The Unseen Shore (part 1)

I.

Brie and Sarah were twins, and Brie looked like Sarah but then again she didn’t. Brie had the same dark brown eyes and full cheeks, but she was more muscular and stood straighter. Brie’s nails were bare but carefully shaped. Those were the little things. What everyone saw was the limp, or that Brie did not have one and Sarah did. She never masked the scars ribboning her leg. The marks were almost two decades old, ripped into her right leg when she was fourteen.

She and her sister had attended water ski camp about eighty miles north of San Francisco. Sarah dragged Brie along after hours as she, and a group of other teenagers at the camp, loosed a ski boat from its moorings. At first, it was enough to heist the boat and drive it as fast as possible but then the girl steering slowed the engine to idling. In the quiet, someone suggested truth or dare. When it was Sarah’s turn, she picked dare, and it only took a few taunts—“you scared?”—before she agreed to ski. Silver flew everywhere from the moonlit water, and there was a flood of adrenaline when she cut the dark skin of the lake. Calm, suspended and flattening, folded over her when she raised her fists in the air and dropped the towrope, sinking into the water. The boat looped to pick her up, and it moved so slowly that she saw her sister, her hand outstretched. Brie’s face warped and sagged as she realized the boat was too close, the propeller already tugging Sarah towards it.  

The moment of contact seared quickly through her, and in an instant she could no longer distinguish the parts of her body from each other, fused as they were into a single, intense core and just before unconsciousness, there was a drop of painlessness, the sheen of the water and the slap of the boat’s soft wake in her ears. Someone, she forgot who, told her Brie leapt off the back of the boat when she heard the screaming. Sarah didn’t remember any noise. Brie held her limp head above the surface. She knew the right things: how not to move her, how not to drag her onto the boat, how to steady her neck, how to tread water, Sarah in her arms, until the camp leaders arrived with the ambulance crew. Floodlights on the rescue boat lit the water red.  

For Brie, there were the numbers. She tracked them in a black notebook she refused to show Sarah until six months after she was released from the hospital, and even then it was Sarah who found the journal, and Sarah who read aloud the numbers metering Brie’s concern. There were multiple complex deep lacerations - right leg, and six surgical procedures, and four units of blood (transfusion), and infection – week one, and infection – week seven, and zero amputations, and twenty-six days in hospital. For Sarah, pain stripped her body like paint thinner, but there were also balloons, stuffed animals, cookie trees, fruit baskets, cards, emails, visitors, and well wishes that streamed towards her so relentlessly over the almost-month of her hospitalization that the nurses and doctors called her Ms. Popular, or Poppy for short. Wish you were here; Thinking of you; Get well soon; Miss you; and all she had to do was heal—which her leg did, slowly, and on its own. On the twenty-seventh day, Sarah cried in the car all the way back home.

 

Now, late August bent into September outside the UCSF Medical Center. Sarah shifted in her hospital bed. She would have been thrilled with her return to the hospital if Brie were cramped in the brown chair beside the medical equipment. Sarah would even have been happy if Clark were there, his long legs propped against the mattress, his sketchpad flopped in his lap. These scenarios were not going to happen. Sarah sent Brie away almost two months ago, and now she didn’t know how to find her sister. Clark—who she thought was the only person who could love her, who did love her—left her three weeks ago and wanted nothing from her besides the harp he thought she had and kept calling about. She let his calls pile on her phone screen unanswered. Both these problems she avoided dealing with until she fell unconscious at the feet of a male model she’d been shooting stock photos of for work. The dead weight of her body remained at the model’s feet for so long that he called an ambulance, thinking her heart had stopped. Sarah was held overnight at UCSF, which is how she ended up here, shaking the word dead from her head. The empty chairs and furniture of her hospital room rose like reprimands, and she found she could no longer ignore that two months ago she chose Clark instead of Brie and effectively, though not in so many words, told Brie to get lost.

 

When Sarah met Clark in the slick of January last year, he took her to a restaurant where women wore bells around their ankles and clicked clamshells together. Music snapping through her ears, Sarah thought Clark looked like relief. Clark was his middle name. His first was Abraham, after his father, who demanded he earn the right to the moniker. His father grew up eating ketchup sandwiches, but as an adult he made his money in steel. When he saw the city skyline from his car window, he said to his driver “mine.” Abraham told Clark he could use his given name when he net his first million. Clark was an architect. Three students cried a week in the graduate class he taught at Stanford. A bridge he designed in a Canadian city won an award so substantial the city put Clark’s face on the buses running downtown. He sent his father the award certificate. “He returned it with a Post-It stuck to the surface,” he told Sarah. “He said nothing Canadian counted.” The way he half-laughed made her unsure if Clark found his father funny or frightening.

Before Clark, Sarah found the anguished and druggy ones because they made her feel compact and necessary. Clark made sense when he spoke, and she never saw him cry. They paced the streets and tipped their faces towards the sky-reaching buildings and talked about what it meant to endure. Clark stopped in front of the Sentinel Building and instead of looking upward, stared at Sarah. He told her, “What remains is love.” The sentimentality didn’t matter. It was finally her turn, she felt. Her number had come up at last.  

 

A nurse entered Sarah’s room. She was gowned in scrubs—hands gloved, face masked. Another woman, her blue hospital garb bulging over a gray dress, followed. A black briefcase bounced against the woman’s knees. Something about her reminded Sarah of a flight attendant. The woman’s eyes were huge orbs floating above her mask. She seemed younger than Sarah, though she couldn’t pin down a reason for that judgment. Maybe it was the slightness of the woman’s legs, poking out from the gown. “This is Elle,” the nurse said. “A rep from ConMed. She’s doing rounds with me today.” The nurse’s monotone made it clear she did not appreciate the rep’s presence. A computer perched on top of a wheeled stand locked in place at the foot of Sarah’s bed. Keys clicked beneath the nurse’s fingers.  

“ConMed is a health tech company that offers professional friends to patients at UCSF—especially those in or about to enter partial or full seclusion,” Elle said. “May I tell you a few things?” The rep moved quickly and was at the edge of the bed. Sarah couldn’t recall hearing the woman walk across the floor. 

“I guess.” Sarah felt unsure. She looked at the nurse. “Do you know what’s wrong with me?”

“It won’t take two minutes,” Elle said. “Professionals friends can provide companionship that friends or family may be unable to because of work or other concerns.” Her light voice softened the stream of scripted information.

 “You’re too close,” the nurse said. “I told you four feet minimum.” Elle stepped away. 

“When can I go home?” Sarah said. Worry cramped her throat. She couldn’t stay here much longer, not alone like this.

“The doctor will transition you soon,” the nurse said. 

Sarah was being moved into what the nurse earlier called a temporary seclusion. Although it was emphasized the move was “for observatory purposes only,” Sarah was certain she was flagged for quarantine, as all potential carriers of superbugs were—especially now. 

Six months ago, in March, a boy named Alfred played the harp at a crowded and boisterous block party in the Moraga area of Outer Sunset. The next morning, Alfred, and ten other people in attendance at the party, were dead. Their hearts stopped. Alfred’s obituary highlighted his love of the harp—a strange instrument, to be sure—but one Alfred adored in the quirky, stubborn way that is characteristic of an eleven-year-old’s obsessions. Investigation into the cause of the deaths ruled out food and drink and many known environmental contaminants. The deceased seemed only to share the fact that they all gathered near the harp as the boy plucked strings to sing a song popular on the radio at the time. Headlines seized this commonality, calling the stopped hearts Harp Hearts—an association that was not easily undone. Although the city’s mayor, James Agage, insisted Moraga was not an epidemic but rather a tragic, but isolated, incident, a few fringe news outlets still pointed to other, inexplicable heart failures in Moraga that occurred long before the party. A small cadre of journalists insisted the Harp Hearts didn’t mark the genesis of a superbug but rather a vicious flare of a bug that had been quietly stopping hearts before the block party, and that was responsible for other deaths, later in the year—other supposedly healthy hearts that no longer beat. 

“Isolation can be alienating,” Elle said. “You may feel like no one can help you.” Her eyes trained on Sarah. She ignored the rep—something she did with most things she found uncomfortable. She wished, again, that Brie were there. Sarah had been so sure Brie would come back after Sarah sent her away that Sarah had also ignored Brie’s absence—filled each day with the thought that tomorrow, her sister would return.  

