by Susan Wilson
“You can wait in chairs.” She points at the rank of chrome and blue vinyl chairs.
Ruby doesn’t care for the grammatical construct. “But I’d like some information.”
“The nurse practitioner will come out to talk with you.”
“So, you do know what’s going on?”
“No. I didn’t say that. I have no information. You have to wait.”
Grumbling to herself, Ruby chooses a chair as far away from the rest of the waiting patients as she can get. She drops a quick text to Polly to get Bull’s actual name so that she can play this fake cousin game a little better. Barton, Polly quickly replies.
A nurse comes out, calls a name, and a sniffling sneezing young guy goes in. Another nurse, another patient. And another. Ruby shifts in her seat, studies her nails. Waits another beat before going back to the window to get the same response. At least this time she can ask for Barton Harrison. It is to no avail and she is sent back to wait it out in the seating area. It strikes Ruby that all this waiting is not a good sign, that Bull Harrison isn’t going to come out from the back of this place with a prescription in his hand. What is she going to tell his dog?
When she is just about to give up, a nurse practitioner comes through the door. Ruby knows that, this time, it is she this woman is looking for, so she quickly gets to her feet. “I’m with Barton Harrison.”
“Are you a relative?”
“Cousin.” Fingers crossed that this woman doesn’t actually know Bull and who he’s related to. It is, after all, a very small town.
“We are having him admitted to U-Mass Medical. We’re just waiting for transport.”
Ruby doesn’t ask what’s wrong, will he be okay, or any of the usual responses to this sort of news. She just asks if she can go in and see him. Ruby really doesn’t want Bull to think he’s been abandoned, or, more important, to worry about Boy.
There is a definite reluctance, but the nurse finally nods. “For a minute. Maybe you can collect his things, take them home for him.”
Ruby is led to where Bull is lying in a mechanical bed, tilted up at a mild angle. He looks pale and gray but no longer in pain. He also looks frightened. “How are you feeling?” It’s such a silly question.
“Nothing a little Jack and a Marlboro can’t fix.” He wants to laugh, but he manages only a grunt.
“I don’t think that there’s a prescription for that. They’re pretty set on you going to the hospital. I can take your stuff home, if you want.”
“And Boy? Where is he?”
“He’s with the Hitchhiker, in the van. Don’t worry about him. He’ll be fine for a couple of days without you.” A couple of days.
“You’re a good friend, Ruby Heartwood.”
“Actually, these folks here think I’m your cousin, or else they wouldn’t let me in.”
“Hey, who knows. You ever get that DNA stuff back?”
As a matter of fact, as she’s been sitting and waiting, Ruby has gotten the email from the Family History Lab. She didn’t want to open it on her phone, or in a public place, so she’s letting the anticipation build until she can settle in for the day. Settle in at Bull’s.
Before Ruby can answer, a pair of young men in dark blue uniforms with the ambulance company logo on their shirts come in and take over the room. Ruby steps out as they begin the transfer of Bull from hospital bed to gurney. As they roll him out of the tiny room Ruby reaches out and takes his big mitt of a hand. “Polly’s been in touch with your son. I’ll take care of Boy and you get better.”
“You got it.” But the strained look on Bull’s face suggests that he might have a hard time keeping up his end of the bargain.
The touch of Bull’s hand in hers floods Ruby’s intuition with unwanted vibes, an unwanted psychic message that Boy is right. There is disease deep within Bull.
Ruby reports back to Polly, who will relay the news to Cooper Harrison. She backs the van out of the parking space and points herself back to Bull’s. Boy remains on the floor in the back, the Hitchhiker in her usual shotgun position. It’s after two o’clock. Time enough to get partway to Maine before dark, but Ruby knows that she’s not going anywhere. When she got into the van, Boy had come up to her and put his great big head in her lap, crying out for reassurance that this upset in his life was temporary. Since the day that Cooper gave the dog, only barely rehabilitated from his traumatic weeks as a semi-feral runaway, to his father, the pair have been inseparable. She understands exactly how that feels. What would she do if she had to be hospitalized, heaven forbid? Who would take care of her dog while she was away? This is something Ruby hasn’t considered in her wholehearted conjoining with this happy beast. And yet the worry is familiar, and she recognizes it from her very early days with infant Sabine. The dread that something would happen to her and her child would be left to strangers. Much as she had been herself.
