Ruby (3 page)

Olivia looked around, trying to memorize everything: Vince Rolioli and his assistant, and Winnie and Arthur and Rex, grinning in his faded jeans and beat-up leather jacket. And David. He had on Levi’s, too, with a white button-down shirt and a vintage fifties tie. Olivia studied his brown curls, his beautiful nose, his eyes—brown and a little too small for the rest of his face. She even made sure to look at his ears, and the sliver of his neck that showed above his collar.

Then, satisfied, clutching the small bouquet of daisies from the deli, she took a deep breath and said, “Let’s go.”

The Honorable Vince Rolioli read his part with great feeling, as if he had once aspired to the stage. Olivia and David’s vows sounded almost childlike beside his thundering words.

It was Rex who had remembered to bring a camera, an old Polaroid. Vince Rolioli’s assistant agreed to take a picture.

“Smile big,” she said, demonstrating how, showing off her own lipstick-smeared teeth. The four of them obeyed, arms around one another’s shoulders, lips parted for wide, eager smiles.

The camera flashed and then spit out a snapshot. Olivia found herself holding her breath as she watched the black fade and the colors appear—David’s tie first, and then the pink flowers on Olivia’s hat, and slowly each of them growing vivid and sharp. The assistant urged them out of the chambers, shooing them, saying, “Good luck! Congratulations!” as if she really meant it.

The line waiting to get married was still long. More bikers, more pregnant brides. Olivia walked past them, saw flashes of bright blue eye shadow, colorful tattoos, beaded dresses, pierced eyebrows and lips. This was her receiving line, studying her, the new bride, the one who had finished what they were about to begin.

Later that summer, she and David would buy that small purple cottage at the beach in Rhode Island. One hot August day there they would decide to start a family. They would hold all the promise and expectation and hope that two people in love can hold. So much came later that summer that all of it would seem to Olivia a blur of happiness.

But on their wedding day, a sunny, breezy Friday in early June, Olivia wanted nothing more than to begin their life. She stopped at the door that led out and turned to the line of waiting brides.

“Good luck!” she shouted. “Happy lives!”

She felt that all the women standing there—pregnant and pierced, foreign and frightened, hopeful and eager—all of them looked at her and understood.

She turned again to leave, hesitated, then tossed her bouquet of daisies over one shoulder. Someone squealed, delighted. All the brides-to-be cheered. Olivia looked to see who had caught it: a teenager, pregnant, round-cheeked, and nervous. The girl raised the bouquet to Olivia and grinned. Olivia flashed on a vision of herself one day: beaming and pregnant. And then even further in the future: an old married lady.

David pushed the door open, and arm in arm he and Olivia stepped out into the blinding sunlight, into their future.

Alone in her shop, Olivia stared at the pieces of felt and ribbon and trim. But she had no plans, no ideas. Her mind was blank. Like snow, she thought. Like blinding sun. Without David, she could not think of what to do next. Their apartment with the view of the Hudson River out the small kitchen window—and the Eames furniture that David had collected, and Olivia’s own flea-market finds and castoffs from interior-design shoots at
You!
—seemed foreign, the way airports feel when you emerge from an all-night transatlantic flight.

She had no refuge. Over their months together, she and David had fought and made up and planned a future; they had become each other’s refuge. The beach house they’d bought sat empty now, unfinished, untended. Olivia could not even think of going there, of driving past the spot where David had been killed, of returning to the bed where she had slept so foolishly while he died.

And then there was this: the morning he died, he had come out of the bathroom and gotten back into bed. He had kissed her, not even minding her morning breath. He had slipped his hand under the T-shirt she wore and found her breasts, sighing as he rubbed the nipples.

“Go away,” she’d said. She had rolled away from him then. “I’m tired.”

He hadn’t gone easily. He had pressed himself against her. He had moved his erection between her thighs. He had lifted her hair and kissed the nape of her neck.

“Why don’t you go jogging?” she said.

This time, his sigh was one of defeat rather than pleasure. “Good idea,” he’d said, leaving the bed. “Better than a cold shower.”

He had not even seen her grinning at that. From her half sleep, Olivia heard him walk down the creaky steps and out the door. She heard him move toward his death a quarter of a mile away.

