I could say, It was no big, act like I could do the butterfly stroke back and forth across the giant expanse of the reservoir if I wanted to—and more. Pretend like I could swim to the end of the Hudson, slip into the bay, circle the Statue of Liberty, cross the ocean, backstroke the English Channel, come home kicking with a Mediterranean tan and an armful of undersea shells for souvenirs.
But I didn’t. I shrugged off any more talk of the reservoir and took my turn at the swings. We didn’t stay in the rec field for much longer—the guys got bored fast—but I gathered up enough speed on the swings to rise as high as I could before I had to jump down and follow them to the cars.
All I kept thinking was that I was Ruby’s sister. In this town, I could do whatever crazy and impossible thing I wanted. Everyone already believed I had, simply because Ruby had made it so.
And if she could do that, she could make them believe anything.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
WHAT LONDON REMEMBERED
What London remembered was being asleep for a week. Eyes crusted closed, limbs too heavy to lift, she slept until she couldn’t sleep another minute and then she woke up.
The first thing she saw when she opened her eyes were curtains. She remembered those curtains, blue she said, or green sometimes, one day one color, one day the other color, some days both colors at once. The curtains moved, she remembered, always, caught in gust after gust of wind. Besides the curtains, she remembered being cold all the time and that her sneakers squished. She remembered how she had trouble hearing anything anyone said to her. How at first it was only lots of mouths talking at her, and hands with fingers pointing, and then, one day, her ears popped and she could hear fine.
This was rehab.
It was now close to midnight, and London was driving me to the house, back to Ruby.
I’d figured “rehab” would be this blank, cavernous space of time in London’s mind, like how when someone overdoses they’re not yet dead but the next step to it, and so there’s nothing to remember. But London remembered. Did this mean she hadn’t ever been dead?
Some things she’d said were sticking with me.
The moving colors.
The ears popping, like water had gotten in them.
And then there was the lack of clocks.
Ruby used to say that time stopped down in Olive—that there was no point in trying to keep track. The poor people of Olive couldn’t even wear wristwatches, since the hands got glommed up and the thick, murky water leaked in. There was a clock on the old Village Green, she said, and it always read eleven past two, the exact point in time the flood levels reached the clock face, so forever after in Olive that was the time, day or night, eleven past two for eternity.
Ruby also used to say how cold it was down there. How the people of Olive shivered so, their knees knocking, chattering their algae-gummed teeth. Their liquid sky was too thick to let in more than a hint of sun, so in their underwater village they grew paler, and their hearts grew colder, and the memories of their surface lives drifted up and away.
London was turning the car onto the road that ran alongside the reservoir—the same road that led to Jonah’s house—but she didn’t steal a peek through the trees. We drove past the reservoir without a word about it, as if it were any other thing: a garbage dump or a gas station or the guy who sells roses out of a bucket on Route 375.
“Ruby said I shouldn’t tell anyone about rehab—it’s not good to dwell, she said—but it’s okay to tell you, right?” She’d asked me this before, but I hadn’t answered.
Now I said, “Right,” even though I was lying.
“So I don’t know how long I was there,” she was saying as we came even closer to the house where Ruby and I now lived. “It was only when I got out that I knew how long. Ruby was there, and she drove me home, and she said everything was back the way it used to be, and—”