Ruby on the Outside

  “To be continued,” Margalit says when we get to her door. “Hey! Hey, let’s never say good-bye to each other. Let’s always just say, To be continued.”

  “To be continued,” I answer.

  “Oh, and hey, wouldn’t that be a great title for our story? To Be Continued, because we can keep writing forever. The never-ending story. We can just go on and on.”

  Even Yvette and Beatrice approve.

  “To Be Continued,” I repeat.

  And I know I have a real best friend.

  Chapter Eleven

  I almost had a best friend once before. Tevin. I know that’s a boys’ name because Tevin was a boy, but it was a while ago, like last year when we were still little.

  Back then you could be friends with a boy—best friends, even. He lived in New York City and we met at Bedford Hills. The whole time in line, I kept noticing this same boy, taller than me, but I could tell he was about my age, ten. I had been coming to visit my mother for years already and I could tell he was a newbie.

  When we got to security, they wouldn’t let Tevin come through the metal detector with his miniature action figure. You can’t bring in anything. Not anything. Sometimes they send you back just because of what you are wearing.

  Once I saw a woman drive ten hours just to get turned away because of her shoes.

  “There’s a Target right down the road, miss,” the corrections officer tried to tell her. But this woman got really angry and that just got her kicked out completely.

  Imagine coming all that way to see your mom, or sister, or whoever she was coming to see, and wearing the wrong shoes?

  No sandals allowed. No tank tops. No short shorts. No backless shirts or dresses. I saw a woman made to change because the neckline of her blouse was too low. And they don’t like T-shirts that say bad things or anything they don’t like. It’s up to them. No use arguing. Arguing is not allowed either.

  But Tevin wasn’t arguing. He just didn’t understand what was going on. He had a little Batman toy in his pocket, and they wanted him to put it in the locker before they would let him through.

  Tevin started crying, right there in line, and that’s when I knew for sure this was his first time. On the outside, it would have been pretty bad for a boy to cry in public like that, but in here, we all understand, and no one even looks at you sideways if you’re crying.

  One time or another, everyone on the inside cries.

  And I knew that feeling Tevin was having. You get stuck on one little thing, and all of a sudden it becomes the most important thing you’ve got, and you don’t want anyone to take it away from you.

  It’s like they’d already taken away the most important in your whole life—your mom—and then they wanted this, too. They wanted this stupid little action figure. Or whatever it happened to be. It didn’t make sense, but I knew what he was feeling.

  “It’s okay,” I walked over and told him. “Everything stays safe while you are visiting your mom, and then you can get it back again when you leave.”

  There was a long line behind us and people were getting a little annoyed, but not too much. That’s one thing about Bedford Hills—everyone is here for the same reason, and everyone here has some heartache and some secret that no one else but someone in here could ever understand.

  And even though lots of other grown-ups had told him the exact same thing, Tevin just nodded his head at me and he let me help him.

  “The locker thing is kind of cool. Do you have a quarter?”

  He shook his head no.

  “Here, I’ve got an extra one.” But I didn’t, and Matoo knew that, but she let me give him my quarter anyway. I showed Tevin how to put it in the slot and turn the key.

  “Just don’t forget your locker number, that’s all you have to do. Fifty-two. Got it?”

  Tevin nodded again and then he said, real quietly, “But I just bought this and I wanted to show it to my mom.”

  I straightened up my shoulders and started to tell him something, something like a teacher or a CO would say: Well, we can’t all get what we want, can we?

  But I didn’t say that.

  “I know,” I said. “It stinks. But it’ll be okay. I promise.”

  Promise?

  Of course, what could I promise?

  Nothing.

  Tevin and I seemed to show up on the same days and about the same time, and after a few months, I started expecting to see him. Sometimes, when there was a really long wait outside the trailer we would break away from the line, take a little walk along the fence and talk. I didn’t ask, of course, but Tevin told me about his mother.

  “She shouldn’t be here,” he told me. “She didn’t do anything.”

  I had long since stopped thinking like that. I knew my mother too had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. She made some bad choices and now we were “all paying the price.” But like Matoo liked to say: It doesn’t help to dwell on it. It’s in the past, she would say, ever since that day my mother tried to talk to me. I don’t want thoughts like that in my mind.

  We need to move on, Matoo would tell me. Let it go.

  “I know,” I told Tevin.

  “No, I mean it,” Tevin insisted. “It was this lady who moved in next door to us. She didn’t have a car, but we did. I don’t know how she got around or anything. We used to see her walking and sometimes my mom would drive her to the grocery or stuff like that, but this one day, I wasn’t home. If I was home it wouldn’t have happened. But I wasn’t home. That’s why it’s my fault. I was at the movies with my stepbrother, but I should have stayed home. I didn’t even want to go. If I had been home my mom wouldn’t have given that lady a ride to her uncle’s.”

  Tevin was talking really fast and I could tell he was trying not to get too mad. Too upset. Or cry. “That’s what she told my mom. She just needed a ride to her uncle’s. That lady didn’t even have an uncle.”

