Imaginary Girls(27)

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.