Mothers and Other Liars (19 page)

Chaz spits the words. “But Lark isn’t even your own child.” He sits on the edge of his bed in his striped pajama bottoms and no shirt. The late-morning sun blares through the window next to the pine head-board. His chest looks too bare without the Saint Christopher medal that he gave to Lark, and now Ruby can’t even remember if Lark was wearing the necklace at the court house.

Ruby sets the tall coffee cup beside the pile of books on the nightstand, pulls off the plastic lid. She pushes aside a book butterflied on the blanket next to him and sits. “Try telling that to the millions of adoptive mothers out there. Try telling that to their kids.”

Chaz’s face is dark with fatigue and a two-day beard. He worked extra-long days—well, mostly nights—last week, played basketball half of Saturday, attended Mass and his mother’s Sunday dinner. Now he is spending today, Monday, in his bed. This is what he does, runs and runs and runs until he hits the wall, then crawls into his cave to recharge his batteries. A “jammie day” her grandmother would call it. Ruby remembers one school day shortly after her grandfather had died when Nana crept into Ruby’s room, turned off her bedside alarm clock and declared a jammie day. Ruby and Nana spent that day watching old movies, eating popcorn made in the heavy metal pot on the stove, and napping in the den. For Chaz, books and bed are his therapy.

On the phone last night, Antoinette filled Ruby in on Sunday dinner—Celeste is up to Russian on her gastronomical globe. And Ruby knows Chaz well enough to know that she would find him here today. She picks up the coffee cup, hands it to him. He holds it in both hands as if they were frostbitten.

“I understand, I think. How you feel.” Chaz sips the still-steaming coffee, jumps as it scalds his tongue.

Ruby takes back the cup, sets it again on the nightstand. “I thought you felt the same, about Lark.”

“I thought you felt like I did about our baby.”

She knows the enormity of what she is asking of this man who reveres family. And she doesn’t know how else to explain to Chaz that she loves the child inside her
fiercely
. That her plan is the only way she sees to save
both
of her daughters.

Flecks of dust pirouette in a shaft of sun.
Oh, to be that carefree,
Ruby thinks,
that exuberant
. At first, she and Chaz were dizzy in their love, until just recently really. All the attention he garnered from pretty girls when she and Chaz were out never bothered her a bit. For her, the attraction was instant. His tall frame, thick hair, soul-seeking eyes. A big part of the allure, though, was his love for his family, and the chance to
belong
to the whole auntsunclescousins swarm. A passport to Monteroland. As much as Chaz’s laugh, even his voice on her answering machine, stirs up a flutter in her chest, that sense of belonging calms a restless place deeper inside her.

“My goodness.” Ruby can’t resist running a finger across the paler patch of silky skin on the underside of his wrist. “You told me you fell in love first with my goodness…so, what do you love now, now that you know I’m not so good after all?”

“You know I love you….” Chaz takes her finger, grasps it in his fist as his voice tapers off. “We can get through this. Together. Lark’s a good kid, a strong kid. She’ll adjust. And when she’s older—”

Ruby jerks her hand away. “You didn’t see her, hear her.”

Chaz stands, paces past the black-and-white photographs of New Mexico landscapes that hang along his wall. He stops at the dresser, sprinkles a dusting of food into the fishbowl; Glug, the electric blue tetra, is the only pet he can handle with his work schedule. He walks around to the foot of the bed, fusses with the thick gray duvet folded into tidy thirds, walks back to stand in front of Ruby. His torso is baby-sleek—if a baby had six-pack abs and the pecs of a gym fanatic. “I can’t. I just can’t give away my child.”

“Maybe it could be an open adoption.” Ruby tries to modulate her voice, keep out the desperation she feels. “You, we, maybe we could visit. And the Tinsdales, they want this. This is how I can make it up to them, what I did.”

Chaz picks up the coffee cup, sits back down next to Ruby. “What I don’t understand is this. If this is about nurture over nature, if Lark belongs with you because you have nurtured her, that she is who she is because of how you have nurtured her—” He stops, takes a slug of coffee, swallows as if swallowing the whole distasteful subject. “Well, then answer me this. What will become of
our
kid if she is
nurtured
by the Tinsdales? You don’t even
like
those people.”

From the beginning, Chaz has had a remarkable ability to home in right on the nagging voice in her heart. Ruby can read wood; Chaz can read Ruby. This is the rub, the stick in her craw: if those people aren’t good enough for Lark, how can they be good enough for her other daughter?

