Mothers and Other Liars

by Amy Bourret

  “It took me four tries to get the first diaper on.” But Lark took to the bottle right away, making the cute smacking noises Ruby remembered from feeding calves on her friend’s farm. Lark finished that first bottle right there in the Wal-Mart snack bar, slurping the last drops as if it were a soda-fountain malt, flipping the empty bottle on the table. Ruby read the formula label again, scanned the book’s chapter on feeding, shrugged. At the snack bar counter, she asked the pimply kid to fill it halfway with water, afraid the baby might explode if over-fed. Lark drank the second bottle at a more leisurely pace.

  After the meal, they got back in the car and headed toward California and its beckoning ocean. In Albuquerque, they hit rush hour, traffic on the freeway creeping along through a maze of orange barrels to the spider web intersection of highways. Ruby didn’t realize she had been spun north, not west, until just outside the San Juan Pueblo. Then before they reached the next exit, she spotted a sign that said Las Vegas was just one hundred and twenty miles ahead. She had watched enough entertainment news to know that Las Vegas wasn’t far from Los Angeles; surely she could find a route to California from there.

  As the last shards of sunlight were soaking into the mountains, the Jeep crested the hill above Santa Fe, and the persistent whine that Ruby had ignored since the big hill up to Cochiti mutated to a metal-on-metal grate. Taking the first exit, she steered the car toward a swarm of lights, like fireflies frolicking in the valley, and coasted into a strip-mall parking lot.

  The baby woke before she could even think about the car. And as she was snapping Lark back into her sleeper, this time fastening the diaper, not backward, not sideways, on the first try, the voice pierced the crisp air. “Hi, I’m Margaret. Let me guess. You thought our Las Vegas was the one in Nevada.”

  She watches Margaret watching her, tries to imagine the view from Margaret’s eyes. While Lark was growing from infant to adolescent, Ruby grew from a too-tall, mousy teenager to the confident mother she is today, or was yesterday anyway. The mousy is still there in her appearance, mousy brown eyes, mousy brown hair that Margaret trims once a month into short layers that feather around her face. If she were asked yesterday, though, she would have said that her demeanor isn’t mousy anymore, but today she’s not so sure.

  “But why?” Margaret asks.

  “I was nineteen and stupid.” Ruby smirks at her belly. “As opposed to almost thirty and stupid.” She takes a sip of the wine. “I wanted to be a wild child. Like my mother.” She remembers so little of that first life. But she remembers this, the wildness. A photograph in her underwear drawer shows her parents standing by that shiny red car, laughing and hugging each other. And in a picture in her mind she sees herself in the backseat, car top down, her father driving, her mother riding shotgun, laughing, hair whipping in the wind.

  “I had just lost my grandmother,” Ruby says. “I had no one. I wanted to go back there, to California. I guess I thought maybe I could find my mother, some of her, there on the beach.”

  Margaret leans back, crosses her denim-clad legs. “And then?”

  “And then came Lark. And you.” Ruby gestures to the mountains, fading to purple beyond the backyard shed. “And this.”

  Back then, Ruby thought that what she wanted, what she needed, was that wild life, unrooted, washed clean every day by the tide. Such a change from the careful Iowa life, cultivated in tidy rows, that she had with Nana. The life her mother had fled.

  But the truth is, Ruby is not her brave mother. She is timid, fearful, afraid of even the idea of constantly shifting sands, foam swirling around her ankles, tugging her out to sea. The craggy edges of mountains give her something to hold on to, and she needs something to hold on to.

  She fills her mouth with the last of the wine from her glass and swallows as if she’s trying to down a pill. “I’ve still never seen the ocean.”

  EIGHTEEN

  “Are you ready to talk?”

  Ruby’s question is met with the murderous look perfected by girls long before they turn nine. She enters Lark’s bedroom without an invitation, sits down on the floor beside the bed. Lark stands at her easel, scribbling furiously in black marker over the painting she has been working on with Molly. “Hey, I liked that one.”

  “I. Messed. It. Up.” Lark spits her words. “It’s ugly.”

  “Well, I liked it. Guess that means I like ugly, huh.”

