Man in The Woods (25 page)

Later that afternoon, with a list from Dr. Montgomery, Kate goes to Healthy Valley, Leyden’s health food store, to purchase vitamins, supplements, and organic juices and vegetables, while Paul takes Ruby with him to visit his sister, which is part two of Montgomery’s plan.

Annabelle is recuperating at home, sleeping on the sofa so she won’t have to mount the steps to the bedroom. “We’re going to get some food for them,” Paul tells Ruby. “Now the thing is, Annabelle’s going to be all right, she’s going to be completely okay. But right now she looks a little beat up. It’s weird at first, but you get used to it. And she’s really happy you’re coming to visit her.”

Ruby gives no indication of listening to a word of this. She sits with him in the cab of his truck and Shep, after a great deal of preparation—pawing at the ground, whimpering and growling—hops into the bed, and finds his spot in a jumble of rags and old shirts Paul has left there for him.

Paul drives slowly up the driveway, in case Ruby has second thoughts and wants to return home. “Just remember,” he says, “my sister’s going to be all right.”

Ruby’s lower lip trembles guilelessly. This girl, a former virtuoso of emotional artifice, has lost her taste for illusion. “Are you sure?” she asks.

“I am very, very sure. I talked to her doctors.”

“Tell me what they said.” Ruby furrows her brows. “But tell me for real.”

“This is exactly what the doctor said. Annabelle had multiple fractures in her neck, in vertebrae four, five, and six. You know what that means? That’s what they call the bones in the neck. They made an incision in the front of her neck and removed the disk between four and five, and then they did the same thing for the disk between five and six, and they replaced them with bone from a bone bank. Isn’t that something? A bone bank? I didn’t even know there was a bone bank.”

“Is it where people save bones?” Ruby asks.

“It’s like a blood bank,” Paul says.

“That’s where you go,” Ruby says.

“Now. Maybe someday I can go to the bone bank. I’m sure glad there is one.”

“So they put a new bone in her?”

“Pretty much.”

Ruby thinks for a moment. “How do they keep it in?”

“Doctor stuff. They file down Annabelle’s own bone and make it so it bleeds and that way when it grows together again it can fuse with the new bone and everything sticks together. Then they put a plate on it, you know, a piece of metal, to hold it all together while it’s fusing, it sort of knits itself together. Once everything is stabilized and the fractures heal, my sister will be good as new.”

The first stop is the supermarket to pick up the few things Bernard has asked for, and while he fills his shopping cart with crackers, club soda, ice cream, chocolate syrup, pita, and chickpeas, Paul’s attention drifts away from Ruby. When he looks around for her she is missing. He can still recall when, no matter what the initial indications were, he always thought that essentially everything was going to be all right. Finding his father dead on First Avenue, being stranded for days in the wilderness, having no money, fighting through a fever with no place to live—none of these things ultimately disturbed his innate certainty that he and what he cared about would always survive. That confidence is gone, yet another thing left in the woods in Tarrytown, New York, along with his footprints, his tire tracks, and who knows how much DNA. He is now a man who is always prepared for the worst possible outcome. He pushes his shopping cart quickly up and down the aisles, with the idea that once he has covered the store he will report the missing child to the store manager and then call the police. He’s been wanting to call the police for quite some time.

But he finds Ruby quickly, standing by a large bin of Bosc pears and staring as if transfixed at what looks like an avalanche of copper-coated teardrops. She’s safe! The magician who orders our fate, after showing the card signifying catastrophe, has placed it back into the deck, and the slow shuffle of unseen cards has begun again.

“Do you want some pears?” he asks her, and she shakes her head no.

“I didn’t know where you went, Ruby. You shouldn’t do that.”

“I was here.” She turns toward him, slowly. “I was going to die.”

“You’re not going to die.”

“Yes I am. Don’t be stupid.”

Paul pretends not to notice the insult. “Well not for a very, very long time.”

“Because I’m ugly,” Ruby says.

“You’re not ugly. You’re a beautiful little kid. Don’t you even know that? You’re beautiful, like your mother.”

“I’ve got a face like penis vomit,” Ruby says. “You want to call that
beautiful
?” She stiffens her arms at her sides and widens her eyes; she looks somehow mechanical.

“Shhhh,” he says. “Don’t say things like that. You are very, very loved.” His words sound a little hollow to him, but when someone is drowning, don’t we throw them lifesavers, and aren’t the lifesavers hollow, too?

