Ruby on the Outside

by Nora Raleigh Baskin

  I get it.

  You can run but you can’t hide. And no matter what you do.

  And nobody knows that better than I do now. I thought I was hiding but I wasn’t. Or I was, but I can’t any longer.

  Josh Tipps is Margalit’s brother.

  I am sick.

  I am so sick.

  I am really so sick to my stomach and I have been all night. I didn’t shut down my computer until after midnight and then I don’t think I ever fell completely asleep. So I probably look pretty bad, which is good. I want Matoo to just go to work and leave me alone. When she calls up the stairs, I tell her I’m not feeling well.

  There is no way I can go to camp today.

  No way. I feel like I am drowning. I’ve never felt so alone before. I am drowning and there is no one who can save me. I just need time to think. I need time to think.

  It takes a lot of convincing, but Matoo is running late and it’s summer, so missing camp is not like missing school. And finally she leaves.

  It’s just me and Loulou now.

  “Loulou, what can I do? I don’t deserve this. I didn’t do anything. It’s so not fair. I can’t tell Margalit. Ever. She can never find out.”

  Loulou looks at me but she doesn’t have any solutions either.

  I rack my brain. I consider every possibility for how to live with this terrible truth and not lose my very first, very best friend. For a crazy second, I want to call my mom—which, of course, I know I can’t do—like I used to when I was little. I want her to put her arms around me and make everything all right. Or at least tell me what to do.

  And then I realize my mother can’t fix anything.

  Because she’s the one who broke it.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Here’s another famous motto: Where there is a will, there’s a way.

  I have the will. And I sure hope I can find a way.

  I don’t have a plan exactly, but twenty-four hours later, and somehow I’ve successfully put my two worlds back where they belong—which is as far apart from each other as can be.

  I just need to stay alert and keep a lid on it, which is another one of Matoo’s expressions. You don’t need to show everyone what you are feeling all the time, Matoo says: Keep a lid on it.

  So I go to camp in kind of a daze, but as soon as I get there, as soon as I see Yvette and Elise and Beatrice and Margalit, and the inviting glint of the swimming pool, it’s like yesterday never happened. And the night before that really never happened.

  I hand Margalit the story notebook, before camp even begins, and tell her how sorry I am but I just couldn’t think of anything to write.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell her.

  “That’s okay,” she says. “I’ll do the story today and you can do the pictures, okay?”

  I nod.

  “So where were you yesterday?” Margalit is asking.

  Yesterday is already, so effectively, gone from my memory that it takes me some time to even remember that I wasn’t at camp.

  “Oh, I had a dentist appointment.” I am impressed with myself for my quick thinking. If I said I had stayed home sick, Margalit would want to know why I didn’t answer the phone. She called three times.

  “All day?” she asks.

  “Huh?”

  “I called you three times. I used Beatrice’s cell phone. You couldn’t have been at the dentist all day.”

  “Quiet down, you two,” Yvette jumps in. She is trying to be a camp counselor today for some reason. She’s decided to teach us some songs while she plays the guitar. She hands us both two paper cups.

  Just as I am about to worry that this lying business isn’t going to be as easy as I hoped and maybe I should have had a better plan, Margalit drops the questioning, but adds, “It was awful here yesterday without you.”

  And she isn’t saying it angrily. She really missed me.

  I mouth: I am sorry.

  And that’s all it takes. Margalit squeezes my hand. I shut the lid and I lock it.

  We are back at the clubhouse, but outside at the picnic tables between the pool and the building. Since it’s during the week, there aren’t many people around, but there are a few young moms with their real little babies and a few kids and a couple of teenagers like Yvette and Beatrice, which is kind of embarrassing for them, I guess, since they have to be hanging out with us.

  “Okay, you guys got your part?” Yvette positions her fingers on the neck of the guitar, one at a time, and I get the impression she is just learning to play.

  It takes her most of the morning to teach us the cup part. Margalit caught on really fast. After a few hundred tries, I got it too. Elise, funnily enough, got it right away. Must be all the ball-bouncing hand-eye coordination.

  Yvette strums once and then starts playing and singing.

  On the chorus Margalit and Elise and I join in with our cups, hitting the opening, flipping the cup over, hitting it again, and back down on its side.

  We sing. Yvette taught us all the harmonies. It’s actually kind of fun. Yvette’s guitar playing gets better and better and our rhythm with the cups starts to happen without thinking and before you know it, we are all singing, really loud and, I think, really good. Before you know it, it’s time for lunch. Margalit and I take a working lunch, writing, drawing, and eating all at the same time.

  And by now, with the day more than half over, I am pretty confident that Margalit won’t ever find out. I won’t even say the name inside my head, ever again.

  Josh Tipps.

  There.

  That will be the last time.

  I mean, how can she ever find out? It isn’t like anyone knows about my mother, so as long as I keep that a secret I am safe. Now, if I want to keep my best friend, I just need to be a little more careful, and for the first time, I am grateful that I have a different last name from my mother.

