Free The Moon Sisters by Therese Walsh Page A

help,” she said. “I’m Ruby, by the way.”
    “Surf,” said Hobbs. “You know the rules.”
    “It’s not like she’s going to—”
    “You know the rules,” he said.
    “Fine. You can call me Surf,” Ruby said, a second before Hobbs poured the vodka.
    I felt the moan in my chest, but not even I could hear it over the relentless clang-clatter of the train.
    Ruby guided me down the car, until we sat closer to the others but not too close, with our backs against the wall across from the open door. The world beyond blurred in greens and browns, familiar to me but causing an unfamiliar pinch of anxiety along my spine. Colored shapes tumbled around in my vision like earlier from the noise, but they were more polite now—not covered in awkward points or raining into my face like a child’s tower of tumbledown blocks.
    “It’s primo seating, unless you really can’t see, and then who cares, right?” Ruby said, and the strength of her high-wire voice put me at ease.
    “My central vision’s gone,” I said. “I can tell you’re a redhead but could only guess the color of your eyes.” Blue, maybe. Green. “I could tell if you stuck your tongue out, but not the exact expression on your face.” I smiled when Ruby stuck out her tongue. “I saw that.”
    “So what’s a partially blind girl like you doing on a train like this?”
    “Trying to reach Cranberry Glades of the Monongahela Forest. My mother was writing a story set there when she died. I brought her ashes.”
    “To scatter?”
    “To see a ghost light.”
    I expected questions, criticism, but Ruby just said, “That’s a new one.”
    We spent the next hour talking about everything and nothing. I told Ruby about home—Babka’s shop and Papa’s talent with the fiddle. I told her about my synesthesia, which she said sounded like taking peyote, a Texas whacky plant that, in Ruby’s words, “makes you see some seriously weird shit.”
    I didn’t mention Jazz.
    Ruby, who insisted that I not call her Surf, told me she’d once lived on the West Coast in a house with a five-car garage that no one used because the door opener had broken. How her parents decided to abandon the family on the same day, leaving notes for each other in different parts of the house, and leaving Ruby alone with her younger brother. It wasn’t a shock. She’d prepared herself for them to leave at various points throughout her childhood; her folks were second-generation hippies with happy feet who shouldn’t have tried to settle down in the first place.
    When they took off, Ruby and Jop decided to follow suit, hop trains like their parents and grandparents before them. Living on the rails was, Ruby said, a “totally unique and harmlessly rebellious way to get out from under the oppressive thumb of the real world, and say a big F you to the parents if they ever decide to phone home.” She had no regrets, she said, and had learned more during a few months on the road and rail than she had through four years of college.
    “So, I have a question for you,” she said, and her tightrope voice swayed. “Traveling alone on the rails isn’t always safe, especially for women. Does your family know you’re out here? Are you meeting anyone on the other side?”
    I dug my hand into my hair, drew a clump over my shoulder, and separated it into three pieces. “I’m not meeting anyone. But my sister knows I’m here. I have a sister. She thinks our mother committed suicide,” I said without meaning to.
    “Did she?” Ruby asked, as if strangers spilled their sorrows to her every day.
    “No.” I pulled one section of hair over the other—right over middle, left over middle—and felt the stretch of skin beneath the bandages on my arms. “She didn’t.”
    I remembered, then, things I’d forgotten about that day. I’d turned off the gas. I’d opened the window and the doors. I’d pushed at my mother’s chest, pounded the skin over her heart when nothing happened, when she