Mothers and Other Liars (12 page)

Dawn doesn’t break so much as seep. Shiny obsidian fades to streaks of deepest purple, then lavender. Stark slashes of trees flesh out into trunk and limbs and leaves. Ruby is as road-weary as her Jeep; neither of them has driven much beyond Santa Fe in the past decade. She took the back route, through Galisteo, down to Clines Corner, picking up the interstate to Amarillo then state highways to Wichita Falls, interstate down to the city. All towns are ghost towns in the hours before sunrise; the strip malls of larger cities as ethereal as the cotton gins of the hamlets.

Then she reached Dallas. This neighborhood is a pocket of verdancy in the midst of all the cement, houses set back on large lots, parkways stretching their long green legs behind them. The house is plunked down between two cottages-on-steroids that look like they grew from irradiated seeds in their own gardens. Next to them, the Tinsdales’ newer Tudor seems ill at ease, as if company is coming and it must be on its best behavior. The yard is immaculate, not a sprig of a shrub or a blade of grass out of place. The stone is scrubbed-with-a-toothbrush clean. Windows and gaslights gleam in the silver light, and a massive Martha Stewart wreath chokes the front door. This is not the house of an accidental house keeper.

Ruby stares at the windows, but she sees no evidence of life beyond the fancy draperies. The house doesn’t breathe, let alone laugh. She can’t imagine her sprite of a daughter springing like Tigger through its hallways.

The tears come unbidden with a startling new thought:
what if Lark is better off here than with Ruby?
What does Ruby have to give? She hasn’t amounted to much in her uneducated ragtag series of lives. These people can offer Lark so much that Ruby can’t. Maybe a Tigger less life was what Lark was meant to live all along.

Ruby crumples over the steering wheel as the weight of it all comes crashing down on her. The pain of losing Lark will never go away. Ruby
knows
this, because she has lost so much, too much, already. The hurt may wane, even scab over for a time, but it will be there, always. And now the wrenching guilt of having deprived Lark of who she was meant to be. It is all too much for one body to contain. If Ruby can’t live without Lark, yet Lark shouldn’t live with her, then how can Ruby live at all?

The rap on the Jeep window penetrates Ruby’s hiccups and gasps. Her head jerks, arm flails against the door handle.

“Ma’am, I need you to step out of the car please.”

Ruby wipes her sleeve across her face. She looks out at a paunch stuffed in beige, then an irritated mouth comes into view. “Ma’am?”

The rest of her day is interminable. Alone in a cell in a police station, Ruby sits on a bench bracketed to the wall. Her body is wrung dry of tears. She feels crazed in the exposed cage, even in a clean, rather
Mayberry
cage. If she were to be sentenced to prison…she’ll end up in a mental ward.

Midmorning, a polite young officer brings her a sausage biscuit, and a few hours later, a fried chicken platter. “Bubba’s finest,” he says. Ruby is amazed to find she is ravenous, devours everything, sops up cream gravy with a flaky biscuit.

She tries to doze, but phones ring incessantly. And she can’t stop the screaming in her head. Finally, the cell door slides open and John stands in front of her.

“
What
were you thinking, Ruby?” He waves his arm. “No, don’t answer that, not here.”

An officer leads them through a series of hallways to a courtroom. Dark wood paneling, movie-theater seats. Ruby sits beside John as he talks to the judge, more a conversation than TV-courtroom banter, like buddies chatting over a pitcher of beer. Technically, she is not in violation of the protective order; she didn’t attempt to contact or communicate with the child in any fashion. And though she is on bond in the federal matter, she did not cross state lines with the intention of fleeing.

The judge has thick white hair and a country-club tan. “What do you have to say for yourself, Ms. Leander?”

“I just needed to see it, where she is living, so I could picture her
somewhere
.”

After more talk and admonishments, Ruby is released into John’s custody. They will fly back to Albuquerque; her Jeep will be shipped to Santa Fe.

Anger reaches the brim of John’s voice as they leave the courthouse. “You are damn lucky those folks live in Highland Park and not the city of Dallas. Separate cities, separate jails. You’d still be just some number in a cell for sure.” He tells her she screwed up royally, that this may impact the outcome of the federal case.

“I wasn’t going to take her,” Ruby says. But she’s not altogether sure what she would have done.

Ruby’s arm muscles ache. Her hands are raw, knuckles scraped of a layer of skin for each layer of paint she has scraped off the old pie safe. Tonight she sits on the shed floor, maneuvering around her belly to scour drawer faces between her splayed knees.

