“Exactly,” Ruby said. “It’s like the suburbs but for basements.”
“Just don’t stay out there too long.” Lily reached into her pocket for a tissue and blew her nose hard. Then she kissed Ruby on the top of the head. She did not kiss Caroline on the top of the head. “I want to be the hider,” Caroline said quietly. Her face had become a hardened shell, like one of her dolls.
“I want to be the hider, too,” Ruby said.
“You’re always the hider, Ruby. You never seek.”
“Lily,” Ruby said, “could you be the seeker?”
“I want to watch TV, sweetie.”
“Please?”
“Okay, okay, yes, yeah, sure, I’ll count to, what is it, ten?”
“Five hundred,” Ruby said.
Lily looked doubtful, but she closed her eyes. “One,” she said. “Two. Three.” Her breathing got a little more regular. Ruby put her finger over her lips, grabbed Caroline’s hand. On the way out of the apartment, she shut the door as quietly as she could.
Then she took Caroline past the laundry room, past the garbage room, to the door of the elevator-motor room—the ultimate hiding spot. Caroline shoved it with her shoulder. It was locked. “It’s okay,” Ruby whispered. “I have the best memory ever.”
“No, you don’t,” Caroline said.
“Yes, I do. And I know the code. Eight-eight-eight.”
Ruby’s father had shown her this room a few weeks before when she had asked him how the elevators worked. There were two elevators in the building: the main passenger elevator, mahogany-paneled and brass-buttoned, and the freight elevator, which was only for Ruby’s father and maintenance people. The freight elevator had bars instead of walls. Its single bulb cast its light on peeling plaster in the elevator shaft. There were still abandoned dumbwaiter shafts that had traveled alongside kitchens, near where the maids’ rooms were, and for a long time in the building, food had been ferried up and down that way. “Before either one of us was alive,” her father had said, and Ruby tried to grasp the magnificent oldness of her own home.
In the motor room, her father showed her the big generators that turned the alternating current into direct current. It was a place of pendulation, of sudden rotations, of machines that seemed like gear-brained bodies. “There are invisible forces all around us,” said her father. “Currents, magnets, ions, waves in the air.” He waved his arms in the air like a bird trying to take off. Ruby’s head rushed with the sound of her blood. These wheels turned and lifted people to their homes, or lowered them back to the city streets, where they might go to the playground or learn about dinosaurs in a museum or find groceries. It was some sort of an enchantment.
There were two big machines, one of which had a wheel on it, long steel cables going around and around. That big machine was for the passenger elevator, Ruby’s father told her. The other elevator machine in the room, for the freight elevator, was a smaller barrel machine that had been in the motor room since 1911. “It’s illegal to install something like this now,” her father said. There were even more ropes around the barrel machine. “Always reminded me of something on a whaling ship.”
Ruby thought about the blue whale hanging from the ceiling at the Museum of Natural History, imagined its innards as this motor room, its giant heart a primordial turbine.
“The barrel machine is dangerous, dangerous, dangerous,” her father went on. “You get near that one, you get even a little bit near, you could lose your arm. The wheel starts spinning when you don’t expect it to spin. Boom. George in the building next door, he knew a guy who lost his arm. You know what that means you should do, Ruby?”
“What?”
Her father had smiled and said, in a voice rich with sarcasm, “You should definitely touch those cables.”
Wow. Wow. Wow. Her own father had not only brought her to this previously unseen space, but had used sarcasm, trusting her to hear the nuances. Ruby felt taller, wiser, ancient. She had laughed. And of course she had not touched the cables.
Ruby did not tell Caroline any of this after she put in the code that let them into the motor room. This was Ruby’s kingdom, and she was the one who controlled what Caroline did and did not know about its courtiers and nobles, its magnificent machines. All she told Caroline was, “Wait, just wait.”
When the door clicked open, nobody came running after them. Lily, on the couch, was still counting to five hundred, or else she had fallen asleep. The girls stepped inside. The door clicked closed. Caroline gasped. She turned around, her mouth moving as though trying to form words about all she saw: the baffling machines, the spinning cables, the sense of mysterious movement.
“My dad knows all the names for all these machines,” Ruby said. “Isn’t that amazing?”
Caroline said, “Let’s pretend this was where they gassed them.”
“Huh?”
Caroline began to chant. “We are orphans, they have locked us up. We are orphans, they have locked us up.”
“But we’re already playing hide-and-seek,” Ruby said. “You can’t play two games at once.”
“At my school,” Caroline said, “anything’s allowed as long as you’re following your real passion.”
“Your real passion?”
“Yes,” Caroline said. “There are no rules except for ‘Use your words.’ Anybody at my school can play two games at once, easy.”
Ruby blushed. She felt like a baby. She had shown Caroline the motor room, shown her the secrets of the basement, the secrets of Ruby’s home, she had resourcefully remembered the code, and still Caroline was commanding their games. “They won’t be able to keep us here for long,” Caroline said. “The Americans are coming. They’ve hidden a key inside one of these machines to free us. We just have to find it.”
Then Caroline reached out toward the barrel machine. She paused, looked back at Ruby. Asking, with her eyes, Is this safe?
And Ruby said, in an attempt to mimic her father’s sarcasm, “You should definitely touch those cables.”
But Caroline was deep in the Holocaust-orphans-sisters-survivors game and their Holocaust-orphans-sisters-survivors games were always powerfully earnest. She took Ruby at her word. She reached out to touch the cables.
Ruby screamed. A whole zoo of animals roared their roars in her voice. There were baby llamas in Ruby’s voice, and howler monkeys, and angry mama bears, and full-grown lions, and wolves, wolves, wolves. She leaped forward, between Caroline and the machine, and grabbed her, and Caroline howled and hit Ruby on the side of her head, and then the cables started to spin, they started to go round and round and round, and Ruby started to pee.