Mothers and Other Liars (25 page)

“Tough day, Mama?” Lark tosses her backpack onto the rear seat and climbs into the Jeep. “You look tired.”

Ruby drives away from the school. “I am tired, baby. I’m gonna have to stop doing pedicures. My big fat belly gets in the way.” She will never get tired of hearing Lark’s giggle, which is sounding closer to normal. “How was school?”

“Not as bad as stinky feet. The afterschool part was fun. We played games in the gym. And I aced my spelling test.”

“Of course you did, my little prodigy.”

Lark sits up straight, clasps her fingers together at her chest, arms triangled out at each side. “Prodigy. P-r-o-d-i-g-y. Prodigy.”

“And how do you spell smart aleck?”

“M-o-m,” Lark says.

Ruby smothers a yawn with her laugh. “You got me.”

“Good thing it’s pizza night. Or you might fall asleep at the stove.”

“That,” Ruby says, “is why God created pizza night.” The sun is sliding into the cleavage of the mountains when she stops the car at the foot of the driveway. Sunset is arriving noticeably earlier each of these late-fall days. “Hop out and get the mail. I’ll send Clyde down to greet you.”

Ruby stomps the pedal to give the Jeep a shot of gas; tired, too, the engine needs a boost up the driveway. She enters the house through the back door, lets Clyde out behind her. “Go fetch the girl, dog. Go fetch.”

She kicks off her shoes, drops Lark’s backpack on the table, then plods over to the phone to call in the pizza order. She’s still on hold when Lark and Clyde tromp in. Lark lays the mail on the counter beside Ruby. Bills, probably. And catalogues. No matter how many opt-out services Ruby tries, she can’t get off those mailing lists. Most of them are still addressed to Mrs. Levy, who was apparently quite the catalogue shopaholic.

Lark makes a beeline for her bedroom. As the pizza guy comes on the line, Ruby snaps her fingers, points to the backpack. Lark retraces her steps, slings the backpack over her shoulder. When she turns again, Ruby spots the tan envelope poking out from between Lark’s arm and side. A small Bubble Wrap mailer, it looks like.

After Clyde has devoured the last of the pizza bones, as Lark calls the crusts, and they are settling in to watch a movie, Ruby asks about the envelope. “What did you get in the mail?”

Lark points the remote at the television screen, fast-forwards through the dire FBI warning. “Nothing really. Just one of those stupid doodads from Girls Inc.”

Ruby swallows a stream of questions before she can give them voice. Her daughter is not fessing up to something.

The hospital room is standard-issue. Ruby wonders which genius decided that pale green was a soothing institutional color. At least she has the room to herself; it’s a slow birth day here at St. Victims, and the hospital wanted her in a private room anyway, to keep the media at bay. She is beyond exhausted, can’t figure out how limbs can be spaghetti and lead at the same time, and her virginia, as Lark coined it when she was seven or so, feels like it has been turned inside-out and bathed in astringent.

St. Vincent’s encourages rooming-in to foster the bond between mother and infant as well as for security purposes. They wouldn’t want a baby going home with the wrong mom, after all. But in the case of adoptions, the hospital’s policy is to keep the infant in the nursery.

Ruby wonders whether this rule is to ease the pain of the mother, to avoid sticky change-of-mind situations, or because they worry that a baby human, like a gosling, will imprint on the first face it sees.

Ruby was allowed to hold the baby after the staff completed their poking and prodding and printing. She knows that in the barbaric days, a child was whisked out from between his mother’s legs and out the door, never to be seen again. The hospital social worker met with Ruby soon after the birth, and with her approval, the nurses have brought the baby to Ruby’s room a couple of times.

The door swings open and Margaret strides over to the bed. Her entire body seems to vibrate. She has been gliding on a druglike high of having coached Ruby through the birth, witnessing the first breath of a new life. It’s the closest she’ll ever get to motherhood, she told Ruby when Ruby asked her to be her Lamaze partner. And giving birth was amazing, really, despite the whole virginia-inside-out part.

But now Margaret radiates anger rather than awe.

“What is it?” Ruby pushes the control button to raise the head of her bed. “The baby?”

The baby is fine, Margaret assures her.

“Lark? Did something—”

“Lark is fine, too. Molly will bring her by later.”

“Then what?” Ruby asks.

Margaret’s words come out like the hiss of a snake, a really pissed-off snake. “They’re out there.”

