Mothers and Other Liars (26 page)

For a moment, Ruby isn’t sure she can do it. Then she stands, pauses to place a palm on Lark’s head. That Lark, not Ruby, should be last to speak feels as right as the rest of this ceremony. Her knees are shaky, and her virginia winces in pain. She takes the baby, her baby, from Molly, waits as the Ms each take a votive, blow them out in unison.

Ruby holds so, so many wishes for this child, too many to be captured on a scrap of paper. She wishes Chaz were here to take part in this ceremony, that the ceremony didn’t need to happen in the first place. Finally, she holds the baby up Abuela-style, peers into his eyes. “My hope is that someday you understand, that one day you forgive me.” As Ruby speaks, the baby stares back at her, as if they are looking further than just into each other’s eyes.

“Imprint this, all of this, in your heart, baby goose,” Ruby whispers.

Lark joins Ruby at the railing but doesn’t take the baby in her arms. Instead she reaches out, grabs that impossibly tiny fist in her own tender hand, leans in close to the baby’s face. “I wish that your other mother will take care of you in lots of special ways, like our mother takes care of me.”

Then Lark reaches both hands around the baby’s neck, and when she steps back Chaz’s Saint Christopher medal hangs from a tiny gold chain. “And this is from your daddy. He asked me to give it to you.”
The mysterious package,
Ruby thinks. When the wash of tears clears her eyes, she is surprised to find that she still is upright.

Too soon, the hospital social worker steps forward to take the baby from her. Ruby instinctively clenches the bundle against her chest, as if she were saving her infant from a fall. The pull is visceral, starting somewhere deep in Ruby’s sore gut and coursing to her arms. The woman peels Ruby’s hands, finger by finger, from the blanket, and takes the baby into her own arms. Ruby swallows a scream as her uterus contracts, this time pushing her child not out of her body but out of her world.

As the social worker walks away with her baby, the emptiness in Ruby’s arms is only a fraction of the hollowness in her core. Yet the feeling is almost comforting in its perverse familiarity. Loss, a guest, albeit unwelcome, too often has visited before.

In her haze, Ruby feels a nudge at her elbow. Lark, the one sweet miracle Ruby has wrested away from that festering guest, hands her a votive. Mother and daughter, too, blow them out in unison, and Margaret helps Ruby back to her seat.

The chapel now is lit only by the two candelabra. They cast their light higher, paler, than the votives. In the dim room, Ruby tries to recognize something profound in how a dozen or two tiny lights can make such a difference, but her brain refuses to grab the thought.

Lark still stands at the rail. “Take these candles home with you,” she says, “and light them when you want to feel a little bit of Charlie.” The nickname flows smoothly from Lark’s mouth and feels natural in Ruby’s ear. “And maybe,” Lark continues, “he will feel a piece of you, too.”

After Lark returns to her seat, the Monteros file out of the shadowy chapel like good Catholics—one row at a time, front to back, with a curtsy and the sign of the cross at the first step out of the pew.

In the faint light of the empty chapel, Ruby sits beside her daughter while Lark folds each strip of paper into thirds, places it reverently into the treasure box that Ruby made when Lark was six or so. What up until now has held a rabbit’s tail, a few pottery shards, a handful of special rocks, will be the repository of all those wishes. Ruby doesn’t remember what she mumbled this morning, but even through the ache in her gut, she recognizes that the dear Ms and her amazing daughter created a sacred garden for the farewell Ruby didn’t know she needed.

A powder-sugar dusting of snow sparkles in the bright sunlight. The air is razor-sharp, stings Ruby’s lungs. On her skin, it tingles, how she imagines her grandfather’s Old Spice felt slapped against his just-shaved skin.

She walks away from Lark’s school, back toward home. Ruby used to enjoy this walk from the little school on Acequia Madre, sometimes stopping at the nearby bookstore café, where she would read the newspaper and Clyde would beg for pastries from people as if he had never been fed in his life.