  Lark shoots Ruby another glare, rips the page off the easel, and crumples it up.

  “We’re going to have to talk about this,” Ruby says. “About what it means.”

  Lark throws the wadded paper to the floor. “It means you lied.”

  Ruby grabs her daughter by the wrist, tugs her to the floor beside her. They sit side by side, each of them with knees pulled into her chest, arms wrapped around shins. Clyde sprawls in the doorway, keenly watching his humans.

  “You lied to me, Mama.”

  “I lied to everybody, baby.”

  Lark rests her head on her knees, with flexibility Ruby lost long before she was pregnant. “So my dad wasn’t killed by a tractor?”

  Ruby shakes her head. “Nope. Your great-grandpa was, though.”

  “I wasn’t really born in Iowa?”

  “Nope.”

  Clyde whines, plods over to them, brushes Ruby’s knees as he darts in to lick Lark. Lark stays folded up, scrunches her face at the dog’s tongue until Ruby manages to yank him away. Lark wipes her cheek against her arm, tucks her chin into the hollow between her bony knees. “And…”

  Ruby tips her head against the mattress edge, as if bouncing her words off the ceiling will soften the blow to Lark. “And even though you didn’t come from my body, I’m still just as much your mother.”

  “Okay.” Lark jumps to her feet, picks up her crumpled artwork, tosses it into the wastebasket in the corner.

  “Okay?” Ruby lifts her head, watching her daughter warily.

  Lark steps back to her easel. “Okay.” She picks up the marker, replaces its cap, drops it into her tackle box of supplies. “Okay, I forgive you. But you should have told me I was adopted.”

  Ruby lets her head fall back against the bed; her brain too heavy with thoughts to balance on a mere human neck.

  “Mom, I said okay. But if it’ll make you feel better, I can ground you.”

  NINETEEN

  Later that night, Chaz sits on the blue cloud of sofa, beer in hand.

  On the surface, their backgrounds couldn’t be more different. Chaz holds a degree from the University of New Mexico; he goes to Mass with his family every Sunday of the world. He is rough-and-tumble, law-and-order. He owns a gun. Yet Ruby found a gentleness under those muscles, and his values were the same ones that Ruby had been steeped in, like she was a bag of Lipton in boiling water.

  When Chaz walked her to the Jeep after they met at the Mexican restaurant, he pointed up to the half-full moon. “My little sister’s right. You hung that one for sure.”

  And Ruby thought to herself, Yes. And I’m over it, too.

  She still is over the moon about this man. If what she tells him, if it drives him away…she can’t imagine facing what ever is to come without him beside her.

  Chaz places a finger on her lip, gently rolls it out from between her teeth. “What is it?”

  And for the third time that day, she breaks her news, knowing she will break another heart.

  For Chaz, Ruby includes logistics. A few discreet questions out at the flea market, and she was pointed to Beer Barrel Pete and his back-room forgery business. A week later, a birth certificate for Lark Ann Leander was in Ruby’s hands. She doesn’t tell Chaz that the date, December 6, was her grandmother’s birthday, or that Annie was her mother’s name.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’ll do what—whatever—I have to do.” She pauses, hesitates. “I can trust you with this?”

  Chaz drops his eyes deliberately, blatantly, to her belly. “How can you ask that?”

  But she
has to ask. He’s a cop, after all.

  As if reading her thoughts, Chaz speaks. “I’m a cop. Didn’t you ever worry about getting involved with a cop?”

  “No.” Ruby shakes her head. “That’s the thing. It never crossed my mind. I never thought what I did was a crime. And it’s not like that day was always on my mind. You think other mothers are constantly reminiscing about their labor or the long road of adoption? After a while, your kid is just your kid.”

  Now, though, Ruby does think about it. By telling him, she’s making him compromise his values, risk his job. She has to know how much this man will give up for her. Would he run away with them, leaving his family behind forever? Would he raise their child on his own, wait for Ruby to get out of jail?

  Chaz sinks lower into the spongy sofa, rests the beer on his knee. “This is what I do, bring kids home.” His voice is chalky; his eyes look everywhere but at her.

