She’d been disappointed to see the door to Ruby’s room closed—she had moved a cot into the nursery that afternoon for her. Olivia had half-expected to tell her all about the date. And now, alone, in her own bed, Olivia was struck by a sadness so extreme that she got jittery. She felt as if she could jump right out of her skin. And into what? she wondered. Some other form, like David?
It was not that she wanted to be with Pete Lancelotta. In fact, Olivia was certain that she did not. But she remembered how often she’d gone on dates with men before David—B.D.—that were fun and without potential but somehow made her aware of all the men out there with potential. Was that it? Was that what was making her so nervous? If she could have a kind of fun with one man who wasn’t her type, what would happen if she met a man who was her type?
“And then what, Pal?” Olivia said out loud. She thought of that morning when he’d wanted to make love and she’d refused. She had sent him to his death, jogging down that road when he should have been with her. Would it always come to that, her last act with her husband, her rolling away from him? She did not even have a final image of him. She had not bothered to watch him go.
Olivia paced.
She went downstairs to get a glass of wine. She decided to take one of the pills that Winnie had given her months ago, back in winter, a pill that Winnie had told her would help take the edge off things. In bed, she drank the wine and took the pill—thought fleetingly of Karen Ann Quinlan and wondered if she would want that, to be nowhere, suspended between life and death. Olivia decided no, she wanted to be here after all. But she had already taken the pill; there was nothing to do about it. Even now the effects of it were grabbing at her; the room and everything in it floated nicely around her. She did something her mother had advised her to try: “When you’re feeling bad, try to remember all the good things you still have.”
Olivia thought of Ruby sleeping across the hall. She thought of that baby hiccuping inside her.
That baby could be hers.
She held tight to that thought, brought it with her into a restless sleep. Olivia dreamed of sex, not the act so much as the sounds of it: squeaky bedsprings and stifled groans and ragged breaths. She dreamed of footsteps and giggles and falling out of windows.
When she woke up, slightly hungover and headachy, the house was still, too quiet. Olivia had one thought: Something is wrong. When she got shakily out of bed, the first thing she saw was that her jewelry box, the one that held her passport and pearls, the one that held David’s voice, was gone. She ran from the room on quivering legs, calling to Ruby, wondering what else had been taken.
“Ruby!” Olivia called in a hoarse voice. “Ruby, we’ve been robbed.”
It wasn’t until she flung open the door to Ruby’s room that the truth of what had happened hit Olivia. They hadn’t been robbed; she’d been robbed. Ruby was gone, and she had taken everything with her.
chapter four
Karma Is a Boomerang
THAT MORNING THAT SHE discovered Ruby gone, Olivia drove straight from her house to the college. She didn’t realize until she was almost there that she still had on her white cotton nightgown. “Underwear as outerwear,” Winnie would say. She could be counted on for tips like that. And counted on to steal Olivia’s life, the one she should be living at this very moment instead of chasing after a horrible thieving kid. Maybe this was one of the signs the woman from the occult store was talking about; maybe genetically this baby would grow into a teenager who stole things. Maybe Olivia should just turn around and forget the whole thing.
But the big granite sign with the college’s seal gleaming gold in the sunlight loomed before her and Olivia turned onto the campus. She couldn’t go back to that in-between life. She had to find the girl and get that baby. She had to reclaim the new life she’d imagined for herself, omens or no omens. The school had lots of trees and ivy-covered buildings and winding roads. David and Olivia had gone to a dance performance there and a James Dean movie festival, but she didn’t really know the campus well, so it was by sheer coincidence that the road Olivia turned down was the one where all the fraternities were located. Where else could Ruby have gone except back to the subterranean safety of one of these houses? Olivia would walk from door to door, looking for Ruby, not stopping until she found her.