She quiets the voice the way she has quieted it all these eternal nights, by reminding herself that her plan is not about whether the Tinsdales are good parents, it’s about whom they should be parenting, or rather whom they
shouldn’t
be parenting. She stands, pulls the ring box out of her purse, sets it on the nightstand.

“I’m going to do this.” She pauses at Chaz’s door. “I’m going to find a way.”

The Santa Fe chapter of the Sierra Club rates the La Vega trail as a moderate seven-mile hike. Moderate maybe for a nonpregnant person. Anger and confusion sear Ruby’s lungs as much as the exertion.

“So, what are you thinking?” Molly asks at the top of the first steep climb.

Ruby eases herself down in the flower-studded meadow. “I’m thinking I want to be a lesbian.”

Margaret sputters, spits a mouthful of water on the ground.

“Seriously. Men, they’re just…alien.” Ruby takes a long pull from her water bottle. The cool liquid sloshes around in her stomach. “You have it easy, dealing with someone from the same planet.”

Molly tosses a few hunks of biscuit in the air. Gray jays swoop in to catch the pieces; the dogs leap to try to catch the birds. The Ms’s little terrier mix, Dudley, jumps several times his height but barely nips at the bigger dogs’ heels. “Chaz still won’t agree, huh?”

Ruby gazes across the meadow. The peak of Santa Fe Baldy looms just beyond, a few patches of winter snow hiding out in crevices. “He’s…”

“Easy?” Margaret says.

“Everything but. Or everything b-u-t-t.”

Margaret shakes her head. “No, I mean us. You know us too well to think a relationship is easy because it’s between two women.”

“You’ve made it fifteen years. Even with all you went through.” Ruby recaps her bottle, secures it in the loop of her fanny pack. “That’s a way longer shelf life than any of my relationships.”

“Well, once you get past the freak-show looks and blatant discrimination, the rest of it, the day-to-day stuff, is easy,” Margaret says.

Molly stuffs the empty bread bag into her pack, helps Ruby to her feet. “Stop baiting her. You know she’s just pissed at Chaz.”

“Except for the toilet seat thing.” Margaret stands, snakes an arm through the strap of her pack, hefts it onto her back. “You breeders are alone with that one.”

The next section of the hike is downhill, a gradual descent through evergreens and aspen trees shimmering silver in the light. The Ms lead the way; Ruby follows, listening to their banter, while the dogs nose through the underbrush, darting back and forth across the trail in pursuit of chipmunks and squirrels.

Margaret raises a fist, counts off with exaggerated flicks of her fingers. “Stealing bedcovers. The endless toilet paper debate, over or under, how should that roll hang?”

Molly chuckles. “Over, obviously. Everyone knows that.”

“And in-laws,” Margaret says. “Let’s not forget about dealing with the in-laws.”

Molly looks over her shoulder at Ruby. “There is something to be said for being an orphan.”

They can laugh about it now, but Ruby knows the story of when they first got together, Margaret twelve years senior to Molly’s just-out-of-grad-school twenty-five. Molly’s parents were livid, apoplectic, threatened to take out a full-page newspaper ad labeling Margaret a pervert sex offender. Then they cut Molly off. Shunned her, like she was an Amish girl betraying the fold. Molly had only the support of her grandmother, and the not-insubstantial trust fund from her grandfather.

After a few turns in the trail, Ruby lets herself lag behind, hoping to find a solution as her pounding heart keeps rhythm with her boots pounding the earth. She catches up to the Ms in a clearing beside Nambe Creek. Clyde and Daisy, the black Labrador, flank Ruby like soldiers attacking a foxhole. Cold creek water flies from their fur, sprinkles her legs.

She chooses a flat place to sit on the big rock where the Ms perch, stretching her legs out in front of her to ease the constriction in her calves.

“You figure anything out?” Molly holds out a bag of trail mix.

“Nope. Not a clue.” Ruby frees her second water bottle from the elastic loop on her fanny pack. “I can’t fathom leaving her there.”

“Well,” Margaret says, “if the thought of not going through with it is unbearable, then we have to find a way to do it.”

“Except the thought of doing it is unbearable, too.” Ruby’s feelings and Chaz’s points are waging a boxing match inside her. As fervently as she believes she must go forward with her plan to bring Lark home, she knows that executing the plan means losing her baby. “I want them both.”

