At the sound of her name, at my voice saying her name, she shook herself out of it.
Before I knew it, she was pulling her dress over her head and slamming the car door shut. “Let’s go for a swim. Do your laps. I’ll make everyone get out of the pool so you can have the whole place to yourself if you want me to.”
“Don’t do that,” I said. The wind had calmed as we walked the lawn—and as we got closer to the fenced-in outdoor pool, I saw we had company beyond the usual townie kids who came here to cool off on summer afternoons.
She was here, too. Her pale head could be made out in the shallow end, where she stood waist-deep, shivering in the sunlight. She was so thin, I could count her ribs.
“Does she know we go swimming on Fridays?” I asked. “Did you tell her?”
Ruby shrugged. “I may have mentioned it.” She called out, “Hey, London. Watch out, my sister’s gonna do some laps.”
When the townspeople at the pool saw Ruby coming, they cleared away from the stairs in the shallow end to make room for her. They knew she liked to sit there, letting the water pool up to the knobs of her knees, splashing at the surface with her fingers, letting the sun warm her face while she watched me swim. No one seemed surprised that we were here again, after a long absence. No one asked me where I’d been.
Like always, Ruby took to her perch on the descending steps and stretched out her long, bare legs as far as they’d go—which was far. She wore an anklet that glimmered as gold as her aviators in the pool’s bright, reflective light. Her bikini was black and white today, the top white and the bottoms black, and her aviators were drawn down over her eyes to keep just anyone from seeing in.
I wore a navy one-piece, and I’d left my new sunglasses in the car.
“Hi, Ruby,” London said, wading through the water to reach us. “Hi, Chloe.”
I tried not to look at her bare arms and legs; even in daylight her skin had a sickly sheen of blue, as if she couldn’t breathe and was standing here drowning and we were made to witness it.
I mumbled something about doing laps. At the deep end, I dove in, the tips of my fingers cutting through the warm water first, then my face, and then my shoulders and the rest of me with a smooth, enveloping splash.
The pool wasn’t empty, but I was easily able to avoid people as I went from the deep end to the shallow, then back again into the deep. From underwater I could see their legs kicking as they, too, tried to swim. I could feel it, the motion they made, the wind. If I stayed under, I could hear them screaming from far off in the distance, like from behind walls and locked doors, houses and whole towns away.
I was still under, at the far edge of the deep end, when I decided I didn’t feel like doing laps anymore. I took hold of the filter and stayed there, drifting. Seconds passed, though they felt like minutes. Minutes like hours.
And, really, I could have stayed down there till nightfall, couldn’t I?
Ruby used to say I could.
I wondered if my sister could make anything happen, if she put her mind to it. Like, right now, here I was skimming my hand along the bottom of this dirty public pool. Maybe I could stay under for the rest of my life, or at least the whole summer, never needing air to breathe. I’d scavenge for supplies to make it through—like if someone dropped a stick of gum, I’d retrieve it and it would be cinnamon-flavored, and it could sustain me for years. It wasn’t reservoir ice cream, but it would do. I’d adapt, the way the people of Olive adapted after their town was taken away. Ruby would make it so.
Maybe I really could breathe down here, become whatever she wanted, even some impossible creature long still alive when I shouldn’t be . . . like London was.
It was when I let my eyes come open again underwater that I saw her.