Imaginary Girls(75)

I went to the fence and saw what I knew would be there, glistening as black as oil on the horizon. The reservoir, which London had come out of just this spring. The reservoir, where I should have known she’d been spending her nights.





CHAPTER NINETEEN


  I CAME BACK


I came back out of the woods after a while. When I returned to Pete’s car, he didn’t comment on how drenched I was. He opened the door for me and said, “Find her?”

I shook my head.

“Women,” he said. “Tell them not to do something, they do it anyway.” When I glared at him, too soaked to respond, he added, “Ruby used to wander off doing crap like that all the time. I’m used to it.”

He jammed the gas and took us back the way we’d come. “You think she’ll be home when we get there?” he asked.

“Yeah. But you know what, Pete? Maybe I shouldn’t go there yet. Maybe we should go into town for a while. I should call her first, or wait for her to call me.” I was thinking how she hadn’t texted. She’d told me to spend time out of the house but hadn’t yet said it was okay to return.

“Can’t chicks ever make up their minds?” Pete mumbled. But he still coasted us on into the center of town, following my instructions without too much more protest.

I pulled out my phone to make sure it still worked. It seemed perfectly fine—and no longer overloaded with messages—so I texted Ruby.

u ok?

I didn’t wait for a response before sending another: ok i come home?

Nothing.

Near the Green, Pete turned off the engine and muttered to himself, but he was still doing what I said. Then he opened his mouth and I thought he’d shoot out something perverted, but he kept his eyes up in the vicinity of my face and said simply, “Anything for Ruby’s sister.”

It was all very heavy and hypnotic, like I’d been the one to bewitch him, but I couldn’t take credit, and, fact was, Pete never needed any bewitching. He’d follow my sister anyway, always had. It was thanks to whatever she’d done to him all those years ago, and ever since he’d walked around barely able to dress himself, caught up in the idea of her, even when she told him for the hundredth time to please go away.

“Pete, why? Why are you like this? What’d she do to you?”

“Who do you mean, Ruby?”

I nodded.

She’d broken his heart, that was a given. Maybe she’d done it with one hand, crushed it into a tight little ball. Maybe she’d done it fast, while it thumped in her palm, then ripped it out to keep in the back of her dresser and all this time he had no idea.

He shrugged. “She was my first girlfriend,” he said. “My first”—you could see the gears turning opposite-wise in his head, like only with great effort could he keep this from being vulgar—“my first, uh, everything.”

I nodded. No special effort needed. No bolts of lightning or hot sizzles of smoke. It was all so ordinary, and that was enough.

“Thanks, Pete. Thanks for driving.”

“Don’t thank me, I’m just the taxi service.”

I tried to think of something to say to make that seem less pitiful, but he spoke again before I could.

“I don’t mind. Really. Besides, you remind me so much of her, so if you need something, it’s like she needs something. And I kinda like that, y’ know?”

“I know, Pete.”

Now he was tilting his head, a hand over his eyes, squinting. People did that when they were making an effort to see a hint of her in me. Boys did. Boys did it all the time.

“I see what my bro sees in you. Saw in you, I mean. His loss.”

I blushed when he used the past tense.

“You shouldn’t tell your sister,” he said.

“I wasn’t planning to.”

“Just, yeah. Just be careful what you tell her.”

That’s the moment we were both startled by the pounding on the hood of the car. I looked out through the rains-pattered windshield, expecting to find the town crazy, Dov Everywhere, who’d been known to thump his sticks on cars if they parked in places he didn’t approve of. But the eyes searing through the glass didn’t belong to Dov. They were the pale, distant eyes of a woman. She was knocking on the hood with her bare hand.

I turned to Pete. “What do you think she wants?”

“You, obviously. She’s not my mother.”