When I Cast Your Shadow

by Sarah Porter

  So Dad has noticed Ruby’s boots, and he’s scowling, and there’s going to be another fight? Oh well. I’m out of it. I’m not anything at all.

  Reality exists somewhere, maybe, but it’s not where everybody thinks it is. Not in this kitchen. Not in my bowl of yogurt and granola. Not in this family.

  Dashiell taught me that. He said that was what the drugs gave him. Transcendence. He said, Once you walk out of your own mind, Never-Ever, there’s no going back. You’ll never forget what a joke it all is. You look back at everything you were so worked up about and you know it’s just a clutter of figments. Shiny little fragments of who-cares.

  Figments, I tell myself. Dad-figment is going to have a figment-fit at sister-figment, but no one is here to care.

  “I’d throw those boots in the garbage,” the man known as Dad is saying, “except that it would provide you with an opportunity to frame yourself as the victim, Ruby. I have to say, Dashiell had a real gift for Pavlovian conditioning: he’d withhold and reject and insult you, so when he finally gave you something it assumed an outsized significance. How many pairs of shoes have I bought for you without it meaning anything to you at all?”

  I mess up then. I start being Everett again enough to worry about how Ruby’s taking it, and I look at her. She’s sitting across from me, not eating, her hands gripping the edge of the kitchen table. Red eyes, swollen nose, her mouth all bent up. But she won’t let herself cry. She’s not real, I tell myself. Ruby is not even an actual thing. I can’t totally believe it, though. She is my sister, and my twin.

  I messed up. I’m sorry. I can’t stop myself from caring about her.

  I, I, I. What a disaster. No matter how hard I try, I can’t keep the I out of my mind for long.

  “You can afford to buy shoes,” Ruby says. “Dashiell got me these with his very first paycheck from the gallery, and it wasn’t much money at all, and he didn’t have anything himself. His own shoes had these huge holes in the soles, and he had to wear them to work like that. Because you wouldn’t help him!”

  “Giving Dashiell money would not have helped him,” our dad says. Very flat, very dead, like he’s talking about a complete stranger. “Nothing would help him. That’s what you can’t see, Ruby. He was fatally flawed. Quite literally. There was darkness in him that was bound to kill him, no matter what anyone did. I’m only grateful that he didn’t take anyone else with him.”

  I stare at the granola lumps sinking into white yogurt. Down and down. Little pocks in white. I should be nothing but those little pocks, sinking and sinking. But my exercise isn’t working now.

  “He was amazing!” Ruby shouts. “He was the most brilliant person ever! And he had so many ideas, and everyone who met him loved him.” That’s it; she can’t keep herself from crying. If Dashiell was here he’d make fun of her until she snapped out of it. But our dad doesn’t know how to do that.

  “He was a monster. Immensely selfish, callous, destructive, and manipulative. The fact that he had some superficial charm only made that worse. Ruby, if you can’t see that, you’ll never be free of him.”

  Ruby pouts. I know what the problem is: she can’t totally deny that Dashiell could be a jerk a lot of the time. “Geniuses aren’t supposed to be nice,” she says at last. “Everyone knows that.”

  Our dad laughs. He laughs in a way that shows exactly where Dashiell got his laugh from. Ruby’s looking at him like she wants to beat his face in. Her ratty blue dress with the big flowers and her hair full of plastic butterflies make it hard to take her seriously. Her face is a blazing pink blob. I wish I could laugh at her too. But I know her too well for that: if there’s anything about Ruby that’s real, it’s how angry she gets.

  “Ruby…” I finally say. She doesn’t look at me. It’s like rage is tied around her in big knots and she can’t move. “Ruby Slippers,” I say, to get her attention. “Ruby-Ru!”

  “You will not call her that in my house!” It’s the first time our dad has raised his voice. So something gets to him after all. “Everett, do you understand me?”

  Ruby smiles. Back in the game, even with a tear still dripping down her fat shiny cheek. “Sorry, Dad. What isn’t Never-Ever supposed to call me?”

  She drags her hand across the table, then knocks twice.

