She had enough wine to make driving difficult. Olivia sat too close to the wheel, stared too hard at the road. Drunk like this, she could hit someone and kill them. Someone’s husband.
She pulled over at a Dunkin’ Donuts for coffee. While she waited inside, she thought about Ruby. What if she was not as Olivia imagined her? What if she was like that Drew Barrymore character, a killer? A thief? Not that Olivia had anything valuable in the house. Her good jewelry and bankbooks were all back in New York. But she had cash and credit cards in the beach house. Her grandmother’s pearls. Her most valuable possession was worthless to anybody else: the answering-machine tape with David’s voice on it. She had not played it since he’d died, not once. Instead, she put it in her jewelry box, the place where valuable things should go.
On the stools at the counter were some teenagers, kids around Ruby’s age, Olivia guessed. They all looked stoned, gobbling sugar doughnuts and laughing too hard about nothing at all. They all had tattoos and pierced body parts; one girl even had a small hoop earring jutting from her tongue. How is she eating so many doughnuts with that thing in there? Olivia wondered. These kids reminded her of Ruby, and they looked scary, dangerous.
What if Ruby was a criminal? In some kind of burglary ring, maybe? What is wrong with me? Olivia thought. She had let a strange girl—maybe even a criminal—into her home. I am a woman so desperate for—love, company, what?—that I put myself in jeopardy. Are you happy, Pal? For a frightening instant, Olivia thought she had spoken out loud, but, no, it was just that her lips were moving, and one of the pierced girls was looking at her as if maybe Olivia was crazy or dangerous. Olivia smiled at the girl, who stared back at her blankly.
Maybe the pregnant stomach is fake, Olivia thought. Something to garner sympathy and gain entry into people’s homes. And Olivia had told her she was there alone, that her husband was away. Instead of a poor kid from the wrong side of the tracks knocked up by some rich, callous college boy, Olivia imagined Ruby as streetwise, a runaway. She’d seen a documentary once about street kids who robbed for a living. They slept on park benches and beaches; they ate from garbage cans behind restaurants.
Olivia could see Ruby this way, with her tattoo and pierced nose. She was disappointed in her own suspicious nature. But then she remembered the careful way Ruby had studied her, the tough way she talked, not unlike these kids, who were eating too many sugar doughnuts and saying things like “Fuckin’ right, man” and “I’ll get that cocksucker.”
It was taking forever to get one simple cup of black coffee. While she waited, some kid was robbing her, vandalizing her house.
“Excuse me,” Olivia said to the kid closest to her, the one who had looked at her before. “Do you know someone named Ruby? She’s got a boyfriend at the college? She’s—uh—kind of, you know, pregnant?” Olivia clutched the slippery counter, drunk and scared and dizzy.
They all turned their red-rimmed eyes on her. They smelled like mothballs and sweat and marijuana. None of them answered. But they, too, narrowed their eyes and studied her.
“As a matter of fact,” Olivia continued, unable to stop herself, “she is pregnant.” Her own sour wine breath wafted up to her.
The girl closest to her had on black nail polish; her pupils were dilated, her lips chapped.
By the time the coffee came, Olivia was trembling with fear. What if Ruby was like them, a drugged-out kid who would stop at nothing? A desperate kid. Olivia didn’t want her things touched, gone over, examined by this kid. In a shoe box in her closet were pictures of David, a video Rex had made of a sailing trip to Block Island. What if Ruby took those?
She went back out to her car. The coffee burned her tongue as she gulped it, hoping to get clearheaded. She checked behind her to be sure the kids weren’t coming out to the parking lot. They weren’t. They were still in there, eating, laughing. Olivia drove the rest of the way home too fast, hugging the scenic route’s curves, keeping her high beams on the whole way to warn people’s pets and bicyclists and joggers that she was there. The cheesecake on the seat beside her was sliding around dangerously but never fell.
Her tires squealed on the gravel of her driveway. Too many lights were on in the house. It looked the way it might if someone had ransacked it, turned everything upside down. Olivia could not remember if she had put those lights on before she left. She could not even at this moment remember Ruby’s face. If she had to go to the police, she would be able to describe only the belly—large and round, with a protruding belly button. “If she drinks water fast,” she would have to tell them, “the baby kicks like crazy.”
Olivia stumbled up the few steps to the door and burst in, ready for anything.
But the kitchen was empty, untouched.
“Ruby?” Olivia called.
No answer.
She made her way through each room, turning off the lights as she went. Everything was in its proper place.