  Tevin’s mom had only been in prison for a few months. He’d get used to it, I thought. You have to make it through that whole first year. That’s what everyone says. First you have to survive one year, your birthday, their birthday, a Thanksgiving, a Christmas, one of every holiday. Tevin needed more time, a full year.

  “It’s not your fault,” I told him because that’s what grown-ups always say. So I said it.

  He’d be okay. He just needed to talk.

  “It wasn’t her uncle. It was a drug dealer,” Tevin went on. “And the police were there waiting, and then they found out that the lady had a gun. My mother didn’t know that. She was just doing that a lady a favor, but no one believes her.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “She didn’t even know the lady. She got ten years for the drugs and two more for the gun. My mother never did drugs. She didn’t have a gun and now I don’t have a mother. I didn’t have a father to begin with.”

  Listening to him, I was just thinking how people here are just like me, and how nobody on the outside is like us at all. And how it’s like there are all these voices and no one is listening. So I tried to listen really hard, because there wasn’t anything else I could do.

  “I’m going to get her out of here,” Tevin was saying. “I’m all she has and I have to.”

  I knew she was all Tevin had too.

  Then every time I saw Tevin he would give me updates about his mother’s chances for a retrial and his whole family’s letter-writing campaign. I didn’t once think about why we weren’t doing that. I just listened. Tevin got better and better at understanding the whole process. He might have been ten years old, but he sounded like a lawyer.

  One time he brought me photographs to show me before we got into the security area. He always brought his own quarter now.

  And then one day when he got up to the counter to check in they told him his mother wasn’t there anymore. Matoo and I were righ
t behind them in line when the corrections officer said, “She’s been transferred.”

  It was the first time I heard Tevin’s grandmother speak. “What?” she asked. “What? Where is my daughter? What do you mean ‘transferred’? When did this happen? Why weren’t we told?”

  Tevin was quiet. He looked like all the air had been sucked right out of him. But he was still standing up.

  The officer at the desk checked his list. “Albion,” he said.

  I knew what that was. Albion was the only other state prison for women in New York. It was really, really far away, almost in Canada. Sometimes women went there right before they were going to be let out. So maybe it was a good thing.

  But Tevin wouldn’t look at me. He didn’t say a word. He and his grandmother had to step out of line and me and Matoo were next. I never saw Tevin again and I had no way to find him. I never thought to ask him his last name or his address or his e-mail. It never crossed my mind that he wouldn’t just be here, every week, just like me.

  But he was gone.

  I liked to believe that Tevin’s mother had a new trial and they found her innocent and they all went home from Albion together. Like a magical storybook with a happy ending.

  I like to believe that.

  Chapter Twelve

  In a way, after I was done being sad about Tevin, I was glad Tevin was gone, because he made me think too much.

  Why do some people go to prison and some don’t?

  Do they put people in prison so they can’t hurt other people?

  Or do they put people in prison to punish them?

  Or do they put people in prison so they have time to figure out what they did wrong so they can change? And if that’s the case, how does it help to take a mother away from her child? A child away from his mother?

  But now I have a best friend, Margalit and the hardest stuff we have to think about is what’s going to happen next in our story. So even though I haven’t forgotten about that other stuff, my brain gets a little time off.

  “I think we need to work on it at my house tonight,” she is telling me.

  It hasn’t rained again, but a lot of our outdoor time we spend on our stories, sitting under the umbrella table by the pool, while Yvette and Beatrice talk or try to teach Elise how to swim. That one boy who used to come hasn’t come back. Guess he felt outnumbered.

  Margalit and I finished our mermaid story and now we are working on a fairy story about two elves that get into all sorts of trouble. I figured out the fun of this game is to throw Margalit some twists and turns and surprises in my chapter that she has to figure out in her part, and still make the story make sense and have that So what? like my language arts teacher, Ms. Genovese, would say when we study writing in class, like That’s an interesting series of events, but so what?

  The So what?

  We want our story to have a meaning.

  Margalit wants me to come to her house again so we can continue work on our elf story, but I still haven’t had her over to my house yet.

  I am thinking that if Margalit is really my best friend, I should tell her the truth. I should tell her about my mother. Because I’m pretty sure Margalit thinks that Matoo is my mother, and it’s not that I don’t like Matoo—I love Matoo—but she is not my mother.

  I feel like I can trust Margalit. I feel like there isn’t anything I couldn’t tell her.

  Besides, Matoo was the one to suggest I invite Margalit over. So I say out loud, “Why don’t you come to my house this time?”

  Margalit looks excited. “Okay, we can just stop at my house and ask my mom. But don’t you have to ask your mom first?”

  Now, there’s a question. I know no one would believe me, but I’ve never had anyone over to my house for dinner before, so I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do.

  “No, it’s fine. She”—I just say “she”—“loves it when I bring people over.”

  Which is kind of true, because I know Matoo would love it if I had a friend, but as I am talking, I also know Matoo hates surprises.

