by Jim Nelson
Hanna’s first impulse on awakening was to check her smartphone. No messages, no voicemail, no new email—no signal. The farm had sparse cellular reception. Her mother never bothered to subscribe to home Internet service. The last activity on Hanna’s phone was the blocked caller the night before, the person who dialed her number every evening but did not leave a voicemail.
After using the hall bathroom and changing into comfortable clothes for loafing around the house, Hanna strode to the kitchen. Ruby stood on a footstool at the stove. She focused on a sputtering cast-iron skillet of eggs and sausage links and blackened tomato slices. With a wood spoon, she stirred a pot of oatmeal, thick as spackle.
Outside in the yard, Cynthia walked across the chicken pen with a plastic bowl of feed in her arms. She tossed the feed across the ground in sprays, left and right, right and left, watching with fascination as the birds scrambled about her feet for their morsels. She wore her bridge daughter dress and bridge daughter shoes, soft flats with decorative buckles across the tops. Her pregnancy was pronounced through the dress, and Hanna had a hard time believing she was four weeks from her finality. Four days was more like it, she thought.
Hanna’s mother sat at the kitchen table drinking a cup of coffee made tan from a generous addition of powdered creamer. She greeted Hanna with “G’ morning” and hacked into a tissue. She looked paler this morning, eyes rheumy and phlegm caked at the corners of her mouth.
“Did it get worse?” Hanna said. She didn’t hear her mother coughing in the night. Of course, after yesterday’s adventure, Hanna had dropped right to sleep, exhausted. Jackie’s nosiness followed by Piper’s petulance had sapped her. Plus, the wine. She was parched. A dull pressured throbbing filled the cavity behind the bridge of her nose.
Dian coughed again. Ruby set down her spatula, stepped off the footstool, and marched across the kitchen to the table. She put a hand to Dian’s forehead who, for once, didn’t protest or resist. Ruby shifted her palm to Dian’s cheek, then the side of her neck.
“You should be in bed, ma’am,” Ruby said.
“I’ll finish my coffee,” Dian said.
“No more excuses.” Ruby tugged at Dian’s hand until she was up from the chair.
“Damn this cold,” Dian said. “Why’d I have to catch it just before you got here?”
“Mom, let Ruby take care of you.”
“Your bridges should be far from me,” she said bitterly at Hanna. “Now’s not the time for them to be getting sick—”
“More the reason you should be in bed,” Hanna said.
Dian asked Ruby for a moment. “Out there,” she told Hanna, motioning toward the landscape-sized window. The jutted road they’d driven was on the far side of the yard, its tracks disappearing in a curve that plunged into the redwoods. “Someone is camped out by the main road,” she said to Hanna. “I saw his tent through the trees.”
Hanna stood on her toes and shifted her weight to peer through the scattering of cypresses and sequoias between the house and the main road. “He’ll probably clear out in a couple of hours,” she said.
Growing up, it wasn’t uncommon for a hitchhiker or a biker to stop on the edge of the property, pitch a tent or a lean-to, and stay the night. Hanna’s mother tolerated it as long as the trespassers packed out their garbage and didn’t try to make the camp their new home. She only phoned the county sheriff to run off campers who abused her indulgences. One more reason Hanna wished her mother would move into town, or at least bring in a like-aged lodger. Hanna did not care for the idea of vagrants regularly spending the night so near her mother, a woman who refused to lock the road gate or even the front door.
Ruby continued tugging at her grandmother’s hand. “All right already,” Dian snapped. Undeterred, Ruby led Dian to the rear of the house.
Hanna lowered the heat on the frying pan and stirred the oatmeal. When she joined the pair in the bedroom, Ruby was tucking Dian into bed and straightening the blankets to ensure she was covered from neck to foot. Ruby located a box of tissue paper in the adjoining bathroom and placed it on the stand beside the bed. She studied the controls on the wall heater and set the unit on high.
“I’ll be back with some soup, ma’am,” Ruby said.
Dian frowned and shook her head at the ministrations. “Your bridge thinks she runs this house,” she said to Hanna. “You should’ve seen her this morning rearranging my kitchen.”
