Mothers and Other Liars (24 page)

A horn toots in the driveway. Ruby turns off the faucet, leaves the breakfast dishes to soak. The waffle iron sits open-jawed on the countertop, drips of crusty, brown batter and a blur of melted rainbow sprinkles on the sides.

“Come on,” Ruby calls. “Shoes. Backpack.”

She thought about taking Lark away, hiding out at the Ms’ cabin, but Lark needs a semblance of normalcy. She needs her first day back to class with her friends. When Ruby called the principal to warn her about the media, the principal was resolute; no reporter is going to get anywhere near this child on school property.

But Lark has a better chance of avoiding detection if Ruby stays far away.

When Ruby peeks through the paper covering the door panes, Margaret’s tinted-window SUV is pulled right up to the edge of the front porch, doors flung open wide to block the view from the street.

“I’ll be fine,” Lark says as Ruby hugs her. “Mama. Let go.”

Ruby forces her arms to separate from Lark’s back, like prying magnets apart, and opens the front door. As a screen, Molly stands on the porch with Margaret’s golf umbrella held out beside her like that dancing fool in
Singin’ in the Rain
. Lark gives Ruby a little-girl wave, dashes alongside the umbrella, and into the car.

As Lark’s head disappears behind the closing door, Ruby resists the urge to call out to her to come back. She isn’t going to cause Lark to miss school, even if it takes old-movie antics to get her there. But she doesn’t even try to quell the panic pounding in her throat as she watches her child disappear from her sight once again.

Lark kneels on the sofa, bends the blind slats to make a peephole. “They’re still there. Three of them.” She spins around, throws herself down onto the sofa. “This sucks.”

Ruby swipes her own forehead. They’ve never before needed a swamp cooler, but the room is stifling, stale without the cool air circulating through windows. She doesn’t even bother to caution Lark about her language. The press siege is wearing her down, too. The reporters are relentless. The phone is unplugged. And the answering machine. Anyone who needs to reach them will know what’s going on.

Clyde jumps up on the sofa, takes Lark’s place at the window, his chubby paws on the cushion top, nose under the blinds. “Get down.” Lark tugs his collar. “You don’t want to end up on national TV.” The dog flinches at Lark’s unusually harsh words. The way he puts his head on Lark’s knee is worthy of its own Oscar.

Little Miss Red Suit showed up at the salon yesterday after Ruby left. Margaret said she never imagined that ohm-chanting Zara knew so many four-letter words. Among other invectives, she told the reporter that if she wasn’t gone in five seconds, she would walk out with a curling iron up her cute little skirt. One of the other hairdressers recognized the reporter; she’s a talking head for a court cable station, all luridness, all the time. Red is her signature color, the magic carpet she hopes to ride to prime time.

Ruby offered to stay away so that the salon’s business wouldn’t be disrupted, but Margaret shrugged off the suggestion, told her the ladies love the intrigue. Then she posted a
REPORTERS WILL BE SHOT ON SIGHT
sign on the front door and let it be known that anyone, staff or clients, who talked with the press about Ruby and Lark would be included in the firing line, or at least shunned for life. The latter threat carries some real weight; Margaret still hasn’t forgiven a cousin who borrowed her car and racked up several hundred dollars in unpaid parking tickets twenty years ago.

And today the reporters are gathering outside their house. Just a small camp, not a full-fledged army. Not yet anyway. Now Ruby knows how Chaz’s fish felt. No, this is worse. Glug at least got fed. Ruby and Lark just get violated.

“How about a game before bed? Scrabble?”

Lark doesn’t answer, just recrosses her arms against her chest. Lark loves Scrabble; she routinely trounces Ruby. Lark can see words in the mess on a rack, while Ruby just sees mess. But not even the chance to skunk her mom tempts Lark today. “How ’bout just bed.”

Ruby follows Lark into her bedroom. “They’ll lose interest soon. Last time—”

Clyde startles Ruby out of her words as he scuttles past her, growls at the window. She rushes to his side. Maybe tomorrow she’ll nail plywood over this window, batten down the hatches to protect Lark from the media storm. But for tonight, she double-checks the latches, tugs at the shade to make sure it covers every speck of glass. That is when she sees the shadow.

Ruby runs out the front door, Clyde at her heels. She grabs the garden hose, turns the spigot on full blast, and aims the cold gushing water at the cameraman skulking along the side of the house. The man shrieks, curses, covers his lens with his jacket. And runs down the driveway with Clyde snarling at his heels. The crash of camera against asphalt, plastic and glass chattering, shattering, is gunshot-sharp against the evening quiet.

At Ruby’s whistle, Clyde comes bounding up the drive, his teeth a flash of grin in the dark. Ruby follows him in through the door, locks it behind her, pats the brown grocery sacks taped over the glass panes to make sure that they are secure. She storms to the phone, plugs it in, and calls Chaz’s ex-partner, Krueger.

