Mourning Ruby (11 page)

‘Give her to me a minute,’ I said. I held the box and I could feel Ruby. She was heavy and I had to brace myself to take her weight.

You’re getting a big girl now, Rubes. You get down now. I can’t carry you any more
.

14

We Are As We Are

After great pain, a formal feeling comes.

The nerves sit ceremonious, like tombs –

One evening that November Adam was reading a research paper. The room was quiet. I’d lit a candle, which I did every night now, because candles give life to a room. Each night there was a different candle. Sometimes they were fat and stubby, sometimes they were tall and soaring like church candles. The tall ones wound their way down swiftly. I bought scented candles and decorated candles. There was a shop I used to go to in those months, kept by a young woman who had begun her business by making all the candles herself, in her bathroom. She liked to talk about the atmosphere which a particular candle would bring to a room.

Tonight’s candle was the blue of polar ice. It burned steadily, without a flicker, and was scentless. I watched a gob of wax make its way down the candle stem.

Adam let his papers fall to the floor. They slithered down off his knee and the movement of the paper disturbed the candle so that its flame fluttered, then stood upright again.

‘I can’t make sense of this,’ said Adam. His eyes were
wide open, blank. ‘I read it and as soon as I read it I lose it. My memory’s fucked.’

‘Can’t you leave it?’

‘I could let it go. It’s only one paper. But –’

‘But you remember when you’re at work? You remember things at work?’

Adam’s fists were clenched. He bumped them on the table, very, very gently, very restrained. ‘It’s different at work,’ he said.

‘That’s good,’ I said.

He had split his life in two. In the compartment of work, the lights were still on. It was warm and there were voices and footsteps, comings and goings, even little family jokes of the kind people have when they work together night and day. Minute by minute Adam was there, concentrating, frowning, smiling, changing with every change in the babies, noting every detail of a drug protocol. He didn’t let go. He wouldn’t let go. More and more, work was drawing him in. He was becoming involved in an international project on HIV and prematurity. There was going to be a lot of travel. There’d be overseas conferences and I could come with him.

Adam had to stay later and later at the hospital, because he couldn’t work at home. He couldn’t concentrate. Our house was full of grief, packed solid with this thing that kept changing shape and seizing us in new ways. It had moved in like a crowd of strangers: animal, vegetable, mineral. At one moment it was a picture book, the next it became a scuffed place under the swing. It sat at Adam’s desk, it would not let us sit at the kitchen table, it pounced as next-door’s cat squirmed in the
autumn sun. It trod everywhere. In the shower water hit me like rods of iron and I gasped at its weight. It filled the garden and shrivelled the nerine lilies and bronze chrysanthemums. It got into birdsong and the sound of sirens. It lay between us in bed like a sword.

There was no room for anything else. Adam couldn’t use the computer. He could barely use the phone. People would call us at home and say, ‘Adam, are you all right? You sound different.’

We learned that it only took two or three months after Ruby’s death for people to begin asking us if we were all right.

I gave up the bar. I tried to go once, but when I saw my short black dress hanging in the wardrobe, my head began to drum.

If Anna’s babysitter hadn’t let her down. If I had told Adam it was too late for Ruby to go to the park. She gets silly when she’s tired. When they’re tired or when they’re hungry, that’s when accidents happen.

You might leave the front door open while you fetch the shopping in. Suddenly she’s out of the house. You run down the steps and catch her as she races into the road. You grab her, shake her. She starts to cry and you yell,
Don’t you ever, ever, ever do that again
. You both go back in the house and shut the door and your heart’s still pumping while she bawls and howls and clings to your waist scrubbing her tears and snot into your jeans. And you sit down together on the hall floor and she burrows into you, and you comfort each other.

If I had gone straight to the park in my work clothes instead of going home to change. If I’d left my hair as it
was. That minute I’d spent shaking out my hair and combing it with my fingers. The minute ticked through my head again. I’d been looking at myself in the mirror.

