I was still listening for it in the living room when my sister came in.
When she found me, her eyes narrowed. London wasn’t with her—maybe Ruby drove her home first. Her motorcycle boots were dripping with mud and her hair was partly wet and so was the hem of her slip and she smelled of it, the reservoir, she smelled of deep, dark things and untold secrets and all of what she was keeping from me, the first being that she never had a shift at Cumby’s. But she was the one to look at me all suspicious and say, “What are you doing, Chlo?”
“Nothing,” I said. I watched her carefully to see if she could hear it, too, but she made no mention of it, the wheezing, whining hiss seeping in through the window. It was growing fainter now, letting the crickets drown it out.
“Did something happen while I was at work?” she said. “You look different.”
“No, of course not.” I immediately thought of my room upstairs. If any evidence of what happened was in there . . . if she’d been upstairs, if she’d seen. “Did you just get home?” I asked, thinking fast.
“Yeah, did you?”
“No, I mean, yeah, I mean I was only outside and I only just came in.”
She circled the love seat, coming closer.
“I think I’m ready for bed,” I said, going the other way and heading for the stairs. “I’m tired.”
“But the ice pops. They’re in the freezer.”
“It’s okay. I’ll make sure to have one for breakfast.”
She eyed me as I walked the stairs to the landing. She eyed my legs as they climbed. She eyed my back and, through it, my beating heart. I turned at the landing before the next set of stairs, before I’d leap the gate and slip back into my room to check my sheets. I said, as casually as I could, “I think I’m gonna sleep in my room tonight.”
All week, we’d been sharing the big bed in the master bedroom, lounging up on the high mattress like royalty, if overheated royalty, since there was no air-conditioning and we had to use electric fans. Sleeping in that room was one of the perks of having the gate up and making Jonah stay downstairs.
Ruby lifted her eyes to mine and said, “Okay, if that’s what you want. I got you cherry. And there’s tropical fruit, too. Ice pops, I mean.”
“Thanks.”
I turned away. I couldn’t hear the whistling anymore, but I could still smell Olive. It was in the house now, in the air, rising up to the top floor, trapped inside with the rest of the thick summer heat.
“Are you sure nothing happened, Chlo?” Ruby called. “Nothing I should know about?”
“Nothing, really,” I called down.
“I’ll find out, you know . . . if something did.”
I kept walking, all the while knowing she would. She was Ruby, after all. She’d dig you up and spread you open and see what she wanted to see. In this town, she was the only one who thought she could have secrets. Everything was hers. Most of all, me.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I WOKE UP
I woke up past midnight to a ringing phone, one I felt sure had been ringing for a while.
It wasn’t my cell. I moved the door aside and peeked into the hall. The phone was close, out there somewhere, its bleating ring bouncing off the unfinished walls and wire-exposed ceiling. Ruby’s door at the end of the hall was closed, and a phone cord was wound up the stairs, over the gate, past my door and past the bathroom door and past the closet that didn’t have a door to within inches of her room. It was the kitchen phone, so archaic it wasn’t even a cordless, and that was as far as it reached.
It rang and rang. If Ruby was in her room, she wasn’t coming out to answer it.
I guess I could blame the fact that I was half asleep for why I answered it. I picked up the phone and said, “Hello?”
There was a gush of breath, and a voice said, “Finally. Took long enough.”
“Excuse me?” The person on the other end must have thought I was Ruby; not too many people could tell us apart, even still.
“You need to get voice mail. Or an answering machine. Or something.”