Goodnight Ruby by G.W. McClary

No mother should have to bury her child, but it will be fine, I tell myself. I make arrangements. I have her cremated, and right now I’m pouring her ashes into a plot of soil. They pepper the darker dirt with flecks of grey, falling into a recession I’d made sometime before to make room for the seed, the tree which would save my daughter. I knead her ashes into the dirt with my knuckles as if I’m spreading dough. I wonder how much of her could really be contained in those little crumbs, those grains of her remains, like some forlorn beach in a black and white film. Tears fall into the soil and ashes, forming darkened sunbursts on the surface of the crater. I chuckle at the thought that I was getting a head-start on watering it. I nestle the seed into the mixture and cover it, struck by the memory of tucking her into bed, trying to remember the last time.

***

Ruby is four and I’m picking her up from preschool. The front desk clerk buzzes me in, and I power-walk to her classroom. It’s more or less free play when I arrive, part of the end-of-day routine, but Ruby shies in the corner and doesn’t come to me.

“It’s normal,” her teacher assures me, “At least she enjoys her time at school enough to not want to leave!”

“Ruby, now, mommy has to go,” I say, putting just a little bass in my voice. I don’t want to embarrass her in front of her friends.

“When mommy picks you up, baby, you come to mommy, okay?” I say to her in the car. She nods in the affirmative and stares transfixed out the window on the drive home, pointing out cars and clouds in her little child’s dreamland.

***

“Hello mother, it’s me, Ruby,” the little sapling says.

“Ruby, baby, is it really you?” I say.

“Yes, mother. It’s been a long journey.”

“Tell me everything, honey.”

“They told me this will be difficult for you to hear, but when it happened, my soul left my body. It went down, mother. Oh, don’t look so worried. All young souls go there. It’s wondrous. An underwater forest at the bottom of the sea, all the branches jutting upward, swaying in the current of the vents beneath them. A robed figure wandered the forest with a lantern lit by the glow of lost souls, its light a pale shade of blue. I felt my soul being pulled toward him. He gave me choices. My memory is foggy after that, but I ended up here.”

I collapse to the floor and wake up sometime later.

“Did you have a good nap, mother?” sapling Ruby says.

***

I water her every day. I learn that I cannot leave her in my bedroom overnight or she will talk and talk and talk, as plants never sleep.

“Do you remember the funeral?” I ask her one morning.

“Of course not, mother, that’s when I was away, at the underwater place.”

***

The day of Ruby’s funeral. All I can think as I frown through the gauntlet of bereaved family members is that her coffin looks so small. Somehow its size didn’t strike me when I picked it out at the funeral home. I look down at her little face, so serene, so pale against the velvet pillow. My Ruby. I imagine the destroyed flesh and bone at her waist, now covered by a frilled dress I’d picked out just for the occasion. There is a slightly troubled look on her face, as if the muscles contorted with pain as she passed and the agony somehow remained. I think about hunting down the man who hit us that day but know it won’t bring her back. Still, a revenge fantasy is one way to pass the time.

I see a man in the corner. A man I haven’t seen in some time. Not since I was still pregnant with Ruby.

“Why here, why now, after all this time?” I say to him.

“I came to see her, and to see you. To make sure you’re okay,” he says.

“Look at me. Do I seem okay? But now that I think about it, it’s not unlike you to show up when it’s too late. Where were you when I was raising her on my own?” I look over to see the other funeral-goers staring, but I don’t care.

“Please. I didn’t do this,” he says.

“Are you saying she’d still be alive if she wasn’t with me?”

“I’m not… It’s just… I’m just glad you’re still here.”

“Don’t. Not here. I don’t need to be reminded of another past failure.”

We leave together. He spends the night. It’s the only thing I can do to mourn her without falling apart completely. He wakes before I do and leaves before dawn, his residual warmth still lingering on the bedclothes when I reach for him.

***

After her birth, after sixteen hours in labor, I bring Ruby home from the hospital alone. She cries little, so at least she isn’t colic. The phone doesn’t ring. Time elongates. She is milk-fed until my left breast stops producing, then I feed her with formula. I rock her and sing to her.

Good night, Ruby

I’ll tuck you in bed

Good night, Ruby

Sweet dreams in your head

On and on I sing to her, changing the words a little every time. She notices. I see it in her face, pudgy and round.

***

“Tell me a story, mother?” Ruby asks me just before bed. It’s the first time she’s asked for one since she came back, but before it was our bedtime ritual.