“The mayor says there is no superbug,” Sarah said. “I don’t need quarantine. I woke up.” She pointed to her heart rate monitor. “See? Not stopped.” Everything about the nurse was economical. Skin on her jawline stretched tight. 

“You may feel like you have no one to talk to,” Elle said.  

“The move is a precaution,” the nurse said. The rep inched closer.  

“You may feel you have failed in some way, by falling ill,” Elle said. Darkness struck through Sarah. 

“Your bedside manner needs work,” she told the woman. “My sister Brie works in HR. She says you’re supposed to establish rapport.” The room spun. Her phone vibrated with another call from Clark. She needed to find her sister. Brie would wring from the nurse’s intentionally calm tone what was wrong with Sarah. Brie would explain why this rep hovered at the edge of the bed dressed like Sarah was contaminated. Brie would find a way out of the “observatory” quarantine. Brie would tell everyone, the nurses, the doctors, the reps, Clark on the phone, Sarah in her bed, what to do. 

“Stay away from the common areas,” the nurse said. “If you need to stretch your legs, lap the unit.” Sarah sighed. When she had woken in the hospital and not in whatever cold quiet lay in the beyond, she caught in uncertainty. Maybe her hospitalization was about the alleged Moraga superbug, or maybe it was about what she had done to her life—to her sister, to the boy Alfred’s harp. 

“Hey,” the rep said. “Does your sister work at ONE?” Elle tugged her mask down and balled it in her hand. Her eyes still dominated her face, but her mouth and chin were neat lines of bone. A generic friendliness emerged.

“Time’s up,” the nurse said to Elle. “I told you not to take the mask off.”

“Yes,” Sarah said. “She does. You know her?” Pain rippled through her chest, and she bunched her fingers together. 

“Sort of,” Elle said. “I did a talk for the HR department at ONE this May.” She shrugged. “Health tech is a small world.” Elle dropped her mask in the garbage can. Sarah’s irritation with this woman, and her strange statements, collapsed into the wild thought that perhaps everything was already righting itself. Perhaps this Elle knew where Brie was, knew how to find her. Maybe, all this time, the world had been turning, invisibly restoring Sarah to where things made sense. An idea began uncurling in a corner of her mind. 

“Have you seen my sister recently?” Sarah said. Elle shook her head. 

“I called last month for a follow-up to the May session, but her assistant said she wasn’t taking meetings at the moment.”

“Next patient,” the nurse said.

 “Wait.” Sarah hoped the rep would stay, hoped she could locate Brie, hope that overwhelmed Sarah’s vague unease about this stranger. “Did you say you were a professional friend?” Elle nodded, looking at the nurse who did nothing to conceal her relief.

“Stay if you like,” the nurse said. “I’ve told you the possible risks.” Elle smiled at Sarah, a little, but not a lot. She liked that.

 

Elle was a nurse but recently started working for ConMed. “I give lectures to businesses and things like that,” Elle said. “But most of my time is spent friending patients at UCSF. Isolation breeds loneliness.” She gestured to Sarah. “You might know that already.” 

 “I’ve never hired a rental.” Sarah avoided asking why Elle didn’t seem worried about friending possible isolation patients. 

“Then you’re the only one,” Elle said. “When I was nursing full-time, professional friends came in for patients day and night. It’s a big city. People are busy. I spend most of my assignments doing ordinary acts of relationship: telling teenagers in blank white casts—don’t worry, you’ll heal, things will work out—or driving people home. A lot of people want to go home from the hospital with someone who feels like a friend.” Sarah nodded. Her idea unfurled as Elle told her about the people she’d met as a rental: the CEO of a successful AI-tech company who was marooned at “hello” during personal conversations; the teenage girls whose parents thought they needed a safety net at parties; the families that wanted Elle to cry at funerals where everyone else was dry-eyed. For all those people, Elle stood in the gap, replaced the sense of alienation, of fear.  

“I want you to help me find my sister,” Sarah said. “I don’t really have anyone else right now.” Her mouth dried. Elle nodded. 

“I can do that,” she said. “That’s why I go room to room with my spiel.” She pulled a tablet from her briefcase. A form opened on the device. 

“Basic stuff,” she said. “Hourly rate, up to a maximum of six consecutive hours. As a UCSF patient, you get a price cut.” She swiped to a different form. “Liability waiver, standard disclaimers about consent. No romance, no lending money.” She handed a stylus to Sarah. “Read through it. Let me know if you have questions.” Elle’s whirlwind pace, her decisive efficiency, all of it reminded Sarah of Brie—a comforting resemblance.

“Six hours is fine.” Sarah scribbled her name beside red x’s on the forms. “Where do we start?” Elle looked around the hospital room. 

“Well,” she said. “We can’t find your sister in quarantine.” She waved a pale hand towards the door. A vein on Elle’s arm rolled a frozen blue beneath her skin.

 

Sarah had been thinking about leaving since her sad, little cup of lemon pudding that morning. The doctors didn’t know what was wrong with her, and Elle was right. Sarah couldn’t locate Brie in isolation. She wondered what Brie would do. Swinging her legs free from the thin hospital sheets, Sarah was certain what Brie would not do was let Elle pull the IV needle from Sarah’s arm and wipe the blood on the mattress. Brie would not let Elle detach her from all the monitors and walk with Elle out of the hospital room, and then out of an elevator, and then out of the gift shop dressed head to toe in UCSF Medical Center swag. Brie would never leave the hospital. Spinning through the door of the emergency entrance, Sarah felt cut loose, uncertain of her footing. This was not entirely unfamiliar. What was foreign was that Sarah rarely, if ever, followed anyone without Brie—Brie, protesting but present, Brie forever unable to admit she couldn’t do something. Elle was far ahead now, walking quickly towards the pier. Sarah’s phone buzzed in her pocket. Wind hit her, hot and dry. She would find her sister, she told herself. She would explain. 

 

“There’s plenty of time to start over,” Brie had said two months previous, when June cooled on the skin, rising as gooseflesh. “Dump Clark’s stuff into boxes, and put them outside the door. We’ll get new locks. I’ll set you up with some harmless paper pusher. Doesn’t that sound nice?” Sarah remembered her pulse throbbing through her ears. “He is not a good person,” Brie said. They’d lasted almost a year, the three of them living together—the happiest Sarah had ever been. 

“You don’t want to like him,” Sarah said, and Brie shook her head.

“I knew you would say that. That’s why I called him.” The sound in Sarah’s ears dimmed and slowed, stretching and shrinking.

“What did you do?” Sarah said. “What happened?” Panic swamped her stomach with nausea. 

“I told him you wanted to talk about our living situation,” Brie said. “You have to tell him to go.”

“You didn’t,” Sarah said, even though she believed her sister. Brie never waited once her mind was decided. Multiple times, she had almost been hit for crossing the street in front of approaching traffic. Once, Sarah yanked Brie onto the sidewalk, pulled her from the path of a city bus. Brie had been angry with Sarah for interfering. She insisted the bus would have stopped. 

“You need to do this,” Brie said. 

That was the thing about her. She gave no warning signs. There was only the sudden action. Yet, Brie had been working more than usual the last few months, coming and going at strange and crooked hours. She was creating a presentation for the Department of Public Health, trying to convince them to support ONE in working to acknowledge the threat of the bug—that was all she would say. When Sarah asked if perhaps what happened in Moraga really was as the mayor said—a terrible but entirely contained event— Brie told Sarah not to worry but the set of her face did worry Sarah. She suggested Brie talk to Clark, who worked on healthcare projects. Sarah felt as though she brought them together: Brie and Clark bent over blueprints of labs he’d designed; compared data points of possible bug flares in the city; debated the relationship of people to their space. Neither Brie nor Clark seemed to believe the mayor’s denial. Both spoke about the bug as if it pre-existed the block party, as if it were worsening, as if it were a real and credible threat. Sarah listened at the edge of the kitchen—the camouflage of their voices, Clark’s dark, Brie’s spiky, both pitched low—as they talked about whether an area-specific quarantine on Moraga would be an acceptable course of action for city government. Brie insisted money could not be treated as more important than people, but Clark, who saw the bottom line in everything, maintained the government’s concern was always money. Confirming the presence of a deadly superbug in the city meant the loss of big industry, like tourism. Quarantine was bad for business. 

