by Karen Rivers
Oh Ruby. Gosh. I don’t even know what to say. Want me to come round?
I wish I hadn’t done it, Fi.
It was your idea.
Maybe I should have just written her an email, so she’d have had time to think about it all properly. I feel like I’ve hit her on the head with a brick. I’m an awful person! I wanted her to talk with me about it so badly, but I don’t think I thought about how shocking it would be for her. I feel so terrible, Fi. What do I do now? And what if she doesn’t go back to normal?
I know you’re not really cross with me, you’re just stressed about your mum, but when you said that about how it was my idea, it felt like you were blaming me. It wasn’t my doing, it was just an idea! I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Ruby. You know I wouldn’t purposefully do anything to betray you or put you in an awful position or anything like that! You’re my best mate!
You know it passes, when she gets like this. Remember? Didn’t she do this last year when that horrible man she was dating asked her if she would go to France with him and then left without her, taking your nan’s old leather luggage with him? I mean, it wasn’t anything the same, but she did cry a whole lot and you had to tell her it was OK. She let you do that, let you take care of her. She’s just doing the same thing now. She’ll be OK.
But Fi, it’s not the same as that at all. It’s like she was so used to being upset about men who leave, she almost became like an actress in a film playing the part of someone heartbroken. This time, it was like a tidal wave of real feelings. Anyone would have been knocked over by that, not just Mum.
I just hope when she wakes up, she’ll be OK. She has to be OK, right?
Ruby,
Everything is going to be totes OK. I don’t know why I had to say that first, but I did. I do. Because I believe it.
She didn’t say it wasn’t true. She did give me away because of my heart. She let me go because she thought I wouldn’t live.
I’m trying really hard, Ruby. I’m trying REALLY hard to think, OK, I can forgive her for that because she was young and her husband had died and she was scared and in America and away from her home in England and everything else that happened, but I don’t know if I CAN forgive her for not even holding me, no matter what your nan said. I was a baby! A sick baby! What kind of awful person was your nan, anyway? I thought you said she was lovely! A real, proper mom would have held me until I died. I don’t expect you to understand because you didn’t die. I’m the one who died. Even though I didn’t.
I’m so super scared I can’t forgive her, Ruby. I don’t think I can! I know I should! I have to! If I don’t, I know that I’ll be the one who gets all twisted up inside. I know it, not just from Buddha, but because I think I’ve already gotten twisted up inside just from my whole life, from feeling like I’m not good enough. From, I guess, already being mad at her. I have to let it all go. I just know that I do.
The thing that I know mostly is that we can’t change what’s already happened. That’s what Buddha would say, and anyone really. It’s done. When I think about Ashley Mary Jane or the fact I was adopted, I think, “Well, it is what it is” and I feel like basically — you know what I said before about not being a path, but being a river? It means we are all the leaves being pushed along by rivers and we feel like we can’t control what happens to us. But we are also the river! All the stuff we think and feel and hate and love and stuff is what decides if the river is terrifying whitewater rapids or just a gentle stream that is perfect for wading where we can bob along in the sunshine, all happy and pretty and safe! It totes makes sense to me now, even though I can’t explain it so it doesn’t sound like the ramblings of someone crazy: The leaf. The river. Us. All of this. It just IS. All we can do is stay in this very exact minute and not try to guess if there is going to be a waterfall up ahead because we’re a leaf. It won’t matter anyway. We’ll just be carried along to the next calm patch sooner or later, or maybe we’ll disintegrate or get eaten by a fish. I’m not sure how that part figures in, come to think of it. I think maybe just to realize that there’s no use in anticipating it until it actually happens. So here I am. I am right here, right now breathing. The sun is shining in the window right now and Caleb is lying in the sunbeam and his fur is warm against my feet. And the way the sun is blasting on the screen is making it hard for me to read, and so I’m all squinty.
A squinty river.
A squinty river with hot feet who can smell a stinky dog (did you know that dogs sweat?).
