“Hold up,” he said, sitting back on his heels. “We were thinking of maybe heading into town. Any interest in coming?”
“What for?”
“New tires for the truck,” Simon said, wandering over to kick at the old ones, which were shiny and bald.
Ruby hesitated. The nearest town was a ten-minute drive, and though it wasn’t much to get excited about—there were more antique shops than stoplights—she rarely passed up a chance to go in. Still, she wasn’t exactly dying to spend the morning at an auto-repair shop.
“There’ll be air-conditioning….” Dad said, wiggling his eyebrows. “And maybe even ice cream.”
“Okay,” Ruby said, dropping her bike. “I’m in.”
While Simon ran inside to change out of his pajamas, Ruby assumed a perch beside Dad, handing over tools when he needed them.
“I’m thinking maybe this thing just needs a jump start,” he said, glancing over at the truck. “What do you say we give it a shot when we get back later?”
Ruby nodded.
“Remember what I taught you about the positive and negative charges?”
“Different poles,” she said, and Dad beamed.
Science had always come naturally to Ruby. Ever since she was little, Dad had shared trivia the same way other fathers told bedtime stories, quizzing her about the animal kingdom and the solar system and the way tides work. Simon had little patience for all this, much preferring baseball to anything even remotely bookish, but for Ruby, this type of knowledge settled in the corners of her mind with an ease that surprised everyone. Most kids knew jokes. Ruby knew facts.
Dad squatted beside her with the jumper cables, the colors faded beneath a thin layer of dust. He pointed to the red one.
“Positive charge,” Ruby said, and before he could ask, she reached out for the black one. “Negative,” she said. “This is the ground one.”
“Right-o,” Dad said, giving her a little pat on the shoulder.
At the entrance to the barn, Simon appeared—now dressed in shorts and a striped T-shirt—and kicked at the ground impatiently. Behind him, the wind picked up, blowing the loose dirt from the driveway in lazy circles.
Ruby noticed that Simon’s face had clouded over at the sight of them. As usual, Dad was completely oblivious, but Ruby could feel Simon’s eyes on her as she worked, and she understood the reason without needing to be told. Dad never asked her brother to help in any kind of real way. When there were boxes to be carried or sheet metal to be scrapped, Simon was the one he called. But if there was anything more delicate to be done, anything scientific in nature, it was always Ruby he asked, and she could feel Simon’s resentment like a kind of heat as she worked.
“Hey,” Dad said now, eyeing one of the coiled pipes beneath the platform. “What if we tried connecting the wires to the base itself?”
Ruby wiped her hands on her shorts. “Town,” she reminded him, conscious of the fact that Simon was still waiting. “Let’s try it later.”
At this, Simon bolted over to the truck, hurdling a stack of books as he crossed the floor of the barn. “Shotgun,” he called out triumphantly, coming to rest with a thump against the passenger-side door.
Ruby shrugged. As she climbed into the back of the truck, her legs sticky against the hot vinyl, Simon reclined his own seat so far that it nearly rested in Ruby’s lap. She slammed the heel of her palm against the back of it, but he refused to move it up again, and she wondered why she was still so concerned about her brother’s feelings, when he’d clearly stopped worrying about hers.
But she couldn’t help it. Some lingering instinct, some fragile connection, still remained between them, like the last dying embers of a fire, and despite everything, Ruby was determined to keep it burning.
three
THE TOWN WAS as flat and brown as the land all around it, a collection of low-slung buildings that seemed to hunker down against the biting dust. The acres of fields stopped just outside the barber shop and picked up again three blocks later, where one of four antique stores signaled the abrupt end of civilization.
In the year or so that they’d lived here, Ruby had been to nearly every store in town—not exactly a difficult feat—but this was her first time at the mechanic’s, which was on the outskirts, an openmouthed garage big enough for three cars, set back on a sizzling apron of black asphalt.