Still, in the moment, that terrible moment Brie told her to move Clark out, there was that noise in Sarah’s ears, and Brie saying, “Get right in your head.” Brie pressed a business card into Sarah’s hand. The cardboard corners cut her palm. “A girl at work used this on her deadbeat ex-boyfriend. They even rearranged the furniture to hide the dents in the carpet from his television stand.”  

“I can’t,” Sarah said. “I thought everything was okay.” Brie rolled her fists against her own temples and squeezed her face.

“I don’t have time to argue with you,” Brie said. “I have to go. Call the number.” She stared at Sarah without blinking. If Brie hadn’t been needed at work, if she had stayed with Sarah longer, she liked to imagine she might have found a way to fit the pieces of herself together. She remembered how the reddish gray of her sister’s sclera bothered her. “Trust me,” Brie said. 

An invisible muscle separated her from her sister; trust me wedged in her throat. How could she explain she did trust Brie? When Clark needed a new place to live, Sarah shaped his desire to move in with her and Brie as a relational swan dive, a move sinking them deeper into each other’s lives. She told him he could room with them before asking Brie, trusting Brie would accept what Sarah saw as Clark’s unwavering commitment was entirely dazzling. When Brie let him live with them—let him sit on the couch, let him use the remote, let him order the pizza—Sarah felt the same rush of certainty she always did when Brie let Sarah get away with something. Here was definite proof, she thought, of what she was always trying to ensure: for Brie, Sarah was indispensable. She traced the invisible threads of need, believed they connected them in constellation—Brie and Sarah and Clark. This connection was something about which Sarah let herself feel somewhat certain. This would hold together, she thought. 

Brie closed the door with a click that sounded loud, and with all Sarah thought she understood about Brie and how far Brie would go with and for Sarah, she did the only thing she thought she could. She uncurled her fingers, staring down at the card. It was for PACK-EX, a speed-moving company. She called the number. 

In less than half an hour, PACK-EX boxed and stacked Brie’s possessions in the lobby of the building. When Clark asked about the odd, blank spaces created in the apartment by the removal of Brie’s things, Sarah said something about three being awkward company. Clark asked if Brie would come back, and Sarah said she hoped so, because she did. She was tenacious in her belief that Brie would return. She saw she and Brie in see-saw—a tension of connected opposites. She thought one couldn’t be without the other. PACK-EX may upset the balance but Sarah believed she and her sister would remain together. Brie would come back. She would open the door, irritated but there. 

When Sarah walked down to the main floor at just past midnight, all the boxes labeled BRIE were gone and Brie with them. It ought to have been a moment of total surprise, and yet, even then, Sarah couldn’t see the limit clearly. You might risk your most valuable thing if you believe it will always be yours and it was precisely this, though Sarah could not see that yet, that had brought her to the lobby, devoid of Brie’s possessions. She sank onto a cracked pleather bench. Outside the sliding doors, night split with light from a streetlamp. She hung her head between her knees. When she straightened, she pushed her way through the glass doors. At the Airtrain station, the next train to the core was in two minutes. Her toes against the bright yellow line, she called Brie’s office. Brie answered slowly, “Hello?”

Sarah asked her sister where the boxes went. She asked what was really going on. She said, “You’re coming back, right?” Brie said something about wanting an apology. She said enough was enough. Sarah was sorry. It was beginning to seep into her body like faint cold that Sarah had at last pushed Brie into a new and desperate place. Brie said, “He still has to go. He has to,” and Sarah, who had heard her sister’s voice her whole life, knew that on this point Brie was immoveable. The sound of their breathing turned to static on the line. The time until the train arrived ticked away. When Brie said goodbye in a cramped voice and ended the call, Sarah kept the phone to her ear, the disconnected dial tone buzzing in her brain. She didn’t move, even with the rush of the train, the beep of the doors opening, the doors closing. 

A week after, late in the evening, too late for the mailman to have been the one to deliver it, a letter showed up in the mail slot. Seeing SARAH in her sister’s restrained writing on the envelope opened an ache in Sarah’s chest. She didn’t read what her sister wrote. Upstairs, in the kitchen, she sliced Brie’s words into incoherent shapes. The tattooed pieces filled a large bowl. In the bathroom, as hot water swirled, she poured those fractured words into the tub. She peeled off her clothes and sank into the flow. Water closed over her feet, then thighs, then head. Heat from the water bloomed throughout her body, and she inhaled, half gasp, half cry. Water and paper filled her mouth, and when she surfaced she spat out inky strips that stained patches of her skin blue. Sarah wrinkled in the tub full of sodden shards until the water grew too cold to bear. Outside, the bright outline of downtown buildings was obscured by trees tracing dark veins on the sky’s wrist. 

 

A woman walking beside Sarah and Elle lost her hat. It spun into the sky as if lifted in play by the wind. Sarah watched a man in a suit, sweat soaking the underarms of the fabric, chase after the hat. He thought he could take back what had been lost, Sarah found that admirable. Elle moved as if drawn by an unseen force towards Pier 54 where the water crinkled like foil. It was unusually hot. The Diablo wind, the newscasters said earlier that morning on the hospital television, had arrived, blowing in from the northeast. Elle stepped around a cracked pavement stone heaving a rim of vegetation and dirt in the sidewalk. Usually, Sarah snapped at her neighbor and let the dishes pile up and ignored knocks at the door—surrendering instead to restlessness, a cloth over her eyes—but not today. Heat was a palm on her throat. Sweat trailed down her temples, and she walked faster. That the Diablo came early seemed to Sarah another sign of how close the edge loomed.   

By the pier, low-lying walls of rock along the pathway and tree trunks were spray painted with messages to lovers, to anger, to the universe. Most of the tags raged against Agage, the city’s mayor. Along one stretch of wall, someone had written Stop Lying We’re Dying in black paint. No one else tagged near the message. Bundles of flowers littered the walkway. 

“There are always so many more memorials.” Elle crossed her arms around her chest. She realized Elle was trying not to cry. Sarah stooped beside a picture of a young boy. He couldn’t have been more than fifteen. Someone had hung a medal on a blue ribbon above his photograph. She lit a candle with a Zippo taped to the picture frame. Sarah overheard a doctor at the hospital talking about the deaths. The doctor said Agage was a killer, that his refusal to acknowledge the superbug was akin to murder. The doctor said the whisperings of the independent news outlets were not wrong. There were other, unexplained heart deaths in the Moraga area before and after the block party brought the superbug to the attention of mainstream media. Elle pressed her hand below her collarbone as if trying to contain whatever sadness leaked out of her. “Are you okay?” Sarah placed a hand on Elle’s arm but drew it away quickly. The unexpected warmth of Elle’s skin reminded Sarah that she had just met her. Elle swallowed. “You don’t have to tell me,” Sarah said. 

“It’s okay,” Elle said. “I can. I come here every day after work.” They followed the path until it curved into a small set of steps leading towards the water. A single shrine leaned against the top step. Elle knelt in front of it. There was no picture, just a cracked license plate, a wreath of flowers wilted by the heat, and a candle fallen into a waxy pile. “He stayed with me most of the time,” Elle said. “I was working nights that week, so he stayed at his place in Moraga.”

“The harp party.” Saliva pooled in Sarah’s mouth. Elle nodded, grazing the license plate with her knuckles. 

“I can’t get his body released to bury him. Agage has everything in knots. I have no idea where he’s being held. It’s all wait and see. I thought working the UCSF quarantine floors I might hear something, but so far—.” She shrugged. 

“I’m sorry,” Sarah said because she was. She was sorry this was a world where a woman couldn’t bury a person she loved. She was sorry that the Harp Hearts may have been a tragic spike in a long, continuing line of death data. She was sorry that when she’d found the boy’s harp among Clark’s things, she hadn’t told him he was wrong to keep it, hadn’t told Brie, hadn’t called the police. Wind puffed over the edge of the wall, and nausea rolled through her. She leaned over. Spots of sweat fell around the candle. 

