Ruby

by Francesca Lia Block

  Ruby

  a novel

  Francesca Lia Block

  Carmen Staton

  for our children

  Contents

  the island of the animals

  states of sound and silence

  nice men

  it might as well be me

  cauldron of wisdom

  the crone

  fear of the dark

  spells of invisibility

  the wish

  miss flora and the demon

  the mother

  sympathetic magic

  sacrifice

  spring

  the green man

  lady of the forest

  the maiden

  the dreams

  the knowing

  my father always

  threefold

  home

  the opposite of birth

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  Praise

  Other Books by Francesca Lia Block

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  THE DAY OF HIS FATHER’S FUNERAL, the boy walked into the parlor and saw his mother smiling. The sun was coming through the leaded glass diamonds, as yellow and bright as the daffodils that grew in front of the cottage. The boy would have preferred a soft mist or rain, as if the willow were weeping. He would have preferred to at least find his mother’s face somber, if not tear-streaked, maybe a little more lined than yesterday, but instead she looked younger. Even her eyes, which—because of their damp darkness and the way they tipped down almost imperceptibly at the corners—always looked sad, seemed to be celebrating. The gentleman was standing with his back to the boy, but the boy recognized their neighbor by his broad shoulders, long legs, and dark, tousled hair. From the back, when you couldn’t see his spectacles and refined features, he resembled an athlete more than a scholar. For the first time it struck the boy that his mother and this man looked a little like brother and sister. It had something to do with their long eyelashes and full mouths as well as their coloring.

  The man had his hand on the small of the boy’s mother’s back.

  The boy thought of his father laid out in a casket. He looked nothing like him and their natures were so different. The boy was like his mother, always pretending he was someone else, somewhere else, believing there was a ghost in the well and a sprite living in the forest at the edge of town. The ghost was evil but his mother assured him it could not get out. She’d tried a number of spells but it was still there, muttering about catching the winged forest creature and feeding it to the tabby cat. The sprite was a redhead, kindhearted and graceful. The boy had fallen asleep in the wood once and been awakened by her dancing on his forehead, like a spider. His mother promised him that the sprite would find a way to charm the tabby. She was good with animals and knew their ways.

  The boy’s father hated when they talked about things that weren’t real, things you couldn’t prove with science.

  “I don’t want you getting ideas into his head,” he told his wife. “He’s flighty enough as it is.”

  So the boy had tried to record the ghost’s voice and photograph the sprite but, of course, neither of them chose to reveal themselves for the purpose of convincing an unbeliever. The tape came back garbled, as if rain was falling into the well, although it was a cloudless day, and the photos were grainy, with splotches of colored lights here and there. The boy’s father remained unconvinced.

  In spite of their differences, though, the boy loved his father. He was, after all, his. He had come home from work every day and sat at the table with them and kissed his son good night on the forehead every evening. He had taught him science and history and discussed politics with him. He was a good man, hardworking, faithful, honest.

  The boy knew his mother was lonely. She and his father slept in separate rooms, and sometimes the boy heard her voice whispering late into the night, reciting the spells his father forbade, and sniffing back tears. Still, it did not seem right that she should be smiling so soon.

  When she glanced over the man’s black-clad shoulder, she saw her son’s face and the smile was gone.

  This is what the boy would remember. Not only that she was smiling but that she stopped when she saw him, as if it were wrong.

  On the day of his father’s funeral, the boy wished for mist.

  the island of the animals

  MY FIRST MEMORY

  I am three years old. I want Opal to play with me but she doesn’t want to. I keep going to her bedroom, pestering her mercilessly, but she won’t listen. So I go to the den in the basement, where my parents are watching television. The only light is from the TV screen. There are no windows down here. The air smells dusty. My sister has followed me.

  Eighteen years later, and here, in my mind, it is all still happening.

  My father leaps over the back of the couch and grabs Opal by her hair.

  He punches her in the face.

  My mother jumps on my father, screaming and hitting him, trying to pry his hands off Opal’s throat. He knocks my mom into the wall. A chair topples over. He is still strangling my sister. I can see her pinned to the ground. I can see her eyes.

  I don’t remember why he stops. He just stops. He lies calmly back down on the couch and orders my sister to go play with me. She is still on the floor, sobbing. I can hear the pressure of his fingers in the sound of her voice.

  I am watching all of this, standing right here, filled with rage and disgust, but also completely separate. Then a rushing, sucking sensation, as if my soul has just dropped down into my body for the first time.

  And now I know who I am.

  I am Ruby. I am three. I have decided. I will fight back.

  DURING MY CHILDHOOD, I had what my mother called a wild imagination. My father called me a liar. Ironic, isn’t it, coming from him. What I was—I was a survivor.

