Mothers and Other Liars by Amy Bourret Page A

who could deal with this horror instead of her. Then she blew a whisper of air at the face, which was answered with a jerk of pink-clad limbs.
    A baby. What kind of mother would just throw away a baby like it was a half-eaten Big Mac? The papers had stories about this kind of thing. Young mothers, poor mothers, desperate mothers leaving their babies in church doorways and outside hospitals. Did this baby cry one too many times on a nerve-frazzling drive? Maybe it was sick or something. Maybe it had some awful birth defect that the mother just couldn’t handle.
    Ruby surveyed the few bits of baby not shrouded in jumpsuit; all body parts looked to be intact and appropriately apportioned. Except for those impossibly huge eyes. Maybe that was the deal breaker; maybe the mother couldn’t stand one more second of those eyes peeling away the layers of her soul, seeing all the ways she was sure to disappoint them in the years to come.
    “Damn, damn, damn.” Ruby rubbed at her gritty forehead, trying to force her road-weary brain to think. The broken telephone was not going to help. And flagging down a passing truck would take more nerve than she could muster. The baby just lay there, not making a sound, clutching the neck of a purple and pink toy giraffe in one tiny fist. Wisps of pale hair framed the narrow face, and those disconcertingly soulful eyes stared back at Ruby as if waiting for her to come up with the answer they already knew.
    Tucking the candy bar into her jeans pocket, Ruby reached in and plucked the baby, carrier and all, from the nest of fast-food wrappers and soda cans.

TWENTY-TWO
    John picks up a pair of dime-store reading glasses, twirls them by one stem. “Have you checked this out? Are you sure it’s the same baby?”
    Ruby nods, incapable of further words. Telling this story again, to an outsider, even one bound by confidentiality, has deflated her. Tears threaten to leak from her eyes like the last breath of air from a punctured tire.
    The lawyer stands, moves to one of the displays, makes minuscule adjustments to the position of a few artifacts. He is kind, she thinks, creating busywork to give her time to collect herself. If nothing else, at least this lawyer is kind.
    That day at the rest stop, Ruby had thought of all kinds of reasons why a baby would end up in a trash can. Except this one: that a couple of drugged-out teenagers would steal a car from a gas station in Dallas, a car with a baby inside. That the girl would sober up just enough somewhere in Oklahoma, hear her boyfriend crazy-talk about his plans to get ransom by sending the parents the baby’s ear. That she would sneak the baby out of the car when her boyfriend stopped to take a leak, hoping he was still too coked-up to notice the baby wasn’t in the backseat. That the girl would find Jesus in rehab nearly ten years later, track down the mother through archived news reports, tell her story. Just the third step of the twelve she was climbing.
    “This says she left the baby on a picnic bench as a trucker was pulling in.”
    Ruby nods. “Maybe she was too stoned to remember. Maybe she didn’t want to admit she threw her in the trash.” This detail, the one that Ruby hopes Lark never learns, could be too horrible for the girl to retain, let alone speak. “I don’t know, but I know it’s Lark.”
    “What about the truckers you saw? Do you remember anything about them, in case we need to locate them?”
    As if scrutinizing the room today will help her peer across the years, Ruby scrunches her forehead. “The trucks were from the same company. It was barely light, but I remember a slogan, something Christian, across the backs.” She doesn’t add that she remembers this because it bugged her, that someone would use religion as a marketing ploy. Jesus is my copilot, so I’ll drive your stuff, what, faster? Better?
    “I can make some inquiries, discreet, of course, with the federal prosecutor down in Albuquerque.” He steps back