17.
The year Ruby was thirteen, her mother disappeared.
Ruby had come home late from school to an empty apartment. The phone on the wall was ringing insistently. She answered it.
It was one of the women her mother supervised. Desirée hadn’t shown up to work. Where was she?
Concerned, her daughter hung up. It wasn’t like her mother not to go to work. She couldn’t remember a single day like that.
Even if she was running a fever, her mom worked. Rents were rising, and life was tough. Desirée wanted her baby to go to college
someday.
As the hours passed, Ruby became more worried. She looked out the apartment window. She grabbed her keys and walked outside,
in the fading dusk, to the hotel where her mom worked. The front desk clerk said she wasn’t there. They hadn’t seen her all
day. Ruby walked to the Piggly Wiggly market where they shopped, where the clerk shook her head. The library had already closed
for the day.
She remembered that initial feeling of panic stealing up her legs. She walked home, telling herself that maybe her mom had
run into an old friend or something. But she knew that wasn’t true.
Back in the apartment, she waited, sitting on the edge of the couch. She heard the clock on the stove tick. The couple who
lived in the apartment below theirs started arguing. It was time for dinner. Her ears were alert to every sound down the hall,
every noise that said her mother might be coming.
Night fell in earnest. Her heart was pounding. She made soup she couldn’t eat. She burned her tongue. She washed her face with the motel soaps they used. She brushed her teeth. In the mirror, her pupils looked big.
I’ll go to the police in the morning, she told herself. That made her relax a bit. If she doesn’t come home, I will go to
the police.
That night passed like fear, like ships of darkness, as if the air outside had grown so heavy with static that even to step
outside and try to breathe might make you drop over dead.
Ruby’s mom didn’t have a cell phone. She didn’t have a car. There was no way to trace her. No way to call and ask, Where are you? Are you coming home?
Ruby slept in the living room, not wanting to miss the moment her mom would come back, and there would be jubilation. What happened, Mom? she would yell, and spring from the couch. Mom would laugh, telling a story that made everything make sense—
She jerked awake. It was very dark, and from down the river came the sound of foghorns.
Rising quietly, she made her way out of the apartment and down the stairs. She stepped outside and looked up to where the
moon hung, silver in the sky. Old Town was quiet, in the way it was in the empty hours of the morning, when time was lost.
She felt for her mother—felt for her in the world. Was she hiding, in one of its many shadows? Where was Mom? What was she
feeling in that moment? Could Ruby go there? Could she still feel her, along this invisible string of life, the joy that had
connected them?
Yes, said the night. Even if it is imagined, it is true.
She heard soft footsteps behind her and swung around, afraid it was a stranger in the dark. But no one was there.
The officer listened to what she had to say, and took a few notes.
“No boyfriends that you were aware of?”
“No sir.”
“I know your mom. I mean, I see her around. She doesn’t seem like a, uh—”
“She isn’t a hooker, sir.”
“Could she have met someone recently?”
“Not that I know about—sir.”
He nodded gravely.
“You say she’s a hotel maid?”
“Yes sir.”
“I can call her manager.”
“Would you?” she asked.
Her eyes were wild with hope and fear.
“I’ll do all I can,” he reassured her.
Years later, she would discover that he never went to the hotel where her mother worked. He never interviewed the other hotel
cleaners, or pulled the list of who was staying in the hotel. By the time Ruby looked into her mother’s disappearance herself,
many years later, all those records were gone.
“I’ll call a social worker for you,” he said.
Her mother had joined the ranks of the 167,389 persons reported missing in the United States that year. One of them stared
at her now, from the carton of milk the sergeant had left on the counter, after pouring some into his coffee.