A squinty, hot-footed, bad-scent-sniffing river who is still really mad and sad. Ruby, your mom is a terrible person. I feel bad that she’s all you had. Because at least I got a great mom out of the deal, one who would never have said, “Oh, that one will probably die,” and walked away. And now she’s making YOU be the mom, basically. She’s letting you figure it out. And that’s just mean. There’s something wrong with her, Ruby. It isn’t actually OK at all.
The stuff I said about the river only made sense when I was typing it. Buddhism is pretty perplexing, as it turns out. Just when you think you get it, then suddenly, you don’t again. I guess not getting it is probably the point, actually. Or at least, part of the point. I just don’t know which part.
Ruth
If you have a mom,
you know how her face looks
when she’s mad
or sad
or happy.
You know how her breath smells after coffee
or tuna sandwiches.
You know that when she’s tired
her left eye squints
and you wonder
what your other mother looks like
when she’s mad or sad or happy
or how she smells after
a stinky meal.
This other mother
being the woman who
put you down, and said,
“I can’t.”
Your real mother is the one
who held her arms open
and picked you up.
None of this explains why
though there were two of you,
only one was
saved.
Which one?
I know you haven’t answered my last note, but something has happened. So can we let bygones be bygones PLEASE and get back to telling each other everything? I need that. So totes pretend I didn’t say anything about FBA! She doesn’t matter! Not compared to this, which is huge, like a river of STUFF and FEELINGS that is crushing the leaf version of me flat under its huge, tremendous weight.
It’s just that I’ve found out something, which I sort of already knew, but now I know for sure: My biological mom left me in America because she thought I was going to die.
Jedgar, I can’t stop thinking about puppies. When Caleb was born, we got to visit on the first day, and his eyes were still all squinched shut. He couldn’t even open them yet. Frankly, he looked like a guinea pig, and I was mostly disappointed because I was little and I thought puppies were born cute, and not actually so pink and rodentlike.
He was the runt. He was basically half the size of all the other puppies and they stomped all over him to get to the mom’s milk, and even the mom didn’t seem to like him. She kept nosing the runt away from the other dogs. And the breeder said, “Oh, that one will die.” And she was so casual about it, like of COURSE the mom-dog would reject the runt-puppy because it didn’t matter! It wouldn’t survive anyway!
It’s exactly the same thing! Do you see that? Delilah Starling nosed me out of the way, grabbed Ruby, and got on a plane and vanished forever.
I am the runt. Just like Caleb.
I want you to put that in the documentary. I just want DELILAH STARLING to hear this part, about the runt-puppy. I want her to feel terrible about it. I want it to break her heart.
Woof,
says the runt.
And her mother
pushes her away,
her huge claws
tearing at the runt’s
; unopened eyes.
Please don’t feel sorry for me! She really isn’t a bad mum. She isn’t. I know it sounds that way. But you have to know how sorry she is. She could hardly even tell me the story when she got up this morning, but she wouldn’t do anything until she’d said it all. She pulled me into her bed with her and made me lie there under her covers and tell her all about you and how you found me and all of it. I just remembered that when I was little, I used to do that, creep in with her. But I hadn’t done it in so long! It’s funny how I forgot that.
Anyway, she said she’d been awake half the night just turning it over in her head, and she couldn’t believe you were alive and that was the miracle, I had to understand that. And then she cried again, and I cried. I’m crying even now while I type this up. There has been so much crying here in the last day that we could cry an entire river for you to be a leaf floating down, if you like. (And I think I almost get what you mean too.)
Then she said, ‘Ruby, I want to tell you every single thing, which I was going to tell you when you turned fifteen, because fifteen seemed old enough to handle it. I had a plan. And that’s what it was. Fifteen’. Then she cried again and hugged me. I cried too. The sheet was getting soggy because we kept wiping our eyes on it.
