Mothers and Other Liars (17 page)

John grabs Ruby’s hand. She can feel the whole courtroom take a collective breath.

“Not guilty.”

Unlike the TV shows, the court does not erupt after these words. The Tinsdales don’t scream out or keen. And Ruby doesn’t faint in relief. There is only a swell of whispers behind her.

“On the charge under the United States Code…of transporting a minor across state lines, we find the defendant…not guilty.” John squeezes Ruby’s hand, like a Montero amen.

The forewoman clears her throat before continuing. “On the charge under the United States Code…for possession of false identification documentation, we find the defendant…guilty.”

Ruby wipes away a splatter of tears from the tabletop as the bailiff returns the paper to the judge. She drops to her chair, too numb to know whether she is crying from relief at the big not guilty or fear about the conviction for using the fake birth certificate, which still could result in jail time, especially in this post-9/11 world.

The judge sets the paper down in front of him, then dismisses the jury. The main door starts swishing and swooshing again as the reporters dash to meet deadlines. The judge turns to the clerk sitting at a desk to the side of the dais, says something or other about scheduling, jots down a few words on his note pad. He looks again at Ruby, but at the rise of belly above the table rather than at her eyes. “Mr. Noble, I will expect a presentencing report within two weeks. Now, is there anything else to come before this court today, Counselors?”

Noble stands, puts on his earnest face. “Your Honor, at this time we would move to revoke the defendant’s bail—”

The judge interrupts, clearly irritated. “Surely you are trying to add levity to these proceedings, Mr. Noble. This defendant came forward voluntarily, accepted service voluntarily, waived extradition, appeared here today. Surely you are not going to attempt to convince me that she’s a flight risk?”

“She’s been convicted of a felony, Your Honor. It is incumbent upon this court to revoke bail.”

The judge clears his throat. “Now, Mr. Noble, I’m quite sure that you did not mean to tell this court what it must do. Rather you meant to suggest a course of action.”

“Yes, yes. With apologies to the court, Your Honor.” Noble’s head dips for a moment, like a parishioner bowing to a cross, then pops back up. “But the issue remains—”

“I understand your issue, Mr. Noble.” The judge turns to Ruby. “Miss Leander, did you surrender your passport at the extradition hearing in Santa Fe?”

Amazingly, Ruby’s legs allow her to stand again. “I don’t have a passport, sir.”

The judge chuckles. “And you don’t intend to procure one illegally now, do you?”

“No, Your Honor.”

“Well, there you have it. Motion denied.” He leans back in his chair, folds his arms. “Now I’m going to ask both Miss Leander and the Tinsdales to go home and love their children.” He picks up the wooden gavel, oak Ruby thinks, and raps it once on the benchtop. “This court is adjourned.”

“All rise,” the bailiff intones, and the judge leaves through the door behind the dais to the accompaniment of shuffling feet and rustling papers. The remainder of the journalists scurry out the main door.

Ruby stays seated, looks at John. He smiles, clasps his hands in front of him. “We can still appeal the birth certificate charge, argue that the five-year statute of limitations has run on your one use and that you are no longer in possession of it.”

She still is too dazed to know how to respond, what to think.

“This was the best we could have hoped for,” John says, “under the circumstances.”

“Under the circus-stances,” as Lark once said the word. Ruby pictures herself under a giant tent, striped black and white like an old-timey prisoner’s uniform, and the heavy canvas of circumstances held up by her own tired arms.

When Ruby steps out onto her back porch, all she sees is flowers. Pink and red and yellow rose petals strewn along the floor, bundles in full bloom tied to the posts.

Chaz stands beside her, a sheepish grin creasing his face.

“How?” Ruby asks.

Chaz shrugs. “I called some elves.”

Ruby crumples into a chair, eases her feet out of Antoinette’s mangling pumps. She watches Clyde, whom the Ms must have brought back when they did their elf magic, run laps around the yard, snuffling nose pointed up in the air. The sky is a community-theater backdrop, a swag of dark burlap punched with strings and strings of Christmas lights.

“You okay?” Chaz asks.

