“Who is this?”
Another sigh. Then the voice mumbled, “I, uh . . . really love you.” And the next I heard was click, as whoever it was hung up.
That was the first.
The other requests Ruby had penned on the helium balloons filtered in, sometimes more than once, as if a balloon had landed in one spot only to blow away to somewhere else. By afternoon we had two large pans of foil-covered lasagna in the fridge, though it was too hot to run the oven and my sister said she wasn’t in the mood for lasagna after all and what she really should have asked for was a homemade cake.
The balloons were answered, one by one, and Ruby didn’t seem at all surprised. In her universe—which encompassed the fuzzy, far-reaching boundaries of our town, skirting up mountains and dredging the lowest point in the valley, dipping into the reservoir and running off on the rapids of the Esopus to other small towns that looked much like this one—she’d gone and asked for what she wanted and every single person here would try to give it to her. As if it was their duty.
Toward the end of the day, when I found a dress folded up on the steps—white eyelet to show bits of skin—I carried it up to our floor.
I found her at the mirror in an odd pose. She’d spotted a gray hair and was stretching out the strand to take a closer look in the light.
“I think this is for you,” I said, leaving the dress on the bed. “There’s no card.”
She glanced at the dress. “Nice,” she said absently. “It looked better in the dark, I think.” She returned her attention to the mirror, crinkling up her brows in concentration. “Look at me carefully, Chlo, and then please tell me you don’t see it.”
“I don’t see it.”
“But you do see it. You’re looking right at it.”
“You told me to say—”
“Do you see it?”
I nodded solemnly. The gray strand stood out against the rest of her dark hair. I also saw what may have been a second strand behind her ear, but I didn’t point it out.
“Get the tweezers. We’ll have to pull it out at the root.”
We performed the operation together and then carefully wrapped the long strand—up close I saw it wasn’t gray but perfectly white from root to tip, and glimmering at all angles, like a hair pulled from a royal Persian cat—in tissue to discard in the toilet. She flushed and watched to make sure it went down, then she flushed again to be safe, as if we were getting rid of evidence of a crime before the FBI stormed in.
After it went down, she sat on the floor and spoke.
“Something’s wrong,” she said.
“It’s just a gray hair,” I said.
“I feel like I’m fading. Like I’m so very tired from all this effort and that”—she pointed at the toilet, where we’d flushed the long strand—“that’s just the start. And what’s next? Sunspots?”
“What effort?”
She glanced at the dress. “Everything takes at least an ounce of effort,” she said cryptically. “I’m not magic, you know.”
I couldn’t tell if that last part was a joke.
She continued. “I’m exhausted. It’s like we just climbed up to the very top of Overlook Mountain—we used to skip school and do that, remember?”
“Yeah.”
“Remember how we’d get to the top, finally after climbing forever, and catch our breath and look down and we could see the whole entire town from up there?”
I nodded.
“I feel like that. Like we’re up at the top and I should be able to see everything. Only, the clouds have come in, and now it’s raining or whatever, and I’m not seeing town like I should. So we climbed all the way up there for nothing. And I’m too tired to climb back down. That’s what I feel like. Something’s in my way and I don’t know what it is.”