Ruby on the Outside (6 page)

Chapter Twelve

In a way, after I
was done being sad about Tevin, I was glad Tevin was gone, because he made me think too much.

Why do some people go to prison and some don't?

Do they put people in prison so they can't hurt other people?

Or do they put people in prison to punish them?

Or do they put people in prison so they have time to figure out what they did wrong so they can change? And if that's the case, how does it help to take a mother away from her child? A child away from his mother?

But now I have a best friend, Margalit and the hardest stuff we have to think about is what's going to happen next in our story. So even though I haven't forgotten about that other stuff, my brain gets a little time off.

“I think we need to work on it at my house tonight,” she is telling me.

It hasn't rained again, but a lot of our outdoor time we spend on our stories, sitting under the umbrella table by the pool, while Yvette and Beatrice talk or try to teach Elise how to swim. That one boy who used to come hasn't come back. Guess he felt outnumbered.

Margalit and I finished our mermaid story and now we are working on a fairy story about two elves that get into all sorts of trouble. I figured out the fun of this game is to throw Margalit some twists and turns and surprises in my chapter that she has to figure out in her part, and still make the story make sense and have that
So what?
like my language arts teacher, Ms. Genovese, would say when we study writing in class, like
That's an interesting series of events, but so what?

The
So what?

We want our story to have a meaning.

Margalit wants me to come to her house again so we can continue work on our elf story, but I still haven't had her over to my house yet.

I am thinking that if Margalit is really my best friend, I should tell her the truth. I should tell her about my mother. Because I'm pretty sure Margalit thinks that Matoo is my mother, and it's not that I don't like Matoo—I love Matoo—but she is
not
my mother.

I feel like I can trust Margalit. I feel like there isn't anything I couldn't tell her.

Besides, Matoo was the one to suggest I invite Margalit over. So I say out loud, “Why don't you come to my house this time?”

Margalit looks excited. “Okay, we can just stop at my house and ask my mom. But don't you have to ask your mom first?”

Now, there's a question. I know no one would believe me, but I've never had anyone over to my house for dinner before, so I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do.

“No, it's fine. She”—I just say “she”—“loves it when I bring people over.”

Which is kind of true, because I know Matoo would love it if I had a friend, but as I am talking, I also know Matoo hates surprises.

But as it turns out, it's all fine. No worries. We stop first at Margalit's house after camp and Margalit's mother calls my house and makes sure it is okay, and Matoo happens to be in a particularly good mood. She says she'd be “thrilled to meet my new friend.” We practically skip the rest of the way, with Yvette and Beatrice trailing behind.

My room isn't anywhere near as fun or interesting as Margalit's, but she acts like it is.

“Oo, I love your desk.”

I turn my head to see what she is talking about. My desk looks pretty average: wood, with drawers on either side, and a chair pushed neatly underneath.

“It's so clean. You must take your homework seriously. It looks like a high school desk.”

I ponder that. I guess I do take my schoolwork pretty seriously. My mother asks to hear about my homework every time I see her. She asks about all my tests, and even if it's been a couple of weeks, she remembers everything. She even gets special permission from the social workers to talk on the phone to my teachers if she thinks they need to hear something about me. I've gotten the same message all my life from my mom:

Do well in school.

Don't get into trouble.

Make smart choices.

Don't grow up to be like me.

“So you're a really smarty pants, then, right?” Margalit asks me, and I know she's not making of fun of me. She's impressed and she sits down at my desk like she's testing it out.

“I guess so. I get really good grades.” I can feel myself blushing a little. I think this is a good time to come clean. Not that I've been lying exactly but before we go downstairs and eat, before she asks me why I call Matoo “Matoo,” or before she sees that photo on the mantel, I should tell Margalit the truth.

“I wish I got better grades,” Margalit is saying.

She sits down on my bed and Loulou jumps up next to her. “And you are so lucky to have this cute dog. You must be really smart in school. Maybe we can study together in sixth grade.”

