Mothers and Other Liars

by Amy Bourret

  THIRTY-NINE

  Under the Calvin la-di-da bedding is a sanctuary. As if she were immersed in water, Ruby hears only her own breath and the occasional deep sigh from Clyde, sees only the shifting light across the plum-and-lilac splashes of the bedding. She breathes in, inhaling her daughter in every breath; she breathes out, Lark wafting across her face like bubbles in the water. Breathe in, breathe out, in, out. This is all Ruby can do, wants to do. In her plum-and-lilac water cave, she doesn’t have to think, doesn’t have to feel anything but the phone receiver she clutches in her hand.

  She ignores the knock at the door, pulls the covers over her head; Lark’s covers. She has lain in this bed for three nights and days now, the sweet smells of her daughter growing fainter and fainter until now Ruby relies on memory more than nose, imagining her long body filling, spilling over, a Lark-sized dent in the mattress. She has vague memories of Chaz spooning against her, of voices—the Ms and Antoinette—swirling through the room. Mostly she just tries to remember that scent.

  The whole time, Clyde has been beside her, head tucked between his front paws as if he were trying to blindfold himself to the fact of Lark’s absence. But even a blind dog would know Lark was gone; her absence is as palpable as Braille. “I know, boy,” Ruby whispers.

  She groans at the tug of the sheets. “No.”

  “Get up,” Margaret says. “Shower. Eat.”

  Then Molly’s voice. “Come on, Clyde. You, too.”

  Ruby allows Margaret to roll her off the bed, march her toward the bathroom. She winces at the screech of the shower faucet, more noise than she can stand. The scent of Lark’s kiwi shampoo that swirls in the steam wrenches her muscles as if wringing fluid from sodden cloth.

  The hot water pelts her skin, each slender needle a stab to her senses. Rivers gush from the showerhead through her tangle of hair. Streams separate into rivulets that weave down her breasts, over her stomach. Just in the past week it seems, the life within her has decided to make a statement, the discreet bump morphing into a flashy bulge, as if the fetus were shouting, “Remember me?”

  Little creeks run down the hill of her belly, her legs. When they reach the tub floor, the creeks merge back into rivers, converge in a swirl over the drain. And Ruby remembers.

  The enormity of her situation weighs as heavily on her gut as her newly expanded belly weighs on her bladder. Lark is gone, but another life is depending on her. How will she support this other daughter from jail? Who will care for her? She doesn’t know how much, even if, she can count on Chaz. Willing her torpor to wash down her body, into the eddy of the drain, she steps from the shower.

  The sounds of Margaret’s kitchen clatters accompany her as she towels off, and this time the noise hurts less. When she swipes the fog from the mirror, the gaunt face, the football player’s black stripes beneath her dull eyes shock her into an understanding. This, she thinks, is how Lark’s other mother must have felt in those days after her child disappeared with her car.

  Shrouded in the weighty hotel robe Chaz gave her for her birthday, she walks into the kitchen. The window above the sink looks bereft; Margaret has put Lark’s avocado pit and the herb pots in the sink to soak away Ruby’s neglect. The table looks cheerier. A handful of wildflowers dance in the blue cream pitcher; Mrs. Levy’s good china glimmers on top of a much-washed twill place mat. The golden halves of a grilled cheese sandwich are parentheses around a bowl of creamy tomato soup; a tall glass of milk sweats beside the plate. Comfort food, and Ruby is ready, finally, to take comfort, in food and in the sliver of family that remains.

  As Ruby sits, Molly returns with Clyde. His walk has not done him the good of her shower. He plods across the floor from the back porch to the front door, flops down, whimpers.

  “He misses her,” Molly says.

  Margaret nods. “We all do.”

  The Ms communicate a coherent paragraph to each other in a look. They bracket Ruby like the sandwich brackets the soup, make idle conversation—salon gossip, the latest art gallery buzz. Ruby devours the sandwich, a bowl and a half of soup, two glasses of milk. It is a certifiable fact that a grilled cheese sandwich tastes better when someone else makes it for you, but this, this food is biblical.

