Ruby can barely see the road in front of her beyond the smeary path left by the worn-out wipers. She’s on a back road, having gotten off the west to east highway an hour ago when the rain started coming down. Neither her wipers nor her nerves can take highway speeds in weather like this.
In the random way of many rural roads, there is suddenly a stop sign in front of Ruby. She has run out of west to east road. Her choice is now left or right, North Farms Road or South Farms Road. The only vehicle on the road, Ruby can take her time deciding. She glances to her left, and there is the prettiest little house she thinks she’s ever seen. A perfect hobbit house of a place. Even in the downpour, the yellow of its clapboards and the bright white of its gingerbread trim glow. Maple trees with their new pale green cauliflower buds bounce in the gusts, framing the view. If there was a B&B sign hanging out front, Ruby thinks she’d stop, see about spending the night. But there isn’t. Press on. She signals to the empty road that she will be taking the South Farms Road turn. Within a few feet she spots a sign: HARMONY FARMS 10 MILES.
At this point, Ruby has been on the road for most of the day and right now she just needs a place to pull the Westie off the road, eat her dinner and regroup. If the rain subsides, she’ll make a few more miles to her, as yet, undetermined destination. If the rain doesn’t let up, she can lock the van and go to sleep.
A sudden streak of lightning and she sees a brown state park sign directing her to Lake Harmony. Perfect. She pulls the van into an empty parking lot, notes the restroom facility and the scattered picnic tables. It’s too dark now to see the lake, but she can make out the lights of homes sprinkled around the edges. Another lightning bolt, immediately followed by the boom of thunder, and she backs the van out from under a pine tree. No sense getting crushed if a tree should get struck and topple over.
In the van she eats the leftover grinder from a rest stop Subway, cracks open a little screw top single serve bottle of wine. Home sweet home.
Are you nervous? Being all alone, a woman, and all? How many times has Ruby had to deflect that question with a wave of her hand and a laugh? A thousand? A million? She doesn’t tell them that it’s being in company that makes her nervous. It would seem rather odd to admit that being around people who want to be with her is far more frightening than bunking down alone in her automotive tiny house. Besides, like a Victorian lady, she does keep a little peashooter under her pillow at night, no bullets, but it’s a comfort. And, in forty years on the road, she’s never had occasion to use it. Ruby is a recluse with an active social life. Just don’t try to tie her down. Even her daughter can’t do it.
As if conjured by her thoughts, Ruby’s phone buzzes with Sabine’s FaceTime alert. Time to bid the grandkids good night and endure another round of where-are-you-and-where-are-you-heading-now-and-why-don’t-you-come-here?
“Hi, Ruby!” Two faces crowd the screen. Molly and Tom. Plain names, what Sabine likes to refer to as normal. Where so many of her mommy-peers are giving their kids trendy monikers, Sabine, who has had to explain her exotic name too many times, chose to give her kids what Ruby thinks of as plain vanilla names. But they suit them.
“Hello, my darlings.” Ruby is fortunate in that she doesn’t have to do much heavy lifting in these satellite-powered versions of face-to-face conversation with her grandchildren. They are happy to give her a thumbnail sketch of a busy kid’s day, talking over each other as they bring Ruby up to speed on the last days of school and the intransigence of their parents in refusing to consider going to Disney as a summer vacation.
And then they’re gone and the face on the screen is her one and only child. “Do not encourage them in this demand we be like everyone else’s parents.”
“Now, Sabine, when have I ever chosen to be like other people?” Ruby smiles. “I will go to the mat for your right to rebel against societal norms.”
“Yeah. So, where are you now?”
“Come on, Sabine, use your talents.” Like Ruby, Sabine has the gift. A gift she has spent most of her life suppressing. A gift quite different from Ruby’s, not just as a reader of signs and portents, but as a medium; seeing ghosts, interpreting the astral plane. Nonetheless, Sabine is pretty good at reading psychic vibes.
“Right now, my talent is pinning you someplace near a lake.”
“Yes! See, you still have it.”