The final layer of paint simply dissolves under steel wool instead of loosening and lifting in pieces like a typical strip job. None of the usual chemical solvents even penetrated this last layer; Ruby spent many frustrating hours trying to chip through it with her scraper. And now, after all that work, the stubborn stuff just liquefies with plain old vinegar. Milk paint—made with actual milk way back in the day. She hadn’t come across that one before, but fortunately one of her grandfather’s books held the answer.

All her labor has done nothing to dull her other ache. The loneliness is unfathomable, this Lark-sized hole in the world. Like a bird knows where to fly south for winter, like a tree knows to reach for sunshine, Ruby knows she has made the biggest mistake of her life. Lark was right; Ruby shouldn’t have told. They should have run if they had to. Sometimes doing the right thing is worse than doing nothing at all.

A memory fizzes to the surface, Mrs. Olestein, the high school health teacher, scratching yet another of her many lists on the chalk-board. The seven warning signs.
A sore that does not heal.
This Larkless life is a cancer. Eating away her heart, her soul. This sore will never heal; it is a gaping wound.

She trudges through her days. Each morning, she rolls out of bed, chokes down her vitamins. She goes to work at the salon, home, then here to the shed until her legs refuse to support her body any longer. Then she lies in bed, clinging to Lark’s “I am” shirt, a piece of pure Larkness, her Lark, not some Tyler the Tinsdales are determined to reclaim. She watches through the window as light shifts through a spectrum of gray, while she thinks up unthinkable plots to kidnap her daughter all over again.

Clyde’s bark alerts her before Chaz steps into the shed. His bulk absorbs a wedge of the fluorescent light. She sets aside the vinegar bottle as he steps behind her, slips his hands at her armpits and hoists her to her feet.

He keeps a hand on her shoulder until she stands steady then turns her to face him. “Wow,” he says to the belly that brushes against his belt buckle. The struggle is there in his eyes, to comprehend the reality, the overt actuality of this other life. “Wow.”

An angry welt rises from his cheekbone. Ruby reaches out, stops short of touching it.

“It’s nothing,” Chaz says. “The kid got in a cheap shot.”

Ruby’s struggle to comprehend
this
reality is like pouring that bottle of vinegar straight through her veins. Chaz’s job is not only unpredictable; it is dangerous. If something were to happen to him…Ruby doesn’t know how she can possibly make this relationship work, with the chasm of the secret she kept from him and the void of Lark between them. But she doesn’t know how she can
not
make it work, either. The scent of Chaz, lime and musk, mixes with her acrid workshop smells.

Ruby knows only this, she knows that she loves him. “I just worry.”

“I know. But don’t.” Chaz walks over to the radio, tweaks the ancient dial, trying to bring in the oldies station more clearly. He doesn’t mind her taste in music, but he can’t stand the static. Maybe because his work is anything but, he does everything he can to make the rest of his life static-free.

“I missed you,” Ruby says.

“More.” He gives up on the radio, runs his hand across the rough and warped base of the pie safe. “This poor thing is a mess.”

“So am I,” Ruby says.

Chaz folds his arms. “I’m sorry I haven’t been here for you. First the conference, and then two shifts back-to-back.”

“It’s okay. I understand.”

“But are
you
okay?” He steps over to her, pulls her into an embrace. “Look at you.” He leans back, hands on her shoulders, eyes on her belly. “Look at her. Are you eating? Taking care of both of you?”

Ruby pulls him outside the shed, down onto the cool grass, rests her head on his shoulder. The night is full-dark, the stars as sharp as the scent of pine in the air, as if she could reach up and pluck them like apples from a tree. “I’m lost without her.”

“I know.”

“I just want her back.” Ruby sits up, clutches a fistful of Chaz’s shirt. “We could do it. We could go to Mexico, with Lark and the baby. Start over—”

Chaz takes Ruby’s face in his hands. “Look at me. Enough. That’s crazy talk.”

She stretches out on the lawn. “I know. I just miss her…so much.” She tells him how she thinks about that other mother, what she went through. “This is unbearable, even knowing where she is. I can’t imagine what it would be like if I didn’t know that she’s safe.”

Chaz traces circles on her forehead, rakes his fingers through her hair. She breathes in, still surprised after all these years to find crisp, clean oxygen with not even a hint of Iowa rendering plant. His words,
everything will be all right, everything will be all right,
are a lullaby. And finally Ruby drifts off to sleep under the stars, with Chaz’s lap as pillow.

When she opens her door, Celeste laughs, places both hands on Ruby’s belly as if she were a preacher healing the wounds of the world. Chunk stands inside the doorway, fidgeting as Ruby and Chaz enter.