  She wipes her mouth with the cloth napkin, another remnant from Mrs. Levy, sets it beside her plate. “Lap-kin” Lark called it, which makes more sense given where it is used. This memory burns but doesn’t char.

  Finally, she speaks. She tells them about the phone call the first night, Lark sobbing across the miles. They call her Tyler. They eat in the dining room. Her room is fancy, blue and white, what sounds like toile from her description. White carpet everywhere. She misses Clyde. She misses the Ms. She misses Ruby. She misses Home.

  While Lark was talking, Ruby heard a voice in the background. “What is that? What are you doing?” Then a click, and silence. Still.

  “They have to understand,” Molly says. “They can’t just cut you out of her life, pretend the last nine years didn’t happen.”

  “They don’t have to understand anything,” Margaret says.

  After the meal, the Ms leave Ruby with a stocked fridge and promises, threats really, to come get her if she doesn’t show up for work tomorrow. Clyde sighs his best doggy sigh, drags his chin down the hall and back into Lark’s bedroom. Ruby follows him and makes a halfhearted attempt to straighten the bedding. As she tucks the blanket under the mattress, her hand brushes something. She reaches a bit farther and pulls out a wadded plastic bag.

  Ruby extracts a ball of bright green fabric from the bag and unfurls it with a shake. On the front of the T-shirt, the Girls Inc. logo stamped over the left breast. And on the back, a silk screen, text with a border of kid-drawn flowers and dogs and cats. “I AM,” it proclaims in Lark’s unmistakable purple print.

  I AM

  a bug-loving bookworm

  a baseball fanatic

  a tree-climbing poet

  an old-movie addict

  I like art and science

  I like to dance and meander

  I am a tomboy girl

  I am Lark Leander

  Ruby sits at the foot of the bed and hugs the shirt as the words Lark spoke when Ruby was outside the window blast through her head. I don’t know who I am.

  FORTY

  This strange magnetic quality seems to have come upon Ruby overnight, as if the Sandman sprinkled her with charged metal filings instead of fairy dust. If she weren’t so uncomfortable, she might find it all funny, heads jerking toward her like a dance team doing a domino routine.

  Ruby remembers the doorbell ringing several times during the days of fog, and Antoinette left a message to warn her that the local court stringer had picked up the story.

  Santa Fe has a reputation of being a town out of touch with reality, out of touch with the world. People might rally around a hot topic like Israel or gay rights, but there is supposed to be an air of not caring, even disdain, for the everyday news. Unless that news is a sordid tale about one of their own.

  When she walked into the coffee shop two doors down from the salon to get a cup of herbal tea, she first checked to see that nothing disgusting hung from her nose, that her pants were zipped. In the swirl of whispers, as intoxicating as the aroma of coffee it seemed, Ruby finally got it; she has joined the rarified ranks of celebrity.

  Even here in the salon, her magnetic pull is inescapable. The salon is a homey place; Margaret wanted to steer clear of too-trendy austere and sleek, and, despite the kitschy name, from too-cute poodle pink as well. Instead, Molly painted the walls with columns and friezes in soothing tones of gold and amber and bronze. The space looks like a cozy corner of an Italian villa, where you would want to curl up, if not curl up and dye.

  Today, however, Ruby feels anything but cozy. Eyes bore into her from the mirrors at the four hair stations and from above opened magazines in the waiting area. Tuesdays are always busy days. But today there is an extra hum in the air. And every woman needs to use th
e bathroom just beyond Ruby’s nail table at least once, walking slowly past her on the way to and fro. If she had a sense of humor at all today, she would make a joke about a contagious bladder infection spreading around like a summer cold.

  Ruby’s own clients are more discreet. They talk about their weekends, complain about their husbands, but the obvious strain of not talking about Ruby’s plight is worse than answering questions would be. One client, who is getting only a haircut today, makes a point of stopping by the nail station, patting Ruby on the head. “I’m sorry to hear about your troubles,” she says. Ruby doesn’t like this, either. She doesn’t like the staring; doesn’t like the pretending that nothing is going on; doesn’t like the patronizing attempts at comfort. She wants her fifteen minutes to be over.

