Imaginary Girls (18 page)

I
t’s time we had the talk,” Ruby announced. We were out on the widow’s walk again, the sky swollen with clouds and bursting blue, the hammer and tap of Jonah down below traveling up to us as he worked on the latest addition to the porch, and Ruby herself, apparently no longer mad at me, glowing and smiling and patting the lawn chair so I’d come close and sit.

“What talk?”

I took my seat and noticed the batch of helium balloons tied to the far rail. They were big and round and came in a variety of colors, much like the ones we saw at the birthday party in the park, but Ruby’s balloons were tied tight with red ribbons, knotted in a bright bunch to the wooden post. She must have had nothing else to use for strings.

Though my sister was smiling, and all the gray had drained from her eyes, she still sounded serious enough.

“
The
talk, the one we didn’t have last night. There are things you can and can’t do, and we need to talk about them.” She counted on her fingers, repeating all the things she’d already told me. The phone, I shouldn’t answer it. I shouldn’t leave town, I shouldn’t eat raisins in front of her (this was new, but I should know that raisins sickened her, and who’s to say they don’t grow back into grapes once they’re swallowed?), I shouldn’t go to the reservoir, she didn’t want me smoking even if she sometimes did, no drugs and no drinking, obviously, and she didn’t think too highly of Owen and if I wanted to like a boy I should make an effort to find another.

This was where I stopped her. “Why? What’s wrong with him? He’s Pete’s brother. You were with Pete.”

She shuddered. “Don’t remind me.”

“Then what?”

“Owen is too pretty,” she said. “There’s something ugly about a pretty boy who knows he’s pretty and assumes everyone else knows it, too.”

What a funny thing for her to say.

But she was only getting started. “He can’t decide on a hair color,” she said. “And then he lets it grow out because he’s too lazy to put in a new color. That says something about the state of his heart, Chlo.”

I let her go on. “He wakes-and-bakes, he’s stoned constantly . . . think of the lost brain cells, Chlo, they don’t grow back, so it’s worse than the hair. And he won’t look me in the eyes. He’s always been shifty like that, ever since he was a little kid.”

I shook my head; she was being silly now.

“I want you to cut this out today,” she said. “That nobody with the bad hair . . . You don’t like him anymore.”

“I don’t?”

“You
don’t
. I won’t let you.”

She was acting like she could forbid me from having an emotion. She could shove a hand down my throat and wiggle her fingers as far as they’d go, plucking out stuff she didn’t want in there, like she did when we got up the courage to clean out last season’s moldy takeout containers from the fridge. She’d do it fast, and didn’t even hold her nose.

“Good,” she said. “Now tell me about London. How was she last night?”

There was something in the way she said it, something unsaid more than said, and I looked down to where Jonah was in the backyard to make sure he wouldn’t overhear—only to find the backyard empty.

I chose my words carefully. “She told me all about rehab.”

“Did she now?” Even though I was her sister, she was playing games with me. We may have played games with everyone in town, including passing tourists, but we shouldn’t with each other.

“I know where she was, really.” Then I added, “Even if she doesn’t.”

Ruby waited. She wanted me to say it.

“I thought she was dead. I
saw
her. But she wasn’t ever dead, was she?”

“She was,” Ruby said softly. “You saw what you saw. But we got her back, didn’t we? You wanted everything the way it was before—and that meant getting London out. Even if it took longer than I thought. And the wait was worth it, because you’re here.”

“All that time . . . she was down there?”

“I wanted her back before you got home, Chlo. So you wouldn’t want to go away again.”

“I went away two summers ago,” I said. “I was at my dad’s for
two years
.”

She hung her head. “I told you, I tried sooner. I tried last spring.”

I couldn’t make sense of what she was telling me.

“Chlo, you left and I was brokenhearted. Before I knew it, it was fall, and getting colder. And then winter—and ice covered the whole reservoir, so there was no getting in, and there was no getting out.” She eyed me especially here. “But when I came back in spring, they wouldn’t let her out then, either.”

