Lock and Key (22 page)

I walked over to the window by the door, looking for Nate. He was usually right on time, and when he wasn’t, it was often because Gervais—who had trouble waking up in the morning and was often dragged to the car by his mother—held things up.

“No, I’m all right,” Cora was saying. She’d gone down the hallway, but only a few steps. “Things are just kind of tense. I’ll call you after, okay? Thanks for remembering. Yeah. Bye.”

There was a beep as she hung up. When I glanced back at her, she said, “Look. About earlier, and what I said about the wedding. . . . I didn’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable. ”

“It’s fine,” I said just as the phone rang again. She looked down at it, then answered.

“Charlotte, hey. Can I call you back? I’m kind of in the middle of—Yeah. Nine a.m. Well, hopefully.” She nodded. “I know. Positivity. I’ll let you know how it goes. Okay. Bye.”

This time, as she hung up, she sighed, then sat down on the bottom step, laying the phone beside her. When she saw me watching her she said, “I have a doctor’s appointment this morning.”

“Oh,” I said. “Is everything—are you all right?”

“I don’t know,” she replied. Then she quickly added, “I mean, I’m fine, health-wise. I’m not sick or anything.”

I nodded, not sure what to say.

“It’s just . . .” She smoothed her skirt with both hands. “We’ve been trying to get pregnant for a while, and it’s just not happening. So we’re meeting with a specialist.”

“Oh,” I said again.

“It’s all right,” she said quickly. “Lots of people have problems like this. I just thought you should know, in case you ever have to take a message from a doctor’s office or something. I didn’t want you to worry.”

I nodded, turning back to the window. This would be a great time for Nate to show up, I thought. But of course he didn’t. Stupid Gervais. And then I heard Cora draw in a breath.

“And like I was saying, about earlier,” she said. “About the wedding. I just . . . I didn’t want you to feel like I was . . .”

“It’s fine,” I said again.

“. . . still mad about that. Because I’m not.”

It took me a moment to process this, like the sentence fell apart between us and I had to string the words back together. “Mad?” I said finally. “About what?”

“You and Mom not coming,” she said. She sighed. “Look, we don’t have to talk about this. It’s ancient history. But this morning, when I said that thing about the wedding, you just looked so uncomfortable, and I knew you probably felt bad. So I thought maybe it would be better to just clear the air. Like I said, I’m not mad anymore.”

“You didn’t invite us to your wedding,” I said.

Now she looked surprised. “Yes,” she said slowly. “I did.”

“Well, then the invitation must have gotten lost in the mail, because—”

“I brought it to Mom, Ruby,” she said.

“No, you didn’t.” I swallowed, taking a breath. “You . . . you haven’t seen Mom in years.”

“That’s not true,” she said simply, as if I’d told her the wrong time, something that innocuous. “I brought the invitation to her personally, at the place she was working at the time. I wanted you there.”

Cars were passing by the mailbox, and I knew any moment one of them would be Nate’s, and I’d have to leave. But right then, I couldn’t even move. I was flattened against the window, as if someone had knocked the wind out of me. “No,” I said again. “You disappeared. You went to college, and you were gone. We never heard from you.”

She looked down at her skirt. Then, quietly, she said, “That’s not true.”

“It is. I was there.” But even to me, I sounded unsure, at the one time I wanted—needed—to be absolutely positive. “If you’d ever tried to reach us—”

“Of
course
I tried to reach you,” she said. “I mean, the time I spent tracking you down alone was—”

Suddenly, she stopped talking. Mid-sentence, mid-breath. In the silence that followed, a red BMW drove past, then a blue minivan. Normal people, off to their normal lives. “Wait,” she said after a moment. “You do know about all that, don’t you? You have to. There’s no way she could have—”

“I have to go,” I said, but when I reached down for the doorknob and twisted it, I heard her get to her feet and come up behind me.

“Ruby, look at me,” she said, but I stayed where I was, facing the small crack in the door, feeling cold air coming through. “All I wanted was to find you. The entire time I was in college, and after. . . . I was trying to get you out of there.”

