Ruby Among Us Read online

  “I’m sorry for not coming sooner with your medicine,” I whispered.

  The nurse gently helped me cover Ruby’s face, and she was gone.

  I turned back slowly to find every person in the hallway sobbing and not one grownup to hold me. The abandonment terrified me. Where would I go without Ruby? Who would take care of me? Would I be sent to an orphanage like in that movie Annie?

  “Lucy!”

  Kitty moved from the back of the small crowd where she’d been standing, stunned by her own grief. “Lucy! Come here, baby. Come to Grandma Kitty.”

  I ran. Grandma Kitty wanted me, and I knew in her arms I would be safe.

  No one questioned Kitty as she carried me out of the hospital, put me in her car, and drove me home—to Ruby’s house.

  How strange it was to come home without Ruby. Only the buzz of the fridge greeted us; immediately I had the urge to find Mommy Ruby even though I’d just felt her cooling skin on my lips back at the hospital. I ran around the house, calling her name, looking under the kitchen table where she used to take cover during games of hide-and-seek. Kitty hadn’t stopped me in my mission to find Ruby alive until I stood in the center of the living room crying, reaching out to touch the roses in the middle of the coffee table, as if they were Ruby herself, not loud and vibrant but soft and delicate.

  Wordlessly Kitty reached for me, hugged me to her, and took me for a bath.

  I screamed when she doused my shampooed head with water. Ruby had always warned me before rinsing so I could hold my nose. Kitty didn’t even tell me the water was coming. I coughed and sputtered, lashing out at her for being so mean, half expecting to be given choice words of punishment.

  Instead Kitty pulled me out of the tub and wrapped my goose-bumped limbs in a fluffy pink princess towel. I slipped into the Barbie gown she held up, and she tucked me into bed, saying it wasn’t my fault Ruby died. In my heart I didn’t really believe her.

  Kitty had a way of looking at things that most people found strange. Ruby had always said so. Now Kitty said that since she was my Ruby’s mommy, I could be her daughter too.

  “A granddaughter is a kind of daughter.” She leaned down and kissed my nose, just as Ruby would have done, and turned out the light.

  I felt only a short moment of panic that Kitty wanted to replace my Ruby, but I was too tired to argue about it.

  Kitty said good night; it was so much like Ruby that I knew Ruby had learned it from her—except for the prayer. I wanted our prayer that night, but Kitty didn’t know how to say it. With her eyes cast to the side of my pillow, she quietly offered to learn if I’d teach it to her, but I said no. It was my prayer and Mommy Ruby’s prayer anyway, I’d decided. I would never say it with anyone ever again. Not even Kitty.

  The morning before Ruby’s funeral, Kitty found me in a big, old white chair on the back deck staring at the sunrise. There were no hummingbirds, just bright, empty sky.

  I pretended Ruby sat with me in the chair the way we’d sit together in the mornings before school. I imagined that my hands resting on the arms of the chair were interlaced with hers; if I closed my eyes long enough, I could feel her breath on my neck and her kisses—unending kisses—behind my ear, through my hair, at the nape of my neck as she whispered how much she loved me.

  I had dressed in the yellow and orange floral print sundress Ruby had bought for my first day of school. I hadn’t worn it yet and wished Ruby was there to iron out the wrinkles still creasing it from the store racks. I knew grownups wore black to funerals, but I didn’t have anything black. Besides, Ruby had always said I looked pretty in bright colors. I smoothed the soft cotton dress over my knees and waited for Kitty to chide me.

  “I should have known I’d find you here.” Kitty stepped onto the deck. “Ruby told me about your little morning teatimes together.”

  I said nothing. It was true, but I didn’t want to share it with Kitty right then. I only wanted Ruby.

  Kitty extended a red floral teacup. I stared hard at the steaming cup for a few moments, trying to imagine Ruby’s hand giving it to me. But I couldn’t summon the vision. I took the cup without a word and sipped deeply. The tea tasted good, just how I liked it—not very hot, not very strong, with cream and sugar.

  “You look beautiful, Lucy, just like Ruby.”

