Mackie says Ruth needs to be the person she is, not the person Magda makes her. He says she’s more than all the people around her put together, that she’s here for a special, separate reason. It’s up to her to put everything in the right place. Danny and what to do about him are up to her. If she is going to make him go away, she’ll have to do it without Magda.
Her mother tugs on the corner of her cape, and she realizes she hasn’t been paying attention. “Look that way,” Matt is saying, pointing out over the Sound, away from the haze of light over Highbone and into the clear sky.
“You watching, Ruth?” Her mother laughs and tugs again. “Where have you been, girlie?”
“Magda’s house. When we were little. I was remembering something.”
“They’ll come up from the northeast,” Matt says, “like they’re spraying up from the horizon. They call them the Lyrids because it looks like they come from a constellation named Lyra, but they don’t. I guess back in the day, the old guys thought they did, before they had good telescopes and stuff. They’re actually between us and Lyra. People thought they were falling stars that came from those constellations, so they named them after the constellation it looked like they were coming from. They were Italians, you know, lots of the great astronomers, like Galileo.”
“I always liked the sound of falling stars,” Ruth sighs. It’s like the hayloft door, another thing that turns out not to really be. “So if they’re not stars, what are they?”
“They come from comets. Comets sort of like carry loads of stuff along with them because of gravity.”
“So, how do you know all this, Matt?” Her mom sounds all interested and motherly.
“Oh, I saw a thing on PBS.”
“No, he didn’t,” Ruth says. “He reads about it. Don’t pretend you don’t, Matt. Mom thinks people who read are cool.”
Matt looks embarrassed now, and Ruth realizes he doesn’t really know them that well. He’s awed by them because they hang out at the beach making fires and smoke pot with the kid. Her. She is an accessory to his worship of her mother’s coolness.
“They’re made of ice,” Matt says. “In the ice there’s dust and little pieces of space crap. So, uh, when the comets buzz past, some of the ice melts, and the little pieces of rock get caught in earth’s gravity and burn up in the atmosphere. Mostly they burn up before they come anywhere near the ground, but sometimes they’re really ginormous, and they land and make craters and stuff.”
“But why are they going up?” Ruth knows her mother isn’t that dumb. She’s just saying it because Matt sounds nervous and she’s trying to give him a reason to feel smart.
“It just looks like that because of the way we’re rotating,” Matt says. “In space, there is no up. The earth is round, with space in every direction. Up is only a concept if you’re standing on something really, really big.”
If you could speed up time, just lying still and looking at the sky would make you dizzy. Sometimes you can see that, if you lie down on your back on the football field when clouds are going by. They’re all on a ride together, like at the firemen’s fair. It’s just that the ride is too big for them to be able to tell, most of the time.
“Anyway,” Matt says, “in space terms, meteors are not coming from far away at all. They’re really way closer than anything else in the sky.”
Just passing sparks trapped by the atmosphere. Just prisoners of gravity disguised as gifts from the stars.
REALITY
one
THE MOON IS up, and you can’t see the falling stars from here. Ruth has been drawing, and her bed is full of paper and pencils. Every time she turns over, her pictures crunch like autumn leaves, but she doesn’t want to put them away. She won’t sleep tonight anyway. There is a clue here; the world is trying to tell her something. The only way to get it out of her head is to draw it. Once, when they were reading Edgar Allan Poe in English, Mr. Driscoll said a clue means a ball of yarn. It’s the thing you use, like Ariadne, to make sure you don’t get lost in the labyrinth. Hold on and follow it; you can’t let go.
Whatever it is she can feel moving towards them all lately, it becomes almost clear for a minute when she tries to put it on paper. It’s like ever since she burned her birth certificate, things have started to show themselves. The pictures are whispering the truth into the dark. She can hear them.
No, it’s someone outside the window, calling up at her from the yard at two thirty in the morning. When she puts her head out the window there is Isabel, standing in two kinds of shadow. Half of her face is mottled with green darkness and the other half is invisible. Is she shaking, or is it just the way the shadows are moving over her?
