“That one is still young enough,” the director said. “I think he’s got a fighting chance to find a home. But we have to act quickly, because the longer a child stays in a place like this, the harder it gets for them to adapt to a normal family.”
“I was told that when the Castle kids were here,” Ruby said, holding up the old file, “it was hard for relatives who wanted them to get them back.”
The director nodded. “That’s true. They used to think that one bad apple meant the whole family was rotten. If a child was removed for a significant reason, like sexual abuse, they didn’t trust anyone in that clan. But now we know that’s not necessarily true. We do family placements when we can. We call them kinship placements now.”
“If the Castle kids were here now, could they have gone to their cousin Betty?”
“If her home was safe.” The director lowered her voice. “I know this is no place for a child.”
Ruby left, but before she was even down the drive, she had to pull over, in a clearing under the trees, because she began to feel dizzy,even unwell. She felt her hands on the wheel and heard the bone, calling from far away. It was saying,Will you listen to me now?
Okay, she thought, opening her mind to the impossible. Tell me. I’m listening.
The sky split open for her then, and she was back in the woods outside Chinook, only now something terrible had occurred. She was in the mind of something, something that was no longer with us, not in the same way. She was a set of dimly twinkling stars. Ruby was at the stars, and she was looking down—on the poorhouse, once again. She saw through a hole in the roof into a room back in time. The matron was there, writing in her ledgers. She was writing a name in the front of the book. She looked up, into her doorway, and Ruby was in Georgia. She was in a car pulling up outside the factory where Mitchell had been transferred. She was a set of hands on the wheel. She felt the sickness rise in her then, and she knew why most people didn’t want to listen to the dead. It was miraculous and awful. Why, she might step through, herself, and—
She came to suddenly, her skin clammy and cold all over, and she could feel how hard it was for the bone, too. How much effort it took to communicate from that place. She heard the bone faintly now, from a distance, pleading with her.Save him,the bone was saying.
Ruby stood outside the factory, watching the last of the workers leave for the day. They said goodbye to each other, carrying their empty lunch boxes. They would go to their apartments across the street and wash the plastic bags they had carried their sandwiches in—bread bags that once had labels, now worn off—and they would hang the bags over the kitchen sink spout to dry as she and her mother had done. Once, eating a sandwich at school, she had accidentally eaten a tiny piece oflabel that said Franz, and, amused, she had imagined it growing into a factory inside of her, all clanging metal and rising yeast.
A man was coming out, talking with the supervisor.
Ronald, as fresh as a West Coast sunrise in the Georgia glimmer.
He saw her, and his handsome face registered pleasure. Then he was crossing the sidewalk to say hello. He towered above her, friendly.
“We were just discussing you,” he said.
The others had left; it was just the two of them.
“I was just thinking about factories,” she said.
“Tell me over a drink?” he asked.
They went not to the Drinking Spot but to another place down the street, a smaller pub with a swinging sign outside. She noticed that his accent changed in the room. People were mimics, she had found. If they were around bad people, they became bad, and they didn’t even know it.
Ronald, his last name plain old Smith, ordered himself a beer, and she had a glass of white wine that tasted as crisp as summer. They sat near the bay window, to watch the sunset. She pictured it diving over the Pacific.
He seemed to be thinking the same. “I have a place in Winchester Bay, by the ocean,” he said. “It’s not the fanciest place, but I like it there. Have you ever been?”
She was surprised and pleased. Winchester Bay was an Oregon fishing town, with old men and women sitting in the shadows of the sea, and stinging spray over the smell of freshly shucked oysters. It was exactly the kind of place she liked.
“I have,” she said, sipping her wine.
“I imagine a lot of the places you end up are poor.”
“Well, I’ve never seen a rich man on death row.”
He drank his beer, wiped his mouth. The bar was warm, but not too warm: it smelled of hops, like Old Town. She felt an almost dizzying array of emotions.
“I looked you up,” he said. “It must be lonely work.”
“I think most people pick careers to be happy, or at least secure,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with that. But my career picked me.”
“I imagine it must feel like being a person of biblical times going out into the wilderness to pick up the dead goats after they had been driven out.”
She blinked: It was a terrible, and accurate, assessment of her work.
“The more you do it,” he said, “the harder it must be.”