Now, of course, Nate did pull up to the curb. Perfect timing. “You left that day, for school,” I said, turning to face her. “You never came back. You didn’t call or write or show up for holidays—”

“Is that what you really think?” she demanded.

“That’s what I know.”

“Well, you’re wrong,” she said. “Think about it. All those moves, all those houses. A different school every time. The jobs she could never hold, the phone that was rarely hooked up, and then never in her real name. Did you ever wonder why she put down fake addresses on all your school stuff? Do you think that was some kind of accident? Do you have any idea how hard she made it for me to find you?”

“You didn’t try
,
”
I said, and now my voice was cracking, loud and shaky, rising up into the huge space above us.

“I did,” Cora said. Distantly, from outside, I heard a beep: Nate, getting impatient. “For years I did. Even when she told me to stop, that you wanted nothing to do with me. Even when you ignored my letters and messages—”

My throat was dry, hard, as I tried to swallow.

“—I still kept coming back, reaching out, all the way up to the wedding. She swore she would give you the invitation, give you the choice to come or not. By that time I had threatened to get the courts involved so I could see you, which was the last thing she wanted, so she promised me. She
promised
me, Ruby. But she couldn’t do it. She upped and moved you away again instead. She was so afraid of being alone, of you leaving, too, that she never gave you the chance. Until this year, when she knew that you’d be turning eighteen, and you could, and most likely would. So what did she do?”

“Stop it,” I said.

“She left you,”
she finished. “Left you alone, in that filthy house, before you could do the same to her.”

I felt something rising in my throat—a sob, a scream— and bit it back, tears filling my eyes, and I hated myself for crying, showing any weakness here. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

“I do, though.” And now her voice was soft. Sad. Like she felt sorry for me, which was the most shameful thing of all. “That’s the thing. I do.”

Nate beeped again, louder and longer this time. “I have to go,” I said, yanking the door open.

“Wait,” Cora said. “Don’t just—”

But I ran outside, pulling the door shut behind me. I didn’t want to talk anymore. I didn’t want anything, except a moment of peace and quiet to be alone and try to figure what exactly had just happened. All those years there were so many things I couldn’t rely on, but this, the story of what had happened to my family, had always been a given, understood. Now, though, I wasn’t so sure. What do you do when you only have two people in your life, neither of whom you’ve ever been able to fully trust, and yet you have to believe one of them?

I heard the door open again. “Ruby,” Cora called out. “Just wait a second. We can’t leave it like this.”

But this, too, wasn’t true. Leaving was easy. It was everything else that was so damned hard.

I’d only just gotten my door shut and seat belt on when it started.

“What’s wrong with
you
? You look like crap.”

I ignored Gervais, instead keeping my eyes fixed straight ahead. Still, I could feel Nate looking at me, concerned, so I said, “I’m fine. Let’s just go.” It took him another moment, but then he was finally hitting the gas and we were pulling away.

For the first few blocks, I just tried to breathe.
It’s not true,
I kept thinking, and yet in the next beat it was all coming back: those moves and new schools, and the paperwork we always fudged—addresses, phone—because of bad landlords or creditors. The phones that were never hooked up, that graduation announcement my mom had said was just sent out automatically.
Just you and me, baby. Just you and me.

I swallowed, keeping my eyes on the back of the bus in front of us, which was covered with an ad reading IT’S A FESTIVAL OF SALADS! I narrowed my focus to just these five words, holding them in the center of my vision, even as there was a loud, ripping burp from behind me.

“Gervais.” Nate hit his window button. As it went down he said, “What did we just spend a half hour talking about with your mom?”

“I don’t know,” Gervais replied, giggling.

“Then let me refresh your memory,” Nate said. “The burping and farting and rudeness stops right now. Or else.”

“Or else what?”

We pulled up to a red light, and Nate turned around, then leaned back between our seats. Suddenly, he was so close to me that even in my distracted state I couldn’t help but breathe in the scent of the USWIM sweatshirt he had on: a mix of clean and chlorine, the smell of water. “Or else,” he said, his voice sounding very un-Nate-like, stern and serious, “you go back to riding with the McClellans.”

