I dove in. I was swimming like Ruby had told me not to. Swimming so far, I lost track of shore. If you’d been watching from the waterlogged streets below you may have seen the white blur of my sister’s bikini—easy to spot against the dark reflected night.
Ruby used to say I’d never drown, that I couldn’t, my body wasn’t built that way. Slip me under, and I’d emerge with fins for feet. Water turned to air once it reached my lungs. That was one of her stories and we’d all heard it a hundred times.
Another was the story of Olive, one of the nine towns flooded to make this reservoir. What was it that made the people not want to vacate it for some other surface town? What tethered the two girls from her story here and made them have to stay? She’d never explained that.
And after the steam whistle sounded out, did the girls stand with backs straight and eyes closed while the dams were raised and the water rushed in, steeling themselves for impact and then letting themselves get washed away when the wall of water hit? I imagined so. And, after, did they ever wonder what was up here, ever think of climbing out? These were things I’d never know.
All I knew was to keep swimming.
When I finally reached her, she looked into my eyes, which were almost like her eyes but barely half as green, and she opened her mouth and she said, “I’m really going to miss you, Chlo.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THEY ASKED
They asked me why she did what she did. Only, when I told them, they refused to believe me.
The people in town, they just kept asking, again and again, for weeks and weeks afterward, what happened, how did she get in that boat, how’d she go under? They never found a body; they never found a reason. No one would hear me when I told them about the hands that got hold of her ankle and pulled her down.
No one believed.
I guess maybe they never had. No one in town had ever really trusted the stories about Olive, about the long-lost people still wading its flooded streets. They’d never heard the whistle, or sensed the eyes keeping track of their trespassing feet. The graveyard up above was any other graveyard. The shards of old teapots that sometimes washed to shore after a storm were any old trash and not valuable artifacts, antiques.
So, later, when I told everyone what had happened to her—her friends and my friends, who couldn’t meet my eyes; Jonah, who skipped town soon after; Pete, who tore her picture from his wall for what she’d done to his brother, then secretly put it back up; her ex-boyfriends; her admirers; the guys at the gas station; the girls who kept her in sunglasses; our mom, at the bar; our mailman, at the corner; the cops, the news, the homeless guy who barked like a dog in the street—they all refused to believe.
They forgot who she was:
Something fantastic we could never explain. Someone better and bolder than every one of us. Someone to paint murals and build bridges for. Someone worth every ounce of our love.
Someone powerful, but in the end not powerful enough.
When she went under, no one would believe she thought it only temporary.
That she couldn’t drown.
That it simply wasn’t possible.
Not her. Not us.
How, when the cold hands got a good tug on her ankle, she said, “Don’t worry, I’ll just have a talk with them.”
How she said, “Don’t worry, Chlo. You know how everyone always does what I say.”
How she was wearing my bathing suit, and I was wearing hers, so, maybe, for a moment, they were fooled.
How she went under and how her breath bubbled up like tiny, translucent balloons cut loose from their strings, and how her arms reached out, and how her hair turned electric, and how her mouth mouthed not to worry, she’ll be back in time for breakfast. And then how the reservoir took her, and I tried to get her back, but her fingers slipped from mine, and how I sat there in the boat under her stars and her moon, gated on all sides by her mountains, watching the last bits of her breath float up and away.
AUTUMN
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I SAID