Ruby (4 page)

Even now, jogging away from where Amanda’s late-model Honda Civic had hit him, Olivia could not say his name. She had taken to calling him “Pal.” It sounded sassy. It sounded like something a tough broad might say. They had loved old Barbara Stanwyck movies, and Olivia could imagine Barbara calling a guy “Pal.” Even a dead guy.

“Pal,” Olivia said out loud, into the early-morning June air, “this sucks.”

She put on her Walkman, tuned to the local NPR station and “Morning Edition,” and continued her run. In the distance, the ocean sparkled in the sunlight. Olivia moved slowly toward it. Slowly was how she did everything these days. Hadn’t it taken her all this time to come back here and close up the house? She had met only half the orders for her hats since Labor Day, even though CNN and Winnie kept reminding her that hats were back. Even though Winnie had fanagled a blurb about Olivia and her hats in an article in the big summer issue of
You!
called “Hats Off to You!”

Olivia rounded each curve carefully, as if a blue Honda Civic driven by a college student might appear at any moment, “Morning Edition” fading in and out. Then, in a burst of strong reception, a reporter’s voice shot through Olivia’s headphones. The reporter was talking to a woman named Sheryl Lamont, whose husband had been tragically killed in a car accident the day after Labor Day last year, the very day Olivia’s own husband had died. This woman, Sheryl Lamont, was now pregnant with her dead husband’s child; she’d had the good sense to have his sperm removed and frozen for later use.

Olivia stopped jogging and leaned against the stone wall. Pink beach roses lined the other side of the wall. Bees hovered nearby.

“I knew,” Sheryl Lamont was saying in a slow drawl, “that I was not ready right then, when he died like that, to handle a pregnancy, a little baby, all by myself. But as time passed and I grew stronger, I knew it was time to realize our dream of having a little Duane Junior.”

As suddenly as they had come to her, NPR and Sheryl Lamont vanished. Olivia shook her head from side to side to reclaim them. She walked in small circles, hoping to move closer to them. But she found just static. When she fiddled with the dial, only the soft-rock station came through, Bette Midler singing “From a Distance” loud and clear.

Angry, Olivia turned off the radio and slid the headphones off her ears. She began to jog back in the direction of her house. Who was this Sheryl Lamont to come up with freezing sperm like that? She sounded young and uneducated; how had she gotten the idea? What about Winnie and all of Olivia’s other supposedly savvy friends in Manhattan? They’d never heard of it. What about Olivia’s mother, who found seemingly endless articles in
Reader’s Digest
about how to grieve but none about freezing sperm?

She should be having David’s baby, Olivia decided. Like stupid Sheryl Lamont. Two weeks before David died, they had decided to start trying to get pregnant. Like all of their decisions, it was spontaneous and surprising.

They were in their small yard, it, too, surrounded by fat blue hydrangeas and an old stone wall. David was grilling salmon and Olivia was stretched out on a chaise lounge, painting her toenails baby blue, the polish a gift from Winnie. She did not know what waited ahead for them in only two weeks’ time. If she had, she would have looked up at him while they talked. She would have studied his back and arms as he brushed olive oil on the fish and placed it on the grill. She would have memorized how he looked from this angle, too: across a small yard on a late-summer evening, with the sun almost completely gone, the white Christmas lights they’d strung twinkling in the hedges, citronella candles beginning to spill light on the dimming day. But no. She had not looked up. She had taken his presence there beside her for granted and simply watched the small brush move across the smooth surfaces of her toenails, smearing baby blue.

David had said, “Should we eat the salmon first and then go inside and make a baby? Or should we just go inside?”

“Whoa, baby,” she said. “A baby?” Because not knowing what lay ahead, she could be flippant.

“It came to me just now,” David said, “that a little girl who looked just like you would be a very fine thing.”

 “‘I don’t know nothin’ about birthin’ babies,’” Olivia said, fanning her toes to help the polish dry. Between each toe sat a cotton ball, tipped with baby blue. She stretched her feet out and shook them.

“You know I hate that movie,” David said.

“You know
I
hate that movie,” Olivia said. Her heart was beating a little too fast, the way it did when she knew something was coming: her birthday present, a trip, a kiss. A baby, she thought.

“Also,” David said, “a little boy who looked just like me would be a fine thing, too.”

Olivia frowned at him. “Don’t say ‘also’ and ‘too’ in the same sentence.”