Ruby led Hanna hand-in-hand to the hall bath. Ruby instructed Hanna to wash with hot water. When finished, Ruby did the same.
“Bad germs,” was all Ruby said as way of explanation.
—
Hanna liked to let the girls play with the farmhouse toys preserved from Hanna’s own childhood, jigsaw puzzles and board games and decks of Uno and Go Fish cards. Every game in the farmhouse had to work with only two players, because at the farmhouse, the only players were her and her mother. Games that could be played solitaire were even better. Dian was plenty busy raising Hanna, leading her through home school while cooking and cleaning. Not to mention administering the farm, which required more business acumen than it would appear, considering how little the farm produced.
In addition to the games, the girls devoured Hanna’s children’s books, especially the mysteries she loved as a little girl. Books like The Three Investigators and Encyclopedia Brown and the three hardback Nancy Drew mysteries Hanna thought she would like but did not. Ruby was the reader, not Cynthia, but both would while away the afternoon hours on the floor flipping through old books and magazines from the 1980s her mother had saved. That was what Hanna desired the most, in a way. She wanted them to connect with her own childhood. She couldn’t pinpoint the reason or the necessity, but she felt it strongly.
Do not connect with them, her mother had said. You are only hurting yourself later, when they’re gone.
Ruby went to the front door and yelled Come and get it! at Cynthia in the chicken pen. The three ate together, each of the girls explaining what they planned to do with their free time that day. Cynthia wanted to explore the property. Hanna told her to stay in the confines of the yard, where she could see her at all times. Ruby wanted to read books and spend quality time with Ruby Jo. Hanna suggested they all walk to the western edge of the property, where the tips of the Golden Gate Bridge towers would be visible in the distance, weather permitting.
After breakfast, Cynthia did the dishes and took a hot shower to wash off the chicken feed’s malty odor. Ruby retreated to the sitting room, presumably to read. Hanna stepped outside to the rotund gravel yard and walked its perimeter.
Not much had changed since her last visit with the girls. The old sun-grayed tractor tire still leaned against the barn, its deep treads cracked like the floor of Death Valley. An ancient gas-powered push lawnmower with no wheels was up on four red bricks, a perpetual mystery to Hanna since there was no grass on the farm worth trimming. What’s more, she could come up with no reason why someone would take a lawnmower’s wheels. It wasn’t as if they inflated and needed more air, or that the tread on them would wear down in any significant way and need to be replaced. And yet that wheel-less mower was mounted on those four bricks the day she and her mother moved to the farm and remained there to that day.
At the jutted road, Hanna made a brim with her right hand and peered off into the trees toward Old Jachsen Road. She made out no movement or unusual colors through the trees. Shifting her weight back and forth, she wondered if the man had packed up and moved on. Probably a biker, she thought, imagining a stocky bearded man in a leather jacket and a Dixie flag painted on his helmet riding a Harley-Davidson down the California coast. Just such a man had camped out on the property when she was a teenager. Agape, he stared her up-and-down when she approached to ask him to leave. Hanna was at an expansive age, only then learning what a thin white T-shirt and denim shorts could do to men.
Hanna returned to the farmhouse. She had a cold drink of water from the pitcher in the Kelvinator. She found Ruby at a
writing desk in the corner of the sitting room. She was hunched over a hefty hardcover tome, its slipcover yellowing and frayed. Unfolded on the desk before her was old college-rule writing paper covered with blue-ink diagrams now smeary from age.
Ruby turned with a wide, almost aghast look on her face. “Look what I found!” she whispered.
Hanna needed a moment to piece together Ruby’s discovery. The book regarded family genealogy, a subject Hanna had grown fascinated with when she was in her early teens. It laid out how to organize family research, resources for finding material and locating information on the deceased, via government records and church registries and the like. The book devoted an entire chapter to the Mormons and their impressive genealogical archives. This was before the Internet, a time when genealogy meant trips to libraries and filling out forms at city archives, a time when you mailed money orders and self-addressed stamped envelopes to groups who may or may not respond in a timely manner.
