Shiner

by Amy Jo Burns

  The morning’s ground clouds gathered thick enough to keep the sun from waking Ruby’s father, but Ivy took no chances. She crept through the moat of holly around the cabin’s perimeter to reach Ruby’s bedroom window in the back. She tapped on the glass, and Ruby’s face appeared, bracketed with blood. Flooded with relief, Ivy remembered that it was Ruby’s wedding day.

  “How did you know?” Ruby could barely speak as she lifted the windowpane. A bruise marred the skin just above her collarbones.

  “Shh,” Ivy said after she climbed inside, taking a cloth from the nightstand and touching it to Ruby’s face. “Your sisters will hear.”

  Ruby’s bedroom was crammed with three bunk beds for seven sisters, and Ruby and Ivy had no space to speak. The pair squeezed into the closet and sat knee to knee with their backs against the wall. Above them Ruby’s wedding dress hung from a steel pipe—six yards of white muslin. On the back wall, she’d also taped up pictures she’d cut out of Ivy’s stash of Seventeen magazines—photos of dresses and crop tops, plaited bracelets and headbands—all the things Ivy had admired and Ruby hoped to make for her. An old quilt covered a cavity in the floor.

  “Ivy,” Ruby said in the dark. “A man found me.”

  She didn’t need to say any more. Ruby and Ivy had heard this kind of parable as a sober ushering into their girlhood, a story imparted to them by their fathers. A hard dick knows no conscience, Hasil had warned Ruby on her thirteenth birthday, in lieu of a gift.

  “I never wanted a story like this.” Ruby’s voice cracked.

  Ivy had no answer.

  “You know what the worst part is?” Ruby rested her chin on the scab of her knee. “My daddy was right. Nothing good happens to a girl after midnight.”

  Ivy didn’t ask what had happened. She didn’t ask if Ruby was all right. She asked only one question—how Ruby had gotten away.

  The Silverado had run her off the road, and the driver threw open the truck’s door. It hit Ruby in the head before she fell into the ditch. She stumbled, too dizzy to stand. The man left the truck and crouched over her. Ruby reached for her knife, and he sank his knee into the soft skin above her heart as he wrestled it away and tossed it into the truck bed. His earlobe was sliced in two.

  Ruby didn’t know how long it was before the headlights of an oncoming car lit up the pines in the distance. The man hid in the shadow of his truck, and Ruby ran.

  She could have flagged down the car and asked for help. But Ruby knew the driver would take her home to her father, and she knew what he would have said:

  Only one kind of girl is out this late at night.

  It was an impossible choice—to die this one death or to die a thousand new ways every time her father looked at her. Ruby wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.

  The closet air hung heavy in the quiet. With this, Ruby resigned herself to silence. Ivy should have spoken then, told Ruby she’d led Lovett to her. She opened her mouth, but the words would not come out.

  Before that night in the Silverado, Ivy believed that the truth wasn’t hard to tell. It was harder to live a lie, and a lie was all that the women on her mountain knew—how to submit to their husbands and swallow their vomit and serve a second piece of pie on Sunday afternoons. She swore she’d never be among them, and neither would Ruby. But the world felt wicked now. Pressed in the closet with her friend, Ivy feared that this lie was all she had left.

  She couldn’t stop herself. “You don’t have to marry him, Ruby.”

  “I do.”

  Ivy wanted to shake her. “Why?” she whispered. “There’s nothing for us here. These men are all the same. We could leave all this. Escape.”

  Weary, Ruby laughed. On the other side of the bedroom door, a baby wailed. Ruby’s mother stirred.

  “You should go, Ivy.” Ruby’s hands lay at her sides.

  Ivy shook her head. “Your mama won’t mind if I spent the night.”

  “No. You should leave the mountain, I mean. Leave me behind.”

  The words, knives in Ivy’s back.

  Ruby leaned her head against the wall, shut her eyes. “I don’t have the strength for it. I’m not sure I ever did.”

  “Listen to me,” Ivy said. “Strength is in my love for you and your love for me. Staying here don’t make you weak. All right?”

  Ruby nodded. The floorboards creaked underneath the soft weight of Hasil pulling on his boots in the next room.

