Ruby on the Outside (8 page)

Chapter Eighteen

And then, just like that,
another week goes uneventfully by and it's Saturday. Again.

Visiting day.

And now from the pot to the frying pan or something like that.

“Ruby, are you ready?” Matoo is standing outside my bedroom door.

I'm as far from ready as could be, but I am dressed and my bed is made and as far as I know my feet are still working. But I am standing at my bureau and looking into the mirror hanging above it, and I can't move.

Is that me in there?

The girl who does well in school. Who doesn't get into trouble. The girl that won't grow up to be like her mother.

Who am I?

Because I
am
my mother's daughter. I look just like her. When we are together, people tell us that; the other prisoners who are her friends, sometimes the guards, other visitors. And whenever somebody said that—you two look so much alike—it made me happy.

As if it was something I
could
take away with me after I left Bedford Hills. It wasn't something you could hold or touch, but it was just as real to me. I could take our connection with me wherever I went. She was my mother and I was her daughter and even if we weren't together we were bonded by this visible DNA.

The eighth characteristic of life: love.

I stand on my tiptoes and look closer. What is it people notice? Our noses? The color of my hair? My eyes? Our teeth?

And if I looked like my mother on the outside, did that mean I was going to be like her on the inside?

How can I love my mother knowing what she did? Knowing what
I
did. I lied about my mother and I said she was dead.

Is that my DNA?

Will I have to lie the rest of my life?

I force myself to smile in the mirror. I do look like my mother. The shade of our skin. And my left ear. There's a little fold at the top of my left ear, just like hers. Just like my mother's.

“Ruby, let's go.” Matoo is knocking on my bedroom door again.

“Okay,” I answer.

There's a huge, long line when we get to Bedford Hills. It's going to take forever to get inside. But today I don't care.

I'm in no hurry.

Today, I am not looking forward to getting inside. I don't know what I am going to say.

“Ruby, what's with you today? You're not yourself.” Matoo parks the car in the lot. I wonder how I never noticed before how horrible and ugly this place is.

Suddenly it looks like a prison in a scary movie. The old crumbling brick buildings that look deserted or haunted or both. The indescribably tall chain link fence with the razor wire running over the top, hundreds of blades, and for the first time I let myself know why it is there.

To keep the bad guys in.

So that if someone tried to escape, if they tried to climb over that fence, forcing their toes into the space between the links, gripping with their fingers, they would only be cut to shreds when they tried to make their way over the top to the other side. I have seen that fence a million times and now I know.

“I'm fine,” I tell Matoo.

We take our place in line and wait forty-five minutes before we are at the door to the trailer where we will be processed. When we finally get inside, the air conditioning is blasting. There will be no air conditioning when we get to the visiting room. It's been broken for weeks and no one can say when it will be fixed. And there is no air conditioning at all in the housing units.

Because this is a prison. It's not supposed to be comfortable.

When we get into security Matoo takes out a quarter and opens a locker. She stuffs her pocketbook inside and looks at me. When I was little I used to beg her to let me put the quarter in, like it was a game at a carnival.

But it is not a carnival. There is no fairy tale that ends like this.

“Do you have anything to put in?” Matoo asks me.

I dig into my pocket and lift out my open palm. I have some change, a dime, two nickels, and five pennies. I think they have been in these shorts from the day Margalit and I were diving for coins in the pool.

I feel a knot growing in my stomach. How many things have I chosen not to see?

So many.

Like every winter my middle school does a fund-raiser or toy drive or a mitten-and-glove collection for poor people. Last Christmas there were a bunch of big cardboard boxes set up in the lobby with a tall color sign. The eighth graders were collecting “new in the package” toys for the “women of Bedford.”

I walked right by it and didn't think about it at all.

I didn't want to think about it.

I might have glanced once or twice at the growing piles of toys, games, and stuffed animals. But it wasn't until I recognized the toy my mother “gave” me for Christmas did I put it together. Some kid at my school donated that gift and now here it was in my hands.

But so what?

I put it out of my head.

