“What was I, seven? Eight?” she said as she sped the car down the street and made the usual turn toward the rec field, where we’d find the public pool. “All I know is I was small, and I’d wheel you in your stroller and people would stop me on the street. They’d say, ‘How cute!’ Or, ‘You two are soooo adorable!’ But then they’d always have to ask, ‘But where’s your mother, little girl?’ And the thing is, I didn’t want to say she was doing shots at the bar. Or, last I saw, she was in some-dude-we-never-met’s truck. I mean, I wanted to say our mother was right there, like in a store buying earrings, right? Our mother was at the library. Our mother was at the Laundromat. Someplace mothers go.” She sighed.
“But,” she continued, cutting around a slow car, “if I was going to lie, I figured I may as well make it fun. So I’d say, ‘What do you mean where’s her mother? I’m her mother.’ I’d tell them different things, depending on who asked. Like I married young and now I’m a widow. Or I got knocked up in Girl Scouts, when I was out selling cookies. Or, you know, if a church person was asking, that Jesus gave you to me. People get all weird when you talk about Jesus. Like unicorns can’t exist, but Jesus did—ridiculous.” She shook her head. “Anyway, I said you were mine. And sometimes when you say a lie enough times, it’s like it’s true. Then you’re not even lying.”
Ruby’s stories changed when she told them—the tales grew more impossible physically, and legally, like how she said she picked me up at school in our mom’s car while sitting on a Webster’s unabridged dictionary so she could see the road. Like how she said we lived for a whole summer at sea, barely emerging from the bathtub. But no matter what miraculous way of surviving she chose for us, our mom was always conveniently out of the picture. It was better than the truth, really.
Ruby parked the car in the rec-field lot and removed the gold aviators. I thought we were going to get changed for swimming—we had bathing suits on under our clothes, so all we had to do was pull our dresses over our heads and find the beach towels—but something was holding her attention across the wide, grassy lawn. She couldn’t tear her eyes away.
From where we were parked, all I could see was the stretch of the rec field. The swings, the sandbox, the jungle gym, the slides, the great lawn beyond, and past that the softball diamond. A game was going on, but Ruby didn’t like sports, so it couldn’t be that. Past the softball field was some kid’s birthday party, marked by a bouquet of balloons tied to the gazebo and fluttering wildly in the wind.
“What?” I said. “Do you want some birthday cake or something?”
“I wonder . . .” she said, frozen where she sat.
“You wonder what?”
A piece of her expression was unnerving me. Maybe it was the glassy green of her eyes. The hard set of her teeth. Maybe it was her knuckles, gone white on the wheel even though the engine was off and there was no reason to hold it for steering anymore.
“What do you think those people would do,” she said, “all the kids there at that birthday party, all the moms, the dads . . . what do you think they’d do if I walked over there and just let them all go?”
“Let who go, the kids?”
She shook her head. What she was staring at was the collection of balloons, watching them fiercely as their long tails whipped against the gazebo post, their brightly colored heads rising as high as they’d reach. It really bothered her to see them tied up like that.
“The red ones first, I think,” she said. “If I cut their strings, ripped them off, and let them fly? What do you think?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “You might make the kids cry.”
She didn’t seem to care about that; she only looked off into the distance, absorbed in something I couldn’t decipher, as if living out some fantasy rescue mission in her mind.
Or maybe she was trying it right now. Trying to break them free by wishing for it.
But of course the balloons remained where they were, and no matter how hard the wind got—and it did seem to get a bit stronger, somehow; as Ruby held her eyes there, a few paper plates went sailing off the picnic table and some little kids lost their cake—but still, no balloons went free. They were tethered there and would stay put, forced to be guests at that party until someone cut them off after, or popped them and let them die.
“Ruby?” I said.