“What?”
“You want to die. You want to curl up under the wheels of a truck and let it run you over as many times as it takes to flatten you flat. You want to throw a hair dryer in the bathtub when you’re in it. You want to do anything to take it back.”
And here she smiled. And the eyes in the walls and the eyes looking through the window witnessed this and could do nothing to stop it.
“So,” she said, “I did.”
A shiver ran through me.
“I did,” she repeated. “I kept you from drowning. I gave them her instead.”
When she said that, the truth of it all came tumbling down on me like a waterfall that falls and falls and keeps falling long after you’ve been swept up in it. I was beginning to remember. Swimming—and not making it—across. The body in the boat hadn’t always been there to keep me from sinking in.
Ruby didn’t realize I was remembering it, though. She said, “And now I’m tired. Look at the bags under my eyes.” She lifted her eyes, and I did see bags beneath them, two purple and puffy foreign objects on her face. I saw how her hair frizzed out. How her elbows had dry spots and how a crinkle had set in deep above her brow. I saw how it had taken its toll, all of it. The effort of keeping this up was leaving physical strain on her body.
“We should sleep now,” she said. It wasn’t long before she fell deep in, drifting so far that I couldn’t rouse her.
In sleep, her face darkened. She didn’t sleep-talk at all.
We spent our last night in that house together, Ruby clinging to me like we were afloat on a raft in the boundless ocean—but we’d long run out of food and one of us would have to let go soon; one of us would have to go under before we ate the other.
I didn’t dream that night. What I did was remember. I remembered a night two years ago, on the rocks at the edge of the reservoir, a night I’d stuffed up in a paper bag crumpled up inside a sock that I’d balled up and shoved far in the back drawer of my mind, where the worst things go.
It was illegal to swim the reservoir, but we did it anyway. And it was impossible to swim across in the middle of the night, but I started to try. My sister would have propelled me all the way to the other shore—like she held a hand under my stomach, propping me up where no one could see she was doing it—except she thought too much of herself sometimes. She thought she didn’t have to help. She began to think I really could swim down to the bottom and grab hold of a souvenir.
Then I felt the water turn cold and, as the chilled spot enveloped me, the downward tugging pull.
A thought bubbled up about Olive. Had they sent an emissary for me—a cold pair of arms to put me in a sleeper hold and drag me down? Is that what was happening? Is that why I was choking on water and couldn’t get air?
Ruby is right, I was thinking. Because I felt their eyes on me, the eyes of Olive, heard them calling me, heard how they already knew my name.
And she was right about me, too. I didn’t need to breathe, the closer I got to Olive; there was enough air in my lungs to last me years.
That would have been the moment I drowned.
Because then there was dark.
Then there was nothing.
Not because I died, but because I didn’t. I didn’t die because my sister had a way to bend the world to her bidding, a talent of hers since she was small. In a panic, she did the first thing she thought to do: save me, even if it meant sacrificing someone else.
In a heartbeat, she lifted me up out of that cold, deep water. She’d sent something for me to hold on to, that rowboat drifting there at just the moment I needed to catch my breath.
I didn’t sink down to Olive, I remembered this for sure now. Someone else took my place so I could be here.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
DON’T GO