Imaginary Girls(4)

My legs got heavy as I kicked past the cold spot, as if the current had turned thicker there, a tugging downward pull.

It’s true that a town called Olive used to be in this spot before the water got flooded in; that’s in history books; that’s not just one of Ruby’s stories. Olive was one of nine towns buried because New York City wanted more water. The city bought up all the land and built its dam here. It dredged out this great big hole and gutted away every last tree. People’s homes and farms were taken over, then flattened. Olive was dismantled and swept out of the valley like it had never been here at all. Like it got erased.

Ruby knew more about Olive than anybody. She knew things no one else did. She said the people in the town didn’t want to leave, that the city of New York tried to buy their houses, their churches and schools, their farms and storefronts, and the people of Olive wouldn’t sell. People in the other towns took the cash and scattered. It was only Olive that decided to stay. Only Olive that ignored the eviction notices, like that time we got a bright orange one pasted to the door of our apartment, and Ruby simply sliced through it so she could get inside. It was exactly like then, Ruby told me—except imagine if it looked like the world were ending because the city cut down all the trees and big machines roared and took the earth from under our feet and we had nowhere to go.

Olive wouldn’t budge, even when the steam whistle blew for a full hour at noon on June 19, 1914, to show that the building of the dam was at last finished. It was only the people of Olive who stood in place on the land where they were born and waited for the water to come flooding in.

“But they did go,” I remember saying to Ruby when she told me this story. “They had to.”

“Did they?” was all she said then.

As I swam over Olive, I wondered.

Ruby used to say that, down in what was once Olive, you could still find the townspeople who never left. They looked up into their murky sky, waiting to catch sight of our boat bottoms and our fishing lines, counting our trespassing feet.

They weren’t ghosts, she’d assure me when I used to shiver at her story; they were people still alive, having grown gills in place of lungs. They aged slower down at the bottom, where time had gone thick with all that mud. When I was little, she’d rile me up, saying they knew all about me, had noticed me the first time we poached a swim in this very spot. They knew me by my feet, she said, recognized me by the way I kept them kicking, and all they wanted was for me to act up, to throw the last tantrum she could stand, hoping she’d get tired and let them have me.

If she pushed me in, right away their cold, webbed hands would come reaching out for my ankles. But don’t worry, she assured me, I’d have everything I needed down at the bottom. Reservoir ice cream was green, which made it mint, my favorite kind. Playing on the swings was way more fun underwater anyway. And having to remember to breathe took up so much time.

That was years ago, when she used to threaten to throw me to Olive, and she never meant it, not really. Sure, when she was fourteen and I was nine she had to take me with her everywhere, and she complained about it sometimes, behind closed doors when she didn’t know I was listening. She told our mom that she should have been the one to teach me to tie my shoes, boil my boxed macaroni dinners, sign my permission slip to the dinosaur museum. She said all that, but it didn’t matter; I knew Ruby didn’t actually ever want me gone.

Like now.

She’d sent me out here, but she knew Olive didn’t still exist—she’d only been keeping things interesting, telling her stories. Letting me have the whole spotlight for once.

She was on shore watching. I felt eyes keeping track of my movements, her eyes and her friends’ eyes, and then more eyes even than that, eyes from below.

I looked back, or tried to, but all the water was in the way.

Everyone probably thought I was still swimming. I wasn’t. I’d stopped—though I didn’t remember stopping, or even slowing. I was drifting out in the open expanse, my legs feeling their weight.

The water was colder here, no denying it. And something was in my path, as if she’d made it appear there for me. A small rowboat bobbed in the water, unseen from shore in the deep night. I rested a hand on it, leaning my weight into its rusted side so I could catch my breath. The moon up above showed half a face; the stars could be counted till morning.

I waited there, legs loose, hair swirling around me, and listened to her friends on shore. Laughing. Splashing. Dragging a canoe out of the woods. Breaking a bottle against the rocks.