There was only one car occupying the space at the moment—an ancient yellow convertible—and as Dad pulled the truck into the stall beside it and they all tumbled out, a tiny woman in a gray jumpsuit appeared, a streak of grease on one cheek like war paint. The name stitched across her uniform in loopy letters read DAISY. She wiped her hands on a rag and regarded each of them in turn.
“What can I do for you all?”
Simon’s face was scrunched up, and Ruby could tell just by looking at him that his definition of an auto mechanic wasn’t exactly a blond woman named after a flower. He wandered over to examine the yellow convertible, peering under the open hood, and Ruby noticed Daisy’s eyes following him warily.
“We need some new front tires,” Dad said. “I think those are pretty much shot.”
Daisy crouched beside the car and brushed a hand over the smooth rubber. “You could go skiing on these things,” she agreed, then gestured toward a second building, which sat just outside the garage. “Why don’t you go pick something out in the office?”
Dad hesitated as he watched Daisy straighten to lift the hood of the truck, which opened with a small cough of dust.
“It’s really just the tires,” he said, but Daisy didn’t even look at him.
“We’re full-service.”
“I’m actually pretty good with mechanics myself,” Dad insisted, and from where they were both now leaning against the convertible, Ruby and Simon rolled their eyes.
“Looks like you could probably use an oil change, too,” Daisy said. “I’ll fix you up while you pick out some new tires.”
It seemed there was no point in arguing, so Dad began his retreat to the office with a shrug. When he looked back for Ruby and Simon, he saw that neither had followed him. They stood just behind Daisy, both of them on tiptoe to look into the engine.
“They can stay,” she said without turning around, and when the echo of his footsteps on the concrete floor had disappeared, she pointed into the guts of the truck. “You two know how you can tell if you need oil?” She reached in and pulled out a long stick, which was black and slick. “This is called the dipstick.”
Simon laughed, and Daisy half turned to them with raised eyebrows.
“He’s always calling me a dipstick,” Ruby explained, and Simon nodded sheepishly.
Daisy looked amused as she wiped the stick clean with the same rag she’d used on her hands earlier. “Now,” she said, “we need to put it back in there to see how high the oil level is. Who wants to try?”
“I do,” Simon said, pushing forward to grab the stick. Daisy helped him climb up onto the bumper, pointing to where it should go. He leaned over the engine, his whole body pitched forward, his tongue poking out in concentration.
“Be careful,” Ruby said, the words escaping before she could think better of it.
“I’m fine,” Simon muttered, then jammed the stick into the depths of the engine.
There was a flash of light as he removed his hand again, and the faintest tracing of electricity seemed to stretch between him and the engine, so quick and bright that even as she watched it happen, Ruby couldn’t be sure it was happening at all.
For the second time that day, a sharp cracking sound rent the air around them. Even before the noise had faded, Daisy had Simon around the waist and was yanking him back off the hood.
A thin curl of smoke drifted up from the engine, and the three of them simply stood there, watching in stunned silence.
After a moment, Daisy turned to Simon with wide eyes. “Are you okay?”
He nodded, glancing down at his hand as if looking for an explanation,
some sign of why this had happened. But it was only a hand, grubby and sweaty and lined with dirt.
“Was that…” Ruby began, but she couldn’t seem to get the question out. “I mean, that looked like…”
Lightning, she wanted to say. It looked like lightning.
But Simon’s face was twisted in confusion, and Ruby left the sentence unfinished. Daisy stepped back up to the engine, her face unchanging as she peered inside. The smoke had tapered off, but the smell of it still hung over the garage like a fog, and for a long time, they were all quiet.
Finally, Simon cleared his throat. “Sorry.”
Daisy shifted her gaze from the engine, regarding him in the way that someone might study a painting, her eyes narrowed with focus. Outside the wind picked up, and they could hear the door to the office creak open and then bounce shut again.
“Has this happened before?” Daisy asked, and Simon looked down at the oil-stained floor.
“No,” he said finally, but Ruby shook her head.
“Sort of,” she said, looking at him hard. “This morning? With the toaster?”
