Imaginary Girls (9 page)

She eyed me oddly, as if I’d chosen the wrong thing to be so surprised about. “I’m no criminal mastermind,” she said. “I swiped Pete’s keys.”

She peeled out, punching the gas so we practically skidded sideways through the knot of parked cars. The way out was downhill, sheets of gravel cascading behind us as the tires spun, and the way she drove was with abandon, like it used to be when she steered another car, during another summer, taking charge of this same road.

Ruby adored night-driving. She loved letting the wind have our hair, no matter how ratted and tangled it got after, often breaking off our brush bristles, and she loved running every red light she could find. Sometimes, back when I was little and before she’d technically taken the test to secure her license, she’d wake me in the middle of the night and carry me to our mother’s car to go driving.

The thing is, we never went anywhere special. For all the hours spent driving, we could have made it down to the city and back—we heard Times Square stays lit up all through the night, unlike our town, which mostly closed up shop by seven o’clock—but Ruby was happy simply driving the rounds of our village. She’d take us as far as the wooded outskirts, loving narrow, twisting roads and steep mountain passes, speeding the bridges across the reservoir, then cutting swift U-turns to speed right back, but that was as far as she’d go. There was a point on the thruway she didn’t like passing. There was a line only she knew about that she considered too far.

The road we were on tonight was a road we’d driven often. If I shoved my head face-out into the wind—drinking in the distance as she tested the limits of the speedometer, letting the wind tear up my eyes, those tears drying before they hit my cheeks—I could be nine again. Or eleven. Or even fourteen.

Except I wasn’t.

Except something hovered in the car with us, chilled and unspoken. This summer wanted to be like all the others, but it was another thing entirely and no amount of wind in my face could cover that up.

I peeked back at London every mile or so, noticing things about her that I never did the first time she was alive:

How long her arms were, so long she must have been taller than I remembered, or else she grew.

How she twitched in her seat, unable to stay still.

How when she drifted off, resting her cheek on my suitcase, she drooled, and how innocent she looked as she did it.

“Is she, y’know . . . okay?” I asked. There was no word for what she really was. I couldn’t fathom a way to ask it.

Ruby clucked her tongue. “She’s as can be expected, I guess. I mean, how do you think you’d be if you came back from—” She cut herself off with a tight glance at the rearview. “She’s fine.”

“Do you think—”

“Yes, I think we should stop and get lo mein after we drop her off,” Ruby said, as much to herself as to me. “A big family-size tub, one set of chopsticks for me and one fork for you. They always used to forget the fork. Only . . . the Wok’n’ Roll won’t be open so late, will it?” She glanced at me.

“I don’t remember what time it closes.”

“We’ll talk about lo mein later, Chlo,” she said now, as if I was the one who’d brought it up. “I don’t want her getting any ideas.”

“She’s sleeping,” I said. “Look at her. She totally passed out.”

“You can still hear when you’re sleeping. Sleep-walls are thin, so voices seep in, like how before you were born I talked to you up against Mom’s stomach, told you who I was so you’d know me. Every day I did that. And then when you came out you loved me more than you loved her.”

“But I don’t remember any of that.”

“Some deep-down part of you does.”

London twitched some more as I watched her, like my eyes held little pointy pins and I kept sticking her with them. Then when she sat up and met my gaze I wondered if she’d been listening the whole time.

“Are you feeling okay?” I asked London. “Did you drink too much?”

“She’s fine, like I told you,” my sister said for her. “Just leave her be.”

We were heading, I thought, straight into the center of town, and then to wherever it was that London lived, but Ruby veered a sharp left over the footbridge and headed a way I didn’t expect.

“Where do you live, London?” I asked.

“I don’t, I . . . It’s, um . . .” She trailed off. Was she so drunk she didn’t even recall how to find her own house?

“I know where to take her,” Ruby said. She was acting so protective of the girl, like we had to tiptoe around her now, though just before this Ruby had been all about taking care of me.

