Back in the day, Ruby Heartwood—fortune-teller, seer, psychic—seemed exotic, mysterious, slightly dangerous. Now, for someone who dresses in a gold-brocade caftan and reads tarot cards in a conical tent with a pennant flapping in the breeze, she looks, well, dated. Madame Ruby isn’t drawing them in like she used to. The trouble with setting up at these Renaissance Faires is that it has become more Game of Thrones cosplay than an homage to the era of Camelot. Nowadays people seem to like seers with pyrotechnics. Today, one customer, dressed like a cross between a barbarian (as imagined) and Jared Leto, offered to let her read the chicken bones from his order from Ye Olde Pub Grub. Complete idiot. She declined, asked for his hand and read him a completely bogus fortune that included attracting a woman who would appear gnomish at first, but then be revealed as a femme fatale. Happily, the hairy jerk planted a sticky twenty in her hand and sloshed his Ye Olde Pub authentic “mead” all over the rug she had beneath her table. Even if she had actually been able to glean a real prognostication from his palm, she would have lied to him anyway.
Ruby tries not to dwell on the fact that for the past few months it’s all been bogus readings. Her powers of interpretation seem to be on the decline—as in gone.
The truth is, Ruby is ready to move on. If this had been a more lucrative gig, she’d stay through the rest of the weekend; but, really, there is no point. Another hundred bucks, and that’s being optimistic, won’t make or break her budget. It’s more imperative to listen to her instincts. This Renaissance Faire is tapped out. Time to go. The itch to be gone has evolved, as it always does, from a niggling idea to a compulsion.
As she always does when it’s time to go, Ruby pulls out her atlas and opens it to the next state from where she happens to be. It’s not quite as random as, say, closing her eyes and dropping a finger on a page, but not too far off. Some would suggest that a fortune-teller might consult her tarot cards or tea leaves, but Ruby prefers a degree of planning over allowing fate to take the wheel. Forty years on the road, and she has learned that it’s better to move one hop at a time than take big strides. Better to have at least an idea of where she’s going. Both she and her VW Westfalia have aged out of eighteen-hour drives.
Ruby packs up her tent, stows everything into the camper van that has been her home on the road since it was almost new, ever since her daughter, Sabine, went off to college and never returned to their wayfaring lifestyle. A decision that made it possible for Ruby to quit any pretense at needing a stationary place to call home. As she has said before, if you have a van you aren’t homeless.
Since the advent of direct deposit and ATMs, cell phones and online bill pay, Ruby hasn’t spent more than a few weeks in any one place. She could. She could take up her daughter Sabine’s offer to use the little garage apartment attached to their house; settle into grandmother-hood and being useful to Sabine and her busy family. Those few times when she’d done that, made a concerted effort to be a normal mother, the claustrophobia descended. Not the kind of claustrophobia that would make one nervous about elevators, but the kind that gives Ruby the sense that she is being followed. Observed. As if she’s an object of someone’s curiosity. Not in the way that as a psychic she has cultivated curiosity. That kind of curiosity she stops attracting simply by taking off the gold brocade caftan, sweeping her hair back up into a twist and throwing on jeans and a T-shirt. Poof, just your average lady. Nothing to see here.
This sense of being watched is neither ominous nor benign. Not comforting; not frightening. It is more a shadow or a glint in the corner of her eye. A presence that keeps Ruby’s hands on the steering wheel and her foot on the gas. Don’t catch me. When she was a kid, a runaway, she sometimes thought that it was her unknown mother looking for her, a fantasy only a little different than the imaginary reunions she and her fellow orphans indulged in. Different in that, even as a teenager, Ruby was pragmatic; her survival required her to focus on the here and now; keeping ahead of the law. Now that feeling of being sought has evolved into a simple habit—keep moving.
Last night, for the first time in many a year, Ruby had a dream about her mother. She had no face, no voice, no presence, but Ruby had awakened knowing that the dream had been about the woman who left her behind.
Ruby doesn’t bother to let the management know of her retreat. Some people call it an Irish goodbye, but for Ruby it is what she has always done. To simply vanish. Even on paper, Ruby doesn’t exist.