  I looked up at Kitty and admired her long black muumuu dress with the rich red rose print. The roses blossomed over her heavy chest, down her trunk to the hem, enfolding in the seams and opening back up, the fabric flowing with her steps as she walked toward me. I couldn’t articulate the idea at eight years old but grasped clearly that this was Grandma Kitty’s way of rebelling against dreary mourning garb at her daughter’s funeral.

  “Look at me, Lucy.”

  I stared at the roses on the muumuu, unable to look in her eyes because then I’d see Ruby and the big hole in my chest would deepen and hurt even more.

  Kitty cupped my chin with her hands and turned my face to hers. I saw her red-rimmed eyes, teary pools in the center.

  What happened to my strong, bossy Kitty? I wondered. This face was so forlorn and weak.

  I was happy when Kitty barked again for me to look at her. The sternness in her voice made me feel more secure, like she was in control, taking care of me. She took me firmly by the shoulders. “It’s terrible, a terrible thing, you losing Ruby. I-I don’t know why.” She fumbled with words between sobs. “I don’t know why God did this to you—to us. I don’t.” She took a breath and fell silent, her carefully applied makeup now tear-streaked.

  Tears streamed down my face too.

  Once, Ruby had said God was a friend to children. I wasn’t sure when she’d said it—so many memories had already begun to fade the day after her death—but if it were true, then why did he take her from me?

  “Your mom,” Kitty was saying, “would defend God and say he always has a purpose.” She shook her head and stared at her hands, then away at the sky, as if she wasn’t really talking to me. “I don’t know what God was thinking.” Her eyes followed the sunrise as we sat quietly. “How could you do this?” she asked the sky.

  Something brought her attention back to me. “Oh, Lucy, you’re shaking.”

  “I’m sorry, Kitty.”

  “You haven’t done anything to be sorry for, dear.” She reached to me with a lace-edged embroidered handkerchief. I worried about soiling the pretty fabric with my tears, but Kitty dabbed at my face like she didn’t care. “You’re just a little girl and can’t understand such things. All this talk about God and his not being here for us must be confusing.”

  But I understood more than Kitty knew. I’d already begun tucking away most of the memories of my mother; I felt my faith being hidden away too. Later I’d wonder if I was tucking away my faith to protect it or to get rid of it.

  But then all I knew was that Kitty didn’t think God was there for us, and I felt the heaviness of that drop over me, a blanket of fear and confusion.

  Even as I followed Kitty’s emotional leading, I thought of Ruby, and at that very moment I felt like a bad girl doing something I was sure my mom told me to never do… because secretly I still believed in heaven. Ruby was there. And if there was heaven, wasn’t there God? Ruby had told me so, hadn’t she?

  I reached from my confusion toward Kitty, wanting to make her feel better and hoping she could make me feel okay too. She was so sad for Ruby; I was so sorrowful for Kitty. We both loved Ruby and we’d both lost her. And then Kitty told me a granddaughter is a kind of daughter, and I was hers.

  I looked over at Kitty, who was staring up at the hummingbird feeder. A jeweled green bird had appeared, flitting around us like a bumblebee. I wondered if it noticed that Ruby was gone, if it had watched the whole thing, witnessing how slow I had been that day.

  I balanced my teacup on my knees and watched the hummingbird dart around us. It paused near my shoulder, its wings buzzing, as if studying the splashes of color on my dress. Was he accusing me? I glanced at Kitty again,
but she said nothing, as if it was an expected thing to have a hummingbird fly right up to me on the day of my Ruby’s funeral. Her eyes followed the hummingbird as it darted away, staring long after it had disappeared.

  My cup rattled, causing Kitty to finally turn her head slowly toward me, and the hollowness of her eyes, so lost and sad, engulfed me. I knew that I somehow should have found Ruby’s inhaler faster, but I didn’t know Ruby could die. Now I had not only hurt my Ruby, but I’d hurt my Kitty too. The doubt seeded in my mind started to grow, its roots already reaching deep. What if God was mad at me for not getting help to Ruby in time? What if he had already forgotten about us?

  What if Kitty didn’t have anyone but me?

  Kitty leaned toward me then and took one of my small hands in hers, careful not to upset the teacup in my lap, her red wooden bracelets softly clunking with the movement. We didn’t talk anymore before the funeral, just sat holding hands and looking out over Ruby’s garden. I knew one thing only then. Kitty wasn’t Ruby, but she would take care of me.