  Morse code. Dash, dot, dot. The letter D. And Dash-Dot-Dot was our private name for him, just like he had his personal names for us that we didn’t ever use for each other. Not until this morning.

  Never-Ever. Ruby Slippers. Normally a name is just sounds, but Dashiell made it seem like our names had infinitely deep meanings. Like they had power.

  For a few seconds our dad looks like he’s about to lose it. Then he kind of smoothes himself over and goes flat again. “Even if Dashiell had been a genius, it wouldn’t have redeemed him. But he wasn’t even close. You have far more potential than he did, Ruby.”

  Dash, dot, dot, goes Ruby’s hand again. Messing with him. But self-control is one thing our dad has in truckloads, and he ignores her.

  “Believe me, I wish it were different. It isn’t natural or comfortable for a parent to think in these terms about his own child. But I’ve had to acknowledge that it would have been much better if Dashiell had never been born.”

  Ruby’s hand stops and she stares at him. Her face goes sickly white and she stands up. I can’t believe it, either. “How can you say that?”

  “I can say it because it would have been better for Everett. And for you, Ruby. And the two of you are what matters to me now.”

  Ruby picks up a vase from the table and weighs it in her hand. It’s a fancy handmade glass thing, clear blue-gray with white globs. Our dad looks at her, then at the vase, then back into her eyes. Like he knows what’s coming and he’s decided not to care.

  “Say that again,” Ruby tells him.

  “Certainly. Even worse than the pathetic tragedy that was Dashiell’s life, Ruby, is the tragedy of how you and Everett romanticize him. Even dead your brother is still a menace to you, because as long as you cherish these deluded views of him, there’s always the risk that you’ll succumb to his influence. Is that plain enough? If I had been able to see into the future twenty-two years ago then I would have done anything, absolutely anything, to save you both from that. Now go on. Throw it. I’m waiting.”

  Ruby puts the vase back down. Very carefully. “Anything,” she repeats dully. “You mean like infanticide?”

  “It would have been a great kindness,” our dad says. “For Dashiell especially.”

  Ruby leaves the room. Not stomping, not banging doors. She just slips away, which is worse, because it means she’s skipped over flipping out and gone straight to ice.

  This is what I get, then, for screwing up and letting myself be Everett again. Letting myself feel what Everett feels.

  I get the most intolerable thing I’ve ever seen.

  “Why don’t you go after her, Everett?” Dad asks. “I don’t think she’ll be speaking to me for several days. And she needs someone now.”

  I stare at him. He’s an old man, as old as some kids’ grandfathers. Silver hair, glasses, blue shirt, and that polite, stiff look on his face. He could retire already but he loves his work too much; today is Saturday but he’s going off to the hospital and he won’t be home until late.

  “You could have gotten away with it, right?” I say. “If you had murdered Dashiell?” He’s a neurosurgeon. He must know the best ways to not get caught. My chest feels wide and empty, like I don’t weigh anything anymore. I almost decide to tell him about the dreams Ruby’s been having—he doesn’t know, and maybe he wouldn’t have said those things if he knew—but then I think of how furious she would be if I did that.

  “That’s beside the point.” He shrugs. “But very probably.”

  “There was a point?” I can’t hear Ruby crying, but I hope she is. I hope she’s not too frozen for that. “There was a point to your saying that to her?”

  “I told Ruby exactly what she needed to
hear. Of course I was aware that it would hurt her. There are times when pain is necessary, Everett. This was one of them.”

  “Like surgery,” I say. I’m still staring at him. He has flat gray eyes, and they shine. I still don’t really get what he thinks he was doing, but I know he was trying to do something. He would never say so, but I know Ruby is his favorite. He hates how intense she gets but he also sort of admires it, and he wouldn’t be that mean to her for no reason.

  He’d never tell me that I had “far more potential” than Dashiell did. Just as one example. I’d be the nerdish slacker who won’t amount to much. The one where you have to say, I love and support you just the way you are, Everett, in an exaggeratedly patient voice, and then look off. Ruby would be achievement-oriented and able to handle considerable responsibility.