For young Hanna, the most curious chapter in the book regarded interviewing relatives. In exceedingly polite terms, the Canadian author discussed how to coerce important details from family members who might be hesitant to reveal them. Family trees are treasure maps of embarrassment, shame, and the undiscussed. For young Hanna, the chapter was a window to the world of adults, a frank admission that sometimes you had to practice a kind of deception with people you loved—innocuous questions designed to extract secrets blocking you from filling in blank leaves on a burgeoning tree.
Hanna pulled a chair over and joined Ruby at the desk. “When I was your age,” Hanna said, “I tried to make a family tree. See? That’s your grandmother.” She pointed to a square on the college-rule paper. In the square, a younger version of Hanna had written, in the near-perfect penmanship she once possessed and had lost in her twenties, DIAN SUSAN DRISCOLL n. ABNEY.
“What is ‘n’ for?” Ruby asked, pointing.
“It means ‘née,’” Hanna said. “Grandmother has two names. Abney was her family name before she married Grandpa.”
“Like you have two names!” Ruby said with a smile of astonishment.
“That’s right,” Hanna said. “But now I’m back to my old name.” She assumed Ruby referred to Hanna’s driving license and credit cards still listing her as Hanna Brubaker.
“This book taught me how to draw family trees,” Hanna continued. “It uses what’s called the Edwardian Form. It’s an unusual way to draw family trees.” Hanna placed her fingers over a row of ovals to hide them. “In the standard family tree, you don’t draw bridge daughters. So it would go from my grandmother—CYNTHIA MABEL ABNEY—directly to her children.” Below Hanna’s fingers were two boxes representing her mother and RICHARD MARK ABNEY.
“That’s Uncle Rick!” Ruby said, pointing at the Richard Abney box. “You and Grandmother talk about him sometimes.” She added, “And sometimes Grandpa talks about him too. Were they friends?”
“We all miss him,” Hanna said. She stroked the back of Ruby’s head.
When Hanna lifted her hand from the page, it exposed the row of ovals across the middle of the sheet of paper.
“You are named after Uncle Rick’s bridge mother,” Hanna said. In the center oval, her younger self had written RUBY-RICHARD ABNEY, although the smeared ink made the name a loopy mess. This Ruby was the girl who gave birth to Uncle Rick in the 1940s. The oval beside it read DIAN-DIAN ABNEY.
“You made a mistake,” Ruby said pointing to the doubled-up names.
“That’s how you write a bridge daughter’s name in the Edwardian Form,” Hanna said. “The bridge daughter’s name first and the name of the child they carried second.”
“Why both?” Ruby asked.
Hanna stroked Ruby’s hair. “Sometimes the child’s not born,” she said softly. “It was more common a long time ago. That was how you recorded the name of the child who died.”
Ruby peered down on the page for a moment, then looked up with a crinkled frown.
“Don’t you worry about a thing,” Hanna said. “Dr. Bellingham says everything is going perfectly for you and Cynthia.”
“So why do people name their children the same as the bridge daughter?”
“Tradition.” Hanna’s fingers brushed Ruby’s pregnancy. “When the child inside you is born, she will look exactly like you. A perfect duplicate. I guess a long time ago, people thought if the child looks the same, it should have the same name.”
“Will you name my baby Ruby Jo?”
“It’s my baby,” Hanna said. On this point, she was firm. “Her name is Ruby.”
“So I’m Ruby-Ruby,” Ruby said with shining pride. “Will Ruby like strawberry ice cream as much as I do?”
Hanna laughed. “Probably. But she will be different from you. Just like I’m different from the other Hanna.”
Ruby pointed a diminutive finger at the leftmost oval in the row. Unlike the other two, the line extending below it did not go to a box, but rather terminated with a Christian cross. In the center of the oval was written HANNA-HANNA ABNEY, barely legible due to the ink bleeding into the paper.
“Is that your bridge mother?” Ruby whispered.
“No,” Hanna said. The oval sobered her up. “She was your great-grandmother’s first bridge daughter. What’s your great-grandmother’s name?”
“Ma Cynthia,” Ruby said. “Cynthia is named after her.”