“Ruth, I need you,” she says. “Come outside.”
“Now? I was sleeping.”
“No, you weren’t. I heard you talking to yourself. I just need some company.” Isabel is standing very straight, holding herself with every muscle. She’s poised like a tightrope walker, like if she lets go of any part of herself or breathes too fast, she’ll fall off of the world.
“Jesus, Isabel. What happened? Did Matt catch you guys?”
“What?” She looks confused, like she robbed someone’s house and then forgot about it. “Oh. No, it’s all good. The weed’s in Magda’s carriage house. We can figure out what to do with it later. Come outside, please.”
“All right, be quiet. You’re gonna wake someone up.”
Ruth throws down blankets and candles, cigarettes and a sleeping bag from her bedroom, and whispers for Isabel to wait in the back by the woods.
“Bring your mom’s mescal.”
She puts her drawings away in the box under the bed, and then takes her mom’s tequila from the dark, spicy living room. Under the trees Isabel has already spread the blankets. From the kitchen door, Ruth can see the burning ember of her cigarette and the blue-white shadow of the blanket. She can smell Isabel’s smoke and the earth under the trees.
“Who do you love the most?” Ruth holds up the half-full bottle of mescal and swirls the worm around the bottom. “Me, right? I’m the one. My mom will notice, and she will be very, very scary. She’s had this for, like, ten years. Her friend Susan brought it back from the Yucatan.”
“Its time has come, Ruth. Trust me. And yeah, you’re the one. I actually think you are.”
“You gonna tell me what’s the matter?”
“Can we just stay here and not talk about me?” Isabel says. “What kind of weird shit are you thinking tonight? Tell me about it.”
“I was drawing. Well, I was in the dark, but before that I was drawing. Don’t you think things are getting kind of weird lately, Isabel?”
“I guess.” It’s like someone invisible is shouting in Isabel’s other ear the whole time, and she’s trying to pretend they’re not there.
“I want to change that flower I drew on the wall in your room,” Ruth says. “I have an idea.”
“No way. We’re not going to my house, maybe ever again.” Isabel is still shaking, but she doesn’t look scared exactly. She looks full of some kind of energy, like sparks would fly off if you brushed up against her.
“Okay, I’m just saying. I was thinking about tulips, and Mrs. Warren and your mom, and just housewives in general. I want that flower to be a tulip. Tulips are a little like housewives. When they first pop up they look all domestic and Dutch and remind you of windmills and shit, but when you bring them in the house they change. In the house, they get kind of tropical. They look like sex and danger. Tulips make me think of a dumpy housewife in her terry cloth bathrobe, stripping off and turning into some kind of Mrs. Robinson.”
“Are you suggesting my mom has some secret Mrs. Robinson element to her? ’Cause that’s nuts. And also, ewww.”
“I just want to change that flower on your wall into a tulip,” Ruth says. “But not a picture-book tulip, an open one.”
By the time the false dawn comes, their cigarettes are making trails as they move to and from their mouths,
and the stars won’t stay still in the sky. The mescal is gone and they’ve split the worm. They’re lying in a weird mix of streetlight and starlight, all patterned by shadows from the woods behind Ruth’s house.
Then she notices Isabel’s eyes, staring out of that light.
“What? Why are you staring at me?”
“You’re always surprising me lately. The stuff that comes out of your brain amazes me. Seriously, I don’t mean that in a sarcastic way.”
“I’m surprising myself, too. It’s kind of more scary than amazing, trust me.”
“Ha. Ruth Carter, you have no idea how much a person can surprise themselves. Trust me.” Isabel has another cigarette in her mouth, but she forgets to light it.
“Hang on, hang on.” Ruth cups a match, and then they both have to laugh at the trails the flame makes. “Jesus, we’re wasted.”
“Anyway, I was just feeling a little bit of awe.” Isabel pauses for a long drag, then cocks her head. “Is that an oxymoron, a little bit of awe?”