Now, sitting alone in the Rose Tattoo, she once again thought about how making love that morning would have kept him safe. He would not have been on that curve, in that bright sun, at that very moment that Amanda drove her Honda Civic around it.

Dear Amanda, she thought. But if she told the girl that it wasn’t her fault, Olivia would have to admit that she was the one who had sent her husband out that morning. No, she thought, the smell of falafels turning her stomach, it was better this way. Better to share the blame than to carry it all alone.

The week between Christmas and New Year’s, as the city took on a sad holiday look—dirty snow, abandoned trees with tinsel still clinging to their branches, lights blinking foolishly—Amanda showed up at the Rose Tattoo. She came with two other girls, friends or sisters—Olivia did not know or care to know.

“I’m in bad shape,” the girl said. “I don’t know what it is I want from you, but all week I’ve been thinking about you all alone. With the holidays and stuff.”

She was so plain, a medium-sized girl with medium-brown hair. She wore painter’s pants and a pink ski jacket with lift tickets dangling from the zipper. Olivia saw a bright blue turtleneck, the top of the yoke of a blue-and-white Fair Isle sweater. An ordinary girl who had happened to kill David.

One of the other girls, dressed similarly—green ski jacket, pink turtleneck, dark green sweater beneath—nudged Amanda.

“I’m taking next semester off,” Amanda said. Olivia could see that the girl was trying to fight back tears. But still they spilled out, streaking her cheeks. “I’m going to stay with my aunt in Seattle. Maybe it will help to get away. I don’t know what to do.”

Olivia wished she could find some words, but the only ones that bounced around her brain were:
Why don’t you go jogging?

“Amanda,” she said, her voice like a croak.

The three girls in front of her seemed to hold their collective breath.

“I don’t know, either,” Olivia said finally.

They waited, but she had nothing to say. She did not forgive the girl. Or herself.

“I brought you this,” Amanda said.

She placed a small loaf of bread, wrapped in plastic and tied with red-and-green ribbon, on the counter.

“It’s cranberry,” she added.

“Thank you,” Olivia said. They both stared down at the bread until one of the girls took Amanda’s elbow.

“I’ve got to go,” Amanda said.

Olivia nodded.

But Amanda didn’t go. She just stood there, still.

“I keep thinking about you,” she said again.

Finally, she turned and left, off to Seattle, to some life for herself. Olivia took the bread from the counter and pressed it against her nose. She smelled orange and cinnamon, the bitter scent of cranberries. The bread was still warm. Olivia breathed in its holiday smell; then she took it out back to the Dumpster and threw it away.

Sometimes, Olivia looked out her kitchen window at the Hudson River and New Jersey beyond and imagined taking a bus out there, to Morristown, where Amanda lived. It hadn’t worked out in Seattle, the girl had written her. Now she was back home, taking Prozac, working at a bookstore. Olivia could go out there and find Amanda’s house, knock on the door, wait until she saw the girl’s bland face. But then what? She always came back to that question: then what? After all, what could a teenaged girl possibly give her that she could not give herself? How in the world, Olivia wondered, could someone so young and troubled possibly help her?

O
LIVIA JOGGED. IT
was June. Hazy, hot, and humid. “The three
h
’s,” the vapid weatherman had said on the sunrise weather report. He had grinned as he pointed to a drawing of a sweating yellow sun. Olivia added weathermen to her list of things that annoyed her. The list was long and growing fast. Just that morning, after driving through the night alone to get up here finally and close up the beach house, put it on the market, do what everyone had been telling her to do since David died—“Get on with your life!”—after drinking so many bitter take-out coffees that she’d been unable to sleep and instead had smeared paste on the kitchen wall and flung everything she could find up there, when she finally fell asleep on the couch, the phone woke her.

“I hear you have a house for sale?” a young woman said.

Olivia had yawned into the phone, closed all the shades against the day, and said, “Who told you that?” in a tone that was less than nice. She didn’t care. Even from the now dark living room, Olivia could see the mess she’d made of the wall where she had once planned to stencil the William Carlos Williams poem about plums.

“Uh,” the woman said—stupidly, Olivia thought. “Your sister? Amy?”

“Figures,” Olivia mumbled. Her sister, Amy, four years younger, bitter, divorced, a single mother, had been trying to take charge of Olivia’s life since David died. Amy was, Olivia had decided, almost relieved that she and David’s sudden romance and marriage had ended so soon and so tragically. “It’s time,” Amy kept reminding Olivia, “to grow up.”