As a little girl, she rarely fell ill. When Sarah did something she thought was wrong, like carving her sister’s name into the bathroom stall door at school to impress another student and letting Brie take the blame when the principal interviewed her about the vandalism, then Sarah started coughing with a cold. Sarah called sickness her moral compass. Brie thought that was ridiculous. She explained repeatedly sickness was infection, bacterial or viral. It was factual, not ethical. Sarah wondered if Brie could see if the superbug, that supposedly claimed so many, had come for Sarah too. She kicked her toes against the wall. Brie told her once to stop worshiping her mistakes. “You fucked up,” Brie said. “Get in, get out, stop wallowing.” Sarah looked at the license plate. Was the bug brewing in her blood? There was no way to know. All the news outlets said so. The only symptom was death. The stilled heart.  

“We need a drink,” Elle said.

 

In May, a month before PACK-EX, Sarah and Clark camped in the forest. Clark said he would teach her how to survive: burn a fire, snare a rabbit, follow shit to water. It was the way Clark was so sure—of her, of his feet on the mountainside, of his anger. Sarah would follow that certainty anywhere. The first night wasn’t bad. She praised Clark’s ability to build leaping flames, collect water in a transpiration bag, navigate using the stars. The following morning, they hiked through the tree line. Dirt turned to mud from the light rain and she slipped. Clark was too far ahead to hear her call for him. She slid against wet leaves, the weight of her body pulling her into a sinkhole. That she struggled, calling Clark’s name, didn’t help. She sank almost to her armpits in the pit, the cold suck of sludge against her skin.  

It was not Clark, but a stranger, a man with straw-blonde hair, who heaved Sarah out by her elbows. The mud held her pants and shoes. She refused to return to the trailhead with the hiker. Clark would come for her, she insisted. She didn’t track how much time passed before Clark returned, but it felt impossibly long. When he rounded the curve, the hiker had left, but she was still sitting on a raspy log beside the mud pit, tears traveling through the clay dried on her face. The hiker draped a stained blanket around her shoulders before he left, but her underwear soaked through with mist. Sarah asked Clark how he could have taken so long. She told him he should have waited for her. She said he should take better care of her. She saw her mistake when Clark’s lips tightened into a staple across his mouth. He grabbed her by the shoulders and slung her across his body in a fireman’s carry. She apologized sorry, all the way down the mountain, bouncing against his spine. He tossed her into the passenger’s seat of his truck. Clark took each curve of the gravel road faster and faster. The whole winding way downward, he listed the ways he protected her. He told her she made him feel like he wasn’t enough.  

Sarah wished she did what she told herself she would: she made him stop, she got out of the tilting vehicle, she hitchhiked home, she deleted Clark’s number from her phone. She rubbed her forehead, tried to loosen what she did do, but the bump of scar tissue was still there, still proof she was the woman who beat her head against the dashboard and said I need you, I need you until a bruise formed on her forehead, and Clark slowed down and told her she did need him and as long as she kept trying to remember that, he would stay.  

 

There would be a time that coming October, as fall thieved softness from everything, when Sarah would explain how someone could do a thing like that. She would see a spiritual masseuse, a woman who pulled more than physical pain from the body. During her first visit, the massage therapist would have Sarah label an outline, sketch injuries onto a paper person’s skeleton. Sarah marked the lump on her forehead with an “x.” The therapist warned Sarah it was not uncommon to cry, to speak aloud, to ask for a break. Sarah would be deep at the bottom of life’s well when the masseuse’s hands brushed across the knot on her forehead. “What happened there?” the woman would say and though Sarah would not answer at first, somehow sessions blurred into sessions that blurred into the wet cold of winter, and one day, as the therapist held her thumbs on either side of the slight rising in Sarah’s forehead, Sarah would feel a long, dark undoing ripple through her, and with each sweep of the masseuse’s fingers Sarah’s answer slowly dislodged, tumbled out. 

Sarah would tell the therapist what she knew about fast food. A Christmas day long ago spent with her mother, father, and sister, all of their knuckles red and raw from scrubbing black from the grout between the tiles of a franchise location that scored so poorly on health inspection that the previous owner was removed by corporate and the location sold as fast as possible at a reduced buy-in to Sarah and Brie’s parents who presented the stinking, fuzzy, dilapidated building to their daughters as the only Christmas gift they would receive that year. The Christmas after that there were no gifts either, just extra shifts behind the cash register until their parents finally saw a profit and then, Sarah would explain, that was when you bought another location. This one was about an hour outside of San Francisco—also a re-possession. An hour didn’t seem far. It was. 

Sarah explained how she found out: she came home one day and found Brie sitting on a chair in the living room—her perfect posture still perfect. Their parents were there too. They explained. They’d taken an apartment two minutes from the new location. They needed to stay in the apartment for at least a year to manage the new store. They would visit the girls once a month, when they checked in on the first franchise in the downtown core. Brie had been told to take care of Sarah. They all told Sarah this was love. Two locations would send Sarah and her sister to the Ivy League. 

The first birthday without her parents, Sarah would tell the therapist, was her sixteenth. It was a long weekend, both stores too busy for time off. While Sarah was at the mall with friends, Brie would stick sixteen pink, plastic flamingos in the lawn and bake a gigantic cookie sixteen inches wide into which she would plug sixteen candles and Sarah would not see any of this until the next morning, having called Brie from the mall to tell her to meet up with Sarah right away; they were going to a house party featuring giant, inflatable pool floats shaped like unicorns. Sarah would drink an entire bottle of tequila and Brie would gently rub small circles with her thumb into Sarah’s back as she threw up in a gum-infested bathroom. 

Their parents did not move back after a year because of an unexpected flood in the second location’s kitchen—a wash of red ink in the books—and Sarah began calling their absence an emancipation and it became everyone’s favourite myth, and they flocked in droves at Sarah’s insistence to party in all the huge, empty rooms of the house and Sarah would describe the sound crushed beer cans made when they struck each other as they were tossed into a garbage bag, the way emptiness rolled around and clanked as Brie cleaned the house post-party and Sarah would even tell the therapist how she, who up until she was two years old had to be held or else she’d scream unceasingly, would put her phone on speaker and dial her mother’s number and listen to the voicemail; she would learn every curve and stone of that recorded voice and though there was a button that said end, there was no way to reach her mother, no end to the reaching.  

 

A long hallway into the bar stretched in front of Elle and Sarah. Daylight dropped away as the doors swung closed. A few people perched on bar stools. Everything was wood paneled. Sarah smoothed her hands against the UCSF sweatshirt. She finger-combed her hair, but the knots snarled around her knuckles. Elle ordered cider. “I’m not really dressed to be here,” Sarah said as she twisted her legs around each other and then separated them. 

“You do look like UCSF puked on you,” Elle said. Sarah laughed without realizing she was going to, sharp and short. 

“I guess I do.”

“At least you’re comfortable,” Elle said. “I’m dying in this dress.” Cider spice stung Sarah’s throat. Elle’s direct voice, the way she presumed comfort Sarah figured she didn’t feel; it drew her to Elle. 

“Drink,” Elle said. Bubbles pinged like miniature bells against the glass. “Seriously.” Elle raised her pint. “It helps.” Nausea waved through Sarah again. “That’s it.” Elle swallowed a long sip. “A little courage for the looking.” 

Sarah laced her fingers into a basket and rested her chin on them. A woman in a dark blue suit was being interviewed on the screen above the bar. The distinct localization of the heart deaths in Moraga, the woman was saying, suggested the bug could have originally leaked from one of the large, experimental bio-tech labs in that neighborhood. Although the woman emphasized that the harp was not the cause of the bug, and that elimination of the harp would not eradicate the heart deaths, she did underscore that researchers wanted the opportunity to examine the instrument. 

