by Sarah Porter
“You seem fine.” He says it almost like that’s the problem, though. “Um, Ruby? Did you have any dreams?”
That wallops me with surprise, I admit, because it hadn’t even crossed my mind. “Oh! I didn’t dream at all. I mean, now that you mention it…” I search through what little memory I have of last night, and all I come up with is an impression of profound, velvety, purplish warmth. Complete serenity. “God, no wonder I feel so much better! After two straight months of nightmares—no, nothing.” I smile at Everett where he stands watching me from under his sloppy brown hair. “I guess Dashiell decided to give me a break, already.”
I meant it as a joke, but I can tell that Everett’s not taking it that way. At first he sort of recoils and then he forces an incredibly tortured smile onto his face. “I guess so.”
“Why?” I ask after a moment—because it’s getting harder not to notice that something’s really wrong with him. “Did you?”
Everett hesitates. “I guess I had your nightmare instead.”
“About him?”
“Yeah. Him.”
I must be so happy from pure relief at the burden of those dreams being lifted, because now I can see the same heaviness dragging Everett toward the floor. It would be too cruel to say, Well, you said you wanted to dream about him. “What happened? It wasn’t—” You didn’t dream that he murdered you, did you?
“It wasn’t like your dreams. I mean, I knew he wasn’t alive again. It was a dream about his ghost.”
“Okay,” I say, but Everett is still staring at me like he’s waiting for a bigger reaction—and in fact my heart is speeding up. Some delicate, alien tremor seems to lift through my chest and flood the back of my head. “Like, you dreamed he was haunting us?”
“I dreamed his ghost was looking for someone to possess.”
There’s a quickening flourish somewhere inside me. I get a bizarre impression of emotions streaming through my mind without actually belonging to me: a thick seethe of amusement and irritation. It makes me feel a little sick, and a little cloudy. I lean back against the wall and look out at the trees: boughs arching like the arms of swimmers in a sea of infinite vibrations.
“Ruby!” Everett says. He lunges across my bed and starts shaking me, hard. “Ruby, don’t!”
“Don’t what? Everett, you know you can stop attacking me all the time, right?”
“You were phasing out.” He’s gone bone white and his lower lip is shaking. “I could tell.”
Phasing out, not spacing out? There’s something off and awful about the phrase.
“I was just thinking about what you’d said.” Is that true? It felt deeper, more engulfing, than regular thinking, somehow. “About Dashiell possessing people. He kind of did that even when he was alive, right? He had such a vivid personality that being around him—it could feel like he was taking over your mind. Do you know what I mean?”
Everett gawks at me and bites his lower lip. I think he’s about to cry.
“So that’s probably why you had that dream, Ever,” I say. I’m trying to be reassuring but I don’t think it’s doing much good. “Dash’s ghost possessing people—it was probably a metaphor your brain came up with. A metaphor for the kind of person he was. It’s okay.”
“Ruby. It wasn’t a metaphor.”
It seems out of character for Everett to be so grim, especially about a dream, and I’m about to ask what he means by that when we both hear the doorbell and then our dad’s steps going to answer it. My bedroom is on our bottom floor along with the kitchen and living room, so we’re close enough to hear right away that it isn’t anything like a delivery; that our dad is first chilly, then exasperated, and that the person who’s out there is a girl, pleading with him. I’m instantly up and sliding out of my room as quietly as I can with Everett close behind me, so we both see her at the same time. She’s standing very near our dad just inside the front door, leaning in like she’s trying to insinuate her way deeper into the house.
Long, sleek black hair with heavy bangs around a pale face so beautiful it looks almost iridescent. Crimson lipstick. A ragged, antique lace dress, skintight down to her hips; the lace is dyed in pink and blue blotches. Little black granny boots. I’ve never seen her before but I know right away who she must be, and I can tell Everett does too, without even glancing at him. She’s too stunning to have belonged to anyone but Dashiell.
Her belly is a tiny bit too round for how thin she is.
“I should have known the instant his name was mentioned,” our dad snaps, “that a request for money was in the offing. I’m sure you must realize that I’m not legally responsible for anything Dashiell did. I have my surviving children to consider.”