  So I can be sad and thankful. Relieved and nervous. Both. It’s all just a matter of keeping that lid on the pot so it doesn’t boil over and mess up the stovetop.

  But I can do that.

  “I started a whole new story,” Margalit tells me. We are supposed to be changing for swim time, but Yvette seems ready to play her guitar again until Beatrice groans and Yvette gets her feelings hurt and while they are arguing Margalit and I go back to drawing and writing.

  This pot will not boil.

  “Oh, good. Can I read it now?” I ask.

  “Of course,” Margalit passes the notebook back to me. “I am so excited for you to read it.”

  Yvette is sulking and refusing to go to the pool with us. Beatrice announces free time. Elise is bouncing her ball. I open to Margalit’s new pages.

  This story is different. It’s not about mermaids or elves or witches like our last one. Margalit is watching me read, which makes it hard, but her story is so good.

  “I did something different,” Margalit says. “I hope that’s okay. I couldn’t think of any more for the elf story.”

  “Yeah, me neither.” I continue reading.

  This story is about us. At least I think it is. It’s about two girls who meet one summer at a summer camp that has only three kids and two counselors. The two girls become best friends. When I come to the end of Margalit’s three pages, I look up at her.

  “Marion? Is that you?” I ask her.

  Margalit nods.

  “And Pearl?”

  I point to myself, and Margalit nods harder.

  A big smile breaks out over my face. “I love it,” I say.

  “Whew, I’m so glad.” She lets out her breath. “Okay, then, your turn. And I’ll work on the illustrations.”

  I take the notebook and settle in. I am pretty confident now that my writer’s block is cured. Margalit’s story seems easier for me to follow. Real-life stuff instead of fairies and mermaids.<
br />
  Write what you know. Isn’t that what Ms. Genovese would say?

  What comes out of my head into my fingers and down through the pen I don’t think much about. I mean, I’m thinking about it, of course, but I’m not forcing it. One thing follows another easily, like a reflex.

  That’s another thing we learned in science class, there are voluntary and involuntary muscle movements. Like a sneeze is involuntary and the way your foot kicks up when the doctor knocks you in the knee with that little rubber hammer.

  And writing a story about how your mother died when you were first born is probably, most certainly, one of those involuntary muscle action that you have no control over.

  I don’t even realize what I’ve written until I pass it back to Margalit and then I realize that in order to keep the lid on, and keep anything from spilling out, I just switched pots on the stove completely.

  “Oh, Ruby,” Margalit has just finished reading my chapter. “Is this true?”

  I know what exactly she means.

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  Ruby looks down at the notebook in her hands. “I mean, is this part true about your mother? Is that why you don’t have a mother? And you live with your Matoo?”

  Of course, Margalit would figure it out. She knew Matoo wasn’t my mother and now she thinks she knows why.

  And I did it on purpose, didn’t I?

  The old bait and switch.

  I killed off my mother in the story because I don’t want a mother, not a mother in prison. Not a mother who is ruining my life.

  “Well, it was a long time ago,” I say. I try not to look Margalit in the eye.

  “I’m so sorry,” Margalit says. She lowers her head. “I can’t imagine not having a mom.”

  Margalit looks like she’s going to cry. No one has ever cried for me. How could they? I guess. I’ve never told anyone about my mom, and now, the first time I have, it’s a big fat lie.

  No one would feel sorry for me if my mother was in prison for murder, but if my mother was dead well, that’s a whole other story.

  “It’s okay,” I say because I don’t know what else to say.

  “Oh, Ruby. You don’t have to talk about it,” Margalit says. “If you don’t want to.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  In my story, I wrote that my mother, or rather Pearl’s mother, died in childbirth. I got that from the book Sarah, Plain and Tall. Luckily, I’ve read that book three times, so I had the details readily available.

  “I’m just so sorry,” Margalit is saying, wiping her eyes.

  “Me too,” I say.

  Oh boy, if she only knew.

  Chapter Eighteen

  And then, just like that, another week goes uneventfully by and it’s Saturday. Again.

  Visiting day.

  And now from the pot to the frying pan or something like that.

  “Ruby, are you ready?” Matoo is standing outside my bedroom door.

  I’m as far from ready as could be, but I am dressed and my bed is made and as far as I know my feet are still working. But I am standing at my bureau and looking into the mirror hanging above it, and I can’t move.

  Is that me in there?

  The girl who does well in school. Who doesn’t get into trouble. The girl that won’t grow up to be like her mother.

  Who am I?

  Because I am my mother’s daughter. I look just like her. When we are together, people tell us that; the other prisoners who are her friends, sometimes the guards, other visitors. And whenever somebody said that—you two look so much alike—it made me happy.

  As if it was something I could take away with me after I left Bedford Hills. It wasn’t something you could hold or touch, but it was just as real to me. I could take our connection with me wherever I went. She was my mother and I was her daughter and even if we weren’t together we were bonded by this visible DNA.

  The eighth characteristic of life: love.

