drove her to his Hollywood Hills apartment. He fed her dinner every night and tucked her into bed on a mattress made of air, and while she pretended to sleep, he cried some more.
Chris died two days before his own twenty-eighth birthday. Kate was in the hospital room with him when he died, alone. Isaac heard her howling and grabbed a nurse, who found Kate wild-eyed, pulling on Chris’s dead finger, shrieking, “Wake up! Wake up!” Kate kept screaming until they left, and afterward for a time, too.
Now, Isaac tore at his manicure until something broke through the sound barrier and into his head. It was Kate’s voice. “What?” he asked.
“I said, is she like me?”
“Who?” He willed his eyes to focus on the girl. Her hair stuck to the side of her dried-out face.
“Aunt Nina.”
Isaac’s memory flashed on Nina, silent and vicious as a treed raccoon. She and Kate were different species. “I haven’t seen her since high school. I don’t even know where she is.”
“I thought she was in Denver.” Kate stopped chewing. “Did you call her?”
“I only have an address. There was a postcard from her old teacher among Chris’s things, so we’ll try his house. It’s a place to start, anyway.” Isaac cleared his throat. “Kate, even if we don’t find her right away, you can always stay with me. Actually, your father, he said…” he trailed off when Kate stopped eating entirely and looked at her lap.
“Isaac,” the assistant director said. “We’re up.”
“As soon as I nail this, we’ll go home to pack,” Isaac said. Kate stared at the crusts of the sandwich crumbling in her hands.
Isaac walked to his spot under the lights. He stood with his legs apart, ready to emote. The day before, they had watched Chris get buried. Chris had chosen a cheap cemetery in South Los Angeles, away from their neighborhoods. Neither Isaac nor Kate would pass it on the way to something else. They’d have to go there specially. Chris was one hundred and nine pounds when he died; his wife, Bethany, had been only seventy-five. A nearby grave was decorated with used hypodermic needles stuck into the ground in the shape of a heart. Isaac kept an eye out during the funeral. The cemetery was in a dangerous area of town, and he thought Kate probably wouldn’t go back there until she was old enough to buy herself a gun.
~
Grand Junction, twelve years ago:
Isaac pulled over at the Black house on 28½ Road. Chris and Nina climbed into the Jeep. “Take us high above this shit,” Chris said. Their mother had left them two weeks before, and Chris and Nina looked like they hadn’t slept since. Their father being what he was, Nina probably hadn’t dared to.
Isaac drove away from the shacky houses and trailer parks until he hit dirt, curling the Jeep up the Book Cliffs. Under a greenish-blue sky, they crawled along the high desert until they found a herd of wild horses grazing in a shallow canyon crusted with random ridges of snow.
“Just like the Stones song,” Chris said. He leaned back and whispered something to his sister, and she ducked her head. It occurred to Isaac for the first time that Chris might tell things to Nina and not him, and he felt briefly jealous of both of them. Even though Chris and Nina were the twins, Isaac was convinced that his and Chris’s futures lay in a twisted double helix, an appropriated DNA that comes with the kind of friends you don’t know how to live without.
They were planning to go west on the last day of school. Isaac had found his parents’ cash stash in a piece of tinfoil they kept in the freezer, and Chris had some money from his job at the gas station. They had almost enough money for the two of them to get to Nevada, or California if they got good gas mileage. Isaac glanced at Nina. Chris was planning to send for Nina once they had enough money. Probably.
“You tell her yet?” he mouthed to Chris through the rear view mirror.
“Shut up,” Chris mouthed back and looked at the dirty horizon.
Isaac didn’t have siblings of his own, didn’t know those social rules. He barely knew his own. He always felt like a guest in his parents’ house, like he had to apologize for his existence, his laundry, his need for peanut butter and toilet paper. He wanted to be a given, not a guest star. Chris always took him for granted, which made him feel more real.
He didn’t know how Nina thought of him, since she never talked. He had even turned it into a game, asking her random questions: “Hey, Nina. If a tree falls in a forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?” or “Hey, Nina. Why can a person be discombobulated but not combobulated?” Every day, he expended valuable daydreaming time thinking of ways to provoke a reaction: “Hey, Nina. Rats can’t throw up,” or “Hey, Nina. Two roads diverged in a wood. I took the one more traveled by. It made no difference whatsoever.” She never responded, except for one time at lunch: “Hey, Nina. What’s the sound of one hand clapping?” Nina thought for a second, reached across the table, and slapped him loudly in the face.
Now, Nina was the first one out of the Jeep the second it stopped. Isaac jumped out behind her. He had heard about these horses years ago, and had been searching for them ever since he got his driver’s license. A cloud of dirt from the Jeep’s wheels still hung round and low in the air, like a filthy sun. “You coming?,” Isaac asked Chris. Chris, never much into nature, climbed into the back seat for a nap. He pulled his baseball cap lower, and slumped down.
Isaac and Nina crunched across the cracked earth together. The air smelled like pine sap. Furry horses in every color quivered a little in the chilly air, although the sun was strong. Their coats were brushed askew by the wind. They grazed on the tough desert grass, heads slung low.
The only one not eating was a black horse set apart from the herd, his mane ruffled up. Isaac and Nina walked over the mud and brush until something in his dark eyes said, Stop.
“See that one, that black one?” Isaac pointed from his shoulder, as if sighting a gun. “Herds always have a sentry. If you scare that guy, they all run.”
Nina’s thin jean jacket was shiny at the seams, and the cold blurred her lips. “You chilly?” Isaac asked. He took off his coat and held it in her direction, looking away as if he didn’t want it. The cold air instantly blanketed his sides, but he was wearing a wool sweater and Nina only had a thin T-shirt under her jacket. He shook it at her, and his hand became light as she lifted it. When he glanced at her again, it was already on her shoulders, flapping almost to her ankles. He sank his hands into his jean pockets, and the cold from his fingers soaked through to his legs.
They watched the horses eat. “What are you going to do after graduation?” he asked.
Nina shrugged. Her black hair rustled against the shoulders of his coat.
“It’s only three months away. You really should have a plan.” Isaac liked the way his voice sounded, deep and assertive like that. He wiped his cold nose with the back of his hand. “I have a plan. A few plans, actually. My old man wants me go into mining, like him.” It sounded as bad outside his head as it did on the inside. He kicked a rock, watched it scurry across the dirt. “There are some jobs in California and Nevada. But I’m not all that interested in it. Dirt and rocks.”
Nina pursed her lips, her gaze fixed on the black horse.
“What I wish I could do is something cool, like be an actor. Like Shakespeare. The great tragedies and