  But as it turns out, it’s all fine. No worries. We stop first at Margalit’s house after camp and Margalit’s mother calls my house and makes sure it is okay, and Matoo happens to be in a particularly good mood. She says she’d be “thrilled to meet my new friend.” We practically skip the rest of the way, with Yvette and Beatrice trailing behind.

  My room isn’t anywhere near as fun or interesting as Margalit’s, but she acts like it is.

  “Oo, I love your desk.”

  I turn my head to see what she is talking about. My desk looks pretty average: wood, with drawers on either side, and a chair pushed neatly underneath.

  “It’s so clean. You must take your homework seriously. It looks like a high school desk.”

  I ponder that. I guess I do take my schoolwork pretty seriously. My mother asks to hear about my homework every time I see her. She asks about all my tests, and even if it’s been a couple of weeks, she remembers everything. She even gets special permission from the social workers to talk on the phone to my teachers if she thinks they need to hear something about me. I’ve gotten the same message all my life from my mom:

  Do well in school.

  Don’t get into trouble.

  Make smart choices.

  Don’t grow up to be like me.

  “So you’re a really smarty pants, then, right?” Margalit asks me, and I know she’s not making of fun of me. She’s impressed and she sits down at my desk like she’s testing it out.

  “I guess so. I get really good grades.” I can feel myself blushing a little. I think this is a good time to come clean. Not that I’ve been lying exactly but before we go downstairs and eat, before she asks me why I call Matoo “Matoo,” or before she sees that photo on the mantel, I should tell Margalit the truth.

  “I wish I got better grades,” Margalit is saying.

  She sits down on my bed and Loulou jumps up next to her. “And you are so lucky to have this cute dog. You must be really smart in school. Maybe we can study together in sixth grade.”

  Margalit is petting Loulou and I get this funny feeling there is something she is trying to tell me, too, because she is talking so fast.

  “I mean, I do okay in school, but I think my brother got all the brains and didn’t leave any for me,” Margalit says.

  She is being so nice and so open about herself that I might have to interrupt and tell her flat-out:

  My mother is in prison.

  The truth floats over my head like a cloud that follows me everywhere I go. It’s dark and heavy. It won’t go away if I talk about it but it will be easier to carry.

  But Margalit keeps talking and I can’t find a place to butt in.

  She is fiddling with the pencils that are stored in a special pencil holder on my desk. I made it in the children’s center. Margalit goes on. “I could probably do better actually, but I think my parents like remembering my brother as the smart one, you know what I mean? Like that’s how things are supposed to be. I am the artistic one. He was the smart one.”

  She turns to face me.

  I want to say something, because I can tell I am supposed to, but I really don’t know what she means.

  “Is that your brother you told me about?” I ask. I remember she told me that she used to have a brother, but I’ve seen lots of kids with lots of different stories. Kids with parents they had and then didn’t, kids that didn’t have parents and then they come back, brothers and sisters they didn’t know they had, or had and then didn’t.

  I wonder if I should have known, if I should have seen his room or heard her talking about him before, but I just wasn’t listening good enough.

  Then Margalit tells me, “Yeah, Josh. Well, Josh was my older brother, but he died a long time ago.”

  “Your brother?” I say. “Your brother’s name was
Josh?”

  “Yeah,” Margalit says. “He was twelve years older than me. I know that’s a big difference. My mom tells me they had Josh when they were so young, like he was a mistake, but I think it’s probably the other way around. I never talk about it. You’re the first friend I’ve ever told.”

  Josh?

  Tipps?

  “You’re my first real best friend, you know,” Margalit says. “I’m so glad I could tell you all this.”

  “You can tell me anything,” I say.

  And something tells me not to say anything about my mother right now. Not yet. Something inside just tells me to stay quiet.

  “Let’s go down and see if dinner is ready,” I say, but my brain is saying something else, quietly working in the background.

  And once my brain starts thinking like that, I worry nothing good is going to come of it.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I still have that teddy bear, the one the woman police officer gave me the night my mother was arrested. I don’t touch it, but I can’t bring myself to get rid of it. It’s still got the stiff red ribbon tied around its neck. I don’t think Matoo knows why I have a teddy bear on my top shelf. She, of course, wasn’t there that night, so I don’t have to explain it to her. We lived in Saratoga back then. I don’t even know where Matoo lived. I didn’t ever see her back then. I didn’t even know I had an aunt until they took my mother away.

  I was only five years old.

  I remember a few things, like remembering a movie you saw a long time ago that you weren’t paying too much attention to in the first place. Still, sometimes, in the dark, against my will, when I am just trying to fall asleep, snapshots start coming into my head.

  Nick and my mother were fighting. I could hear them from my bed. I didn’t think much of it. I mean, I hated it, but they fought all the time. The scary part was if Nick lost his temper, if he broke something, or grabbed my mother’s arm and left his fingerprints as dark bruises on her skin, and I would hear her crying.