  The fourth appointment is Beverly Sokol, a longtime client whose metabolism was obliterated by chemotherapy several years ago. Beverly has a great attitude; Ruby has never seen her down. She has no breasts. Her hair grew back gray and limp and uncontrollable, when she was hoping for springy red curls. She can’t control her weight. But, by God, she’s going to control something, if only a perfect ten of passion-pink acrylic nails.

  Today Beverly sits in the client chair and promptly dissolves into tears. “I’m sorry,” she gasps between sobs. “It’s just so awful.” Ruby brings her a glass of water, puts a box of tissues on the table. Beverly cries through the soaking, cries through the application of acrylic fill with the paintbrush, through shaping the nails with an electric file. She cries all the tears that Ruby can’t shed.

  Not until Ruby strokes polish on the first hand does Beverly drop the last wad of tissues in her lap. She puts her other hand flat on the table, sits up straight in her chair. “Oh, my.” Her voice is as soggy as the tissues. “It’s just…”

  “I know,” Ruby says. “It is. But I finally have some good news. A hearing—for probable cause, it’s called—has been scheduled for next week, in Dallas. And the CPS worker has arranged for me to visit with Lark while I’m there.”

  Knowing when she will see Lark has lifted such a black weight off her that Ruby wonders how she managed to stand upright with it in the first place. Like when a person has the flu. The first day she starts to feel better, she thinks, Wow, I feel so much better, and doesn’t realize how ill she still felt that day until she feels so much better yet the next day. Ruby will never recover from the virus of losing Lark, but at least the days are more bearable now.

  Even so, by one thirty, Ruby’s head is pounding harder than her heart. The stench of hair spray and ammonia-based dye, the pulse of the New Age music Zara turns a decibel too loud, the glob of turkey sandwich caroming around in her stomach, all of it ends up in the space between her eyebrows and hairline.

  She tidies up her station, sterilizes her tools, throws a load of towels in the washing machine in the back room.

  “You’re an official tourist attraction.” Margaret leans against the counter, speaking between mouthfuls of her own late lunch.

  “I’m so sorry,” Ruby says. “I know it’s a distraction.”

  “No complaints from me.” Margaret snaps the lid on her plastic salad bowl, crams it back in the refrigerator. “We’re booked solid through next week.”

  FORTY-ONE

  The doorbell rings soon after Ruby and the dog get home from an evening walk. She turns from the kitchen counter, and the earth shifts beneath her feet. Her heart hammers her ribs as she walks to the door.

  “Lark…”

  Ruby swallows the rest of her sentence when she sees the stricken eyes on the other side of the screen, tries to regain her composure. “…Is not here. She’s in Texas, Numi.” Numi stands there, holding a book in her brown arms. Numi’s build is more athletic, the body of a gymnast rather than a ballerina. She is taller than Lark. They couldn’t possibly be mistaken for each other, even in dim porch light, except by a parched soul desperate to believe.

  “I know. My mom told me.” The young girl holds out the book. “This is hers. I didn’t get to give it back.”

  Ruby takes the slender volume from Numi. “That’s okay, sweetie. I’m pretty sure she read this one already.” Ruby pauses, smiles. “A few hundred times anyway. Would you like to keep it?”

  Numi forces her mouth into a class-photo grimace. “No, thanks.”

  Ruby feels a surge of desire to keep this friend of Lark near. “Why don’t you come in?”

  “My mom, she’s waiting in the car.” Numi stares at the porch floor, scuffs her shoe back and forth. Ruby leans out, waves to Numi’s mother at the curb, waits.

  “I was just wondering.” Numi rakes her hand through Clyde’s coat. “She’s not going to come back, is she?”

  Ruby hugs the young girl against her, her large hand a skullcap on the small head. Every time Ruby breaks a heart, hers breaks a little more, too. “Maybe you’d like to come walk Clyde sometime, keep him company.”

  Numi buries her face at Ruby’s hip. “It wouldn’t be the same.”

  “No, it won’t. But sometimes, in time, different turns out to be okay, too.” Somehow, Ruby thinks, if she can console this child, spread a balm atop her naked wound, then maybe the healing will reach Lark as well.