Daisy nodded; her face was impossible to read, but her eyes never left Simon, who shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other.
When Dad appeared at the entrance to the garage, they all seemed to tense up, and Ruby braced herself for Daisy to tell him what had occurred.
“Is something burning?” he asked as he handed over a slip of paper, the name of the tires he wanted scrawled across the page.
Daisy glanced once more at Simon, who seemed to be holding his breath. “You’ve got a faulty battery,” she said after a moment. “You’re lucky we caught it.”
“What?” Dad cried, flying over to the truck. “There’s no way. I just checked it.”
“It’s completely dead,” Daisy said patiently. “Why don’t you guys come back in an hour or so? I’ll get you fixed up with a new one, and put the tires on.”
Dad sighed. There was really no choice. This was their only vehicle, and their only way of getting home.
“We need the battery later anyway,” Ruby reminded him. “To jump-start the TGI.”
“Fine,” Dad agreed, leaning to examine the engine once more with a doleful look. “An hour?”
Daisy nodded, her eyes on Simon. “Try to stay out of trouble till then, okay?” she said, and though it was meant to sound casual, there was something strained in her tone.
To pass the time, they wandered over to the hardware store, where Dad filled a paper bag with bolts and screws and the twins filled their own bags with gumdrops and sour balls. As she replaced the lid on one of the old-fashioned candy jars, Ruby caught the briefest flash of gray out of the corner of her eye. She whirled around, her heart racing, her mind filled with the one possibility that had been trailing her like a ghost all morning.
There, on the highest shelf, resting above the rows of hammers and duct tape, the bath mats and the kitchen knives, was a gray hat.
It wasn’t even the same one; it was stiff and new, with a price tag hanging from the brim. But for a moment, Ruby had been absolutely sure of it: that he was there again, right over her shoulder—the man from the barn.
She let out a shaky breath and saw that her knuckles had gone white around the bag of candy. As she turned to make her way up to the counter, where Dad was waiting, her eyes swept the aisles. It was nothing, she told herself.
But even as she worked to settle her busy mind, to tell herself that nothing was lurking at her back, her foot caught her other leg. She tripped, pitching forward so that the bag went flying out of her hands, candy scattering across the wooden floor like marbles. When she spun around, Simon had a hand clapped over his mouth.
“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean for it to spill.”
Ruby glared at him until he dropped to his knees and began scooping up the skittering sour balls with both hands. It was just one of Simon’s many annoying habits, this trick of his: He loved to walk behind her, and then, with the slightest tap of his foot at just the right moment, send her stumbling over herself.
“One foot in front of the other,” Mom would always say, and Ruby would give Simon a withering look as he skipped ahead in triumph. Now was no different. As he handed her the ruined bag of candy, she could see the amusement scrawled across his face. But she noticed that his eyes were also glassy, his face paler than usual.
“You feeling okay?” she asked, and his expression darkened.
“I’m fine,” he muttered, then wandered away again.
By the time they got back to the garage, Daisy was just finishing up the last tire. Once they were ready to go, she watched them all clamber back into the truck before knocking on the door, her fist making the whole thing clang.
“Thanks again,” Dad said, starting the engine. “We’ll let you know if anything else comes up.”
“I hope you do,” Daisy said, but she wasn’t looking at him at all; she was looking at Simon. “Good luck with it.”
By the time they arrived back home, Ruby had decided she’d had enough of engines and wires and electronics for the day, so when Dad asked if she still wanted to help out with the invention, she shook her head.
“Can we do it later?” she asked. “I still want to go for a bike ride.”
“You sure?” he said, squinting out over the fields, which looked wavery in the heat. “It’s almost noon. Hottest time of the day.”
“I can help,” Simon offered, appearing at Dad’s elbow.
“Great,” he said. “You and I can clear out that wrecked metal, and then we’ll try the jump start when Ruby’s back later.”
Simon’s face fell, and Ruby pretended not to notice. “Sure you don’t want to come?” she asked, but he was already walking off toward the shed with Dad, trotting to keep up with his long stride, and so Ruby slipped into the barn alone.
