RUBY WOKE UP ALONE, in a strange place, and two things drew her attention. First of all, she felt a pain in the tip of her right ring finger. When she looked at it, she saw a tiny red dot, like the hole a splinter leaves behind. But there was also something else: the most glorious smell.
“Daddy?” she whispered. “Daddy?”
Dim red light filtered through constellations of dust specks. She was in a large, dark building. The walls looked to be made of brick. The ceilings and floors were bare wood planks. The entire floor she was on was empty—she could see from one end to the other, deep into the shadows. Except in the middle. There was something solid in the middle of the room.
She felt energized. She stood up and walked. She took a deep breath—even in all that dust, her breathing was clean and clear. In the middle of the room, her bare feet came down on broken, brittle leaves and they crunched under her as she walked. It was strange to her, these leaves inside the building, and soon she realized that was where the smell was coming from—the leaves. Ruby took another deep breath and found her energy came from the leaves. She felt health moving through her veins.
She got down on her hands and knees and stuck her nose right against the floor, against the precious dust of crumbled leaves, and took a deep breath. Instead of clogging her nose, it somehow expanded her airways. She felt like she could run a hundred miles. She felt like she could fly if she tried.
Ruby stood and walked closer to the thing in the middle of the room. It was round, so thick that she would have had to hold hands with three or four friends in order to reach all the way around it, and it stretched from the floor to the ceiling. It looked like the outside of a powdered piece of chocolate, brown and dusty and warm. She touched it. The surface was leathery and gave way like a very firm sponge.
It was the trunk of a massive tree, one that had grown up through the floor, but the ceiling had not been able to stop it. She peered through the ceiling where the boards had split and cracked to make room, and she could see the tree had already grown through two or three more floors. She wanted to see how far up it went, so she ran to the edge of the room and found a stairwell.
The next level was empty too except for the tree growing up through it, and at each level the trunk grew smaller. She went up two floors before seeing branches split off from the main trunk. She ran over to one and felt the silky leaves. She plucked one off and it broke in her hands, fragile and tender. A substance like aloe oozed out, and the smell filled her with a heady kind of joy, a feeling that nothing would go wrong ever again. She licked it, and it satisfied her hunger immediately. She knew she was cured in the way a child who wakes up one morning after an extended period of sickness somehow knows they have turned the corner.
She sat down with her back against the tree, and she slipped into the deepest sleep she had ever experienced. A dream came and it felt thick and slow, the way dreams sometimes will. In her dream, a breeze blew through the building, rustling the leaves. That’s when she saw the fruit—it had been invisible to her at first because it was the same color as the leaves, but it moved differently in the wind. Now that she saw it, she realized it was everywhere in various shapes and sizes.
“Who are you?” a voice asked from one of the shadowy corners of the building.
“I’m Ruby,” she said in her little girl voice, and in the midst of that empty floor and in the midst of that massive tree, her voice sounded far away and tiny. Lost.
“Ruby,” the voice said, tasting the word. “Ruby. That’s a beautiful name. You can call me B.”
A woman came out of the shadows. A beautiful, small woman with reddish-brown hair and soft features. She looked so kind and caring. Without thinking twice about it, Ruby ran to her around the tree, dust clouding up at each step. She threw herself into the arms of the woman.
“I don’t know where my dad is,” she said, tears choking her voice, and in her dream this was suddenly very concerning, the absence of her father. “I don’t know where he is.”
“Oh, it’s okay,” B said, holding her close, stroking her forehead. “It’s okay.”
Ruby looked up into her face, a round tear falling from each of her eyes. “I like you,” she said.
“I like you too,” the woman said. “Are you feeling better? You were very sick.”
Ruby nodded. “I feel good.”
“Of course you do. Better than good.”
B looked around, holding Ruby at arm’s length while bending down and talking to her at her height.
“It’s the tree,” she whispered. “Isn’t it wonderful?”
Ruby nodded. A thought came to her then, from some faraway place, that this might not be a dream. In the uncertainty, she felt like she might float away, cease to exist. She joined her hands in front of her, needing to hold on to something.
But there was still the tree. Being reminded of it made her reach up for another leaf, which she broke off. The tree was so full of sap that when she pulled the leaf away from its stem, a long string of it drooped along. Ruby licked the sap off of her fingers, feeling more alive, more energized by the second. She broke the leaf in half and licked the sap again, and before she knew what she was doing, she had stuck the entire leaf in her mouth and was munching on it like a salad. It had a green taste to it, but it was also sweet. She closed her eyes and savored each chew.
“It’s wonderful,” Ruby repeated.
