It was simply something I was aware of, like I’d be aware of getting wet if the night turned to rain and I was out with no umbrella. Down deep in the reservoir, under the water where no one would think to look, was the other town, and the people who’d once walked its streets could be found wading through what was left of them still.
My sister didn’t have to say so. She didn’t have to make up some story; I could make it up myself. I was doing it right now, imagining them, the people of Olive, bobbing up under cover of night.
They waited for the late hour to do their looking. Tonight I wondered how many of them were here. Maybe they formed a chain from the rocky bottom, locking webbed fingers to slippery wrists, lifting the lightest one to the top, where the water broke open and the air got them gasping and Pete’s car could be made out on the hill.
I wondered if they knew who was in the car. If they spotted her, and sitting next to her, me.
If the lookout then dipped back under, to let the rest of them know. If they burbled whispers, playing telephone from one waterlogged ear to the next, all down to the end of the line. She’s back. She’s come home.
While I was away, the reservoir had stayed put. Close to a hundred years it had been there, the towns it swallowed far longer even than that. It had been here before I was a thought in this world. Before my sister was a thought, and our mother was a thought, before the mother of our mother’s mother, who I never even met, before anyone who looked anything like us had set foot here, this reservoir had existed.
And it wanted us to know. This was apparent in the wind batting up at us from the water below. The wind that rushed in through the windows, cold hands at our throats, colder fingers angling down our shirts.
But when I looked over at Ruby, she let the wind off the reservoir touch her anywhere it wanted and she didn’t do a thing. She had her eyes on the water, not the least bit intimidated.
She was an ant before a bear. She was a girl before a speeding eighteen-wheeler truck. And yet she didn’t act like it. Here was the second deepest reservoir in the state and she showed none of the awe most people did when they gazed at it. She didn’t let out a sigh and say what a beautiful treasure it was. She acted like it was a challenge, like she was waiting to see who would break eye contact first. She looked on as if it would wither up in a dry spell and she’d go down there and celebrate by stomping around in its dirt.
Then, when I felt sure something was about to happen, she turned her face away.
“That’s what I wanted to tell you,” she said, as if we’d never paused in conversation. “The reservoir. It’s so close.”
“You could walk to it,” I said.
When we lived in the heart of town, the reservoir used to be a ten-minute drive; we’d have to stow the car somewhere secret before going on foot through the trees. But this new house where Ruby lived had been built to be as close to the water as possible without trespassing on city property. The city of New York still owned the water and the land surrounding it, though they weren’t here to keep an eye on it. Ruby was.
“It looks closer than it is,” she said. “You have to cross the road to get to it—you just can’t see. There’s a hole in the chain link, and there’s this little path I know of over the rocks, but—” How serious she grew here. How cold her hand was, now that it grabbed mine around the wrist, her skin chilled to the same temperature as the wind. “But, Chlo, don’t go down there. Just don’t.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Promise?”
I nodded.
“You won’t go near it,” Ruby announced. “You won’t. C’mon, let’s show you the house.”