1
Ruby can barely see the road in front of her beyond the smeary path left by the worn-out wipers. She’s on a back road, having gotten off the west to east highway an hour ago when the rain started coming down. Neither her wipers nor her nerves can take highway speeds in weather like this.
In the random way of many rural roads, there is suddenly a stop sign in front of Ruby. She has run out of west to east road. Her choice is now left or right, North Farms Road or South Farms Road. The only vehicle on the road, Ruby can take her time deciding. She glances to her left, and there is the prettiest little house she thinks she’s ever seen. A perfect hobbit house of a place. Even in the downpour, the yellow of its clapboards and the bright white of its gingerbread trim glow. Maple trees with their new pale green cauliflower buds bounce in the gusts, framing the view. If there was a B&B sign hanging out front, Ruby thinks she’d stop, see about spending the night. But there isn’t. Press on. She signals to the empty road that she will be taking the South Farms Road turn. Within a few feet she spots a sign: HARMONY FARMS 10 MILES.
At this point, Ruby has been on the road for most of the day and right now she just needs a place to pull the Westie off the road, eat her dinner and regroup. If the rain subsides, she’ll make a few more miles to her, as yet, undetermined destination. If the rain doesn’t let up, she can lock the van and go to sleep.
A sudden streak of lightning and she sees a brown state park sign directing her to Lake Harmony. Perfect. She pulls the van into an empty parking lot, notes the restroom facility and the scattered picnic tables. It’s too dark now to see the lake, but she can make out the lights of homes sprinkled around the edges. Another lightning bolt, immediately followed by the boom of thunder, and she backs the van out from under a pine tree. No sense getting crushed if a tree should get struck and topple over.
In the van she eats the leftover grinder from a rest stop Subway, cracks open a little screw top single serve bottle of wine. Home sweet home.
Are you nervous? Being all alone, a woman, and all? How many times has Ruby had to deflect that question with a wave of her hand and a laugh? A thousand? A million? She doesn’t tell them that it’s being in company that makes her nervous. It would seem rather odd to admit that being around people who want to be with her is far more frightening than bunking down alone in her automotive tiny house. Besides, like a Victorian lady, she does keep a little peashooter under her pillow at night, no bullets, but it’s a comfort. And, in forty years on the road, she’s never had occasion to use it. Ruby is a recluse with an active social life. Just don’t try to tie her down. Even her daughter can’t do it.
As if conjured by her thoughts, Ruby’s phone buzzes with Sabine’s FaceTime alert. Time to bid the grandkids good night and endure another round of where-are-you-and-where-are-you-heading-now-and-why-don’t-you-come-here?
“Hi, Ruby!” Two faces crowd the screen. Molly and Tom. Plain names, what Sabine likes to refer to as normal. Where so many of her mommy-peers are giving their kids trendy monikers, Sabine, who has had to explain her exotic name too many times, chose to give her kids what Ruby thinks of as plain vanilla names. But they suit them.
“Hello, my darlings.” Ruby is fortunate in that she doesn’t have to do much heavy lifting in these satellite-powered versions of face-to-face conversation with her grandchildren. They are happy to give her a thumbnail sketch of a busy kid’s day, talking over each other as they bring Ruby up to speed on the last days of school and the intransigence of their parents in refusing to consider going to Disney as a summer vacation.
And then they’re gone and the face on the screen is her one and only child. “Do not encourage them in this demand we be like everyone else’s parents.”
“Now, Sabine, when have I ever chosen to be like other people?” Ruby smiles. “I will go to the mat for your right to rebel against societal norms.”
“Yeah. So, where are you now?”
“Come on, Sabine, use your talents.” Like Ruby, Sabine has the gift. A gift she has spent most of her life suppressing. A gift quite different from Ruby’s, not just as a reader of signs and portents, but as a medium; seeing ghosts, interpreting the astral plane. Nonetheless, Sabine is pretty good at reading psychic vibes.
“Right now, my talent is pinning you someplace near a lake.”
“Yes! See, you still have it.”
“What I have is Find Friends.”
Ruby’s concession to Sabine worrying so much about her wandering lifestyle was to agree to let Sabine add her to the app. “I have no idea where I am, somewhere between here and there.” It’s her old dodge of a joke. “Hey, it’s really coming down now and starting to thunder. I have to hang up.”
“Go. Be safe. Call me in a couple of days.”
“Love you.”
“Love you too.” A statement Ruby had despaired of ever hearing while Sabine worked through her adolescent rebellions. “Hey, Mom, quick question.”
“Shoot.”
“How old was I when I, you know, started feeling things?”
“You had flashes of it by the time you were eight or so.” Ruby would ask Sabine why that particular question, but she already knows the answer. “Molly?”
It seems as though it is an inherited trait, this business of sixth senses and visions and clairvoyance. Like the distinctive single freckle located at the corner of Ruby’s mouth, Sabine has the same small blemish. Once Molly had grown out of babyhood and her features become more of a little girl, Ruby had seen that she, too, bore this tiny hereditary marker. It simply stands to reason that Molly would grow into the other distinctive family marker.
