Ruby's Misadventures With Reality Page 8

  “Do you have any known allergies?”

  “No.”

  “Are you pregnant?”

  “No.” As she said no, Ruby tried to remember when her last period was.

  The doctor sensed her uncertainty. “Are you sure that you’re not pregnant?”

  “Pretty sure.” She thought of the sexy nurse costume. Maybe there was a reason it didn’t fit.

  Catching her hesitation, the doctor asked, “When was your last period?”

  “You know, I’m just here for my finger. I’m not pregnant.” Even saying the word out loud sounded preposterous. “Sure, I put on a little weight recently…but I’m totally not here about that.” She paused, “Why does it matter if I’m pregnant anyway?”

  “Well, I don’t mean to pester you. It’s just that the medication I normally prescribe would not be my first choice if I also had to consider how it might affect a fetus. The pregnancy question is routine. I only inquired further because you hesitated.”

  Ruby’s blood pressure lowered a tad. “Sorry. I was just surprised you asked.” She thought for a minute. The last time she could remember having her period was on her weekend trip to visit Ming’s family in Malibu. That had been a great vacation. “I guess my last period was sometime around Labor Day. I think.”

  When she said it out loud, she realized it had been almost two months ago. She’d never missed a period before.

  He paused long enough to calculate the elapsed time. “Well, Miss O’Deare, that’s been about two months. Have you had unprotected sex since then?”

  Ruby said, “No,” then amended, “I don’t think so,” as she tried to remember the details of the infamous night with Noel. She’d woken up purple with a receipt for condoms. That much she knew. But had they used them? Even if they did, a little voice in the back of her mind yelled, Glow-in-the-dark condoms. From the Dollar Store… Probably expired! Still, she’d never thought of herself as the fertile type, whatever that might be. To her, unplanned pregnancies were like tornadoes—they only struck trailer parks.

  “If you don’t mind, I’d like to rule out pregnancy before I prescribe any medication for you.”

  “Fine. But…” Her high school guidance counselor’s mantra “It only takes once” cut her off her would-be protest.

  After peeing into a cup, Ruby sat and waited. She tried to read, but couldn’t focus. She scanned the multitude of posters hanging in the room encouraging diabetic foot care and vaccinations. The obligatory poster of the female reproductive system glared down at her, somehow making her feel like an animal, a verging-on-chubby specimen of the female variety. Make that an irresponsible specimen, never mind $150 haircut and law job, not to mention Ming’s lab coat. In truth, she felt more like an unwed teenage mother than a responsible lawyer.

  When he finally came in, he sat down calmly. “Miss O’Deare, I know that you might not have been expecting this news.” He waited a moment to let her steel her nerves. Instead of steeling her defenses, she felt them crumble around her. When he said, “You are pregnant,” she felt the tears well up involuntarily.

  She blinked and said, “You said I’m pregnant?”

  “Yes.”

  Looking at her knees, she exhaled a few times and propped her head in her hands. She had planned on doing so many things before she had kids—traveling, learning French, paying off all of her credit cards, reading some of those books she had pretended to read in college. Even higher up the list of things she should have done before this moment was marriage with a honeymoon (in Hawaii) to a man she had spent more than one night with. Instead, the father was in the lobby, oblivious to this possibility, reading about corn subsidies. It was too much to bear.

  And the whole baby aspect of the pregnancy… She had never even held a baby. Just the thought of a baby stole all of her resolve. Boneless, she sank farther into the chair. Her life was turning into a serious movie, something Oscar-worthy, a movie that required a strong lead, probably Jodi Foster or maybe Natalie Portman. Maybe Kristin Wiig. No one would ever cast Ruby O’Deare for this role. It would be like casting Tori Spelling. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Then, because there was nothing to be done, she put on her courtroom face, wiped away the tears that were threatening to spill, and asked, “Are you sure I’m pregnant?” Tori Spelling had like four kids, right?

  “Yes.” He pulled out a little calendar and counted back. “It looks to me like you are ten, no wait, six weeks pregnant, based on the date of your last period.” He paused for a second and put on his diplomatic face. “So, Miss O’Deare, have you given any thought to whether you want to keep the baby?”