“We’ll let it go.”
“You know, Ruth, we could . . . I mean, no one’s here. Don’t you think I should just kiss you? Should I?”
“Christ, Isabel! You like guys, everyone knows that.”
“I like you, too, Ruth. Don’t be so suburban.”
“You’re addicted to male attention, Bel. That’s why you’re never going to live by yourself on a houseboat. There’s always gonna be some skinny, brooding artist leaving his dirty socks around. Guys are your fucking vocation.”
“Bel? I’m Bel all of a sudden?”
“I’m kind of drunk and tripping. Three syllables is a lot. Anyway, you’re talking crap.”
“Shut up,” Isabel says. “I need you right now. Anyway, I want to.” And she does, and all the rest of it is Isabel’s idea too.
Ruth can feel the nervous energy in Isabel’s body. She always imagined it would feel still and weightless, holding someone like Isabel. Like dreaming. This is like speeding down a highway while you’re trying to put your hand out and touch the car next to you.
After a while she has to bite Isabel’s shoulder so she won’t shout and wake up the neighbors. For a second, she imagines a circle of angry middle-aged suburbanites in their bathrobes holding pitchforks, staring down at them with hellfire in their eyes.
But then Isabel whispers in her ear.
“Come on,” she says. “You have to save me now.”
There is a shadow over Ruth, and where the shadow isn’t, she can feel the daylight on her skin. When she opens her eyes, it will be morning and there will be a third person there, so she keeps them closed as long as she can. She can hear Isabel next to her, breathing quick, oblivious breaths. At some point, Isabel was crying in her sleep, but that stopped hours ago.
It turns out to be Mackie, standing there in front of the light, just the black outline of his coat against the sun. She can’t see his eyes, but she realizes he must be able to see all the parts of them that aren’t covered.
“Didn’t I tell you you’d be new?” he says.
“This is what you meant?” Ruth puts a hand up to shade her eyes and Mackie’s face resolves out of the shadow.
“Maybe. Come and have a smoke; she looks like she’s down for the count.”
Ruth wraps an open sleeping bag around herself and makes her way over to sit with Mackie on the kitchen steps. The cold cement feels good scratching the backs of her calves. Mackie smells like a bar and also like the ocean.
“So, how you feeling?” He cranes his neck to look around and into Ruth’s eyes.
“About what?”
“Everything, little Carter. Everything.”
“This doesn’t mean they’re suddenly going to get me,” Ruth sighs. “You can touch people without touching them, you know?”
“Why do you keep giving yourself to people, Ruth?”
“Uh, duh. Because I want them to give themselves back. Doesn’t everybody?”
“You think she wants that?” He tosses his head towards Isabel.
“No, I don’t. How come you know everything about everyone? You never even met Isabel.”
“Seen ’em all before. There’s another way to do things, you know. You could just take what you want and let everybody else look to themselves. That’s what they’re all doing.”
“Lately I think I might do something drastic. Something I can’t take back. I want to set things straight around here, but do I actually want to hurt people? I mean I would, totally, to protect my mom, but is that actually what I’m doing?”
“So,” he says, “what is it you want?”
“I kind of want to know about my dad. I mean, you know, on one level I don’t give a shit. But why does my mom have to lie to me about it? Everyone knows who he is, but no one will ever say it. There’s a picture of me and my parents in the encyclopedia under ‘Elephant in the Living Room.’”
“People are never gonna be honest, Ruth. You have to learn to see through them.”
“There isn’t any room for me to talk about stuff like that around those two.” She looks up at Isabel. “What’s the point? But, you know, people are messed up and wrong. I don’t see why we have to just leave it like that.”
“Well?” Mackie stretches his legs out on the steps and looks sideways at her.
“I want to make people admit what they’ve done. How come somebody gets to slam my mom up against the wall and then just walk away? I don’t want people to get away with just screwing people over, especially not us.”
