world. A toast to Jess O’Fines, to the future, and to the loyalty of a loving family.”

  “Oh my god,” Teddy said. “I am certainly going to throw up now.”

  “Get a grip,” Delilah said.

  Delilah’s hot breath was windy in Teddy’s ear with the sweet smell of champagne, and Teddy could feel the coming of an attack. A familiar tightness in her throat, her face damp, her heart beating so hard it felt as if it could jump out of her chest.

  She had to get out of the room quickly, without causing a fuss or throwing up between her chair and the exit door, without losing her heart, which was about to burst through her skin and drop in a free fall from her body to the floor.

  This was a panic attack. It had happened before. Three times in the last few months, once on the train home for Christmas. Out of the blue, she’d thought she was dying, and she’d gone into the bathroom and sat on the floor, concentrating on the whiteness of the toilet bowl until she began to feel like herself again. The other two times happened at the Home, and a counselor, Dr. Peach, very young, with wild curly hair, had held her by the wrists, speaking to Teddy in the softest voice she had ever heard.

  “I promise you,” she had said. “You are not going to die.”

  “But I can’t catch my breath. I’m having a heart attack.”

  “You are not having a heart attack, Teddy. You are having a panic attack.”

  A panic attack.

  “It happens,” Dr. Peach had said. “Especially to girls, it happens. You are worried and nervous and uncertain, and out of the blue, like a locomotive hurrying down the tracks, you have this thing happen to you that feels like dying. But it isn’t.”

  Dr. Peach had taught her how to breathe into a paper bag, in and out, in and out, so there was a balance of carbon dioxide and oxygen.

  “Like this,” she had said, showing Teddy what to do. And it did help and Teddy did feel better.

  But now, in the Bay Room of the Brambles Hotel, at her sister’s rehearsal dinner, sitting between her parents, Teddy O’Fines was not about to request a paper bag of the waitstaff.

  She struggled to get up, pushing back the chair.

  “I’ll be right back,” she said to her mother, breathing deeply to get more air into her lungs. “I’ll bring the safety pin.”

  “Are you all right?” Delilah asked. “Do you want me to come with you?”

  “No, no,” Teddy said. “I’m fine.”

  “You look terribly pale.” Delilah took her by the wrist.

  “I’m fine,” Teddy said, lifting up the chair. “I have to pee.”

  And she would be right back, she told herself. She’d go to the ladies’ for a few minutes, where she would throw cold water on her face, sit on the toilet seat with the cubicle locked, taking in deep breaths, and then she’d go back to the rehearsal dinner.

  Her tiny purse with a long ribbon hung over her shoulder, and as she was sitting, breathing, her eyes closed, she heard the whoop of a text message.

  She opened the purse, checked the phone, and there it was, three words:

  Help! Terrible trouble.

  Jess.

  Teddy got up quickly, opened the door, and ran out of the ladies’, down the long corridor beyond the Bay Room, into the lobby, and over to the elevators, pushed UP, and waited as the doors creaked open.

  She was alone in the elevator except for an elderly lady checking her lipstick in the mirror and in the mood for conversation.

  “A very lovely hotel,” she said, and Teddy nodded.

  “I’m always happy to be at a lovely hotel, aren’t you?” She smiled.

  Teddy nodded.

  The 2 was lit in the panel above the elevator doors, but they were moving very slowly. Four more floors to go.

  “I’m here for my niece’s wedding. My great-niece, actually, Miranda duFall. Do you know her?”

  “I don’t,” Teddy said, as the doors opened on six.

  “Well, have a nice day, now,” the elderly lady said.

  A
Nice Day?

  A member of the cleaning staff was standing at the door to room 618 with a pile of towels.

  “You live here?” she asked Teddy with an accent, maybe French, maybe not.

  Teddy nodded.

  “Well, nobody’s here and the door’s open. I’ve been waiting for the folks to come back.” She shrugged her shoulders.

  “Nobody’s here?”

  Teddy stepped over the threshold.

  The Pack and Play was set up, a towel spread out on the floor, and on the bed, tossed there, the skirt brushing the carpet, was Whee’s wedding dress — draped casually across the bed, as if someone had been wearing it and suddenly had to leave in a hurry but without the dress.

  “You the bride?” the cleaning lady asked.

  “No,” Teddy said.

  She picked up the dress, Whee’s precious and expensive wedding dress. She hung it up on the shower bar in the bathroom.

  Whee’s makeup was scattered on the sink.

  So Jess had been in the bathroom, probably feeling sorry for herself, and a little angry, although she wasn’t ever angry like Teddy, who was almost always a little angry. Jess must have looked at herself in the mirror and decided on a whim to try bronzer on her cheeks, sky-blue eye shadow, the raspberry lipstick that Whee must have purchased just for her wedding day.

  Teddy dumped the tubes and brushes and pots back in the makeup bag, setting them on the side of the sink. She turned on the water to wash out the dusting of blue eye shadow.

  Jess must have tried on the dress. Surprising, Teddy thought. Not like Jess to do something forbidden. By nature she wanted to please, to be admired and loved, to be helpful and cooperative, all of the good things that endeared her to her teachers and parents and her brother and sisters.

  But Teddy suspected that Jess wasn’t really obedient or dutiful or happy-go-lucky. She played the part of the good daughter in the O’Fines family the way Teddy played the part of the bad one.

  “Well I’ll be,” the cleaning lady said, coming into the bathroom. “Some beautiful dress.”

  “It’s my older sister’s dress,” Teddy said. “She gets married downstairs in this hotel tomorrow.”