  “Seriously?” She had never imagined a doctor would ask her that question. This was the question she expected someone else from her high-school class to hear, probably that girl who took yearbook and low math. She squinted a little, but couldn’t stop her eyes from welling up again. Ruby couldn’t believe she was having this conversation. She wasn’t opposed to abortion for religious reasons. She hadn’t attended church since her confirmation class ended when she was thirteen. Still, she knew she didn’t want one. It just seemed wrong since she was twenty-eight. She had life insurance. At least she assumed she did. And she had a job and a nice-enough car. Well, a temp job and a convertible, but still, she was an adult. Her birth certificate said so. With conviction she said, “I’m keeping the baby.”

  “Excellent. In that case, congratulations are in order.”

  “Well, I don’t know if I’d go that far.” Ruby had trouble focusing on the doctor as he told a few basics about prenatal health. She needed to schedule an appointment with a family practice doc or OB/GYN, stop eating tuna, and eat more legumes. This statement gave pause to her runaway thoughts. What are legumes? Then, she thought of that Jäger and everything else she’d drunk in the last two months. Yikes! “I haven’t been watching my alcohol intake or anything. Will the baby be okay?”

  “I wouldn’t worry. That’s how half the people I see end up pregnant in the first place.” He chuckled and added, “Just be careful from now on.”

  She was ready to leave when the doctor said, “Now for the finger. How did you manage to do this?”

  “Oh.” Ruby tried to smile. “I forgot about the finger. I was carving eyelashes into a jack-o-lantern.” Next Halloween, she would have a baby to stuff into a little costume, a cute little thing with a pink cheeks and a toothless smile. She imagined she’d have a cute one. Maybe she could make enough to live comfortably, just her and the baby. Or maybe…she didn’t dare think about Noel or the (three!) of them yet, but she couldn’t help herself. In her rebellious imagination, they were living in a sun-dappled villa on a winery somewhere between Emerald and Topeka. Marvel had said the villa was a ways out of town.

  He put a couple of stitches in her finger, but she was so distracted by the other news that it barely even registered. After he finished the stitches he told her the nurse would come by with a splint in a minute. The doctor’s words snapped her out of her reverie and she looked up. The poster about diabetic foot rot stared back at her and she nodded as the doctor recommended that she change the bandages on her finger regularly. But, she was still thinking about Noel, who she would have to face in approximately one minute. Her stomach heaved.

  “Are you okay, Miss O’Deare? Do you have anyone here with you?”

  “I’m fine. Just a little nauseous.” The thought of Noel made the vomit rise up in her throat.

  “Well don’t worry about it. That’ll happen from time to time. But it should get better in a week or two. If you haven’t had much morning sickness thus far, you’re probably in the clear.”

  She bid the doctor a quick good-bye and greeted a nurse who came in to bring her a fancy blue finger splint. She was the motherly type of nurse who probably gave all the kids suckers and extra stickers.

  “How you holding up, sweetheart? Do you want me to get that handsome young man who came with you?”

  Ruby smiled. “I’m just fine. Definitely
don’t get him. I’ll be fine.”

  “I’m sure you will. Such a nice, young couple. I can tell you will be great parents. He looks so caring and handsome.”

  Ruby’s feelings began to overflow again and she felt the tears run down her cheeks. A baby was one thing, thinking of herself as a mother was something entirely different. And, Noel, she wondered how he would take going from landlord to father before they even managed one date.

  Ruby walked into the waiting room with a freshly bandaged hand, a splotchy red face and a complementary bottle of prenatal vitamins that she quickly shoved into her lab coat pocket. She gave Noel a weak smile and said nothing because, really, what do you say in that situation?

  “Is everything okay? You look like you could use some more Jäger,” he teased, handing her the flask. When she didn’t laugh, he joked, “Do they have to amputate?”

  She smiled a little. “I’m just a little worn out. Long day.” She looked so beleaguered that he put his arm around her and gave her a squeeze on the way out of the door. The doctor, who was standing at the patient counter discussing something with the staff noticed and assumed this was a “congratulations honey!” hug and called out, “Congratulations! Good luck with everything, Mr. and Mrs. O’Deare.”

