Imaginary Girls (13 page)

Ruby didn’t tell me what she’d said in there. Instead she told a story, as usual.

“Did you know I used to walk around town saying you were
my
baby?”

“Yeah?” I didn’t stop her; I liked when she told it.

“What was I, seven? Eight?” she said as she sped the car down the street and made the usual turn toward the rec field, where we’d find the public pool. “All I know is I was small, and I’d wheel you in your stroller and people would stop me on the street. They’d say, ‘How cute!’ Or, ‘You two are soooo adorable!’ But then they’d always have to ask, ‘But where’s your mother, little girl?’ And the thing is, I didn’t want to say she was doing shots at the bar. Or, last I saw, she was in some-dude-we-never-met’s truck. I mean, I
wanted
to say our mother was right there, like in a store buying earrings, right? Our mother was at the library. Our mother was at the Laundromat. Someplace mothers go.” She sighed.

“But,” she continued, cutting around a slow car, “if I was going to lie, I figured I may as well make it fun. So I’d say, ‘What do you mean where’s her mother?
I’m
her mother.’ I’d tell them different things, depending on who asked. Like I married young and now I’m a widow. Or I got knocked up in Girl Scouts, when I was out selling cookies. Or, you know, if a church person was asking, that Jesus gave you to me. People get all weird when you talk about Jesus. Like unicorns can’t exist, but Jesus did—ridiculous.” She shook her head. “Anyway, I said you were mine. And sometimes when you say a lie enough times, it’s like it’s true. Then you’re not even lying.”

Ruby’s stories changed when she told them—the tales grew more impossible physically, and legally, like how she said she picked me up at school in our mom’s car while sitting on a
Webster’s
unabridged dictionary so she could see the road. Like how she said we lived for a whole summer at sea, barely emerging from the bathtub. But no matter what miraculous way of surviving she chose for us, our mom was always conveniently out of the picture. It was better than the truth, really.

Ruby parked the car in the rec-field lot and removed the gold aviators. I thought we were going to get changed for swimming—we had bathing suits on under our clothes, so all we had to do was pull our dresses over our heads and find the beach towels—but something was holding her attention across the wide, grassy lawn. She couldn’t tear her eyes away.

From where we were parked, all I could see was the stretch of the rec field. The swings, the sandbox, the jungle gym, the slides, the great lawn beyond, and past that the softball diamond. A game was going on, but Ruby didn’t like sports, so it couldn’t be that. Past the softball field was some kid’s birthday party, marked by a bouquet of balloons tied to the gazebo and fluttering wildly in the wind.

“What?” I said. “Do you want some birthday cake or something?”

“I wonder . . .” she said, frozen where she sat.

“You wonder what?”

A piece of her expression was unnerving me. Maybe it was the glassy green of her eyes. The hard set of her teeth. Maybe it was her knuckles, gone white on the wheel even though the engine was off and there was no reason to hold it for steering anymore.

“What do you think those people would do,” she said, “all the kids there at that birthday party, all the moms, the dads . . . what do you think they’d do if I walked over there and just let them all go?”

“Let who go, the kids?”

She shook her head. What she was staring at was the collection of balloons, watching them fiercely as their long tails whipped against the gazebo post, their brightly colored heads rising as high as they’d reach. It really bothered her to see them tied up like that.

“The red ones first, I think,” she said. “If I cut their strings, ripped them off, and let them fly? What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “You might make the kids cry.”

She didn’t seem to care about that; she only looked off into the distance, absorbed in something I couldn’t decipher, as if living out some fantasy rescue mission in her mind.

Or maybe she was trying it right now. Trying to break them free by wishing for it.

But of course the balloons remained where they were, and no matter how hard the wind got—and it did seem to get a bit stronger, somehow; as Ruby held her eyes there, a few paper plates went sailing off the picnic table and some little kids lost their cake—but still, no balloons went free. They were tethered there and would stay put, forced to be guests at that party until someone cut them off after, or popped them and let them die.

“Ruby?” I said.

At the sound of her name, at my voice saying her name, she shook herself out of it.