These days, though, Ruby can barely manage to command herself to crawl out of bed, shove a cereal box across the counter, and trudge along beside Lark. The walk, her very life, feels like a forced march. She has whittled down her voluntary motion to the barest of necessities, bathing when she reeks, eating when her stomach thunders, speaking when spoken to. She curses her body for tormenting her with its involuntary actions, breath, pulse, brain waves. Only pain, and sleep, are welcome.

The thought she can’t seem to stop bouncing around her head is where she would be if she had never found the magazine article. She pictures the game Mousetrap, a relic from her own mother’s childhood that Ruby found in a closet when she was young. Blue and red and yellow pieces of plastic snapped together on a board, creating a rickety course for a metal ball to travel, ultimately knocking into a rod on which the domed mousetrap perched, sending the red trap skittering down the rod to capture some loser’s mouse.

If Ruby hadn’t found the article, Lark never would have been sent away. Ruby never would have been put through a trial. Ruby and Chaz wouldn’t have broken up. And Charlie would be with all of them now. Ruby can’t stop feeling like a little plastic mouse peeking out through the bars of a cage, wishing she had never started the ball rolling in the first place.

She tells herself to chase away the black dog, the mean reds, the colorless funk, what ever this is that haunts her. She tells herself she has to pull herself together for Lark, just as she did for the baby while Lark was away. She worries that Lark might think Ruby regrets her choice, wary of making her daughter believe she needs to earn a place in Ruby’s heart continually.

Lark’s birthday is coming, the holidays, too. Ruby wants, needs, to make those days special. Her doctor says to be patient, that her hormones are still adjusting, that postpartum depression is common, especially when no baby comes home.

The gardens along the road that were summer-lush just a few months ago are now a nuclear winter, dead-brown stalks, leaves black and mushy from frost. Ruby’s grandmother used to say that this was faith, hacking away your plants for winter in the belief that spring would come and grow them back. “And spring always comes,” Nana said.

Even though this November day is August-bright, spring seems a long, long way off to Ruby. She knows that winter is hanging out around a corner, a kid loitering in front of the Rexall, waiting to come blustering through. And she is having difficulty gathering the faith, like the squirrel collects the last pieces of nuts from under the tree beside the road, that winter will require.

She tells herself she should be used to the sadness. This is just one more on a long list of loss. The hurt of her breakup with Chaz is still there, a layer of scar-tissue ache under her acorn shell. But she carries the absence of her baby in her gut, a weight as if she has yet to give birth at all.

As Ruby and Clyde cut behind the art galleries that line Canyon Road, she happens upon the detritus of a party. Melted ice bags are in a limp pile by a tree, reminding her of the witch in
The Wizard of Oz.
A hill of trash bags is buttressed by liquor boxes, flattened, bundled, and tied. The pieces of an Erector Set party tent lie waiting to be carted off.

Something about the whole scene pricks Ruby with sadness, the kind of sad of an opportunity lost or time marching too quickly. When she sees the balloons, though, she crumples to the ground, as a knife stabs her chest. Clusters of pink and red and white balloons hanging limply over tree branches like someone’s forgotten laundry. She sits there, not crying, not feeling anything but the knifepoint in her chest. She sits there until the cold, hard ground finally penetrates the numbness of her skin, until Clyde practically knocks her over with his worry.

By the time Ruby trudges behind Clyde up the final hill, her own driveway, the feathery snow has vanished, some down into the earth to nourish the slumbering plants, some up into the cloudless sky to come again another day like the childhood rain song. If only the snow in her head could dissipate as easily.

She just didn’t expect it to be this hard. Yes, she rescued Lark, brought her daughter home. Yes, that was worth any price. But she didn’t expect the payment to hurt so much. She feels the phantom ache each time she reaches for her belly, finding a barren plain instead of the mound she expects.