“The harp,” the woman said, “due to its proximity to those that died at the block party, may still contain traces of whatever is causing these heart failures.” The woman said that because the young boy Alfred’s heart stopped, it was likely his harp had been exposed to an active strain of the bug too. This exposure may make the harp uniquely useful to attempts to formulate possible treatments. Sarah shifted in her seat. A picture of the missing instrument enlarged on the screen, a hotline for tips scrolling below. The woman was careful to explain that the harp was not a weapon or the reason the people died at the party; rather, she repeated, the harp would have been just a harp until it was played at the party and likely contaminated by the bug. Sarah stared down at her napkin. She shredded it into strips. Despite the interviewer’s insistence that the woman was merely speculating, the woman would not step away from her position that the bug was a threat, and the mayor’s denial dangerous. Sarah’s cider was almost gone. Elle poured half her drink into Sarah’s glass.

 “My ex-boyfriend designed some of those labs they’re talking about.” Sarah looked at the screen. “He and my sister talked all the time about possible design flaws that might compromise public safety. I thought it was good they had something to talk about, but now I’m not sure. I think something went wrong.” 

“Really?” Elle’s fingers tightened in her lap. “A design flaw?” Her voice was flat. “There’s so much I don’t know.”

“That’s how I feel too.” Relief flowed through Sarah at this shared uncertainty. Elle slung a gentle elbow into her arm.

“Hey,” she said. “We’ll find her.” Alcohol floated Sarah above the rim of pain spreading through her bellybutton.  

“What if she knew?” Sarah’s voice tripped on this thing she hadn’t yet said out loud. Elle dropped her head to one side. Sarah heard herself telling Elle the things she thought she had hidden from Brie: the way Clark’s hands went from open to closed, how he beat on the window of the car that cut in front of him until the terrified woman behind the glass called the police, how Sarah introduced him by the wrong name at a work function and he punched a hole through their bedroom wall when they got home.

“Shit.” Elle flattened her hands against the bar. 

“It was worse after Brie left,” Sarah said. “The wall was after.” Elle looked at Sarah as if she both did and did not know her. “He never let anything go,” Sarah said. And then after a second, “But there were other things too. Stacks of love letters. Copies of pages from love poems he said reminded him of me. He carved our initials into stone buildings and took pictures of them that he framed and gave to me. He said we were written in stone. He called me bewitching.” Remembering Clark’s assurances ached in her but there was warmth too, like holding a hot coal in a cold palm. Elle rolled her lips into her mouth. She exhaled, long and slow. 

“I guess it’s hard when you love someone,” she said. “You’re not the first I’ve heard talk like that.”

“So he’s not so bad, right?” Sarah said. Elle shook her head.

“I didn’t say that.” Sarah could see worry in Elle’s face.

“We broke up,” Sarah said, and Elle’s mouth relaxed a little. 

“Tell me you did it,” she said. Sarah shrugged. 

She explained how she forgot to call Clark one night in early August. She was three hours outside the city shooting water landscapes for website templates. Clark called her, all lathered up. He yelled about the things she didn’t do. His laundry wasn’t folded; the dishes weren’t washed; his call log showed no calls, emails, or even texts from her. She cried and promised she had just forgotten, that Brie usually did the housekeeping, but when he told her he was sick of hearing about Brie, sick of never being enough for Sarah, sick with this sense that he never loved her, she began to vomit stomach acid and could no longer respond. When she came home, all of Clark’s things were gone from the apartment, and he wrecked what was left behind. Dishes were smashed, and the television hurled into the bathtub. The oven was also on—incinerating what Sarah later realized was every plant in the kitchen. 

 “Now he keeps calling me,” Sarah said. “I should probably change my locks. If not, I might wake up one night, and Clark will be swinging from the rafters above me.”

“Or standing over you with a knife.” Elle nodded at the bartender and ordered two shots of whiskey.  

“The scenarios aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive,” Sarah said. The shots slid, spilling over, in front of them. Elle picked one up and pushed the other towards Sarah. 

“My boyfriend told me nothing is one thing or the other,” Elle said. “He believed what happened to you mattered and all you needed to understand would make itself clear to you.”

“What do you think?” Sarah said. 

“I think whichever way you look at it, your ex requires a drink,” Elle said. They toasted each other, and whiskey fired a rough finger from Sarah’s mouth to her gut. She coughed, and Elle clapped her on the back.

“Straightens you out doesn’t it?” Elle said. Sarah waved at the bartender for a glass of water. “It’s called the Dragon. They put cayenne and hot sauce in the whiskey.” Sarah was still hacking.

“You’re turning out to be quite the friend.” She gulped the water. 

“I think you need a little fire in your belly,” Elle said. 

“My tongue is singed.” Sarah stuck it out and poked it.  

“I had five of those before I knew what I wanted.” 

“Five would put a hole right through you.” 

“A lot of things will do that.” Elle’s voice was quiet and slow. She ordered another beer. 

The shot made Sarah bolder. “You seem to drink a lot,” she said. 

“You seem to have let a crazy man destroy your apartment.” 

“When you figured out what you wanted,” Sarah said. “Did it help?”

“Depends on where you’re standing.” Elle tilted her head again and looked at Sarah. “I was going to chase the shots with an overdose and I didn’t.” Sarah’s head jerked back slightly. 

“Why didn’t you?” 

Elle shrugged. “I was in a crappy hotel room with bad wallpaper. I wouldn’t have even made the news.”

“Do you think if we’d met in real life we would have been friends?”

“Does your sister do that too?” Elle said. 

“Do what?” Lights from the bar warmed on Sarah’s cheeks. 

“It’s like something could burn in front of you,” Elle said. “And you’d say, ‘So anyway.’”

“That’s not necessarily true.” Sarah thought of how she tried to save her plants from ashes. When she opened the oven and the scalding air rolled towards her, she closed the door, but at least she tried. That had to count for something. 

“It’s okay to say you’re afraid,” Elle said. Sarah nodded even though she didn’t agree, even though she couldn’t remember the last time she said she was scared. She didn’t know when she realized that fear frightened others, pushed them away in a way that sadness, uncertainty, even wildness did not. 

“My boyfriend’s parents live in Georgetown, in El Dorado County,” Elle said. “We were visiting and went out one night to get something from the car. Four mountain lions prowled around the driveway. They looked right at us. You know what you’re supposed to do? You’re supposed to look the cats dead in the eyes and make yourself as large and loud as possible.”

“I didn’t know that,” Sarah said.

“Try it,” Elle said. “Pretend I’m a mountain lion.” She stiffened her hands into claws. “You can’t do it, can you?” She made a sound Sarah was pretty sure was supposed to be a growl, and she laughed then, and Elle did too, and if Sarah hadn’t felt the meter draining out of her stomach, or out of the bar, or out of the whole world cracking up outside, she might have seen there was no way this could ever end right side up. 

 

II.

Dusk dropped over the city. Light darkened into gold, gilding the chips in the concrete sidewalks, the brown grass, the windows of the downtown buildings. Empty, plastic containers tumbled around the feet of pedestrians. The Diablo sighed over everything. Sarah couldn’t tell if the heat burning into her was from outside or burning through her from inside.  

Elle suggested Brie’s office. She seemed so sure Brie would be there that Sarah let herself be swept from the bar onto the Airtrain platform where a woman busked on a sitar. Elle flinched, her fingers pinching Sarah’s side. “Sorry,” she said. 

“What if we don’t find my sister?” Sarah said. Elle chewed a flap of skin inside her cheek. Sarah scanned the faces in the windows of the Airtrain as it slid to a stop, but her gaze blurred. She looked at the rails, and the way the paint slipped over the edge of the platform. Brie would have seen each face, known each individual detail. Sarah thought she might throw up. 

“We’ll find her,” Elle said. Everything rippled—teenagers peering at their phones, the sounds of the sitar, even the air disturbed as it was by the force of the train.  

“How can you be so sure?” Sarah said. 

“Because I’m a super friend.” Elle lifted her chin upward. Sarah took a deep breath and thought about the things she could have done. She could have called Clark. She could have pressed the nurse button. She could have stayed in one place, the way adults tell children to do when they’re lost. Don’t move. Stay put. Trust you’ll be found. 

