Honey, Baby, Sweetheart (11 page)

“What are you doing? Travis!”

“Ruby! I know these people. You’d think I was
breaking in.”
He stuck his hand in one pocket, pulled out a key ring. “Would I have a key to the place if I didn’t know them real well? Is it breaking in if you have a key?”

Travis held up the key ring to the small amount of
available light from the street and looked through the keys. There were a lot of them, labeled with tiny squares of masking tape. I looked down; a pair of women’s tennis shoes sat outside the door. I was beginning to be scared out there in the dark, in this strange place that belonged to the woman with the tennis shoes and not me. “How many people give you their keys?” I asked.

“Here it is.” He held up the key, stuck it in the knob and turned. Cold air hit my face. These people were not home. These people hadn’t been home for a while. Travis took off his shoes. “Will you get in here?”

“Travis, no. I don’t know what you’re doing, but these people are not home.” The ugly seed was building to panic. I felt the way I did that day in the water, when he held me under. I needed air. I heard the crickets chirping and nothing else; there was only silence and that cold, empty air. Suddenly my stomach felt sick with the fluttery wings of fear.

“I’m not going in there.”

“Shit, I didn’t think you of all people would be this skittish.” His voice softened. “Ruby, relax.” He held his hand out to me, and I took it. He pulled me gently inside. “I know they aren’t here. They’re on vacation, all right? I’m feeding their cats, for Christ’s sake.”

Cats. My heart was still pounding, questioning whether it was safe to slow down or not. “You said we were going to see your friends.”

“I did not. I said we were going to their house. Can we talk about this inside, please?” I took off my shoes, same as Travis, and went in.

I started to feel foolish. I actually did. And relieved, too. “I’m sorry, Travis,” I said. The tile floor was cold on my feet. The whole place felt refrigerated. It smelled unfamiliar—floral, old wood, some kind of lemony furniture polish. I followed him through the kitchen to an antique-filled living room dominated by a marble fireplace. The streetlights shining through the filmy drapes made everything glow an eerie yellow. There was a large Oriental rug, botanical prints hung by wide, satiny bows, dishes held face-out on display on the mantel.

“Maybe you’d better wait here,” he said. “Have a seat. Unless you want to try out one of the beds.” He passed his hand over the butt of my jeans.

“I’m sure they would really appreciate that,” I said. I sat down on the flowered couch strewn with embroidered pillows, looked over my shoulder as Travis climbed the staircase, with its wide, curved banister polished to a high shine. I kept my mouth shut, looked at the candy dish on the coffee table, which was filled with candies wrapped in pink and purple and gold foil, twisted on the ends. A tall statue of a heron was pointed toward the window, his view temporarily impaired by the closed drapes. You wondered where people who lived in houses like this kept their junk mail and spare shoelaces and batteries they were mostly sure worked.

Framed photos sat on a desk with thin, curved legs at the side of the room. I squinted at them in the dim yellow light—the studio shot with posed formal smiles, the woman who must have owned the tennis shoes, with her
gray-blond hair and long skirt, her silver-headed husband, two stick-thin boys that looked close enough alike to be twins, and a little girl in a fancy dress that looked scratchy, all set against a velvety drape. There were several others too: the boys with their father and someone else, in ski attire, goggles on their heads; an elderly couple, the man stooped and frail, the woman sitting on a garden bench and holding a baby. I sat in these nice people’s house, these nice people with their candy dishes and ski vacations and tennis shoes dirty from the garden, wondering how they would feel knowing a stranger was sitting on their couch. And then something else occurred to me. That dimness that made it hard to see the pictures clearly . . . Travis had not turned on a light when he had come in.

I couldn’t hear Travis upstairs. Unlike my own house, where you could hear someone clearing their throat in the next room (actually, you could probably even hear someone
thinking
about clearing their throat), this house was so huge and solid that I could not hear his footsteps above me. The only thing I could hear was the ticking of the clock that sat on the mantle in front of me, a sound that made me uneasy in the silence and dark.
Tock, tock, tock.

What had Travis said about coming here? My mind replayed bits of conversation, stopped at a memory. He had said something about surprising these people. If they knew he was coming, how would this be possible? I felt sick again, and I stood. I didn’t want to be sitting on these
people’s couch, leaning my back against embroidered pillows that maybe the lady on the garden bench had lovingly stitched.

“Travis?” I called up the stairs. In the silence my voice sounded as if it could break something. I paced around in my socks, rubbed my hands together against the cold. Through the etched glass panes on either side of the front door, I could see the lights of the east side across the lake, though the glass had split the beams into fuzzy, abstract prisms. Five minutes later, according to the mantle clock—hours and hours, according to the feeling in my chest—Travis came downstairs.

“How are the cats?” I asked. Travis took my face in his hands and kissed me. He pulled me down until I was on top of him on the stairs.

“Did I ever tell you how beautiful you are?” he said. I wasn’t going to kiss him there, in that empty house with the creepy ticking clock. I struggled to stand. I wanted out of there.

“The cats,” I said.

“You know there are no cats.”

“God damn it, Travis.” Panic and fear, thundering now. “What are you talking about? What are you saying?”

Travis rose from his place on the stairs. He stood in the entryway, touched the top of a music box that was on a table. He turned it upside-down, twisted the tiny bar that turned it on. “Don’t touch that. What are you doing here? What are we doing here, Travis?”

Some song I didn’t know played sweetly from the
music box. “You know what we’re doing here.” He stuck a hand into one of his jacket pockets and pulled out a clump of jewelry—gold, silver, pendants, and watches.

“Shit, Travis. Oh, shit.”