  A grandmother was a kind of mother too.

  2

  My home, Ruby’s home, became Kitty’s too, and she moved in all of her things.

  “You will always be close to Ruby this way,” she said. Secretly I wondered if this was really for my sake or more for Kitty’s because, as she moved in, we moved out none of Ruby’s things. Her antique piano still sat in the corner. Her blue velvet wingback chair stood nearby. Her bent tubes of oil paint lay heaped on a small table surrounded by canvases, some empty and others half-finished, waiting for details to be filled in. Finished paintings filled the house too. Fifteen self-portraits by Ruby lined the walls of my bedroom. The twelve-by-twelve blocked canvases hung side by side, a sort of border that I loved and studied every day as a soldier does a photo of his children and wife, hoping to be reunited when the war is over.

  Only I knew I didn’t have the hope of seeing Ruby again. At least not in the waking hours.

  In dreams Ruby came to me. Sometimes in nightmares I would see her moving desperately through the house, looking for an inhaler. When she found it, she’d clasp it to her lips, sucking deeply, like getting a fix from a cigarette. I could only watch, paralyzed, all the fear and sadness coming over me. Then Ruby would sit down, breathe deep, and when she had her breath back, she’d smile at me like this had been no big deal.

  I would wake relieved. But only for a moment before remembering that Ruby was gone.

  In more pleasant dreams, I relived our last day, remembering how she woke me with a glass of orange juice. I’d been parched from the heat of the evening before and gulped down the juice so fast Ruby laughed—clear, happy. She handed me a pair of scissors then; together, on my bed, we cut out paper dolls as we had so often when she was alive.

  My favorite, even to this day, was the woman in a full, green taffeta gown. Ruby said she looked like Scarlett O’Hara, a brave lady from a book she’d read once. Scarlett had yanked her curtains off the wall and sewn a new dress when she had no more fabric.

  I laughed and told Ruby the curtain trick sounded like something she or Kitty would do. Ruby nodded in agreement and fluttered at me her favorite paper doll, a skinny woman wearing a water-blue straight gown and a tiara.

  “Curtains fit for a queen.” She winked. “Or Diana, a real, true princess.”

  Ruby told me a long story about Diana, how nice she was, how she liked to help people, how everybody in the world loved her because of her kindness and grace.

  “Like you, Mommy Ruby!”

  Her lips, red and shiny, broke into a smile, and the tear that slid down her cheek surprised me. “Mommy!” I whispered, touching the wet spot.

  She smiled reassuringly at me. “Mija, thank you for thinking I could be a princess. You are the real princess. My breath, my…”

  I giggled then. “I know. I am your light.”

  She’d kissed the tip of her finger and placed it on my forehead. “Yes, you are!”

  The irony that she and Diana both died young in their lives and that Ruby told me about Diana on the same day she herself would die was never lost on me.

  I always wondered if Prince William and Prince Harry missed Diana as deeply every living day as I did Ruby. I watched them during Diana’s funeral on television, recognizing the grief on Harry’s small face because it so perfectly mirrored my own. I’d bawled throughout the coverage, my own sorrow for Ruby pouring out as compassion for Harry. Watching the scenes from the funeral over and over, looking for Harry, I relived my own mother’s funeral. The feelings were the same ones I would have later, in junior high too, when I discovered Emily Dickinson’s poem, which begins:

  I measure every Grief I meet

  With narrow, probing, Eyes—

  I wonder if It weighs like Mine—

  Or has an Easier size.

  I’d found the poem in the center of a book at the library—a large leather-bound volume creased open to poem #561, as if it had been read repeatedly by some other library patron. Instinctively I knew the other reader, like me, had grieved terribly, and after that I began searching the faces around me.

  For years I treasured the Emily Dickinson poem in my heart. Only later would I understand why: that grief, though universal, can only truly be recognized in its purity when active and present and by others trudging through the same dreadful bog.