  “If you want to stay,” Ivy said, “then we’ll stay.”

  Before Ruby could protest, Ivy crept across the room and lifted herself out of the window. Then she ran toward her house to bathe the night off her. Once her skin felt clean, if not her conscience, she’d catch a lift toward town, where she’d find her weak-hearted Ricky and agree to marry him. In this she’d join her friend.

  Never again would Ivy abandon her.

  * * *

  Both Ruby and Ivy got married in autumn. They stuck to their men, spotted each other from across the gas-station meeting room, and sighed like ghosts. Ivy wondered how they’d gotten so old in only a month’s time. The leaves had yet to fall from the trees, and still all Ivy could feel was winter in her chest.

  Her every thought settled on Ruby. So much so that she couldn’t see how well her lovesick husband doted on her. His jars of crocuses went unwatered, his pastel love notes went unread. Ricky even went along to church, though he didn’t care much for it. Jesus, he said, could never give him the high that Percocet did.

  Since their night in the Impala, Ivy had fallen for the hero Ricky was, even as she hated him for the hero he wasn’t. The two feelings brawled within her. The only way Ivy could show her husband any affection at all was through barebacked, body-blinding sex. They made love anywhere but their bed—Ivy hoisted herself onto the galley kitchen counter of their trailer, Ricky thrust against the Impala’s backseat, both of them crimped with parched stiltgrass in their backyard. Sex said what Ivy’s mouth couldn’t: It will never be enough.

  Ruby’s every move had an edge to it now. She scrubbed Briar’s collared shirts twice as long as she needed to, raking her fingers over the washboard until they bled. She tore out entire seams on her skirts, only to restitch them, and the rainbow colors of her dresses began to fade. She started making soap, then making more. Ivy even ripped off her own buttons just to give Ruby’s hands a fresh purpose. Ruby saw no one, went nowhere, except for Sundays. Every time Ivy caught sight of her vacant gaze looking toward the razorbacks, her own remorse threatened to drown her. Ruby flew to dark places in her mind, leaving Ivy to wonder when—or if—she’d return.

  Ivy knew she ought to tell Ruby the truth about that night in the Silverado. But this truth would not set Ivy free. It would cost her. If she lost Ruby, Ivy told herself, she would die. She couldn’t survive life on the mountain alone. The problem was, Ivy couldn’t be sure her friend would survive what haunted her, either. When Ruby’s hands lingered on frosted windowpanes or over a crackling fire long enough to forget all feeling, Ivy feared she was losing her Ruby, even still.

  * * *

  Three years passed slow, then quick, full of nothing days that never seemed to end. Ivy’s Grandmother Harper died the day Ivy went into labor with her firstborn, and Ivy couldn’t parse the ache of losing her from the agony of giving life. When the clinic’s doctor had handed Bobby to her and offered congratulations, she’d wanted to laugh. Congratulate her on what? The life she was given to squander and ruin? She didn’t feel joy. She felt only the purest sense that Bobby belonged to someone else. Even his name—Bobby—sounded like he could have come from anywhere. Some other woman, Ivy knew, could have taken much better care of him. She didn’t know whether Bobby’s rightful father was Flynn or Ricky, and she couldn’t summon enough shame over it to risk breaking her husband’s heart. All Ivy knew: She wasn’t fit for motherhood, even though it was all she had.

  Ruby hadn’t
felt this way. Having Wren buoyed her, a miracle Ivy thanked God for. Never had Ivy seen a more beautiful baby than Wren, who was rosy and light-eyed like her daddy.

  Ruby wouldn’t bear any more children after her first. She didn’t like sex, another sadness Ivy blamed herself for. Ricky remained the only person who knew that Ivy had led Lovett up the mountain, and she shuddered in the face of such unwanted intimacy. He’d seen her at her worst, yet still he wanted her. Ivy had no reason to trust that depth of loyalty from a man. Either he was a fool or he was biding his time to use her secret against her, even though Ricky never would. He loved Ivy and pitied her, though not as much as he pitied himself.

