Mourning Ruby by Helen Dunmore Page A

project on HIV and prematurity. There was going to be a lot of travel. There’d be overseas conferences and I could come with him.
    Adam had to stay later and later at the hospital, because he couldn’t work at home. He couldn’t concentrate. Our house was full of grief, packed solid with this thing that kept changing shape and seizing us in new ways. It had moved in like a crowd of strangers: animal, vegetable, mineral. At one moment it was a picture book, the next it became a scuffed place under the swing. It sat at Adam’s desk, it would not let us sit at the kitchen table, it pounced as next-door’s cat squirmed in theautumn sun. It trod everywhere. In the shower water hit me like rods of iron and I gasped at its weight. It filled the garden and shrivelled the nerine lilies and bronze chrysanthemums. It got into birdsong and the sound of sirens. It lay between us in bed like a sword.
    There was no room for anything else. Adam couldn’t use the computer. He could barely use the phone. People would call us at home and say, ‘Adam, are you all right? You sound different.’
    We learned that it only took two or three months after Ruby’s death for people to begin asking us if we were all right.
    I gave up the bar. I tried to go once, but when I saw my short black dress hanging in the wardrobe, my head began to drum.
    If Anna’s babysitter hadn’t let her down. If I had told Adam it was too late for Ruby to go to the park. She gets silly when she’s tired. When they’re tired or when they’re hungry, that’s when accidents happen.
    You might leave the front door open while you fetch the shopping in. Suddenly she’s out of the house. You run down the steps and catch her as she races into the road. You grab her, shake her. She starts to cry and you yell, Don’t you ever, ever, ever do that again . You both go back in the house and shut the door and your heart’s still pumping while she bawls and howls and clings to your waist scrubbing her tears and snot into your jeans. And you sit down together on the hall floor and she burrows into you, and you comfort each other.
    If I had gone straight to the park in my work clothes instead of going home to change. If I’d left my hair as itwas. That minute I’d spent shaking out my hair and combing it with my fingers. The minute ticked through my head again. I’d been looking at myself in the mirror.
    I turned away from the mirror. I opened the front door, found the keys in the side-pocket of my bag. I locked the door, came down the steps. I felt the August heat on my arms.
    Better put her pink jeans in the wash tonight, she wants to wear them all the time.
    Another November evening. Adam was back so late these days that I knew I had plenty of time. I would light my candle, and read Joe’s letter again. It was an email, but I’d printed it out and put it in an envelope to keep.
    He didn’t write about our feelings, or about his own. He wrote about Ruby. He wrote about her yellow cardigan, and the day she was born, and the visits we’d made to Moscow, and how when Ruby was four Olya had taught her how to say ‘Do you want to be my friend?’ in Russian because this was what Ruby said to everyone she met. And then Olya had invited her niece to play with Ruby. They’d played together, not seeming to notice that they weren’t speaking the same language. Ruby and Sveta both fell over in the park and both wanted Disney plasters on their almost invisible grazes when they came back to the apartment. And Sveta liked the plasters so much that Ruby secretly put a handful of them in her jacket pocket so Sveta would find them when she got home. Joe remembered everything, in a way I thought no one else would remember.
    I think of you both constantly , he wrote at the end of the letter. I believed him. Joe was constant. It seemed tome when I held the letter that his thoughts flowed towards me, strong and sure, over thousands of miles. It was true even though he had never touched