The irony is, she keeps wanting to turn to Chaz for advice, like a twist on a twisted O. Henry story. He would help her sort through her feelings. He’d do his Chaz thing and home in on the one nugget of right in all the wrong.

Molly shrieks. “Oh, Dudley!”

The smell reaches them first, then the dog, wagging proudly at their feet, his coat more green than tawny.

“Horse manure,” Margaret says. “Again.”

“That is disgusting,” Molly says to the dog. “Look, even the other dogs are embarrassed for you.”

Dudley wiggles and wags, decidedly unabashed.

“Better than dead animal,” Margaret says. “Now that is disgusting.”

Molly shakes a finger at the dog. “Oh, Dudley. You’re not my favorite anymore.” The black Lab perks her ears, as if she understands exactly what Molly said. “That’s right sweet Daisy-girl. You’re Mama’s favorite now, aren’t ya?”

Ruby knows Molly is just kidding around; she loves both those dogs with all her heart. A good mother wouldn’t pick favorites.

No mother should have to choose between her children.

The radio keeps Ruby company as she carves the wood. The AM station is static-free on this snow-globe night, confetti stars strewn across the glassy dome, the real moon paper-pale and low outside the shed door.

The words to one of her grandfather’s favorites, the song playing, fit Ruby’s mess like the long-lost piece to a jigsaw puzzle: if only Chaz believed in her. Perhaps theirs was only a paper moon after all. Earlier tonight, they had an ugly fight. Their battling ultimatums still hang sawdust-heavy in the shed.

The argument had started softly.

“I’m tired of this,” Chaz said.

“You have to understand,” Ruby said. “I love you so much.”

Chaz’s reply was a statement, not a question. “But.”

“But I have to get Lark back. We can have more babies.”

Their words escalated, sibilant
s
’s flying around the room, hard consonants smashing against walls like family china thrown in a rage.

“I’ve talked to a lawyer. I have rights. If you don’t want our daughter, let me have her.”

“You know this isn’t about
want
.”

“If you push this…” Chaz said. “There won’t
be
other babies. I won’t—I couldn’t—be with you.” He wasn’t sure he could even be in  the same town. Maybe, he said, he would take that job with the national gang task force, or pursue an opportunity with the LAPD.

“You’re asking me to choose between you and my child.”

“
Our
child. And, yeah, I am.” Then Chaz stormed away.

She has been crafting a wedding gift for a young Jewish couple, commissioned by another sentimental fool. Turning a family armoire into a canopy bed that will first be used as a chuppah. The shed wasn’t big enough to hold the armoire; Ruby had to disassemble it in the yard. The head-and footboards poked out of the shed door while she crafted them; days ago Chaz helped her wrestle them into the house and out of the way.

Tonight she works on the posts, carving acanthus leaves to give them an organic sensibility. Her grandfather’s woodworking bible lies open on the workbench beside her.
Hollows are chamfers which have been curved with a gouge. First plane the chamfer, and then chisel the hollow with the gouge
. Ruby could swear she can smell her grandfather’s pipe smoke on the well-thumbed pages, but she knows that the pungent fragrance of his favorite tobacco emanates from her memory rather than the musty old book.

As she strips away thin curls of wood with the gouge, she thinks that she may never have this, the wedding, or the marriage like her grandparents had. Maybe the price
is
too dear. But then she thinks of Lark, her ghostly pallor, gaunt face. Chaz might not be able to live with Ruby if she goes through with her plan. She can’t live with herself, though, if she doesn’t. Somehow, she’s got to make him understand. For all of their sakes.

Clyde lies curled in a comma at the door while she works. His reddish coat gleams with gold in the wan moonlight. He seems less mournful, is eating his kibble, these past few weeks, but is hardly his old self. He lifts his head, eyes bore into her, as if to say that her plan wouldn’t be make-believe if she believed in him, as if he
knows
that everything is going to work out.

“I’m trying to believe, Clyde,” Ruby says. “I’m trying.”

The moon is only halfway up its arc to the top of the dome when Antoinette steps over Clyde and into the shed. Her face is a melted candle of grief. Clyde whines, nuzzles Antoinette’s jeans. Time freezes in this little snow-globe world of Ruby’s.

“It’s Chaz.” Antoinette’s voice is raspy, raw.