Ruby never said, “Stay.” Not out loud, not so I could hear. She came down to the curb as I was leaving for my dad’s and she simply stood there, eyes held back behind sunglasses, watching me go.
She didn’t do much to acknowledge my dad, who’d come all that way to take me. She spoke only to me, as if he were a blot on her shiny lens that she’d wipe off when she felt like it—and until then she’d look right through the speck of him like he wasn’t there.
All she said to me was, “I wish you didn’t have to do this, Chlo.” And then her voice got choked up and she backed away from the car and wouldn’t say one more word to me.
Two dark lenses between us, a rolled-up window, a hard right into the road. Then miles of highway, the phones not ringing, then years.
The dad I left with wasn’t Ruby’s dad. We have different fathers, so technically I’m her half-sister, not that we count in halves. She was there the moment I was born—literally, right there in the room, she’ll say and she’ll shudder. She saw me born at home on the futon, and though it may have scarred her for life, this means she won’t ever forget it. Or me.
“I’ll never leave you,” Ruby used to promise. She’d cross her heart with me as a witness; she’d hold my hand hard in hers and hope to die. “I’ll never leave,” she said, “not ever.” Not like Mom, she didn’t have to say. Not like my dad, who left me, and her dad, who left her. No, she’d promise. Never.
I guess we didn’t expect I’d be the one to leave her.
Away from the town where we lived, I tried to forget the details of my life with Ruby. I had a new life now. Wednesdays, I no longer snuggled up on the couch to mock girl movies or laced on old roller skates to ride the ramps behind the Youth Center; I spent my hours alone doing homework. There were no weekend sprees for new sunglasses, no taking turns with the scissors to slice out fashion models’ painted lips and eyes from magazines to tape to our walls. After the last bell at school, there was no white car waiting for me—no detour down the old highway alongside the real highway, no windows open wide so the wind could dread my hair. I had to take the bus.
But I thought of Ruby constantly. Of being with her, of what we did.
How at all hours we’d lounge on the hard stone benches on the Village Green, which marked the dead-center point of our town, watching the cars go around, watching them watch us, and only now did I wonder if Ruby sat there just to be seen? Did I know how the universe revolved around the spot wherever Ruby happened to be, be it out on the Green or at home, or did I pretend I didn’t know, like a sun that’s gone lazy and slips down from the sky to lie out on the rooftop in her favorite white bikini only because she can?
I tried not to think about that.
I thought about our town. The exact blue of our mountains, the certain green of our trees. The Cumberland Farms convenience store where Ruby worked, pumping gas and filling in at the register, her hand dipping in the till, shortchanging tourists. Her apartment by the Millstream, her big, old-lady car. The store where she got her signature shade of wine red lipstick, how they held her color behind the counter so no one else could wear it. The rec field where we took to the swings, the spillway where we had parties. The reservoir, worst of all the reservoir. Every night I walked the unmarked path to Olive’s edge and couldn’t stop if I tried.
Always, in my dream, it was dark. Always the stars above held the same pattern, because it was the same night, and time had wound back to let me take my place in it, where I belonged.
I had the same aftertaste of wine coating my throat, could hear the same voices echoing from shore. My body made the motions to swim that great distance, even though I knew I’d come to the cold spot soon enough.
Even though I knew I’d reach the boat. And her.