What she did to London.
A coldness crept into my bones as I realized what she’d admitted. How she needed to make it right. Because what she’d done was so wrong in the first place.
She’d conjured up the girl I found dead. Worse, she’d conjured her into the rowboat in the first place.
It wasn’t only that my sister had brought London back—it was that London’s body found its way to the boat that night because Ruby put it there. London spent all that time in Olive because she was sent there. By my sister.
It was like she’d given London up for sacrifice—but for what?
What more was Ruby not telling me?
“Chloe!” she snapped. “Why are you staring at me like that?”
“I . . . I just can’t believe what you did.”
She grinned, openly. “That’s nothing. You can’t even imagine what else I’ve done.”
And I couldn’t—imagine it. Not then, and not for a long time. All I knew was that for the first moment in my life, I felt truly frightened of her. The heavy pull in my legs wasn’t a fear anymore of Olive or London or anything I saw in those bad dreams I had in Pennsylvania . . . it was dread.
Were people only allowed to wander our town at the whims of my sister? Could she rub anyone out, and blow the chalk dust away?
If you’d asked me in that moment, standing in the wind on her widow’s walk, I would have put my hand to my heart and swore that, yes, in fact she could.
And, more, I wondered what my sister could possibly do next. Wondered how far she’d go. And if I’d ever need to stop her.
In the house, a few thumps sounded. Someone was coming upstairs—Jonah. She slammed the window closed so he couldn’t come out. “I’m glad we can talk about everything now,” she said.
She walked to the other end of the widow’s walk, the side facing the driveway and the road toward town, the side where, with our backs turned, we could forget the reservoir even existed.
“Chloe, come and look,” she said.
The helium balloons on their bright red ribbons reached for the sky, but she’d knotted the ribbons tight enough to the railing so that none could escape, though they tried. It was windy up here, close to the water, windier than anywhere else in town except for the very top of Overlook Mountain.
I followed and sat on her reclined lawn chair. “What are these for?” I said, careful with my words, now that she’d told me what she’d told me and I was suspecting there was still more to tell.
“Guess,” she said.
“Are we having a party?”
She feigned a delicate gag into her hand. “And invite people over? People from town? Here? So we’d have to talk to them and feed them our food and wash all their mouth marks off the glasses after?” She looked stricken.
“So no party then?”
“No, thank God. But the balloons are sort of for them in a way . . .”
“Where’d you get the balloons anyway?” I asked.
“The store, where else? You can rent a tank to fill them up and everything. Seeing the ones at the rec field gave me an idea.”
When Ruby’s hair caught the sun, the henna in it shone through. She blazed up, looking far warmer in day than she did in the dark, wild practically. Her eyes had a fever in them that I wasn’t sure could be blamed on the bright light.
She was about to do something impossible again—I could sense it, as if she were at the very edge of something dangerously high and she were about to take a running leap.
“Look,” she said, still indicating the balloons.
That’s when I noticed that the balloons were tagged already with her neatly penned messages. She’d spelled them out in delicate letters, using a thin-point Sharpie. They weren’t little innocent greetings like Ruby says hi, the way she’d written inside Jonah’s furniture, or even Ruby was here, like on the brick wall of the town credit union. They were tiny directives:
bring me a milk shake
bury $8 in your yard and mark it w/ a red ribbon so i can find it