The “hallway” to reach Ruby’s room was a set of plywood planks running from one side of the house to the other. I could look down and see the first floor a story below. Walking the planks was like performing the trapeze in a dark circus, only everyone’s gone home already and they’ve taken the net with them, so if you fall, the hard ground is all that’s there to catch you.
Ruby balanced on the planks without looking down. She didn’t put a hand to the wall to keep steady. Once in her room I could see that her clothes were scattered about, and a chair was set up in the middle of the floor to hold only sunglasses, and her dresser drawers spilled out more than they held, all of which was like her, explosive and full of color and impossible to step over unscathed because she was everywhere.
The room itself was small, but the bed she slept on was grand, with four tall posts and a place to hang a canopy, though it only held a few T-shirts and a gypsy skirt. The bed was high off the ground, as if a stepladder was needed to get up on it, but I didn’t see a stepladder, so I imagined Ruby doing running leaps to reach the bed, nosedives and somersaults from off the chair of sunglasses to the mattress beyond. She’d do it, too—it was something we would have done together, had this been our bed.
I went to her side of the bed, where on the tangled sheets was last night’s nightgown, skimpy and dotted with bloodred ladybugs, and one white sock.
On the sock, she’d penned a note to herself at the ankle:
cocoa pebbles dish soap
birdseed tampons
string cheese—lots
A shopping list. She always used to write them in the strangest places.
I stepped around to the other side of the bed, the side where I figured this new boyfriend of hers got to sleep.
I could tell he shared this room. His stuff was all over. There on the dresser, a man’s wallet and a bulky ring of grime-encrusted keys. Hanging over a chair, a pair of work pants, the kind with pockets running up the legs and you can’t imagine how anyone would need all those pockets, but I guess her boyfriend, Jonah, did. Those were his discarded boxers on the floor. Here was his wrinkled half of the sheets.
It bothered me to imagine him sleeping on that tall bed beside my sister. To think of some guy I’d never met peeling off his pants in front of her and putting his head on a pillow beside her head.
I tore my eyes away from the bed and checked the room again, taking it all in.
“You’re quiet,” she said. “What’re you looking for?”
“Nothing. I don’t know.”
What I was looking for made no sense, not even to me. Something magical had happened, and London was apparent living proof of it, and maybe I thought there’d be some kind of evidence in here. Like Ruby might’ve dropped a clue out of her pocket. She could be clumsy like that.
Like if I lifted up my foot, all explanations would be right here.
I did notice that Ruby had two huge windows in her room—looking out behind the house in the direction of the reservoir. They were dark for now, since it was night, but when the sun came up, there would be no curtains or shades to keep the water from showing clear.
“You’ll sleep here tonight,” she announced. “With me. But take that side, the one near the wall, not the windows.”
Jonah’s side, she meant. She said those words and clapped her hands together and it was done, without informing the boyfriend first, because why would we?
It was decided and, soon, it was happening: my first night under my sister’s new roof. Soon, we were on the bed, divvying up the pillows, and she was so close I could feel her elbow in my side and her knee crushing my elbow. We had each other again, and there was nothing and no one that could get between us.
Everything was as it should be—except for the one thing.
The girl at the keg, the one we’d dropped off in the middle of the road.
The dead girl who was no longer dead.
That’s the one thing that prickled at me.
Somehow, while I was gone, she’d been reanimated, blown full of air so she could take her breaths again among us. My sister was connected to her now—which meant I was also, if my sister was.
London was back, as I was—and she shouldn’t be.