“No way!” Gervais said. “The McClellans are
first-graders
. Plus, I’d have to walk from the lower school.”

Nate shrugged. “So get up earlier.”

“I’m
not
getting up earlier,” Gervais squawked. “It’s already too early!”

“Then quit being such a pain in the ass,” Nate told him, turning back around as the light changed.

A moment later I felt Nate glance at me. I knew he was probably expecting a thank-you, since he’d clearly gone to Mrs. Miller that morning to talk about Gervais because of what I’d said, trying to make things better. But I was so tired, suddenly, of being everyone’s charity case. I never asked anyone to help me. If you felt compelled to anyway, that was your problem, not mine.

When we pulled into the lot five minutes later, for the first time I beat Gervais out of the car, pushing my door open before we were even at a full stop. I was already a row of cars away when Nate yelled after me. “Ruby,” he said. “Wait up.”

But I didn’t, not this time. I just kept going, walking faster. By the time I reached the green, the first bell hadn’t yet rung, and people were everywhere, pressing on all sides. When I saw the door to the bathroom, I just headed straight for it.

Inside, there were girls at the sinks checking their makeup and talking on the phone, but the stalls were all empty as I walked past them, sliding into the one by the wall and locking the door. Then I leaned against it, closing my eyes.

All those years I’d given up Cora for lost, hated her for leaving me. What if I had been wrong? What if, somehow, my mother had managed to keep her away, the only other person I’d ever had? And if she had, why?

She left you,
Cora had said, and it was these three words, then and now, that I heard most clearly of all, slicing through the roaring in my head like someone speaking right into my ear. I didn’t want this to make sense, for her to be right in any way. But even I could not deny the logic of it. My mother had been abandoned by a husband and one daughter; she’d had enough of being left. So she’d done what she had to do to make sure it didn’t happen again. And this, above all else, I could understand. It was the same thing I’d been planning to do myself.

The bell rang overhead, and the bathroom slowly cleared out, the door banging open and shut as people headed off to class. Then, finally, it was quiet, the hallways empty, the only sound the flapping of the flag out on the green, which I could hear from the high half-open windows that ran along the nearby wall.

When I was sure I was alone, I left the stall and walked over to the sinks, dropping my bag at my feet. In the mirror overhead, I realized Gervais had been right: I looked terrible, my face blotchy and red. I reached down, watching my fingers as they picked up the key at my neck, then closed themselves tightly around it.

“I told you, I had to get a pass and sign out,” I heard a voice say suddenly from outside. “Because this place is like a prison, okay? Look, just hold tight. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

I looked outside, just in time to see Olivia passing by, phone to her ear, walking down the breezeway to the parking lot. As soon as I saw her take her keys out of her backpack, I grabbed my bag and bolted.

I caught up with her by a row of lockers just as she was folding her phone into her back pocket. “Hey,” I called out, my voice bouncing off the empty corridor all around us. “Where are you going?”

When she turned around and saw me, her expression was wary, at best. Then again, with my blotchy face, not to mention being completely out of breath, I couldn’t exactly blame her. “I have to go pick up my cousin. Why?”

I came closer, taking a breath. “I need a ride.”

“Where? ”

“Anywhere.”

She raised her eyebrows. “I’m going to Jackson, then home. Nowhere else. I have to be back here by third.”

“That’s fine,” I told her. “Perfect, in fact.”

“You have a pass?”

I shook my head.

“So you want me to just take you off campus anyway, risking my ass, even though it’s totally against the rules.”

“Yes,” I said.

She shook her head, no deal.

“But we’ll be square,” I added. “You won’t owe me anymore. ”

“This is way more than what I owe you,” she said. She studied my face for a moment, and I stood there, waiting for her verdict. She was right, this was probably stupid of me. But I was tired of playing it smart. Tired of everything.

“All right,” she said finally. “But I’m not taking you from here. Get yourself to the Quik Zip, and I’ll pick you up.”