Mothers and Other Liars (27 page)

Clyde’s head bobs up and down, and a silly grin erupts on his face in between barks. Ruby would like to think that he’s keeping time to the music, but she knows he is just trying to shake off the party hat strapped to his head. For Lark’s last birthday, she wanted a bowling party. For her sixth, they threw a grown-up beauty party at the salon, complete with hairdos, makeup, and, of course, manicures. This birthday, though, called for nothing but silliness.

Lark, Numi, Olivia, and a handful of other kids dance around Jay’s friend Brigham as if he were a Maypole. They shake tambourines and maracas and castanets, all with ribbons flailing, while Brigham does his one-man-band thing in the center of the circle. Antoinette, the Ms, and Jay contribute clapping and laughter and mostly out-of-tune singing from the sidelines.

Ruby leans against the kitchen island, shoves a streamer out of the way. She didn’t dare risk balloons after her meltdown behind that gallery, but the banners and confetti are festive enough. She refills her glass of champagne; the chains of bubbles race one another, burst at the surface, like upside-down fireworks. She takes in the scene, absorbs it through every pore in her skin, and her heart hums. What a marvel that this much silliness, this much joy, can exist in a room, in a world, that was shrouded in so many different shades of darkness, such a short time ago.

Lark’s old inquisitive, imaginative self is back, but tinged with a sad worldliness, like a shadow of a stain on cloth. Although they now know her actual birth date—Ruby was off by sixteen days—Lark was insistent that they continue to celebrate on December 6. Ten years old; Ruby’s baby bird isn’t a baby anymore.

As for Ruby, her postnatal hormones finally have leveled out. Her pain for her son is a jagged hole ripped in the crazy quilt that she pictures as the stitching together of her lives. Yet she is learning that she can let happiness share the space, live this fourth life, without feeling as if she is betraying her love for him. This is her new-normal.

Brigham finishes a song with a toot toot toot of his air horn. Ruby grips a glass drawer knob on the gloriously barn-red pie safe. The drawer slides open smoothly on its new wooden bottom. Behind the screen doors, blue willow plates stand out against the whitewashed back panel. Ruby takes out a book of matches and calls for everyone to gather around the table for cake.

Ruby is a decent cook, but she has never been a particularly adept baker, which makes the result of this particular effort fit perfectly with the party’s theme. The three lopsided layers of gloppy chocolate icing and confetti candies look like a mud sculpture gone awry. The icing is extra thick in the spot where the top layer caved in, and toothpicks hold a broken chunk of the second layer in place. This is truly a cake of love and joy and silliness, and thankfully the burning candles, ten plus one to grow on, distract from the chaos below.

After a raucous round of “Happy Birthday,” complete with “cha-cha-chas,” Lark blows out the candles with a single billowy breath and just a little spit. Ruby doesn’t know what Lark wishes for, her nose scrunched up to her squeezed-tight eyes, but Ruby makes her own wish on those candles, for many normal, quiet, even boring, days in the year to come.

Margaret carves the cake like she is parting hair to apply highlights. Molly scoops ice cream, and Antoinette distributes the garish paper plates to eager hands. Brigham declines dessert. “This place needs more ambience,” he jokes as he picks up his harmonica.

Once again, Ruby steps back toward the living room and just enjoys the scene. A now-hatless Clyde steals a plate off the corner of the table, scoots it across the kitchen floor as he licks it clean of ice cream. Margaret and Molly lean into each other, exchange a look of sheer comfort that reminds Ruby of her grandparents. The kids snicker and point at each other with purple plastic forks flecked with frosting and drippy with melted ice cream. They chatter in grade-school shorthand, telling tales on each other over the honks and rattles of Brigham’s rendition of “Hey Jude.” Ruby can’t imagine that any place on earth is better than this home at this moment.

The sudden silence breaks her reverie first. Then she sees Lark’s bleach-white face.
The Heimlich
, Ruby thinks; Lark must be choking on the chalky cake.

“I’m not going back.” Lark’s voice sounds tiny, scared. “I won’t. I’ll take Clyde and run away.” The next few seconds pass in clicks of slow motion: Molly flashing to Lark’s side, wrapping a protective arm around her; Clyde whimpering, whining; Ruby following Lark’s stricken eyes to the glass-paned front door.

