by T. Greenwood
Nessa nods.
“There’s a girl at my school who can’t talk, but it’s because she’s deaf.”
Nessa unwraps the second candy and puts it into her mouth, the baby kicks again, this time hitting her bladder. She needs to pee. She puts her finger out as though to say, “Wait here,” and the little girl nods. She rises to her feet, and the pain in her foot is blinding. She starts to see stars and reaches for the wall to steady herself.
The girl scrambles to her feet and offers her her arm. “Are you hurt?” she asks.
Nessa nods again and leans against her, tears starting to fill her eyes.
“My dad can’t walk. He’s in a wheelchair. I help him all the time. I know what to do,” she says, though Nessa hasn’t offered her a single word.
The girl guides her as she hobbles out the door. Nessa motions with her chin that she’s okay and that the girl should go back into the cabin. The girl releases her and Nessa makes her way along the side of the cabin and pulls up her skirt to pee. The sound of her urine echoes the sound of the river. The grass is wet from her pee, wet from the rain. She has nothing to wipe with but damp leaves. She struggles to get herself situated again and then hops back to the door where the girl is waiting for her and helps her back into the cabin.
“I can go get help,” the girl says.
Nessa shakes her head.
The girl shrugs, but doesn’t persist.
“Here,” she says, handing her a pencil. “Make a list of what you need. I’ll come back in the morning. Will you be okay until the morning?”
Nessa nods and takes the pencil from her. She flips the paper over and thinks about what she needs. It is overwhelming. The words come like a hailstorm, and she scribbles and scribbles until her wrist aches with the effort. She hands the list, this odd poem, to the girl and the girl says, “Okay, okay. We have all that.”
She has written Bread, milk, cheese, apples, meat on this list. Tylenol, ice, bandages. She doesn’t show her the other list, the one with his name, with his phone number, with all the other things she yearns for. Not yet.
“Are you sure you’ll be okay? You could come with me, you know, to my house,” the girl says, but even as she offers this kindness, Nessa senses a hesitancy. A pause and uncertainty. And so she shakes her head, no. She has learned the nuances of generosity. The limits.
The girl stands to leave, and studies the list again.
“You’re having a baby,” she says, as though simply to acknowledge this obvious truth.
Nessa nods and the baby reaffirms this fact by kicking her in the ribs. She winces with the sharp pain of it.
“Okay,” the girl says, and then she is gone.
The candle has burned down, the flame is out. Nessa is alone again with only her hunger to keep her company. She tries to get comfortable in the nest she’s made with her sleeping bag on the floor. But as she drifts into that strange place between wakefulness and sleep, she worries that she is delirious, hallucinating, that she has only dreamed this little girl. That she is simply a figment of her imagination.
Sylvie stands at the edge of the yard listening to her own voice as it echoes Ruby’s name. And then she listens as the sound of Ruby’s footsteps recedes in the distance. She thinks about running after her, but her legs refuse. Her whole body refuses. Her will is no match for her body’s stubborn refusal.
Her only comfort is that Ruby knows these woods. She and Jess were practically born in them. From the time they were little, they claimed them as their own. Sylvie used to joke that they were feral children, more animal than human. For the first few years here, they didn’t even wear clothes, attired instead in mud and grass, twigs in their hair and leaves on their bodies. They disappeared into the woods and came out again only when she called them for dinner. It was their playground. Their world. But even as she finds a small solace in the fact that Ruby is no stranger to the woods, she cannot forget that there is someone else out there. There is someone close who wants something from her. No matter how hard she tries to explain it away: the broken bulb, the trampled garden, the loud crash and the scurrying away, the fact remains that they are not alone. And now Ruby is running right into the darkness. Headlong into danger. It feels as though she’s doing this on purpose. To test Sylvie. To see what it will take to get her to finally leave the house.