Ruby backs into her space in Bull’s yard, lets the dogs out. She scrolls her “favorites” and hits Sabine’s number.
“If anything happens to me, will you take my dog?”
“Hello, is this my mother?” Sabine at her wittiest. “Of course, but is there something you need to tell me?”
“No. It’s just that a friend of mine…” She relates to her daughter the past few hours, and how it has made her think of potentialities. Made her think of her time being the only person responsible for a child.
“You never told me this before, how afraid you were. I only knew about your anxiety about having me taken away from you, not you from me.” Sabine pauses. “You don’t have to worry; the kids would love nothing better than to add a dog to the family, but we’d really like it if you came along too.”
“I know, I owe you all a visit and I will, once I get back from fair season.”
“And yet you haven’t left Harmony Farms.”
“Don’t tell me about it. I was literally on my way out of town when I had this premonition to check on Bull. It was a good thing to do, but now I’m stuck for yet another couple of days, at least till we know what’s going on and what I should do with his dog, Boy.”
“Has it yet occurred to you that you’re supposed to stay?”
“Is this a prognostication?”
“Maybe. It’s odd, but I’ve never been to Harmony Farms, but I picture you there perfectly. When I think of some future event, like Christmas or Molly’s birthday, I see you coming to us from there.”
“Well, stop it.”
“By my calculation, it’s the longest you’ve stayed put in many a year. How many weeks? Two months?”
“Three and a half, four almost.”
“A record for you.”
“Change of subject. I got the DNA results back.”
“And?”
“I haven’t looked. I will, after I hang up with you and grab a bite.”
“How can you wait?”
“I guess maybe because I’m afraid of disappointment, that nothing in the report will lead to answers.”
“Call me tonight when you’ve digested the information. Let me know if I have to add long-lost relatives to my Christmas card list.” Sabine signs off as it is suddenly school pickup time, which makes Ruby think of Doug. She should really let him know she’s not on the road. And even having that slight suggestion of common courtesy gives Ruby pause. She has never before considered someone else having a need-to-know position in her life. Sometimes, not even Sabine.
Still in school, Doug doesn’t answer so Ruby leaves a message. “Unavoidably held up. Still in Harmony Farms. Give me a call and I’ll explain.”
34
My friend Boy is very upset, and I try to make him feel better with shoulder bumps and shoving my toys in his face, but he is inconsolable. His person is absent. His person was in a strange place with strange smells and stranger people and then he wasn’t and that is the part that Boy is having the hardest time with. Where did they take his person? Boy also knows that his person is sick. Not the sick of having eaten carrion un
advisedly, but sick from something deep within. Boy’s person, for the size of him, is very fragile.
With Boy preferring to sit on his own porch, I have gone back to my person, my Ruby. I let her know that Boy will not leave the yard, that he won’t leave the steps until his person, Bull, returns. He may not even eat, which is troubling for me, although when Ruby sets down a dish of kibble in front of him, he does pick at it and reminds me that it is his dinner, not mine. No big deal. I prefer my kibble to his anyway. He laps at the big bowl of water and he does allow me to share in that with him. For a short time, the three of us, Boy, Ruby, and I, sit on the back steps and say nothing to one another. But Ruby’s right hand comforts Boy with ear scratches, and her left hand admires me with broad strokes. As surely as she hears mine, I hear her thoughts and I worry that this staying put is temporary. Ruby has this constant hum of wanting to be in motion that I have tried hard to neutralize with demonstrations of immobility, especially after a long walk when immobility is so pleasant.