Ruby’s medicine-numb brain churns. The Tinsdales declined to be present for the birth. Darla laughed, said Philip was more the Hugh Hefner, cigars-in-the-waiting-room type. Ruby considered going to Texas for the birth, so the baby could make that trip in the security of her womb, but some wrinkle between the two states’ adoption laws made it simpler to give birth here. Ruby called Darla last night when her water broke. The Tinsdales are coming in a day or two, whenever the baby is released; they aren’t supposed to be here now.

Margaret repeats herself. “They’re out there at the nursery window. The Monteros. The whole bunch of them.”

Now Ruby understands. Despite its growth over the past decade, Santa Fe is really just a small town, St. Victim’s a small-town hospital. And the Monteros are one big family. Somebody must know somebody who knows somebody who. Ruby rubs her forehead with her fingertips, draws her palms down until they support her chin. She peers out through her spread fingers, as if a carnival mask will separate her from the situation.

“Chaz? Is Chaz here?” Ruby remembers calling out for him during one of the last contractions before her epidural, thinking that if this were a movie, he would rush into the delivery room as she made her final push.

“I didn’t see him,” Margaret says. “I’ll call security.”

“No. No—”

A gentle rap interrupts them before Ruby can formulate the rest of her thought, and Antoinette steps into the room, approaches Ruby’s bed. “Hey, girlfriend.”

Ruby looks over Antoinette’s shoulder, expecting an incursion of the Montero tribe.

“It’s okay,” Antoinette says. “They’re not coming in.” She sits half her butt on the edge of Ruby’s bed. “How are you? How do you feel?”

“Like I just gave birth to an elephant.” Ruby’s tongue feels as fuzzy as her brain. “But the drugs are good.”

Antoinette fiddles with the edge of the thin blanket, pulls at a loose thread. “I want, I need to ask…” Her eyes remain downcast as she speaks; her fingers pick at the blanket’s stitching, unrolling the hem. Ruby tries to focus on Antoinette’s words, but she keeps thinking how her friend really, really needs a manicure.

It would mean so much to the family, Antoinette says, if they could do just this one thing, if they could have their priest come to baptize the baby before he is sent away from them. “You know, so they won’t all worry that he’ll end up in limbo or hell.”

All of it, the exhaustion, the emotion, the reality that she is giving up her child, is an insidious fog that creeps in and shrouds Ruby as tightly as her baby was swaddled. She says something, she must, because Antoinette squeezes Ruby’s foot then disappears. Margaret holds a big plastic mug to Ruby’s lips; she drinks from the straw, feels the cool water trickle down her throat. Margaret lowers the bed. And Ruby closes her eyes.

Candles throw their golden light everywhere. Rows of flickering votives line the ledges that run down both sides of the little room and balance on the railing in front of the pews. Two tall candelabra stand like many-armed goddesses on the riser just beyond the railing. The candles transform the plain, institutional chapel into a garden of light.

This whole thing was organized in a brief few hours while Ruby slept. She climbs out of the hospital-regulation wheelchair at the doorway, walks gingerly beside Margaret down the aisle. She can’t help compare this feeble processional of two to what she had imagined for her wedding day.

Ruby eases down beside Lark in the first pew, squishes her daughter in a sideways hug, kisses her head. Margaret takes a seat in the row behind them, next to Molly. The other side of the aisle is crammed full of Monteros. In the front row, the immediate family.

Ruby scans the small crowd. Chaz is not there. She doesn’t know whether she feels relieved that she won’t have to face him, or sad that he didn’t come to meet his own child.

Before she can sort through her feelings, the heads of the entire Montero side turn in unison and emit a collective sigh as a nurse carries the baby up the aisle. Ruby almost expects them to stand, throw rose petals in the nurse’s wake. Father Paul steps out into the aisle, takes the bundle of baby from the nurse, walks through the gate at the railing and up onto the riser.

With the baby in the crook of one arm, the priest pours water from a weary plastic pitcher into a gleaming silver bowl. He sets down the pitcher, picks up a small glass vial. This water, he says as he empties the vial into the bowl, is from the River Jordan. The vial disappears into a pocket of his billowy robe as he clears his throat.

“What is the Christian name of this child?” Father Paul sweeps his eyes across both sides of the room, waits. “This situation is a bit out of the ordinary order of service, but we need to name this child before God.”

