The Ruby Notebook

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Glossary and Pronunciation Guide

About the Author

Glimmers of ideas for this book appeared fifteen years ago, while I was living in Aix-en-Provence with Annie and Alain Thille, my fun-spirited and generous host parents.
Merci mille fois
to you and your family for sharing your love, your home, and your amazing meals with me both when I was a college student and on recent visits. Conversations with the Aixois artist Juan Carlos Gallo in his exquisite gallery-courtyard gave me endless inspiration.
Grâce à vous
, Juan Carlos, this book (and my life) are infused with a bit more magic and mystery. A big
merci
to my
hyper cool
friends Jean-Christophe Prin and Megan Daily for their help with French language details.

Once again, my editor, Stephanie Lane Elliott, and her assistant, Krista Vitola, were instrumental in shaping and shining this manuscript. I’m deeply grateful for their patience and confidence in me, and for all the dedicated behind-the-scenes support everyone at Delacorte Press has given to my books. My energetic agent, Erin Murphy, deserves heaps of thanks for bringing the Notebooks series from an idea to a reality. Old Town Writers’ Group has kept me sane and smiling—thank you, Carrie Visintainer, Kimberly Srock Fields, Leslie Patterson, Molly Reid, and Sarah Ryan. Special thanks to Coleman Barks, phenomenal Rumi translator, for his generosity in letting me quote so much from
The Essential Rumi
.

Most of all, I thank my mother, who—when I felt overwhelmed and lost with this manuscript—showed me the way again, step by step. I suspect that you
do
have a magic wand after all, Mom. Dad and Ian, thanks for picking up our slack when Mom and I dropped everything in a scramble to finish this book. And Bran, thanks for your toddler joie de vivre in Aix-en-Provence as we rode the carousel and danced to street music and splashed in fountains!

I
t’s true. There’s something about the light here. It’s hazy golden, as if it’s moving through honey. I’ve seen all kinds of light. Wet green glow in the Amazonian jungle, squid luminescence in the Pacific, indigo dawns through a waterfall in the Andes. But this particular light—this southern French light glinting off my tiny espresso cup—this is something else.

It hits me now, the familiar urge to e-mail Wendell. It’s a hunger that needs to be satisfied every three or four hours. A split second later, the rational part of my brain kicks in, and I remember he’ll be here in a week. June twenty-fifth, the day filled with unabashedly giddy hearts and exclamation points on my calendar. He’ll be here, in Aix-en-Provence, in this square, and we’ll actually be touching, and
this light will be settling on his skin. He’ll be hopping up to snap pictures through the fountain spray, catching the cloud of pigeons alighting on an old man’s shoulders, a miniature dog nonchalantly making a large pile of
merde
as the owner, unaware, studies a dress in a shop window.

Across the café table, Layla picks up her little bowl of lemon
glâce
and tilts her head back to pour the last melted drops in her mouth. Not the kind of thing the well-mannered French people surrounding us would even think of doing. I know my mother so well, I can guess why she does it. It’s not just because everything’s so expensive in Aix—although that drop of
glâce
is probably worth ten
centimes
. That’s just Layla, savoring the tiniest droplets, sucking every bit of sweetness from life. Which is maybe why we move to a different country every year. Sixteen countries in my sixteen years on earth. It doesn’t take her long to lick a place clean.

She gazes over my head. “Doesn’t everything here look edible, Zeeta?”

“Edible how?” I can’t help smiling. We’ve been here a week, already over the jet lag but still marveling at every novel detail. It’s amazing; not a single sarcastic comment has emerged from my lips all week. Layla and I have been like sisters adventuring together, probably because I’m insanely happy about Wendell coming.

Best of all, he’ll be staying in our apartment. I’ll see him every day for two months, enough to make up for nine whole months apart. While I was getting his room ready this
morning, I had a goofy smile on my face, just imagining breakfast together at our sunny kitchen table, dinner on our roof patio. Almost too good to be true.

“Look at those buildings, love.” Layla waves her arm, her bracelets clinking. “They’re like sugary, buttery desserts.”

I nod. “Crème brûlée.” All the buildings—shops, cafés, bakeries, post office, town hall—are painted in the same dessert palette. This honey haze has oozed into everything, even the people. They’re draped in pale creams and lemons and silvers. They even talk in milky hues, their lips pursed and cheeks sucked in to form sexy French vowels.

Layla leans in. “Don’t you love that we’re living in a place pronounced ‘X’? Like X marks the spot. Like there’s a hidden treasure here! Like it can be whatever we want it to be!
C’est magnifique!
” She blows a kiss at the sky.

“He’ll like it here,” I say. Layla knows the
he
I’m talking about. For nine months, she’s heard me find roundabout ways to work Wendell into every conversation.

“Is his room ready?” she asks.

“Clean sheets, empty chest drawers, space in the wardrobe, a shelf in the medicine cabinet. All set.” He’ll be moving into my room, and I’ll sleep on the sofa bed in the living room.

“
Hyper cool,
” she says, pronouncing it the French way. “Eep-air” cool. A few months ago in Ecuador when I told her my plan to have Wendell stay with us this summer, she just said, “
¡Que pleno!
”—“Cool” in Spanish. The idea of my boyfriend sharing our apartment didn’t faze her one bit. She’s more like a sister than a mother, young-looking
enough that people often ask if we’re doing our junior year abroad together, pretty enough that random college backpackers turn to ogle. Even on windless days, her blond hair flies wild behind her, trailing along like a comet’s tail. “It’ll be good to have him around again,” she says. “Other artists inspire me.”

Just what kind of artist Layla considers herself is hard to get a handle on. Life is her canvas, each country a brushstroke of a different color. Wendell’s another type of artist—a photographer, slow and thoughtful with his craft. But what I love most about him is just him. His presence. How it feels to be near him. I imagine kissing him goodbye as he leaves for classes, and meeting him in the afternoons to wander the town together, meandering through the markets, hanging out at cafés.

Still, there’s a piece of me that’s wary, sure that this
is
too good to be true, a piece of me prepared to have my heart torn apart. My heart has been torn apart, over and over, every year, every time we say goodbye to our home. Still, somehow, over the course of a year in the new home, my heart heals and hopes and loves … only to be torn apart again.