“That’s right,” Hanna said. “This is Ma Cynthia’s house. She raised your grandmother here.” She returned to the family tree before them. “Ma Cynthia had a Hanna too. She would’ve given birth to Grandmother’s sister, but she died before her finality.”
“I thought you said that only happened a long time ago?”
“It was a long time ago,” Hanna said. “She had something called Hoff’s Syndrome.”
“Why didn’t they take her to the hospital?” Ruby asked.
“They didn’t know how to treat it back then,” Hanna said.
“Was it sad?”
“It was sad,” Hanna said. “But your great-grandmother was a pretty tough cookie.”
“A cookie?”
“That’s what people called strong women back then. A tough cookie.”
Hanna, lost in thought, turned in her chair toward the rear of the house. The third bedroom, the clapboard room she slept in, wasn’t for guests as her mother had told her. It was for Hanna Abney, Ma Cynthia’s first bridge daughter. She would’ve slept in it in the 1940s. When that Hanna approached her finality, she would’ve been separated from the younger bridge daughters. That explained why Ma Cynthia built the third bedroom. One for herself, one to house the youngest bridges, and the third for the bridge daughter approaching her finality.
Separating the eldest bridge from her younger sisters was an old-fashioned New England tradition the Calvinists brought with them from Europe. In colonial days, bridge daughters in their last month would sleep in the parents’ room, as they were pardoned from the household drudgework the other bridges were assigned. In more modern days, the eldest bridge was given her own room and tended to by the younger bridges.
Ruby was sobbing. Surprised, Hanna returned to the present. She instinctively put an arm around her. “What’s wrong, what’s going on?”
“I know you love Uncle Rick,” Ruby said, voice thick and wet.
“Of course I do,” Hanna said, confused.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t give you a boy,” Ruby said. She cried harder. “I would’ve tried anything, I would’ve tried so hard. But I wanted a Ruby Jo.” She shook in Hanna’s arms. “I should have thought of you and Grandmother first.”
“Shhh,” Hanna whispered into Ruby’s ear, wrapping herself around the little girl. “It doesn’t work that way.”
“Mama,” Ruby said, “I want to raise my baby so bad.” Her face was sopping wet. “I want to take care of little Ruby Jo every day. When she’s crying at night, I want to get up and rock her back to sleep. I want to make her breakfast every morning. I want to change her d
iapers.” Ruby buried her face into Hanna’s shirt. “I can hear her heartbeat when I close my eyes. I can hear both our hearts at the same time. She’ll be so soft and warm and small.”
Stunned by the outburst, Hanna weakly shhh’d and stroked Ruby’s hair, wondering where this all came from. Like Cynthia, Ruby’s little body was flooded with conflicting hormones and biochemistry. Her own gefyrogen and progesterone was mixing with the child’s estrogen, introducing bodily changes and creating unpredictable, contradictory emotions.
“Please let me call her Ruby Jo,” she cried.
“You can call her whatever you want,” Hanna said to comfort her.
“I would give anything to be Ruby Jo’s mama.” Ruby pulled away from Hanna’s shirt. “I’m sorry I didn’t give you a boy,” she said, still crying. “I should have thought of you first.” She flopped her face on the desk. Her tears dropped in splashes over the family tree. The tears made the old blue ink bleed further, and the page grew even more unintelligible.
Thirteen
It was four in the afternoon, a lull time between meals and the daily chores. Ruby sat at the kitchen table poring over old Betty Crocker cookbooks she’d discovered in a bottom drawer. She studied the recipes with uncommon patience in an age of instant search and cooking channels. She admired the oversaturated Kodachrome photos of 1960s American comfort food: casseroles and roasts and thick stews and glazy Bundt cakes. She massaged her distended belly through her dress while reading. Hanna asked how she was doing and Ruby replied fine, although she could feel the baby moving within her.
“They’re twins,” she said offhandedly while studying a recipe for baked Alaska.
“Who are twins?” Hanna said.
“Ruby Jo and Ruby Jo,” she said. She nodded toward the toy crib set up in the corner of the living room adjoining. Ruby’s wenschkind lay in it. Ruby had put her down half an hour earlier.
“Twins?” Hanna said. “Honey, twins are born at the same time.”