Imaginary Girls(76)

I wanted to deny Sparrow, say Ruby was more a mother to me than she ever was, that the word was meaningless, that the word shouldn’t be legally binding, and biology didn’t mean I had to be civil, but I also felt a tad sorry for her and wanted to get her off the car and out of the rain. I hadn’t noticed until now that Pete had skidded to a stop just outside the Village Tavern. We were practically on her doorstep.

“Uh, I think she wants to talk to you,” he said, as she wasn’t showing any signs of going away. “Just go in with her. I’ll keep watch while I have a beer at the bar.”

Soon after that, I found myself sitting across from the woman Ruby and I begrudgingly called our mother.

Seeing her up close brought back patches of my childhood:

Standing over her in a sheetless bed while she slept thirteen hours straight. Poking her in a recliner upon finding her passed out bright and early on a school morning. Pelting her with raisins from the packet of trail mix, since Ruby and I didn’t eat raisins even if they’d been dipped in chocolate first. Watching her conk out in a car, while she was at the wheel and the car was still moving.

Most of my memories of our mom didn’t involve her being conscious.

She looked frailer than ever. Her hair must have weighed more than the rest of her. She took in a ragged breath and said, “She know you’re here?”

I shook my head. “No, but she’s going to text me back any minute and then I’ll have to go.”

“I just wanted to see you. Without her.”

“What for?”

“Because you’re my daughter,” she said, but she said it so robotically, I didn’t believe her. I looked around at the place instead of at her—the Village Tavern was as dark inside as I’d always pictured it, a low-lit room with sunken ceilings, lopsided wooden tables filling up the space and a long bar against one wall where Pete sat with his back to us, slurping a pint. I was far below twenty-one and shouldn’t have been allowed inside, but no one from behind the bar was coming over to kick me out. The only person who’d stop this reunion in its tracks was Ruby—and she wasn’t here.

This tavern was where our mother spent her time. Maybe the whole of the past two years Sparrow lived in this dark hole, forgetting what sunlight looked like and letting herself be forgotten. This was what happened when Ruby stopped paying attention. You may as well cease to exist.

“Did you want to tell me something?” I said.

She nodded. She was looking down at her hands. She wore numerous rings, eight at least, cheap flea market silver with grimy birthstones from months she wasn’t born in, the bands gone tight beneath her swollen knuckles. This was why Ruby said you should never wear a ring long enough to grow old with it—some people shriveled and some people swelled, and you couldn’t be sure which way your body would go.

“She told me not to see you,” my mom confessed. “She said no visits. Not to call. Said she’d let me know when—” She looked up, and there was a flicker of fright in her watery eyes, and then she stopped talking.

I didn’t believe her excuses. The idea of my mom wanting to see me all this time, all while living in the same town, was absurd.

“Ruby didn’t tell you not to see me,” I said. “She would’ve said something.”

The expression on her face made me think she was more sober than she let on, that if I said the right thing, asked the right question, she’d know exactly how to respond.

“There was something not right with her from the beginning,” she said. “A mother knows when her child’s not right, she can sense it.”

She must have been remembering a different Ruby, not the one I knew. Whatever she saw in my sister wasn’t what I could see. And wouldn’t want to.

“What do you even mean by that?” I said. “There’s nothing wrong with Ruby.”

“She has a way about her, ever notice that? Always did, since she was small. A way of getting you to do things for her. To get what she wants. Say what she wants you to say.”

I shrugged. This was true, but what of it?

“You couldn’t stop her. You couldn’t stop her if you tried.”

I glanced up at Pete, wanting to mouth Help! and have him rescue me, but his attention was too caught up in his beer.

“I should’ve been there for you, Chloe,” my mom was saying. “To leave you alone like that with her. I’m so sorry.”