Imaginary Girls (10 page)

Then, when I felt sure something was about to happen, she turned her face away.

“That’s what I wanted to tell you,” she said, as if we’d never paused in conversation. “The reservoir. It’s so close.”

“You could walk to it,” I said.

When we lived in the heart of town, the reservoir used to be a ten-minute drive; we’d have to stow the car somewhere secret before going on foot through the trees. But this new house where Ruby lived had been built to be as close to the water as possible without trespassing on city property. The city of New York still owned the water and the land surrounding it, though they weren’t here to keep an eye on it. Ruby was.

“It looks closer than it is,” she said. “You have to cross the road to get to it—you just can’t see. There’s a hole in the chain link, and there’s this little path I know of over the rocks, but—” How serious she grew here. How cold her hand was, now that it grabbed mine around the wrist, her skin chilled to the same temperature as the wind. “But, Chlo, don’t go down there. Just don’t.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Promise?”

I nodded.

“You won’t go near it,” Ruby announced. “You
won’t
. C’mon, let’s show you the house.”

We left Pete’s car where she’d parked it, inches from toppling over the hill. The subject of the reservoir was closed and tucked away, as were other subjects as far-reaching as mothers we were avoiding and girls come back to life. The night was filled with strange things, but what wasn’t strange was being together with my sister again. That was the one thing that felt right.

We followed a path of stones to the house, with Ruby leading the way, saying, “Watch where you walk, step only on the stones, that’s why they’re there, no, don’t walk on that one, walk on
that
one, that’s right, that stone there,” until we reached a series of short, squat steps and then a door. It was unlocked, and unpainted, and had a hole where the knob should be. Even so, she opened it wide and ushered me in.

Indoors, with a few lamps on to see, the house was revealed to not exactly be a whole house yet. It was a house in progress, one being built up around us as we stood inside. The walls and floors were half-completed, formed from scraps and panels of wood, electrical wires for who-knew-what gaping out from above. And yet furniture was arranged in the room—a table and chairs, a love seat on one side, a couch opposite. It looked like someone had insisted on moving in too soon. Or that the furniture was planted here first, and then the walls of the house were put up around it.

Ruby made no comment on the state of the house. She took a practiced step over a hole in the floor, indicating where to put my feet to avoid falling in, and then gave a quick tour of the downstairs: kitchen to the right, living room and den to the left, bathroom through this hall and around that bend. There were more doorways than it seemed there should be, if the only rooms downstairs were the ones she mentioned, but when I asked where the extra doors led, Ruby smiled and said sometimes you need more than one way to reach the outside.

There was no introduction to Jonah, the new boyfriend, whose house Ruby treated as her own. She said he was around somewhere, but she didn’t feel like looking. I’d meet him tomorrow, she said. She’d get him to make us breakfast or something.

Up a set of stairs, turning sharp corners without a banister to hold on to, we reached the second floor, where a hole in the floor meant for a ceiling fixture was poked through with a glowing pole of light. I could see wall frames where eventually there’d be walls, but now I could see through the walls—as if I’d grown X-ray eyes. It seemed that if you walked down a hallway, only when you reached the end would you know if it held a room, because we walked down one and there was nothing, and then we walked down another and there was a door.

“This one’s yours,” Ruby said.

I went to the door, but it didn’t swing open. It was propped there, leaning against the frame and not secured by hinges. A single push, and it could topple.

Here, for the first time, she acknowledged the state of the house. Maybe she was getting worried, now that she could see my reaction.

“Jonah’s going to build it up to something great,” she said. “He is. It takes time, I guess. But I told him. I told him, ‘My sister’s got to have her own room.’ And so he made sure. He should’ve gotten this door working first though.”

“Thanks,” I said. But I was thinking how Jonah knew about me, building this room for me before he ever met me, and tonight was the first I’d heard of him.

“I wanted you to have a room that’s all yours, Chlo. There’s a bathroom up here and everything. And it’s bigger than your old room at the Millstream, too. And your old bed’s in there, and your furniture.”

