“Who do you know like that?” Olivia asked her.
“My dad. My real dad, that is. Not the loser my mother married. I haven’t talked to him in like five years. But he wanted to be a writer. He wrote like three novels that never got published. Then he’s got to pay child support and pay a mortgage and stuff and he’s forced to take shitty jobs.” She swallowed hard. “He maybe drank too much because he was so far from what he wanted. I don’t see him anymore. He tried AA and NA and every other A. But they never quite fixed him, you know? And we sort of lost touch. Maybe he’s even dead. Maybe he died in some real tragic way.”
This last would make Ruby happy, Olivia realized. A father who gave his life for art.
“Can I ask you something?” Ruby said. “I mean, since you’re older and everything, maybe you can help me out here.”
Olivia shrugged. “I’ll try,” she said.
Ruby lay down on the grass, which was only green in spots; mostly, it was brown from lack of water. There was a drought.
“Did you ever wish you could take something back? Like totally change something you did?”
“Like what?” Olivia said. But already her gut was twisted with regret. Already she was imagining a different day last year, a day when she turned toward David and his unshaven face, his searching hands, and saved his life. A day when she kept him away from that blue Honda Civic.
“Like why didn’t we just use a rubber?” Ruby said. “I just want to, like, go into a time tunnel and play that one time over, except this time do it different, you know?”
“It doesn’t get you anywhere to beat yourself up about a mistake,” Olivia said, without much conviction. It was advice Winnie had given her often enough. Advice she was still not able to take.
“Yeah, yeah,” Ruby said, waving her hands dismissively. It was foolish advice for someone ridden with guilt. “I have this moment frozen in my brain and I keep replaying it, you know? Here we are, in Ben’s room at school and slightly stoned, good stoned, not like totally blasted, but just riding this high and like totally into what we’re doing, you know, and he goes inside me and he says he’ll pull out, you know? He says, ‘Just this once, don’t make me put on a rubber,’ and I know in my brain that it only takes one fucking microscopic sperm and I know one can leak out before he even comes. I know everything, but I think, What are the chances?”
Bingo, Olivia thought. What are the chances that you go back to sleep instead of making love with your husband and he gets killed by a college girl driving a blue Honda Civic?
“I guess,” Olivia said, “the chances were pretty damn good.”
“No shit,” Ruby said.
Usually, Olivia did not let herself think about the girl who had done it. A college sophomore on her way to get a few things for the house she was renting with three other girls. Milk and toilet paper and M&M’s. Olivia knew these details because the girl had come to the house, shown up there the next day with her roommates to explain. “We like M&M’s. While we study, you know?” she’d said. She had explained about the bright sunlight, about the curve, how David had appeared out of nowhere. But of course that wasn’t right. He had appeared straight from Olivia’s side. He had shaved and had a glass of orange juice and then gone out and run smack into the girl’s car. “I didn’t know what I’d hit,” she’d said, still awed by what she’d done. Later, a letter had come to Olivia in New York. “I can’t sleep at night,” she wrote. “I keep thinking, If only I’d stayed put. If only I’d taken the main road instead of the scenic route. But it was such a beautiful day. And now I’ll regret that decision the rest of my life.”
“Regret,” Ruby said, “is the worst thing, don’t you think?”
For a moment, Olivia wondered if she’d spoken aloud.
“What do you mean?” she asked stupidly, because as much as that girl had regrets, had dropped out of school for a semester and gone home to New Jersey and taken Prozac, as much as her life was now shaped by regret, so was Olivia’s.
“Take my mother,” Ruby said. “My mother regrets that she let my father go. That she didn’t fight harder for him. And like I regret some things. Little things. Like robbing you. I regret that.”