Imaginary Girls(17)

We were getting closer.

The bus turned onto the first highway that led toward town and passed the spot where Ruby blew a tire and got three guys to pull over and offer to fix it, though she ended up fixing it herself, while they watched, and then let them watch her drive away. The bus turned onto the second highway, where Ruby liked to ignore all signs noting speed limits and, sometimes, if there were no trucks coming, jammed the gas and raced with headlights dark, fingertips guiding the wheel.

The bus took the left turn toward town.

There was the tattoo shop where Ruby got her eyebrow pierced, then decided she didn’t want her eyebrow pierced and instead got her nose pierced, then decided she really didn’t want anything pierced, not even her ears.

Cumby’s, open twenty-four hours a day. Even so, there was no point asking the bus to stop there, since Ruby’s car wasn’t parked out front.

The rows of storefronts, shuttered and dark, and how Ruby could walk into any one and come out with whatever thing she wanted on layaway, which to her meant getting to take it home with her and never bothering to come back and pay.

Soon, the bus was pulling up to the Village Green, the center of the town where I was born and where Ruby still lived. The bus doors were opening and I was climbing down the stairs with my bags and retrieving my suitcase. The bus doors were closing and I was left standing on the Green with my bags at my feet. The bus was pulling away.

It was a Saturday night, late June, and there was absolutely no one here.

I texted Ruby: guess where i am

No response.

I texted Ruby the answer anyway: im here

almost didnt survive bus ride

bus driver had rly small head. wondered if he cld even see road

drove us off bridge

I waited for some time, then tried again.

kidding abt bridge. u still live @ Millstream?

want me 2 go there? or u pick me up???

My phone was silent, not a beep or a buzz to let me know.

When I last lived in town, our mother had a place back behind WDST, the local radio station, but Ruby said the classic rock the deejays insisted on playing filled her head with near-total boredom, and had on occasion put her to sleep while standing, which was terribly dangerous, like when she was getting the mail at the curb and “Stairway to Heaven” came on again. So that’s why she rented her own place on the opposite end of town, near the stream—that and the fact that she couldn’t stand our mother. My school papers said I lived at my mom’s, but all my things were at Ruby’s. Or they had been.

The Millstream Apartments weren’t far from the Green, but I had my bags and my suitcase and there was that hill.

So I waited for her to pick me up. She’d be here. She knew tonight was the night. It was her idea, after all, that I come home.

I sat on a prime bench in the center of the diamond that made up the Green and took it all in: these trees, that sidewalk, this place imprinted on every surface with thoughts of Ruby as if she’d gotten her greasy hands all over everything and trampled the lawn and dirtied up the benches with her muddy boots.

Only, it was too quiet. I’d never seen the Green empty in warm weather, not once, not in my life. On summer nights, there was always someone out: a random townie tripping too hard to operate a motor vehicle; some tie-dyed tourist who hitched here all the way from burning things up at Burning Man to camp in our shrubs; a few kids from the Catholic high school the next town over who never got invited to our parties but still came here hoping; or that guy Dov Everywhere who lived somewhere out in the woods, no one knew where. He took care of the town’s stray dogs, collected sticks to walk with, and always gave fair warning when it was about to rain. He also barked for no reason and threw his sticks at cars, so you had to be careful on what night you caught him.

Not even Dov was there on the Green that night.

I would have thought time had stopped completely, leaving the town untouched since I’d left it—if the wind didn’t snatch the stub of the bus ticket out of my hand and shoot it across the Green, plastering it against the window of the empty pizza place, then flip it back down the stairs to flutter and gasp at my feet.

The wind would have stopped, if time had. Time would have had to stop for Ruby not to come meet my bus. So where was she?

My suitcase rolled itself too fast down the hill that led to the Millstream, and I had to run to keep up. I knew where to find Ruby’s key, as she tended to use the one hidden on the windowsill more than the one on her key ring, but when I got the door to her apartment open, I saw an empty room with takeout menus for the Wok ’n’ Roll and the Indian buffet scattered over the floor. The windows had no curtains and the sink had no dirty dishes. There was a mattress left behind in her bedroom, but it had no sheets.