Slumber

by Tamara Blake

  She woke with a start, her face plastered against the textbook, sweating, heart pounding. “Damn,” she muttered, the taste of honey lingering, the feeling of Tam’s mouth on hers making her lips burn.

  “Shelley, hurry up. The bus is here!”

  “I’m just saying bye to Mom.” Shelley ran out of their mother’s room, pink Disney Princesses backpack bouncing behind her. Ruby finished sweeping the crumbs up from the piece of toast she’d given her sister for breakfast. Thank God for free school lunches, so her sister would at least get one square meal today. She gave Shelley a friendly swat on the butt as she ran out the door to the waiting school bus.

  Ruby was running late herself. After staying up late to finish her homework, she’d dragged herself to bed totally exhausted. The strange dream about Tam had stayed with her. The dream kiss was so intense, so real, she’d found it difficult to concentrate on her homework, which made it take twice as long as usual. Then, once she did manage to drop off, her slumber was so deep she slept through her alarm and had to rush through the morning routine. She rubbed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose, but it didn’t help. She still felt sleepy.

  After Shelley’s school bus had pulled away, Ruby peeked in on her mother.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked from the doorway.

  Her mom was sitting on the edge of the bed. “Better,” she answered. Then she stood, wobbled, and fell.

  “MOM!” Ruby rushed to crouch beside her. “That’s it, we’re going to the emergency room.”

  The color had drained from Mom’s face and she was breathing heavily. “But you have school—”

  “No arguing.” Ruby gripped her mother under the arms and helped her back onto the bed. “I’ll make up the missed classes. I always do. You need to see a doctor.”

  Her mom nodded wearily. “All right. I guess we’ll figure out how to pay for it later.”

  Mom couldn’t walk by herself, so Ruby helped her pull on a sweater over her pajamas and got her settled in the minivan. While Ruby was fighting the traffic to the hospital, horns blaring as she weaved through the lanes, her mom almost fainted again. By the time she pulled into the parking lot, her mom’s face was putty-colored, and her breath came in short gasps. Ruby had to almost carry her inside, anxiety and worry eating at her. Mom felt so frail in her arms.

  Today they were in luck: the emergency room wasn’t packed end-to-end. The nurse called her mom’s name almost right away. Ruby stood, but her mom shook her head.

  “No, I don’t want you to come with me,” she told Ruby, sternly.

  “But Mom—”

  “I mean it, honey. It’s no place for you.”

  “We’ll take it from here,” the nurse said, signaling the orderly to bring up a wheelchair.

  Ruby sank back down on the ratty bench as the nurse and orderly helped her mom in the wheelchair and disappeared with her down the corridor. Nervously, she chewed a hangnail. What if her mom’s illness was serious? What if she had cancer? Would this shit be happening to them if Dad were still alive? What if, what if, what if…

  A girl about her age with one arm in a sling was ushered into the waiting room. She sat a couple of chairs from Ruby, a dazed expression on her face, and her frizzy hair caught messily in a ponytail. At first Ruby only gave her a cursory glance. But her eyes were drawn back to the girl. Something about her was so familiar.

  Red kimono.

  Almond eyes.

  “What are you looking at?” the girl snapped.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to stare,” Ruby said. She turned away, flushing as she remembered the half-naked, writhing bodies. She wasn’t planning on being the first to bring that up. Hey, how did you break your arm since I saw you at that orgy yesterday? Not great emergency room conversation.

  “But you were, so what’re you staring at?” the girl demanded.

  “Nothing really. It’s just that I think I’ve seen you before. Were you at a party this weekend?”

  “Party?”

  “Yeah. At Cottingley Heights. It was a rager.”

  What little color was left in the girl’s face drained away.

  “I didn’t go to a party,” she said. “But I dreamed that I had.”

  “Dreamed it?” Ruby said sharply.