In a perverse way, Ruby needs to hang on to that pain, even knowing that her hurting has got to be hurting Lark. As fiercely as she loves Lark, as surely as she knows she did the right thing, Ruby doesn’t want to lose the pain of losing her other child.

Her nail polish a shimmery burgundy, Antoinette blows on her fingers. “Berry tones, they’re all the rage this season.”

“Again already? Who decides that crap?” Ruby asks.

Antoinette picks up her purse with the tips of her fingers. “They, the proverbial
they
do. Come on, I’m driving.
You’re
drinking.”

In the car, Antoinette looks Ruby over with an exaggerated head-to-toe nod. “We got us some
work
to do. Margaret’s blitz attack on the hair helped, but we still got us some work to do.”

“That’s redundant, you know,” Ruby says. “Blitz attack. It’s like saying ‘baby puppies’ or ‘with au jus.’”

Antoinette shoots Ruby a look. “Yep, we got us some work. We’ll start with margaritas.”

Ruby gives her a wry smile. “You know, alcohol is no cure for depression. Not even a Band-Aid.”

“Maybe the Band-Aid’s not for you, but so the rest of us don’t have to look at your ugly sore.”

Ruby’s laugh is almost a guffaw. The mere fact that her friend can joke about it, that Ruby even gets the joke, tells her that she’s going to claw her way out of her black hole.

The traffic signal turns red as Antoinette approaches the intersection of Cerrillos and Paseo de Peralta. To the right is their usual restaurant, where Ruby met Chaz, where Chaz met the reporter. Relief is a warm flush through Ruby when Antoinette turns left. She may be seeing some glints of light these days, but she’s not quite ready to see those piñatas, or the tree that bears Chaz scars more visible than her own.

Antoinette doesn’t miss Ruby’s sigh. “Gotta get back on the horse someday, girl. My mama would say, ‘Don’t ya think that tea bag has steeped long enough?’”

“Wallowing,” Ruby says. “Nana called it wallowing.” As if rolling around in sadness were a pleasure, like the Ms’ Dudley writhing in manure. “She’d set a time limit, two hours, two days, depending on the cause.” And when time was up, wallowing was put aside, tucked away like a forgotten handkerchief in a drawer. “I wonder how much time she would give me for this, for giving my baby away.”

Antoinette cocks her head. “I’ll give you, oh, about a third a pitcher of margaritas.”

In the backseat of the Jeep, Lark and Numi chatter as Ruby drives down Canyon Road after picking them up from dance class. With her friends, Lark seems almost normal these days. She peels away a layer of the reserve that still hangs between her and Ruby.

Both girls wear black leggings and shirts. Ruby is wistful, thinking of the days of pink tights and tutus, strands of Lark’s hair escaping the bun no matter how many bobby pins, how much gel. But the wistfulness is quickly replaced by sheer gratitude that she has
these
days about which to grow wistful in the future.

Ruby glances in the rearview mirror. “I like your shirt, Numi.”

“Thanks, I, uh, put it on backward.”

Over her leotard, Numi wears her green T-shirt from Girls Inc. camp, indeed backward. Laddering down from the “I am,” oversized, polka-dotted capital letters spell NUMI in the middle of other words:

I am

da
N
cer

f
U
nny

to
M
boy

k
I
nd

“Tomboy,” Ruby says. “There should be a word for girls who like to play outdoors that lets them still be girls.” Her gender-image musing receives no response from the backseat. When she looks in the mirror, Numi is rummaging in her backpack, and Lark is staring out the window, all her layers of reserve tucked up tight under her chin.

Ruby knew she was whacking at a hornet’s nest when she mentioned the shirt. The last time she checked, Lark’s own “I am” shirt was shoved to the back of the dresser drawer. At least it was
in
the drawer; that is progress.

Lark will never be the same person she was before she went to Texas. Yet, while Ruby thinks of each distinct segment of her own years as a separate “life,” she hopes that someday Lark will be able to knit her ordeal into all the ways she defined herself before. Like a mended bone, stronger after a fall from a tree.