  Noel looked from her to the doctor with a confused expression. Ruby eked out a shallow laugh and started walking to the door and avoided eye contact with Noel. They needed to get out before anyone said anything else.

  “Wonder what that was about?”

  Ruby shook her head and shrugged.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” He took her arm, unsure of how else to help her. “Let’s sit you down.” He ushered her to the car, opened the door, and insisted on ensuring that she sat down without further injury.

  Ruby rode home, almost completely silent except for a little sniffling as she tried to keep from crying. She tried to say something so that she didn’t look like such a nut, but when she opened her mouth, she couldn’t think of anything to say. By the time he got her home, he insisted that she go straight to bed and kicked the last chemistry revelers out of the house. He gave Ming instructions to “keep an eye on her” and drove home.

  After an hour or so, Ming who’d been watching America’s Most Wanted re-runs, peeked in to make sure Ruby was still breathing. She was sitting up in bed staring at her wall. Even Vera Wang looked concerned, mewling a little in the corner. “What’s the matter? I thought it was just a finger thing… Do you need something? I bet Todd has something.”

  “No. The finger is fine. It’s something else.” Looking at her hands, she said, “The doctor made me take a pregnancy test and I found out that I’m… I’m pregnant.”

  “What?”

  “I’m pregnant.” The fact sounded so much worse out loud than it did in her head.

  “Are you serious? With Noel?” She answered her own question, since she knew Ruby hadn’t been with anyone else. “What were you thinking? Aren’t you on birth control?”

  “Well, yeah, but I must have skipped one or two days…or maybe last month. I wasn’t exactly worried, you know.” She didn’t mention the expired condoms. Ming would get too much material from that.

  “Okay, in the morning we’ll take care of it. I’ll drive you to the clinic and then we’ll go out for coffee or something.” Ming was not the motherly type. She was militantly against children, actually. She was the woman, probably the only one that Michelle Bachman warned about, ruthlessly picking an abortion clinic conveniently located next to a Starbucks and a nail salon so that she’d have something do while Ruby took care of business.

  “No. No. I think I’m going to keep it.”

  “What? You can barely remember to feed the cats. You had to get an automatic feeder, Ruby. By the way, I think you forgot to fill it this week. I think the neighbor might be taking care of them.” Ming scowled. “You need to stop buying animals like they’re handbags.”

  Ruby rolled her eyes, her conviction strengthening against Ming’s arguments. “I feel like it’s the right decision. Do you know that I’ve been craving crème brûleé and caramel rolls for the last six weeks? I think the baby likes caramel. She also must be a morning person because I’ve been waking up really early every day. She already feels like a person to me.”

  “Ruby, I’m sure you feel that way, but you should think it over. It’s just a cluster of pluripotent cells. It has the potential for humanity, but nothing more. I think you should get some sleep and think about it tomorrow, after a good breakfast and coffee, my treat. Also, you should sleep in. It’s late.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Murder

  In the morning Ruby felt drained before she even opened her eyes or could recall the source of her lingering despair. For a minute she just lay there feeling as disoriented as a sci-fi traveler waking from cryo-sleep. Instead of finding herself in the Andromeda Galaxy with an alien race to fight, she remembered. She was pregnant, her finger was sort of broken, and she couldn’t take anything stronger than Tylenol. Pretty much as bad as the alien race scenario. She pulled the covers over her head and shut her eyes until she managed to fall asleep again.

  Next time she woke up, Ming was pulling the covers off her face. “Ruby, wake up. I’m starving and I need to start cheering you up over breakfast now.” She handed Ruby a cup of coffee.

  “I’m just not up to it, Ming. Let me sleep in today.”

  “It’s already ten o’clock. Time to buck up.” Ming only had about a half-hour’s worth of sympathy and one bedside coffee delivery in her and Ruby had just used up both.

