Burning Bright - By Ron Rash Page 0,26
the iron bars but never acknowledging the cage’s existence. She had not remembered then what she remembers now, a memory like something buried in river silt that finally works free and rises to the surface, a memory from the third grade. Mrs. Carter tells them to get out their History of South Carolina text-books. Paper and books shuffle and shift. Some of the boys snicker, for on the book’s first page is a drawing of an Indian woman suckling her child. Ruth opens the book and sees a black-and-white sketch of a jaguar, but for only a moment, because this is not a page they will study today or any other day this school year. She turns to the correct page and forgets what she’s seen for fifty years.
But now as she drives west toward Columbia, Ruth again sees the jaguar and the palmetto trees it walks through. She wonders why in the intervening decades she has never read or heard anyone else mention that jaguars once roamed South Carolina. Windows up, radio off, Ruth travels in silence. The last few days were made more wearying because she’s had to converse with so many people. She is an only child, her early life long silences filled with books and games that needed no other players. That had been the hardest adjustment in her marriage—the constant presence of Richard, though she’d come to love the cluttered intimacy of their shared life, the reassurance and promise of “I’m here” and “I’ll be back.” Now a whole day can pass without her speaking a word to another person.
In her apartment for the first time in three days, Ruth drops her mail on the bed, then hangs up the black dress, nudges the shoes back into the closet’s far corner. She glances through the bills and advertisements, but stops, as she always does, when she sees the flyer of a missing child. She studies the boy’s face, ignoring the gapped smile. If she were to see him, he would not be smiling. Her lips move slightly as she reads of a child four feet tall and eighty pounds, a boy with blond hair and blue eyes last seen in Charlotte. Not so far away, she thinks, and places it in a pocketbook already holding a dozen similar flyers.
No pastel sympathy cards brighten her mail. A personal matter, Ruth had told her supervisor, and out of deference or indifference the supervisor hadn’t asked her to explain further. Though Ruth’s worked in the office sixteen years, her coworkers know nothing about her. They do not know she was once married, once had a child. At Christmas the people she works with draw names, and every year she receives a sampler of cheeses and meats. She imagines the giver buying one for her and one for some maiden aunt. There are days at the office when Ruth feels invisible. Coworkers look right through her as they pass her desk. She believes that if she actually did disappear and the police needed an artist’s sketch, none of them could provide a distinguishing detail.
Ruth walks into the living room, kneels in front of the set of encyclopedias on the bottom bookshelf. When she was pregnant, her mother insisted on making a trip to Columbia to bring a shiny new stroller, huge discount bags of diapers, and the encyclopedias bought years ago for Ruth.
They’re for your child now, her mother had said. That’s why I saved them.
But Ruth’s child lived only four hours. She was still hazy from the anesthesia when Richard had sat on the hospital bed, his face pale and haggard, and told her they had lost the baby. In her drugged mind she envisioned a child in the new stroller, wheeled into some rarely used hospital hallway and then forgotten.
Tell them they have to find him, she’d said, and tried to get up, propping herself on her elbows for a moment before they gave way and darkness closed around her.
Richard had wanted to try again. We’ve got to move on with our lives, he’d said. But she’d taken the stroller and bags of diapers to Goodwill. In the end only Richard moved on, taking a job in Atlanta. Soon they were seeing each other on fewer and fewer weekends, solitude returning to her life like a geographical place, a landscape neither hostile nor welcoming, just familiar.
That their marriage had come apart was not unusual. All the books and advice columnists said so. Their marriage had become a