“Save me from redundancy,” he said, dropping to his knees on the damp grass at her baby blue—polished feet. She opened her legs and he rested his head between them.

She should have studied him more carefully from this angle: his chin tilted up at her that way, his curls sparser than they looked upright, his teeth long and white and even.

But instead, Olivia did math.

“You know,” she said, “if my biology of the female reproductive system is right, today would be a perfect day—”

“For banana fish?” he murmured into her thighs, where his tongue was making neat little circles.

“They are like fish, aren’t they?” Olivia said. “Little fish swimming around inside a person.”

His tongue had worked its way beyond her thigh, past the hem of her madras short shorts.

“Ah,” Olivia said, her mind filled with thoughts of happiness and fish and David’s tongue exactly where it was.

“So should we have dinner first and then go inside?” he said.

“Fuck dinner,” Olivia said. “And who needs to go inside?”

He had caught her on the phone in the kitchen the next morning telling Winnie.

“We have,” Olivia had said. “We’ve gone completely mad.”

He had read somewhere that the best way to conceive was to have lots of sex. They did. All weekend. By the next weekend, Olivia thought she felt funny. Not sick exactly, but different.

“Do you think we actually did it?” she’d asked him that Saturday night back in Rhode Island.

“Of course we did it. We are blessed,” he said. He had exactly ten days to live.

The next Saturday, Winnie and her new boyfriend, Lou, and Rex and Magnolia all arrived from the city to spend Labor Day weekend. All day, Olivia pulled David into the bathroom to help her search for traces of her period. But there were none. She stopped drinking the blender drinks that Rex concocted. She put her feet up. On Sunday morning, she told Winnie.

“Maybe you’re just late?” Winnie asked.

But Olivia was sure that David was right. They had been blessed with each other, with the success of her hats and his new designs in plastic polymar. With a baby.

Things started to go bad early Monday morning when Winnie stumbled upon Magnolia and Lou screwing on the beach. She kicked sand in their faces, ran back to the house, woke Olivia up to tell her what she’d found, got in the car, and drove back to New York, leaving Rex to ride the train back with Magnolia and Lou, who claimed they had fallen in love.

As they were leaving for the train station, Olivia realized that Arthur was missing. The five of them searched the house and yard, the beach and neighbors’ yards, but no Arthur.

“Maybe he fell in love, too,” Rex said.

Standing on the platform as the train pulled away, David took Olivia’s hand.

“Let’s not go back to New York tonight,” he said. “Let’s stay in bed and drink nonalcoholic beer and name our baby.”

“And maybe Arthur will turn up,” Olivia said.

“He will. He has to. He’s part of our ever-growing happy family,” David said. He had less than twelve hours to live.

Arthur never turned up again.

And after the policeman came and told Olivia, and drove her to the hospital to identify David, and after she had made phone calls from the pay phone in the lobby to Winnie and Rex and her parents and David’s parents, standing by the entrance to the emergency room, waiting for her father to come for her, Olivia felt the warm gush of blood. No baby. No David. In just a few hours, everything had gone bad.

Running, her house in sight now, Olivia thought, I am thirty-seven years old. I am a widow. I will never meet someone I will love like that again. Her life stretched before her, sad and blank.

“Oh, Pal,” she said in between breaths. “How could you?”

A cat meandered past her, and for a crazy minute Olivia thought it was Arthur. But Arthur was gone, too. She started to cry. It was easier to cry for Arthur than for her other enormous losses. It was easier to say his name as she ran, like a beat: “Arthur, Arthur, Arthur.” Somewhere deep within her, it was a different name she called. But Olivia could not speak it out loud.

“Arthur,” she said foolishly, crying. “Arthur.”

Olivia could hardly make it up the dirt road that led to her own little house. She had run too long, too hard. Her dead husband’s T-shirt stuck to her like a hug. Inside, she would drink water from the jug in the refrigerator; then she would go upstairs, pull the shades, and get back in bed, where she would stay for hours, or even longer. Maybe forever, she decided, wondering how long it would take to starve or die of thirst or neglect. This was the type of thing David would have known.

A few feet from the kitchen door, Olivia noticed that it was open the slightest bit. She stopped, certain that she had locked it. She remembered growing frustrated with the old-fashioned key, pulling hard on the knob to be certain the door had locked. A robber was there, no doubt, convinced the house was empty. It had that look about it—neglected and unloved, like Olivia herself. She decided right then that she would let him kill her. In fact, she was almost relieved that it had come to this.