Ruby’s first reaction is confusion, seeing someone out of context, out of place. Then the primal instinct to protect Lark from an intruder pulses in her veins. What follows is a worse thought, that something awful has happened to her other child. Finally she commands her body to move to the door.

“I forgot why I was driving around that night in the first place.” Darla’s face is streaked with tears. “In all the commotion after, I forgot.” Her tongue stumbles over too many words gushing from her mouth all at once. She is sorry; she tried to call from Albuquerque, but no one answered. She is sorry; she forgot what it was like, what Philip was like, with a fussy baby. She looks down at her feet.

Ruby’s head follows Darla’s, and there he is. Ruby’s whole body tingles with the disorienting sense of déjà vu. A carrier. A baby, in footed onesie pajamas—blue this time.

Then Ruby bends down, picks up her other child, carrier and all, and brings him inside.

Everything seems to happen in an instant. Parents arrive to collect children—thankfully, the cake was the finale of the party. Molly takes a quaking Lark to the safety of the Ms’ home. Brigham and Jay pack up the percussion instruments into a big wicker basket, haul it away. Margaret and Antoinette make quick work of kitchen cleanup and disappear.

Ruby holds herself ramrod stiff in a chair beside the sofa, where Darla sits like a two-year-old in time-out, the baby sleeping in the carrier on the floor below her.

“It’s just so hard.” Darla’s words come in awkward, embarrassed bursts. Philip is uneasy around babies, children at all really. He worked his way through his first marriage, long hours at the office, business trips, late-night meetings. The frailest of threads link him to his adult children. When he married Darla, and Tyler came along, he said he wanted to be a real parent with his second family.

Darla’s words are almost drowned out by the questions pounding in Ruby’s head. She stares across the room, keeps her eyes away from the baby—her baby—sleeping at Darla’s feet.

“Philip
wanted
to be a father. But his work was so demanding. He needed his rest.” The night of the carjacking, Darla had been driving around and around, not as much to lull a teething baby to sleep as to keep the shrieks away from Philip, to keep the peace. She drove around until her gas tank hit empty, then she stopped to fill it up. “He blamed me. But looking back, I think he was relieved at the same time.”

Darla doesn’t say it, but the rest of the sentence hangs in the air between them:
And Darla was relieved, too.
Ruby can picture her, the beleaguered wife trying to keep her fussy baby from flaring her husband’s temper. Then, overnight, she turns into a poster child for mothers of lost children. Not that anyone sane would ever choose the role, but a power, prestige even, exists in victimhood, the identity that Darla has owned for more than nine years.

Ruby squeezes shut her eyes, opens them. She forces her ears to suck in the woman’s words, an attempt to crowd out the hope prickling at the edge of her brain.

“The truth is…Philip is miserable around babies, the mess, the noise, the disruptions to his routine.” Darla’s face reddens, with chagrin at confessing her perfect husband’s imperfections, or at the fact that she is talking about her own inadequacies, resentments, as much as his. “It’s awkward, him suddenly having an infant when all his golf buddies have empty nests.”

Why did he even take Lark back in the first place, or go along with the plan to adopt the baby?
Ruby wonders. She wants to believe he acted out of love for his wife, knowing how badly Darla wanted a child, but more likely his motivation was about vengeance, to punish Ruby for taking what was his. When Darla pauses, clenching and unclenching her hands, Ruby decides that she must voice one of those pulsing thoughts, get it out of her head before her skull explodes.

“I’m so sorry that you are having such a hard time, but, well, we’re not trading back.”

From the doorway to the hall, where he guards Lark’s turf from this intruder, Clyde lifts his head, growls softly, more from his tail than throat, a mild warning that he, too, won’t let Darla take away Lark again.

“No, no,” Darla sputters. “I wouldn’t dream…is that why Lark ran? You thought…no, no, I don’t want her back.”

Ruby bristles at Darla’s words, not “I didn’t come to take her away,” but “I don’t want her.” Thankfully, Lark is not in earshot.

“Then what
do
you want?” There. Ruby breathes easier after she lets the question barge into the room.