“But you won’t consider your grandchild at all? Dr. Bohnacker?” Tears form two shining rivulets down her cheeks. “I was planning to get an abortion, but there was no way I could do that once Dash was dead, when I knew that this was all that was left of him. You can—you have to understand that!” Her voice is satin smooth and she reaches out to grab his arm; he shakes her off. Somehow I know he’d be gentler with her if she weren’t so outrageously beautiful. If she wasn’t gazing at him with that palpitating sweetness.
“I don’t believe giving you money would be in that child’s best interest. If that is in fact my grandchild, then I have all the more reason to refuse.” At first I don’t understand what he’s driving at, but then it all falls into place: he suspects she’s on drugs the way Dashiell used to be. He thinks her silky eagerness and wide eyes are all about suckering him into feeding her addiction even while she’s pregnant, and he despises her for it. She’s so pearl-skinned and flawless that I never would have thought of anything like that—Dashiell looked kind of tattered whenever he was using—but maybe Dad is right? “Perhaps you should reconsider while you still have the chance. That, I would be prepared to help you with. How many weeks are you exactly?”
She looks a little shocked, and then she notices me standing fifteen feet away from her in the hallway’s crooked shadows. “You must be Ruby. Ruby Slippers. Do you want me to kill your brother’s baby?”
“No,” I say, but I can feel myself starting to hate her too. Syrupy-sweet vampire princess. She’s talking like she loved Dash so much, but I sure didn’t see her at his funeral. I know somehow that she usually wears baby-blue lipstick and that she put on the red today because she thought our dad would like it better; I know it the way you know things in dreams, with the crystalline certainty of having seen it all before, over and over again. “I want you to give the baby to us. We’ll do a better job raising it than you will.”
Our dad’s eyebrows shoot up—partly at what I’ve said and maybe also because he’s just registered my hair—and Everett jabs me in the back.
For being rude to her. Of course.
Our dad sighs. “I will pay your rent once. Once only. How much is it?”
She softens her gaze and I get the feeling she needs to use all her willpower not to stick her hand out right away. “Almost four thousand. Dr. Bohnacker, I am so, so grateful.…”
He snorts at the number; she does live in Manhattan but that’s still a lot of money. “How much exactly?”
A pause. “Three thousand, seven hundred. And then I have to pay the electric.”
He nods. “I’ll mail the check directly to your landlord, then, Miss Kittering, if you’ll be so good as to send me a copy of the invoice. Now please go. My children have been through enough without having to listen to this.”
She’s a lot less grateful now than she was a moment ago. Her brows draw together and her mouth tweaks. “So it’s worth almost four thousand dollars to you just to stop me from talking to your little Ruby?”
He actually smiles: at seeing her drop her angel-kitten pose, at her cynicism finally coming out to play. “You understand me perfectly.”
“What are you afraid I’ll say to her? Do you think I know something about the way Dashiell died that she’s not mature enough to hear?” Her s
mile tightens now like she’s slurping down bitter juice. Our dad doesn’t even deign to answer, just opens the door and stands there holding it and sort of crushing her personal space, though without touching her, like he can drive her out by increasing the air pressure.
She keeps looking at me for as long as she can get away with it. Everett is tucked partly into my doorway, so maybe she can’t get such a straight shot at him. I’m not trying to look friendly, though, and after a long moment she gives up and turns her back on us. Her dress swishes behind her as she goes, blue and pink like a captive sunset. When our dad slams the door his face is crimped with distaste.
Dashiell exhibited truly crappy judgment sometimes, but there is no way he could have been serious about her.
“I didn’t even get to ask her name!” Everett says, coming out into the hall. “I couldn’t say anything.”
Our dad gazes at him. “Paige Kittering. Not that she calls herself that, of course. Galadriel or something equally inane.”
Everett scowls. “Not Galadriel. No chance.”
“Probably not,” Dad agrees vaguely, but I can tell he’s thinking about something else.
“Probably Vampire Barbie,” I say, and he cracks up laughing while Everett glares.