“I think so.” Sabine’s face on the tiny screen betrays a maternal blend of worry and acceptance. “And you, when did you get yours?”
“About the same age, although it wasn’t until I was older that it became a problem.” It is a conversation like the one most mothers have with their daughters, except that the topic isn’t menstruation but psychic powers. “And, Sabine, the good thing is that Molly will never have to figure it out on her own.”
“Like you did.”
“Like I did.”
She saw Karen fall on the playground, except that they weren’t on the playground, they were in the chapel, hands clasped in proper reverence for the morning’s prayers. She felt the burn of a skinned knee even as her own, bare between knee sock and plaid skirt, felt the smooth fabric of the kneeler. She wanted to reach over to Karen and comfort her friend even as Karen dutifully recited the prayers, oblivious to her upcoming accident. The feeling was so strong, so inevitable, that when Karen joined the queue to head out for their ten minutes of play before school, she grabbed her hand and jerked Karen back from going outside. “Mary Jones, what’s the matter with you? Let me go.” Karen yanked her hand out of Mary Jones’s and ran out of the chapel onto the playground and promptly tripped in exactly the way Mary Jones had seen in her mind’s eye. And Karen, knee bleeding and tears running, blamed Mary Jones for her fall.
Ruby shuts off the little battery lamp on her pop-up table, pushes the curtains to the side, the better to enjoy the light show nature has provided for her entertainment. The storm is moving northeast and streaks of lightning illuminate the wind-roughened lake water in front of her van. She can hear the sloppy chop of water against a wooden pier jutting out away from the beach. A split second of brilliant lightning and an almost immediate crack of thunder and suddenly all of the lights across the lake are out. Within seconds, a second thunderbolt and the fine hairs on Ruby’s arms stand up; her whole body tingles. The darkness is complete. Then a searing brightness that lasts for a full five count. Ruby closes her eyes against it. When she opens them, she fumbles for her lamp and turns it on, pulls the van’s curtains across the windows. Squeezes through the space between the two front seats and sets up the folding privacy screen against the windshield. It’s a weak measure against the brilliance of the electric show outside, but she feels better. Except that the tingling is not subsiding.
Another person might be concerned, but Ruby sits and listens to this phenomenon, studies it for meaning. A normal person might think she’s been lightly electrocuted, but Ruby doesn’t. She may not have gone beyond an eighth-grade education, but she knows that the van, on its four rubber tires, sitting in sand, out from under trees, and with its aerial long gone, is grounded.
Auguries and signs. Portents and forebodings. The ozone is thick in the air. She can smell the pine, the water, the very sand and where it changes from beach to loamy trail. She can hear beyond the heavy rain the sound of a fish jumping. This has happened before—a literal recharging of her senses. Whether it simply manifests itself as a better sense of smell or as renewed extrasensory powers, she won’t know until she is tested. But one thing Ruby is certain of, something is about to change.
2
Ruby dreams again of her mother. This time she hears her voice. Of course, she cannot possibly know what her mother’s voice sounded like as she has never heard it. Or seen her face. Or felt the touch of her hand. Nonetheless, someone is speaking to her, a faceless entity. Please open the door. Let me in.
Ruby opens her eyes, pushes back the café curtain in the Westfalia. The light gracing the lake shimmers in the dawn. The blue sky above the lake’s surround of green pines is cloudless. It’s a pretty day. The dream has dissipated, but not the sense of hearing a voice.
Open the door.
“Oh geez.”
Not her dream-mother, but some stranger outside her van asking for admittance. Jumping up, Ruby slips a sweatshirt over her T-shirt, pushes open the café curtain on the door side of the van, and looks out. No one there. Then she hears a rough scratching against the side of the van, too rhythmic to be a branch. She slides the heavy door a few inches and looks out, then down. Looking up at her is a small black and white dog. It has a goofy grin on its face, as if it’s brought her a surprise. Please let me in.
Ruby sinks back onto the bench. Scowls. She slips the derringer into the palm of her hand, then pulls aside the café curtains on the other side of van, looks out. Still no one. No one human.
In, please.
Ruby jerks open the van door to its fullest and steps out, looks for the ventriloquist who has woken her with his foolish parlor trick. But it is only the dog. Taking her silence for permission, the dog jumps into the van, jumps onto the bench, circles three times and is instantly asleep.
“Hey, you can’t do that. Out.”
The dog opens one eye. “You invited me in.”
It’s not like the dog’s mouth is moving, or even that she’s hearing its voice with her ears, it’s more like she’s being inhabited by some kind of auditory mist. It’s all in my head, she thinks. And yet it doesn’t feel entirely unfamiliar. It is almost exactly the same misty sense that she gets when she has an actual intuitive moment with a client. Or when she was a child, just finding out about her clairvoyant powers, and would see the future or the pain or the conflict residing within a person. In this case, she is hearing what the dog thinks. It’s not even that what’s bouncing around in her mind are actual words, it is the language of images and senses, not speech. Gingerly, she reaches out and touches the dog on its furry back. There is a mild vibration, a tingling that courses up through her fingertips and suddenly her mind is filled with sounds which feels like she’s breathing them in. It’s like a sudden onset synesthesia, where scent translates into colors. In this case, the olfactory becomes visual. She hears grass and macadam; the way a child’s skin is soft; the way loss is unspeakable. She pulls her hand away. Her heart is racing, her hands shaking. Ruby is suddenly dry-mouthed. She leaves the van, leaving the door wide open and runs to the park’s restroom. Scooping water from the faucet, she drinks and then splashes her face. Catches her breath. “This is crazy.”