  The girl continued in a faraway voice. “It was super-weird. I climbed to the roof of some Addams Family mansion with a posse of gorgeous boys. I think I kissed a few. Then someone yelled, ‘Let’s go flying!’ and they pushed me off the roof. I woke up on the floor at home. I’d fallen out of bed and landed on my arm so hard, it broke.”

  “You fell out of bed?”

  “Yeah. But how could you know about my dream?”

  Ruby stared at her. Was she making up the dream-story as a cover? But the girl seemed genuinely confused, the corners of her mouth trembling like she was trying not to cry.

  “Lucky guess,” Ruby said, creeped out. For sure she did see the girl at Cottingley, barely covered by a red kimono in the make-out room. Maybe the girl got so drunk or high she blacked out when she got home.

  “Ruby Benson?”

  Ruby’s nerves jolted. A woman in a white coat stood in the doorway. The doctor. Ruby followed her into a private area behind the desk, nails digging into her palms. She tried to read the doctor’s expression for a clue about her mom, but her face remained professionally neutral.

  “Where’s Mom?” Ruby asked.

  “She’s having some blood work done. Would you like to sit down?”

  Ruby felt her heart squeeze. Nobody ever asked you to sit down so they could give you good news. “Just give it to me straight.”

  The doctor studied her for a moment, then, evidently deciding she could handle it, said: “It’s not good.”

  Ruby’s nails made deeper dents into her palm.

  “We gave your mother a CAT scan and found an anomaly on her thyroid gland.”

  Ruby felt the floor under her drop away. She had no idea her mother was so sick. “An anomaly?”

  “A tumor. Has your mother been eating well? Sleeping well?”

  “She’s…been under a lot of stress lately.”

  The doctor nodded sympathetically. “Stress and anxiety tend to deplete the body of resistance to tumorous cells.”

  Ruby listened to the doctor rattle off glandular secretions and hormonal imbalances and other medical terminology before she interrupted with, “Is she going to die?”

  “We’ll embark on an aggressive form of treatment, of course,” came the response.

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  The doctor put a hand on Ruby’s shoulder and sighed. “I’m not going to pretend that your mother’s situation isn’t grave, but we need to stay positive and focus on treatment plans. I’m going to refer her to a specialist who will prescribe medication to see if that reduces the size of the tumor. If that doesn’t work, we’ll have to consider surgery.”

  “Oh.”

  Oh Mom . . .

  “Do you have health insurance?” the doctor asked gently.

  Ruby blinked back tears. “No.”

  “I’ll send you to social services to point you toward resources available to low-income residents, but even with this assistance, the co-pays and drug therapies will get expensive.”

  “Not to mention the surgery.”

  “If it comes to that,” the doctor agreed. “Our hospital policy states that uninsured individuals will be required to place a co-pay deposit before we can schedule an operation. I’ll try to get around that administrative hurdle, but you’ll still have to come up with a financial contribution.”

  Ruby listened to the doctor explain the reasons why—lack of funding, government requirements, and the fact that the hospital can’t run on a deficit, but her brain was scrambling around the realization that they needed to come up with extra money in a hurry or Mom’s health would just get worse.

  The doctor gave Ruby’s shoulder
another sympathetic pat before directing her to a window where she was given a pile of forms to fill out. In a daze, Ruby went back to the waiting room with the paperwork while her Mom finished up with the blood work. She sank down on the bench, the forms untouched on her lap, and stared out the window at the bright mid-morning sun.

  It’d been bright and sunny the day they got the call about Dad, too.

  No way were she and Shelley losing both parents. Not if Ruby could help it. She’d do everything in her power to help her mother get the best medical treatment possible.

  But that meant she’d have to earn the money they needed. She set the forms aside, took out her cell phone, and hit the shortcut to the Happy Housekeepers number. So what if she’d have to skip school more often? So what if she didn’t have a hope in hell of being accepted into NYU with her shitty grades? They needed the money or Mom’s treatment would cost them everything. If they couldn’t pay…she didn’t even want to think about it.