“A very astute guess!” our dad says. Then he looks sharply my way. “Ruby?”
Do you still hate me? he means. Are you speaking to me again?
I barely know what I’m doing when I run up and hug him. He’s squeezing me and stroking my hair as I start to think about what Paige said: that my dad was paying her off so she wouldn’t spill some terrible secret about the way Dashiell died. That was one gorgeously timed comment, coming at the perfect moment to send all my dark suspicions flaring up again, leaping and spinning.
I know she did it on purpose. I know she was poisoning my mind as part of some evil game, probably just crude stupid blackmail. Is she trying to make me suspect my dad? Well, if that’s what she wants, then it’s a pretty good sign that I should look in any direction but his.
I still don’t know what Dash needs from me, but I’ve got to start somewhere.
EVERETT
Ruby is Ruby. Most of the time. She does homework and goes out to a salon to get her hacked-up hair trimmed and layered until it looks almost like something a reasonable person might do on purpose. It’s not like an epileptic fit interpreted in hair anymore, at least. She cooks everyone dinner, and tells big dramatic stories about the Peloponnesian War with her hands waving. I know it’s mostly an act: to convince me she’s okay enough that I won’t mention anything about rocks and the East River, to convince herself that whatever weirdness is going on in her head isn’t a big deal. I know she has to feel something happening to her, even if she doesn’t understand what it is. She’s almost overdoing acting like herself. An identity crisis, Dashiell called it, and now it’s like she’s overcompensating for that by playing Ruby on a million imaginary TVs.
Because she isn’t Ruby all the time. There are moments where she phases right out of herself, slips into some hole behind her brain, and then she’s just gone. I keep watching her whenever we’re in the same room together and I’m learning to spot the signs. It always starts with her looking really spaced out and a scattery shimmer breaking up her stare. Her rounded shoulders roll back, square off and tilt, her back stretches sexily, and this knowing smirk takes over her mouth. Then Dashiell looks out of her eyes, and every single time he turns her head until he’s staring straight at me with her chin lifted, daring me to recognize him. He never says anything, and it never lasts for more than a few seconds, but I must catch him controlling her that way half a dozen times.
Once when our dad is with us in the kitchen Dashiell rolls Ruby’s eyes in his direction, grins, and lifts one finger up to her lips. Hush hush, Never-Ever. Don’t say a word to anyone. There’s a good little nerdling. God, and for a few hours there I’d almost managed to convince myself it’s not him, that I’d just had a dream or even a hallucination; whatever it takes so I could tell myself it isn’t freaking Dashiell. But it is. It has to be. Each time I see it happen, the reek of his whole way of being just gets stronger.
It is the slowest and most sickening Sunday I’ve ever lived through, and whenever I’m not watching Ruby for her next outbreak of dead brother I’m picturing her, Paige-who-calls-herself-something-else. Paige, who ground me into nothingness by just glancing in my general direction; one look from her and I knew I was a meaningless assemblage of atoms, something that might cause minor eye irritation until you managed to flush it out. I’m picturing what Dashiell must have done to her every night, her black hair whipping the pillows and his hands squeezing her hips. She was probably so hopelessly in love with him that she’d do anything he asked and then kiss him all over his chest afterward.
Dashiell always got everything he wanted, and what do you know? He still does. Even now that he’s rotting in the ground and I’ve flung shovelfuls of dirt on his damned ass he goes on smugly sitting in my sister’s brain, winking at me, knowing I won’t tell Ruby anything—because after yesterday I know she’s way too close to cracking up already.
Me and Dashiell, we’re both waiting for the night.
* * *
I pretend to go to bed to keep our dad happy, but I’m not about to lie there like a lump until Dashiell sneaks in on me. At around one I get up and walk quietly downstairs, then sit on the bottom step. I have a good view of Ruby’s door from here. After that there’s nothing to do but wait. Cars go by in the street outside and throw light through the living room windows. Every time that happens, the shadow of the stairs’ railings spins on the wall beside me like a carousel. It’s kind of hypnotic and my head starts to tip over, then jerk up again.