 

It was quarter past six, and the train was dense with commuters. Sarah hung with both hands from a blue, plastic loop in the standing room section. Elle leaned against the clear divider. Seats filled with slumped over people. Sarah watched a little girl work her finger into a tear in her chair that spit chunks of foam. The girl tugged out blocks of spongy lining. When the girl’s father noticed and told her to stop, the girl pushed the padding back, but it didn’t work. What had been inside could not be returned. The girl brushed the remains onto the floor. Cityscape flashed by in windowed sections, and Sarah saw what she always did—the graffiti memorializing the dead, the spray paint hearts, the ragged teddy bears, the bundles of drooping flowers taped to pictures frames hung along fences, and her own face, mapped onto this montage of things gone away. 

 

There was only one time Clark had mistaken Sarah for Brie. Mistaken was perhaps not the right word, Sarah conceded as she told Elle. It was the start of their relationship, when Sarah was beginning to understand how Clark held his jaw when he was frustrated. He was supposed to pick her up for dinner. She sat, feet propped on the balcony railing, and listened for the growl of his vehicle. The sun was slipping, and the buildings spread to her left swam in pink and orange. Mirages waved on the asphalt. Below Sarah, a young woman in a green sundress cracked an egg in an empty parking stall in front of the building. When it fried, she let loose a high-pitched shriek and grabbed the arm of her girlfriend who stood, hands caught in the denim loops of her shorts, looking down at her. The parking lot rolled out below Sarah, a blank face scattered with rows of broken down teeth. Cars rusted and baked. Some never moved. Clark’s car shone with wax, and when it rounded the corner, the beat from his speaker system shook the air. He accelerated and, her hand over her mouth, Sarah thought he would run over the girls who poked at the egg and laughed. The rim of his bumper stopped hard behind them. He was halfway out of the vehicle before the engine quieted. He met the girlfriend, who was waving her arms and yelling, with even larger arm motions. The girl in green tugged her partner’s arm. Clark pushed the girlfriend’s shoulder. He pointed at the parking lines. The Chinese couple next door, who helped Sarah assemble furniture when she moved in and who still brought mail to her, were also on their balcony. They yelled down to Clark and the girls about the police. They waved their cell phones in the air. That was when the girls finally stepped away. Clark looked up and waved both his hands at Sarah as if to say, can you believe this shit and also I’m here, so come on down.

 “You know him?” the couple called across to her. “He belong to you?” She hadn’t dared wave back. She told her neighbors that he was Brie’s boyfriend. When Clark banged on the apartment door, Sarah answered and told him Sarah had gone away on a last minute work trip. It was really that easy. A lie and Clark left. Almost, anyway. He sat in his car in the lot for an hour before he drove away. Sarah had not been able to decide, looking down from her window on Clark in his vehicle, whether she was relieved at how easily she could hide behind Brie, or whether she was devastated that Clark was not sure enough of her to tell her he knew she was not Brie.    

“He was waiting, I assume,” Sarah said to Elle, “for my sister to come home and prove I was lying.” 

 

The ONE building, glowing like a dollar store jewel in the late-day sun, was visible from the Airtrain station, but as they wove through the crowd streaming from downtown, the dark, glass structure disappeared from sight. Sarah’s phone rang in her pocket. Elle squished against Sarah as people in business clothes brushed by them. A grocery bag banged her thigh. 

“Are you going to answer that?” Elle said. Sarah shrugged. 

“I know who it is.” 

 “He broke up with you,” Elle said. “Why is he still calling?” Sarah shook her head. She focused on the spaces between people, through which Elle pushed them. Her navigation quickly landed them in front of ONE.

Tall, industrial-grade steel doors opened into an all-white atrium, at the center of which a green installation ascended in a clear cylinder. Sarah swayed. The plants spiraling upwards bothered her. The greenery would outgrow the space. Its twisted arms would reach the glassed-in ceiling and find a false sky.

“Come on,” Elle waved at Sarah. “You said you wanted to find her.” Winding beside the installation were stairs cut from cloudy blue Lucite. Her sister’s office was only a floor above ground level. In front of the closed door, Sarah’s chest burned. Engraved on the steel doorplate was Brie’s name. Something about the look on Elle’s face reminded Sarah of the expression she had seen in her own face, reflected in the window of Clark’s truck racing down the mountainside—all that desire, drying her throat with thirst. 

 

When Sarah was twenty-eight and the Ivy League she and Brie attended flattened in her rear view, she applied for what she thought was her dream job shooting boutique weddings in the same small town her parents lived. It was exactly what Sarah hoped her mother wanted: near enough to touch, with flexible hours for accommodating spontaneous brunch breaks with mother-daughter mimosas. The weekend she interviewed, Sarah stayed in her parent’s neat, olive-green home, despite Brie, a serious look on her face, warning that the visit could not possibly go the way Sarah wanted. Sarah and her mother curled in deep Adirondack chairs by the side of the backyard pool and ate chunks of melting cheese in the watery blue shade of a striped cabana and talked about how alike they looked. They paired their feet, Sarah’s right beside her mother’s left. “Identical,” they said in unison, the synchronicity echoing in their similarly wheezy laughter. When Sarah told her mother about the job, her mother tucked both her feet beneath her. She shook her head. 

“You’re so young,” her mother said. “You need the big city, a real photography career.” 

“I can visit you any time,” Sarah said. “I’ll be that close.”

“You’re wasted here,” her mother said. “There’s no opportunity. You went to Yale.”

Sarah never went to the interview. She returned to the city and Brie met her at the door. She saw Sarah’s silent, pale face and sighed. Brie understood what Sarah did not: that their mother’s love was the kind that pushed, that insisted on something better, that longed for something greater than a chain of grab and go franchises. Though Brie would explain all this to Sarah, repeatedly, Sarah was unable to feel anything but the ache of disappointment at being told to go, at what she saw as her mother’s continued refusal to keep her close. This ache would keep Sarah from returning to the little green house, and so she would not see it: the way her mother would hang every photograph she could find of Sarah’s in print. There would be so many pictures on the walls, from carpet to ceiling, that when the front door closed, rattling the frames on their nails, it looked as though the very house trembled. 

 

Sarah pushed the handle, and the door eased open revealing Brie’s office piece by piece. Brie was nowhere but also everywhere. The bookshelf was color coded and alphabetized. A gray cabinet, its sleek surface uncluttered, lined the wall opposite the books. Above the cabinet were leveled rows of framed awards Brie received for her work as a leading industry professional. 

“She never told me about these.” Sarah ran a finger over the surface of the most recent certificate. In their stretching time apart, Sarah had never again called or visited Brie’s office, choosing to believe Brie would find her instead. She picked up a photograph in a thin black frame from Brie’s bookshelf. It was not a picture of Brie and Sarah. It was a picture of Brie. She was in a wetsuit, up to her knees in the water, her arms flung in the air, the Golden Gate behind her. Draped around her neck was an Alcatraz swim medal—the distinctive shark shape of the finisher’s prize unmistakable against her chest. The ribbon encircling her neck was printed with that year’s date.

“She swam the Alcatraz escape.” Sarah pinched pounding at the base of her skull.

“Water’s not my thing,” Elle said. “Why would anyone want to cross the ocean like a fleeing convict?” Sarah shook her head. 

 “We were going to swim it this year. We always race together, but it was a few days after I kicked her out. I didn’t think she’d go. I didn’t go.” Brie smiled, really smiled, in the photograph. Nothing about her seemed troubled. Sarah wondered who took the photo. Who held the camera, captured Brie’s excitement and her long arms reaching upward? She searched the office walls and surfaces. There was no trace of Sarah. 

The office receded. Distance filled her body. Spaces warped—echoes between the lamp and the wall, the desk and Sarah’s body cramped together, her sister’s figure a single, indistinguishable point far from her hand holding the picture. Brie’s careful sanitization of Sarah from her workspace, Sarah’s fear rose sick and sharp in her throat. She rolled her tongue around her teeth, around the skin in her mouth, tried to swallow the feeling that welled. Whatever invisible structure Sarah thought connected her with her sister, Brie had broken with it. That understanding was its own kind of pain, but the hurt swamping Sarah was not that but Sarah’s lack of understanding. She looked again at the picture, at her sister’s singular joy, her sole celebration—she could not imagine what everyone in her family but her seemed so capable of; what could shift so totally in them, in Brie, so that she could fling her arms in this way, revelling in a state of being that Sarah could not find comfort in, even for a moment. In her own sister, Sarah had missed something vital. Her chest squeezed. Her phone buzzed again in the pocket of her sweatpants. “He’s still calling you?” Elle scrunched her face. 