  She couldn’t tell Ricky she didn’t want their second child. He wouldn’t understand. Ricky thought babies were all coos and snuggles, little blessings who magically learned to sleep through the night and piss in a toilet. Ivy knew the great pain of bringing a child into the world, and it had nothing to do with labor. It had to do with poverty of choice—either Ivy would give birth to a man or she’d have a daughter who’d grow up to serve one. There ain’t no in-between, as Ruby had said to her once before, when they’d reckoned with abandoning their hills. Ivy knew she had nothing left in her heart to give. Motherhood gave her a lonely squall in her gut, and Ivy didn’t dare bring her affliction to the one person who would help her bear it.

  Turned out she didn’t need to. Ruby could sense her friend’s despair from a mile off, the same way bloodhounds knew to search for signs of buried life in the hillside after a heavy snowfall. Ivy, out of luck, was the very thing Ruby needed to revive herself.

  It was her idea to give Flynn the baby, her plan to keep Ricky and Briar in the dark. Ivy had always been the conniver among them, but Ruby’s love for her friend brought forth a primeval instinct. Ruby knew what Ivy needed, even when Ivy herself didn’t.

  “You don’t have to keep it,” was all Ruby said one morning as they stood side by side at the cliff. Together they stared into the lavender lowlands.

  Behind them Wren and Bobby took turns counting paces toward the snake shed. They dared each other to see who could go the farthest in the fog. Five steps, six steps, seven steps, eight. A witchy consonance clung to the mist. Ivy could feel a change stirring, guided by Ruby’s careful hand.

  Only after it happened could Ivy see how well Ruby had fixed things for her, and for Flynn, too, by arranging the trade. It seemed simple enough. Ivy would birth the baby, then Ivy would give the baby away. Flynn would have someone to love—an absolution for Bobby, who Ivy alone knew might have been Flynn’s rightful son. In this way Ruby unknowingly worked her own miracle, mending two hearts in one act. It reminded Ivy of how as girls she and Ruby had played tag beneath the gas station’s willow tree, conspiring ways to outlast the boys who circled them. It felt easy then to escape those confines, just as it felt impossible now.

  * * *

  Ivy gave birth the night after Sherrod died. She started having contractions as the sun slipped beneath the Royal Empress trees. Wren had fallen asleep at the foot of Ruby’s bed, and there would be no getting Briar out of the house after dark. Suspicion grew on him quicker than a serpent’s strike. Their only option would be for Ruby to abscond with the infant in the middle of the night.

  “This is going to be hard,” Ruby said, grasping her friend’s hand. “But don’t fret. I helped my mama do this plenty. You can’t make a sound.”

  Already in enough pain to silence her, Ivy nodded. “You best run out, soon as the baby cries,” she whispered.

  Ruby kissed her hand and hoped Briar would sleep soundly. The moon hovered as a fragment of itself. The foxes kept to their dens. Ruby counted these as mercies, just as she did Ivy’s short labor. When it came time to push, Ivy stood, grasped the bedpost in Wren’s tiny bedroom, and bore down.

  “It’s another boy,” Ruby said as the baby eased out. He was pink and blue and red, a stark cowlick already swirling on top of his head.

  “Do you want to see him?” Ruby asked after she’d finished her work cleaning both Ivy and the baby.

  “No,” Ivy said, collapsed on the mattress. “Just go.”

  Ruby swaddled the boy tight, and then she hiked to Flynn’s to ask him to take the child as his own. While she was gone, Ivy waited, unable to sleep.

  She could not have prepared herself for how much it would hurt to give a baby away. So set in the comfort that her second-born would live a better life as Flynn’s son than as hers, she hadn’t stopped to consider the blow. Ivy didn’t regret it, but the loss flattened her. In the hours after the delivery, her body fought her mind. Her breasts burst with milk for a mouth she couldn’t nurse, and her stomach contracted like it wanted to take back the baby it had let go. She’d go on to have three more boys before the day she died, and all of them she would keep.

  Ivy slept, fitfully, then woke and found herself alone in Wren’s room. When Ruby returned with her empty laundry basket, she told Briar in whispers that the baby had died. Ivy listened from the hallway. She cracked the door, and a triangle of light spread across her bare thighs. The lie on Ruby’s lips was sweet, full of mercy. A melody, if ever Ivy had heard one.