She started over. ‘I was shattered when your dad died, I was pregnant and alone in New York. I was so young! My heart breaks now for the girl that I was. I was just a girl! And your dad was just a boy! A lovely boy, but just a boy. And then we found out we were having a baby, and it was like we were creating this whole new world. We were prepared to just love you, even though we hadn’t any money. We had such romantic ideas. Somehow everything became so big and grand and extravagant when we talked about it, that’s how we suddenly got married. We just got swept up’.
She started to cry again. ‘But then Philippe died! He DIED. You can’t imagine how awful it was, except you can, because of Nan’s death. But it was different because it was my HUSBAND and in a foreign country where I never really fit in. I was so lonely. My friends were all just normal starving artists. Young people, who had no idea what to do with the pregnant girl who kept crying because her husband was dead. They didn’t even have boyfriends! Not proper ones. They didn’t understand about husbands. About how horrid and impossible that was for me’. She looked up at me and said, ‘Is this what you want to hear? I’m sorry, darling. It’s all so awful and I can’t seem to stop crying. You must think I’m mad’.
‘A bit’, I said. Then I added, ‘You’ve always been a bit mad, Mum. It’s OK. I just need you to tell me what happened so I can tell Ruth, do you see’?
‘Ruth’! she said. ‘I just can’t believe she’s alive. Can I talk to her? What’s her email thingamajig? So I can write her’?
‘Mum’, I said. ‘I don’t think she’s ready yet. Please keep telling me’.
‘It’s not too much for you’? she said.
And it was but I shook my head, because I could tell that she’d started now and she was going to keep going anyway, and I knew I had to hear it all, for you. She was crying a little bit again, so I just waited and tried not to cry myself. Then she said, ‘When my water broke, I was so scared, I called Nan. Nan and I weren’t talking, because she was cross about how Philippe and I had married so quickly.
‘So, anyway, I didn’t have anyone else. So I called her. And Nan was such an amazing woman, she managed to get there while I was still in labour. I don’t know how she did it. I was in labour for what felt like days! It hurt so much and I was hallucinating. I kept seeing your dad and screaming his name and Nan would say, “He’s gone. Concentrate on the babies”. And I said, “What BABIES? It’s just one baby”!
‘I didn’t know there were two of you until the moment she said it. I’d had one examination in the very beginning, and that was it. Philippe didn’t think much of American doctors, and we couldn’t afford regular visits anyway as we didn’t have insurance. And I was healthy as an ox for all of my pregnancy, so there wasn’t any need. Anyway, the labour wouldn’t end, so eventually they had to take you and Ruth out the other way, which was a proper operation. I was out of it with drugs and such, and when I woke up, there you were in the room with me, and I got to hold you, and you were the first miracle.
‘Then Nan said, “There’s another one”. And I said, “Another what”? She said, “Another baby”. I thought she’d gone completely off her trolley, just absolutely barking mad. Then I remembered the doctor saying when I arrived at the hospital, “Is it twins”? and that I’d laughed because I’d thought he was joking. They give you laughing gas for the pain, so it all gets mixed up, whether you’re laughing because something’s funny or because of the gas, and I must have known he wasn’t joking. I suddenly understood why I was so huge and why it sometimes felt like there was a whole herd of babies in there, kicking in every direction at once.
‘Time did this strange thing then. I can’t understand it, so I can’t quite explain it, but I expect it was all the drugs. It was like I kept tipping back and forth into dreams that I was desperately trying to wake up from. I don’t know how much time passed. When I finally lurched awake, desperate to know what was happening, Nan said, “The second girl won’t make it”. She was looking at me with this look that she had, it was this really loving look, and I felt like I had when I was a little girl, and she’d take care of things for me. She told me that Ruth’s little heart was full of holes, and I should let her go. That I had to let her go. I can’t think now why I would have accepted that, except for back then, I was always losing people I loved and I suppose I thought it was happening all over again. I know I screamed. And wailed. And cried.
