But before that, when they were free under the chinaberry, Maggie told Ruby that she wished she had a fine ring to give to her. She said she wished for a steeple someplace that would hold them up high in the eyes of God. But Maggie could not steal a ring good enough for Ruby, for they kept them under glass at the five-and-dime, and the only rings in Liberty were on the hands of some married ladies. So Maggie had wrapped Ruby all the closer, always holding her like she was made of lace and glass, and promised she would get a ring befitting her Ruby Bell. Not long after, she had gone to work, and not long after that, Ruby had lost her.
To leave Maggie, Ruby had had to forget the chinaberry and the blueberry sky, the crickets and cicadas who accompanied Papa Bell. The mockingbird, who came after the fiddle was put away, and sang every birdsong in the forest, the wood thrush’s and the pine warbler’s, even making up his own tunes. Ruby had to push all of that away and turn into that hard clear river stone. She had to turn her tongue into a sharp stick — otherwise she would have stayed. She had to all but kill Maggie to leave her. She had been too young to know she could have kissed her good-bye. She had been too young to know that a person can still hold on to the shared secret of love and walk away. She hadn’t known, until she reached Manhattan, that she had murdered a part of herself as well. That it would be years until that part came to life again.
RUBY FELT her eyes grow wet, a knot form in her throat. She swallowed it down — as she had done the whole of her life.
Then she grew angry. If Maggie had left, even for a trip to Houston, she would not be on that platform. Fuck Maggie. She saw the Red Cap helping a young blond woman with her bags. New passengers had begun to congregate on the platform waiting for the next train, both Negro and White. Fuck Maggie and fuck the Red Cap. Slow-ass Negro. She flicked her dead cigarette onto the tracks and as she lit another, her jaw started aching. Over the past week she had been pressing her molars together so tight that at times the mandible had begun to throb. She wished she had brought her aspirin, or Mrs. Gladdington’s sleeping pills, or both. Ruby could not remember the last time she truly slept. Even before the telegram, many nights a low scraping sound had kept her awake — like a man sanding a wooden floor. Ruby’s hand shook a bit as she took another long puff of her new cigarette.
The train platform was sparse and clear. She had to think. Wait. She pursed her lips and pushed the smoke out of her lungs. Where was the goddamn porter? Suddenly a dark curve between her bags shifted and moved. Ruby ignored it, as she had ignored it for weeks, as she had ignored so many things lately. But the nothing that lived on the periphery of her vision had been the worst of it. The nothing with small chubby fingers that sifted through the weave in her clothes — that sometimes had the outline of pigtails. Ruby hated her. Hated her need, the way she tried to curl on her chest when she slept. Hated that she knelt beneath the apple bins and ruffled through the bok choy in the fresh-air markets in Chinatown. Ruby saw that the dead nothing was hollow and imagined that was why it had affixed itself to her left femur.
Once anchored, she had trailed behind Ruby like a helium balloon, drifting back down to earth, only to rise again. Ruby had tried to shake her, take sharp turns, or leap into subway cars seconds before they closed, to no avail. Once she had gotten the telegram from Maggie, once she was headed home, the spirit floated above her in Penn Station near the newsstand, fluttering the folded papers with images of the young Buddhist nun guilty of self-immolation. She had settled near a cafeteria radio while Ruby got a regular coffee, and swung her legs in time to “It’s All Right.”
She’d cozied beneath Ruby’s seat on the train, tickling the inside of her knees. Now on the platform she crept out of her hiding place. Ruby refused to look down. In answer the puff of air leapt onto her shoulders. Ruby stood quickly, knocking over two of her bags. Four faces turned her way. A shock of fear shot through her. She sat back on the bag but the little spirit clung tight to her neck. Desperate now, Ruby felt it trying to enter at the base of her skull. She quickly put her hand there, a thin sweat filming her forehead. It then slipped under her arm and was pushing now against her chest, softly at first, then roughly, almost knocking Ruby onto the platform boards. Ruby wanted to run, to scream and kick the cloud of a girl away.
Now, Ruby was trapped on the mountain of pink bags. The day tilted. The horizon slipped blue to prairie brown to cut-outs of green. Too green. An electric spinning green. The black of the tracks, the wash of the ties. Her fingers were on fire. Ruby flicked her orange cigarette to the ground then sucked at the fleshy burns. She smelled the remnant of a cigar burning somewhere, some salty thing like ham, perfume. And sweat. All left behind on the platform. The child was weeping now, so strong that the air crackled. In moments, Ruby knew she would scream. In a few moments she would break through the mirror of convention and the White men would come running, their hands twisting her thin wrists, eyes too red, faces too white. The Black folks would cower as they hauled her to jail or worse. So Ruby prayed. She prayed for the illusion of sameness.
As if in answer, the spirit grew smaller. Younger. A toddler. Younger still until she was six months old, three, until she was a small baby newly born. Ruby recognized her for the first time. Heart-shaped face. Long tan body. Her breath stopped when she saw it was her girl. Her baby who died without a name when Ruby was fourteen.
She was swaddled and tiny, there on the wooden planks, so of course Ruby lifted her into her arms. The child began crying. Bawling so loud, so scared, coughing something out of her lungs, trying to breathe. Ruby held her and rocked back and forth. Her girl. Her lost girl. Ruby tried to hide her from the people at the station, some of them turning to look. Ruby pretended she had a chill and was merely wrapping her arms around her body, but her child could not stop — the sound tearing through Ruby.