Once she’d wheeled her bike outside she mounted quickly, then glided down the driveway, the tires grumbling over the rocks and dirt. She swung left down the road for no particular reason; every direction was much the same as any other, all square fields with roads running between them like the stitching on a quilt, and there was little to mark off her journey: a neighbor’s barn or a chipping silo, a sagging fence or a field of listless cows. The newly planted corn was uniformly brown where it should be green, and the wheat was stiff and parched. The world looked like something too long forgotten.
She wasn’t sure how long she rode, farther than usual perhaps, though the air was heavy with heat and her shirt was stuck to her back. The road held straight for so long that Ruby began to wonder if she could follow it all the way south to Chicago. But it wasn’t until she saw the windmills that she realized just how far she must have gone.
They stretched tall against the blue sky, looming white poles with slow-moving rotors that spun like giant insects in the air. She counted seven in all, staggered across the skyline with no apparent pattern, an eerie grouping of modern machines amid the pastures and cornfields. She was so busy looking up that she didn’t notice the old hay wagon parked just below the nearest one until she was just a few feet away.
There, sitting with his back to her, his legs dangling off the edge, was the man in the blue shirt. His hat was perched atop his head at a skewed angle, and he was leaning back on one hand, while the other twisted a piece of hay lazily in the air.
Somehow, the most surprising thing about seeing him there was just how very unsurprising it was, as if Ruby had been drawn not by the powerful windmills or the arrow-straight road, but by the man himself.
She gripped the handlebars of her bike as she tried to make sense of the situation, worked to formulate some kind of plan, to come to a decision about whether to speak up or run away. But before she could decide, the man cleared his throat.
“Nice weather we’re having,” he said without turning around. He swung his legs up onto the bed of the wagon and then swiveled to face her incuriously, like he’d been expecting her any minute, like it was o
nly a matter of time. But before Ruby could disagree, before she could say anything at all, he removed his hat and twirled it in his hands, glancing once at the sky, and then, just like that, it started to rain.
four
THE FIRST TIME Ruby ever watched The Wizard of Oz, Mom had smiled and leaned in close during the part with the ruby slippers.
“Just like you,” she’d whispered, kissing the top of her head.
Even then, Ruby suspected it was her duty to wish for a pair herself, as all little girls undoubtedly should. But it wasn’t the sparkly shoes that had fascinated her.
She soon got into the habit of skipping the beginning, fast-forwarding right through the munchkins and the good witch, the banding together of friends along the way. Her favorite part was the end, the march through the field of poppies only to find that the wizard was nothing more than an old man with white hair.
Simon was always as disappointed as Dorothy by this revelation, that a wizard could turn out to be just a normal person.
But Ruby saw it differently: Normal people, it seemed, could be wizards.
And she couldn’t help feeling a bit like Dorothy now, the endless crops stretched out all around her, the rain falling fast as if the man on the wagon had conjured it himself. She closed her eyes and let it stream over her, the water impossibly cool, loosening the layers of dust and dirt and sweat that had clung to her for what seemed like forever.
When she looked up again, the sky behind the hay wagon had turned flat and gray, and she saw that the man’s hair was nearly the same color. His face was deeply tanned and lined with creases, but in a way that made it difficult to tell just how old he was. As she watched, he turned his hat upside down, peering into it as the brim grew soggy and the hollow part began to fill.
“It’s been a while, huh?” he asked, but Ruby couldn’t find the words to answer. She wiped the water from her eyes and stared up at him, unsure whether to stay or go, unsure whether he was crazy in a harmless way or a dangerous one. It occurred to her that he might be homeless, but even in the rain she could see the expensive silver buttons on his shirt, which matched the one in her pocket. Perhaps he was a thief, though if that were the case, he couldn’t be a very smart one. All the McDuffs had to steal was a pile of scrap metal in the barn and a roomful of blank canvases upstairs.