The sky was hers.
That’s when the thumping from inside the house made itself known again. Jonah was knocking on the window. Pounding.
Ruby watched the window idly, as if a bomb could shatter the glass at any moment and she was curious enough to stay and get sliced.
“Are you going to get that or should I?” I said.
“Go ahead. And while you’re at it, tell him to go back downstairs, please.”
I was already at the window when she said that last bit. In a low voice I said back, “But it’s his house . . .”
“I don’t want him upstairs,” she said. “Upstairs is for you and me.”
I turned to face the window. The glass wasn’t shaded or anything and I could see Jonah right there—my face inches from his face, one thin, translucent sheet between us. He could see us, and he could probably hear us, too.
I undid the latch and pulled up the window. Before I could open my mouth, Ruby called from the railing, “Tell him I didn’t put the gate up for nothing. Did he step right over it like it wasn’t there? Ask him.”
The gate? She put up a gate?
I asked, my voice faltering. “Ruby wants to know . . . Did you, um, step over it?”
He nodded. There were wood shavings in his hair, little flecks, so many he’d have to dunk his head in the shower to get them all out, and some scattered and got on me when he moved.
“She says . . .” I started, trying to find the words, polite words, words that wouldn’t make him hate me, seeing as I was his guest, technically, eating his food and sleeping my nights in his bed. But I couldn’t finish that sentence. I turned back to let her do it. “You should tell him yourself,” I said.
But Jonah said, “No need, I got it.”
He slammed the window shut, almost on my fingers. Then he retreated down the stairs and I saw the gate there—a barricade, really, one made from two dresser drawers stacked up and propped across the floor, plus the long handle of a kitchen mop, stretched across, plus a picture frame with no picture in it. It looked like something a child would build, to keep a dog out. But Ruby used it on Jonah.
“How long has that been up?” I asked.
She shrugged and her expression didn’t soften. “He has the couch to sleep on.”
“He’s mad,” I said. “I think he’s really, really mad.” Never before were we in the precarious position of making a boyfriend mad who we still had to face the day after. Previous boyfriends we could kick out. Or drive away from. Previous boyfriends didn’t live downstairs.
“He’s fine. He can’t get mad,” she said. “Not at me. Besides, he’s not the one we have to worry about.”
Her bright, glowing green eyes flicked out at the water in the distance, the water hiding what had once been Olive. But then her eyes weren’t on the water at all, they were on the sky, on the clouds, on her red-tailed balloons making their way toward town.
I believed in her. I even believed in those balloons.
I’d seen what she could do, hadn’t I?