Ruby and Rebecka-Chapter Six

Swearing and Singing

Driving Bertha had become second nature now, she felt a comfort with her hands on the hard blue steering wheel, navigating through mazes of magnolias, scrubby pines and ancient live oaks, sent her into a kind of trance. She pretended Granny and Inez were with her and her friend Ruby the crow. It was Monday now and she’d been driving all day trying to figure out what to do next and now it was late afternoon, and she didn’t know any more than when she had started driving at sunrise.   

Yesterday was bizarre. Even thinking about it caused her cheeks to flush with embarrassment and shame. How could she have fainted like that and allowed all those people to find her. Oh, she pressed her lips together trying to press away the thought the humility of it all. Finally, not knowing what to do next, tired from driving with nowhere to go and not wanting to return to the drab musty room at the Flamingo court, she navigated to a little pullout next to the marsh, climbed out of the car, and plunked down on a little stretch of sandy beach next to the inlet creek. She tried to take solace in the showy setting of the sun. The vivid pink and orange of the sky and the glint on the creek. But it was hard to shake the shame, and she also couldn’t shake stain of the dreams that haunted her at night. The crows had disappeared now replaced by strange gaping mouths and amorphous shapes and snatches of singing nothing concrete. Just a feeling of impending doom and nameless dread causing her to prop a chair against the door of her room at the Flamingo Court. As if she could stop the ghosts the memories the unnamable thing that was trying to get her.  

So instead of trying to Find Pete, she’d driven all over the island as if she could outrun it all. She’d even made it almost to Beaufort and back and now it was late afternoon, and she and Ruby had only eaten fast food again. She was a regular at Bojangles now.  

Her mind wandered back to the feast the people yesterday had shared with her. The okra gumbo. The red rice and beans. The crab salad and the biscuits. Like Inez used to make. Real biscuits. Flaky and soft slathered in pats of butter that melted and ran over onto your fingers. She thought of their kindness and how polite and gracious they were. Elijah and Cornelia, who knew what they thought of her strangeness, politely skirting around the obvious questions, like what was she, a gangly middle aged white woman doing fainting in their cemetery? 

Little bubbles from some creature or other popped out of the soft gray muddy sand next to the water. The heat still wrapped around her like a hot wet blanket and the mosquitoes tangled in her hair and bit a track along her cheek. She swatted at them and refused to retreat to Bertha. Ruby hopped onto her head and down to the sand and then cawed like laughing and then cocked her head as if waiting for a response. It was weird to return to a place like this. What on earth was wrong with her? Why had she fainted like that?  Maybe she had a heart condition? Yes, that must be it. Something must be wrong with her heart, and she needed to go home and go straight to the doctor. She just needed to talk to a person. She needed to talk to her husband. She wanted to talk to a person. She was grateful for Ruby’s company, but she was a bird not a human.  

She sucked in a huge breath of marshy air to steady herself. And a hummingbird buzzed past her face so close she felt the whir of its wings on her skin and then it circled around and around her head.  

Weird. Ok. You are cute but now this is weird. Shoo.  

Lord, she was tired.  

Hummingbird... Inez... She closed her eyes. A memory of Inez with her on a dock came fully formed into her mind’s eye. She must have been about nine.  

Inez held her hand out to Becka. 

What is that, she asked, although she knew, a strange feeling fell over her. An awe that made her not speak louder than a whisper. 

Baby hummingbird. 

Can I touch it? 

Be gentle. 

The bird was so tiny, more like a bug than a bird. Is it sick? 

I think so, got to take it over to Althea. 

Who’s that? 

The bird lady. 

But as she spoke the hummingbird began to stir in Inez's palm. She gently stroked the creature with her finger and just like that the bird lifted and whirred away, a blur of green and ruby feathers. 

Inez made a ticking sound with her tongue. 

Good sign, that’s a good sign. Inez sighed and turned towards the dusk settling over the marsh. See how things can always surprise you? 

The sun was an orange ball floating in the sky. Mm-mm, we’re lucky to live in such a place. Lotta power out there in the at marsh. The ocean fills up the creeks, all the places it's been, but slowed down some so we get to know its mystery. 

Becka followed Inez’s eyes. All she saw was the marsh stretching all the way over to the darkening sky. She struggled to understand what Inez meant and then decided it didn't matter as long as she could stand here like this next to Inez. Safe in her warmth. 

Don’t forget you come from here. And don’t you ever forget that the real power, the power like the place you come from, is also inside you.  

Ok. 

Dark clouds began to gather on the horizon. Storm in coming. We need to go. 

It was hard to shake this daydream, for a moment she couldn’t find the boundaries of her own self and the marsh, the tall grass, the smell of sulfur, the egret frozen with one leg raised, the crabs scuttling along the water’s edge and she. Who was she?  For a moment she wondered if she too was just another creature made of mud and water and air and salt indistinguishable from the landscape. An egret, a crow, or perhaps even a hummingbird.  

She shook herself out of her reverie and laughed at herself. She tried to let things come back into focus. An egret was certainly a more elegant image than being called a stork all the time. She studied her legs; they were long and skinny. Her hands mottled with freckles but were really age spots she knew. She put her hands to her face, she’d given all the freshness, the youth, to King, in exchange for not having to face her own broken heart. She’d never really thought of that before. He just seemed like a really good idea at the time. He was so cute, and he could dance. He wasn’t Malcolm. He was allowed. He would help her forget. And in a way he did. She hadn’t’ reckoned on the fact that if you made yourself forget one part of your heart you were going to have to forget the whole of it.  