I turned away from the mirror. I opened the front door, found the keys in the side-pocket of my bag. I locked the door, came down the steps. I felt the August heat on my arms.

Better put her pink jeans in the wash tonight, she wants to wear them all the time.

Another November evening. Adam was back so late these days that I knew I had plenty of time. I would light my candle, and read Joe’s letter again. It was an email, but I’d printed it out and put it in an envelope to keep.

He didn’t write about our feelings, or about his own. He wrote about Ruby. He wrote about her yellow cardigan, and the day she was born, and the visits we’d made to Moscow, and how when Ruby was four Olya had taught her how to say ‘Do you want to be my friend?’ in Russian because this was what Ruby said to everyone she met. And then Olya had invited her niece to play with Ruby. They’d played together, not seeming to notice that they weren’t speaking the same language. Ruby and Sveta both fell over in the park and both wanted Disney plasters on their almost invisible grazes when they came back to the apartment. And Sveta liked the plasters so much that Ruby secretly put a handful of them in her jacket pocket so Sveta would find them when she got home. Joe remembered everything, in a way I thought no one else would remember.

I think of you both constantly
, he wrote at the end of the letter. I believed him. Joe was constant. It seemed to
me when I held the letter that his thoughts flowed towards me, strong and sure, over thousands of miles. It was true even though he had never touched the paper, because I had printed out his email. It bore no marks of his sweat, and there was no envelope which might have his saliva on the seal.

I think of you both constantly
. He was thinking of Ruby like that, remembering the Disney plasters and the yellow cardigan. He remembered the way Ruby would balance in his arms, lightly, with a straight back and frowning slightly at first. And then breaking into a smile, petal after petal of it, her eyelids, her cheeks, her lips –

Joe didn’t tell me to turn my mind away, to forget, to make things bearable, to heal myself. He did not write about the stages of grief.

Winter was coming. The trees and bushes were losing their leaves. Soon they’d be dry and brown, stiff and scratchy, and to all outward appearances dead. But inside, if the frost didn’t burn it away entirely, there was the quick of the plant. It was barely green but if you put your lips to it you could feel that it was moist. How I dreaded the thought that inside my shrivelled self there was something that wanted to come back to life.

I folded Joe’s letter, and put it away. I blew out the candle, and turned off the lights. The house was so familiar that I could find my way around in the dark. I put on my nightdress and my dressing gown. I walked around the rooms, checking that the lights were off in all of them, the TV unplugged, and everything safe.

I came to Ruby’s room in the dark. I hadn’t changed her sheets, or washed her pyjamas. The smell of Ruby clung to them.

I always promised her I would come in and kiss her goodnight after I came back from work. Even if I’m asleep? Ruby asked. Even if you’re asleep, I repeated. I like the smell when you come back from work, she said. Sometimes I forgot, but the next morning I always told her I’d done it. I told her about how she was all curled up and I tucked the duvet round her, and you know what, Ruby, you were snoring. Like this. That made her laugh.

The thing was to stay in her room. The dark and the Ruby smell melted into me and I hung in time. There were no minutes any more. I didn’t have to hold on.

‘I’m here, Ruby,’ I said. ‘Go back to sleep. You had a bad dream.’

I thought that Adam had come home too, and slipped into the house without telling me. He was waiting in bed, feeling the empty space where I belonged. He knew that I’d come soon, when I’d settled Ruby down.

I didn’t try to touch Ruby, not even to stroke her cheek. She knew I was there.

‘Go to sleep, Rubes,’ I said.

The days were nothing any more. I had to get through them and I understood why Ruby wasn’t there in them. I would look at my watch as the day drew on and know it was only a few hours now, and then I would be with her again.

One night the phone kept ringing. It rang for twenty rings and then it stopped, but after a brief pause it began to ring again. I couldn’t answer it. When you’re settling a child down you can’t always get to the phone in time. People understand that.