We’d been driving for a short while when Ruby stopped the car, not near any house that I could see but on a darkened stretch of road running alongside a thick embankment of tangled trees. I knew where we were, but I wasn’t about to acknowledge it out loud.

London seemed to live not too far from the place where she died. It was the reservoir that would be found if you pushed through that thicket of trees and went running. Did she have an inkling of this? Did she remember?

Ruby had turned in her seat to face London. “Here good?” she asked.

London opened her mouth and then closed it. Maybe she did have an inkling. Maybe she remembered it all and didn’t know if I did.

“I said do you want to get out here?” Ruby repeated.

“Yeah, okay,” London said. She drew a curtain over her face that showed me nothing. “I can walk from here.”

Something unspoken was hovering between them, but before I could ask what was going on, London shuffled out of the backseat and the door behind me was swinging open and then smacking shut. London stood for a moment on the asphalt, wavering there like she wasn’t sure which way was home. One of her feet was bare, as if by crawling out so quickly she’d lost a sandal and didn’t feel like going back in to scoop it out.

I turned to my sister. “We shouldn’t drive her all the way home?”

“Nah,” she said. “She wants to walk. It’s not far.”

London nodded and echoed that. “It’s not far. It’s just over there.” She pointed into the black night and maybe there was a driveway; I couldn’t see beyond where she was standing. Maybe she liked being dropped off in the middle of the road so she wouldn’t disturb her parents.

“But your shoe,” I called to her.

She shrugged. Then she started walking.

I was mystified by her. Part of me was waiting for her to dissipate into a puff of smoke and leave behind a sandal and a striped shirt and whatever coins and junk she had in her pockets and then for my sister to run over her remains in the road.

But Ruby only waved and drove off.

“You wouldn’t let me walk home with one shoe,” I said.

“You’re you,” she said. “She’s not.”

I twisted around in my seat to look after her, but the dark had swallowed her up entirely.

“Forget the lo mein,” Ruby said, as if I’d just brought it up. “I have to tell you two things before we get to the house.” She was headed away from town now, away from the Millstream Apartments where she used to live, and away from the Wok ’n’ Roll where she’d wanted to pick up dinner. She was heading a way we didn’t usually go.

“One,” she said, “Jonah is perfectly harmless, even if he gets noisy with the buzz saw, and I’m warning you now, in case it ever wakes you.”

“The buzz saw?”

She nodded.

“About Jonah . . . he’s your new boyfriend?”

“That’s what he calls himself.”

“So you’re like . . . living with him?” Maybe other people moved in with boyfriends or girlfriends, but in all the years I’d known Ruby, which happened to be my whole entire life, she’d never lived in the same physical location with one. That would make a guy think he had a claim on her. It would be harder to string someone along, push him away, pull him back, push him away, if you toasted your toast in the same kitchen.

“Sure, I live with him,” she said. “Technically it’s his house.”

I let this sink in.

“Is that all you wanted to tell me?” I asked.

She was tapping her fingers on the steering wheel now. Her nails were perfect gleaming ovals, not needing a drop of polish to shine brighter than the moonlight.

“No,” she said. “There’s still that second thing.”

She jammed the pedal to the floor like she wanted to bust the engine out of Pete’s car and leave us riding on fumes. Over the rush of wind she said, “Do you trust me?”

I trusted her, always, blindly, forever. She used to ask me that question before she’d lift me up and fling me into Cooper Lake by my fingertips, not ever letting go because she promised she wouldn’t. I trusted her then, and I trusted her now.

I trusted her, though I’d come all the way from Pennsylvania and she hadn’t bothered to meet my bus. I trusted her, though she’d shown me a walking dead girl tonight like it was no big deal. I trusted her; she didn’t need to ask.

“You trust me,” she said, “like with your life?”

The road ahead was perfectly dark, seeing as she’d cut off the headlights, but she didn’t let the car slow.

“Ruby, what are you doing? Put the lights back on!”

“Do you trust me, or do you trust me? Close your eyes.”

“Only if you put the lights back on.”

