Imaginary Girls (14 page)

“London went with him,” she continued. “We have the house to ourselves. Wanna go up on the widow’s walk? Let your wet hair air-dry? If you want, I could do it up in braids like I used to when you were little? Remember? Then we could stay up there till the sun sets?”

The widow’s walk was Ruby’s most favorite part of the house, even if it wasn’t a widow’s walk, not technically. She’d had Jonah build the tiny platform of a porch as high as he could on the slope of the roof, reachable only through a window at the top of the last set of stairs. She could see everything from up there, she’d told me. She even had a straight view, over the treetops, into the heart of town.

“Sounds good,” I said.

She led the way down the hall, moving so fast she’d made the last turn before I reached the first one, and she was all the way up the stairs before I’d even started climbing.

That was when I caught sight of myself in the mirror she’d returned to its spot on the wall. The mirror was hanging crooked in a dark corner, and the face bobbing in the glass startled me. With my hair all one length and down to the middle of my back, and sixteen now to her almost-twenty-two, I resembled her more than ever before.

I stepped away, unable to look anymore, and climbed the stairs. Everything seemed brighter now, drenched in sun. And the brightest point was beyond the three last steps leading up, at the top, on the widow’s walk. Out there in the light were two browned feet. The feet, attached to Ruby, wiggled in greeting when I came close, then snapped out of view, indicating that I should crawl through the open window to join her.

She had a lawn chair waiting for me beside hers and beckoned me to sit in it.

“I’m so glad you’re here with me, Chloe,” she said. “It’s how I promised it would be, isn’t it? The way it was before? Just like it?”

She wore only her bikini, black on bottom and white on top, and the gold anklet she had on at the pool. Her hair hung down to the curve of her hip, and around her wrist was a single hair elastic. Her face was clean, not a dab of makeup, her nose shiny since she hadn’t powdered it. She looked stunning. She looked real. She looked all the more stunning because she was so real.

Somehow, I didn’t want to answer her question.

I turned from her and looked out over the railing. We were at the highest point that we could get on the house, short of climbing to the peak of the roof and stretching out our limbs like two weather vanes. And there it was, beyond the dirt patch of the backyard and the half-built wooden deck, past trees and across road, where the land broke open and the water flooded in, exactly where it had been when I saw it my first day home.

Except this time I could see the entire expanse of it, a bird’s-eye view of the whole living, breathing thing.

“What are you looking at?” she said, knowing full well what.

“It looks bigger,” I said. “Since the last time I saw it.”

“That’s just from up here. It makes even the mountains seem bigger, see?”

I saw the blue humps of the Catskills, there in the clouds where they’d always been. They didn’t seem bigger. They seemed closer from here, not as tall as they appeared from the ground. I turned back to the water.

“No, really,” I said. “The reservoir. It looks . . . deeper than it used to. Like, look at those rocks. They used to be way out on shore and now they’re almost completely covered in water. Isn’t that weird?”

“What rocks?” She shot over to the railing, balancing her weight on the tips of her toes. I heard her take a breath in, surprised by what she saw, I thought, but then she said, “Those are different rocks, Chlo. You’ve never seen it from this angle. You’re confused.”

I wanted to argue it—as if I wouldn’t remember the rocks on the shore I’d been visiting since I was a baby—but then a small crinkle showed in her forehead, midway between her eyes, and she rubbed at it and rubbed at it and seemed to forget all else.

“I’m getting a migraine,” she said. She returned to her reclining lawn chair and moved it into a patch of shade.

“Has there been a lot of rain?” I asked. “Is that why the reservoir looks bigger?”

“Nope,” she said, “I can’t remember the last time it rained.” She swiftly changed the subject. “Hey, Chlo, don’t you love this widow’s walk? I told Jonah I had to have one, like in the olden days when the husbands went away to sea in pirate ships and the wives kept watch at home. After like a year apart, the wives would see the Jolly Roger out on the horizon and wave the ship into port. Though if I’d been alive back then, I bet I would’ve been the pirate and made some guy wave for me at home. You think?”

