I didn’t think much about the baby being cute, or the way she wrapped her tiny hand around my finger and squeezed. I wasn’t thinking about how her eyes watched me, or the words Little Sister scrawled across her shirt.
What I was thinking about were those sea anemones, the ones in a book Matthew had brought for me when I was a kid: would-be murderers in delicate, angelic bodies. I thought of their wispy tentacles when the baby twined her hand around my finger, I considered their brilliant colors when the baby looked and me and beamed. They looked like flowers but they were not. Instead, they were predators of the sea. Immortal. Injecting paralyzing venom into their prey so they could eat them alive.
This baby was a sea anemone.
I thought that I hated her, I did. But as the bus drifted across the country, and the baby held tight to my little finger, and from time to time just stared at me or smiled, I had to remind myself that she was evil, as if that thought just kept slipping from my mind. I told myself I wasn’t going to like her. Not one bit.
But in the end, I did.
*
As we boarded a new bus in Denver, some girl slid into the seat beside me, dropped down into the chair like a plane crashing from the sky, and asked, “What’s your baby’s name?” I opened my mouth but no sound came out. “What’s the matter?” she asked. “Cat got your tongue?”
The girl was all skin and bones, her cheeks hollowed in. She wore clothes that were too big on her, an unshapely coat that just drooped. Her hair was dark, her eyes dark. Around her neck she wore a dog collar with spikes.
“No, it’s...” I stuttered, unable to come up with a name.
“She’s gotta have a name, don’t she?” not even flinching when I couldn’t tell her my baby’s name. Course I couldn’t say the baby’s name was Calla. Then she might have known. “How about Ruby?” she asked then, as she gazed out the window, watching as the bus bypassed a Ruby Tuesday restaurant on the side of the road. There it sat, right before the expressway entrance. Karma, I believed.
I stared at those words, the big bold red letters. I’d never known anyone named Ruby before. I thought of that brilliant red gemstone, red, the color of blood.
“Ruby,” I repeated, as if tasting the word in my mouth. Savoring it. And then, “I like it. Yeah. Ruby,” I said again.
And she said, “Ruby,” ingraining the word in my mind.
The girl had a bruise the size of Mount Everest on her head, slashes across a wrist that she tried to cover by yanking down the sleeve of a green coat. She caught the bus in Denver, and by Omaha she was gone. I tried not to look at the bruise, but my eyes found it near impossible not to stray to the purple goose egg on her head. “What?” she asked nonchalantly. “This?” She swept her hair down, to cover the bruise. “Let’s just say my boyfriend’s an ass,” she said, and then asked me, “What brings a girl like you out on the road in the middle of the night? With,” she adds, pinching the baby’s tiny nose, “a babe.”
We got to talking, that girl and me. She had a low-key approach that I liked, a way of holding my eyes when she talked. “Let’s just say we needed a change of scenery,” I said and with that, we stopped asking about where we were going and where we’d been because we both knew the other had come from someplace ugly.
We had a stopover in Kearney, Nebraska, during which time the girl poured a bottle of reddish hair dye over my head and I did the same to her. It didn’t sit long enough, and so, instead of ginger hair, as depicted on the box, I remained snot colored, tinged with red. The girl shimmied out of a pair of torn jeans and a sweater. “Here,” she said, thrusting the clothing into my already jam-packed hands. “Switch.”
I slipped the baby into her tattooed hands, a half butterfly on each palm that, when pressed together, made it complete. “A tiger swallowtail,” she said when I asked. In the stall of the bathroom—the walls covered with ink: Benny loves Jane and Rita is a gay—I took off the pants Matthew had given me and pulled the sweatshirt up over my head. I left on the undershirt, the one dotted with Joseph’s blood. This, I couldn’t dare let her see. I slipped on that girl’s clothing: the jeans and sweater, a hooded coat the color of green olives and leather boots with frayed brown shoelaces. When I emerged from the stall, she was holding the baby in a single arm, a safety pin in her right hand.
“What’s that for?” I asked, watching as she removed a course of earrings from her ear: an angel’s wings, a cross, red lips.
“It’ll only hurt for a second,” she replied and with that I held the baby while she thrust that pin through my ear and set the earring inside the swollen lobes. I screamed, squeezing the baby unintentionally, and Ruby, she screamed, too.