The art gallery teems with an opening-night crowd. The boldface types are factions from the arts councils, Chamber Music Festival, opera, ballet and local charities, and of course artists and art lovers and art sellers. Ruby recognizes many faces from the salon and from Molly’s previous shows.

Ruby clasps both hands around her plastic cup of wine—white only; no gallery would risk a stumble and splash of cabernet on the works. Tonight’s opening is a big deal for Molly here in the third-largest art market in the country. Molly’s pieces are showcased in the front room; glossy white walls and precision lighting make her large collages shine. In the next room, stark sepia prints by a young American Indian photographer expose the third-world conditions of the sparsely populated pueblos just north of the excess and abundance of the city.

“Girl, you are looking fine.” Antoinette steps around a cluster of patrons. “How is it fair that my stomach balloons out after a big plate of pasta, and yours is flat after giving birth?”

“Cheers.” Ruby taps her cup against Antoinette’s. “And thank you, for the confidence boost.”

“De nada.” Antoinette studies the artwork behind Ruby, a background of thickly painted fragments of a plantation house, a column here, a crumbling cornice there. “That would look so
good
in my bedroom.”

Ruby shakes her head. “Horrors. Don’t talk about matching artwork to your bedspread around here. Artists have killed for less.” She pauses to look at the piece again. Over and around the architectural components, Molly has layered strips of paper with typed text, like they have been torn from oversized pages of
Gone with the Wind,
and antique fabrics cut into the shapes of icons of her Southern upbringing. A drapery-brocade tree drips with Spanish moss that is tea-stained lace. “And you’re too late; this one is sold.” Ruby points to the red dot beside the collage.

Through the throng of people, Ruby catches glimpses of Molly, like patches of barn flashing through a field of grain. Her red top is a rebellion against the black that is de rigueur at these events, black turtlenecks or sports coats over jeans for the men, sophisticated black pantsuits or dresses for the women. No loud-print broomstick skirts or squash-blossom necklaces in this crowd; those are reserved for tourists and the storeclerks who cater to them.

Margaret breaks away from a group of her clients and joins Ruby and Antoinette. “Lark’s over at the buffet table with some Olivia kid from her school. Have you eaten anything? The crab cakes are good.”

Margaret and Antoinette make small talk, pointing out people here and there, tossing Ruby morsels of their lives. The whole scene seems a bit surreal; Molly’s opening is Ruby’s first real outing in months. She feels as if she should be draped in one of Molly’s debutante-gown fabrics instead of her good jeans and dressiest top.

“Don’t look,” Antoinette says. “Over my shoulder, nine o’clock. The guy is checking you out, girl.” She whisper-squeals, “I said don’t look!” when Ruby and Margaret, of course, both snap their heads.

“The granola-cruncher?” Margaret asks. “Looks like he lives in a cave with a bear?”

Antoinette smacks at Margaret’s shoulder. “The
other
nine o’clock.”

Ruby swallows the last of her too-warm, too-ripe wine, trying to be discreet as she gazes across the room over the top of her glass. “I’m sure he just recognizes me. From, you know. Or else it’s you he’s checking out.”

“No,” Antoinette insists. She leans closer to Margaret and whispers, “Does he play for our team?”

Margaret rolls her eyes. “Darn. I left my gaydar at home.”

Ruby risks another glance in the direction of the man—tall, fortyish, silver-strewn hair. She feels her face sizzle when she meets his eyes.

“No wedding ring,” Antoinette says.

Ruby shakes her head. “No matter. I am so not ready to even think about it. He’s all yours.”

“If you insist.”

As Antoinette slinks off like a bad-movie spy on a winding route toward the man and his friends, Margaret raises an eyebrow at Ruby. “Soon.”

“Right,” Ruby says with sarcasm. “When Lark’s in college, maybe then.”