It was way too babyish a gift, but I never let on. I didn't want to hurt my mother's feelings. I hugged the toy—I don't even remember what it was—and pretended that I loved it. And I did love it. Because my mother had picked it out for me.

But now the CO is asking me to walk through the metal detector with my arms out to the side, and I am thinking that the gift my mother gave me for Christmas last year was a gift someone else got for their birthday they didn't even want enough to open.

“Step up here, please,” the CO says. She is wearing rubber gloves.

I step up and she runs the wand all around my body. When I was little I thought that the rays coming out of it could read my mind. I used to try and make my mind blank so they wouldn't know what I was thinking. So they wouldn't know that I was scared, and excited, angry, and sad, and nervous, and happy to be finally getting to see my mother again.

Now Matoo and I pass through the bars. The thick black bars just like in cartoons where the man in jail is resting his hands and trying to press his face out. Because this is a prison.

“Right hand, please.”

We are at the Plexiglas window with only a small opening where I am supposed to reach in with the top of my hand facing up. The officer behind the glass stamps my hand with an invisible stamp. Today it is the right hand. Yesterday must have been left. I am not sure why they switch it every day, but I am sure it has something to do with preventing the prisoners from getting out. Or the wrong people from coming in.

Now we have to walk outside again.

There is a whole line of us, staggered, depending on how long you took to pass through security. The man behind the Plexiglas pushes a button and those black metal bars slide open. We are walking from one building into the prison itself. I can see more razor wire right over my head. It is so close I can see the sun glinting off its edges.

Matoo puts her arm around me for a short squeeze. She can tell something is wrong but we keep walking.

Here there is a little machine that you have to put your hand under and suddenly, there it is, the glowing stamp they just put on your skin. I used to think that was so cool, so magical.

Not anymore.

My heart is racing. I know the next stop is for our table assignment and, wouldn't you know it, it's Officer Rubins.

“Good morning, ladies,” he says.

I look down at the floor.

“Good morning,” Matoo answers.

I don't say anything which is not like me, but this isn't a day care center. Nobody cares.

“Table sixteen,” Officer Rubins says. He checks us off. Now it's up to him when he decides to call the housing unit and let them know that prisoner 556731 has visitors.

That is the number my mother has to recite when they do a count. Twice a day, every day, or more if they need to. Not Janis Danes, her maiden name. Not even Janis Sands, her married name. But prisoner 556731.

Matoo had explained to me that the prison count was like Buddy count on a field trip. And I used to believe that. It reminded me of being at the Bronx Zoo when Mrs. Clark blew her whistle and shouted,
Buddy count!
We had to stop whatever we were doing, find our assigned buddy, and hold our clasped hands up in the air. We couldn't lower our arms until Mrs. Clark had counted each and every one of us.

I loved Mrs. Clark. She was one of my favorite teachers. You could just tell she cared so much about us. She wanted to make sure we were all safe and that she hadn't lost anyone in the zoo.

“This is a big, huge park,” she told us. “I want us to have fun, but I don't want anyone to wander away from the group and be scared.”

Matoo and I sit down at our table and wait.

My mother let me get lost.

And now I have to find myself.

Chapter Nineteen

For the longest time I
thought that my mother got put in prison because she got in trouble. “Trouble” the way kids use it.

Like:
Don't do that—you'll get in trouble.

Or worse:
Better not do that you'll get in big trouble.

So for a long time, I was terrified of getting in trouble. Of being bad. And for some reason, I felt like I was always just a hair away from doing something wrong. And getting in trouble.

But sometimes trouble just sneaks up and smacks you in the back of the head.

“Ow.” I turned around.

I watched a pencil roll across my desk and hit the floor. Someone had thrown a pencil at me. It was Trevor, I was sure.

Trevor was a bully. He bothered kids for no reason. He didn't seem to care who he hurt and he never got caught. I suspect that he was aiming for the boy in front of me but I got hit.

I was only in third grade at the time, old enough to know better, but I leaned over and picked up the pencil. I even looked up at the front of the room and waited until I saw our Spanish teacher writing on the board. And then I threw the pencil back at him. It whirled through the air, tip over eraser, in a nice easy glide. I hadn't meant to, but it was aimed right at Trevor's face. He wasn't expecting it, so he wasn't looking and it hit him—just my luck—point forward, right in his cheek.