“I don’t know.” She breathes in the pure air, relieved to have access to oxygen in a gaseous form as opposed to the soggy Jell-O that Texans are expected to inhale, more relieved to be here, home. She doesn’t think she has ever felt this tired, every bone begging her to crawl into bed, despite the fact that she was asleep before the plane took off from Dallas, then slept again through the drive from Albuquerque.

Ruby rests her leaden head against the back of the chair, draws in an eight-count breath.
Be still and know that I am God
. She expels the air in steady four counts, pulls her rib cage against her lungs.
Be still and know. That I am God.
This was her grandmother’s breath prayer, which usually presented itself when Ruby had pushed her too far. Ruby hasn’t thought about it in years, but now here it is, a bit of Nana come to tuck a heavy quilt of comfort under her chin.

She is still counting breaths when Chaz pushes his chair back, drops to his knees in front of her. He clasps her hands in his, rests them on her belly. “I know I can sometimes be an ass,” he says. “But what ever happens, I’m here.”

He reaches into his jacket pocket, pulls out a small square box, places it in on her belly. The black box cartwheels, seemingly in slow motion, down to her thigh, bounces, swan dives to the porch floor. Chaz grabs the box, puts it in her hand, folds her fingers around it. “No matter what. I want us to be a family. You. Me. This baby.”

Ruby is too stunned for words.
Now
he proposes?

Chaz rises on his knees, draws one leg up in an old-movie proposal stance. He pulls Ruby’s hand onto his bended knee, squeezes her fingers around the box. “I love you, Ruby Leander. Would you honor me, will you marry me? Please?” His eyes glisten mercury-bright in the dark.

Ruby lifts her free hand, touches his cheek, feels the hard lump, like a pistachio, that remains from his tussle with the angry gangbanger. This moment, this whole day, nothing feels real except the breath in her lungs, and the voice in her head. “I love you,” she says. “I love your whole stubborn, sometimes sanctimonious, sometimes ass-acting self.”

Chaz’s eyes bore into hers. “But?”

“Before I can answer…” Ruby adds her free hand to the knot of fingers and box on her lap.

“No, you don’t have to convert to Catholic.” Chaz slips one of his hands from the pile, stacks it on top of Ruby’s. The proverbial upper hand.

“There’s something…”

“Anything,” he says.

“This is big. Huge.”

Chaz shakes his head. “Anything.”

Ruby remembers reading something, an old philosopher guy who said that in every person’s life there are one, maybe two, moments that define who she is. She imagines those moments as river channels, forging the course of a person’s life, like water carving through a wall of rock. Her one moment, she always figured, was finding Lark. Now, she is about to jump into the raging waters of her second. She swallows, squares her shoulders, and tells Chaz her plan.

Chaz’s body is as rigid as the post beside him. Ruby sets the ring box on the table next to her chair, stands, sits again.

“They don’t want Lark,” she says. “They want the baby they lost. I…we…can give them that.”

Chaz sits on the porch floor, stares off into the silhouette of hills. She waits for the words to find their way to his mouth. “You can’t just…
swap
…children.”

Ruby slips in beside him. Her legs hang off the edge of the porch. She knows that the gentle slope of the yard is there, just beyond her toes, but in the inky dark of this night, once again she has the sensation that she is at the edge of the world. Yet this time, for the first time, she feels like she has the ability to step back from the precipice. This time she has a plan.

“I can give them back what I took from them. And bring Lark home.”

Chaz’s eyes flash with intensity. “Could you really, though? Give away your own baby?”

“I don’t know how I’ll do it.” She loves this daughter inside her. She will always love this child, will miss her every second, with the per sis-tent yet phantom pain of an amputated limb. There is more room in a broken heart after all. But the baby won’t miss Ruby, won’t miss someone she never knew. “I just know I have to do it.”

“This is more crazy talk.” He drapes an arm across her shoulders. “You’re exhausted—”

“No. I mean, yes, I’m exhausted. But I know what I’m saying.”

Chaz rises, retrieves the ring box, presses it into her hand again. “Get some rest. You’ll see things differently in the morning.”

“I won’t.” Ruby speaks to the ring box, as Chaz leaves her on the porch.

