AI small flame was cupped in a pair of hands. Alice saw August light a candle. The room was much bigger than Alice had initially understood; they were only in one corner of it. Her brother had always been thin, but he was now approaching gaunt. His high cheekbones stuck out in ridges, which were clear even beneath an unflattering and scraggly beard. Though his arm muscles were clearly defined, the skin looked shrunken around each tendon; veins were thick as cords. “Alice,” he said, “what are you doing here?” His hands were dark against the white of his T-shirt with which he relentlessly fiddled before encircling his sister’s shoulders in a quick and pungent hug. Then he backed up, saying nothing as he sat leaning up against one wall, one leg bent and the other flung out in front of him. She could no longer make out his face. “Lookup,” he finally said.
Alice looked and saw that the dome overhead had an open circle in the middle, as if the builders hadn’t gotten around to attaching the center of the roof. It was a peephole to the universe, the size of a small umbrella. “Great,” she said, not bothering to sound convincing. “Where’s Cady?”
“Cady’s gone,” he said.
“What do you mean, ‘Cady’s gone’?”
He shrugged. “She left. I don’t know.”
“What happened?”
“She went back to work.”
“But what about—”
“Believe me, Alice, I don’t need your insight on this. Nothing— I mean nothing—is as clear as how it lives in your mind.”
“You have …” Alice said, swallowing hard. “You have no idea what lives in my mind.” She sat down on the cement floor, which was cold and covered with fine wet sand; her legs were worn out. “Gus, what are you doing here?” Alice asked gently, gesturing around the massive hollow space. “What is this place?” she said, not entirely without humor, but the very kind of comment that pushed his buttons. The moment Alice mentioned living conditions or money or working some kind of job, he was raw and complicated and she was polished and simple. At that kind of moment, which sooner or later inevitably arose when she was around her brother for any length of time, Charlotte was silently invoked. Her mother—whether or not in reality Charlotte might have ultimately agreed with her daughter—was judging not Gus but Alice. As soon as Alice voiced a negative opinion about Gus, she could feel her mother, languor included, judging the hell out of her. Alice was small-minded and Alice was sanitized, without imagination.
He responded evenly: “I slept outside for a while but it got cold and the ocean kept me up. This I like. And here,” he said, as his face was lit briefly and hard by a new match’s flame, “here are some more candles,” he muttered, lighting a slew of votives. “Let there be light,” he said, revealing bloodshot eyes, blackened fingernails, a killer tan.
“Why did you come here?”
He laughed. “You want to know why I’m here? The surf is outrageous, the weather is perfect every day, and there’s spectacular fresh food to be had for nothing. It seems pretty simple to me.”
“And your recent marriage?”
He looked at her blankly and she mirrored him until he finally proceeded. “We pushed it. Maybe I pushed it and she accepted. What’s the difference, really? It didn’t work.”
“The difference is that I don’t believe you. I mean, I don’t believe you’re that blase about her leaving and I don’t believe you about coming here solely for the awesome waves. Come on,” Alice said, her voice softening, “you must know that I spoke with her.”
Gus got up from his seat on the floor, where he’d hardly even shifted around. He stood up straight and looked at the sky before looking down at Alice. With his baggy pants and small undershirt and wild hair he looked, for the first time, dangerous. Her brother was not a big man—he could appear at times almost elfin—but he was dark and lean, and he’d acquired a recent steeliness that she presumed had come from a dose of hard living and what she could best—though vaguely—identify as inner resolve. “She’s never trusted me.”
“Have you given her reason to?”
“We all know she’s too good for me.” His eyes flashed in a way that made Alice uneasy. For the next few days she knew she’d think of his eyes in that very moment and not be able to rid herself of what exactly disturbed her so.
“You tell me,” he said, sitting down once again. “You’ve always been good at that—telling me what I’m actually doing. When I didn’t go to college you told me that I didn’t go because I felt superior. When I went to Java and didn’t call for a while, you told me I was desperate. So I wish you could tell me what I’m doing now. I do. I’m curious what you come up with.”
“Are you that angry I’m here?”
“Yes. But I’m more angry at Cady for asking you to come.”
“She didn’t ask me to come. She just called to let me know where you were. She knew I’d begin to worry, and she wanted to let me know.”
“Liar.”
“What makes you think I’m lying?”
They were looking at each other from a few feet away, each of them seated in a similarly defeated fashion. The dark was muddy with candlelight. “She’s not that considerate,” he finally said. “Why did you come?”
“I think you’ve been keeping something from me.” When he didn’t answer, she wasn’t surprised. “Okay, let’s start with something easier,” she said. “ ‘How’s the house, Alice?’ ”
“That’s fine, just give me the script. It really is better that way. ‘How’s the house, Alice?’ ”
“She’s a mess, actually—sagging and bulging in all the wrong places, but you know what? She’ll survive. Everything’s sorted, in boxes. Everything’s ready to go.”
“That’s good, right?”
Alice didn’t laugh. “I can’t believe you just left like that.” She waited, but he didn’t seem entirely anxious to explain. “And what was that note} If it were all up to you, you’d have sold the house, because we all know you need money, or you’d have asked some buddy of yours to go ransack it and collect on the insurance. All of our photographs and Dad’s prizes and collection of articles and Mom’s beautiful things, you’d have just as well seen them stolen or destroyed.”