She picked up the door in both her arms and moved it aside so we could enter. She made a motion that I should go in first and then hovered behind me, close enough to step on my heels if I backed up even one inch.

“I know this room isn’t like that little truck-thing you were living in at your dad’s, but you weren’t thinking of leaving just yet, were you?” she teased. She’d practically whispered this up against the scalp of my head, so I couldn’t see if she was smiling as she said it—though I felt sure she was. Smiling.

Then she backed up and continued, cautious now, timid even. “You won’t leave because things are just like they were . . . that summer. Before . . . everything. Right, Chlo?”

She meant London was back the way she was, because she sure couldn’t mean the mysterious new boyfriend and the slapdash house.

“Is she alive?” I said, bursting out with it. “Can everyone see her?”

“Pete saw her,” Ruby said. “You saw her, I saw her, everyone at the party saw her.”

“Then she’s alive.”

Ruby opened her mouth and let it hang for a second too long—but she didn’t end up denying it. “She’s not a ghost, if that’s what you’re saying. You know we don’t believe in ghosts, silly.”

“How?” I said.

“How
what
?” she said.

“
How
is she alive?”

Right then, Ruby held up a hand to stop me from saying more and shot her gaze over my shoulder, to the open doorway behind me. There was a thump coming from out in the hallway. Then another as a heavy weight was dropped.

Was that Jonah?

I stayed very still as she checked outside the room.

But when she returned from the darkened hall she held in her arms a framed mirror that must have slipped down from the wall—and somehow didn’t break.

“Maybe we do have a ghost,” she teased.

“That wasn’t Jonah?”

She shook her head. “It’s the house settling, that’s all.” She held the mirror facing out at me and for a brief moment it caught a bare corner of the room and I didn’t see myself in it—like I was the one whose existence we should be questioning. But it was only the angle. When I shifted, I was back in frame and made a reflection as usual. She plunked the mirror on the floor, careful not to get a crack of bad luck in it, and asked me what she’d asked me before.

“So,” she said, “you’ll stay?”

“Well, yeah,” I said. “Of course.”

How could I leave? Now back, I couldn’t picture anywhere else. Literally—like my mind had been wiped clean of all other towns clear from here to Route 80. Places that weren’t this place had lost their names. Here was home, because Ruby was here.

“And didn’t you notice?” she said. “I decorated. You like?”

Tacked to the walls in random spots were photos of the two of us. We grinned and pursed our lips and dangled candy-colored tongues over the electrical outlets. We posed with faces mashed together, nose to nose, or cheek on cheek, the flash deviling our eyes, on a windowpane. There was one of me in her lap posted halfway up a wall, but I wasn’t a baby, I was twelve years old. There was one of the two of us in her bright white car, sunglasses on and lenses reflecting white-hot sun, above the light switch. There were no boys in any of the photos. And it went without saying that there were none of Mom.

The last of the photos was taken the summer I was fourteen. There we were, cooling ourselves off in the Millstream, Ruby at the edge of the frame with a diamond-shaped fleck of mud on her nose, and me in the center, too many flecks of mud on my body to count, about to splash her.

That was the most recent photo—missing from the walls were the two years we’d spent apart, a time left unphotographed and unrecorded. Neither of us mentioned that.

“It’s perfect,” I told her. “I love the pictures.”

“We’ll bring up your suitcase later,” she said.

Suddenly I remembered what I’d wanted to check. I was propelled to the window. The room she’d had built for me was at the front of the house, and the view out the window displayed only the driveway. Nowhere, from any spot in that room, could I see a hint of the reservoir. Which meant it couldn’t see me.

That answered my question.

“Are you going to show me
your
room?” I asked her.

She nodded and led the way.

The “hallway” to reach Ruby’s room was a set of plywood planks running from one side of the house to the other. I could look down and see the first floor a story below. Walking the planks was like performing the trapeze in a dark circus, only everyone’s gone home already and they’ve taken the net with them, so if you fall, the hard ground is all that’s there to catch you.