“I have something he wants,” Sarah said, forcing herself to feel her toes in her shoes, to look up from the picture frame. “Sort of.”

“This guy sounds psycho,” Elle said. Sarah dropped into her sister’s chair. In front of her, on the dark wood desk was nothing but a lamp. She leaned down and tugged at a drawer, trying to pull herself away from the fear rolling through her. Hospital patient files consumed half the space inside. Behind the files was a neat stack of facedown pictures. She flopped the folders on the desk. Elle grabbed one from the pile. Sarah turned the photographs over. There were four, all of Sarah and Brie. She stared at the images. The surfaces fuzzed with dust. Whatever edge the shot gave her fizzled away. A slim black organizer, revealed by the removal of the other contents, was at the bottom of the drawer. 

“These are patients in quarantine at UCSF.” Elle waved paper at Sarah. “I friended this one. How does your sister have access to these?”

“She’s persuasive,” Sarah said. The slight heft of the journal sent the memory of Brie bent over its pages, her glasses sliding down her nose, through her arm like heat. She opened the journal to August. Brie’s neat writing filled each day—meetings with doctors, lab technicians, and nurses. Other notes on the superbug crowded the margins. Sarah brushed her fingertips over her sister’s writing. 

“She’s logged tons of data,” Elle said. “She’s charted where this woman’s being held.” Excitement flushed her features, bringing an unsettling intensity to her face. 

“Held?” 

“Her body,” Elle said. “Your sister knows where the bodies are held.” The edges of the file curled in Elle’s grip. She flipped pages, one after another. A mad rustle of paper crackled into the air. 

“I have this thought,” Elle’s voice shook. “When I find him, he’ll be lying on an exam table, and I’ll hop onto the table beside him and stretch out. Lie there for a while. Rest.” 

It was a weird vision, Sarah thought, worsened by the hugeness of Elle’s eyes, her fingers turning pages, the vibrato of her voice and yet it was also reassuring for Sarah, who had a recurring dream of Clark coming to the door of her apartment holding white roses that she would sink into water while he flopped at the kitchen table, his hair loose on his forehead. “Doesn’t sound crazy to me,” Sarah said.

“That’s your problem,” Elle said. “It should.” Her voice returned to its wry lilt, and some of Sarah’s unease faded into the pain curling in her legs. She flipped the pages of Brie’s organizer backwards through time, letting them settle and open onto June. “I knew your sister would know how to find him,” Elle said. Her eyes covered the whole plane of her face.

Lightly grayed out, the final week of May ran across the top of the calendar. On the second last day of May, Brie wrote Clark has harp. Sweat chilled on Sarah’s chest. Brie underlined the words three times. Sarah knows? was written in the margin beside the note, and the question mark struck through with a dash. The ink grew darker at the end of the dash as if Brie pressed against the short, wordless line. Sarah clapped the journal closed. She dragged air into her lungs. 

“You alright?” Elle looked up from the scattered folders. “You’re breathing weird.” Sarah tapped the notebook against the knot on her forehead.  

 

It had been the first week of May, almost a year and a half since Clark and Sarah met. There was no bump on her forehead then. They came down to the basement of the building to look for a portable stove in their storage space. Clark wanted to camp that weekend. While searching the locker, Sarah tugged three rolls of drafting paper out of the way. The rolls landed with dull thuds sending dust and dirt into the air, filling it with things to which she had been oblivious. 

“What’s this?” Sarah looked at the harp. Clark crossed his arms. The instrument was smaller than she thought, about four feet tall. It was bright red, but dirty, like the picture of the boy’s harp the police wanted. 

“It’s not what you think,” Clark said. Muscles on his forearms flexed. “I can’t explain it yet.” All she should have said, about the right thing, about the police, about public safety, stuck rough and harsh in her mouth, and that she let the harp slide away so easily, that was still left to live with. In his crossed arms, she felt the edges of her decision that was made in a second, less than a second, over a whole lifetime. To expose the harp to the authorities, Sarah saw this would snap him from her. She read it in the line of his jaw, his locked-up muscles. But to hold his silence, to add her own to his, this, Sarah thought, was a shared weight heavy enough to anchor them to each other. Clark had tugged the stove out from beneath a pile of luggage. “Let’s have our weekend together,” he said. “I’ll show you the sunrise over the trees. There’s nothing like it.” 

Sarah left the harp behind, let Clark slide his hand in hers, let their skin on skin warm the air cupped in their palms, because the last time she went camping as a young girl, Brie trapped five fish on her little fishing hook and Sarah none. Brie told her if she couldn’t catch a fish, she wouldn’t have anything to eat for dinner. When Sarah at last tugged a twitching, brown fish onto the beach, the hook was through the fish’s eye. She was so glad to have caught something that she carried the fish, the hook dragging the eye apart, back to the tent. Brie called her cruel, but Sarah never saw anything in that fishhook but her crooked gladness when she joined the warm circle of shoulders by the fire, laughter splitting the air like sparks from exploding logs. 

 

Sarah dropped the organizer in her lap. The feeling was of cracking and closing, the way a heavy door swings shut. Get right in your head. That was what Brie said. Sarah saw something she had not seen in the memory of her sister’s face, the pained tilt of her eyebrows: Brie had been talking to herself as well. 

“Speak,” Elle said. “You’re freaking me out.” Wrinkles rayed around her mouth. 

“Sorry,” Sarah tried to smile. “Not doing so well.”

“Okay,” Elle said. “Nurse time. You’ve gone very pale.” Elle stood and held Sarah’s wrist. She counted her pulse, and Sarah fixed on the picture of Brie in her wetsuit. She stood perfectly straight. That was the thing, Sarah thought. The uprightness. She traced the strike through the question mark. Another ache—unlike the pain in her body—seized her stomach. 

“What’s going on?” Elle said. Sarah wanted to stop carrying what she had done to the harp. The force of the words leaving her mouth might pull the weight away. Elle touched Sarah’s elbow, a familiar move. It was the same one Sarah had made towards Elle, standing over the memorials by the water—Sarah witness to Elle’s sadness.

She told Elle instead about a storm a month before she and Brie graduated high school. Rain whipped the ground into slop and a flash flood battered the dam in their neighbourhood. It was one of the hand-built ones, with rocks stacked and the cracks between filled with an unknown substance. She and Brie went, in their rain boots, with the rest of the neighbourhood to sandbag the wall. Mud streaked their arms and legs and Sarah’s boots rubbed her feet until massive blisters formed and broke, formed and broke, blood running with water and dirt and grime. When they returned home, in the late afternoon, the appliances blinked PF and the entire house was disconnected from the phone lines, from the power lines, from the Internet. 

The storm knocked out—they learned later—an entire block. It wasn’t until Brie slammed her math textbook, dusty from burial beneath other books, on the kitchen table that Sarah understood. Brie’s last final, physics, was the next day and the review units online. The teacher hadn’t referenced the book all year. Sarah watched her sister take careful, detailed notes, her phone on speaker, waiting for the dead sound to animate. For hours, Brie flipped pages and listened for proof of re-connection. She didn’t go to bed. She studied until the early hours of the morning. She watched the rain lighten. As Sarah drove them to school, she saw though the high water insisted, the dam held. When the water line receded two days later, two days after Brie fell asleep in the middle of her exam and was woken at the end of the period by the teacher and despite Brie’s tears, her begging, her pleas for understanding, was not allowed to complete the exam she had barely begun, long cracks in the wall were revealed. It wouldn’t hold another flood. Though Brie would still graduate, she would fail the final, and the wall, despite its survival, would be torn down instead of repaired. 

“She’s a perfectionist,” Sarah said to Elle by way of explanation. She insinuated her distress was over the jagged edges of Brie’s disappearance—leaving her organizer behind was unusual and out of character. 