“Penis vomit penis vomit penis vomit penis vomit penis vomit penis vomit penis vomit,”
Ruby whispers to herself, running the words together so they sound like Latin. A prayer fervently muttered.

Bernard and Annabelle’s house is on Guilford Drive, a cul-de-sac not far from the center of Leyden—an easy walk to the post office, for those who can walk. There are fourteen houses on Guilford, all built in 1970, by the same builder, using the same plans and the same materials, and Paul must drive slowly and peer at each one in order to pick out which house is his sister’s. He makes his best guess and pulls into an empty driveway. “Here we are,” he tells Ruby. If Ruby holds any fear about visiting someone who has been badly injured, or dreads having to confront some putrid odor or gaping wound or gurgling digestive noise, or if she believes that she herself is somehow going to be blamed for what has befallen Annabelle, she gives no evidence of it. She seems drowsy, and when Paul puts his hand on her shoulder she lets out a long sigh, as if he is rousing her from a summer afternoon nap.

Bernard is waiting for them, in shorts, a tank top, and flip-flops. He is dressed similarly to Ruby, though the effect is considerably less sporty in a stocky fifty-year-old man, especially in Bernard’s haggard, unshaven, badly rested state. He relieves Paul of the grocery sack and presses two twenty-dollar bills into his hand. Paul doesn’t want any money and forty dollars is more than he spent anyhow, but it seems too complicated to refuse payment.

“Wait here while I put these things in their place,” Bernard says, in a voice just more than a whisper. “She’s sleeping in the front room.”

“The hell I am,” Annabelle calls out.

“She’s been looking forward to your visit,” Bernard says to Paul. “And yours, too, Ruby.”

“Remember when you said we were going to chop down a cherry tree and make a bookcase?” Ruby says to Paul.

Paul thinks for a moment. “Yeah, I do.”

“I think you forgot,” Ruby says.

“Well are you coming in or not?” Annabelle’s voice is an octave lower than usual, dragged down by the pain medication.

“It’s okay,” Ruby says to Paul.

“I didn’t forget,” Paul says. “We’ll do it.”

They find Annabelle sitting on the sofa in her gray cotton nightgown. A pink-and-blue crocheted blanket covers her lower half; her bare feet, long and narrow, are on the coffee table. The TV is on without the sound; a black bear rakes its paw through a rushing stream, presumably hoping for salmon. Annabelle’s right arm is in a soft cast; three fingers of her left hand are taped and splinted. Her head has been partially shaved, and though she has brushed her hair over the exposed area, alarming patches of redness and blackness are still visible, as well as a seemingly random scatter of staples. Flutters of squeamishness make their way through Paul’s stomach.

Annabelle reaches for what looks like a bright white bedpan resting next to her on the sofa, but it turns out to be a cervical collar. “I’m supposed to wear this night and day,” she says, “but it’s really itchy and hot.” She holds it up for Paul and Ruby to see; it’s pearl and bright white, with bright chrome hardware on the sides. “It’s called exo-static,” Anabelle says, “which is pretty close to ecstatic, which is a pretty big lie. When I put it on, I look like Queen Elizabeth I, but if I cover it up and you only see the top then it looks like a priest collar, so either way it’s pretty cool.”

Ruby has made it only halfway into the room and stands where she is, staring at Annabelle and breathing shallowly through her mouth. Life seems to be presenting itself to Ruby as a series of images projected onto a sheet, some of them lurid, some of them inexplicable, which she looks at with the presumption of complete privacy.

“I’m bored out of my mind,” Annabelle says, “which is probably a good sign. I know I look horrible, and I totally don’t care, which is probably not a good sign, but I think I always sort of wanted to be this person, the person who sits on the sofa and doesn’t give an Irish jig what she looks like. It feels right to me. It’s my appointment in Samara. Plus, the Vicodin.”

“You look a million times better than two days ago,” Paul says.

Annabelle adjusts her neck. “What do you think, Ruby? Do I look like a priest to you?”

Ruby doesn’t say anything, but she looks unnerved.

Bernard comes in, carrying a teapot, three cups and saucers, and a glass of chocolate milk, all on an ornate brass tray, which rings hollowly from the movement of the crockery.