* * *
“Boy, do you want to go in the house?” Ruby stands up, dusts her backside, and opens the screen door for the dog. She really doesn’t want to leave him outside all night, but she’s ready to pack it in for the day. The dog casts her a baleful look then slips past her into the house. She shuts only the screen door, if he needs to get out, she’ll hear him. She really doesn’t think Bull’s tumbledown place is much of a security risk.
She and Doug have played a little back and forth with messages. He’d had meetings after school, and tonight is his bowling league, so he’ll give her a call later if that’s okay. She texted back, any time is fine, and then wished she hadn’t. She’s beat. All this worrying about someone is such hard work.
Ruby’s laptop is open on the pop-up table. Bumping the table wakens the screen and the unopened email from Family History Labs, still dark with “unread” status. She sits on the bench seat, not yet unfolded for sleeping. She sits forward, feet on the floor, hands hovering. Click. A cheery welcoming paragraph, and a request to enter her ID and password. Miraculously, Ruby remembers both, which doesn’t always happen, and taps the information into the login screen.
What appears before her now is a lovely pie chart, pretty colors in varying percentages, but mostly of a lovely green hue that identifies Ruby’s ethnicity as primarily Scottish, Irish, an infusion of French, and a healthy dollop of Welsh. Jones. A quintessentially Welsh surname. So, maybe that really is her name, Mary Jones. Another segment of the pie indicates a flavor of Scandinavia. Ruby knows enough history to figure this has something to do with the Vikings raiding the English shores. It’s like looking at history through her own lens. Really, there is nothing surprising here. “So, where does the fortune-telling gene come in?” The Hitchhiker looks at Ruby, decides that the human speech isn’t meant for her and closes her eyes. It would have been nice to see a line of pink, say, or gold to indicate this special trait.
Ruby’s phone chimes with an incoming call, Doug. She fills him in quickly with how her plans for the day have been scuttled.
“Almost sounds to me like divine providence.”
“How so?”
“Being in the right place, knowing what to do. Being curious about that other psychic enough to seek out Bull on a day when he really needed you.”
“I think it was just plain old bad karma.”
“Don’t sell yourself short. You had a feeling and you followed up on it. And if your escape plans have been delayed, that’s maybe all right.”
“Doug, you have no idea how trapped I feel.”
“Why is that, Ruby? You are as free a person as I’ve ever known. A will o’ the wisp of a person.”
“What you’re saying is that I am one of the few people in the world who has no responsibilities. No connections. No roots.”
Doug doesn’t answer right away, one of the things she has noticed about him, he thinks before speaking. She supposes it’s part of his training as a psychologist. Let the patient do the talking. Interject little if nothing to turn the conversation. She decides to turn the conversation herself. “I got the DNA results.”
“And?”
“Nothing particularly exotic, mostly what you’d expect. Heavily British Isles with a bit of cross Channel mixing. A soupçon of Welsh and Viking.” She clicks on one of the pie segments; it expands to zoom in on a more select section of northern Britain. “If there had been a bit of Spanish or Middle Eastern, I might think that’s where the mystic in me originated, but it kind of looks like that’s not the case.”
“I’m pretty sure there are plenty of solidly British fortune-tellers. After all, tea is solidly British and only the British wrap their teapots in blankets.” He’s teasing, of course, but it does remind Ruby of the broken teapot. Maybe she should have been protecting it with a quilted tea cozy against the depredation of Cynthia’s bony hips.
“So now I have to buy into the database. I know what I am, but not who else might be out there with the same genetic material. What if no one related to me has ever gotten the test?” She knows she sounds a little defeatist, a little petulant, but Ruby is a bit disappointed that all of this waiting has really answered nothing.
Doug counters, “Oh, I don’t know. Seems to me that getting your DNA test done is becoming all the rage. In the thousands of possibilities coming from your genes, surely you’ll find one.”
“I only want to find one.” Her mother. That’s what all this has been about. Finding her mother.
It’s getting late and Ruby has had enough of the topic. It seems only polite to ask after Doug’s day, but he sounds done in too.