Margalit is petting Loulou and I get this funny feeling there is something she is trying to tell me, too, because she is talking so fast.

“I mean, I do okay in school, but I think my brother got all the brains and didn't leave any for me,” Margalit says.

She is being so nice and so open about herself that I might have to interrupt and tell her flat-out:

My mother is in prison.

The truth floats over my head like a cloud that follows me everywhere I go. It's dark and heavy. It won't go away if I talk about it but it will be easier to carry.

But Margalit keeps talking and I can't find a place to butt in.

She is fiddling with the pencils that are stored in a special pencil holder on my desk. I made it in the children's center. Margalit goes on. “I could probably do better actually, but I think my parents like remembering my brother as the smart one, you know what I mean? Like that's how things are supposed to be. I am the artistic one. He was the smart one.”

She turns to face me.

I want to say something, because I can tell I am supposed to, but I really
don't
know what she means.

“Is that your brother you told me about?” I ask. I remember she told me that she
used
to have a brother, but I've seen lots of kids with lots of different stories. Kids with parents they had and then didn't, kids that didn't have parents and then they come back, brothers and sisters they didn't know they had, or had and then didn't.

I wonder if I should have known, if I should have seen his room or heard her talking about him before, but I just wasn't listening good enough.

Then Margalit tells me, “Yeah, Josh. Well, Josh was my older brother, but he died a long time ago.”

“Your brother?” I say. “Your brother's name was Josh?”

“Yeah,” Margalit says. “He was twelve years older than me. I know that's a big difference. My mom tells me they had Josh when they were so young, like he was a mistake, but I think it's probably the other way around. I never talk about it. You're the first friend I've ever told.”

Josh?

Tipps?

“You're my first real best friend, you know,” Margalit says. “I'm so glad I could tell you all this.”

“You can tell me anything,” I say.

And something tells me not to say anything about my mother right now. Not yet. Something inside just tells me to stay quiet.

“Let's go down and see if dinner is ready,” I say, but my brain is saying something else, quietly working in the background.

And once my brain starts thinking like that, I worry nothing good is going to come of it.

Chapter Thirteen

I still have that teddy
bear, the one the woman police officer gave me the night my mother was arrested. I don't touch it, but I can't bring myself to get rid of it. It's still got the stiff red ribbon tied around its neck. I don't think Matoo knows why I have a teddy bear on my top shelf. She, of course, wasn't there that night, so I don't have to explain it to her. We lived in Saratoga back then. I don't even know where Matoo lived. I didn't ever see her back then. I didn't even know I had an aunt until they took my mother away.

I was only five years old.

I remember a few things, like remembering a movie you saw a long time ago that you weren't paying too much attention to in the first place. Still, sometimes, in the dark, against my will, when I am just trying to fall asleep, snapshots start coming into my head.

Nick and my mother were fighting. I could hear them from my bed. I didn't think much of it. I mean, I hated it, but they fought all the time. The scary part was if Nick lost his temper, if he broke something, or grabbed my mother's arm and left his fingerprints as dark bruises on her skin, and I would hear her crying.

But that night, after the yelling stopped, it just got quiet.

When I heard my mother's footsteps coming near my door I quickly turned my head to the wall and pretended to be fast asleep. I could tell she was looking at me, listening. I tried to make my breathing slow and even. She walked away from my bed, out of my room, and she carefully closed the door behind her.

A few seconds later I watched the car lights move across my ceiling and down my wall, I knew they had driven away.

I wasn't afraid. Not really. I was tucked into my bed. Safe in my room. The door was closed.

I waited.

And I waited.

I must have fallen asleep because the next thing I remember is the sound of our front door cracking off its hinges—splintering, cracking, breaking, booming shattering—the men's voices, and the bright lights shining under my bedroom door. The sound of things falling, drawers opening. I could hear it. I could hear walkie-talkies and shouting, footsteps. Voices that weren't my mother's. And weren't Nick's.

I froze. Every sound shot through my body, sinking me deeper and deeper into my covers. I was alone.