It stuck there for what felt like ten seconds, was probably just a split second, but long enough to leave a deep black imprint, and then fell.

Trevor jumped up.

“Oh, God. I've been poisoned,” he shouted. “Ruby Danes stabbed me with a pencil. Look.” He couldn't have seen it himself but he pointed right to the mark on his face. Of course, everybody looked. Including Señora Bavido.

Trevor got sent to the nurse and I got in-school detention for two days. No recess. After lunch I had to report to my classroom and sit at my desk while everyone else was outside playing.

I could look right out the window. There was Kristin running around with a bunch of girls. I wasn't really friends with them, but I had known them for two whole years. I knew they were playing TV tag, a game that if you can shout out the name of a TV show and squat down before you get tagged you are safe. I didn't have a best friend, but if I was out there, I probably would have been playing TV tag too.

When Kristin ran right by the big glass window I lifted my hand to wave.

I don't even think Kristin saw me.

Matoo knew I had gotten detention. She had to sign a piece of paper saying she knew.

“Don't worry about it, Ruby,” she told me that morning. “It wasn't your fault. Just be more careful next time. Don't throw pencils even if someone threw one at you first. You don't want to get into trouble.”

No, of course not. I didn't try to get into trouble.

I didn't even try to hit Trevor. I could throw that same pencil a hundred times and not hit him like that ever again. I stand at the plate for Wiffle ball every year in gym class and I've never the ball once. Hitting Trevor right in the cheek with that skinny pencil was the definition of an accident and yet there I was. In detention.

I looked outside again at the world that was kept from me and then it occurred to me. Was I being kept from the world?

Had I been so bad that everyone out there was in danger of being stabbed in the face by a crazy pencil-wielding eight-year-old?

I raised my hand.

“There's no talking in detention,” the detention teacher said. “But what is it?”

“Why am I here?” I asked her.

“You know exactly why you are here.” The teacher quickly shuffled through some papers on the desk that wasn't hers, but she was using for this period, to guard me and the only other kid in the room, Carlos, who didn't do his homework for a whole week and had no excuse.

“I mean,
why
why? What good will it do?”

“You will learn a lesson,” she said. She stopped looking for whatever she was looking for. “You are being punished. Kids today think there are no repercussions. Do you know that means?”

I nodded. I did.

“Consequences,” Carlos shouted from the back of the room. He was supposed to be doing his homework while he was here, so
his
detention made a little more sense to me.

“Exactly,” the teacher said.

“But I didn't do anything on purpose.”

“There are consequences for accidents, too. Young people need to learn to be responsible for their actions.”

I thought about that. It didn't make sense. I knew I could have chosen not to throw the pencil but I still didn't see why sitting here instead of playing outside was teaching me a lesson. It was just making me sad and mad and lonely.

Now I just really hated Trevor Sullivan for being a bully and for never getting caught and for getting me trouble because of his big mouth.

“Yeah, Ruby. No one made you throw that pencil,” Carlos said. I think he liked talking more than doing his math homework. He didn't want the conversation to end.

“Is that what happened?” the teacher asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “But the other kid threw it at me first. I've never thrown a pencil before.”

“And I bet you'll never do it again. Huh, Ruby?” Carlos added.

That was true.

“Maybe that's the best we can do,” the teacher said.

“So that's my lesson?” I asked the teacher but I knew the answer. I was being punished and Trevor wasn't, and that was just the way it was. So sure the world was a safer place but not for me.

At the end of the period, Carlos bolted out the door. I just sat there.

“I know it seems unfair.” The teacher came over and stood by my desk.

If she was now going to tell me that life's unfair, I thought I was going to throw a pencil at
her
.

“And in many ways it is, Ruby. I know.”

It is?

“And for what it's worth, I'm sorry you didn't get to play outside today. But I have to say, I did enjoy talking with you. Maybe you'll get detention again and we'll get to spend more time together.”

I knew she was joking.

She meant to be nice, but I didn't think it was funny at all.