Maybe, I am still of this place, she said out loud, to the marsh to the sky, to Ruby, to the squall falling out of the sky on the horizon. She didn’t really know what that meant but it was something.  

Becka began humming to herself now. She fished the key and the card out of her purse and studied it as she sang a song from Sunday school at Granny’s church. This little light of mine... 

She sang out loud now to the marsh to Ruby to the memory of her Granny and Inez. Her song gathered and grew and widened and as it soared over the grass something in her opened and she felt a kind of gladness she’d not felt in a long, long time.  

And then her phone dinged. She picked it up and there was King. texting.  

Hey Becks, and then the little bouncing dots ... then nothing then the dots again ... 

I have to go out of town on a job, looking at some land to purchase, don’t worry about coming home. The text said. 

What?! she jabbed his name to call him. But the phone just rang.  

What what in heaven’s name she thought.  

She began to text furiously.  

Ronald King, I know you are there the phone must be in your darn hand. Why are you avoiding me? This is just weird now. Call me immediately. 

She sent the message twirling into the ethers.  

And she received back... nothing.  

Nothing? She stared incredulously at the screen.  

Really? In real life he was not going to answer her?  

Now her heart raced. Why was he not speaking to her? Was it Chrissy? You’d think if he was really carrying on with that woman, he would be texting and calling and at least feigning indignation so she would think all was normal, unless he just didn’t give a damn. Did he really just not care? I don’t understand. She pressed her hands onto the damp sand and tried to do that square breathing that was supposed to do to help calm her down but never did. Once she'd almost passed out in her fervent attempt to find equilibrium. She’d stopped going to the therapist after that.  

And this was no different, she didn't feel calm. She didn't feel soothed instead she felt something new. So different she had to sit perfectly still to understand what it was. A churning in her belly. And though she wasn't a person who cursed very often a small fuck him rose in her mind. It felt good to think this thought. 

And then weirdly, she thought of how she'd missed church yesterday and the potluck after. 

Had he gone on without her and basked in the attention of poor him alone abandoned by his strange wife? She thought of that skinny little Sarah Maness sidling up to her one Sunday, holding a bowl of her special ambrosia, and who the hell made ambrosia anymore anyway, and saying under her breath. “King sure is handsome, you know if you don't want him there are plenty of us who do.” She remembered staring at Sarah not knowing how to reply to such a brazen statement about her husband. 

Finally, she’d smiled and said, Well, lucky me. 

As she walked away, she somehow had turned this on herself that she was so weird she gave the impression even her husband was up for grabs. But now here on the side of the marsh, with the rage simmering up inside of her she thought of ambrosia, how gross it was, and who the fuck makes ambrosia anymore anyway? What if I’m not the weird one? They are the weird ones. She grabbed a fistful of sand and hurled it into the creek. 

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Bertha rocking like a little gale was buffeting her about. 

And Becka thought how odd a special little squall just around my car as Granny and Inez rocked the car laughing and rejoicing. 

She dug deeper now into the damp sand and grabbed a bigger fistful, and she hurled it with force into the creek. An egret startled and loped off across the sweetgrass. And a fury she had never allowed turned from a simmer into a rolling boil. 

She began gathering fistful after fistful of sand and hurling them harder and harder into the creek muttering expletives and what the hells over and over again. She had stayed all these years, enduring insults, being called defective because no babies took hold in her womb. Enduring the snickering behind her back from the pert little ladies at Junior league and even church. Feeling weird and more akin to the birds in her garden than the ladies at the garden club. And she had cooked and supported and laughed and danced and stopped singing. And now he had the audacity... audacity. She sucked in a large shaky breath trying to quell the rage that was threatening to consume her and yet it did nothing. The rage rose all the way up inside of her and she screamed out into the marsh, hoping no one but the grass and the sky and the birds whom she didn’t know would hear her. Screw you. And then the song came fully into her mind, not the pallid song from Granny’s church but the deeper one laced with feelings she didn’t understand. I’m going to get to heaven and put on my wings and fly all over God’s heaven. And her voice came out pure and clear like it had been preserved in the bottle she’d pressed it into and now it was released. She sang and sang and her song was loud and long and pure until finally, spent she sank back to the ground just as the sun slipped over the horizon.  

Ruby sidled next to her and began to croon. She turned to the bird and smiled in spite of herself.  You are a weird, sweet being. Do you want to fly home? Can you find your way back? I think I’m staying here awhile. 

Well, that is much better than the dumb square breathing, she said.  

She fished into her bag and pulled out the envelope from Granny. She found the key and studied it. Hmm, she thought.  

All right then, Granny. I’m here. I’ll go see what this mysterious Pete has to say.  

She put the key back into the envelope. She checked that all the dollars were still there, she folded the envelope closed and hugged it to her chest.  

Alright then, here we are.  

She picked up her phone, switched King off of emergency contacts, and Find My Friends. She erased their text stream. And deleted him from her contacts.  

Fuck him she thought again and marveled at how good it felt to say such a word.  

Come on, Ruby. Let’s go see what’s next.