“Oh Bernard, Bernard, Bernard,” Annabelle fairly sings. Then, to Paul, “It turns out I
do
know how to pick them.”

“Doing what is normal,” Bernard says, setting the tray down onto the coffee table and giving Annabelle’s big toe an affectionate little pinch. “I very much liked chocolate milk when I was your age,” he says to Ruby.

Slowly, as if against her better judgment, Ruby approaches the tray and very carefully picks up the chocolate milk. Streaks of partially stirred chocolate syrup marbleize the sides of the glass.

“Sit next to me with that,” Annabelle says, patting the sofa. “Paul? Will you pour me a cup of tea, and maybe put a little milk in it?”

Paul understands that he is being asked to vacate the couch, and he does so with some trepidation. Yet as uncertain as he is about what his sister has in store for Ruby, when Ruby gives him a questioning look he nods his head and encourages the girl to sit next to Annabelle.

“You know,” Annabelle says, “I knew this was going to happen. It was an accident waiting to happen. I just totally knew it.”

“It’s not your fault,” Paul says. “Anyhow, the things we think are going to happen don’t usually happen.”

“We’re not completely in the dark,” Annabelle says. “Things don’t just
happen
. There are patterns, warnings. How many times did I envision some idiot hitting me from behind? I think I imagined it happening at the very mailbox it happened at. I really do. What went down in Bernard’s country? Do you think God just threw down a thunderbolt because the people were drinking too much champagne? Come on. People saw it coming long before it arrived. Or Dad, what happened to him. God, there was a slow-motion train wreck that anyone could have seen coming.”

“I didn’t,” says Paul.

“You were a child,” Annabelle says. Turning from Paul and looking at Ruby, she asks, “Do I look pretty scary?”

Ruby has quickly drunk nearly half her chocolate milk, and now her tongue is crawling down the side of the glass in pursuit of the smears of chocolate syrup.

“Well it looks worse than it really is,” Annabelle says. “But I’ve been wanting to tell you something.”

Ruby looks questioningly at Paul, and Paul shrugs, extends his lower lip, as if to say Your guess is as good as mine.

“Do you want some cookies or something like that?” Annabelle asks Ruby. “Actually, I don’t think we have any cookies. Do we, Bernard?”

“We have real English water biscuits,” Bernard says. “Why not Paul comes with me and we’ll look around and see what we have?”

“Me?” says Paul. First removed from the sofa and now from the room. What next? Sent to the truck to wait with Shep?

“Yes. It’s too long since I’ve shared a house with a child. I trust your knowledge of what a little girl will like.”

As soon as Paul and Bernard have left the room, Annabelle leans over and grasps her legs beneath their calves and slowly lowers her feet to the floor. “Oh, that feels nice,” she says. She eyes the peach plastic bottle of Vicodin planted on the edge of the coffee table and then looks at her watch. She is thinking it might be time for her next dose, but if she’s going to do this by the book she has to wait another two hours, or, in other words, sixty minutes. Which can be rounded down to forty-five.

Annabelle points to a vase on the television set, filled with two dozen white roses. “Aren’t they pretty? Your mom sent them.”

Ruby nods but only pretends to look at the roses. Sometimes she has to be careful about what she sees. Sometimes seeing something new is like being shoved off the top step of a long staircase, especially something new when the knowledge of the thing feels like hands on the small of her back. She knows ways to make her eyes into shields off which the arrows of the outside world merely bounce, and, on the occasions when the shield fails, Ruby can redirect the images before they reach her brain. They are sent down to some wasteland within her, where the unseen things accumulate with all the things she pretends she hasn’t heard and all the things she has resolved to forget, until her body gets rid of them.

“I want to tell you something, Ruby,” Annabelle is saying. “Paul said you are feeling a little weird because you gave me something to keep me safe and now you think maybe it didn’t do the job. And maybe I’m mad at you or something?”

Ruby has listened to only a few words of this, but enough to glean the sense of it. “I guess,” she says.

“Well I want to show you something,” Annabelle says. She slips her hand beneath the afghan and gropes around her lap for a moment and pulls out the gold cross Ruby gave her, wrapping the delicate chain around her finger and lifting it slowly, and then enveloping the entire thing in her palm. “I think having this saved my life, Ruby. The car that hit me? It was going over sixty miles an hour, really fast. Everyone says I was just unbelievably lucky to survive.”