Before I knew it, she was pulling her dress over her head and slamming the car door shut. “Let’s go for a swim. Do your laps. I’ll make everyone get out of the pool so you can have the whole place to yourself if you want me to.”

“Don’t do that,” I said. The wind had calmed as we walked the lawn—and as we got closer to the fenced-in outdoor pool, I saw we had company beyond the usual townie kids who came here to cool off on summer afternoons.

She was here, too. Her pale head could be made out in the shallow end, where she stood waist-deep, shivering in the sunlight. She was so thin, I could count her ribs.

“Does she know we go swimming on Fridays?” I asked. “Did you tell her?”

Ruby shrugged. “I may have mentioned it.” She called out, “Hey, London. Watch out, my sister’s gonna do some laps.”

When the townspeople at the pool saw Ruby coming, they cleared away from the stairs in the shallow end to make room for her. They knew she liked to sit there, letting the water pool up to the knobs of her knees, splashing at the surface with her fingers, letting the sun warm her face while she watched me swim. No one seemed surprised that we were here again, after a long absence. No one asked me where I’d been.

Like always, Ruby took to her perch on the descending steps and stretched out her long, bare legs as far as they’d go—which was far. She wore an anklet that glimmered as gold as her aviators in the pool’s bright, reflective light. Her bikini was black and white today, the top white and the bottoms black, and her aviators were drawn down over her eyes to keep just anyone from seeing in.

I wore a navy one-piece, and I’d left my new sunglasses in the car.

“Hi, Ruby,” London said, wading through the water to reach us. “Hi, Chloe.”

I tried not to look at her bare arms and legs; even in daylight her skin had a sickly sheen of blue, as if she couldn’t breathe and was standing here drowning and we were made to witness it.

I mumbled something about doing laps. At the deep end, I dove in, the tips of my fingers cutting through the warm water first, then my face, and then my shoulders and the rest of me with a smooth, enveloping splash.

The pool wasn’t empty, but I was easily able to avoid people as I went from the deep end to the shallow, then back again into the deep. From underwater I could see their legs kicking as they, too, tried to swim. I could feel it, the motion they made, the wind. If I stayed under, I could hear them screaming from far off in the distance, like from behind walls and locked doors, houses and whole towns away.

I was still under, at the far edge of the deep end, when I decided I didn’t feel like doing laps anymore. I took hold of the filter and stayed there, drifting. Seconds passed, though they felt like minutes. Minutes like hours.

And, really, I could have stayed down there till nightfall, couldn’t I?

Ruby used to say I could.

I wondered if my sister could make anything happen, if she put her mind to it. Like, right now, here I was skimming my hand along the bottom of this dirty public pool. Maybe I could stay under for the rest of my life, or at least the whole summer, never needing air to breathe. I’d scavenge for supplies to make it through—like if someone dropped a stick of gum, I’d retrieve it and it would be cinnamon-flavored, and it could sustain me for years. It wasn’t reservoir ice cream, but it would do. I’d adapt, the way the people of Olive adapted after their town was taken away. Ruby would make it so.

Maybe I really could breathe down here, become whatever she wanted, even some impossible creature long still alive when I shouldn’t be . . . like London was.

It was when I let my eyes come open again underwater that I saw her.

London Hayes.

She was down here with me. She’d swum the length of the pool to share the deep end with me, far enough away from Ruby so she couldn’t see. London skimmed the bottom of the pool closer to me. There were her thin legs drifting. Her skin so pale as if rubbed in blocks of ice. I noticed that she had a small scar on one knee. I watched the short, bleached strands of her hair reach with electric intensity for the surface. Her eyes blinking and on me.

She stayed still, limbs floating, mouth pressed closed.

Were we seeing who could stay under the longest?

I held my breath, held it till my lungs burned. I kept my hand locked to the filter, not letting myself up though all the rest of me begged me to go. I forced myself to believe in it, in my sister, to stay down at the bottom, to stay.

I didn’t want it to be me, but my body wouldn’t listen. My lungs were about to burst with the effort—I had to break free to the surface. I needed air.