He probably can feel the blaze of her words through the phone line. “Hold on,” he says. She hears him on his cell phone, calling in a favor from the police captain. “They’ll be right there,” he says to Ruby through the landline as he thanks his boss on the other phone. “And the cruisers will drive by all night.”

When Ruby walks back into Lark’s bedroom, Clyde stands guard in front of the bed, where Lark sits cross-legged, her face a mask of shock and indignity, her pj’s clenched to her chest. Ruby sits down beside her. “I think Clyde helped himself to a cameraman’s bum for a bedtime snack.”

“Good boy, Clyde.” Lark strokes the dog’s head, and he looks back at her with a mixture of complicity and adoration. “I wish you could eat them all.”

Ruby takes Lark’s pajamas from her, pulls the top over her daughter’s head. “All this make you want to go back to Texas?”

Lark leans her head against Ruby’s arm. “How ’bout maybe next never?”

How does a person explain the inexplicable to a nine-year-old? At first, Lark was so relieved to be home that she didn’t ask why or how. Ruby unplugged the television, didn’t bring newspapers into the house. But, of course, kids at school talk, and now the questions come. Lark is an old soul, in many ways wiser than Ruby. Yet this is a lot of albatross to hang around her skinny neck.

They sit on the rug of the living area, Ruby and Lark and Clyde. This carpet picnic is borne out of feeling vulnerable rather than adventuresome. Ruby hasn’t been to the salon in a week. The commotion became too much for everyone, that and the fact that Ruby’s belly gets in the way of her nail table.

Ruby has been pacing this cage of a house, feeling so much like a zoo attraction even with every pane of glass obstructed. When she and Lark moved into Mrs. Levy’s house, Ruby felt as if she was crawling into Nana’s big iron bed after a thunderstorm, but today she finds no comfort anywhere. Her ankles are swollen, her back aches, she’s just downright grumpy.

She tried woodworking, but she is too ungainly to be around sharp objects. Besides, Margaret heard from one of her clients that the people in the house behind Ruby’s have rented out a second-story window to paparazzi, and Ruby doesn’t want a shot of herself waddling to the shed at every cash register in America.

So here they are on an otherwise glorious fall Saturday, or glorious as far as Ruby can tell from quick peeks out the window, picnicking on the carpet instead of under a canopy of brilliant gold and orange leaves.

The baby kicks at the tender spot between her separated ribs. Over the past months, Ruby has been so caught up in an emotional whirlwind that she hasn’t paid nearly enough attention to this baby. In the torrent of the trial, the details of getting Lark back, the devastation of breaking up with Chaz, this burgeoning life has been anything but nurtured. Yet now, when Ruby most needs the detachment in order to do what she has to do, the baby’s presence, its sheer physicality, is consuming.

As Clyde shifts his sprawl across their legs, Lark giggles. She pokes at Ruby’s protruding belly button, visible through her shirt. Ruby takes her daughter’s hand, rests it on the steep side of the mound, where a ropy appendage writhes.

“Ooh,” Lark says. “Does that hurt?”

“Sometimes.” What Ruby doesn’t say is that the physical discomfort is nothing compared to where her mind keeps taking her. Her third-trimester nesting instinct has kicked in, and she can’t eat away the hours readying for the baby she won’t be bringing home.

And now Ruby needs to explain to Lark about the swap. She sets her tuna sandwich on the blue willow plate, tucks a wisp of hair behind her daughter’s perfect ear, and begins. If nothing else, she wants to make sure that Lark doesn’t think that she was rejected by the Tinsdales, that they preferred someone else’s infant over their own biological kid.

The trick is how to make Lark understand without her realizing that Ruby essentially made the same choice as the Tinsdales, swinging back to smack Ruby in the face.

“I get it, Mama.” Lark pats Ruby on the knee. “I think. They wanted me, but you wanted me more.”

Ruby starts to interject; she doesn’t want Lark to think this was some competition for her love. No child should have the burden of being anyone’s whole world. But before she can say anything, Lark continues.

“I didn’t know how to dotter around those people. I know how to dotter with you.”

Ruby puzzles over Lark’s words. Did the Tinsdales subject her to one of those overachiever-kid schedules, with no time for dawdling, meandering around?

“And you know how to mother me better than they do.”

Finally, it is Ruby who gets it; her sage child really does understand.
Daughter
, not
dotter
. Daughterhood creates as much of an action verb, as much of a sense of place in the world, as being a mother does.

Finally, the press siege has wound down. Ruby thinks of that Sinatra song about a fickle friend blowing in. Not that the media was ever her friend, but indeed it was fickle. After the reporters’ collective thick skull finally absorbed the fact that Ruby was never going to speak with them, the story petered out. There just wasn’t enough
there
there to feed the voracious appetite. Little Miss Red Suit did ride her crimson carpet to the big leagues, though; Zara saw her behind the desk on a network early-bird news program.