The woman took a big, impatient breath. “My name is Kim Potter-Franco and my husband is Joseph Franco,” she said, and when Olivia didn’t give her a how-do-you-do, she continued, “Anyway, my husband and I—we’re newlyweds, you know?—we’re renting over by the college, in the graduate-student apartments, and they’re just awful. So when I met your sister at the gym and she said you wanted to sell your house, or maybe even rent it first, I said, I just have to call. We’re both getting Ph.D.’s,” she added, her voice full of idealism and hope, “in literature.”

Olivia could see it, Amy and this idiot side by side on treadmills, walking hard and fast and going nowhere.

“This is our house,” Olivia said. “And it’s not for sale yet.”

“These apartments,” Kim Potter-Franco said, lowering her voice, “are not so great. We moved here from Ohio and we had this darling little place. We just want somewhere nice.”

“Our house isn’t nice,” Olivia said. One of the witches from the occult store next to the Rose Tattoo had given her a book on feng shui and some smudge sticks to chase out the bad spirits and bad karma here. “Bad spirits,” Olivia added.

“It’s just that a house would be so nice,” the woman said, “what with all our new things—the wedding china and crystal. We’re newlyweds,” she said again.

“We don’t want anyone in our house!” Olivia shouted. “It’s ours. We bought it so we could put our toes in the ocean whenever we wanted. We bought it so that we could grow old here. We don’t want anyone with a stupid hyphenated name living here with china and crystal and big dreams. Do you hear me, you stupid fucking newlywed? You happy person?”

But Kim Potter-Franco had hung up already.

Olivia jogged down the scenic route, careful to run on the side facing traffic, to stay close to the edge of the road. She jogged past blue hydrangeas and old stone walls and houses hidden behind large trees—weeping willows, evergreen, oak, and maple. She jogged until she reached the spot. Then she stopped, panting, and waited.

The spot was on a curve. The policeman had called it “a blind curve,” had said it in a way as if to abdicate it of any responsibility. The policeman had seemed like a schoolboy, fresh-faced and awkward. So awkward, in fact, that Olivia had comforted him, placed her arms around his trembling shoulders, brought him a glass of water, told him
she
was sorry. Sorry that he had the terrible job of showing up at the little purple beach house that she and David had bought and telling her that her husband had been hit by a car on Route 1A and was dead.

Olivia stood in the spot where it had happened and made herself think about all the details she had tried to forget over the past nine months. How she had made a big pot of coffee so they could take some in a thermos for the ride back to New York. How she had sat at the small green patio table with its wavy opaque glass top and looked out the window and wondered if she was pregnant. She’d let herself think of names for their baby, writing different combinations on a scrap of paper, the way in fifth grade she had written her name in various forms with Paul McCartney’s: Olivia Bertolucci McCartney, Olivia McCartney, Mrs. Paul McCartney. She had sat and written names at the table, sipping Tanzanian peaberry coffee, the sunlight streaming through the window and bouncing off the glass tabletop almost playfully.

She had imagined many things as the morning stretched on and David did not return from his run. That he went to the good bakery for fresh croissants. That he had stopped to help someone who needed help. But she had not imagined even once that he was dead. They were too happy; life was going too right for them for something that bad to happen. He was, she’d thought fleetingly, hurt perhaps. She’d thought of twisted ankles or a wrenched back. She’d wondered if she should drive down the road to see if he needed help. But something kept her at home, at that table. So that when the too-young policeman appeared at their door, Olivia was smiling and ready to give him what he needed.

Now, standing here sweating in David’s blue-and-gold Berkeley T-shirt, remembering these things hurt, but not in the doubling-over, all-consuming way they had at first. Everyone around her—even Winnie, even Rex—used euphemisms, cloaked language. They said in hushed tones that David had passed away, that he was gone. Didn’t they know, Olivia thought as she began to work her way along the route, to move past the spot, didn’t they know that verbs were harmless? To say the word
died
did not hurt her. Nouns were the part of speech that hurt. When she tried to speak his name out loud, she strangled on the syllables. When she dreamed of him saying her name, she woke up crying. When she had to say the word
husband,
she always choked.