Imaginary Girls(6)

Then I was turning to my sister, who was there beside me in the back of the cop car, because suddenly we were in a cop car, and my sister, who never found herself in cop cars, wasn’t fighting it, or clawing at the cage, or making any attempt to break free.

Her eyes were full of the night’s stars and her hair was glowing with the police lights and she acted as if nothing at all was wrong—until she got a closer peek at me.

“What’s the matter, Chlo? You look so . . . scared.”

I shook my head. I couldn’t put it to words. We were sitting in the backseat together, but part of me was wading that cold spot in the reservoir, hanging on to the edge of the boat, shivering like I was there still.

She took my wet hair in her hands and wrung it out on the floor, to leave the cops a good puddle; and she brought my damp head to her lap, and didn’t care that I’d soak her skirt, and told me to close my eyes and sleep.

I don’t remember much else after that. Or I try not to.




That’s the summer I stopped living with Ruby. My dad in Pennsylvania took me, and then my hair grew out, and I lost my virginity in the back of a Subaru, and Ruby wasn’t there to tell it to. Ruby wasn’t there.

Only sometimes did I call and get her voice mail and hear the sound of her telephone voice—nearly indistinguishable from my telephone voice—saying, “Leave a message if you dare.”

I didn’t dare.

I thought about other things instead. Like how I could have made it to the other shore, maybe, if I’d kept kicking and didn’t stop to catch my breath.

How this could have been the story of that time I crossed the reservoir past midnight on a Thursday the summer I was fourteen. How I would have dove in, traveling underwater the entire way, a submarine in a mismatched bikini, a torpedo of hair and a flurry of kicking feet. Proof, she would have said, that I’m a creature built without need of lungs—inside me a safebox of air and scattered clouds: in case of emergency, break glass and breathe.

In the water, my legs would have formed a tail, my arms fins. Ruby had seen it happen, she’d say, those times all those years ago when she’d been the one to give me a bath when our mother was at the bar. She’d seen the silvery flash under bubbles, the quickly shifting skin, seen it with her own two eyes.

As Ruby wanted, I would have reached the cold spot and then gone deep. I’d touch my hands to the murky floorboards and abandoned roadways of the town no one could bear to leave, get my prints all over them. Then I’d come up with a piece of Olive in my fist: a rusted fork from a drifting dinner table, an algae-covered comb Ruby could rinse off and use in her hair.

And no one would have believed it, no one would have thought it could even be possible, not till they shined their lights on the other shore and saw me standing there, waving the comb at them like I was someone special, mythical even—just like Ruby said.





CHAPTER TWO


  RUBY NEVER SAID


Ruby never said, “Stay.” Not out loud, not so I could hear. She came down to the curb as I was leaving for my dad’s and she simply stood there, eyes held back behind sunglasses, watching me go.

She didn’t do much to acknowledge my dad, who’d come all that way to take me. She spoke only to me, as if he were a blot on her shiny lens that she’d wipe off when she felt like it—and until then she’d look right through the speck of him like he wasn’t there.

All she said to me was, “I wish you didn’t have to do this, Chlo.” And then her voice got choked up and she backed away from the car and wouldn’t say one more word to me.

Two dark lenses between us, a rolled-up window, a hard right into the road. Then miles of highway, the phones not ringing, then years.

The dad I left with wasn’t Ruby’s dad. We have different fathers, so technically I’m her half-sister, not that we count in halves. She was there the moment I was born—literally, right there in the room, she’ll say and she’ll shudder. She saw me born at home on the futon, and though it may have scarred her for life, this means she won’t ever forget it. Or me.

“I’ll never leave you,” Ruby used to promise. She’d cross her heart with me as a witness; she’d hold my hand hard in hers and hope to die. “I’ll never leave,” she said, “not ever.” Not like Mom, she didn’t have to say. Not like my dad, who left me, and her dad, who left her. No, she’d promise. Never.