RUBY HAD LEFT THE APARTMENT BUILDING A SHORT TIME AFTER talking with Dani on the phone. She had showered and dressed and gone out for some dessert to bring back for Dani. She was on her way to the twenty-four-hour diner when a police cruiser with its lights on went speeding in the opposite direction. Not long after an ambulance with its siren blaring came roaring up and turned where the police cruiser had. There was no reason for it other than premonition but she abandoned the idea for dessert and turned back and began walking to where the cruiser and ambulance had fled. She began to walk faster. Faster until she was running down the sidewalk, her shoes now wet and heavy with puddle water. And not far from where the vehicles had turned she saw the red and blue lights and a small crowd of people and the unmistakable shape of Dani’s VW.
There were onlookers gazing down from the apartment windows and people loitering on the sidewalk and the police were holding them back with their arms held out like they were holding back livestock. One officer was beginning to string up the yellow tape. On the crowd’s fringe Ruby lifted on her tiptoes to see anything. Some of the onlookers had umbrellas. Some did not. She could hardly see a thing.
Ruby pushed through. Some people jeered. Watch it, they said. They said: Hey!
But she didn’t listen. She kept pushing and all of a sudden there was no more crowd, only the wet and gleaming pavement of the street between her and Dani’s body. All the life drained out of Ruby as she stood there looking.
Pastor Lee had been called. He arrived at the scene and found her collapsed on the asphalt. He carried her to his car, got her in the front seat, and went around to the driver’s side and started the motor. Ruby sat there slumped against the door. He didn’t say anything. Just put the car into gear and drove away. They got to the shelter and he helped her to the room Dani had made up for her all those days before. Laid her down and pulled the blanket up to her chin. He was saying something but Ruby didn’t hear it. It was like she was underwater and he was talking above it. He finally left, leaving the desk lamp on. Ruby just stared at the ceiling. There’s a sadness that is incapable of feeling, and that was happening to Ruby: she didn’t feel a thing.
She lay like that for hours. Not talking and not feeling. The only thing she knew was that her life had been altered and could only go one way. She could never go back.
She was suddenly roused from this state and pulled off the blanket and sat up and stood from the bed and walked barefoot through the big room and out the front doors. She walked down the sidewalk. The rain had stopped. Sometimes the moon showed behind the clouds. It was a crescent moon and the horn rode the clouds like a running sail. It was cold and she had on only a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt but she didn’t feel the cold and didn’t feel the rocks under her feet.
She stopped once and glanced out at the lighthouse spinning in the darkness. She might have stood watching it for a few seconds or a few hours. She didn’t know. Didn’t care. Time for her was no longer measured in minutes and hours. No longer in days. Just a single life, the only certainty of which was the commencement. All else was unknown. All else just debris in the tides.
She walked a mile. The road led away from town and bent lower toward the water. She walked over the beach and looked out at the lighthouse. The water over the bay was still as a millpond. The horned moon was mirrored upon it. Then from somewhere above a single flake of snow drifted down like a speck of ash. Then another. And another.
She stood on the shoreline with her toes just touching the water at that discernible place where one world ends and another begins. She undressed. She let her clothes fall where they did. Then she stepped into the water. It came to her ankles, then her knees. It rose to her hips and when she’d waded to her chest she began to gasp at the cold. She lurched forward in an awkward dive and began swimming toward the lighthouse. She kept her back to the fading shoreline so as to never see it again. The freezing water was lapping at her lower lip. The salt choked her. But she kept swimming with the ebbing tide, and she would keep swimming till it turned, and when the flooding water brought the flood of euphoria she wouldn’t fight any of it anymore.