“Not that long. Well . . . I started at noon,” he admitted. “Then I had a minor heart attack, but now I’m super rested.”
Ruby nodded as though beautiful boys built snow forts in her honor all the time. And even in his puffy coat, Dov looked beautiful, with the orange glow of the fire splashed across his skin, his gray beanie pushed carelessly back over his black hair, and his dark brown eyes lit like candlewicks.
At her silence, his forehead wrinkled. “We don’t have to stay out here. We can go in, or to a movie or something—”
“No, no, this is fine. This is good.” She settled into the chair beside him, positioned so they were both staring into the fire pit. They were close enough that with their elbows on the canvas armrests, their coats swished against one another. Every noise was made louder, every hint of contact electric, by her growing certainty that this was a date.
According to Cece, of course it was a date. “He’s inviting you to a private bonfire,” she’d said on the phone when Ruby had called her, just after the text exchange. “Obviously he likes you.”
“But why?”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know him. He doesn’t know me.”
“So? You’re pretty and funny and mysterious. Of course he wants to get to know you.” She sighed, as if explaining simple math, then said, “You don’t have to go, Bebe. But if it makes you happy . . . I think you deserve to have fun.” Cece’s voice was soft with what Ruby could only interpret as pity.
To stop herself from following that downward spiral of thought, she nodded to a box of organic graham crackers in Dov’s lap. “What’s that?”
He offered it to her. “This was the best I could do, s’mores-wise. I forgot to go out and pick stuff up, with all the shoveling. But here.” He bent over and picked up a mug and a thermos from the ground by his feet. “I made tea.”
“Spicy or mild?”
He laughed, then from a pocket on the side of his chair, he fished out an almost-full bottle of Canadian Mist. “That’s up to you.” He had his own mug nestled in his chair’s cup holder, she noticed.
Glancing back toward his house, she took the bottle. “Your parents are . . .”
“Mom’s working out of town, and Dad’s chaperoning Talia’s ski club trip. They went up to Eaton Mountain, and they’re staying in town so they can hit the slopes early.”
She’d known that Talia was in the ski club, and the French club, and mock trial—she moved quickly, for a new girl. But Ruby had been paying extra attention, now that Talia was important (and not just in an integral-cog-in-the-vast-and-unfathomable-machinery-of-the-human-race way, but important to Cece, and thus, to Ruby). She’d been observing them at lunch. Yesterday, Cece had blushed down to her T-shirt collar and smiled shyly when she saw Ruby watching, and Ruby had smiled back. But the one time Talia met her eyes, Dov’s sister had cocked an eyebrow challengingly and looked away in her own sweet time.
“Your sister seems . . . nice.”
“I don’t think I’d call her that. I don’t think she’d call herself that. But she’s a good person. She’s a good sister. It’s not her fault she’s brilliant. I think it’s probably really tough, actually. Because everyone expects that whatever she ends up doing after high school, she’ll be mind-blowingly great at it. Like, change-the-world kind of great. That’s a lot of pressure, if you think about it. And Mom . . . she has, like, really strong ideas about what she wants Talia to do. Following in her noble footsteps and everything.”
Ruby filled her mug with steaming tea and a thick splash of whiskey. “What about you?”
“Not so much.”
“Sorry.”
“No, it’s cool! It’s good. I’m not really great at any one thing, especially not my mom’s thing.”
“Why, what’s her thing?”
He took a sip from his own mug, and by his wince, she guessed there to be a good amount of whiskey in it. “She’s . . . into helping people.”
“Like, she does charity work?”
He laughed. “Definitely not. More like, uh, holistic medicine.”
“Ah.” Ruby said. “Crystals and candles and stuff? Dahlia—my sister—she’s into that.”
“Not you?”
“I would say that I am firmly science-based.”
“Yeah, I’m not really into it, either. Or, I don’t know, it’s not into me,” he corrected, though that made little sense to Ruby. “And I know Mom’s sad about that sometimes, even if she never says so. But it’s okay. It kind of means I can do anything, you know? I could be in a band that sells three whole albums on iTunes, ever. I could go teach English in Morocco. I could work on a chicken farm in Paris, and I wouldn’t even have to be a brilliant chicken farmer. I could just be.” The way he said it, he seemed in awe of the idea.