“So how did you”—I didn’t know how to put it—“change their minds?”

“I waited, very, very patiently.” Her eyes glimmered. “And then I tricked them.”

There was an awkward silence. The weight of the reservoir could be felt at our backs.

“Why?” I asked. A better question was
How?
but that word wouldn’t cross my lips.

Ruby kept her eyes shaded from view with a well-placed hand. “Why did I work so hard to get her back? Because she went away and you were sad,” she said simply. “Maybe
sad
’s not the right word. Maybe messed-up-in-the-head is a better word, only that’s not one word. You left, Chlo. Because of that girl, you left! And I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t stand it. So I fixed it. Now that London’s here again, so are you.”

I let that sink in. She’d brought London back from the dead—for me. For us.

Inside my sister was some kind of inexplicable power. She could decide what lived and breathed. Who could stay and who should go. She controlled everything that happened in this town. She really was more than anyone who’d ever said they loved her could have dreamed.

But then she kept talking, trying to explain herself.

“Is it so wrong, Chlo? Can you blame me for taking back what I did to her, for making it right, even if it was a tiny bit selfish?”

What
she
did to London.

A coldness crept into my bones as I realized what she’d admitted. How she needed to make it right. Because what she’d done was so wrong in the first place.

She’d conjured up the girl I found dead. Worse, she’d conjured her into the rowboat in the first place.

It wasn’t only that my sister had brought London back—it was that London’s body found its way to the boat that night because Ruby put it there. London spent all that time in Olive because she was sent there. By my sister.

It was like she’d given London up for sacrifice—but for what?

What more was Ruby not telling me?

“Chloe!” she snapped. “Why are you staring at me like that?”

“I . . . I just can’t believe what you did.”

She grinned, openly. “That’s nothing. You can’t even imagine what else I’ve done.”

And I couldn’t—imagine it. Not then, and not for a long time. All I knew was that for the first moment in my life, I felt truly frightened of her. The heavy pull in my legs wasn’t a fear anymore of Olive or London or anything I saw in those bad dreams I had in Pennsylvania . . . it was dread.

Were people only allowed to wander our town at the whims of my sister? Could she rub anyone out, and blow the chalk dust away?

If you’d asked me in that moment, standing in the wind on her widow’s walk, I would have put my hand to my heart and swore that, yes, in fact she could.

And, more, I wondered what my sister could possibly do next. Wondered how far she’d go. And if I’d ever need to stop her.

In the house, a few thumps sounded. Someone was coming upstairs—Jonah. She slammed the window closed so he couldn’t come out. “I’m glad we can talk about everything now,” she said.

She walked to the other end of the widow’s walk, the side facing the driveway and the road toward town, the side where, with our backs turned, we could forget the reservoir even existed.

“Chloe, come and look,” she said.

The helium balloons on their bright red ribbons reached for the sky, but she’d knotted the ribbons tight enough to the railing so that none could escape, though they tried. It was windy up here, close to the water, windier than anywhere else in town except for the very top of Overlook Mountain.

I followed and sat on her reclined lawn chair. “What are these for?” I said, careful with my words, now that she’d told me what she’d told me and I was suspecting there was still more to tell.

“Guess,” she said.

“Are we having a party?”

She feigned a delicate gag into her hand. “And invite people over? People from town?
Here?
So we’d have to talk to them and feed them our food and wash all their mouth marks off the glasses after?” She looked stricken.

“So no party then?”

“No, thank God. But the balloons are sort of for them in a way . . .”

“Where’d you get the balloons anyway?” I asked.

“The store, where else? You can rent a tank to fill them up and everything. Seeing the ones at the rec field gave me an idea.”

When Ruby’s hair caught the sun, the henna in it shone through. She blazed up, looking far warmer in day than she did in the dark, wild practically. Her eyes had a fever in them that I wasn’t sure could be blamed on the bright light.

She was about to do something impossible again—I could sense it, as if she were at the very edge of something dangerously high and she were about to take a running leap.

“Look,”
she said, still indicating the balloons.