“Close your eyes and I will.”

I snapped them closed and it felt like we moved over the road as if through time. Centuries draining past so if only I’d looked out I could have seen my own future, my babies’ babies’ babies’ babies forgetting who they came from in their space-age sun-panel tattoo-thin clothes.

The car flew. Trees stepped aside for us. The mountain split open. There were no lanes here, no cars coming, nothing to stand in our way.

And I guess I could have come back to town only to die in a horrible car wreck, like the girl who found herself wrapped around a tree when I was in elementary school, and everyone in town left flowers in the tree roots, and stuffed turtles because I guess she had a thing for turtles, and Ruby and I would have our own tree, and what would people in town leave for us? What stuffed thing would hold our memory for eternity?

I’d never know.

The car had stopped, the engine down, the wind still. I peeled open my eyes.

Ruby wore a grin.
“You do trust me,”
she whispered.

Lights from a house showed me her face. She had even more freckles than I remembered—at least three more.

The house itself was pale wood, unpainted, and set back away from the road. This was the house where she lived now, where I lived now, where we’d live together.

She pushed the wind-warped hair out of my face and tucked it safely behind my ears. Victory in her eyes, speed still pinking her cheeks, she pulled away and said, “The second thing is this. Go ahead, look.”

I was looking—at the house. But she didn’t mean the house. She meant what was behind the house.

What was seeping into the distance, blotting out trees, erasing mountains, leaking up into the night with no dividing line on the horizon to show where it ended or if it ended ever at all. The shapeless, formless thing that took a breath in as I was watching it, then let out a breath when I looked away. This thing I’d been avoiding. This thing I ran away from. There before her outstretched arm, lit up from the headlights, was the reservoir.

The one I never did swim across.

O
live was here, below the hill. Across the two-lane stretch of road and through walls of trees, far enough away to keep their distance, the people of Olive had come up to watch, called to the surface by the car’s headlights.

Ruby might have told me this to send a chill up my spine, but I knew they were down there without her having to say. I felt them.

It was simply something I was aware of, like I’d be aware of getting wet if the night turned to rain and I was out with no umbrella. Down deep in the reservoir, under the water where no one would think to look, was the other town, and the people who’d once walked its streets could be found wading through what was left of them still.

My sister didn’t have to say so. She didn’t have to make up some story; I could make it up myself. I was doing it right now, imagining them, the people of Olive, bobbing up under cover of night.

They waited for the late hour to do their looking. Tonight I wondered how many of them were here. Maybe they formed a chain from the rocky bottom, locking webbed fingers to slippery wrists, lifting the lightest one to the top, where the water broke open and the air got them gasping and Pete’s car could be made out on the hill.

I wondered if they knew who was in the car. If they spotted her, and sitting next to her, me.

If the lookout then dipped back under, to let the rest of them know. If they burbled whispers, playing telephone from one waterlogged ear to the next, all down to the end of the line.
She’s back. She’s come home.

While I was away, the reservoir had stayed put. Close to a hundred years it had been there, the towns it swallowed far longer even than that. It had been here before I was a thought in this world. Before my sister was a thought, and our mother was a thought, before the mother of our mother’s mother, who I never even met, before anyone who looked anything like us had set foot here, this reservoir had existed.

And it wanted us to know. This was apparent in the wind batting up at us from the water below. The wind that rushed in through the windows, cold hands at our throats, colder fingers angling down our shirts.

But when I looked over at Ruby, she let the wind off the reservoir touch her anywhere it wanted and she didn’t do a thing. She had her eyes on the water, not the least bit intimidated.

She was an ant before a bear. She was a girl before a speeding eighteen-wheeler truck. And yet she didn’t act like it. Here was the second deepest reservoir in the state and she showed none of the awe most people did when they gazed at it. She didn’t let out a sigh and say what a beautiful treasure it was. She acted like it was a challenge, like she was waiting to see who would break eye contact first. She looked on as if it would wither up in a dry spell and she’d go down there and celebrate by stomping around in its dirt.