I check my phone. Two thirty-eight a.m. The bastard’s probably keeping me waiting on purpose.
On my left I can see the dark blocks of living room furniture and the TV like some creepy square black pool. On the right there’s the hallway with its vine wallpaper and a row of low bookcases and Ruby’s door with no sounds behind it. The longer I look at it the less it seems like a door and the more like an abstract pale trapezoid hanging in space. I’m slipping again.
Then my head jerks up. The angle of the door is different now.
Dashiell comes swaggering out, wearing Ruby’s body like he’s annoyed that it doesn’t fit right. He spots me on the step and smiles. “Never-Ever. Are you experiencing difficulty sleeping, and on a school night at that? You know, if anything is troubling you, you can always unburden yourself to me.”
I stare for a while, trying just one more time to persuade myself that it isn’t him, and he leans there and lets me look him over. Ruby’s body is as chubby and curvy as ever in floppy plaid pajama bottoms and this stupid T-shirt with a cow on it, and it’s all totally unlike him. But Dashiell-ness blasts through anyway, in the way her head tips back and her gaze sort of slants across her cheekbones, in the ironic pucker of her mouth. And then there’s the voice. Now that I’ve had time to think about it, you can still tell it’s coming through Ruby’s vocal cords. It sounds like a girl’s voice pitched way down. But every little shift in the tone is just too perfectly Dashiell to be an imitation. It’s impossible that he’s here and talking, but anyone acting this well? That would be double or triple impossible. So logic insists that it’s him, him all over again. Great job on the goddamn dying, Dash.
“Let’s go have a seat in the living room,” Dash says. “We wouldn’t want to wake anyone.”
So I get up and follow him in there and sit on our big red sofa. I need to know what he wants if I’m going to have any chance of getting rid of him. I’m sorry he’s dead, I really am, but once you’re dead you have a serious moral obligation to stay that way and let everybody else recover from what a crazy jerk you were.
He turns on a side lamp and settles in too close to me. It isn’t much light and there are still big piles of shadow everywhere.
“Why do you wait until Ruby’s asleep?” I
ask. “There were times today when you could have talked to me, if you’ve got something you need to say.”
Dashiell shrugs. “Well, it’s simpler this way, isn’t it, Never-Ever? When Miss Slippers is out cold there isn’t the hassle of some competing consciousness elbowing for position. And then if I displace her too often when she’s awake she’ll start to notice the lacunae: blackout confetti scattered around where her mind should be. I don’t want to cause my baby sister any more distress than strictly necessary.”
“You don’t have to be here at all,” I say. “It’s seriously creepy that you’re doing this at all.” Just rot already, I think, but how can you say that to your own brother?
“Why, this is my home too, Never-Ever,” he says, and there’s a weird flash where I’m not sure if he’s talking about the house, or about Ruby. “It surely belongs to me as much as it does to you. And I’ve already put you and Ruby at an advantage as far as inheritance goes. You heard our father today, fretting over keeping every nickel for his surviving children. How ecstatic do you think he must be, that I’ve spared him the unpleasantness of writing me out of his will by kicking off in the first bloom of my youth?”
I’m pretty sure he’s just bringing up that conversation so I’ll know that he’s always there, watching us and listening to everything we say, even when it seems like Ruby is completely in control of herself. Does he ever sleep?
“Whatever,” I say. “That doesn’t make up for what you’re doing at all.”
“And there’s poor Paige, lurching around in her delicate condition and begging for scraps,” Dash says. He tips Ruby’s head so her slashed hair falls across her left eye. “Ruby Slippers didn’t seem like she was overly taken with Paige, did she?” He smiles. “But you were.”
“Shut up,” I tell him. But there was no shutting Dashiell up when he was alive and I know there won’t be now.
“Ah, but you must feel immense sympathy for her. On her own like that, just nineteen years old, with the father of her child abruptly deceased? She’s in desperate need of help, and you could be the face of that help when it comes to her. Her hero. Not much to look at, maybe, but with a nobility of character that commands attention. Doesn’t that sound like something you might enjoy?”