Ruby was envious. She would never feel that kind of freedom.
Unless . . .
“What about you?” he asked. “What do you want to do after we graduate?”
She didn’t want to lie. That seemed wrong, when he’d just given her something personal. So she hedged. “When I was a kid, I wanted to grow up and be a scientist. Just a generic scientist in a white lab coat I guess—I didn’t know how many fields of study there were, or even what a ‘field of study’ was. But I was Carl Sagan for Halloween when I was eleven. Like, I combed my hair over and wore a tan suit from Goodwill that my sister chopped up, and a turtleneck, and I carried around a library copy of Carl Sagan’s The Cosmic Connection.”
“I’m shit at science, but that sounds fantastic.”
“It is. He wrote it to try to get people back into science in the seventies, after the Apollo missions didn’t find life on the moon and everyone peaced out. I have this part memorized . . . wait.” She gulped her tea for courage. “‘There is a place with four suns in the sky—red, white, blue, and yellow; two of them are so close together that they touch, and star-stuff flows between them. I know of a world with a million moons. I know of a sun the size of the Earth—and made of diamond. There are atomic nuclei a few miles across which rotate thirty times a second. There are tiny grains between the stars, with the size and atomic composition of bacteria. There are stars leaving the Milky Way, and immense gas clouds falling into it. There are turbulent plasmas writhing with X- and gamma-rays and mighty stellar explosions. There are, perhaps, places which are outside our universe. The universe is vast and awesome, and for the first time we are becoming a part of it.’”
Dov whistled, and in the cold, steam billowed from his lips. “I kind of meant little you in a suit and comb-over, but that’s pretty fantastic, too. I was probably just Batman when I was eleven, because I dressed up as Batman for, like, three years in a row. For Purim, too.”
“Purim is like Jewish Halloween?” Realizing that might be a terrible or offensive question, and that she might be a little drunk already, she wished she could take it back. “Sorry, sorry, forget I said that.”
But Dov laughed again. “No, it’s fine. I mean there’s a whole long story behind it, but it’s not a big holiday. We’re not even that religious. We had to convert when we were little and everything, since my mom isn’t Jewish. She’s . . . kind of complicated. But mostly we did it because our saba and safta, Dad’s parents, wanted us to. I don’t even know if I believe in any of it.” He chewed thoughtfully on a graham cracker. “I believe in things I don’t absolutely understand, though. That doesn’t mean they aren’t real. I don’t know if anything’s impossible.”
A shudder ran up Ruby’s spine.
Dov slid his arm across the armrest and took her free hand. “Cold?”
There were layers of Thinsulate and fleece between their palms, certainly too much fluff to feel the heat from his skin. And the air just outside the globe of the fire was freezing. But she didn’t feel cold.
She felt electric, and powerful.
They sat for a long while, watching the fire burn up the fuel on the logs. Sometimes they talked—Dov about the dozen or so places
he’d lived, his favorite being St. Petersburg, Florida, where they rode Jet Skis instead of snowmobiles all winter long. Ruby, about being a Maine native, and about Cece, and the one time she and the cousins had convinced her to go snowmobiling, when she’d crashed Mikki’s ride within seconds.
Sometimes she and Dov sat there, glove in mitten, silent, watching the flames crackle down, diminishing in the pit.
When they were low, she snuck a glance at Dov, his face flickering in the dark. Emboldened by their nearness and, probably, by Canadian Mist, she broke the pleasant silence. “Can I ask you something?”
He leaned forward to set his mug down but didn’t drop her hand, instead pulling lightly on her arm until he’d righted himself. “Sure.”
“Why’d you want me to come over tonight?”
Swiveling a bit, he looked at Ruby, full lips parting, eyebrows folding. “What do you mean?”
“I’m not talking, like, ulterior motives or anything. Unless you have those. And that’s cool. But you don’t even know me,” she said, repeating what she’d tried to tell Cece. “You’ve been here for six or seven months, and we’ve never talked before. So why now?”