I was alone.

Then my whole room lit up when my bedroom door flew open.

“It's okay, sweetheart.” A woman's voice. “It's okay.” The woman policeman handed me the teddy bear and nothing was okay. Ever again.

Then everything is pretty much a big bank of fog, until I remember living with Matoo here in the condos in Mt. Kisco, and I had no idea how either me or my stuff got there. It's like there's a big chunk of time that just disappeared. I suppose for a while we were all lost and then slowly, slowly it just started to be home. I didn't ask any questions but I was vaguely aware that being here had something to do with being near my mother so we could visit her easily—so when she came home we were ready.

Soon.

And when “soon” never happened, the past fell away, along with all those meetings, and phone calls, lawyers and plea bargains, court dates, babysitters, more meetings, more phone calls, another trial date. A new lawyer. Another trial.

Sentencing.

Twenty to twenty-five years.

Then I started school and I had to figure out my new teachers, new kids, where the bathrooms were, who to sit with on the bus, who not to sit with. I had to learn spelling and geography.

I learned to be quiet and listen, not get into trouble if at all possible so I can report to my mother every week—all good things—nothing bad. And my worlds, though a mere five miles apart, divide like the continental shift we learn about in social studies, hopefully never to meet again.

Inside and outside.

Real and unreal trade places. And then they trade back again.

Somewhere during that time Aunt Barbara becomes Matoo.

Now it's just my house, where I live; my bed, my dresser, my books, but not much from my old life, except that teddy bear.

Chapter Fourteen

Matoo doesn't make homemade anything,
but you'd think from the way Margalit goes on, that there were no better chocolate chip cookies than the ones that we are having for dessert.

“Oh wow, these are so good. Can I have another one?”

Matoo looks kind of happily astounded as she passes the box across the table. “Of course, sweetie. But they're just Entenmann's.”

“Oh, I don't know. But they are so good. My mother never lets me have store-bought. I mean, not that she doesn't let me, she just never buys them. These are amazing, but don't tell her I said that.”

We all laugh. I guess you never know what you should be grateful for.

Matoo asks Margalit a lot of questions, which is something I never do because when you ask people questions that leaves you open to their questions about you. But I see that Matoo's technique is to ask so many questions the other person doesn't have a chance to ask you anything. Besides, she's really good at it and she remembers everything a person tells her, which is probably why she's so good at her job at the doctor's office. Everyone likes her because she remembers their names and anything they tell her.

Pretty clever, I must say.

And so far it's working. We know all about Margalit's mom and dad, what they do for a living. What kind of car they drive. Where her mom learned to cook. What kind of art the grandfather does. But I notice Margalit stays away from mentioning anything about her brother.

I understand.

I haven't said much at all until I suddenly make one of my infamously dumb statements when Margalit tells us where she lived before she moved here to Mt. Kisco. “Why have I heard of Glens Falls,” I blurt out.

“Because, Ruby,” Matoo says. “You used to live right near there, in Saratoga.”

“Oh.” And a warning light goes off in my brain. A little late, however because Margalit is all over this one.

“You did? You lived near Glens Falls?” Margalit says. “Where? Usually when I tell people where I'm from they never heard of it. It's not that far from here really. When did you guys live there?”

Us
guys didn't. Just me. And my mom.

“It was a long time ago,” Matoo answers quickly. She pats both her hands on the tabletop firmly. “Well, that's it. Do you girls think you could take Loulou out for a walk before it gets too dark?”

“Oh, really? I'd love to. Can we?” Margalit jumps up.

And she forgets about Glens Falls. But I don't.

“You can just look it up.”

Rebecca had all the answers. She was older than me and had been coming to the Bedford Hills children's center much longer. She had both her mother and father in jail and she knew a thing or two about jails and prisons, parol hearings, clemency boards, and, well, pretty much everything, and when I first met her, she scared me.