Ruby’s bedroom was dark and warm. Water sucked and gurgled in her radiator. I must find the key and bleed it, I thought. The noise was loud enough to keep Ruby awake.

‘It’s only your radiator, Rubes,’ I said, in case she thought it was something bad. I moved my chair closer to her bed. I didn’t need to touch her. She could always tell when I was there. She felt my presence just as I felt hers.

‘I’m here. Go back to sleep,’ I said. ‘You don’t want to be tired and grumpy in the morning.’

Ruby was restless. I knew she wanted me to sing to her.

How many miles to Babylon?

Four score miles and ten.

Will we get there by candlelight?

Yes, and back again.

If your heels are nimble and light

We may get there by candlelight.

‘My heels are nimble and light,’ said Ruby.

‘I know they are.’

‘Are yours?’

‘Not as light as yours. But we’ll get there, Rubes.’

The light crashed on. It was Adam standing there in his coat. He came across to me and the cold air of outside touched me.

‘I heard you talking,’ he said. ‘Rebecca, you’ve got to stop this.’

Everything shrivelled and went. In front of me there was a flat bed, a lamp, and a toy reindeer. On my lap there was a limp pair of pyjamas.

‘She’s gone,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Adam.

‘She’s –’

‘Yes.’

‘Why didn’t you let me keep her?’

‘For Christ’s sake, Rebecca. For Christ’s Christ’s sake.’

‘I’m sorry, Adam,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, Ruby, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry –’

It was the heart of the night. Our best time, the time we always returned to ourselves. We could dissolve the day’s quarrels in a moment. I checked the illuminated face of the alarm clock. Twenty past one. Adam had fallen asleep. He was breathing shallowly, fighting the current of sleep as it tried to carry him into deeper waters. I wondered who was in his dream.

He must sleep. He must recover himself. He needed eight hours’ sleep, or he wouldn’t be able to work.

He had to work. When I’d first met him and loved him I’d loved his work too without knowing it, because it was in every part of him, twisted into his fibres. His sureness, his attentiveness, his boldness. His lack of fear when he touched a baby who was little bigger than his hand, and had been startled into life months too soon. I would have shrunk back. I would have been too scared of causing more pain. I would not have dared do anything for fear of doing harm. But Adam wasn’t afraid. He didn’t shrink back and he trusted that what he did would be of use. He held together in his head the whole complex
thing, and acted simply. He always talked to the babies, wouldn’t do anything to them without telling them what he was doing.

He must sleep. I thought of his hands which I knew so well I seemed to know them from the bones outward. Robust hands, and practical and tender. It was too dark for me to see if his hands were still clenched into fists.

So often I’d thought that our bed was a ship and we were voyaging in it together. I would roll over in the bed and imagine the waves leaping around us, and the fathomless water. Everything that was in us made up the voyage. Our body heat, our dreams, the taste of Adam’s sweat, the juice of sex, the pang of Ruby’s conception. We would go on and on, pushed where the waves took us. We would die in that bed, I believed.

Nothing in Adam was alien to me. There were unknown things, but nothing alien.

He groaned, and heaved himself over. Now his back was turned to me.

The wind was getting up. I’d left the window open and it sucked at the curtain, drawing it in and then letting it belly outwards. I always left our bedroom door open and I couldn’t stop doing it. The door creaked, and moved. Its catch tapped against the frame.

I must close the door. I must close the window so that the wind doesn’t come in
.

I pushed back the bedclothes and slid out of bed. I went over to the window and the curtain blew into my face. I fumbled between the folds of cloth, found the parting of the curtains and drew them back.

There was the tree-lined street. The plane trees were
tanned orange by the street lights, and they had lost their leaves. Wind was moving in the big, bare branches. The street was blank and still.

The cold wind made me shiver but I pulled the sash up a little higher.

On the first day that Ruby came home, we wrapped her cherry-coloured shawl around her in the car seat. We carried her swiftly from the car to the house, and shut the door, and turned the heating up. We would not have let a drop of rain fall on her.