  “Hi, this is Ruby Benson calling for Margie Benson. Do you have any jobs coming available? We—I mean, she’ll take anything. Her schedule is wide open.”

  The woman on the other end of the line let out a sharp laugh. “Yeah, so’s everyone else’s. Most of our clients have canceled their cleaning contracts.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just that. Maybe it’s the recession, who knows, but people are cancelling our service left and right. In other words, we’ve got nada work for your mom.”

  Ruby felt her heart hit the pit of her stomach. What were they going do now?

  “…Except…hang on, something did just come across my desk…”

  Sounds of paper shuffling. Ruby bit her lip to keep from screaming at the woman to hurry up.

  “…Cottingley Heights. They just booked. They’re offering a regular gig. Five days a week. Your mom did that job the other day, right? Does she want it?”

  Ruby closed her eyes. Go back to that madhouse cleaning up after coked-up orgies and rich spoiled brats who never seemed to have suffered a day in their lives? Every day?

  But they needed the money. Mom needed the money.

  And you’ll see Tam again, a voice whispered.

  “Yeah. She’ll take it.”

  Chapter Four

  “No! I don’t want you cutting class anymore,” Mom said. “How are you going to graduate? Go to college? Have a future? I don’t want you to end up cleaning houses all your life like me.”

  Ruby wanted to go to college and have a future, too. But she wanted her mother to live more. “It’s just temporary, until you get better and we’ve paid off the bills.”

  “That could be months! Years, Ruby! Be realistic,” Mom said angrily.

  “I AM being realistic!” Ruby shouted.

  Over the head of the stuffed teddy bear she clutched to her chest, Shelley’s wide eyes traveled back and forth between the two. Ruby felt a pang of guilt. Despite all the stresses in their lives, she and Mom rarely fought, and never in front of Shelley. But this was different.

  “I’m taking the job, and that’s that!” Ruby stormed out of the trailer and hopped into the minivan, slamming the door behind her. She really didn’t need her mother’s lecturing right now. She knew that the longer she stayed out of school, the harder it would be to get back on track. But she had no choice. They needed the money. She gunned the accelerator and rattled out of the parking lot.

  Storm clouds gathered thickly as Ruby took the turn into Cottingley’s private woods. Under the canopy of the tree branches, the light was so dim it seemed almost like evening, despite the fact it was mid-morning. She turned on the headlights so she wouldn’t hit one of the massive potholes. As she drove past the colossal oak where she’d seen the black stag, the minivan’s engine sputtered ominously.

  “No, no, no,” Ruby begged. “Don’t do this now.”

  In answer, the minivan gave a wheeze…and died.

  “Damn it!” Ruby yelled as the vehicle rolled to a stop. Then she folded her arms on the steering wheel and dropped her head on them. Tears of frustration pricked her eyes. How much more could she take? She could barely afford to put gas in the tank, let alone pay a huge repair bill.

  Thunder rolled overhead and the trees shuddered in response. After a moment, she lifted her head, and wiped the moisture off her cheeks.

  Come on, Ruby. So you’re going to have to walk it. Get moving or get caught in the rain.

  A few drops spattered down from the clouds just as she struggled up the driveway, lugging her bag of cleaning supplies and vacuum cleaner. Above, the sky darkened over Cottingley’s weirdo horror-story battlements, and a couple of crows cawed. An upsurge of wind whispered through the ivy clinging to the side of the house just as Ruby swiped the security card in the keypad by the front door. She shook off the feeling that nature was trying to get her attention, to warn her not to go inside, and hauled her equipment over the threshold anyway. She had a job to do.

  Inside the darkened interior, the house was still and suffocating. Something dripped somewhere, and the air smelled stale and sour, as if Cottingley had remained shut up since she’d last been there. She took a step forward into the gloom and her foot kicked something. A beat-up bottle of Windex. Hers. A half-laugh left her. She must have dropped it when she bailed with Shawn two days ago. Obviously no one thought to pick it up. Or to open a window and let fresh air in. Or bother lifting a finger to clean, since it was just as dirty as she’d left it.