It kills her. This cruelty. Ruby knows that she is powerless, that she cannot go. That this house has a magnetic pull, an invisible tether. It makes her think of Foster, and that awful run that Robert installed. The dog running up and down the same path all day every day. And the horrible way it would snap him back if he tried to test it, to go farther. She used to hate that, watching him get excited about a rabbit or a squirrel—the way he’d forget he was chained up and would shoot out toward the animal only to be choked back in, nearly strangled to death if he persisted. She remembers the wincing sound, the whimpering that would follow. The anguish of both the frustration and the pain.
She stands in the backyard waiting for something, anything, for nearly ten minutes. In the floodlight, she feels as though she is standing on a stage, unable to see a single face in the audience, as they wait for her to deliver her first line, to do something. Anything.
When the phone rings, it sends shock waves through her whole body, but it also confuses her. It is such a foreign sound, like something from a half-forgotten dream. She looks toward her house, as though trying to decipher the sound coming from inside. The phone. Maybe it’s Ruby. Maybe she’s gone far enough away from the house that she has reception in her phone. She tries to imagine she’s just gone to Hudson’s up the road, that she’s on the phone, sipping on a Coke she’s gotten from one of their coolers. That she’s eating penny candy by the handful.
She rushes to the counter and picks up the receiver. It feels heavy in her hands as she presses it against her ear.
“Syl?” Robert.
“Hi,” she says. She sits down, her legs shaky underneath her.
“How is everything?” he asks. “Ruby?”
She nods. She can’t lie to him. “She’s angry,” she says. She tries to picture him on the other end of the line. His callused hands holding the phone, his kind face changed in the last year, laugh lines becoming worry lines.
“At me?” he asks softly, and her throat grows thick at his assumption that he has somehow done something wrong.
“No,” she says, feeling terrible that she has allowed him to feel even one moment of guilt. “At me.”
“Listen, Syl,” he says then, and he sounds the way he sounds when he is about to deliver bad news. She knows this tone of voice better than she should. It was the same voice she heard the day he said he was taking Ruby to move in with Bunk. It was the same voice he used when he told her he’d forgotten how to love her.
“The storm is expected to hit here by the weekend. I don’t know how soon we’re going to be able to get back. They’re talking about closing the bridge to the mainland down. We could be delayed. And there’s a good chance we won’t have power, which means my cell phone might go out. But we’re safe. I don’t want you to worry.”
She almost laughs. Telling her not to worry is like telling the sky not to be blue. Like telling the rain not to fall.
“Can I talk to Ruby?” he asks.
She pauses. Should she tell him? What would be the point? What can he do? He’s stuck on an island in North Carolina. Stranded. It’s not as thought the truth is going to help him. It’s not as though he can do anything. But she has never been able to lie to him. Not even when the lies were less painful than the truth.
“She’s run off to the woods. But I’m sure she’ll be back. She’s just angry with me.”
There is nothing but an awful silence at the end of the line.
“Jesus, Sylvie. Why didn’t you say something? How long has she been gone? Have you gone to look for her?”
His words are like a barrage, like gunfire. She ducks her head as though she can escape. But every si
ngle one feels like an accusation. And worse, deserved.
“I . . .” she starts, but what can she promise? What can she offer him anymore?
Just then, the back door opens, and Ruby walks in. Her face is red, and her eyes are swollen.
“She’s back,” she says into the phone. “I’m sorry. Everything’s fine. She’s here.”
She drops the phone and goes to Ruby. She grabs her shoulders first, as though she wants to shake her, but then she just pulls her in close and ignores the way Ruby’s body stiffens. The way it refuses to yield. She doesn’t care; because she is back. She is home. She is safe.
THURSDAY
In the morning Ruby packs her bag with all the items from the girl’s list. She has not spoken to her mother since last night. She is already learning from the girl, the one who is waiting for her in the woods, the power of silence.
