She peeled out, punching the gas so we practically skidded sideways through the knot of parked cars. The way out was downhill, sheets of gravel cascading behind us as the tires spun, and the way she drove was with abandon, like it used to be when she steered another car, during another summer, taking charge of this same road.
Ruby adored night-driving. She loved letting the wind have our hair, no matter how ratted and tangled it got after, often breaking off our brush bristles, and she loved running every red light she could find. Sometimes, back when I was little and before she’d technically taken the test to secure her license, she’d wake me in the middle of the night and carry me to our mother’s car to go driving.
The thing is, we never went anywhere special. For all the hours spent driving, we could have made it down to the city and back—we heard Times Square stays lit up all through the night, unlike our town, which mostly closed up shop by seven o’clock—but Ruby was happy simply driving the rounds of our village. She’d take us as far as the wooded outskirts, loving narrow, twisting roads and steep mountain passes, speeding the bridges across the reservoir, then cutting swift U-turns to speed right back, but that was as far as she’d go. There was a point on the thruway she didn’t like passing. There was a line only she knew about that she considered too far.
The road we were on tonight was a road we’d driven often. If I shoved my head face-out into the wind—drinking in the distance as she tested the limits of the speedometer, letting the wind tear up my eyes, those tears drying before they hit my cheeks—I could be nine again. Or eleven. Or even fourteen.
Except I wasn’t.
Except something hovered in the car with us, chilled and unspoken. This summer wanted to be like all the others, but it was another thing entirely and no amount of wind in my face could cover that up.
I peeked back at London every mile or so, noticing things about her that I never did the first time she was alive:
How long her arms were, so long she must have been taller than I remembered, or else she grew.
How she twitched in her seat, unable to stay still.
How when she drifted off, resting her cheek on my suitcase, she drooled, and how innocent she looked as she did it.
“Is she, y’know . . . okay?” I asked. There was no word for what she really was. I couldn’t fathom a way to ask it.
Ruby clucked her tongue. “She’s as can be expected, I guess. I mean, how do you think you’d be if you came back from—” She cut herself off with a tight glance at the rearview. “She’s fine.”
“Do you think—”
“Yes, I think we should stop and get lo mein after we drop her off,” Ruby said, as much to herself as to me. “A big family-size tub, one set of chopsticks for me and one fork for you. They always used to forget the fork. Only . . . the Wok’n’ Roll won’t be open so late, will it?” She glanced at me.
“I don’t remember what time it closes.”
“We’ll talk about lo mein later, Chlo,” she said now, as if I was the one who’d brought it up. “I don’t want her getting any ideas.”
“She’s sleeping,” I said. “Look at her. She totally passed out.”
“You can still hear when you’re sleeping. Sleep-walls are thin, so voices seep in, like how before you were born I talked to you up against Mom’s stomach, told you who I was so you’d know me. Every day I did that. And then when you came out you loved me more than you loved her.”
“But I don’t remember any of that.”
“Some deep-down part of you does.”
London twitched some more as I watched her, like my eyes held little pointy pins and I kept sticking her with them. Then when she sat up and met my gaze I wondered if she’d been listening the whole time.
“Are you feeling okay?” I asked London. “Did you drink too much?”
“She’s fine, like I told you,” my sister said for her. “Just leave her be.”
We were heading, I thought, straight into the center of town, and then to wherever it was that London lived, but Ruby veered a sharp left over the footbridge and headed a way I didn’t expect.
“Where do you live, London?” I asked.