Dilemma McNair

Absence

The meet had gone exceptionally well for the whole girls team, especially Ruby. The small white ribbon stuffed into the bottom of her sports bag read 1st place in ornate gold lettering. Her shorts, t-shirt and running shoes were stuffed over top. She flung the borrowed elastic-y head band to another girl on her team and stood from the sticky bus seats. She walked limply down the aisle, down two steps and jumped the last.

Coach patted her on the back as she walked past, "Great job today McNair. Rest well tonight."

Ruby's smile lasted just long enough to convince coach, "thanks. I will."

Coach gave her another solid thump.

It took Ruby twenty minutes to walk home from the high school with her sports bag flung over her shoulder and as heavy as her soul. Coming down the sidewalk, she watched her feet tread down the familiar path of cement, passing through long phases of shadow and circles of light cast by the street lights. Through the urban fog of night, she could pick out two lone stars, and a hazy circle of moon. The kitchen lights of her house looked far more welcoming from the sidewalk than they were in person.

Ruby combed through her bangs with the tips of her fingers and trudged up the three steps that led to her house. Her entrance into the air conditioned kitchen made her feel oddly claustrophobic. As if everything that her surrounded her didn't exist, only the presence of mother did.

"Where have you been?" Mother's cardboard face didn't show worry, or anger, or relief that her daughter was home. Mother's cardboard face didn't show anything.

She let the muscles of her jaw fall slack and into a rigid expression that mirrored her mothers, "Track meet."

"Oh, was that tonight?"

Ruby squeezed her eyes shut. Mother's voice should have raised an octave or so when she realized that she had missed the big meet, when she released her error. Mother should have quickly set the jar of pre-made Alfredo sauce onto the counter and enveloped her in a hug. Mother should have apologized for forgetting. Mother should have showed some form, any form of interest in Ruby's affairs, but she didn't even utter a 'how'd you do?'

"Yes. That was tonight."

"Your Father's just washing up for dinner."

"Got it." If stilted conversation were an Olympic sport, then they would be world champions. Ruby walked down the hallway and flung her sports bag into the corner of her room. She walked through the bathroom door just as Father with his receding hairline, thin nose and scraggly eternal beginnings of a beard.

The bathroom had a creamier light, and the white tiles made it the most heavenly room in the house. The window was cracked a bit so that a natural breeze could just slip through, probably the rebelious act of Father. The room was small, but far less suffocating than the kitchen had been. Ruby ran the tap on cold. With her hands grasping the edges of the sink she blocked the clatter of forks and knives from her. All that was there was the light roar of the water in the sink, her own miniature Niagara Falls.

Her vision narrowed to the plummeting water. What she wouldn't give to get out of there her scrawny town, to go to a big city, to cross the border into Canada, to make it to Europe. Her self-diagnosis was wanderlust.

She held her hands under the icy waterfall and watched as her flesh flushed pink.

Ruby scraped pasta from her plate with slow and deliberate movements and kept her eyes down.

Father reached for the alfredo sauce, "I'm glad you joined us for dinner tonight." She shrugged.

"How was your day?" Conversation with Father didn't have the same hostility as it did with Mother, but it was still stilted. Just not to the Olympic level.

"I had a track meet."

"Oh... that's good."

Mother propped her elbow onto the table, "What did your coach think of that haircut?"

Ruby shrugged, "Coach didn't care. The more hair out of your face, the better."

"I'd think that she wouldn't like the way your bangs hang."

"There's literally one week of track left. It doesn't matter what Coach thinks or what anybody else thinks. It's the last month of school."

Mother frowned, "Well I--"

"This isn't about you. It's about me!"

"Oh, I'm glad of that, because it might be a problem if it weren't about you for once."

"You're narrating your own life, Mother." The more words poured out of her mouth, the stronger the taste of sour milk was on her tongue. She pushed pasta onto her fork and brought it to her mouth, "You should write a book."

"Ruby, you have no sense of the world around you. You need to stop being so arrogant and ignorant. You--"

"So how is the paperwork going?"

Mother's jaw hung slack suddenly and her cheeks flushed, "What paperwork?" Her father looked away as if looking at Ruby pained him.

"The divorce papers." Ruby set her fork and knife slowly at three o'clock, "I don't know when you were planning on telling me, but I know anyways."

Mother recoiled immediately, "How did you find out?"

"It's not like you're the queen of secrets. The walls are thin, you're never quiet." Ruby tried to spit the sour taste out with the words, but the more she said, it grew stronger. "I didn't think I was that invisible to you. I would've had to find out anyways. How long were you planning to wait exactly!"

Mother's jaw flapped up and down like a fish gasping for water. Father gathered the little courage he had and looked straight at her, "We were planning on some time next week. The paperwork should all be settled within a month. We mainly just need to figure out your details."

Ruby stood, "Well, at the moment I'm not really feeling like staying at either one of you's places." Mother and Father watched as she walked deliberately to her room and slammed the door.

Behind the closed door, Ruby didn't bother with radio or any form of distraction. She could hear her parents murmuring back and forth hurriedly in the kitchen. She kicked her sports bag roughly to the middle of her floor and aggressively pulled the zipper open. She took out her mesh jersey that read Track and Field in large white letters on a bottle-green background. She took out the matching bottle green running shorts. She thrust her hand in without looking once more and immediately pulled it back, wincing. She nursed her hand for a minute and her her Father's voice say "I just don't know anymore."

Ruby reached gingerly into her bag and pulled out her spikes. They looked like normal running shoes from above, pink bodies, pink soles and black details, but you could see what made them special from the bottom. She could feel it too.

Ruby set her triple jump shoes aside and rummaged once more. She pushed away the plastic tube of deoderant, the spare sports bra and loose change that had sunken to the bottom until she clenched her fist around the small and insignificant ribbon. She set it on her desk beside her history textbook and below the other track and field ribbons tacked to her wall.

The medley of 1sts and 2nds made a rainbow on her wall, a collection she had been building since grade eight. She figured it was the sort of thing normal parents should've been proud of, but for her it was just one more pebble on the beach of life, waiting for a current strong enough to wash out into the ocean. The sm.all white 1st place ribbon didn't make a big difference. Even if had been from the second biggest meet of the season, it looked the same of all the rest.

"No, Bryna. I don't think so." She heard Father raise his voice and she finally resorted to the loud, obnoxious music that made up America's Top Forty.