Ruby balanced on the planks without looking down. She didn’t put a hand to the wall to keep steady. Once in her room I could see that her clothes were scattered about, and a chair was set up in the middle of the floor to hold only sunglasses, and her dresser drawers spilled out more than they held, all of which was like her, explosive and full of color and impossible to step over unscathed because she was everywhere.

The room itself was small, but the bed she slept on was grand, with four tall posts and a place to hang a canopy, though it only held a few T-shirts and a gypsy skirt. The bed was high off the ground, as if a stepladder was needed to get up on it, but I didn’t see a stepladder, so I imagined Ruby doing running leaps to reach the bed, nosedives and somersaults from off the chair of sunglasses to the mattress beyond. She’d do it, too—it was something we would have done together, had this been our bed.

I went to her side of the bed, where on the tangled sheets was last night’s nightgown, skimpy and dotted with bloodred ladybugs, and one white sock.

On the sock, she’d penned a note to herself at the ankle:

cocoa pebbles dish soap

birdseed tampons

string cheese—lots

A shopping list. She always used to write them in the strangest places.

I stepped around to the other side of the bed, the side where I figured this new boyfriend of hers got to sleep.

I could tell he shared this room. His stuff was all over. There on the dresser, a man’s wallet and a bulky ring of grime-encrusted keys. Hanging over a chair, a pair of work pants, the kind with pockets running up the legs and you can’t imagine how anyone would need all those pockets, but I guess her boyfriend, Jonah, did. Those were his discarded boxers on the floor. Here was his wrinkled half of the sheets.

It bothered me to imagine him sleeping on that tall bed beside my sister. To think of some guy I’d never met peeling off his pants in front of her and putting his head on a pillow beside her head.

I tore my eyes away from the bed and checked the room again, taking it all in.

“You’re quiet,” she said. “What’re you looking for?”

“Nothing. I don’t know.”

What I was looking for made no sense, not even to me. Something magical had happened, and London was apparent living proof of it, and maybe I thought there’d be some kind of evidence in here. Like Ruby might’ve dropped a clue out of her pocket. She could be clumsy like that.

Like if I lifted up my foot, all explanations would be right here.

I did notice that Ruby had two huge windows in her room—looking out behind the house in the direction of the reservoir. They were dark for now, since it was night, but when the sun came up, there would be no curtains or shades to keep the water from showing clear.

“You’ll sleep here tonight,” she announced. “With me. But take that side, the one near the wall, not the windows.”

Jonah’s side, she meant. She said those words and clapped her hands together and it was done, without informing the boyfriend first, because why would we?

It was decided and, soon, it was happening: my first night under my sister’s new roof. Soon, we were on the bed, divvying up the pillows, and she was so close I could feel her elbow in my side and her knee crushing my elbow. We had each other again, and there was nothing and no one that could get between us.

Everything was as it should be—except for the one thing.

The girl at the keg, the one we’d dropped off in the middle of the road.

The dead girl who was no longer dead.

That’s the one thing that prickled at me.

Somehow, while I was gone, she’d been reanimated, blown full of air so she could take her breaths again among us. My sister was connected to her now—which meant I was also, if my sister was.

London was back, as I was—and she shouldn’t be.

“Comfortable, Chlo?” Ruby’s voice rang out from her side of the mattress—as if she knew right then on whose face my mind had been lingering.

“Yes, Ruby,” I said from my side.

“G’night then,” she said, choking it out almost, like she had a dry, scratchy spot in her throat. Like being here with me again, tonight, was making her feel emotional.

I waited for her to say more, but she didn’t. She had her back to me, but after some long moments her arm reached out, and her hand tapped my hand to be sure it was still there. I tapped back.

Then we both went to sleep and let my first night home dissolve into day.

R
uby slipped over to my side of the bed and wouldn’t budge, though I tried and tried to wake her. The clock showed that it was morning, and far later than I usually slept, but Ruby was still deep under. Her long hair trailed across the tangled sheets and reached down for the shadowy dust bunnies kept beneath the bed. Her arm circled one of my pillows, and her legs had kicked aside my legs.