Then more questions, and London’s friends surrounded her again, and I couldn’t get to her, I couldn’t see her face or hear what she was saying. I thought of when I found her in the rowboat, and then when everyone knew, and everyone saw, and you couldn’t think with all the yelling and the splashing and the need to get away.
I could see the accident as clearly as if I’d been in the car as it happened, in the back, watching. Speeding down the dark road, no cars ahead, no cars behind, and then the blur of a traffic sign to the right, the town line crossed, and the girl at the wheel gone. The car would keep going even without her frail weight on the gas pedal. The wheel would veer even without her hands there to make it turn.
Owen wouldn’t know what was happening at first. He’d shout, “Watch the road, Lon!” The windows would be down, so his ears would fill up with wind. He wouldn’t be wearing his seat belt.
When he realized the driver’s seat was empty beside him, it would be too late to jump in and take over. Far too late to hit the brakes. He wouldn’t know how to stop the car. The last sight through the windshield would be the thick, oncoming trunk of a tree.
Then, inexplicably, by some kind of cruel miracle, the girl would reappear, but outside the car, dozens of yards away.
She’d be back inside the town line, a town—she wouldn’t know this—she couldn’t ever leave.
Her parents’ car gone.
Her friend with it.
And she’d have no idea how.
If you were driving on Route 28 late that night, you might have seen the girl in the middle of the road, looking like she’d dropped from the hatch of a low-flying plane and only just got to her feet after the fall. She would have been dazed. She wouldn’t have moved out of your way, so you would have pulled up near her, rolled down your window, called out, “Are you all right? Do you need a ride?”
“I blacked out again,” she would have said, and run off—a streak of white into a dark nest of trees.
That was how I pictured it.
Now Pete was rushing to his car, off to find his brother. And Asha was frantically trying to reach Owen on the phone. Damien was crying like a girl. And Vanessa was peppering London with questions. Cate was staring into her flashlight, and Kate, who I’d forgotten was there, was trying to find her shoe. Others had phones out searching for signals, and a boy I didn’t know was saying, “This isn’t happening, this isn’t happening,” though it was, most definitely it was.
Ruby wasn’t there at all.
I turned around, toward where she’d been sitting on the rock. Did she see what she’d done? Did she regret it? Would she wind back the clocks to set it right like last time? Could she? Was there something wrong with me that I believed she could?
Only, she wasn’t on the rock anymore. She wasn’t on the shoreline or near the fire that was puttering out to nothing. She was gone.
My eyes went to the reservoir. And out there, drifting somewhere in the dark middle, was what may or may not have been a rowboat, with a person hunched over in it, a person who may or may not have been my sister.
Her arm moved. For a second there, I thought she may have been signaling to me.
If there was anyone in the world I knew, it was my sister. Ruby, who’d been there the day I first opened my eyes. Ruby, who’d raised me. Ruby, who kept all my secrets even if she didn’t reveal all of hers. Ruby, whose bathing suit I was wearing right then so I looked more like her than maybe ever.
Balance, she’d said. Something about balance.
Sometimes you look at someone and, if you know them well enough, like really know them, you can be sure to guess what they’ll do before they do it. You may not understand why, may not ever understand it, but you don’t need to know the whys and the hows of things. Sometimes you only need to stop them.