“What if you’re the one who’s right?” he says. “Remember that time in karate when the sensei yelled at you because you turned a different way from everyone else? He wanted you to defend yourself because you were the only one who got it right. You’re not crazy. You just trust other people too much. Whatever you think you might do, maybe it’s the right thing.”
“Even if it hurts?”
“Everything hurts.”
“She won’t care, Mackie.” Ruth points at the blankets and the empty bottle and Isabel in the middle of the mess with her arms tossed out to the side. “It won’t mean anything.”
“Not to her, maybe. People don’t have a right to just use you, Ruth. Maybe you’re the first woman in your family who’s gonna do something about it.”
“I can’t sleep these days, Mackie. If she didn’t come, I would have been up all night anyway, just dreaming with my eyes open. I’m so tired.”
“Fix things. Then you can rest.” He stands up and puts his hands in the pockets of his coat, turning away from her to face the woods.
“Where were you anyway, Mackie? Have you been up all night? You just going home?”
He doesn’t turn around, just raises his hand and walks into the trees towards the brake repair shop.
two
RUTH CAN FEEL the heat from under the hood of Danny’s car when she climbs up to sit on it. Danny is in the deli, getting them take-out Saturday breakfast. He came into the backyard this morning and said if they wanted they could go out on the boat with him. He said the sun would burn the haze off the water and it would be warm enough to swim. Creepy the way he keeps trying to suck up to her.
“It’s Saturday and I’m up at seven o’clock.” Isabel slumps down onto the stoop of Mariner’s Maps and Books. “This is just twisted.”
“You’re the one that wanted to come, Isabel. I didn’t want to play the happy-families game.”
She can tell Isabel isn’t even thinking about what happened in the night. She won’t remember it next week, probably. Matt, then Isabel, and now Danny. And still Isabel. Isn’t there someone you can apply to for a break when too many things happen at once? She remembers Mackie, fading into the trees.
A little gust of summer blows up Main Street. Ruth stretches her arms out to welcome it, trying to feel that August heat that will come up off the street just to wrap around them and hold them. Spring is so merciless, the light without the heat, and the way it fools you and then throws cold breezes
, so you never know what to wear or when you can relax. In the summer, days will be slower, even though they have the same number of hours. One night they’ll realize they’re out in the dark with short sleeves, wrapped in just the warm air.
Today, there is that mist that comes off the water when two seasons collide. Danny could feel it all the way from South Highbone, the way fishermen do. He said it meant the air would be warm over the water.
“You know there are tunnels under here, and whole rooms and stuff,” Isabel says with her eyes closed, head against Mr. Lipsky’s glass door.
“What?”
“Underground Highbone,” she says. “It’s left over from Prohibition, secret speakeasies with bars and pianos.”
“That’s a myth,” Ruth says. “Everyone knows someone who’s been down there, but have you ever actually met someone who’s seen it?”
“It’s not. People have been down there. We could probably get into every building on Main Street from the tunnels under there. We can move the weed down there. It could be our secret headquarters.”
Why won’t she stop talking? All this stuff about tunnels under their feet is wrecking Ruth’s thoughts about warmth and light. Isabel showed up last night and just bulldozed her way right into Ruth’s body. Now she won’t shut up.
Ruth looks down to the bottom of Main Street, where Lefty is standing by the floating dock with his friend Robert. They’ve got their heads bent down, scanning the sidewalk for abandoned treasure. You can tell they haven’t been to sleep. They’ve been standing for hours at the edge of the park, smoking the rescued ends of cigarettes and waiting for the air to turn from blue to yellow. Maybe Lefty is about to open up his mouth and let out the poetry that’s been building up all night. It will sound slow and soft in the warm air.
“Come on.” She pokes Isabel with her foot. “Let’s say hi to Lefty and his friend. We can get a poem for breakfast.”
“I was talking, you know, Ruth.”
“Yeah, but Lefty’s talk is better.”
Little Wrecks Page 11