Rubbing his chin with his glove, Dov squinted into the fire. “I guess because you haven’t been around. I never saw you out, even with Cece. Maybe we would’ve talked, I don’t know. I wish we had. And I thought . . . if we were alone, this could be our chance. Because there’s some stuff I wanted to tell you, before we hang out again. I mean, if you wanted to. Hang out again.”
The soft hope in his voice, and the solid feel of his hand, sent another shiver through her.
His fingers contracted around Ruby’s. “Now you’re cold. Come on, we can talk inside.” He dropped her hand at last to put out the fire, which took a while—long enough for her to top off her mug with Canadian Mist and drink it down. He poked through the logs with the shovel, thinning the flames into almost nothing. Then he spread the remains around, picked up a small bucket of water and poured it slowly over the bowl. The ashes steamed, and he added more water until nothing billowed from the pile. By the time he was done, he had to reach down and pry Ruby out of the camping chair—her limbs were frozen stiff, though at her core she was warm and fluid.
Maybe it was Dov, or maybe it was whiskey. Probably it was both.
Back up the snow path through the pitch-black yard, they surfaced under the glow of the lampposts along the driveway. They started for the front door, but Dov held her back. “Damn, I forgot my keys out back.” They had left their chairs, taking only the bottle of whiskey with them. “It’s fine, this one’s always open.” He let them in through the garage, and they spilled out into the bright kitchen. He set the bottle, its contents considerably emptier than it’d been a couple of hours ago, on the counter beside a tall glass vase of roses the exact blue-violet of the Orion Nebula. A plastic tag speared through their middle read Get Well Soon!
Flowers for Mrs. Mahalel?
Peeling off coats and gloves and boots, shedding half their bodyweight in winter layers, Ruby nearly moaned as the blood came back into her fingers and toes.
He winced sympathetically. “Can I get you a blanket?”
“I’m fine,” she said, teeth chattering in her skull. She tugged off her hat and freed her trapped hair, which fanned out around her face with static.
Dov laughed, his own skin flushed. He reached out and smoothed the strands from her face, and then—
There was a natural phenomenon Ruby had read about, completely unexplained and so rare that until the sixties, scientists believed it was a myth: ball lightning. It appeared in stories throughout history, tales of luminous electric spheres, from pea-sized to meters wide, spit from the sky during storms. Of fire that chewed through stone and smashed wooden beams, that split ships’ masts, that singed the earth as it rolled slowly along, that sounded like cannons and smelled like sulfur.
As the warm pad of Dov’s thumb swept her icy cheek, she could swear that electricity rolled from his fingertips, a bright ball that sparkled and singed and sounded like gunfire in her ears. It should’ve hurt. It should’ve been terrifying.
She wanted more.
Ruby wrapped a hand around his forearm, fingers pressed into the ropey muscles beneath.
He slid his palm around the back of her neck.
She ran her fingers across the shoulders of his oversized plaid button-down and along the collar, skimming her fingers through the hair at his nape. He shivered under her touch, and leaned down, eyes bright and unfocused. Then they were kissing.
Ruby had kissed boys before. But her few samplings were limp things, dry lips and surprise tongue and misaligned noses, and no real thought behind it but Is this all?
Not this kiss. This was something else.
They traveled from the kitchen, down the hall, to the bottom of the staircase that way—tangled in each other, hands moving and lips crushing. There was a warm bud inside her chest like the cherry on a cigarette, bright in a dark room. It burned hotter as they stumbled up the stairs, pausing to kiss on the third step, the landing, and by the time they reached Dov’s bedroom right at the top, it was a star going supernova. It was wonderful and horrible, like the death of Ruby’s heart foretold by one last, awesome explosion.
Maybe this is real kissing, she thought as he fumbled at his doorknob, back pressed into the door, every part of her body pressed into his. Everywhere and not enough. Maybe this is wanting, she thought. Maybe this is love.
She slid her hand up, playing at the hem of his shirt and just under, the skin above his jeans smooth and hot.
Suddenly, Dov grabbed for her wrist. “Wait.” His dark eyes refocused a little, panic surfacing. “We shouldn’t . . . we can’t do this yet.” Ruby didn’t have time to feel slighted, because that was when she heard the voices.