Last night after she got home, her mother tucked her into bed, stroked her hair, whispered her apologies until Ruby’s eyes were heavy with sleep. But Ruby didn’t say a word. She didn’t have to. Her running away had provided everything she needed to say. Now she offers her mom only a few words, and she has no choice but to accept them.
“I’m not going to swimming lessons today. I have to work on my school project. I’ll be home later.” Her mother looks at her with those sorrowful eyes, and so Ruby offers, “I’ll be safe. I promise.”
Ruby makes sandwiches, slathering slices of bread with mustard and mayonnaise. Heaping piles of deli meat and thick slabs of sharp cheddar cheese. She wraps the sandwiches and fills baggies with crackers and cookies and dried fruit. She empties the box of granola she finds in one cupboard into a Tupperware container and pours milk into a Thermos. She closes the bathroom door and raids the medicine cabinet for something that might help the girl. Tylenol, an Ace bandage. She fills a baggie with ice.
Her mother is consumed with the evisceration of a plover she found in the bushes this morning. Its black belly is splayed open, its guts bleeding into a blanket of newspaper on the table. It makes Ruby’s stomach turn.
“I think maybe we should call Animal Control about the babies. In case the mother isn’t coming back,” Ruby says.
“I don’t know if today is a good day,” her mom says, shaking her head, and this makes Ruby bristle. Why does it matter? Why can’t she just be ready for visitors? Why can’t she just take care of things like a normal mother? “I just mean, maybe tomorrow would be a better day.”
And Ruby wonders what her logic is. Each day here is the same as the last. Each day is equal. Each day is identical to the one before it and the one that will come after. Her mother depends on this monotony, this safety in similarity.
“The trap is gone, which means the mother might be hurt. The babies will die without her,” Ruby says. Why can’t her mother understand this? “They need to come get the babies. Somebody needs to take care of them.”
Her mother sighs and looks out the window at the porch where the baby raccoons are stirring. “They seem okay,” she says.
“God, Mom, we can’t have animals living on the porch. Don’t you get it?” Ruby is angry again. It feels like she is always angry now, as if the bitter sadness she usually feels around her mother has turned into pure rage. She clenches her fists and then resumes packing her bag.
“Is it something I can help you with?” her mother tries again. “This project? Is it something we could work on together?”
Ruby almost laughs. And this makes her sad. When did the idea of her mother helping her with anything become ludicrous? When did the idea of her being a regular mom go out the window? Did it happen that night when Jess died? Or did it happen before? She can’t remember anymore. It doesn’t matter.
“No,” she says. And she doesn’t even bother with the nicety of an explanation.
“Really, if you just tell me what it is . . .” her mother starts.
But she just heaves her pack onto her back and walks out the back door, letting it slam shut. It echoes like a gunshot, like something more violent than it is.
She can feel her mother’s eyes on her through the window as she walks away.
Her body still buzzing with anger, she kicks at the loose fence wall again, the wood relenting and splintering.
Her mother opens the back door and says, “Ruby?”
Ruby turns to her. Her mother’s arms are wrapped around her waist, and her face looks sad. Ruby’s throat feels thick. If she doesn’t go now, she never will.
“I’ll be home in a little bit,” she says.
“Okay,” her mother says, nodding. “Be safe.”
It is windy today, the wind is howling through the tops of the trees. It sounds like a woman moaning, like an animal. Ruby looks up as though she might be able to locate the origin of that keening. But there is only blue sky, green leaves, and pressing sunlight. There is no sign of rain, of a storm. She makes her way to the river’s edge.