She yanked the screen door open, then pushed on the other door, the wooden one, and walked into her kitchen.

But it was not a man sitting there at the green metal table with the glass top.

It was a girl, a teenager.

She sat at the table, drinking a glass of water. Perspiration glistened on her face, which was pink and blotchy. Her hair was not quite red and not quite brown, but somewhere in between; long and thin, it hung in a sweaty tangle around her face, strands sticking to her neck. She had too many freckles, the kind that make a face look cluttered. She wore a nose ring, a small silver hoop in one nostril.

And, Olivia realized, she was pregnant.

Her T-shirt stretched ridiculously across her belly. Olivia could see her belly button pressing against the shirt. Her belly, round and big, made Olivia think of melons and bounty. Of life. The girl could be Sheryl Lamont herself. Or a figment of Olivia’s imagination. So Olivia spoke in a loud, booming voice.

“What the hell is going on here?” she asked.

The girl’s head jerked in Olivia’s direction. Something flashed across her face—not panic, exactly, but something like it. Awkwardly, she got to her feet, in that way that pregnant women have. She was all belly. The rest of her was slender; her legs, poking out from cut-off dungarees, were a young girl’s legs. She waddled, off balance, straight to Olivia, like one of the baby ducklings in that children’s story.

“Stop right there,” Olivia ordered, putting an arm up like a traffic cop. Her eyes scanned the kitchen counter for something she could use as a weapon, but there were only crumpled bags of junk food from her ride up here in the middle of the night. And the jar of paste she’d used when she arrived, to paste the things she’d found here to the wall: David’s cracked Wayfarer sunglasses and unopened mail and the newspaper still unread from the day he died and Arthur’s tiny straw hat that he hated to wear and dead flowers she’d found in a vase by the bed. Before her run, she’d pasted all of that to the wall. Oh, Olivia groaned inwardly now, how can you defend yourself with paper and paste? She remembered that childhood game: paper, scissors, rock. Rock always won, she thought.

“Look at me,” the girl said with a nervous laugh. “I’m harmless.” Taking a step closer, she added, “I’m desperate.”

The smell of her own sweat slapped Olivia in the face. “Don’t you come any closer, you little trespasser,” Olivia said, sounding foolish rather than threatening. The Lord’s Prayer ran through her mind for the first time since her childhood. “Forgive us our trespasses.” Or was it “trespassers”? Olivia picked up the ruler she’d stuck in the jar of glue and held it up.

“Don’t call the police or anything,” the girl said.

“You bet your ass I’m calling the police,” Olivia told her. “Breaking and entering and who knows what else.” She tried to make a plan, to figure out how to call the police and keep the girl from running away.

“I didn’t take anything except, like, eight ounces of water,” the girl said, indignant. “Jeez.”

Her voice was a teenager’s, a voice that was capable of uncontrollable giggles and passionate sobs over small things like dead animals by the roadside or a Top Ten love song. Olivia knew this because she’d been that type of teenager herself. She saw something familiar in the girl’s eyes. It was what Olivia had felt sitting in her room with the canopy bed and pink dotted-swiss bedspread and matching curtains and silver monogrammed hairbrush and hand mirror. Get me out of here, she used to think, begging the stars, the gods, whoever might be “out there” listening to a teenager’s cry for help.

Olivia looked at the girl and remembered all this, but she thought, Still.

Still, she was a stranger. A stranger who had broken into Olivia’s house.

“What the hell are you doing in my house?” Olivia said. “If you haven’t taken anything, then why the hell did you break in? People don’t break into other people’s houses.”

“I was just so hot.” She shrugged, keeping her young arms—also covered with freckles—held out in surrender.

Olivia had to call the police. The phone, nestled against the far wall, seemed miles away. She could hear herself telling them, We have a B and E here. Barbara Stanwyck would be proud. But a pregnant teenager, she thought, how dangerous could she be? And she heard her own teenage self crying, Get me out of here. She had saved herself with Melanie records and cheap incense and rock concerts at the hockey rink that doubled as an auditorium. This girl had found sex.
Still.
Olivia considered everything. When she licked her lips, she almost tasted the black cherry lip gloss she used to wear, almost smelled the Love’s lemon scent that she used to spray on herself after a bath.