If she can understand what this dog is thinking, what does it expect of her?
Refreshed from its brief nap, the dog greets Ruby outside the van, bows and stretches. Shakes. Squats, and Ruby sees that this is a little girl dog. Ruby sits down, pats her knee and the dog bounds over. “What do you want?” She doesn’t touch the dog, wanting to see if this phenomenon will happen without a physical connection. She leans down, and the dog gives her a tiny kiss. “I want to be with you.”
“Why?” Ruby hopes that she is truly alone in this state park; she would hardly like to be observed asking a dog questions as if she expected answers.
“You are alone.”
“I’m not looking for a companion.”
“Yes, you are.”
Okay, this is all in her head. Ruby is certain that she’s never been psychotic before, but maybe that’s what all this fortune-telling has really been; all this seeing the auras of other people. The way the gift, as her first mentor called it, rises and ebbs like the tide. Maybe she really is just plain crazy. Although, to be accurate, she’s never before heard voices in her head. Voice, singular, and, to be clear, she’s not hearing a voice, but hearing images. Oh, yeah. Totally not normal, not even for a psychic.
Ruby pushes the sliding door fully open and sits on the ledge of the van’s carpeted floor. The dog snuggles up to Ruby, shoving her little black nose under Ruby’s arm so that she can press herself against Ruby’s side. The dog’s white ruff is as soft as down and Ruby feels herself calming as she runs the fur through her fingers. She can practically hear her own pulse slow down. They sit, neither one speaking, and that overused phrase, companionable silence, seems to describe the moment just about right. The morning air is spring flavored. The calm beyond the storm. The calm of capitulation for sure. The lake surface ripples as a fish somewhere leaps for joy. Where the heck am I, Ruby thinks, in what rabbit hole have I fallen?
“With me,” says the dog. “Place. Stay.”
* * *
It had been a horrible night. I regretted my impulse to bolt from where I had been even though I had been there without food and water for so long. The rain and the thunder and the searing lightning were terrifying, until I saw that van. I have been in many a van in my short life, always in a crate. I expected that the person in that van might have a crate I could crawl into, and maybe food too. The problem was that in all that storm noise, she couldn’t hear me ask for help. So I hunkered down beneath the vehicle, waited until it was safe to come out and then asked for what I needed. Thankfully, I had happened upon the only human I have ever encountered who understood me.
* * *
An hour later and Ruby is dressed and ready to move on. She needs coffee and the van needs gas and now she’s got this little hitchhiker ensconced on the bench seat as if Ruby wants her there. “What am I going to do with you? Who’s your person?”
No answer. The dog wiggles her expressive eyebrows and settles her chin more comfortably on the seat. Ruby sits beside her, places her left palm against the dog’s skull. A mild stimulation tickles her palm. “Home with you.”
“This is my home.”
“Mine too.” The dog’s mouth cracks open in a happy pant. “Now.”
“I can’t complicate my life with you.”
“I’ll be good.” She rests her chin on Ruby’s arm. “I’m a good girl.”
This audible scent of good intentions floods Ruby’s mind with a strange mixture of hope and comfort. Without a doubt, she understands, this dog is as rootless as she but hasn’t always been. No one will come looking for her, any more than anyone has ever really searched for Ruby.
Ruby cups both hands against the sides of the dog’s head and feels the increasing tingle. “Where did you come from and why did you choose me?” It may be a far too complex question for a dog’s thoughts, but she asks anyway. A moment later, the scent of rotting flowers, that peculiar nasty odor of forgotten vases. No. It’s not flowers. This dog has lost her former owner to death. A lingering, lonely death. Ruby jerks her hands away.
For nearly eighteen years Ruby traveled with her daughter, Sabine. Encumbered first by pregnancy, then by an infant, then by having to make sure her daughter was educated, even if it meant settling for a school year in a dozen different places, Ruby missed Sabine, but as an empty nester, or, in her case, an empty Westfalianer, she’d quickly grown used to, was maybe even happier, going solo. She and Sabine had knocked heads so often over Ruby’s wandering lifestyle that not having a glowering teenager in the passenger’s seat was, in some ways, a blessing. Happy and settled, Sabine was a lot more fun now when they saw each other.
So, at least a dog wouldn’t complain about being constantly on the move. A dog might even be useful. A dog whose thoughts she could interpret might even lead to something interesting. What if Ruby is now open to other dogs’ thoughts?
“Okay. You can stay.” Ruby strokes the dog’s head, noting that the tingling is gone. But the contented look on the animal’s face is plain. Ruby has made her happy.
Copyright © 2021 by Susan Wilson
