Imaginary Girls(28)

“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.





CHAPTER SEVEN


  OLIVE WAS HERE


Olive 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.