  “For surgery we have anesthesia, Everett. With the body we can suspend feeling and no harm is done. But we don’t have that luxury with the mind.” He pauses, mulling it over. “Anesthetize the mind, and you wind up with someone like Dashiell.”

  People almost never believe things because they’re objectively true. They just believe in whatever made-up reality hurts them the least. So that’s what I’m thinking while our dad is talking: like, that maybe hating Dash so much is the only way he has to hold off the pain of what happened.

  RUBY

  It’s a gray day and the trees up and down Carroll Street are cinnamon and singed tangerine. When the wind surges they all rock and shudder together, and I want to smash the window with my bare fists and reach out for them and ask them to take me away from here forever. Ruby Slippers is my true name, the name for the secret version of me that Dashiell knew and that I know too: the me that is too big and wild and free to fit in any room, or in my school, or especially in what other people think I am. No one is going to tell me I can’t use my real name. You will not call her that in my house!

  I hear sharp steps heading out the front door. Dad is heading to work and I wish he’d stay gone.

  Because it’s like Dad doesn’t just want to go back in time and kill Dashiell. He also wants to kill the me that Dashiell knew was in there, even if I look like some dumb pink rabbit and act like a straight-A good girl who writes teen-angst poetry, and the adults all smile behind their hands and say, Isn’t it just adorable that she’s so mad? Because they know I’ll never actually do anything about it. Or they think they know that.

  Maybe Dashiell died at twenty-two, but at least he didn’t spend his life doing and being exactly what other people wanted him to be. At least he had the balls to piss everyone off. He didn’t just obey them like some docile little weakling and live up to their lame expectations.

  My head drifts over and I see my boots again, the boots that started the whole fight because I’m presumptuous enough to love my own brother. And suddenly I’m back in the memory so intensely that my blue walls and bird-print curtains are wiped away and I’m listening to the doorbell ringing again, somehow knowing it was Dashiell although it’d been weeks since he’d even texted me …

  * * *

  “Well, hi. Look at Miss Slippers, at the door in two seconds just like she’s been waiting for me all along. Have you?” I noticed right away how healthy he looked, how his skin was clear again and his hair was shiny lush strawberry-gold and he wasn’t so scrawny anymore. Tall and gray-eyed and gorgeous as usual, but in a much better way now. It was obvious that he’d managed to keep off the drugs, so when he sort of shoved me back from the doorway and wrestled me into an off-balance hug I didn’t mind. I wasn’t supposed to let him in the house—under no conditions, Ruby!—but if he was clean it had to be okay. He even smelled better, without that sneaking rotten stink he’d had before. “I just got paid from my new job at the gallery. Wanna see how much of my check we can blow into ectoplasm? You and me, Ruby-Ru?”

  It was a Sunday but he didn’t even ask if our dad and Everett were home. They weren’t, but how did Dash know that? He was pulling back my hair to make me look at him like I was the only person in the world he’d ever wanted to see. I couldn’t hide how happy I was. “Don’t you think you should save it?”

  “Oh, pah! Don’t tell me my Ruby Slippers, my sweet lady of slip-sliding away, has gone and turned into an uptight old woman so soon? Let’s go run through the streets. Let’s make candy boats and sail them down the river.” He was softly pushing me, buffeting me around the head, and I was glad I was laughing so hard because that way he wouldn’t realize that I was also crying a little. “Or we can make paper boats out of your damned homework. Come on, maiden fair. Get your shoes and let’s go!”

  I reached to grab my sneakers off the hallway floor, but Dash was still bopping me around too much. “I’m trying!”

  Dashiell twirled me so fast I completely lost my sense of direction and flopped against the wall.

  “Oh, trying, trying. Here I come to rescue you from this vile nest of bourgeois propriety, Ru-Ru, and all you can say is that you’re trying?” He was partly kidding, because that was Dashiell’s way: to talk through strange shining layers of joking and poetry, so that you had to guess what he was really saying. He straightened the picture I’d knocked sideways and helped me to a chair, smiling slyly. “Let’s go get ice cream. I’ve heard it does simply marvelous things for your coordination.”

  I was lacing my sneakers as fast as I could.