In her research, Ruby has learned about all the world’s great bridges, those made of wood and steel and stone. But she has also learned about the imaginary ones, the ones made of dreams and fear. In many religions, there is a bridge that exists between the world of the living and the world of the dead. In Zoroastrianism, this is the Chinvat Bridge. When a soul dies, it must cross this bridge. And depending on the person’s life, it will appear differently to each person who crosses it. For someone who has been wicked, the bridge is narrow, and fraught with demons who will drag them from the bridge. If the person has led a good life, the bridge will be wide and offer safe passage from one realm to the next. There is a similar bridge in the Muslim religion as well. It is called the As-Sirt, and it is thin and razor sharp. For those who have not led righteous lives, the fires of Hell below the bridge make their passage impossible. But for those who have been good, their passage is expedited, and they are able to cross the bridge quickly to reach Hauzu’l-Kausar, the lake of abundance or paradise. Ruby thinks about bridges between this world and whatever exists beyond this one. She likes to imagine that when you pass from this life to the next, that there is a structure, a place that will keep you safe as you pass. She thinks about kindness and evil.
She runs and leaps, not needing a bridge here at this narrow place between worlds. It is easy, this passing from the island her mother has made to the rest of the world. And she wonders if it’s because this is the opposite of these stories, of these myths. Because here she crosses from the land of the dead to the land of the living.
Right after the accident, nobody worried about Sylvie wanting to stay at home. People could understand her fear of driving, of getting in a car even. They gave her her space. Room to grieve and to breathe. But months went by, winter came, and still she wouldn’t go anywhere unless she absolutely had to.
She couldn’t work, couldn’t listen to the urgency in the women’s voices as they waited for their babies to come, the excitement and the fear. She used to pride herself on being able to measure how dilated a woman was simply by talking to her on the phone, but now their voices only reminded her of what could be lost. She could no longer make that long trek toward uncertainty in the middle of the night; she realized how many times she had tempted fate and felt both fortunate and foolish. And so the women who had counted on her to bring their babies safely into the world stopped calling. Rumors circulated, she was sure, that she’d had a breakdown. That she’d lost her marbles. But what they couldn’t understand was that it wasn’t grief that confined her. It wasn’t her sadness or sorrow that made her shun the rest of the world. They didn’t know that seclusion began long before Jess and Ruby were even born.
People wonder if she is lonely. This is what Gloria would ask when she still came by. “Aren’t you lonely?” she would say, fear and tenderness and frustration in her eyes. But the answer wasn’t simple. Perhaps the question should be, rather, are you lonelier?
Yes, she lives a secluded life here. Indeed, she has opted to cloister herself in this small house by the river, but is she any more
isolated than she once was? Probably from an outsider’s perspective. The prevailing assumption is that if one is surrounded by people that one is not alone. But even then, even all those years when she was never physically by herself, she was beginning to feel the chasm growing between her and the rest of the world. It was like a small tear in the seam of a dress, a certain pulling away. A ripping. And once it started, there was no stopping it. Of course, she tried so hard to keep it together, to tether herself to the world. She filled her life with people. With friends and family. But even then she knew that the mere presence of people in one’s life cannot eliminate the terrifying sense of one’s aloneness in the world. Being surrounded by people is not the same as connection. As friendship. As love. When Robert came along, she believed for a little while that she had found the answer, the bridge that crossed the deep canyon. And the children too became links between herself and normalcy. The accident didn’t start it, it just proved the faultiness, the tenuousness of these connections.
But that bridge is gone now. Robert and Ruby are gone. Jess is gone.
And so yes, she is lonely. She feels that ragged tear where she once ripped herself away from the rest of the world every day, though its violence has faded into a dull aching reminder. But she is not any lonelier than she was before she sequestered herself.
There is no verb form for the word recluse. There is only the noun. And it is she. A woman who is tired of being terrified and finds little solace, even in the confines of her own home. Reclude. That is a verb, but it is the exact opposite of what it sounds like. To reclude means to open. To unclose. Recluse. Reclude. A door that swings two ways. One way opens to the world. And the other shuts it away.
The girl listens to Nessa.
For the first time in so long (months, years, lifetimes?) someone seems to hear her. To want to hear her anyway. Because the words remain trapped inside. But this little girl sits patiently, her face as wide open as a flower, and Nessa wonders if she might wait forever to hear what it is that she has to say.