  “Are you serious, Ming? I just found out that I’m about to be an unwed single mother. It’s sort of a shock to go from debutante to Jerry Springer in one night. Give me a minute.” This was no exaggeration. Not only was Ruby a former county fair princess, she was literally a graduate of a social etiquette club with a full-fledged debutante ball. Probably not the best life training in hindsight.

  “Oh, come off it. You’ve been dancing around Jerry Springer ever since freshman year when you lived in the AOII house. Do you know what everyone else called that place?” She paused before the answer. “The ‘ate her pie’ house. Debutante went out the door a while ago. And so what? You made a bad decision. Just start making some good ones now. We’re leaving for breakfast in fifteen minutes. No excuses.”

  “Oh my God. Who are you? Jillian Michaels?” Ruby complained as she swung her legs over the side of the bed dramatically.

  Showered, but bare of jewelry and mascara, Ruby climbed into Ming’s black hybrid SUV, a vehicle as unfathomable and contradictory as Ming herself. Ming drove to Auntie Em’s, belying the fact that she felt no sympathy. She was about to break her macrobiotic diet with sugar-coated beignets, Em’s Saturday morning specialty.

  Ruby looked at Ming gratefully, “Thanks, Ming.”

  Toward the end of the beignet binge, during which there was no discussion of Noel or the baby, Ruby’s phone rang. She pulled it out and looked at the caller ID. “It’s Eric.”

  “Answer it. You might need a baby daddy,” Ming said, as if Eric would ever voluntarily take on responsibility.

  Ruby followed Ming’s command and picked up the phone. “Hi, Ruby,” Eric said in an unusually professional tone of voice.

  “Hey, Eric. Why so serious?”

  “It’s Estelle.”

  “Is she okay? What happened?”

  “She’s dead, Ruby.”

  “What?” She must have misheard. She felt like she had that morning when she couldn’t quite distinguish her reality from her dream. Estelle couldn’t be dead. Yesterday, she’d eaten pie at Auntie Em’s wearing a canary yellow outfit with too much blush.

  “We found her this morning.”

  Ruby set down the beignet she had been about to eat and wiped the sugar off her fingers robotically. She couldn’t eat. Ruby had never experienced a loved one’s death before. Being notified about a death unexpectedly over doughnuts, it was wrong in so many ways. There was no
reason he would make it up, but she couldn’t process it. She knew what she was supposed to say and think—“she was fine yesterday” or “how did it happen”—so she uttered her lines, not even bothering to listen to the answers.

  “I’m meeting the medical examiner over at her place in fifteen minutes. I wanted to let you know, but I also wanted to come by and ask you some questions later. I know you saw her yesterday.”

  Numbly she asked, “Do you want me to do anything?”

  “No, I’ll be over later. Just thought I’d give you a heads-up.”

  “Okay. Bye.”

  Ruby set down the phone and stared at her last two beignets and the latte she’d ordered. Estelle is dead. Ruby tried telling herself again. Estelle is dead. It just didn’t ring true. She’d seen Estelle yesterday. Her stomach still hadn’t recovered from Estelle’s tar-slick black coffee. She had been looking forward to finding out how Estelle had saved her house.

  Ming looked at her, “What’s the matter? You look like your fairy godmother just died.”

  Ming’s unintentionally apt description made her tear up. Estelle was her fairy godmother. “It’s Estelle, the pro bono client I’ve been helping recently. She died this morning.” Announcing this felt strange, especially when she hadn’t absorbed the shock herself. It felt wrong to even say it out loud. Ruby’s announcement hung in the air for a moment unacknowledged.

  With a look of annoyance on her face, Ming said, “Is one crisis at a time too much to ask? Could you please hold the drama for five minutes and let me finish breakfast?” Ming finished a few beignets and drank her coffee before asking, “How did she die?”

  “I don’t know. Eric didn’t say. Would you mind driving me by her place on the way home? I want to see for myself.” If nothing else, Ruby felt like she had to confront the reality of Estelle’s absence before she could believe it. And maybe she could help. She felt like she had to do something, anything. Though everyone always expected her to be useless in a crisis, one of those overly dramatic girls who needed to be consoled when someone else was bleeding, Ruby wasn’t that girl. This morning, she wanted to do something useful.