That’s when I noticed that the balloons were tagged already with her neatly penned messages. She’d spelled them out in delicate letters, using a thin-point Sharpie. They weren’t little innocent greetings like
Ruby says hi
, the way she’d written inside Jonah’s furniture, or even
Ruby was here
, like on the brick wall of the town credit union. They were tiny directives:

bring me a milk shake

bury $8 in your yard and mark it w/ a red ribbon so i can find it

leave a good book on your doorstep for me to take

ask me to dance and let me say no

call me at midnight and tell me you love me

don’t wear that dress again, i want it

tattoo me on your body (make it nice)

cook me lasagna

try as hard as you can to make me cry

“What’s all this?” I asked, holding up the orange balloon demanding lasagna.

“Do you ever read self-help books, Chlo?”

“Not really.”

She grabbed the lasagna balloon from my hands, untied its ribbon, and let it fly. We watched it take to the clouds like a small, runaway sun, a blazing tail of fire spouting out behind as it went.

Next she untied the green balloon wanting eight bucks, about enough for a pack of cigarettes, which she shouldn’t be buying anyway because I didn’t want her to smoke, and we watched it rise.

“Well, I read in some self-help book that you have to
ask
for what you want, or no one will know to give it to you,” she said.

I laughed, but she was serious.

“You know what I want?” she said. “Something fun for a change. I want people to do the work for
me
, instead of me always working so hard for them.”

Was she joking?

No. She was absolutely not smiling now.

Her face obstructed my view of the balloons. She was talking very close, so close her nose was a pale, blurred blob. I was struck by how symmetrical the freckle on her cheek was, a true circle, as if her maker had drawn it on with the world’s tiniest compass and hadn’t messed up even once.

“Right now I want something for me and me only,” she continued. “Well, you can have some lasagna, too, Chlo, but you know what I mean.”

Did I? As far as I could tell, my sister always got whatever she wanted. And, if she didn’t the first time, she went back and she took it and there was no one strong enough to stop her.

That was one piece of her magic, the way everyone melted and let her take and keep taking; it was her charm.

But, for some reason, this was no longer enough for her.

She clapped her hands and made me jump. “I can’t wait to let all these balloons go!” she shrieked. “I can’t stand to see them tied up. Stuck like they are. It’s pitiful.”

She quickly untied a red balloon and let it drift.

“Now you,” she said. “You let one go, too.”

I did what she wanted; I didn’t even question it. I held a turquoise one up to the sun. “You want someone to ask you to dance and then you’re going to tell them no?”

She nodded, so I unwound its ribbon and set it free.

“I like to be asked,” she said. “And I might not say no. Depends on who’s asking. But if they assume I’ll say no, they’ll be surprised if I say yes, and isn’t that nice?”

“
If
you say yes.”

“You’re right, I’ll probably say no.” She smiled, tucked my hair behind my ears even though it didn’t need tucking. She was happy with me now. I was doing what she wanted. “You know me better than anyone knows me in the whole entire world, Chlo. You could write a book about me. If you were standing before the firing squad and they said they wouldn’t shoot you in the head only if you could answer one question and it was a question about me, you’d keep your head, Chlo.”

Now I smiled at that, couldn’t help it. She knew I liked to hear that I was the only one who really knew her. I liked to be reminded.

I watched her let the other balloons go. Watched her unwind their tails to leave them untethered. Watched her step away. Watched her watch each red ribbon take its leave and rise up out of reach even from her.

Soon they were all gone. I looked up into the sky, and her balloons were everywhere, it seemed, the air marred with bloody streaks and littered with demands, and nothing and no one could stop them from coming.

I felt her at my side, bristling with the power of it. The possibility. The rush.

Something in her had come undone just like the balloons did.

Now nothing could contain her.

The sky was hers.

That’s when the thumping from inside the house made itself known again. Jonah was knocking on the window. Pounding.

Ruby watched the window idly, as if a bomb could shatter the glass at any moment and she was curious enough to stay and get sliced.