“Have you tried the fruit yet?” the woman asked, reaching up and plucking a piece from one of the lower branches.
Ruby shook her head. No, she hadn’t.
The woman held the fruit in between them and, separated from the tree, it took on a new appearance. While hanging in the tree it had looked shiny and solid, but up close Ruby realized she could see inside of it. She saw strange things swirling around inside the fruit, visions of things that had happened to her. She saw her bedroom in her father’s house! She saw the backyard of azaleas, her brother Leo chasing her down the rows!
“Leo,” she said quietly. In what dream had she had a brother? In what world?
“Did you know the fruit of this tree grows in twelve different seasons?” the woman asked her. “When one of the types begins to drop, another type begins to grow. They don’t all grow at once, but they do overlap—that’s why you see three or four different kinds of fruit in this one tree.”
The woman shook her head in awe, and Ruby could tell that she found the tree fascinating.
“Have you ever eaten your dreams?” the woman asked, lifting the fruit to her mouth and taking a large bite. Juice dripped down onto her chin, and she closed her eyes, seemingly overwhelmed with delight at the taste of the fruit.
Ruby reached for a piece that hung heavy on a branch close to her head. She plucked it off and looked at it, looked inside it. She saw visions of her mother and her brother and a lady standing with her father in Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1. Her small, five-year-old hand held that large piece of fruit, and it smelled wonderful. She had never wanted to do anything more than eat that fruit.
Ruby stopped, staring at the fruit. The woman’s voice was so clear, so present. It couldn’t be a dream.
Could it?
Ruby felt something strange well up inside of her, another new feeling: it was the sense that she wanted to do something she should not do. But that wasn’t new—she had often felt that. The new sensation was her awareness of it, and her deep desire to disobey for the sake of disobedience. She wanted to be sneaky. She stared at the woman for encouragement.
The woman nodded, her eyes beckoning Ruby to take a bite. “Go ahead,” she said. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
As if to illustrate this, the woman reached for another piece of fruit and plucked it from the tree. The sap hung in a draping string from the tree to the stem of the fruit. But this time, when the beautiful woman lifted the piece of fruit to her lips, Ruby noticed something about her that made her drop her own piece to the dusty floor.
The woman’s teeth, they didn’t look like normal teeth. They were pointed instead of flat, like the teeth of a shark, and her mouth opened farther than it should. This time she didn’t take a bite of the fruit—she closed her eyes and put the entire thing in her mouth, devoured it, the way a snake consumes an animal that at first appears much too big for it.
Ruby took a few steps back.
The woman opened her eyes, and they were deep pools. She looked at Ruby, and when she saw the child’s reaction to how she had eaten the fruit, her voice swelled with alarm.
“Oh, child, I’m so sorry,” she said, lifting her arm and using her sleeve to clean the light green sap from the corners of her mouth. She seemed embarrassed, as though Ruby had caught her doing something improper, like talking with her mouth full or picking her nose.
“I’m sorry,” she said again. “Did I frighten you?”
Ruby nodded, taking another step back. This was not a dream. This was real, and it was a nightmare.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of. Go ahead, take a piece.”
For a moment Ruby didn’t move. On the one side, there was the absence of her father and the presence of what appeared to be a kind, caring woman. Yet there was something about this woman that felt horrid—her sharp teeth and the way she ate with such greed. But Ruby liked how the leaf had made her feel. She liked feeling healthy. She enjoyed it. She imagined the fruit would be like that, perhaps even more so.
Ruby looked down at the piece of fruit she had dropped on the floor. It was dusty, so she picked it up and rubbed it off, but already it had grown too soft, and as she rubbed it the skin pulled back and the fruit fell apart in her hands. Within moments the inside of it had blackened and she dropped it back down to the floor. Ruby watched as it decayed before her eyes, turning to dust. All that dust. She became aware of something she hadn’t heard before: a soft thudding sound. It wasn’t happening very often, which is perhaps why had she hadn’t noticed it, but there, in the silence of indecision, she heard it off to her right. She looked and watched as another piece of fruit fell and turned to dust in less than a minute.
“You can’t keep it, you know,” the woman whispered. “It won’t last. Otherwise we could take it from here by the truckload and give it to everyone outside. Everyone could feel this way! But it won’t keep. We’ve tried everything. And they destroy the tree every time it grows out there. Now go on. Eat.”
Ruby nodded, reached above her, and plucked another piece. She took a deep breath. What was it inside of her that held back? She raised the fruit and opened her mouth, pushing through the uncertainty.
“Ruby!” a different voice shouted. “No!”
It was the voice of her father.