  “Bangers,” Ruby says. “Druggies, messed-up kids.”

  “They’re still kids. They still have mothers.”

  “I am her mother.”

  Chaz looks her in the eye, finally. “No. You’re not. That’s the problem, Ruby.” He sets his beer on the table, stands, wipes his hands on his jeans.

  “Don’t,” she says. “Please.”

  “I need some time.”

  As he walks out the door, Ruby wonders if he is walking out of her life.

  TWENTY

  This office doesn’t look like a TV law firm. The lawyers have converted an old adobe home off Paseo de Peralta into an airy workspace. A woman—secretary, receptionist maybe—leads Ruby to the doorway of what must have been a corner bedroom, closes the French doors behind her. Two walls boast twin sets of windows that seem to pull the ash trees inside. The other two walls are lined with glass shelves that hold a collection of pre-Colombian artifacts; the glass and precision lighting create the appearance that the pieces are levitating under an ancient mystical spell.

  A fiftyish man, poet’s beard, jeans and white turtleneck, sleeves pushed up to the elbows, steps from behind the drafting table centered between the windows on the far wall. “John Brainard,” he says. “John.” The hand he extends is calloused, not the hand of someone who sits behind a desk all day. A gardener, Ruby thinks. She tries to still the quaking in her own hand as she holds his.

  “Angela was a little vague about what you need.” He motions her to a low-slung leather chair next to an old chunk of wood—probably a piece of gating or a window shutter—that serves as a coffee table. He takes the seat next to her, picks up a crisp yellow pad and pen off the table. “What can I do for you?”

  Ruby clasps her hands in her lap, sits ramrod-stiff in the slinky chair. “It’s confidential, what I tell you. Right?”

  “Unless it involves a future crime—say you tell me you’re about to murder someone and tell me exactly who—then, yes, I am bound by attorney-client confidentiality.”

  She looks around the room, trying to get a fix on this poet-lawyer-antiquities-collector-gardener, whether to put her trust in him. Her grandmother used to say something about faith, about jumping off a cliff and building your wings on the way down. Ruby isn’t sure that she can craft wings big enough for this mess, but she doesn’t know what to do except jump.

  TWENTY-ONE

  For so long Ruby had been alone with that macaroni necklace of a center line, tugging her through the void, away from Iowa and Nana’s too-fresh grave, away from what she considered her second life, even if she could barely remember the first. Then, just as the blackness was fading to purple, the oasis appeared, a rest stop right there beside that sorry excuse of an interstate. Her parched throat urged her to exit.

  She steered past three slumbering trucks, their amber bulbs glowing like animal eyes in the half-light. Two drivers in gimmee caps stood to the side, jumped back in mock terror as Ruby maneuvered up the narrow lane. At the top of the hill, she stepped out of her shiny new Jeep, stretched to reshape her body from a question mark into an exclamation point, then walked behind the rented trailer to give the padlock a quick tug.

  The vacant pavilion wasn’t much of a rest stop, just a couple of picnic tables and a bathroom ripe with bleachy stench. But it did have vending machines, and after feeding them with lavender-scented coins scavenged from the bureau drawer and administering one swift kick, Ruby held a sweaty can of Coke and a Clark bar. One person’s pin money was another’s breakfast.

  Down at the bottom of the hill, engines coughed and yellow lights lit up the humps of the semis, modern-day camels leaving the oasis to cross an asphalt desert. She stood there for a moment, feeling very alone in that breezeless Oklahoma air. Then she drained the can in a few gulps, the burbling stream trickling down the desert of her throat with a burn comforting in its familiarity.

  If Ruby hadn’t been such a strident litter-loather, she would have missed her entirely. But when she tore off the end of the candy wrapper, a bit of paper clung to her fingers, still moist with condensation from the can, so Ruby stepped right up to the mesh barrel—tilted for drive-by tosses—to flick the scrap into the mound of trash.