I couldn’t breathe. I knew what I was seeing, but my brain couldn’t even wrap itself around it. And then, an arc of headlights through the curtains filled the living room.

“Oh, God,” I said. I grabbed his arm. I had the urge to run, but my body had frozen. The music box was still playing.

“Just stay there,” Travis said calmly. “It’s probably just someone turning around.” But his face looked afraid. For the first time I saw the tight line of fear across his jawline.

We waited. No doorbell or footsteps. “See?” Travis said. “Just someone turning around. No big deal.”

I ran to the back door, the way we came, tried to put my shoes back on but my hands were shaking too badly. Travis went to the refrigerator, modern black and chrome, shiny. He opened the door. The light shined on his satisfied face; he took a can of Diet Coke, cracked the top, and took a drink.

I shivered the whole way back over the bridge. I trembled as if I were in the throes of a fever. All the way there I’d had to hold on to Travis Becker on that motorcycle. My hands felt guilty and disgusted, certainly not like my regular hands. These hands were too small to handle what had just happened.

I got in my mother’s car where I’d left it. Travis Becker
walked to my window, knocked on the glass. I rolled it down and he ducked his head into the car. “I like the pissed-off act,” he said. Which was a good thing, because right then I started to roll up my window with his head still in it. He made a little squeak of surprise, then turned his head sideways and released himself before my furious rolling marred his beautiful, sleek neck. My own neck still wore that necklace he had given me; I was suddenly aware of its ugly weight. I grabbed it and yanked, and the gold cut across my skin but I didn’t care. I pulled it until it lay limp in my hand, and I drove off still clutching it. In the rearview mirror I could see Travis Becker standing in streetlight. His expression was so satisfied we might have just become lovers.

There is nothing that can make you feel quite as guilty as walking into a quiet house full of sleeping people, people who are dreaming gentle dreams and who don’t know enough to suspect you of wrongdoing. Even the buzz of the refrigerator was innocent enough to make me hate myself. I took off my shoes by the door, walked in bare feet across the floor. Maybe I was getting good at creeping around still houses.

On the way home I had stopped by the side of Cummings Road on a weedy patch thick with blackberry brambles and thistles and wide, furry dandelion leaves. The necklace was limp as a dead body in my hands, and I looked around to make sure no one saw as I flung it deep into the prickly branches. It might have been a
Valentine’s Day gift bought by a man who’d gotten off early from work one day and looked carefully through glass shelves, and a sick knot of disgust filled me at the thought that it would lie there in the dirt, eventually covered by rotted blackberries and dry leaves, snow, and mud. I was glad it was gone, though.

There was still a light on, shining under the door of my mother’s bedroom. I set my ear against the door, but there was no sound. I turned the knob slowly so as not to make any noise, and opened the door. My mother lay asleep on top of the bed, her glasses askew, giving one side of her forehead twenty-twenty vision. Her hand rested on the top of a book, which was facedown on her lap. It must have been a good one—it was open not quite halfway, and I knew that in the last few weeks she hadn’t been able to read anything, to me a more frightening sign of her depression than almost anything else. I turned my head sideways to read the title:
Life Times Two
by Charles Whitney. I eased it from her hand. My eyes caught on the words.

I saw her twice that day, the woman I will call Rose, because that’s what she was to me. Beautiful, perfect, eventually brutal in protecting her gentle self against my own destructive tendencies. It was on August 14, 1945, V.J. Day, amidst riotous celebration on the streets of New York City that I saw that flash of the crimson skirt that caught my eye in the crowd. It was a cinema moment—I saw the flash of
the skirt, looked up. She turned and looked over her shoulder at me. With that look, something had been decided. My whole life, though I didn’t know it then. I dropped my cigarette, ground it into the street with the toe of my shoe. A definite action was called
for,
some final punctuation, and that was the most definite action I could think of. Then she turned and disappeared into the crowd.

I saved Mom’s place by folding in the book jacket flap inside the cover. I carefully removed her glasses from her head. If she woke right then, her eyes would only see the me she thought she knew, not the me I was.

My mother stirred. “Ruby?” she said sleepily.

“Shhh,” I said.

I pulled the quilt over my mother and then I turned out the light.

“Ruby, we don’t do that here,” Joe Davis said. He was wearing
his shorts with all of the pockets again, and a Sea World T-shirt with a leaping whale on the front.

“What do you mean you don’t do that here? You don’t have one of those little boxes you go in and we can talk through the window?”

“Catholics do that.”

“Oh.” We sat in Joe Davis’s office, where I’d gone the next day after I’d finished work at Johnson’s Nursery. I’d never been there before. I’d expected his office to look, I don’t know, more churchlike. He had a desk that appeared to be used only to stack things on, as well as two worn chairs and a coffee table, an ugly gray filing cabinet with a fishbowl on top, with one fish swimming around a fake castle in water that should be changed. The place was full
of books, not only stacked on the desk but also in shelves along the wall. All kinds of books, too. Not just religious-looking ones, but books on baseball and oceans and sea kayaking, slim books of poetry, mysteries. A mug of tea sat on the coffee table, with the tea bag still inside and the string draped over the edge, and there was a pencil cup with only one pencil and a large chunk of coral, white and wavy. The only evidence that I was in a minister’s office was the crucifix over the door and a picture of a sad-faced Jesus in a flowing white robe and sandals. Even this was hung with a picture of a desert and one of the Golden Gate Bridge at sunset. Why there were never any cheerier pictures of Jesus I’ll never know. I realize he had a rough life, but it didn’t send the rest of us a very good message about the joys of living, if you ask me.