Ruby (16 page)

“Go and live in Indonesia?”

“Or Greece or Costa Rica.” Ruby was measuring her words; Olivia could tell. “There’s so many better places.”

“When did you talk to Ben, anyway?” Olivia asked, trying to sound offhanded.

Ruby shrugged. “Oh. You know. Whenever.” Again, she tested the water.

“Either drink some of that or turn it off,” Olivia said angrily. “There’s a drought, you know. You don’t stand and let water run and run when people aren’t even flushing their toilets or taking baths in order to save it. Do you ever think of anyone other than yourself?”

Without even getting a glass, Ruby turned off the water.

“Have you done anything to get my stuff back, for instance?” Olivia said. The letter was just a piece of crushed paper now, wrinkled and moist in her hand.

“It’s gone,” Ruby said. “I told you that.”

Olivia nodded. “I know. But what about the stuff no one wanted?”

“Can you be more specific?” Ruby said.

“The jewelry box.”

Ruby held up both of her hands. She no longer wore the cheap rings, and seeing them plain like this reminded Olivia of a washerwoman’s hands: rough and red and swollen.

“I’m sorry I said anything about your stupid poem,” Ruby said. “I only saw like three words or something.”

“Forget it,” Olivia said. She pretended to clean up the kitchen just to have something to do.

“Like I saw the word
baby.
Was it a poem to the baby?”

Olivia concentrated on wiping the counters.

“Can I pick the name?” Ruby said. “I know it’s a big thing, but I wanted to put my two cents in.”

“What name?”

“The baby’s. Can I pick it out?”

Olivia didn’t want Ruby to name the baby. She felt uncertain again; Ruby might take this baby and go away somewhere. Somewhere far.
Indonesia.
Then she would have nothing. No baby, no minicassette of David’s voice.

“What names do you like?” Olivia asked.

“I just like one. Sage. For a boy or a girl.”

“Sage,” Olivia said, hating it, hating Ruby. “Interesting.”

“I’ve liked that name forever,” Ruby said. She gently rubbed her hand across her stomach in that circular motion. “That’s what I always wanted to name my baby. Even when I was little and I’d pretend I had a sister, I’d call her Sage. I mean, she was invisible and everything.”

“It’s a good name,” Olivia said. If you want to name your kid after an herb, she thought. Or a Simon and Garfunkel song.

“I can tell you don’t really like it. But would you consider it? I don’t want this baby saddled with Jennifer or Elizabeth or something.”

Reluctantly, Olivia said, “I think you should name the baby. Sage.”

The baby is mine, Olivia thought. She put her hand lightly on Ruby’s stomach, too. Beneath the tight drum of belly, the baby kicked back at them both.

Olivia tried not to leave Ruby alone too often, but sometimes she was happy to be away from the girl. Ruby liked to go off by herself, to the beach—“Not where anyone can see me like this!”—or to a movie, where it was air-conditioned and dark. That was where she was going tonight, the movies, while Olivia and Pete had dinner with Carl and Janice.

Olivia had gone out with Pete one other time, to the lobster fest in Point Judith, where they sat and drank beer and ate chowder and lobsters under a tent one Saturday afternoon. Their time together that day had been brief, and Olivia quickly put it out of her mind. This isn’t a date, she’d kept reminding herself. It’s just two people eating lobster and coleslaw under a hot tent. Thinking this, over and over, had helped her relax. She’d almost had fun.

But this dinner with him felt all wrong. Janice called, too often, all chatty and excited, as if they were back in high school and getting ready for a Saturday-night double date.

“This is just dinner,” Olivia told Janice. It was a good way to remind herself, too. “Not a date.”

“Whatever,” Janice said.

Olivia frowned. That was an answer Janice had used for as long as they had known each other. In high school, it had sounded sassy, even cool. Now it was simply irritating.

“Pete Lancelotta is not my type,” Olivia told Janice during one of the calls. “I would never date him, even under the best of circumstances.”

“Whatever,” Janice said, and launched into a one-sided discussion about what to wear that night.

Now that she was actually on her way to the dinner, Olivia reviewed all the reasons why she would never date Pete Lancelotta. No matter what she added or subtracted from the list, she always ended with the same thing: Pete was not David.