“I don’t think widow’s walks were built for waving to pirates . . .”

I was noticing how haphazard an addition this so-called widow’s walk was to the house. Boards were jutting out where they shouldn’t, the platform supported in a way that seemed to have no support at all. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the whole thing gave out from our weight and skidded down the side of the house.

Ruby was still talking.

“But you’d wait and wait up on the widow’s walk and you wouldn’t see any skull and crossbones on the water, not for years. And that’s because they weren’t coming back, the pirate husbands. They used to drown at sea—which is what happens when you don’t take swimming lessons.” She shook her head. “In the end, I guess a wife could only hope his ghost would decide to come home and keep her company. She’d go up to the top of her house, and when she saw her husband on the wind, she’d catch him like a firefly and keep him in a jar, on the windowsill, forever. And that’s why widow’s walks were built on houses.”

It was Ruby’s favorite kind of story: where the boys lost and the girls won and got a souvenir in the bargain. It was also factually inaccurate and made no sense if you thought on it too hard.

“I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts,” I said.

“I didn’t say
I’d
catch my husband and keep him in a jar,” she said. “If I ever even have a husband.”

“Besides,” I said, pointing out at the water. “That’s not an ocean.”

“I know that,” she said softly.

The widow’s walk had been built, clearly, because she wanted to keep an eye on the water, ocean-size or no. Here, she could watch over what she said lay drowned at the bottom, as this spot was the best view in all of town.

“This patch of land used to be in Olive,” Ruby said, jolting me by saying its name aloud. “Before the suits in New York City said there was no such place anymore because they were erasing it. Right up this hill and halfway down the driveway: Olive. Not anymore, of course. Can you believe we’re standing in Olive right now, Chlo? Isn’t it funny how you’d never even know?”

“I guess,” I said. Each time she said its name—Olive—I felt a sharp tug. I had to step away from the railing, sure I’d tip over. Sure I’d fall.

She’d forgotten about doing the braids in my hair like she used to when I was a girl. Instead, she began another one of her stories, telling me again about the people who wouldn’t go. How the city bought up their land and forced them to tear down their houses and move someplace else—and some people, they refused. Because who says? Who says they could come up here with their bags of money and make our town their bathtub? She was getting worked up now, saying she understood why they wouldn’t leave.

None of this was new and yet, somehow, with the reservoir at my back and the wind spooling out my hair, I felt like I was hearing it for the first time. Really hearing it.

Her eyes glimmered at the idea of the loyal people who refused to abandon the town where they were born and raised. These were Ruby’s people. This was practically her town. She wouldn’t have been a pirate gone off to pillage vast oceans; she would have been one of those who stayed.

She startled me by telling a part of the story I’d never heard before. Maybe she was making it up, right here, on the spot. Inventing it piece by piece, and girl by girl—for me.

“Back then there were these two girls,” she said. “One was the big sister and one was the baby sister, and of course the big sister was the one who took care of them both, because there was no one else to do it, you know?” I did know. She kept going. “The people of Olive didn’t understand how close the sisters were. They were jealous. Most people don’t have another person who’d do anything for you.
Anything.
Most people, in the end, really are all on their own.”

“Didn’t the girls have a mother?” I asked.

“I’ve got no idea,” she said dismissively. “Probably she died. Consumption. Fever. Mountain lion. I don’t know.”

I kept quiet.

“The sisters had the same dad though. That’s why they looked so much alike. Their dad . . . guess who he was. Someone important. The mayor of the whole town.”

“Really?” I watched her warily. “Who was he?”

“You know Winchell’s Corners, on the way to the high school?” That was a lone intersection on Route 28 made up of a pizzeria, an antique store that I was sure had closed, and a traffic light. Ruby tended to ignore all existence of the traffic light, so we always sped right through.

I nodded.

“That was named for him. Mayor Winchell, the last known mayor of Olive. He died before the town got demolished, and no new mayor came after. Once he was gone, the two girls were left all on their own. No one in town would help them—jealous, like I said. The big sister knew she had to take care of her baby sister, because no one else could be trusted to do it.”

“And she had to take care of herself,” I added.