Inside the house, the Monteroland clan swarms Ruby and Chaz. Even the auntsunclescousins are on the welcome committee, either as recompense for the last dinner’s debacle or in deference to Ruby’s pain. Like a square dance, they swirl and whirl around Ruby and Chaz, until Chaz has been do-si-doed to the living room with the men and Ruby has been spun off to the kitchen with the women.

The air is rich with spices; jars line the counter like toy soldiers marching toward the stove top. Cumin, coriander, saffron, ginger, cinnamon, paprika. Celeste is up to Morocco on her world gastronomical tour. Ruby missed Japan through Lithuania, yet Celeste, Ruby is sure, hasn’t missed a bit of what’s been going on.

“Don’t worry.” Aunt Tia pats Ruby on the back. “We’re not eating with our fingers.”

Ruby eyes the water pitcher; she is anxious to keep busy. Antoinette must notice, because she fills the ice bucket and motions Ruby toward the table.

“So your court date got moved up.” Antoinette reaches past chairs, dumping scoops of ice cubes into water goblets.

“Yeah, the judge had a hole in his schedule.” Ruby pours water slowly, as much to stretch out the task as to protect Celeste’s table. “If it means I see Lark sooner, if it means the trial will be over sooner…”

“If I were your lawyer…” Antoinette has talked about applying to law school since Ruby has known her.

“You should, you know,” Ruby says. “You’d be good,
do
good.”

“I just wish I could fix it, just this one thing, you know?”

“I wish you could, too.” The clank of ice cubes against glass sounds like wind chimes as she gives Antoinette the latest news.

John told her just yesterday that the Tinsdales are now screaming about a civil suit, suing her for damages for keeping Lark from them. Like when a wife sues her husband’s mistress for loss of conjugal rights or parents sue a hospital for wrongful life. Not that Lark shouldn’t have been born, but that she didn’t get to live the life she was supposed to have lived, that Ruby gave her the wrong life.
Civil lawyer
, Ruby thinks,
that is definitely an oxymoron
. She is in the unfortunate situation of facing both a criminal prosecutor and a civil trial lawyer who have political aspirations, John explained, and they will seek the spotlight at every turn.

Ruby’s own attorney is a jack-of-all-crimes and will represent her in both the civil and criminal proceedings at a fraction of his usual fees. “Margaret offered a lifetime of free salon services for his wife,” Ruby tells Antoinette.

“He’s probably getting the better bargain.”

First Lark was treated like property. Now the value of trying to keep Ruby out of jail is being measured in shampoos and sets. “His wife
is
addicted to hair spray,” Ruby says.

Buffered between Chaz and Antoinette in the circle of faces around the table, Ruby is touched when Chunk adds to his prayer a plea to watch over her in “her trials and tribulations.” She is also relieved to see Chunk’s sister remove the wine goblet from her husband’s place setting; the farting uncle apparently has been conscripted to the wagon. He looks down at his lap when Celeste holds up the wine bottle. Ruby is not the only reluctant teetotaler at this table.

“Today’s pairing is an Australian shiraz, to complement but not compete with the Moroccan spices.” Clearly, Celeste has been watching too much of the Food Network.

By an edict from Celeste, no doubt, the meal chatter is kept far from anything to do with Lark or Ruby. Tia’s daughter is grilled about her new boyfriend until an uncle asks Chunk about the rash of residential construction in the south of the county. This topic carries them well through the plates of roasted lamb with a tomato-onion glaze, steaming couscous the color of autumn, stewed vegetables with chickpeas. Chunk has worked for the county roads department forever, from the grit and grime of pothole detail to his current position as supervisor of all the crews, and he is the resident expert on land development.

The dinner table is a storm, flooding wine and snowdrifts of food. Ruby eats slowly to avoid any chance of a repeat of her performance art at the last meal. She chews chews chews each bite of lamb so tender that neither silverware nor teeth are necessary. And at some point during the meal, she realizes that she feels almost
good
. The grief of losing Lark is a tight twist of second skin, like the ripples and welts from a third-degree burn. She’ll walk around with those scars forever, but she
will
walk around.

Finally, dessert, a honey-soaked pastry stuffed with apricots and almond paste, is passed. Every culture, it seems, has its own burrito. After she has eaten enough to look like she has eaten enough, Ruby elbows Chaz.

“Sorry, Ma,” Chaz says. “We gotta go. I want to crash a pickup game at the park basketball court. Try to bond with the street thugs.”

“The dog, he’s still not eating,” Ruby adds. “I need to check…”

Before Ruby and Chaz reach his car, Celeste hurries through the gate. She thrusts a grocery bag full of leftovers into Ruby’s arms, smooshes the bag and Ruby in another embrace. “We’ll all keep lighting candles. You, Lark, your baby girl. The dog, too. You’re all going to be all right.”