When she pulled into the parking lot of the restaurant and saw Janice and Carl’s car parked right beside Pete’s, she had to fight the desire to turn around and surprise Ruby at the movie. She sat in her car and looked at the name of the restaurant: Angel’s. Maybe, Olivia thought, David had sent Ruby her way. Maybe he was in heaven, or wherever it was people went, and he’d found Ruby for her. She imagined David screening potential people to help her get along without him. Certainly he had eliminated Amy and Pete Lancelotta. But then he’d come across Ruby. A pregnant girl who did not want her baby. And David had said, Yes! You! As crazy as Olivia knew this was, she almost believed it. Sitting there in that parking lot under a sign that said
ANGEL’S
, Olivia finally felt David’s presence.

A loud knock on her car window startled her.

There stood Janice, peering in.

“Are you okay?” Janice shouted, loudly enough for Olivia to hear through the closed window and above the car’s air conditioner.

Olivia didn’t turn the car off. She rolled down the window, swallowing a mouthful of muggy summer air.

“I am,” she said. She struggled to explain it all to Janice. David had sent her Ruby. He had sent her the baby they never got to make together. But she couldn’t find the words to say to Janice, who was standing there in her pink dress and white sandals, all dressed up for a dinner out.

Instead, Olivia said, “Pal?” softly into the summer night. “Thanks.” Her voice was a whisper. Despite the heat, a shiver ran up Olivia’s spine, making the back of her neck tingle.

“Uh,” Janice said, glancing over her shoulder, “we’re all inside waiting.”

“You know what?” Olivia said, almost lightheartedly. “I can’t do this.”

“You can,” Janice said. “It’s just friends. A dinner.” She glanced back again. “They have really good calamari.”

Olivia shook her head. “The thing is, I’m working on this project.”

She would go home and paint the nursery the way she and David had discussed once, with murals—a cow jumping over the moon, Jack and Jill tumbling down the hill, Humpty-Dumpty. “You’ll paint it the way a kid’s room should be,” David had told her, and she’d imagined it, the brightly colored walls depicting a child’s world. He’d had faith in her to do it right. And she would.

Janice was reaching in to take her arm, to lead her out of the car and into the restaurant toward Pete Lancelotta and the good calamari, but Olivia resisted.

She said, “I’m sorry, Janice.”

Janice stepped back. On her face, Olivia read a whole world of emotion—Poor Olivia, she was thinking; Olivia was certain of that.

“I’m okay,” Olivia said. “I am.”

What Olivia imagined was that she would sit down and plan the room. She would go home and dig through her portfolio, the one she used to carry in the trunk of her car, the one full of graph paper and different points for her drawing pens, the one that had been under her bed since last September. She would sit at the kitchen table and begin. When Ruby came home from the movie—and Olivia could see the moment, Ruby’s face shiny from buttered popcorn, and her breath sweet from an extralarge soda—she would find Olivia there, drawing, and together they would construct the room for the baby.

But instead, Olivia came in and heard the television upstairs. Ruby was home already. Or perhaps she had been too tired to go to the movie after all. The theater was a short walk from the house, and Olivia had seen Ruby start off. But she must have turned around. She got tired so easily.

Olivia rushed up the stairs, eager to begin.

She expected to see Ruby in Olivia’s bed, in Olivia’s nightgown, all the pillows behind her and food strewn everywhere and some silly sitcom on—Ruby loved them, all of them, with their fake versions of life in New York City and ridiculous friendships and canned laughter.

But what she found was this: Ruby large and naked—and Olivia had not seen her naked, was unprepared for the large misshapen belly and jutting belly button and blue-veined breasts—sprawled out on the bed, her cheeks flushed, her face pink. Beside her, also naked, was a boy, a teenager, with long blond hair to his shoulders and a dark tan and the kind of muscles that stand out even when the person isn’t trying to show them off. They were lying together, tangled, familiar, eating the gourmet popcorn that Winnie had sent—jalapeño.

Olivia stood in the doorway, too shocked to be embarrassed.

The bluish lights from the TV screen made them look otherworldly; as if a very pregnant naked teenager and a naked boy weren’t otherworldly enough. Olivia thought she smelled marijuana. There was the canned laughter, and then the two of them laughed, too, a beat behind.

That was when Ruby saw Olivia in the doorway.

“Oh,” Ruby said, not the least bit nervous. Did the girl ever act embarrassed or surprised or guilty? “Hi,” she added, as calm as ever. Like a hostess introducing guests at a cocktail party, she held an arm out to Olivia, palm turned upward. “Olivia,” she said, “this is Ben.”

