I could see Ruby lit up by a flashlight. This was the summer she was nineteen. She was beautiful, everyone said so, but that wasn’t all she was. Her hair was deep brown and long down the length of her back. She had a smattering of freckles, just enough to be worth counting, across her nose. She wore boots every day, even with sundresses; and she never left the house without sunglasses, the kind with the giant, tinted lenses that celebrities wear while lounging on some distant tropical beach. When Ruby slipped the glasses up on her forehead to keep the hair from her eyes, when she let you see her whole face, she got the sort of reactions a girl from a magazine might get if she flashed what was under her shirt. The stopped traffic, the stares. Ruby just had this light about her that can’t be explained in words—you had to see her.
I was an echo of her. We both had the long dark hair, the sometimes freckles. We shared not just a mother, but also preferences in sugary-sweet foods and slow, sad songs; tendencies toward motion sickness and talking in our sleep; our knees went purple in cold; our hiccups could last days; and our telephone voices were nearly indistinguishable, so she could pretend to be me or I could pretend to be her if we wanted to fool you into leaving a message.
More than that, we had the same recessive earlobes, identical pinkie fingers and toes. But those were inconsequential details. Who ever called a girl beautiful because of her toes? In reality I was a pencil drawing of a photocopy of a Polaroid of my sister—you could see the resemblance in a certain light, if you were seeking it out because I told you first, if you were being nice.
Only then, all those eyes on me in the water, did I wonder if this was what it felt like to be my sister. To be looked at this way, always. To be seen.
She was gazing down at me, down from a very long distance, but straight-centered into my eyes. “You ready?” she asked, and sent a smile that was meant for me only, understood to be mine. I’m not sure how she thought I’d manage to come back with a souvenir from Olive, but I couldn’t ask her, not now, not in front of everyone. I knew she was already gathering the pieces of the story she’d tell tomorrow—Ruby loved her stories—and here I was, the star.
“Ready,” I said.
This would be the story of my crossing, and with the twenty bucks for my effort we’d ignore the overdue phone bill and buy dinner at the Little Bear.
This would not be the story of how I drowned at the deepest point of the reservoir the summer I was fourteen—Ruby would never let it happen.
“Okay, Chlo,” Ruby called to me, “show them you can do it. Bring us back something good! . . . Go.”
The boys at the edge of the water were shooting waves in my direction, getting the current going, giving me my push. And they looked at me the way they looked at her, because it was dark, because it was late, because they were confused or high or drunk or all three, and I didn’t mind it, didn’t mind it at all.
I started swimming.
It was night, so I knew there was no way they could see how far out I’d gone. When I was moving this fast, there wasn’t a flashlight that could find me. I cast out quick past the point at which the rocky ground gave way, when I could touch my toe to the bottom and then when I couldn’t, when it felt as if there was no bottom at all. I moved out into the depths where no one could catch me.
I could hear them back on shore, and then I couldn’t. I kept swimming.
The water spread out all around me, familiar and warm. As I swam I didn’t keep my eyes open; I knew the way. And then I felt it, all at once, how as I darted forward the water turned cold, seeming at least ten degrees cooler than before, and I knew I’d gotten close to where Ruby always said we’d find the center of Olive. Its heart, she used to say, was in the middle of the reservoir, at its deepest, bottommost point.
My legs got heavy as I kicked past the cold spot, as if the current had turned thicker there, a tugging downward pull.