Ruby waved that away, unconcerned. “All the sisters had to their names was their house in Olive. And when the city came with bulldozers, that house was supposed to get flattened with the rest. The girls were supposed to follow—even though they had nowhere to go and no one left. But the big sister had another idea.” She smiled here, waiting for me to say it.

“She didn’t go?”

“No, she refused. She and her baby sister—they stayed.” She was filled up to glowing at the idea. “Those girls were some of the ones who stayed till the very end, Chlo.”

“How do you know all that?” I asked. “Did you read it somewhere?”

“Hmm?” she said, distracted. “We wouldn’t’ve left, either. We would’ve stayed put until the last day, till they finished building the dam and the machines went quiet and the workers got sent back to wherever they came from. Till it was time.”

“Time for what?”

“Time for the flood, Chlo. Time to take away our everything.”

“What would we have done?” I was almost whispering, but still she heard me. I wasn’t sure anymore who she was talking about—the two Winchell sisters, the older one who knew what to do or the younger one who followed, or us, real or unreal, alive or dead, catalogued in history or completely made up, the four of us confused and washed away on a wave together.

“What do you think we would’ve done?” Ruby said. “We would’ve climbed to the highest point of our house. And waited it out, just like those two girls did. The big sister led her baby sister up there, and they perched on their chimney and waited. Because when the dam was opened, they couldn’t be sure how high the water would get—it’s not like there was a line drawn in a tree trunk to give a heads-up or anything. All the trees had been chopped down.

“But before the water came, there was this sound, so loud you could hear it for miles. That was the only real warning they’d get. Last chance, run while you still can. . . . Know what it sounded like?”

She pursed her lips and let loose a shrieking hiss, like some instrument had its holes plugged and then broke apart, bursting with noise. Awful, painful noise. Ruby—it wasn’t known by many, or else they all ignored it—was actually tone-deaf.

“A steam whistle,” she explained. “But imagine that it played on and on—for an hour. A whole hour to give everyone time to get out. Then it stopped, and it was so quiet for a few seconds, you could’ve heard birds chirping in the trees . . . if, you know, they hadn’t burned down the forest and killed the birds. The steam whistle stopped. And the water gushed in. And you and I know what happened after that.”

“And those girls?” I asked.

She let her eyes go to the water, and I let mine follow. That was her answer.

“So the big sister lost her little sister after all that,” I said. “Didn’t she?”

“What do you mean?” Ruby said blankly. “Weren’t you listening?”

I was. I was trying to hear—and understand.

I returned my gaze to the reservoir, and now a shiver ran through me as I studied the calm, smooth surface. You wouldn’t think there was anything living underneath, not even fish. But my sister and I knew better.

When I looked back at Ruby, something had changed in her face. Her skin still glowed, her lips flushed without need of her lipstick, and her eyes taking on the green of the trees, but that was only what she was showing on the surface. Underneath, there were things she wasn’t letting me see.

Things involving the reservoir, I felt sure of that. Things involving Olive.

“Why are you telling me this, Ruby?” I asked.

“I only wanted you to know,” she said innocently.

“What does all this stuff about Olive have to do with us?”

She opened her mouth. Then she closed it because we could hear voices down below in the yard. Jonah had come back, with London.

Ruby went to the edge of the widow’s walk and called over the railing, “Did you fix the flat?” They spoke some, and then she turned to me.

One thing she’d forgotten to bring up to the widow’s walk was a pair of sunglasses, so she covered her eyes with a hand while she looked at me. That way, she could see me, but I couldn’t see all of her.

“Lon said she’s driving in to town to hang out with her friends, those girls, I can’t remember their names,” Ruby said. “She wants to know if you’d like to go, too.”

“Me?” I said.

“Yes, you. She invited you.”

“Did you tell her to?”

She didn’t answer that. “Maybe you
should
go. Like I said before”—she tapped at her head—“I do feel a migraine coming.”

She lifted the hand from her eyes and gave a faint smile. When the light hit her face, all at once she did look a bit ill, which was odd, as she’d looked close to perfect before.