A
T THE KITCHEN TABLE
, Ruby and Ben huddled together on one chair, Ruby half on Ben’s lap and half off, clinging awkwardly to the edge of the chair. They were the type of teenagers who gave each other hickeys, French-kissed at their lockers, made out until their chins and mouths grew red and raw; Olivia saw this about them right away. Even now, dressed but tousled, they nuzzled and petted one another, stroked and rubbed enough to embarrass Olivia. Rather than look at them—and they sat right in her line of vision, right across the table from her—she looked at a place on the wall beyond them where one strip of wallpaper met another, making the faded teapot pattern look fractured.

“See?” Ruby was saying. “He’s real. You thought I made him up, didn’t you?”

“Well,” Olivia said, “he certainly is real.”

Ben had pulled his long hair into a ponytail held in place with a piece of rawhide. He had a beautiful face, good strong cheekbones and a fine jaw, the kind of eyes that reflect the color of the sky or the sea. He was, Olivia knew, a boy a young girl would fall in love with too easily.

He grinned at Olivia, the slow, lazy grin of a charmer. A charmer who’s stoned, Olivia added, because the strong smell of pot clung to him, filled the air around him. Olivia thought of Pig-Pen from the Snoopy comic strip, who traveled in a cloud of dirt.

Ruby looked at Olivia, suddenly all wide-eyed. “You’re not
mad,
are you?” she said. “That Ben’s here?”

Olivia thought that indeed she was mad, as in crazy. Mad because her life was this unpredictable, uncontrollable
thing.

“Because I never said I wouldn’t see Ben. I mean,” Ruby said, “I love him.”

When she said this, her eyes actually teared. Only teenaged girls loved that way; Olivia remembered it, remembered sitting at her bedroom window waiting for the boy up the street to drive by in his white VW bug. Just a glimpse of him could make her dizzy. She used to stay in her room and play Crosby, Stills & Nash records until her mother begged her to turn them off. She remembered all of it and she still thought Ruby could turn on those tears without any problem. A real actress, this kid. A real winner.

“You lied about going to the movies. He smoked pot in my house. And you had sex in my bed. That’s what I’m angry about,” Olivia said.

Each point forced her voice a bit louder, until she was practically shouting. The kid was such a liar. How could she ever have believed anything Ruby told her?

Ruby grinned at her, a big goofy grin, as if she had access to some secret that Olivia couldn’t begin to understand. And she was right, in a strange way. Here she was with her ponytailed boyfriend, in love.

“Maybe you should just go,” Olivia said, her voice low again, defeated.

“Don’t make her go,” Ben said.

His voice was smooth and deep and made Olivia think of chocolate ice cream, espresso, molasses. What a heartbreaker he must be. She wondered if he was going to break Ruby’s heart. Immediately, she thought, Of course he is.

“See,” Ben continued, “I have to be upstate for the summer—”

“I told you!” Ruby said to Olivia, bursting with righteousness.

“Like I’m teaching tennis at this totally bourgeois camp for rich kids when I should be here with Ruby.”

He stopped talking long enough to kiss Ruby some more and long enough for Olivia to imagine him there, at the camp. She could see him with his thick blond hair, his strong arms and legs, in tennis whites. All the girls in love with him, whispering his name when he passed by:
Ben Ben Ben.
All the girls doing anything to get his attention. She imagined starlit nights, a still lake, the smell of pine trees and clean air. Poor Ruby, she didn’t stand a chance against these rich, unpregnant girls. Worse, she remembered that Ben fancied himself a poet. Teenaged girls loved poets, longhaired boys who played the acoustic guitar and wrote love poems and taught tennis. Poor Ruby, she thought again.

Ben said, “But we need the money so we can go to Greece or Bali or somewhere to live.”

“See!” Ruby said, smiling, redeemed.

“So I have to do it. As much as I’m going crazy being away from her and the little one.” He rested his hand on Ruby’s large belly, but he kept talking right to Olivia. “It’s so amazing, isn’t it? She’s got a life in here. A baby growing inside her.” He shook his head. “It blows my mind.”

Olivia’s mouth went dry. He wasn’t talking like a person about to give his baby away. She could picture the fantasy that Ben had: he and Ruby and their baby—Sage—the three of them on an exotic island, feeding each other olives, swimming naked, drinking local wine, the baby in a papoose on his back, sleeping in a hut with a thatched roof. A poet, Olivia thought again, scoffing. He probably was in love with Rilke. Her fantasy didn’t stand a chance against his.