Whatever it was had been thrown by the impact, and Olivia had to walk several yards to find it, thinking the whole time of David, of how he’d hit that Honda Civic and was airborne for an instant before he landed with a sound that the girl—Amanda—had described as “sickening.” She thought of all the details she had tried to forget: how his sneakers had been knocked from his feet, how they’d recovered only one. She thought of the way the policeman held the few things David had carried in his pocket: his house key, a five-dollar bill, and a scrap of paper with her name written on it and their phone number below that. By the time she saw it, she was crying. It was a cat, and it was very dead, eyes opened in horror, guts spilling onto the road.
Her own stomach flip-flopped as she bent toward the cat, a fat orange one with a red collar with a charm hanging from it. Olivia recognized the charm as a milagro, a good-luck charm from Mexico, this one a hand with a heart on its palm. There was no tag, though, no owner to call. In a way, Olivia was relieved; she didn’t want to knock on someone’s door and deliver such news.
Olivia got the blanket from her trunk and used it to drag the cat off the road to the grass. She could not stop thinking of the policeman who had come to her door that warm Tuesday morning last September, grim-faced and nervous. “Mrs. Henderson?” he had asked, sweating, almost ashamed. In that instant, Olivia had known why he was there—a little earlier, she had heard the wail of sirens close to home—and, not wanting to hear the news, she had shut the door on him, leaned against it, shaking, muttering, “No, no, no, no.”
What would these people think of a crying woman coming to their door with a bundle wrapped in a sandy beach blanket? This way, she thought, leaving the cat in the blanket beneath a row of beach roses and sea lavender, they might think the cat had simply wandered off. They might remain hopeful that it would return. They might imagine it with another family, happy somewhere else, loved. It was what she imagined Arthur doing. Though of course she knew how unlikely that was.
That milagro was what she thought about for the rest of the ride home. Someone’s hope that death could be held at bay by a foolish charm. But once home, she wished she had taken it from the cat’s collar. Maybe it was meant to do some other magic—to make good things happen. Olivia even considered driving back and retrieving it.
But then Ruby came outside. She had been crying; Olivia recognized the red blotches that crying always left on her face.
Olivia stepped out of the car, but she couldn’t seem to move closer to Ruby, who stood at the front door. Behind her, the house looked more run-down than ever, the purple paint blistered in the heat, the roof sagging a little in the middle.
“You talked to him?” Olivia said. Her knees were weak; that cat with his guts spilling onto the street, the thump, the small milagro around his neck.
“He says okay,” Ruby told her. “He says he’ll sign.” Relief so strong washed over Olivia that she feared she might fall over. When she opened her hands to welcome Ruby into a hug, there were cuts on her palms from her nails digging in, small half-moons of hope.
chapter ten
Still, I’m Going to Miss You
OLIVIA WAS READY. She spent each night in a half sleep, listening for sounds from Ruby’s room: a gasp at her water breaking, a groan from the first twinges of labor, the creak of bedsprings as Ruby got up to tell Olivia it was time.
In their childbirth class, half the women had already had their babies, all of them early. Each week, there were fewer pairs there, more reports of babies born, labors induced. As Olivia listened to the women’s stories, to the names of these new lives, she rocked in her seat, gently, back and forth, as if she already had a baby to soothe. Sometimes, she left the class angry at Ruby for taking so long.
“Jeez,” Ruby told her, “it’s still early. Give me a break.”
But Olivia was anxious. She paced and prodded Ruby with questions. Was there any sign of labor? Anything at all?
“It’s easy for you to want labor to start,” Ruby said. “But I’m the one who’s got to go through it. Right now, I feel like it would be okay just to stay like this. You and me living here, thinking about the baby and stuff. In limbo, you know?”
But Olivia couldn’t imagine anything worse. Get on with it, she willed the girl. Get on with it already.
One morning, sounding young and frightened, Ruby described how the baby’s head was lodged in the birth canal.
“It’s like so low, I feel it could drop right out. I mean, I keep feeling like I have to pee, but then I don’t; it’s just the baby. And you know, I was thinking, If it’s so low already, maybe it won’t hurt so much. It doesn’t have that far to go to get out, right?”
It was easy for Olivia to forget that Ruby was a child herself really. Especially lately, with the baby so close to being hers that Olivia could think of nothing else. But she saw how scared Ruby was, and she drew the girl close to her. Ruby smelled of strawberry shampoo and sea air.
“Think of all the people from class who’ve done it now,” Olivia said. “It’s all over and they have their babies.”
The girl stiffened in Olivia’s arms. “Yeah. Right. But I’ll go through it, the water breaking and the pain and the pushing. But in the end, I won’t even have the baby. I won’t have anything.”
“Of course you will,” Olivia said guiltily, because for the life of her, she could not think of one thing that Ruby would have. Not one.