  She felt stifled. She turned to open the window nearest her, and saw that the casing was covered in a crusty red-brown substance. Rust? Or…Lying on the window sill, just out of sight behind the wine-red brocade drapes, was the desiccated corpse of a cat. It looked like it hadn’t died well either. Her stomach heaved.

  “Holy crap. These people are messed up,” she muttered, backing away.

  As she spoke, the delicate sound of guitar music penetrated the suffocating stillness. At least one of them was awake before noon. Ruby pulled plastic gloves and a twenty-five-gallon garbage bag out of her work kit. Maybe if she threw herself into the job, time would go faster.

  She gingerly placed the cat in a smaller plastic bag, tied it off and left it by the front door. “Poor kitty,” she murmured. At some point she’d find the dumpster and get rid of it properly.

  She followed the trail of random trash, picking up as she went, down the hall to the lounge with the indoor swimming pool. Sitting cross-legged on the bar, a beautiful dark-skinned girl, a guitar in her lap, played an old-fashioned folksong. She didn’t look up when Ruby entered.

  “Don’t mind me,” Ruby said. “I’m just the cleaning lady.”

  The girl ignored her and kept plucking deftly at the strings.

  A laugh behind Ruby made her turn. For an instant, she found herself hoping it would be Tam. But no. Drifting into the room was another impossibly hot guy, all full-lipped mouth and sleepy looks, and a girl with enormous blue eyes and a cascade of brown curls rioting down her back. Yet more kids who could be on the runway. How many of them lived at Cottingley?

  They ignored Ruby too.

  “Check this out,” the guy said to the girl. He held out his phone so the girl could see the video on the screen. Ruby heard laughter, playful shrieks, and the sounds of general horseplay coming from the clip. She caught someone saying, “Real deep slumber,” then a male voice yelling “Yo, let’s fly!” followed by a girl’s terrified scream. The two broke up laughing.

  “That’s awesome,” the girl giggled, and without missing a beat gave the guy a kiss as they strolled past.

  Ruby felt cold all over. That couldn’t have been the girl in the emergency room, could it? The one with the broken arm? Had one of these maniacs really shoved her off the roof?

  “Hold up a sec,” she called after the pair, but they didn’t even break stride and disappeared into an adjoining room.

  How freaking rude.

  “Hey, I want to talk to you!”
she said, following them into the room.

  As it turned out, it wasn’t a room at all but a darkened corridor lit by one weak bulb dangling from the ceiling and filled with the smell of mold and dirt. The two supermodels had vanished into the gloom. “This place is like Hogwarts on crack,” Ruby murmured. She took a couple of steps forward into the shadows, thinking she could catch up to the pair and ask them about the video, but instead she heard…crying.

  The hair on the back of her neck rose.

  “No, no, no.” It was a male voice, and he sounded scared. Or in pain. “Help me…”

  “Hello?” Ruby called. “Where are you?”

  No answer. Ruby listened hard over her drumming pulse but didn’t hear the cry again. It had been so faint, she started to wonder if it was just her imagination. She grabbed the knob of the nearest door and found herself back in the library where Shawn had stumbled in the other day.

  The room still smelled strongly of brandy and sex. As her eyes adjusted to the murky light, she picked out the figure of a girl with dark skin and white-blonde hair standing by the window, wearing a filmy lace dress. The storm outside meant that hardly any natural light filtered past the thick mullions, but the girl still stared intently out into the darkness.

  “Did you hear that sound?” Ruby asked her. “A guy crying or something?”

  The girl turned at the sound of Ruby’s voice. Her eyes were utterly blank, pupils blown. She blinked once, then went back to staring out of the window.

  “Hello?”

  No response. Obviously the chick was high. She seemed to be around fifteen years old, max.

  Ruby tried again. “I said, did you hear someone crying?”