  IN THE MIDDLE OF THE LAKE there was a small island. I took my boat there every day. An old white mare carried me through the woods where each tree held a small wooden house supported and concealed in its branches. The air was decked with the scent of flowers I’d never seen before. Their fragrance was almost visible; it made my head spin.

  We came to a large mansion. It was like some kind of plantation home, white with black shutters, columns, a wraparound porch with big rocking chairs and wooden palm-leaf fans. Quirky contraptions for using the natural energy of the sun and wind. All the plants in the overgrown garden had healing properties if you knew how to use them. Inside the house, the animals roamed free. They had been rescued from their abusive homes. A parrot with its eyeball burned out by a cigarette butt. An ocelot that had been declawed and whipped until it could barely walk. Lizards smuggled from their native habitats, crammed together inside of tiny boxes so that their frills had broken off. I spent the day with the animals. They sat on my shoulders and in my lap. I fed them berries and sang to them. I never wanted to leave.

  But back I went to sit at my parents’ table, watching my father clenching his cigarette, dropping ashes on the linen.

  Once, my fingers got in the way. When he burned me with the cigarette he insis
ted it was accidental.

  At least I was safe in my mind, though. I knew the animals were waiting for me.

  THERE WAS A BOG behind my friend Amy’s house. I spent hours there, feeling the squishy earth between my toes, lying on my stomach near the water’s edge watching the toads mate and lay their eggs. The males mounted the females, who expelled eggs into the mud. Then the toads all left. The eggs hatched into tadpoles, and I dropped peat moss onto the water’s surface to see the frenzied black squiggles feed.

  Over the spring, I watched them grow legs, become toads, too. My own private lesson in evolution.

  Sometimes, at twilight, I saw bright, eerie sparks just beneath the shallow marsh water. Eyes. The creatures were slicked with mud and they spoke in soft, guttural whispers. I wondered, would they evolve, become girls like me, or were they what I would become if I chose never to leave?

  “They know all about us,” I said, watching my father swallow his meat at the opposite end of the long table. We were the only ones there.

  “Eat your food, Ruby.”

  “Make me.”

  He scraped his chair back and left the room. I sat waiting, motionless, gripping my knife. When he came back, he was holding a yardstick. He reached out and, very slowly, tapped me on the top of the head with the end of the stick.

  I ALWAYS LOVED TREES. I couldn’t stop touching them. Sometimes I rubbed my hands with the residue from their leaves and sniffed my fingers to calm myself as I fell asleep at night. I started climbing as soon as I was tall enough to reach the lowest branches. And there was one tree I loved most of all.

  He was old and strong. Large, low branches spread out like a cupped hand with the fingers open. I could climb halfway to the top and not worry that my weight was too much for him. We talked many times, until we could understand each other’s words. Old man tree. He said that not all trees are men, only a few, most are women. He told me how the years had passed for him, not years like ours, just passages of time based on growth and weather. I never fully understood the system but I listened, and I told him my secrets. I told him about the one hundred books I’d read that summer, running back and forth to the library to win the local contest. I told him the stories I’d made up.

  “What’s the difference?” he asked.

  “Between what?”

  “The man beating the child. The woman in the sky who makes a man from the pieces of her body she loses each night.”

  “One is real. One is fantasy.”

  “But what’s the difference? What does that mean?”

  I couldn’t explain, because the lines were blurry for me, too.

  For example:

  I am at my grandparents’ farmhouse, sitting on the floor, playing with my plastic farm animal set while everyone is watching TV.

  “Where are King and Queen?” I ask.

  My mother looks at me sideways, her eyes large and her mouth small.

  “What did she say?” my father barks.

  “She asked where King and Queen are,” says my grandmother.

  Everyone stares at me. Even my grandfather stops watching the television screen. My mother rubs her arms to smooth out the goose bumps.

  “What do you mean, Ruby?” she asks. “Are you playing a game with your toys?”

  “No,” I say. “King and Queen. The dogs.”

  The German shepherd and the collie. That morning, we went walking on the hill beside the house. Under the big, old walnut tree. They were on either side of me. It was very sunny and I was wearing a delicate pale yellow dress.

  “How could you know that?”

  “How could she know about that?”

  “She must have heard us talking.”

  “She must have seen photos.”

  “She’s never seen photos.”

  My mother explains that King and Queen died a long time ago. I never saw them.

  I insist on it. They say it’s impossible. I know it is true.

  Or:

  I am seven years old. Very ill. Mom and Dad are fighting about taking me to the doctor. He doesn’t want to. I can’t eat and can barely drink. Losing weight. High fever. Can’t walk. I crawl to the bathroom to throw up the Popsicle I just ate.