‘I know that I said, “Can I see her”? And Nan said, “No, of course not”. And I said, “Give her to me, right now”! She said, “No. Trust me. It’s better this way”. It just wasn’t the English way to do things like that, not like in America and on telly when people are clinging on to their dead babies and howling. I suppose the truth was that she was in the NICU. Of course, I couldn’t have held her, she was being kept alive by pumps and wires. But I could have seen her. I just felt so broken. I just wanted Nan to tell me what to do. I felt like I had completely been torn apart and there was only a thin thread holding me together and Nan held the thread. That was it. She held me together.
‘The trouble was … well, she was lovely, Nan was, except she was also quite cold. I know you loved her so much that maybe you couldn’t see it, the way she was. Efficient, like. A bit … removed. I wasn’t, though! I was screaming, “GIVE ME THE BABY”! And she was saying, “You can’t do that to yourself”. And the nurse, I suppose, was saying, “We can take you to her”. But Nan was waving her off and saying, “She doesn’t want that, respect her wishes”. And Nan had a way … so I suppose they thought … Anyway, I …’
She kind of gasped then, and I went and got her some water. My legs were all wobbly. It’s a lot to take in about your mum. And your nan. I mean, I really can’t think that Nan would do that! That she’d say things like that! I can’t quite put it together, not properly, in my head.
After she had some water and cried some more, she kept talking. ‘We were in hospital for a few days. I cried and cried. I thought I’d never stop. The nurse said I had the baby blues, that it was a normal thing and it would pass. But it was like my head was full of this haze, and there you were, crying and crying and needing me and needing me, and honestly, I thought I’d get up out of the bed and run away to Brighton, but then I remembered I was in America and you were my daughter, and I couldn’t run away. And then I thought of Ruth and cried more and then they put me on some pills so I could stop. It did work! I stopped, but I stopped feeling anything at all. It was the strangest thing. I’d be holding you, and looking at you, and feeding you, and I felt nothing. Like a robot. Like I’d cried out all my insides, and they’d been replaced by steel.
‘Nan was pleased. I went along with her because it was the easiest thing. I signed lots of papers and people came and s
poke to me but I don’t know what they said, I felt like cotton wool was draped all over me, and everything was muffled and far away. I really thought I’d gone mad. I thought they could see that, all of them. I was scared they were going to take YOU. It was terribly confusing. And then there was a lawyer who said, “Are you sure you know that you’re giving up this baby for adoption”? And I was so startled. “ADOPTION”? I remember screaming at Nan. And she said that Ruth couldn’t be moved to England, she needed too many surgeries, and she was going to die, but there was an American couple who could take care of her until then, better than I could. That the father was a doctor, and it would be the kindest thing. And because I loved Ruth and I was so sick inside and out, I signed the papers.
‘And the next thing I knew, Nan said that Ruth was gone and we were heading back home’.
Then she started crying again, that awful crying, the snot rivers, and like she’d never stop. I was so tired, I wanted to curl into her and sleep, and maybe I did a bit. I’m sorry, Ruth. I was listening to her and trying to take it all in, but it was really hard to hear!
When I woke up, Mum was sitting on the edge of the bed. She said, ‘I dream about her, though, every single night. I always dream there are two of you’. Then she said, again, ‘It’s a miracle’.
I looked around the room and it was all completely the same, the sun spilling in on the white painted floors and the curtains exhaling dust on the sunbeams and the tree outside being all big and green and leafy, and I thought about what you said about the leaf on the river, and I looked at Mum, who was trembling, really like that baby bird on the flypaper, her whole body, even her hair was shaking. And she was waiting for me to say something to make it better, but I didn’t know what to say. Finally I said, ‘It’s OK, Mum’. Then I said, ‘It’s really Nan who I’m angry with now’.
She laughed in this sad way and then said, ‘No, it isn’t OK, Ruby. Probably not for Ruth either’.