The room is so silent that Ruby feels as if she can hear the candles breathing their carbon into the air.

“Charles Henry. Charles for his father, Henry for his great-grandfather.” The name comes from Ruby’s mouth unbidden. She had consciously, deliberately refused to think of her baby with names or endearments since the moment in Texas when she thought up her plan, and all the names she and Chaz had discussed before then were for girls. She looks across the aisle, wondering if maybe the Monteros would object to using Chaz’s name, but she sees only nods of approval.

Father Paul proceeds through the short ceremony of baptism, then ends with a prayer. A rustle rises up from the Montero side as they reach across pews to make a chain of hands for the amen squeeze.

“Wait!”

Lark is on her feet before the reverberation of the amen settles back over the pews. She walks up and through the gate, takes the baby from the priest as if she has been holding newborns her entire life. Father Paul steps aside, looks down at her.

“When Mama said yes to this, she said, ‘But let’s do it right.’” Lark pauses, looks past Ruby to the Ms. “So we, well I, decided that besides a baptism this would be sort of a farewell, not a party because it’s too sad, but a nice good-bye.”

Lark walks with the baby through the gate, stops in front of Celeste. The priest glides past her, slips into a pew behind the throng. Lark explains what she has in mind, shuffles the baby from her arms to Celeste’s, and returns to her seat next to Ruby.

Celeste sits there for a moment, looking down at the child of her child. Then she stands, walks to the railing, turns to face the small group. She cradles the baby in her arms. “What I want for you”—Celeste’s voice quivers—“is for you to never for a moment forget that you are loved, by many, many people.” She motions to Chunk, who comes up and takes the baby, then Celeste picks up a votive, blows it out, carries the candle back to her seat.

The father of three gazes at that infant as if he were the first baby on earth. And Chunk cries. His tears roll like mercury down his fat cheeks, splash on his grandson’s face. The baby shudders, limbs jerk; during this second baptism, arms escape the tight swaddling.

Abuela approaches next, her crepe-soled shoes squeaking on the industrial flooring. The old woman takes the baby as casually as she would take a loaf of bread. She holds him upright, a hand at head, a hand at bum, and brings the baby’s face to hers. She holds the infant like that, nose to nose, for several minutes, then she settles the child at her neck. Abuela leans her head into the bundle, and she whispers.

Ruby remembers a story that her grandmother used to tell, about why people have that little cleft just below their nose. Before a baby is born, she said, it knows all the secrets of the universe, and just before it enters this world, God puts a finger to its lips, says, “Shhh, don’t tell.” And the imprint of God’s finger remains forever, to remind our souls to keep His secrets.

Maybe Abuela tells this infant about his father and all the history of the Monteros so that he will always know where he came from. Maybe she tells him stories, folklore. Maybe even that Abuela will someday be his guardian angel, will always watch over him. Ruby doesn’t know what Abuela says, only that this baby whisperer whispers for what seems like a very long time, until Antoinette steps forward and puts a hand on her grandmother’s shoulder.

Antoinette looks straight at Ruby as she speaks her wish. “May you be blessed with friendship, even one true friend, because that will make you rich no matter what is in your piggy bank.”

And so it goes. The Monteros move up to the railing one by one, tell the precious child their hopes for his future, blow out a candle, and return to their seats. A tidal wave, of words salty with emotion, crashes into Ruby. A few voices tremble, but most resonate in the tiny room. To know God, to know happiness, to know himself, to know football, the wishes go on and on.

Ruby is rapt, wrapped in the warmth in the room. She doesn’t notice what Lark is doing beside her until a yellow scrap of paper floats to Ruby’s feet. She reaches down, picks it up, hands it back to Lark. Her incredible old-soul daughter is writing down the wishes on colorful strips of paper, in careful schoolgirl script.

When each of the Monteros has taken a turn, four glowing candles remain on the rail. Lark and the Ms couldn’t have known how many to place there, how many Monteros would attend. This is just one of those God things.

Margaret and Molly walk up to the rail together. Margaret takes the baby first. “May you always love people for who they are inside, not for their race or gender or sexuality. May your heart always be open to new ideas, new ways of doing things.”

Margaret hands the baby to Molly. “And may you always nurture both sides of your brain, both your intellect and your creativity.”

Then Margaret looks at Ruby, nods to her.