Now that we were alone, I wanted to tell her what I’d seen: London vanishing and reappearing in the road, then sneaking in to go sleep at the reservoir. But, if I went and told Ruby that, I’d also have to explain how we got ourselves past the town line. Plus I’d have to tell her I knew what happened when London crossed over. How it meant that everything my sister had done could only be found in here, in our small town.
Which meant, if we left, it would crumble to nothing.
“We need supplies,” Ruby said to me now, muddying up the kitchen. “We’ll stay upstairs all night, no coming down till tomorrow. Just in case.”
She filled her arms with anything not yet past expiration. She grabbed bags of nuts, a heel of cinnamon bread, some slightly overripe bananas, a sprig of grapes, and somehow managed to wrangle up a clean bowl to hold it all. We were abandoning our diet due to a state of emergency. Then she swept me up the stairs with her, leading the way over the gate.
I knew how her mind worked. Once, years ago, when our mother had company, Ruby led the two of us out a window onto the rooftop, then a tree branch, then over to the neighbors’ trellis and onto their porch, where we sought refuge till morning. This was because if she didn’t like a thing that was happening, she wouldn’t stand by to watch. Sometimes she’d leave before there was even a chance at a thing happening—she’d slip out of a car just before the kiss, anticipating the moment of denial before having to deny it. If there were still some visible parts of the road out there, we’d be speeding down Route 28 right now. As things stood, we’d wait and hope for morning.
Upstairs, Ruby closed her bedroom door and turned on me. Now we’d talk. Now I’d tell her.
But she said, “They know you’re back, Chlo. Explain to me how they know. You went swimming when I told you not to, didn’t you? You snuck in.”
I denied it. Barely tapping the water was not the same as plunging into it. One touch of a toe wouldn’t, couldn’t cause all this. Could it?
The more I said my denials, the more I felt something in the house with us. It had followed us upstairs. Its smell had seeped into the furniture, the wood now sweating with it, drips of condensation running down. The air in the room was growing cold, too cold for summer, and too cold for the surface. It felt like we were deep under with the rest of Olive, their telltale chill seizing hold of my bones.
I thought of what she’d said. She’d said they. So she felt them here, too.
I brought the question to my lips. “Do you think they got in the house?”
Her face chilled, and the temperature of my skin dropped even more degrees, and I took a step back, and was up against the big canopied bed, and then I was crawling into the bed to make sure my feet didn’t touch the floor.
The walls looked down on us, knowing who we were talking about, yet not calling them out by name. Shadows in the paint made grave faces at us, eyes as large and serious as my sister’s, but without lashes, and without the mechanism to close. Toes curled and went black; nipples dangled to the floor like extra fingers. The lamplight turned murky, the shadows green and strangled around a taut, drowned neck.
You’d think that the people of Olive torpedoed up to the surface to wait for us to start talking. That they broke free and choked out their first earthbound breaths in a near century all so they could hear what she said about them. They crawled the hill, slithered down the porch, suctioned sticky hands to the walls. They braved splinters. They found the widow’s walk. They pressed damp ears to the window screen and listened in.
Maybe they did. Maybe they were.
“Have you seen them?” I asked.
She nodded faintly.
“Has London?”
“Of course.”
I confessed the way the girl had turned to air in my hands, but Ruby barely blinked at that admission. I said I saw where she sleeps.
She didn’t say a word about it.
“You could have drowned, and it would have been all my fault,” she said instead. “You’ve never had a baby sister, so you can’t know how it felt. How it still feels. How every morning I wake up and think of what I almost let happen.”
“Almost,” I whispered.
“Almost,” she agreed. “I’d do anything for you—anything. I have. Want to know what happens when you let your baby sister get hurt? What that feels like?”