It was here, before my all-too-human body took over and flung me upward, gasping and spluttering and spitting up chlorine, that London opened her mouth. She breathed without struggle. She stayed under like she could, easily, for years.

She let me see her do it. She wanted me to know.

What
is
she?
my mind screamed, needing answers, but then I was up, unable to think anything more, up in the air choking on the edge of the pool, and she was still down at the bottom.

She didn’t come up for air for the longest time.

I
couldn’t forget what I saw in the pool. Ruby and I were in her car not too much later, driving back to the house, and all I could picture was London opening her mouth underwater and letting me see her breathe. Ruby had misled me when I’d asked if London was alive again.

She was more than alive. She might outlive us all.

Ruby, though, hadn’t seen London in the deep end. She’d run over in a panic when I’d emerged, choking, at the edge of the pool, and she was still admonishing me over it.

“Why’d you scare me like that!” she shrieked as she skidded through a red light and narrowly avoided a four-car collision. “How could you do that, Chlo!” She was more frightened by the idea of me holding my breath in the pool than she should be. She was acting like I’d taken a running leap off a cliff.

Then she said the strangest thing. “How do you think I felt, having them pull you under like that? When I was too far away to get to you? When I couldn’t even barely see!”

“Wait,” I said. “Them who?”

She shook her head as if shaking herself from a trance. “There were too many people in the pool, Chloe. I couldn’t see past them. Don’t pull a stunt like that again.”

We’d turned onto the road that led to Jonah’s house when Ruby slammed the brakes without warning. I lurched forward and was kept from flying through the windshield by the seat belt, which I had absolutely no memory of putting on.

“What the—!” I cried. I checked to make sure she was okay—she was—and checked to make sure I was okay—I was—and checked to see if we’d hit anything, like another car or an animal, and that’s when I saw her, standing in the road with her thumb out, having stumbled directly into traffic as if she were begging to be run over.

Ruby threw up her hands and said to the car’s ceiling, “Hitchhiking?! Sometimes I wonder if certain people are just
meant
to die.”

Before I could ask what that was supposed to mean, she’d leaped from the car and was dragging the girl out of the road. Just in time, too. Ruby moved her out of the way seconds before a truck took the blind turn and barreled straight over the spot she’d been standing in. It was so sudden, I didn’t know what to make of it.

All I knew is it looked like my sister had saved London’s life.

Again.

London was trying to explain how she ended up out there after her swim at the pool. She was talking fast, saying she’d left the pool and was driving her parents’ car home and it got a flat. She was only hitching because there was no spare and no one had stopped to help and her cell was dead and she had to pee—and because she was an idiot, Ruby broke in to say. It was only a coincidence, London swore, that she was on the road not a mile away from Jonah’s house, where we happened to live. Just as it was a coincidence that Ruby had leaped out in time to save her from the speeding truck. That Ruby was there whenever London needed her, as she used to be solely for me.

I watched from my window as Ruby talked to Jonah and London out in the driveway—Ruby whispering in London’s ear, Ruby plucking off a leaf that had gotten stuck to London’s shirt, London letting her—and then I left the window and waited on my bed for Ruby to come upstairs.

“Is she okay?” I made myself ask, once Ruby appeared in my doorway.

Ruby thought some. Then she said, “I don’t think she was ever ‘okay,’ even before, do you?”

I shook my head. I wanted to tell her what I saw. But, more, I wanted to know if she had a direct hand in it.

“Why’d you do it?” I asked, fishing to see how she’d answer that question—if she knew what question was being asked.

If I even did.

“That truck would’ve flattened her,” Ruby said. “She would have had a set of tire tracks permanently etched on her face.”

Her expression softened and she stepped inside to come closer to me. She lifted a hand, as if to pick something off my shirt, but then hid the hand behind her back, as if I wouldn’t want her doing it. Nothing had changed and yet something had—in the form of that living, breathing bleach-haired girl. “So,” Ruby said, “I told Jonah to go out to the highway and fix the flat.”

I knew she could have fixed it herself, if she felt like bothering, and I liked that she’d opted not to bother, and stay with me instead.