  “Holy shit!” Ruby’s voice was a rifle shot through the still of dawn as she jumped back from the barrel. “Ho-ly shit.” She stepped closer, peered into the pile of trash. Maybe it was dead, so unblinking were those saucer eyes. She looked back at the pay phone, where a receiver-less cord hung next to an empty, blue phone book jacket. She looked down at the entrance ramp, hoping to see another car, someone, anyone, who could deal with this horror instead of her. Then she blew a whisper of air at the face, which was answered with a jerk of pink-clad limbs.

  A baby. What kind of mother would just throw away a baby like it was a half-eaten Big Mac? The papers had stories about this kind of thing. Young mothers, poor mothers, desperate mothers leaving their babies in church doorways and outside hospitals. Did this baby cry one too many times on a nerve-frazzling drive? Maybe it was sick or something. Maybe it had some awful birth defect that the mother just couldn’t handle.

  Ruby surveyed the few bits of baby not shrouded in jumpsuit; all body parts looked to be intact and appropriately apportioned. Except for those impossibly huge eyes. Maybe that was the deal breaker; maybe the mother couldn’t stand one more second of those eyes peeling away the layers of her soul, seeing all the ways she was sure to disappoint them in the years to come.

  “Damn, damn, damn.” Ruby rubbed at her gritty forehead, trying to force her road-weary brain to think. The broken telephone was not going to help. And flagging down a passing truck would take more nerve than she could muster. The baby just lay there, not making a sound, clutching the neck of a purple and pink toy giraffe in one tiny fist. Wisps of pale hair framed the narrow face, and those disconcertingly soulful eyes stared back at Ruby as if waiting for her to come up with the answer they already knew.

  Tucking the candy bar into her jeans pocket, Ruby reached in and plucked the baby, carrier and all, from the nest of fast-food wrappers and soda cans.

  TWENTY-TWO

  John picks up a pair of dime-store reading glasses, twirls them by one stem. “Have you checked this out? Are you sure it’s the same baby?”

  Ruby nods, incapable of further words. Telling this story again, to an outsider, even one bound by confidentiality, has deflated her. Tears threaten to leak from her eyes like the last breath of air from a punctured tire.

  The lawyer stands, moves to one of the displays, makes minuscule adjustments to the position of a few artifacts. He is kind, she thinks, creating busywork to give her time to collect herself. If nothing else, at least this lawyer is kind.

  That day at the rest stop, Ruby had thought of all kinds of reasons why a baby would end up in a trash can. Except this one: that a couple of drugged-out teenagers would steal a car from a gas station in Dallas, a car with a baby inside. That the girl would sober up just enough somewhere in Oklahoma, hear her boyfriend crazy-talk about his plans to get ransom by sending the parents the baby’s ear.
That she would sneak the baby out of the car when her boyfriend stopped to take a leak, hoping he was still too coked-up to notice the baby wasn’t in the backseat. That the girl would find Jesus in rehab nearly ten years later, track down the mother through archived news reports, tell her story. Just the third step of the twelve she was climbing.

  “This says she left the baby on a picnic bench as a trucker was pulling in.”

  Ruby nods. “Maybe she was too stoned to remember. Maybe she didn’t want to admit she threw her in the trash.” This detail, the one that Ruby hopes Lark never learns, could be too horrible for the girl to retain, let alone speak. “I don’t know, but I know it’s Lark.”

  “What about the truckers you saw? Do you remember anything about them, in case we need to locate them?”

  As if scrutinizing the room today will help her peer across the years, Ruby scrunches her forehead. “The trucks were from the same company. It was barely light, but I remember a slogan, something Christian, across the backs.” She doesn’t add that she remembers this because it bugged her, that someone would use religion as a marketing ploy. Jesus is my copilot, so I’ll drive your stuff, what, faster? Better?

  “I can make some inquiries, discreet, of course, with the federal prosecutor down in Albuquerque.” He steps back toward Ruby, pretzels himself into his chair. “I know her. We were in law school together at UNM. She’s a straight shooter and a good lawyer. She trounced me in moot court.”

  He picks up his yellow pad and starts scribbling. The scritch scritch of pen against paper fills the quiet of the room. Then he lays the pad on the table, leans forward, hands clasped at his knees. “It is possible, given the circumstances, that we can negotiate a deal for you, but…”