Elle would not know the physics final was Brie’s only academic failure, the sole reason she and her parents could not attend the private gala thrown by the school’s dean and academic board for grade-perfect students and their beaming families. Brie—who, in the two years since her parents moved away, privately held the gala to be the moment when she could show her parents she was as good and as capable and as impressive as they told her she was when they left her in charge—called her parents and told them not to come. Their parents were to arrive three day before graduation for the gala, to snap pictures of Brie and her gold-stamped award certificate. Brie insisted they not arrive early anyway. 

Sarah was furious. She told Brie to call their parents back, to tell them they should still drive into the city early, as originally planned. Brie refused. The day of the gala, Sarah and Brie did not speak to each other, Sarah blind even then to Brie’s humiliation, her disappointment, blind even to the way in which Brie would stop, as Sarah would, to listen the minute they thought they heard what might be a car, a car that was not coming, on the driveway.

 “Your pulse is fast.” Elle’s forehead wrinkled.

A stone, small and hard, formed in Sarah’s jaw. She rubbed the knot with the base of her hand. That Sarah knew about the harp and did nothing, because she loved more than she was good, that was not why Brie left. When Brie didn’t report the harp to the police, when Sarah didn’t remove Clark, Brie’s sense of what was right, what she should do, and Brie and Sarah’s relationship too, broke up. Brie didn’t return because if she had her goodness would be crippled and bound, not by love or loyalty, or whatever Brie’s feelings were for Sarah, but by Sarah’s need for Clark. Sarah bent over the garbage can tucked beside her sister’s desk. Saliva landed in the metal basket. The eye of the fish swam through Sarah’s spit—all that was torn apart, strung out, a universe on a thread of lost universes. 

 

When he walked in, Sarah thought it couldn’t be him, because she saw him everywhere and yet it was never him. Elle’s fingers tightened against Sarah’s shoulder.

“Who are you?” Clark started to say but, seeing Sarah, stopped talking. A slight smile, only perceptible to her, curved his jaw. “You have some explaining to do,” he said.  

“Why are you here?” Sarah said. “How are you here?” Her vision darkened and burned. Clark closed the door and leaned on it. He hadn’t come here for her. She could see his surprise swimming below the stillness of his face. 

“Who’s this?” Clark said. He looked sideways at Elle who stood silently beside Sarah.

“What do you want?” Sarah said. She stood and leaned against the cabinet, the desk between her and Clark. 

“Don’t do that.” Clark shook his head. He shifted his body towards her. One of his hands curled and the smell of burned plants filled her nostrils. Sarah gripped her phone in her pants pocket.   

“You should probably go,” Elle said, looking from Clark to Sarah. He smiled again, and more saliva rushed Sarah’s mouth. 

“What did she tell you?” Clark turned to Elle. “Was it a sob story? I bet it was. She makes you think she needs help, that she needs you, and then she lets you down. I bet she told you I did something unspeakable to her.” 

“You did,” Sarah said but it came out a whisper. “You destroyed my things.”

“She lied to you,” Clark ignored her. “She lies about everything.”

“I haven’t lied.” Sarah watched Elle squint. 

“What did you do with it?” He was close enough that Sarah saw his pupils flecked with light. Things narrowed. The world became him, fixed upon her.

“The what?” Elle said. “What is he talking about?” 

“The harp.” Clark’s gaze didn’t waver. She swallowed. She turned Clark, the good Clark, the one who loved her, into a sheet of paper. She crumpled the paper. She tossed the paper into a garbage can. 

“I was trying to help,” she said. She couldn’t keep straight who she needed anymore. Her breath was shallow.    

“I don’t believe this,” Elle said. Clark shifted his weight from foot to foot, and coolness collided with the heat radiating through Sarah’s body. “What did you do with the harp?” Elle said. “Did you turn it in to the police?” There was something like pleading in Elle’s voice. Sarah was silent. 

“You know she didn’t.” Clark propped himself beside Sarah. His arms hung loose at his sides. 

“Please don’t,” Sarah said. The paper crept out of the garbage can. 

“No one is going to help you.” Clark closed the space between them. She could see the curve of his collarbone where she used to put her face. Her tongue thickened inside her mouth. “Not your friend, not your sister, not me.” 

“I’m sorry.” Sarah’s headshake was weak, almost a tremble. Clark’s fist thumped beside her ear, rattling the cabinet. A framed certificate fell, slapping the ground. 

“Where is it?” he said. The paper spread out, unfolded white and blank all over her. Elle’s voice came from the end of a long tunnel.  

“We’re leaving,” Elle said. “Now.” She grabbed Sarah by the arm. Clark seized her other elbow.

“Tell me where it is.” His fingers curled, an insistent pressure around her arm. Caught between Clark and Elle, Sarah felt a fist form in her stomach. A finger of pleasure curled beside one of anger curled beside another of sadness and a short, blunt thumb of anger. She could tell him what she did to the harp but then he would drop away from her, perhaps Elle’s hands would too, and then where would she be? He would hurt her, she thought—his fingers gripped her flesh so firmly that her skin puckered—but he still needed her. She stitched her silence together, second by second. 

“Let go,” Elle said, and after two more beats of quiet where Clark’s hands tightened enough that Sarah would wake the next morning with the outline of his fingers bruised beneath her skin, he pulled his hand away. Depressions remained in her arm from his hold on her. Elle tugged Sarah into a run that did not slow, even once they were a block away from ONE.

 

There were so many shades of dark, Sarah thought, as her feet pounded along the road. The shadows between the buildings, the velvet night, the dark faces of hooded joggers, the tinted windows of limos, the shrubs spiked like warped hands where the streetlights didn’t reach. There was so much going on in front of her, in the city, in the people rushing around her, that she couldn’t see. Still, street light melted through the air, seeped through their clothes, spilled beneath the linings, searched for broken threads, ragged edges, rips and frailties to pass through into what was below, and below again. She stopped, her hands on her knees. Elle looked behind them. Their breath was ragged. “We have to reach the water,” Sarah said. A heavy tread sounded around the corner. She began walking again, quickly. 

“This is crazy,” Elle said. “I can’t come with you.” Sarah’s pulse rattled her brain into her skull.

“He hates the sea,” she said. “Can’t swim.” Elle hesitated and for a second they were far enough from each other that the sound of feet and rustling surrounded them, a fear symphony. When Elle caught up to Sarah, even the sight of their shadows beside each other barely held the threat of him at bay. 

 

Three years ago when Sarah and Brie moved into the apartment, Brie didn’t move in at all. She was away on a business trip, and Sarah carted their belongings from the street outside into the empty, stuffy living room. The first night, thudding at the door late in the evening woke her. Her phone was dead, the charger buried in a still-taped box. Boots shook the doorframe. She watched, frozen, as the handle rattled. When the would-be home invader started singing, that was somehow too much. She pulled on rain boots. An umbrella in her hand, she stared out the wobbling glass peephole. That might have been all she did except the man outside her door saw the young girl who lived two doors down come around the corner of the hallway. The girl helped Sarah move her heaviest boxes earlier that day. They had talked about a shared love of extra crisp fried chicken and that old movie scene where the guy holds a boombox above his head. Sarah heard the girl say, “Hey man, I don’t want any trouble,” but the man took the girl by the throat and pressed her against the wall opposite Sarah. She swung the door open. “Young man,” she said, realizing the guy was nothing more than a boy, maybe seventeen. “I need you to leave.” At the sound of her voice, another door eased open. A head, gray and tousled with sleep, poked into the hallway. 

“I’m going to ask the same,” said the woman in 6B. Four more doors opened, one uncovered a man holding a baseball bat, but by then the boy had dropped his hands from the girl. He walked past all the open doors and took the stairs out of the building. The girl and Sarah didn’t say anything to each other, but when she saw the girl the next day in the lobby, she smiled at her, and the girl smiled back. Though Brie would lecture Sarah about unnecessary risk when she returned, every time Sarah saw the girl, a faint rainbow streaked through Sarah at the shared, invisible thing that passed between them. 

“You’re nuts,” Elle said when Sarah finished speaking. She shrugged. That was the one thing Clark and Sarah and Brie shared. All of them had grown up here, one shoulder cocked higher than the other, listening for the day the Diablo would start blowing, and mothers would start bolting the door three times, and the dogs would skin themselves on stucco, and the bottom would fall out of everything while everyone kept talking, talking, talking about everything, anything, except what was really the matter.