  And then we were out and I barely managed to lock the door before Dash was tugging me down the steps—we live in the top two floors of our brownstone and rent out the bottom apartment—and we were charging up the street like a pack of wolves was after us—and for the rest of that day he stayed with me, his arm locked around my shoulder as we walked so that people we passed looked around in disbelief, that such a handsome boy was out with such a homely girl. He told me about the ways his life was changing, how excited he was, how glad to be free from his addiction, and I knew in my heart that the horrible part was finally over.

  We walked to Dumbo and got lost in a big art installation made of nets, and then Dashiell insisted that we had to buy construction paper and tape to make boats, and we went to the park and the boats we patched together were ridiculous flowery multicolored things that swirled and floundered in the East River, and someone yelled at us for littering but we didn’t care.

  And then we went on the merry-go-round that sits like a jewel in its faceted glass house. Manhattan loomed on the far side of the river, and every time we went around I watched Dashiell’s reflection stretched out on the glass, smeared and distorted so that it looked like some angelic golden tower had appeared on the New York skyline: a tower with a face. When it was over we got in line again, and rode again, our crystal reflections flying over the river and streaking through the sky.

  Then we went for ice cream, just like he’d said—only when I asked for a cone he ordered two enormous sundaes—and sat at an outdoor table where we could watch the ferries skimming through blue ripples. While we were eating he grabbed my chin and turned my head at different angles, inspecting me. “You know, Ruby-Ru, your face isn’t so bad. You’ll grow up to be a reasonably pretty woman, even if no one can see it yet.”

  “I know how I look, Dash-Dot-Dot, and if I ever forget there are a ton of boys at my school who just love to remind me. You don’t need to try and make me feel better about it. At least I’m smart, and I’d rather be a smart dogface than a beautiful moron any day.”

  “Oh, but I would never try to make you feel better about anything, Miss Slippers. I’d be happy to make you feel downright suicidal if honesty required it.” He was smiling really sweetly while he said it, though, still tipping my head around. “Now, your goal should be to become just pretty enough that people can fall in love with you, but not so beautiful that everyone fools themselves into thinking they love you when they actually hate your guts.”

  I knew right away what he had to be talking about. “You mean like you.”

  “I mean like me, Ruby Slippers. Never has a man been so despised by so
many people who profess to feel the most uncontrollable adoration for him. Why, even my own family!”

  That shocked me. “Who are you talking about?”

  “Well, not Dad, obviously. He hates me with a perfect lack of ambiguity. I’ll give him credit, Ru. The man never pretends anything different.” I knew that Dashiell had stolen almost fifteen thousand dollars from our dad, mostly by using his credit cards to buy things he could sell for drug money, but it seemed cruel to bring that up right when Dash was getting better. And anyway that wasn’t what mattered then.

  “Then who do you mean? Mom? I think you’re the only one of us she actually cares about!” I didn’t want to say it, but I had to. “Dash, you know how much I love you, right? You would never think that about me?”

  He took a slow bite of ice cream and licked the fudge off his spoon, gazing at me speculatively. “Well that’s an extravagant claim, Ruby-Ru. How am I supposed to know if you love me? Love me, that is, without some contrary treacherous feeling lurking below the surface? You haven’t turned against me yet, but who knows if you will one day?”

  “Dash, I always stand up for you, and I always—” I always miss you so much that it feels like my heart is leaking blood, maybe just a trickle, but real blood, whenever you stay away and ignore us for long.

  “Love is one of those things that proves itself over time, Miss Slippers. From that perspective you’re too young to say you love anybody. Sixteen? For God’s sake, girl, what is that? You haven’t lived long enough yet to demonstrate love. We’ll just have to wait and find out.”

  “Dashiell…” My eyes were getting hot and my face felt swollen. I knew it was making me look repulsive.

  “This isn’t a discussion worth having, Ruby Slippers. Now stop before you ruin our perfect day together.” He swatted me, but gently, and got up and chucked his half-eaten sundae in the garbage. “Ugh. Enough of that. Recent studies have shown that hot fudge induces excessive mawkishness in adolescent girls. We should go for cocktails instead. Let’s get you plastered. An excellent antidote!”