She drank her coffee, shaking her muddled head.
He saw. As an expert on people, he knew. This woman, he thought, needs comfort.
“You look tired,” he said. “I got a back room. It’s safe, I promise. I let the drunk ladies sleep there all the time, so they don’t get robbed or worse trying to get home. You can rest back there for a bit, if you like.”
“I’d like that, but I’ve got to eat first.”
“I know just the thing. I got to fire up the grill anyhow. Got some fresh fish in the back. Make you the best fish sandwich you’ve ever had, then let you take a rest.”
Which was how she ended up on a leather sofa in a quiet, dark back room, her belly happy with what had been the best fish sandwich she’d ever had, with leftover slaw, chased by an icy cold beer, ready to dream, her travel alarm from her bag next to her. From behind the wall, she could hear the music turn on, softly, and the pinball machine ting.
She slept.
She woke with a start. The alarm had not gone off—reaching for it, she realized that she had not set it—and she could sense that it was getting dark outside. Feeling like she was still dreaming, she moved through the now crowded bar out the door. The bartender, busy, did not see her go.
She stepped into the sunset. The humidity was so high she felt like a sea was hanging in the air, dripping down her neck, pooling in her clavicle.
She realized that she was thinking, not for the first time, about how our parents make us real. They form us from blood and cells. We come from them, as helpless as the proverbial infant we are, and we choke on their spirit until the doctor suctions it from our lungs, and hands us to the nurse to spank. Then we come alive. But we are not really alive until our parents are with us, standing by our side, cuddling us, feeding us from their breasts or carrying us on their backs.
When they disappear, our very bones melt.
She froze. There, in her bag.
She reached for it, feeling as if another set of eyes was leading her.Look again at that picture,the bone said.
Ruby held the picture, seeing it anew. The Caddy for the kitchen worker, the pink car for Mary Baldwin, the dirty Gremlin for Wes Rogers.
The brown Datsun.
Why, of course, she thought. You didn’t notice because you grew up seeing this, surrounded by it from a young age.
Oregon plates.
She drove back to Hammock County, feeling restless and filled with a strange energy. The nap, she knew, meant she would not sleep. The stars, hanging in a foggy sky, told her it was too late to do anything about the license plate or the man at the bar tonight.
She found herself back at the truck stop, with its rows of concrete restrooms. A few semis had pulled in for the night, their windows covered. They were long-haul drivers, crossing the country. She had heard that Georgia was one of the more complicated states to cross because of varying restrictions on weight classes and exclusions from the Atlanta interstates—some of the many factoids she had learned from truck drivers, some of her favorite witnesses. They were her eyes and ears on the road.
Grabbing her bag, she went to the women’s room. Here were a few johns, with no doors on the stalls, and a buzzing fluorescent light in a metal cage. The floor was sticky, but in the back was a solitary shower, with a rusted metal showerhead. A sign bolted on the wall saidrespect each other,and then3 minutes.
Ruby turned to see that the door had a lock. She slid the bolt home and tried the shower. The water came out lukewarm. It was warmish in the pipes, she thought—no need for a water heater here. That was fine with her. She stripped, reaching for one of the motel soaps Willa had given her. The soap left silky steaks of bubbles on her pale skin: She felt like a sliver of moon, here in the concrete restroom. She rinsed, mindful of the three-minute time limit. A woman truck driver could be pulling in, to sleep under the twisted pines, the ropes of moss. The last trickle of water ran down her face.
Stepping out of the shower, she realized that she had forgotten to pack a towel. Oh well. She brushed herself dry in the warm summer air.
She dressed in the change of clothes from her bag, put her holster under her arm, and washed the outfit she had been wearing in the sink, rinsing the clothes well and wringing them out.
Feeling clean and well cared for—it was remarkable how low that bar had become, after her mother disappeared—she went back to her car and cracked the window in the back. She hung the wet clothes out the window, knowing they would be dry by daybreak. She locked the doors and lay down on the cool back seat. Ruby looked out the cracked window at the sky. That narrow slice of air leading to the sky mesmerized her. She wasn’t sure why. She just knew it did.
32.
At the death house, Mitchell was tired of contemplating his fate. He didn’t want to hear from that damn bone anymore. Let his grandfather have all the coffee klatches with the dead he wanted. Mitchell was still a young man—or rather, he had been when he came here—and he was done thinking about death. He still wanted to run and jump and play; he wanted to dance like Ruby had danced, to feel the joy of music and the rush of a healthy young body.
This was not allowed, so he spent his final days the best way he could. Now he understood why Wicked Willy did push-ups in his cell. Mitchell hadn’t understood before. It wasn’t a discharge of energy—it was a way to harness it. To pretend you had some great future, outside these walls.
He had always been a model inmate. This was not hard to do when you’re in a cell. They had a room they were taken to for exercise. Mitchell drilled the old, half-deflated basketball with the chew marks on it from the insane and driven insane against the concrete wall. Once, he had found an insect in that room, and he had marveled at it, and later thought about it a lot. The insect was alive, but unlike Mitchell and the other men on death row, it didn’t know when it would die. No living creature should know exactly when it would die. That curse was something only humans delivered to each other, in the form of the death penalty. He realized that this was the point. They were stealing the mystery of life from him.
Now he lay on his cot, aware of the hours draining away. He waswaking up out of the death fog of the past few weeks and didn’t like the reality he was finding.
He tried to distract himself with memories. The problem with dying young is you don’t have enough memories to entertain yourself. He thought of his mother, Charise. His memory of her was fuzzy, but he would never forget the squishy feeling of her ample belly. As a little guy, he had liked to stroke the soft inside place of her arm, and she would laugh while he did it, and then look faraway and distracted.