Lark sits on the kitchen counter, her feet in the sink. She trims the leggy ivy cuttings, nips some brown edges off the basil. Ruby looks at her supple form bent over her knees, imagines the day when she can even
see
her own knees again.

“You ready?” Ruby puts a hand on Lark’s back.

“I don’t want any of it.” Lark slides off the counter and onto the floor. “I don’t want to even touch that stuff.”

“That just means a bigger bonfire.”

They walk together out the screen door to the back porch, or rather Lark walks while Ruby lumbers. The boxes are lined up against the house, where Lark demanded the deliveryman carry them. She was adamant that they not enter her bedroom, her house. She said she would need to burn incense just to cleanse the porch. That comment prompted Ruby to respond that perhaps the two of them had spent too much time in Santa Fe amid the seekers and reincarnates and general crazies.

Ruby slices open the first box and lifts out frilly dress after frilly dress, piles them to one side. Then she hits the rock-star clothes—slinky fabrics, sequins, spangles, outfits that Ruby doesn’t think belong on any nine-year-old body. “Was Darla schizophrenic?”

“Skiza what?”

“Never mind. I just can’t imagine the same person buying these two extremes of clothes.”

Clyde noses open the screen door, pads over to Lark before her giggles subside. “Actually, Dingbat Darla bought the trendy stuff,” Lark says through a face full of fur. “And the creepy grandmother gave me the others.” She stands up. Clyde nuzzles her belly.

Ruby doesn’t scold Lark for her language. The counselor whom John recommended told Ruby that this is a way for Lark to work through her anger.

“Can I go now?” Lark’s voice is colored with desperation. “Please, can you just do this?”

“Pick out two outfits, one from each pile. We’ll burn those and give away the rest to children who need them.”

Lark points to the most hideous of each, avoids touching any of them. “Now?”

“Now.” Ruby rubs the spot between her breasts, trying to soothe the heartburn that is her companion these days. “But don’t—”

“I know. Don’t talk to anyone. Blow my whistle and run if I see any cameras.”

Although Ruby hasn’t spotted a reporter in several days, she’s still skittish. She can’t keep Lark cooped up forever, though. She watches her daughter and Clyde bound down the driveway. They look more like puppies on the loose than a nine-year-old girl and an at least five-year-old mutt. When the last shimmer of head bobs out of sight, she turns back to her task.

The bonfire was Lark’s idea. Each September, Santa Feans gather in Old Fort Marcy Park and set fire to a three-story marionette. They burn Zozobra in effigy for all of the bad things that have happened in the past year, throwing scraps of paper that list what they each want to put behind them. The festival started out as an ancient new year’s ritual—the Aztec calendar, like the Jewish calendar, starts each year in September—but has morphed through the years into an excuse for teenage gangs to rampage. The gang kids Chaz used to try to help.

With Zozobra just around the corner, Lark decided they should have their own ritual burning, of everything that even touched anything in Texas. Ruby sets aside the two outfits Lark chose and sorts the rest into garbage bags that she will deliver to local charities.

The scrapbook and CD that Molly sent to Lark are wrapped in a flowery sweater at the top of the second box. Ruby will store them for later; Lark may want them when her emotions are less raw. The rest of that box contains hair bows and headbands in various colors, prissy nightgowns—Lark must have hated sleeping in those leg-constricting things—and sexy-girl pan ties that Ruby would be embarrassed to wear.

Finally, when she reaches the bottom of the third and final box of more and more clothes, she finds what she is looking for. There, nestled all together in a corner, lies the photo of Ruby and Lark, the note she slipped into Lark’s duffel bag. And the giraffe.

Ruby lifts them out reverently. She smiles at the photograph, vows to take Lark up to the top of the Chamisa Trail before the fall colors fade, even if she needs to be hoisted by a crane to get there. The letter has been folded and refolded so many times that it feels like tissue paper. Ruby opens it carefully, lays it across the patch of lap that the baby has not overtaken, which most people call “knee.” The ink is smeared, words here and there obliterated, others barely legible. Ruby didn’t want to read it anyway; she doesn’t want to be reminded of what she wrote.

Lark, alone in a room in the huge state of Texas, crying over this note.
Ruby tears up herself as that picture forms behind her eyes. She refolds it carefully, sets it with the clothes to be burned. This will be her own offering to Zozobra, to satiate the beast of bad days.

She picks up the giraffe. Just touching it brings a flood of memories. Those first weeks with Lark, Ruby was terrified she would break the baby, harm her somehow. Yet she also remembers feeling, right from the beginning, that they were supposed to be together, that Lark was a sudden gift of fate.

She lifts the giraffe to her face, rubs it against the tip of her nose like baby Lark did while sucking her thumb. Ruby closes her eyes, inhales deeply through her nose. And she could swear that it is there, a tiny trace, the merest hint even, of talcum powder, of formula, of Larkness.