by Victor Allen
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Five years later.
“Vroom! Vroom! Vroom!” Lance raced his model car across the carpet while Jean washed dishes. The aged carpet had never been replaced and was more bald than ever. The toy race car made a ratcheting noise as its tin and plastic wheels spun. Lance careened it around in a roaring Bat turn and flopped it on its side. He giggled and Jean wondered if the wheels were making grooves in the carpeting. That was all she needed, one more thing to worry about.
“Lance, stop that,” Jean admonished tiredly, plopping down in a chair. “Mommy doesn’t feel well.”
The race car stopped speeding across the carpet and Lance looked up, undisturbed. It was the price he paid, he knew, for being a kid, having to do what mommy said. But sometimes Ruby came to him and told him about the place she would take him one day. A place where there was no mommy to tell him what to brush his teeth or go to bed. A place where it was never cold and candy flowed in the streets and vegetables were illegal. At first Ruby had been far away, like a dream, but as the years went by, she became more and more real, almost in the room with him now.
“Thank you,” Jean smiled. It was funny, she thought, how Lance had changed from a human blank as an infant to a five year old with his own personality. It wasn’t the one Jean thought he would have, but it was his and she couldn’t change it. Try as she might, she saw more of Ruby in him than herself, just as she could see more and more of Ruby in her own features as the years passed, staring back at her from the mirror in the living room. The way she cocked an eyebrow, or tilted her head. They had been sisters. Nothing changed that.
She believed that Lance had no memory of the night that Ruby had tried to take him. Jean only thought of it herself on the anniversary of Ruby’s funeral, preferring to douse that witch with water and render it to a harmless puddle.
But she couldn’t always ignore it. After the second year that Ruby called on the anniversary of her burial, Jean simply refused to answer the phone at three thirty in the morning, when the call invariably came. The third year she had turned the phone off. It still rang. The fourth year, she had stayed at a hotel. She left her cell phone at home and turned off the hotel phone. Without fail, the phone pealed out at three thirty in the morning. Now, she had finally accepted it and chose to live with it.
“Mom, who was Ruby?”
Jean jumped in her chair. She had never told Lance about Ruby and how he could have found out about her was a mystery. Her father had passed away a year after Ruby’s funeral, and her mother refused, as did Jean, to even speak of Ruby. Lance looked at her blandly, no hint of irony or cunning about him. In his shorts and yellow tank shirt he looked like any five year old kid on this unusually warm March day.
“Ruby was my sister,” Jean said slowly. “Your aunt. She died a long time ago, when you were just a baby. Why do you ask?”
And how do you know about her?
“She comes to me sometimes,” Lance answered carelessly. He turned his race car over in his small hands and looked studiously at its underside. Jean remained very still, unknowingly twisting a dishrag.
“She tells me about the place she lives and about how much she loves me. She said she was sorry she had to go away, but someday she’ll come back and take me with her. But I won’t have to stay forever, will I, mom? Not forever.” Lance looked at her questioningly.
“Lance, don’t talk like that. You’re scaring me.”
“Why should it scare you, mom? Was Ruby a bad person?”
“Ruby isn’t alive anymore,” Jean said. Panic started to tinge her words. Those terrors she thought she had doused began to sprout into poisonous life, weeds with tearing thorns and teeth.
“You’re not going anywhere, honey. You’re going to stay here with me until you’re all grown up.”
“That’s not what Ruby says,” Bobby responded sadly. “She says that one day I’ll leave with her forever and I’ll never see you again. I don’t like her as much as I used to. She scares me. She’s not…. like us.”
Jean stood up and put her arms around Lance, tears barely held back.
“Don’t worry, honey. You’ll never have to worry about leaving. I’ll fix it somehow. I swear that I’ll fix it.”
She looked over the top of Lance’s head at the calendar on the wall: March, 15th. Ruby had been buried for five years.