“I…” Darla slouches down farther; the deep cushion envelops her in a down-feather embrace. She sobs like, well, a baby. A baby who makes rather unfortunate belches when she cries. The noise wakes the real infant in the room, who joins Darla’s chorus.

Ruby averts her eyes from the carrier. She doesn’t want to see recrimination, or Chaz, staring back at her. She waits. Darla does nothing. Finally, Ruby rummages through the diaper bag beside Darla, finds a bottle filled with water, a spice jar with a dollop of powdered formula. She dumps the formula into the bottle, shakes. Scoops up the baby and plugs the bottle into his pursing mouth.

The baby settles down immediately in the crook of Ruby’s arm. She repeats her whispered “There, there,” like a mantra. She can’t bear to call this child by the name the Tinsdales gave him, the name Ruby put on his birth certificate as they instructed. Thinking of Lark as Tyler was impossible enough, but naming this second child after the daughter they lost that night at the gas station seems to burden his tiny shoulders with huge expectations before he can even stand.

Ruby coos, and the baby squirms his way closer to Ruby, as if he remembers her voice and wants to crawl back into the womb. That other thought shrieks for attention inside Ruby’s head as she watches him suck down the bottle, sigh, and go limp with sleep. She sets the bottle aside, lifts the baby to her shoulder, burps him, brings him back down to her lap without him stirring a bit.

“I…” Darla clears her throat of clogging tears. “I want you to take him.”

Ruby leans back in her chair, too stunned to speak. The thought that she didn’t even dare to think solidifies from a vapor of hope to real possibility.

“I want you to have him.” Darla bounces herself out of her sinkhole, balances on the edge of the sofa, wraps her arms around her chest. Philip wants to travel, she says. He wants to be a doting grandfather, not a parent. “And I want Philip.”

The fireflies shooting around Ruby’s head amazingly don’t disturb the slumbering infant in her arms. She walks with the baby to the kitchen phone, calls John. She catches him at his office as he is walking out the door after Saturday preparation for a Monday trial.

John is at her door in minutes, a thick file in hand. He looks back and forth between Ruby and Darla, shakes his head. He sits in the chair opposite Ruby, sets the file on the old cedar chest that serves as a coffee table. “Does your husband know you are here?”

Darla nods with vigor. She is older than Ruby, yet she seems like such a child. “You can call him.” She pulls a cell phone out of her pocket, holds it out to John. Ruby isn’t sure what kind of Darla-child she is, a smarty-pants daring him to make the call or a suck-up trying to be helpful.

“I’m going to do that.” John turns to Ruby, tells her he doesn’t want to waste anyone’s time or create false expectations if this is not on the level. Ruby winces at his lawyerly words. He’s trying to protect her, she knows, but she wants to scream out,
Don’t make her mad. Don’t make her change her mind.

The conversation is short, just a few uh-huhs and I see’s on this end. John snaps the phone shut, hands it back to Darla. “Well, then.” He explains that the waiting period is still running, that the Tinsdales can withdraw their petition for adoption at any time. “But you need your own lawyer to draw up the papers. I want this so aboveboard that it knocks on the floor of heaven.”

Heaven,
Ruby thinks.
Can this really be happening?

Darla goes outside to her car, steps back inside the doorway with two Neiman Marcus bags stuffed with stuff. “Is that hers?” She sets the bags down and points to the artwork on the wall beside her. “Is that Lark’s?”

“Yes.” Ruby puts the baby in his carrier and walks over to the painting, a bright red O’Keeffe-sque poppy, stands protectively beside it. “She gave it to me for Christmas last year.”

“I had one framed,” Darla says. “One of the canvases she left behind.”

Ruby won’t tell Lark about that, not yet anyway. Lark still would dig a Grand Canyon between her and Texas if she could. But she won’t tell Darla about Lark’s attitude, either.

The two women walk outside and hug awkwardly at the door of the rented SUV; one zigs while the other zags.

“Tell Lark, if she has any questions, wants to know anything…she can call.” Darla fumbles with her purse as she speaks, its contents spew to the ground. Her forehead almost collides with Ruby’s as they both squat, gather up pens and credit card receipts, a couple of pill bottles, sunglasses.

“Tell her…tell her I’m sorry.”