“Okay. There was once a very sad queen.”

“Ooh, I’ve never heard this one before, goodie. Why was she sad?”

“She lost something very dear to her. She knew that the king was going to replace her the next morning with someone far more youthful and beautiful than she, so she scooped up their daughter, the princess, who was still just a baby, and stole off into the night. There were dangers in the lands surrounding the castle, but the queen chanced upon a wanderer who chose to help them. He fought back great beasts that sought to destroy the queen and the princess, but they were unsuccessful. They made their way to a rival kingdom, where she expressed her woes to the rulers there. They listened to her with sympathy, for her husband the king had a nasty reputation. Attacking would mean outright war, so they devised a plan. The woman who was to be crowned queen had a twin sister who was easily bribed. They swapped her out just before the ceremony, and she slayed the corrupt king before his followers. The people fell into turmoil and reduced the kingdom to ashes, but the queen was free to raise her daughter in relative peace, protected by the rival kingdom and her new companion, who put aside his wandering ways and stayed with her and the princess. She forgot her queenhood and lived a simple life in the village.”

“Well, that’s not a very good story to tell right before bed,” Ruby says. I kiss one of her leaves.

“I’ll see you in the morning,” I tell her.

***

I begin to have second thoughts.

“Ruby, this is starting to feel unnatural.”

“Mother, don’t you see that it’s right this way? This way, you won’t outlive me.”

“Ruby, please…” I trail off. Anymore, I can only talk to her for a few moments at a time.

***

“Are you going to give dad another chance?” Ruby asks me one morning.

“That man is not your dad. He’s not even your father. He never was, so don’t grace him with that title.”

“There must have been something that drew you to him in the first place,” Ruby says. I huff over to her pot and lift her up, sticking her in the closet.

“Mother, no, please,” Ruby pleads, but I pretend not to hear her. I close the closet door, her muffled voice leaking through as I walk away.

***

“Actually, the real reason I came here was to tell you about something. It’s an ancient practice I picked up from one of the refugees at work. You don’t have to lose her,” Ruby’s father says to me as we lay in bed, the night of the funeral. “They say it’s a way of redirecting a soul, in this case, into a tree. All you have to do is put her ashes in with the soil.” He leans over and fishes something out of his pants pocket. He produces a seed, wrapped in a crinkled manila envelope, a strange red symbol stamped on one of the corners. It looks old and weathered, as if it’s traveled many miles and traded many hands to get here.

“This is the seed you must use,” he says, placing it in my hand and closing my fingers over it, sealing it, willing it. The ritual begins.

***

“Mother, did you go to the underwater place like I did?”

“No, Ruby, I went somewhere else, where older souls go. It was… darker than the place you described, like a poorly lit library. I had to find my way by feel, trying to read some pattern in the letters I felt inscribed on the shelves. It seemed like I wandered for a long time, but my eyes never adjusted to the dark.”

“You didn’t have eyes then, mother.”

“And I don’t have them now.”

“It’s okay, we don’t need them. This is enough.”

“It is. Agreed.”

***

Ruby’s father visits us from time to time, bringing us gifts and sitting there on the grass for a while. Sometimes he cries, other times he laughs. Once, he got furious and stormed off. I wonder what he was thinking about then. What is he thinking about now, as we speak not to him, and he not to us. We just sit in silence together, feeling the breeze. And yes, he does come up and hug us on occasion. We don’t really mind.

***

The roads are icy. I’m dropping Ruby off at elementary school. If only she gets out on the other side. If only she doesn’t have to run behind the car to get to the sidewalk. Whiplash is all I get out of the ordeal; all else is taken from me that day.

When the ambulance pulls away, I can’t bear to ride along. I can’t see her like that. The look on the paramedic’s face as he closed the doors isn’t exactly reassuring. His eyes are averted, downcast, falling bombs.

***

I put it in my will that my ashes be buried along with another special seed some distance away from Ruby. The first few months are maddening, as my voice is not yet loud enough to reach her, but over time, I grow large and our conversations stretch on for months, then years, then decades, as the landscape changes and time marches on with its glacial persistence.

Every so often, when the wind allows it, we can actually touch branches. I can feel a cold front coming in. Perhaps we can muster the courage to reveal ourselves to passersby and convince one of them to tie our branches together. I feel just a little bit warmer when our leaves are touching, almost as if we’re holding hands.

“Good night, mother.”

“Good night, Ruby.”