He didn’t say anything for a while. “You’re probably right. I’m not saying I’m proud of it, but I just can’t imagine wanting or needing anything from the house. I remember what I remember.”
“And what do you remember … ?”
Gus smiled as if he were caught in an unnecessary lie. They both knew that she wasn’t really asking that question—at least not in the conventional sense—with any expectation of having it answered.
Looking up through the hole in the ceiling to the increasingly starry sky, she surprised herself by saying, “Do you know any of the constellations?” She didn’t recognize her own voice. It was the voice of a smart woman stuck with a potentially menacing stranger—that, or a hopeless first date. It was draining—all this talk, the soggy room.
Gus, however, seemed relieved at this banal turn in conversation. He cracked his wrists with a vengeance, as if he wanted to shake his hands right off. “I can still find Cassiopeia, the Dipper, the North Star. I used to know so much more, remember?”
She nodded. “You haven’t asked about my trip.”
“How was your trip?” He smiled.
“I hit a herd of cows with my rental car and was bleeding from the head. I ended up collapsing on a beach.”
He moved forward to examine her more closely and squinted up his face in a way that Alice recognized as something he’d done when they were children—he sometimes seemed as if he’d learned certain facial expressions by imitation and hadn’t moved past the exaggeration stage. She could not help but crack a smile. “You look fine,” he said. “You’re fine.” Then he came over and sat beside her. He took her hand. They sat like that for a long while. It was as if they both knew the quarreling was long from over, and they wanted to mutually prepare; they wanted to tap into their reserves of shared material.
“Since he died,” Gus said, “since I went back, I need to be alone more, but I get so sick of myself, you know?” he said, giving a short exhalation that was supposed to pass for a laugh. “The only way I can get out of my head is to talk to total strangers. Do you ever feel that way?”
She nodded. “But I get too involved,” she said.
“You’ve always been too empathic.”
“I wish that were true.”
“I didn’t mean it as a compliment.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Look, I wish Cady had stayed longer, and I do feel badly that I drove her to leave, but in a way I know she couldn’t have stayed, no matter how well behaved I was. I know how it feels when someone’s only half there.”
“Are you talking about Mom?”
He shrugged. “Mom, me, everyone but you,” he said sarcastically but Alice could tell, for whatever it was worth, that he meant it. “God knows you’re always there. You’re right there, all right.”
“Cady said you met someone who knew Mom,” she finally said. And having said it at last, having come to her point, she wanted only to say it again. “Did you?”
“No.”
“Just—no?”
“No, Alice.”
“Why would she say such a thing?” Alice shifted her weight on the floor and waited. “Well?”
“That’s totally ridiculous.” He sniffed. “She must have said that to get you to come down here and take care of me.”
“So you didn’t see anyone in Oaxaca who knew her.”
He laughed without showing his teeth. “Of course not. She told you that? She’s amazing. No, Cady got you on board so she could leave me and still feel like a responsible person. If you haven’t noticed, she’s big on responsibility.”
“Right,” said Alice, watching him closely, waiting yet again. Alice thought of Cady, back in her apartment or house—she didn’t even know where Cady called home or whom she would call in a crisis. “I don’t believe anyone.”
“That’s too bad,” he said. “But I suppose it gives me less reason to worry over you.”
“You worry about me?”
“Not really, but you know, I might start. Look at you,” he said, “you’re a delicate flower.” He reached out and gently tugged at a strand of her hair. A moment passed, then: “It’s good to see you.”
She hated that lift in the back of her throat, the watering of her eyes—the heavy, disproportionate, and welcome relief that inevitably occurred at the softening of his voice.
“Stay here with me tonight,” he said.
Alice looked at her brother in this, his personal squalor. She wanted to not be here, not here at all, but ten years old and out in the poolhouse—unrenovated and unburned. She wanted to be holding the big heavy flashlight and watching his hands make shadow puppets. Do the bunny. Do it again. Do the bird.
“No,” she said, standing, “I’ll go back.”
“Where?” He grinned, looking up at her. “There aren’t many options here. Let me guess: with the Canadian backpackers in a hostel? So you can play backgammon in the common space}”
“Where I’m going, there are no nice Canadian backpackers,” she said gravely. “There is no common space.”
“Don’t go. I have a sleeping bag you can use. It’s soft and warm. Just don’t go right now. It’s really late and you don’t know the roads well. Please don’t.”
“Give me the sleeping bag,” she said. “Give me a sip of your water.”
She curled up in the opposite corner. She blew the candles out as he hummed a made-up song. In his sister’s mind there were lyrics about phosphorescence, fireflies, long-limbed selfish children. She wondered if he knew how grateful she was to him each time he helped indulge the small part of her that truly loved not making sense. She waited for him to apologize or to explain; there was a physical space inside her that stayed open and waiting, but as he kept humming those low and infuriatingly relaxing melodies, the space simply faded away.
In the shack that had become the poolhouse where they’d camped out years ago, Alice had remained quiet for hours, and what Gus had done was talk. He’d told her all of his secrets, all of his many plans. Now he was silent, and soon, she heard, he was asleep. She watched the moon, barely a sliver, in the collapsing sky. The stars up above were brutal gossips: Make a wish, they said, giggling, so ravishing and mean, so many in number, Alice didn’t stand a chance.