  Numi pulls away, turns from Ruby, swiping an arm across her face. “That would take a very long time.” As the child slinks down the driveway, Ruby calls out to her. “I’ll tell her, when I see her. I’ll tell her you said hi.” Clyde licks Ruby’s arm while she waits until she hears the car door shut, watches Numi’s mother drive away.

  In the corner of the ceiling, Lark’s bat, Louie, hangs undisturbed. Ruby remembers a summer evening a couple of years ago, soon after Lark discovered their front-porch friend. Chaz was grilling—corn on the cob, hot dogs for Lark and Numi, a big steak for him and Ruby to share.

  “Louie.” Lark’s rosy tongue pushed through the gap of four missing front teeth. “Chaz says we should name him Louie.”

  Ruby remembers Chaz grinning from the side-porch grill, teasing him about being a bad influence on her daughter. “That’s just so politically incorrect, naming a bat after Mr. Armstrong. You’ll have the antidefamation league after us for sure.”

  And then the girls giggling. “He’s blind, mama. Bats are blind, not deaf.”

  And Chaz at the same time protesting, “Not Armstrong. Slugger. Louisville Slugger, the bat.”

  Then Ruby dissolving in laughter at the whole Abbott-and-Costelloish confusion, not even trying to explain to Lark and Numi the difference between “deaf” and “defamation.”

  Tonight, she looks up at Louie and sighs. “This house needs some laughter.”

  FORTY-TWO

  “Come on, girlfriend.” Antoinette pushes Ruby out the door. “You need to get out for a while.”

  Ruby’s shoes scrape across the gravel driveway like one of the old men walking the halls at the nursing home where she volunteers. She climbs onto the side rail of Antoinette’s cousin’s pickup truck, heaves herself into the passenger seat.

  “This’ll be good for you. We’ll find you an old chifforobe or something to punish.” Antoinette backs down the driveway, takes Old Pecos Trail, the more scenic route from the center of Santa Fe to the highway.

  Ruby slides from side to side on the seat with each turn of the truck. She feels adrift somehow, tightens the seat belt that rests below her belly. She keeps looking over at Antoinette, way on the other side of the cabin, across the abyss that used to be Lark on these trips.

  Antoinette tries to fill the void with small talk, about her work-week, how glad she is that the judge she works for decided to close the office while he is on vacation. She talks about her last bad date, her family’s latest antics. Then her speech sputters to an awkward stop in the first sentence of a story about her cousin’s six-year-old daughter.

  “It’s okay,” Ruby says. “I know that other kids still exist.”

  “Just remember, in only eight years, maybe seven if the courts agree, Lark will be able to decide for herse
lf where to live.”

  Ruby looks out the window, at the vast expanse of scrub brush and sand. Eight years is almost as much time as she had with Lark. “What if she ends up hating me for what I did? What if she likes being a little rich girl better?”

  Antoinette looks down at the space between them. “The Lark I know wouldn’t do either of those things.”

  “A lot can happen in eight years.”

  Antoinette fiddles with the radio dial, tunes in an Albuquerque country station. “I’m not gonna tell you everything’ll turn out all right. But I will tell you I’ll be there with you, no matter what.”

  “Will you come visit me in jail?”

  Antoinette takes Ruby’s hand. “Oh, girlfriend. I’ll be bringing you the cake with a file.”

  “With your cooking?” Ruby squeezes Antoinette’s hand then lets go. “I’d probably die from the cake before I could break out.”

  “Pot.” Antoinette flicks Ruby’s shoulder with the back of her hand.

  Ruby manages another grin. Her cheeks feel tight, muscles unused to the upward movement. “Kettle.”

  FORTY-THREE

  A smattering of people work their way around the furniture crammed into the back room of the auction house. The owner, Ernesto, waves to Ruby as she and Antoinette enter. Four or five times a year, or whenever the stacks of chairs reach the rafters and any semblance of aisles disappears, he holds these last-chance sales of estate items that have not been sold.

  Ruby never bothers attending the first-call monthly auctions; antique dealers and decorators and, especially, novice collectors drive the prices out of Ruby’s range at those events. But here, amid the chipped veneer and crap-wood pieces, she has found many treasures. Burled walnut buried under fourteen layers of paint, golden oak planks in furniture too banged up to be useful in its current incarnation.