  Ivy tried to let herself breathe. Then Briar spoke.

  “It’s for the best,” he said. He didn’t bother to lower his voice. “You know she ain’t fit.”

  The words might have brought Ivy to her knees, if she cared what Briar thought. She waited for Ruby’s reply.

  “Ain’t fit for what?” Ruby asked. “Motherhood? Briar, no one is.”

  The truth was that Ruby, like Ivy, had nothing left to give. Emptied, the both of them—whether by what happened the night the Silverado went up the mountain or by life itself, Ivy couldn’t figure. But she knew Ruby had marshaled what remained of her strength for her friend, and now it was gone.

  * * *

  Thirteen years passed before Ivy saw Sonny again. She didn’t track the time in years. Instead she tracked it in life lines. Three more boys, born. A father, dead. Ivy didn’t attend the funeral. She and Ruby kept to their daily sacraments—Ivy climbed Ruby’s hill, implored her to leave the house. Returned home before dusk. The rhythm had a natural rise and fall, the breath both Ruby and Ivy drew as one.

  The friends aged, but their friendship didn’t. It took on a hot, static distance—not because Ruby and Ivy were distant from each other but because Ruby was distant from herself. Ivy couldn’t understand how Briar didn’t see it. Ivy ached to be so blind. She longed to find that kind of distance from herself, even as it seemed to shred Ruby to bits. The secret Ivy kept was a burdensome pet, one she needed to groom and feed. Every time she drove past the Saw-Whet’s empty lot, Ivy looked for a white Silverado—even though she never saw one. She found herself hunting for noise, running from the quiet. Always Ruby’s mournful voice followed her.

  The day before she caught fire, Ivy fell sick. It started with a string of dizzy spells, each worse than the last. Next came a heat rash that swept across her chest and back. She vomited, steadied herself. Checked the calendar she kept in the drawer of her bedside table.

  She counted the days—thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five. A familiar weight cradled near her navel, told her what she already thought she knew.

  Ivy was pregnant.

  She forgot about her promise to meet Ruby and Wren that morning—something Ivy had never done. Instead she left her boys with Ricky and sped down the mountain. At the Shop ’n Save, she stole a pregnancy test. The inside of her Pontiac sweltered as she sat in the backseat, waiting for the results.

  Down the street she saw Flynn’s Tacoma parked at Teddy’s Tavern. Ivy watched him unload a few cases of moonshine and take them through Teddy’s back door. Sonny stood in the truck bed, sweeping dust into the street. A fissure in Ivy’s chest—her baby had grown into a strong young man. Flynn had done that. And, in a way, so had she.

  She looked down at the test, tried
to divine some truth from it. Was that a line she saw—the faintest pink horizon? She looked again and saw nothing, like her body was waiting to decide.

  Ivy felt the truth then. She didn’t want another baby. She also didn’t want to give another baby away. Ivy opened the Pontiac’s back door and fell out of it before vomiting on the grass. Then she looked up, blinked against the sheen of the sun. A soft shadow moved in. Ivy wiped the side of her mouth and blinked again. Her vision went from black to gray to light. Then she caught sight of Sonny Sherrod staring back at her.

  “Ma’am,” he said, touching her elbow. “You all right?”

  He helped Ivy to her feet. A stark gravity stretched between them as Ivy got drawn into Sonny’s orbit. She felt herself ever spinning, unable to stop.

  “Ma’am,” Sonny tried again. “Are you okay?”

  She nodded, locked herself in her car. Drove homeward, Sonny a distant sun in her rearview mirror, as Ivy wished for some way to heal one wound without creating another.

  * * *

  Later that night Ivy penned the longest letter she’d ever written to her best friend. My Confession, she titled it on the envelope. She tucked it into the drawer of her bedside table and promised herself one day she’d find the strength to give it to Ruby.

  Inside the letter Ivy revealed everything she hadn’t had the courage to say when they were just seventeen and itching to leave the mountain behind. She admitted she’d led Lovett to Ruby that terrible night, and that she’d never wanted to risk losing Ruby by telling her the truth. Ivy never blamed Lovett like she blamed herself. She couldn’t show herself any mercy. No one had ever offered her any.