“I’m so glad you’re here with me, Chloe,” she said. “It’s how I promised it would be, isn’t it? The way it was before? Just like it?”
She wore only her bikini, black on bottom and white on top, and the gold anklet she had on at the pool. Her hair hung down to the curve of her hip, and around her wrist was a single hair elastic. Her face was clean, not a dab of makeup, her nose shiny since she hadn’t powdered it. She looked stunning. She looked real. She looked all the more stunning because she was so real.
Somehow, I didn’t want to answer her question.
I turned from her and looked out over the railing. We were at the highest point that we could get on the house, short of climbing to the peak of the roof and stretching out our limbs like two weather vanes. And there it was, beyond the dirt patch of the backyard and the half-built wooden deck, past trees and across road, where the land broke open and the water flooded in, exactly where it had been when I saw it my first day home.
Except this time I could see the entire expanse of it, a bird’s-eye view of the whole living, breathing thing.
“What are you looking at?” she said, knowing full well what.
“It looks bigger,” I said. “Since the last time I saw it.”
“That’s just from up here. It makes even the mountains seem bigger, see?”
I saw the blue humps of the Catskills, there in the clouds where they’d always been. They didn’t seem bigger. They seemed closer from here, not as tall as they appeared from the ground. I turned back to the water.
“No, really,” I said. “The reservoir. It looks . . . deeper than it used to. Like, look at those rocks. They used to be way out on shore and now they’re almost completely covered in water. Isn’t that weird?”
“What rocks?” She shot over to the railing, balancing her weight on the tips of her toes. I heard her take a breath in, surprised by what she saw, I thought, but then she said, “Those are different rocks, Chlo. You’ve never seen it from this angle. You’re confused.”
I wanted to argue it—as if I wouldn’t remember the rocks on the shore I’d been visiting since I was a baby—but then a small crinkle showed in her forehead, midway between her eyes, and she rubbed at it and rubbed at it and seemed to forget all else.
“I’m getting a migraine,” she said. She returned to her reclining lawn chair and moved it into a patch of shade.
“Has there been a lot of rain?” I asked. “Is that why the reservoir looks bigger?”
“Nope,” she said, “I can’t remember the last time it rained.” She swiftly changed the subject. “Hey, Chlo, don’t you love this widow’s walk? I told Jonah I had to have one, like in the olden days when the husbands went away to sea in pirate ships and the wives kept watch at home. After like a year apart, the wives would see the Jolly Roger out on the horizon and wave the ship into port. Though if I’d been alive back then, I bet I would’ve been the pirate and made some guy wave for me at home. You think?”
“I don’t think widow’s walks were built for waving to pirates . . .”
I was noticing how haphazard an addition this so-called widow’s walk was to the house. Boards were jutting out where they shouldn’t, the platform supported in a way that seemed to have no support at all. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the whole thing gave out from our weight and skidded down the side of the house.
Ruby was still talking.