  That night, I am asleep on the floor of the bathroom and then I am hovering—weightless, warm, full of light, looking down at my small body huddled on the cold tile. I am flying through the house, feeling a fresh breeze on my face, looking down at everything with love. My books and toys, my mother asleep in front of the television, her face in the strange light, the carpet with the red roses, the china with the blue bearded iris pattern, the yellow kitchen that still smells of the bread my mother baked that morning, my sister, Opal, asleep in her room at the far end of the house. Why is her room so far away? I wonder. I can see why they named her Opal. Her skin is so milky and luminous it is almost blue.

  Time to go back.

  No. Why? I don’t want to go back.

  It is time.

  The next morning, Dad takes me to the hospital. I am lying in the room with Dr. Martin, who is looking at my X ray, telling my father they don’t know what is wrong with me. They don’t think I’m conscious.

  “I know what those are,” I say, sitting up. I am pointing at the large bubble shapes all over my torso in the X ray.

  The doctor looks at me, surprised. “What do you think they are, Ruby?”

  “Giant gas bubbles.”

  He examines the dark death-mask image again. “You’re right. How did you know that, sweetie?”

  “I don’t know. I just did,” I say. “Maybe I figured it out when I left my body. I was looking down on everything and I understood things.”

  Dr. Martin comes and sits beside me. He takes my hand. I am aware of my father in the room, watching us. He has never held my hand or called me “sweetie” this way. He almost never calls me anything. It was my mother who named me and my sister—her precious gems.

  The doctor does not address my father, as you might expect, instructing him in my care. He speaks directly to me instead, as if he senses that I am the one who is going to deal with this, make myself better.

  “You have to eat, Ruby,” he says. “Even if it makes you feel sick. And someday maybe you can come back here and work for me. You seem to know a lot for a little girl.”

  “She knows a lot,” my father mutters when we are driving home. “A lot about lying.”

  But it wasn’t lying. I don’t know what it was. My imagination? Real?

  SO I COULDN’T EXPLAIN to my old man tree about the difference between reality and fantasy. I didn’t know.

  We had to move away from my tree. I was too sad to say good-bye to him. I’ve always felt guilty for that. He was the first man I trusted.

  UNTIL STEVEN.

  My friend Amy had come to visit us in the new town. We went cruising the square in her mother’s station wagon. Everyone knew each other, so a new face stood out and Amy was very pretty.

  “Hot,” Steven would say later. “It’s cool she looked so hot because otherwise you and I never would have met.”

  A boy in a Camaro flashed his lights at us, the signal to pull over, and we did. He had short, dark hair, broad shoulders. He was interested in Amy but they didn’t have much to say to each other, so he and I started talking.

  I knew how to talk to boys. You look them in the eye. You listen carefully. You ask questions. You act casual, not girly, like a friend. But sometimes you reach out, almost imperceptibly, and touch their sleeve, their wrist. It is important to not only touch the cloth but to make contact with actual skin.

  Steven took me out the next weekend. Amy had gone back home and I was lonely. I remember how good it felt to walk out the door of my father’s house and get into Steven’s car. I was free. I was safe.

  After the pizza and the movie we had sex in the back seat. I knew something about that, too. It was such an easy way to escape.

  ONE NIGHT, I HEARD STEVEN at the window. I let him in and we lay on my bed, watch
ing 60 Minutes. There was a segment about a virgin rain forest that had been discovered in Africa. It was possibly the last untouched terrain. The gorillas had never seen a human, so they did not know to be afraid. They came right up to you with long, questioning faces. Only the elephants knew. Their kin had sent the message. Fear them. The elephants knew, but when the natives came, the gorillas just stood there until all the adults were killed, just like that, one after the other, and the babies stolen to sell. The dead gorillas were sold, too—their hands and heads to the healers, their fur to wear, their meat to eat. The Western man who had found this place was trying to preserve it. It was perhaps the very last. He had set out to rehabilitate some of the baby gorillas, the ones who had lost their parents. But how would they ever get back where they came from? So as not to die, a primate must bond. If they bonded with the humans who were helping them, they could not be separated.

  I was crying and trying to tell Steven about the gorillas and the rain forest, but he just changed the channel to a football game and ignored me.

  Later that night, when we were having sex, I moved my mouth to his but he moved away.

  “What are you doing?” I asked him.

  “What?”

  “Why don’t you ever kiss me?”

  “I kiss you.”

  “I mean really kiss.”

  He pulled out and flopped over on his side, his back to me. I got up and sat on a chair with my feet tucked up under my thighs, wondering what I was doing.

  I thought I was safe. But, like the gorillas, I had bonded falsely. And now I didn’t know how to separate and survive.