19.
Ruby didn’t like to remember her years of foster care. She graduated high school and got a scholarship to study criminology at the city university. Even before she knew what she wanted to do, she knew who she wanted to be, and that was a person who understood what had happened to her mother. She felt she might survive the grief if only she knew.
What she remembered most from foster care was the screaming, hollow feeling inside. She wore her shoes thin with walking. She walked every neighborhood of the city. Up and down old lanes, past homes festooned with vines, across hospital and school lawns, her shoes growing wet. Past homes decorated for Halloween, then for Christmas and Easter, and for May Day with baskets hanging on doors. The leaves blew away, and it was spring again. Summer and fall and an endless wheel of terror, looking for her mother.
There were times she thought she saw her mom, and her heart would explode, and she would go running down the street to catch the woman in the bus, or to stop the car at the light. The bewildered woman would turn, her long hair parting. It was never Ruby’s mother.
In later years, Ruby learned that this is such a common phenomenon that it has a name: bereavement hallucination. Over half of people who have recently lost a loved one report seeing them—a face in a crowd, or a figure sitting at a bus stop. Often it is someone in the distance. The longer the relationship, the closer it was, the more likely the hallucinations.
But Ruby didn’t believe that they were hallucinations. She suspected that the dead were still in reach. They were there, tantalizing the living. They didn’t want to be forgotten.
It was during her years in college that she started the map. She found it in an antiques store and was drawn to its buttery yellow surface. She hung it up in her dorm room, and the first flag she put in it was a red one for her mother.
Her mother, too, was the first person whose report she collected, from that sergeant, now retired. He had white eyebrows and seemed to think he had done well. He had smiled at her, handing it over, as if he felt sorry for her, to have a mother who left.Child abandonment,he had written in that report.Daughter was born out of wedlock.There was no crime, Ruby was learning, in simply disappearing, and many police assumed women did as men: They left. If anyone had committed a crime, that sergeant had decided, it was Desirée herself. For leaving her child. If she reappeared, she would face charges.
Ruby took all the required courses for her degree. Policing. Courts. Theories of crime. White-collar crime. There was no criminology class, then or now, on missing women. It was like they didn’t exist. Not once, in her entire four years, did a professor even raise the issue.
The number of flags on her map grew. She collected the names from police bureaus, calling to say she was working on her thesis, which was about missing women. They didn’t care. Sometimes she visited police stations and dug missing women reports out of dusty drawers, and she wrote to faraway bureaus, and soon thick packets began arriving battered in the mail from across the country, saying postage due in the upper right-hand corner. But there were so many police bureaus. There were so many women.
20.
“Greetings,” the grandfather said.
He was sitting outside his cabin, in the kind of cane-bottom chair she had once learned to weave. A cool breeze floated up from the river. It was almost hypnotically green.
Ruby had come straight from the airport, after a red-eye flight. She felt fusty, and her mouth tasted like ashes. She figured this would be her last trip back to Oregon for this case. When she returned to Georgia, it would be for good—until the case was over.
“Your son tells me you have a bone that talks to you,” she said.
She said it like it was an everyday thing, to have a talking bone.
“I was wondering when you’d figure that out.”
“You didn’t want to tell me?”
He turned his glossy dark face up to her, his endless eyes.
“She told me to tell you, but I was afraid you’d take her.”
“Can I see it?”
He got up, reluctantly, and felt his way into the cabin. After a moment, he came out, holding the bone reverentially in his hands. It was wrapped in a long cloth. Ruby saw that the cloth was a scrap of a childhood quilt, and she knew instinctively that it was a remnant of history.
He opened the quilt to reveal a femur bone. It was yellowed with age, and the surface was pitted.
“Sheriff said it was no one we knew, just some old remains from the poorhouse. But she still has something to say.”
“Like what?”
“Here. You listen,” he said, holding out the bone.
The moment the bone was in her hands, Ruby felt a power surge through her that was so strong it was almost nauseating. The colors were brighter—they were different, and she saw with eyes that were no longer limited, which was odd, because her own eyes had closed. It was like she had exchanged one set of eyes for another, and could see even if hers were shut. The world swayed: It was dark, and then it was light. She was in a dark forest. There was a line of feral pigs, all with whiskered cheeks and dirt-rubbed snouts: They raised up on their cloven hooves, hairy tails dangling, pink-mottled bellies showing, and they advanced. In a circle they ran, and in a circle she felt like she was—
Fainting.
“There now, I got you,” the old man said, and it was instinct that had made him move close, and feel the air around her move as she fell and he caught her in his arms.
Ruby was still holding the bone, as if it were soldered to her hand. She felt sick all over, but it was a premonition: a premonition of a past that kept happening.