She was one of those tough girls. You can find them everywhere, not just in prison. I heard that there are plenty of tough girls in the middle school, ones that sneak out of the cafeteria to hang out in the bathroom, leaning on the wall or blocking your way to the stall. I heard some girls hold in their pee all day because they are too scared.

But after I got to know her, Rebecca wasn't really like that. She just wanted other kids to think she was.

“Look what up?” I asked her. We were both sitting in the seats inside the trailer. It was raining and instead of making us wait outside getting wet, like we usually have to, they let everyone pile inside the trailer and wait. There was a little corner with little-kid seats and some old books. Rebecca looked funny sitting in one of those seats. I bet I looked funny too, but she must have been at least thirteen. It was just a little while after Tevin stopped coming.

“You can look it all up,” she said. “Go on the Internet. Google your mother's name. It's all public record. Court documents, newspaper articles, even transcripts of the trial if you know where to look. If you know how to search.”

It seems funny now, that I never thought to do that. But at the time, it seemed perfectly normal.

“Did you do that?” I asked Rebecca.

I knew that her dad was in jail too, and she had told me that visiting her dad in prison in Ossining made Bedford Hills look like a four-star hotel.

“Sure I did,” Rebecca told me. “When I was about your age. Maybe a year older, like around twelve. I learned everything, and let me tell you, it wasn't pretty.”

I can see Matoo sitting in one of the regular seats by the door, waiting our turn to show our papers, show my birth certificate, empty our pockets, sign the papers, and begin the process all over again, for the hundredth time or more. Doesn't matter if you've been here once or a million times, it's the same every time.

“What?” I asked Rebecca. “What isn't pretty?”

“Well, let's just say ‘criminal justice' is an oxymoron.”

I had no idea what she meant by that, but I could tell she was angry.

But I knew better than to ask. Tevin talked, but most kids didn't. And you never ask. We just don't talk like that in the children's center. Nobody says stuff like,
What did your mother do? Do you think she's guilty? Do you think she did it? Or if she did it, do you think she deserves
this
?

I never thought like that. Why would I? I can't change it. Matoo says the past is the past. What good does going over it do? What good is talking about it?

“So are you glad you found out?” I asked Rebecca.

She got quiet for a bit.

She didn't answer me but I could tell whatever she found out wasn't what she thought it was going to be. Let's just say that conversation with Rebecca didn't exactly inspire me to want to run home and do the same thing.

At least not that day.

But after Margalit went home, stuffed on Entenmann's, I stay up in bed to work on my story.
Our
story. I touch my pencil to the paper at least five times before I realize I can't think of anything to write or draw. Margalit and I are both supposed to write a whole new elf chapter before camp tomorrow. But I am stuck. Is this what they call writer's block?

I can't even think of a name for my character.

I have the story notebook propped up on my knees, under the covers, all cozy for the night. My teeth are brushed. The house is quiet.

Under the green, green grass,
I begin. No, not under the grass. You can't be under grass, can you?

Deep, in the dark, dark woods, Edgar the Elf makes his journey.

Edgar the Elf is stupid. I don't like that, so I erase it.

Peter the Elf.

Nah.

Josh the Elf?

Josh?

Josh Tipps. Why is that name stuck in my head?

Glens Falls? Why does that come into my head?

Saratoga.
Glens Falls.

Glens Falls.
Saratoga.

Josh Tipps.

I can't write. My brain won't let me think about anything else.

I look over at my computer on my desk. It's off for the night. Our computer teacher at school say it's better to just leave it on, sleeping, but Matoo can't stand leaving anything on. She unplugs the microwave when we are not using it. She even turns the router off at night, so computer waves can't penetrate our brains while we are sleeping.

But sometimes she forgets.

I slip off my bed and into my desk chair. The computer hums to life when I press the power button. If the Wi-Fi is still on, the Internet availability icon will show full access. It takes a while for everything to boot up and come flying onto my screen in bits and pieces.

The Internet is working.

I open Safari, type my mother's name and “Josh Tipps” into the search box, and while the little icon loops in circles I hold my breath.