“What I have is Find Friends.”
Ruby’s concession to Sabine worrying so much about her wandering lifestyle was to agree to let Sabine add her to the app. “I have no idea where I am, somewhere between here and there.” It’s her old dodge of a joke. “Hey, it’s really coming down now and starting to thunder. I have to hang up.”
“Go. Be safe. Call me in a couple of days.”
“Love you.”
“Love you too.” A statement Ruby had despaired of ever hearing while Sabine worked through her adolescent rebellions. “Hey, Mom, quick question.”
“Shoot.”
“How old was I when I, you know, started feeling things?”
“You had flashes of it by the time you were eight or so.” Ruby would ask Sabine why that particular question, but she already knows the answer. “Molly?”
It seems as though it is an inherited trait, this business of sixth senses and visions and clairvoyance. Like the distinctive single freckle located at the corner of Ruby’s mouth, Sabine has the same small blemish. Once Molly had grown out of babyhood and her features become more of a little girl, Ruby had seen that she, too, bore this tiny hereditary marker. It simply stands to reason that Molly would grow into the other distinctive family marker.
“I think so.” Sabine’s face on the tiny screen betrays a maternal blend of worry and acceptance. “And you, when did you get yours?”
“About the same age, although it wasn’t until I was older that it became a problem.” It is a conversation like the one most mothers have with their daughters, except that the topic isn’t menstruation but psychic powers. “And, Sabine, the good thing is that Molly will never have to figure it out on her own.”
“Like you did.”
“Like I did.”
She saw Karen fall on the playground, except that they weren’t on the playground, they were in the chapel, hands clasped in proper reverence for the morning’s prayers. She felt the burn of a skinned knee even as her own, bare between knee sock and plaid skirt, felt the smooth fabric of the kneeler. She wanted to reach over to Karen and comfort her friend even as Karen dutifully recited the prayers, oblivious to her upcoming accident. The feeling was so strong, so inevitable, that when Karen joined the queue to head out for their ten minutes of play before school, she grabbed her hand and jerked Karen back from going outside. “Mary Jones, what’s the matter with you? Let me go.” Karen yanked her hand out of Mary Jones’s and ran out of the chapel onto the playground and promptly tripped in exactly the way Mary Jones had seen in her mind’s eye. And Karen, knee bleeding and tears running, blamed Mary Jones for her fall.
Ruby shuts off the little battery lamp on her pop-up table, pushes the curtains to the side, the better to enjoy the light show nature has provided for her entertainment. The storm is moving northeast and streaks of lightning illuminate the wind-roughened lake water in front of her van. She can hear the sloppy chop of water against a wooden pier jutting out away from the beach. A split second of brilliant lightning and an almost immediate crack of thunder and suddenly all of the lights across the lake are out. Within seconds, a second thunderbolt and the fine hairs on Ruby’s arms stand up; her whole body tingles. The darkness is complete. Then a searing brightness that lasts for a full five count. Ruby closes her eyes against it. When she opens them, she fumbles for her lamp and turns it on, pulls the van’s curtains across the windows. Squeezes through the space between the two front seats and sets up the folding privacy screen against the windshield. It’s a weak measure against the brilliance of the electric show outside, but she feels better. Except that the tingling is not subsiding.
Another person might be concerned, but Ruby sits and listens to this phenomenon, studies it for meaning. A normal person might think she’s been lightly electrocuted, but Ruby doesn’t. She may not have gone beyond an eighth-grade education, but she knows that the van, on its four rubber tires, sitting in sand, out from under trees, and with its aerial long gone, is grounded.
Auguries and signs. Portents and forebodings. The ozone is thick in the air. She can smell the pine, the water, the very sand and where it changes from beach to loamy trail. She can hear beyond the heavy rain the sound of a fish jumping. This has happened before—a literal recharging of her senses. Whether it simply manifests itself as a better sense of smell or as renewed extrasensory powers, she won’t know until she is tested. But one thing Ruby is certain of, something is about to change.