Her plan sounded so logical, reasonable—and right—when she laid it out for him. But now, alone with this blooming life inside her…
Could she do it, could she really give away her child?
Her rationalization that she doesn’t know this baby seems anything but rational when Ruby counts the ways she does know her already, how she gets restless when Ruby eats garlic, how she prefers that Ruby sleep on her left side, how Ruby’s grandfather’s show tunes soothe her hiccups.

Then Ruby remembers reading in
People
magazine about those switched-at-birth kids in Florida, how both families were shattered when the kids were returned to their biological parents. Didn’t one of those girls end up dead?

The arguments are still spinning in her head, the ring box still in her hand, when Clyde darts around the house toward the driveway.
Crap,
Ruby thinks. John thought the media would leave her alone for now, until sentencing.

A moment later, Chaz climbs the porch steps, Clyde at his heels. “This. This is our
child
.
My
child.”

“A child you weren’t even sure you wanted,” she says softly.

“A child we didn’t
plan
for, a surprise. I never said…” His face is tight, skin stretched across his cheekbones. The pistachio pops out against the sharp bone like Ruby’s belly against her hips.

Ruby stands, moves closer to him. “You thought about it. We both did.”

Chaz steps back against a post as if she struck him. “For a moment, maybe. But I never would have…I’m
Catholic
. And now, seeing you, seeing her. She is my
child
.”

“A child who would never know the difference, who wouldn’t be scarred for life. A child who would be loved. Just by someone else.”

Ruby and the baby inside her share DNA, but a person is so much more than mere genes. She thinks about gazing at Lark and seeing every Lark she has ever been, every moment, every experience there in her face, experiences Lark shared with Ruby. This child will grow up to be the sum total of her own experiences, shared with someone else. “We can have another baby.”

“I want to have more. I want a whole basketball team.” Chaz’s focus shifts somewhere to the future before coming back to Ruby. “But this one—she’s ours, too.”

Lark’s “Do something” beats in Ruby’s marrow like a mantra. “I have to do this.”

“It’s crazy.” Chaz shakes his head. “And what makes you think those people in Texas would even agree?”

Ruby pictures Darla Tinsdale staring wistfully at Ruby’s belly. “It’s the only way I can make things right for them.”

Chaz places his hands on her shoulders, squeezes. “I love you. I want to marry you.” His words slide across his tongue as if it were saturated with tequila. “But I will never,
never
agree to this.” He walks down the steps to the driveway, turns back to her. “Call me. When you come to your senses.”

Sawdust dances in the workshop light. With safety glasses on, Ruby shoves a plank of wood into the saw’s gap-toothed mouth, slicing the board in half with a satisfying screech of metal against tree. The saw snarfs board after board, pried off an old oak armoire, and regurgitates two-by-two slats into a gangly pile. Then Ruby sands and sands and sands, until each piece is satiny soft, its grain breathing healthfully once again.

When the armoire is all chewed up, she turns to a stack of unfinished deck chairs. She screws legs on to seats, her emotions threaded as tightly as the metal studs. Chaz basically handed her an ultimatum: Lark or him. She wouldn’t just be giving up her baby, she’d be giving up the man she loves as well. Shouldn’t a mother, though, be willing to sacrifice
anything
for her child?

Ruby thinks about what her grandmother did for her, the sacrifice to shield Ruby from just one moment of horror. “Do something,” Lark implored. How can Ruby
not
do this? That is, if she can figure out how to get it done.

Sometime after midnight, she pulls her grandfather’s other bible, his woodworking book, from its place on the shelf above the workbench, next to the bits-and-pieces case he crafted, using old wooden Velveeta boxes for drawers.

The time-stained pages of the book, a school textbook really, cover every aspect of basic woodworking—from selecting wood to fancy finishes to repairs—in dry, unemotional sentences. Grooved joints, dowel joints, dovetail, mortise-and-tenon, so many ways to bind pieces of wood.

Ruby runs her hand down the flyleaf, where as a child, she wrote his name.
This book belongs to Henry Leander.
And now to Ruby Leander. If only there were an instruction manual for putting a family together, making it adhere.