  I stand on my tiptoes and look closer. What is it people notice? Our noses? The color of my hair? My eyes? Our teeth?

  And if I looked like my mother on the outside, did that mean I was going to be like her on the inside?

  How can I love my mother knowing what she did? Knowing what I did. I lied about my mother and I said she was dead.

  Is that my DNA?

  Will I have to lie the rest of my life?

  I force myself to smile in the mirror. I do look like my mother. The shade of our skin. And my left ear. There’s a little fold at the top of my left ear, just like hers. Just like my mother’s.

  “Ruby, let’s go.” Matoo is knocking on my bedroom door again.

  “Okay,” I answer.

  There’s a huge, long line when we get to Bedford Hills. It’s going to take forever to get inside. But today I don’t care.

  I’m in no hurry.

  Today, I am not looking forward to getting inside. I don’t know what I am going to say.

  “Ruby, what’s with you today? You’re not yourself.” Matoo parks the car in the lot. I wonder how I never noticed before how horrible and ugly this place is.

  Suddenly it looks like a prison in a scary movie. The old crumbling brick buildings that look deserted or haunted or both. The indescribably tall chain link fence with the razor wire running over the top, hundreds of blades, and for the first time I let myself know why it is there.

  To keep the bad guys in.

  So that if someone tried to escape, if they tried to climb over that fence, forcing their toes into the space between the links, gripping with their fingers, they would only be cut to shreds when they tried to make their way over the top to the other side. I have seen that fence a million times and now I know.

  “I’m fine,” I tell Matoo.

  We take our place in line and wait forty-five minutes before we are at the door to the trailer where we will be processed. When we finally get inside, the air conditioning is blasting. There will be no air conditioning when we get to the visiting room. It’s been broken for weeks and no one can say when it will be fixed. And there is no air conditioning at all in the housing units.

  Because this is a prison. It’s not supposed to be comfortable.

  When we get into security Matoo takes out a quarter and opens a locker. She stuffs her pocketbook inside and looks at me. When I was little I used to beg her to let me put the quarter in, like it was a game at a carnival.

  But it is not a carnival. There is no fairy tale that ends like this.

  “Do you have anything to put in?” Matoo asks me.

  I dig into my pocket and lift out my open palm. I have some change, a dime, two nickels, and five pennies. I think they have been in these shorts from the day Margalit and I were diving for coins in the pool.

  I feel a knot growing in my stomach. How many things have I chosen not to see?

  So many.

  Like every winter my middle school does a fund-raiser or toy drive or a mitten-and-glove collection for poor people. Last Christmas there were a bunch of big cardboard boxes set up in the lobby with a tall color sign. The eighth graders were collecting “new in the package” toys for the “women of Bedford.”

  I walked right by it and didn’t think about it at all.

  I didn’t want to think about it.

  I might have glanced once or twice at the growing piles of toys, games, and stuffed animals. But it wasn’t until I recognized the toy my mother “gave” me for Christmas did I put it together. Some kid at my school donated that gift and now here it was in my hands.

  But so what?

  I put it out of my head.

  It was way too babyish a gift, but I never let on. I didn’t want to hurt my mother’s feelings. I hugged the toy—I don’t even remember what it was—and pretended that I loved it. And I did love it. Because my m
other had picked it out for me.

  But now the CO is asking me to walk through the metal detector with my arms out to the side, and I am thinking that the gift my mother gave me for Christmas last year was a gift someone else got for their birthday they didn’t even want enough to open.

  “Step up here, please,” the CO says. She is wearing rubber gloves.

  I step up and she runs the wand all around my body. When I was little I thought that the rays coming out of it could read my mind. I used to try and make my mind blank so they wouldn’t know what I was thinking. So they wouldn’t know that I was scared, and excited, angry, and sad, and nervous, and happy to be finally getting to see my mother again.

  Now Matoo and I pass through the bars. The thick black bars just like in cartoons where the man in jail is resting his hands and trying to press his face out. Because this is a prison.

  “Right hand, please.”

  We are at the Plexiglas window with only a small opening where I am supposed to reach in with the top of my hand facing up. The officer behind the glass stamps my hand with an invisible stamp. Today it is the right hand. Yesterday must have been left. I am not sure why they switch it every day, but I am sure it has something to do with preventing the prisoners from getting out. Or the wrong people from coming in.

  Now we have to walk outside again.

  There is a whole line of us, staggered, depending on how long you took to pass through security. The man behind the Plexiglas pushes a button and those black metal bars slide open. We are walking from one building into the prison itself. I can see more razor wire right over my head. It is so close I can see the sun glinting off its edges.

  Matoo puts her arm around me for a short squeeze. She can tell something is wrong but we keep walking.

  Here there is a little machine that you have to put your hand under and suddenly, there it is, the glowing stamp they just put on your skin. I used to think that was so cool, so magical.

  Not anymore.

  My heart is racing. I know the next stop is for our table assignment and, wouldn’t you know it, it’s Officer Rubins.

  “Good morning, ladies,” he says.

  I look down at the floor.