“School was fine, only one meeting. Bowling was fine, I didn’t embarrass myself. Will you leave tomorrow?”
“I wish I knew.”
“That seems like an odd thing for a psychic to say.”
“You’re right. I’m going to pull out my tarot cards right now.”
“Call me if you do. Or don’t. Either way.”
“I will.” And maybe I won’t, she thinks.
Ruby has left the van’s windows open and in the middle of the night she feels the breeze ramp up, a tinge of fall in it. She pulls up her extra blanket. The Hitchhiker stirs, sits up, listens. Ruby hears Bull’s screen door being pushed open, the dry squeal of a hinge, and a sharp slam. Boy has let himself out of the house. She slides out from under the covers and opens the sliding door. Boy clambers in, jumps uninvited onto her bed, and flops down. “Hey, move over.” He’s three times the size, maybe more, of her usual bedtime companion, who has now planted herself on Ruby’s other side. Boxed in by canines, Ruby no longer needs the extra blanket.
Maybe it’s the extra weight of the big yellow dog, maybe it’s the circumstances, but Ruby dreams vividly of being boxed in. She literalizes her current sense of entrapment with a dream of walls closing in. This is a dream that she has had before, always in the wee hours of the morning, and, upon waking, she has made her decision to leave. It has happened so many times in the past that she is surprised when she wakes up this time and the decision to go has been neutralized. She feels calm, unhurried. And then she understands that she is not really awake. Ruby’s dream self has emerged from the box and is standing at the crest of a gentle hill. In the distance is a figure, familiar in its etherealness, its facelessness. Ruby the dreamer cannot tell if the figure is advancing toward her or if it is moving away.
Ruby awakens abruptly. Someone has distinctly said: Find me, find you but there is no one there besides the dogs who are both sound asleep.
* * *
My prey eludes me. I dash and grab, shake and growl. Vermin, fuzzy, I will gut you. I am a mighty hunter. I lose my grip and it moves through the air, but I am fast, as fast any anyone and I pounce, grab, and shake. Growl. It resists and I tug and yank and growl. I dig my hind legs into the dirt and pull for all I am worth, and suddenly my prey is in my mouth, so I shake and growl. Chomp down until it squeals in agony. I am so satisfied until it leaps off the ground
and up into the air, arcing as Ruby tosses my stuffed fox into the basket. We are making our house back into a ride.
* * *
As her “mother” dreams do, this one has lingered long past the point it should have dissolved into the mists of dreamworld. Find me. Find you. Who is being sought, who is looking? As soon as it is a decent hour on a school day to call, Ruby calls Sabine, who has just dropped the kids off at school and is on her way to work. “I’ve got ten minutes, Ruby, so let’s have the interesting stuff first.”
Ruby quickly gives her daughter the results of her DNA test.
“What about cousins, aren’t those things supposed to reveal that?”
“Yes. But I haven’t bought into the database yet.”
“Well, do it. This is only part of the story.”
“There’s something else I’d like you to think about.” Ruby outlines her dream, still vivid, still puzzling. At least to her.
“Basic stuff, you’re searching for your origins. Your mother. Your dreams just suggest that you should keep on. Ergo, buy into the database.”
“But what about the words: the ‘find me, find you’?”
Sabine considers the question. “Because if you find her, you have found yourself.”
“That seems like a simplistic interpretation.”
“Jeez, Mom, it was a dream. It is simplistic.” Sabine laughs.
“So, what would you tell a paying customer who’d come to you with such a dream?”
“Oh, I’d dress it up in woo-woo, of course. It’s what’s expected.” Sabine rarely uses her gifts, preferring to keep that part of her under wraps. The one thing Sabine is that Ruby is not, is a medium. Sabine sees ghosts. That’s a much more intense kind of psychic talent. One that Ruby is glad not to have, one she assumes Sabine inherited from Madame Celestine, who often took on the role of medium, passing along messages from the dead at the behest of paying customers. Ruby hadn’t believed Celestine’s shtick until her own daughter developed the sixth sense.