They were braided together into one low chant, but still recognizable. There was Polina’s voice, steely and gruff; there was her mother’s voice, velvet and gravel and fresh in her mind; there were great-aunts and great-grandmothers and cousins separated by generations. Voices she’d never heard, but knew they belonged to her. They spoke Russian, and though she didn’t know the language, she somehow knew these words:
Prinyat’ vse.
Take everything.
She shoved off from Dov’s body and stumbled away, the impossible lightning gone, her vision clearing, too. But she didn’t remember the edge of the staircase behind her until she realized she was falling.
Dov grabbed for her at snail speed as she teetered backward.
He missed.
Ruby had too much time to look up at him while she floated slowly away. She saw the horror on his face, the way his reddened lips shaped around her name, the breath too tangled up inside his throat to make a sound. She wanted to answer him, but the collapsed core of her heart was lodged inside her own throat.
It took forever to fall, and then, no time at all.
• Twenty •
Nothing cleared the mind like a broken bone.
Whatever electric fog she’d been lost in at the top of the stairs, Ruby was awake by the time she smacked into the landing, rolled, and crashed to the bottom. She heard the sound, like a nut splintering inside a nutcracker. Lying flat out, the wind knocked from her lungs, she felt it even as she gasped for air. Her right ankle was wrong. Not painful, but promising pain.
Then it arrived, like a deep bruise but so much worse.
Dov thundered down the steps, jumping over her twisted body. “Shit, shit, shit, shit,” he said, coming to rest beside her on the floor, his careful hand on top of her head.
It’s fine, she tried to say—a silly promise to make after hearing the celery snap of your own bones—but she hadn’t got her breath back, and all she could do was lie there, wheezing.
“What hurts? Is it your back?”
It was a little hard to concentrate, and by the time she shook her head, he wasn’t looking anymore, patting around in his pockets instead. He pulled out his p
hone, already dialing. Maybe it was 911—he was calling an ambulance to come and get her and her ankle-that-was-not-an-ankle—but then he swore, and hung up without speaking.
Is 911 out to dinner? she thought stupidly.
Dov’s eyes burned down on her. “Just wait here, okay?” he said, suddenly calm.
Ruby tried to laugh, and it vibrated through her body, kicked up a dark cloud of nausea. Then she was alone, until his face swam into view once more, jaw tense.
He was holding the vase of purple roses from the kitchen.
“Ffffuck?” she managed to gasp, because it seemed he’d left her on the floor to bring her a Get Well Soon gift.
Then, instead of handing them to her, he did something insane. With force, he smashed the vase into the hardwood. From her strange angle, Ruby watched the water puddle across the floor, glass glittering among the flowers. Kneeling down, Dov pressed one hand into the mess, swearing under his breath as he ground his palm into thorns and shards and petals, until blood wisped out into the water like red ink.
She gaped as he wrapped his raw, blood-slick hand around her wrist. There was heat coming off his skin, and suddenly it wasn’t just in her wrist but in her leg. Not so different from the fire in her chest moments before, but this time, no dead ancestors whispered to her. She heard only the whoosh of blood, a heartbeat in her ears, in her throat, in her bones. So loud, it took her a moment to realize she was shouting at Dov while he murmured to her—or to himself, she couldn’t tell—and her whole leg was aflame beneath her jeans, and then . . .
It wasn’t.
She was herself, perfectly fine, folded over on the floor. Her ankle was an ankle and not some hinged, busted thing. She wasn’t even out of breath.
Ruby sat up in time to watch Dov slump to his side, his face a horrible shade between brown and gray.
“What . . . just . . .” Ruby began.
Braced with one elbow, Dov turned and vomited on the stairs.
Resisting the urge to scramble backward in revulsion, she crawled forward, careful to avoid the glass. Tentatively, she cupped one hand around the back of his neck. The skin felt hot and clammy. Where moments ago, she couldn’t stop herself from touching Dov, she now stopped herself from pulling away. There was no lightning this time, but a faint crackle, like the last heat of a dying fire. “Dov? What did you do?”
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