  There is a picture of Ruby and me on the lamp table in our living room; in the picture I’m astride a shiny red tricycle with my light brown curly hair in pigtails and a huge grin on my face. Ruby, curly brown hair hanging forward over her shoulders, smiles too with rosy lips. Her whole face is lit up as she leans over me like she’s pushing me along. We both look happy, but I can never recall the moment.

  I couldn’t recall much of life with Ruby, though her things surrounded me every day: the linen curtains on the patio doors that allowed the sun to pour through, the pictures of antique roses adorning the walls in frames of gilded gold or ornate, cream-colored frames, the painting of me in watercolors hanging in the center of the small living room above the antique piano. In the painting I have a small smile, and I’m holding roses tied with a bit of lace. Light pours out of the roses, shooting out an open window; next to the window is a ladder like I’ve seen on television in Spanish movies, the same kind women tossed handmade rugs over and tourists bought in gift shops. The ladder is knotty and almost red, with two clusters of dried yellow roses hanging upside down from one rung. Light from my roses shoots past them. The portrait is called “Ruby’s Light,” but I couldn’t remember Ruby painting it.

  Kitty said Ruby had been interested in her roots, and that’s why she’d included the ladder.

  “What roots?” I’d asked.

  “Oh, Ruby was always enamored by the idea that we had some kind of Latino roots—even though she obviously wasn’t full-blooded Mexican.”

  “Are we Spanish?”

  “Oh, Maria Lucero. My Lucy. You sound like Ruby.” Kitty reached out and smoothed back my hair before turning and busying herself with making tea.

  While the painting intrigued me, the blue velvet chair held more mystery. I had a fuzzy memory of it, something never clear but seemingly important about Ruby and me in that chair. Kitty always dismissed my questions.

  “It is just a chair, dear.”

  These were times I didn’t really understand Kitty. I was confused that she seemed sad about my lack of memory of Ruby, but she seemed to always avoid my mounting questions or at least redirect my attention to something else, especially when I probed about the many quilts she’d made and placed over the couch, on the arm of a chair, and on the wall behind the desk. That last one was the masterpiece. Made of rich gold, red, and green patterned squares, this was the quilt Kitty said she’d hand-stitched for Ruby’s high school graduation.

  I asked Kitty if I could have it to lay across the edge of my bed with my other quilt of Ruby’s.

  “No,” she said without explanation. It was rare for Kitty to
ever outright tell me no, so I assumed the quilt was one thing in the house she’d claimed as her own—that is, besides me. She’d claimed me as her own the day Ruby died.

  Sometimes I would test Kitty, asking her about things I knew were Ruby’s, looking for something to hang on to—stories about the mother I was losing more in memory every day.

  “Where did this come from?” I’d run my hand across the top of a heavy cherry chest or the mahogany table. I was getting older and becoming more aware that most single mothers—or grandmothers—in an apartment the size of ours couldn’t afford such things. Ruby was never wealthy, according to Kitty, and these pieces were expensive. They didn’t really seem like the Ruby in my mind. I’d always imagined that she would have picked out wicker or something else simpler.

  “We found this at the flea market,” Kitty explained once. “Other things were gifts from people who wanted to help your mother.”

  “Who would give such expensive furniture to us? Wouldn’t Ruby have been happy with something not as expensive?”

  “Yes, of course she would have settled for less, and she did settle in many ways.” Kitty paused a long moment. “But some people like to give more than simply what is needed, dear. Ruby brought out that quality in people. And besides, she never would have refused their gift. She was too nice, a lot like you, Lucy.”

  “Who were they?”

  “The people who gave the furniture to her? We don’t know them anymore.”

  And that had been that.

  Intuitively I knew I wasn’t supposed to question Kitty, and so I didn’t repeat my questions often. I’d always trusted Kitty because she had been the most steadfast person, if not the only person, in my life, but her secretive silence bothered me.

  Even if I never quite understood how we had so many nice things in our tiny apartment, I loved our home and its furnishings. The roses, lace accents, quilts, and furniture had always represented Ruby’s personality to me, giving me a taste of who she was and what she liked. I clung to certain things, willing them to bring back faint memories of Ruby. In particular I loved the round, amber-colored glass bowl that still sat in the center of the mahogany coffee table. Ruby had placed deep red roses in that bowl her last day; I always tried to keep it filled with flowers in her memory.