By two in the morning everyone was peeling off, giving up for the night. There was a feverish tinge to the air, stars suppurating in the dark, and one person after another offered me a ride home or a place to stay, so I wouldn’t be alone. And I fended them off, one at a time, standing on the roadside near the gorge. Of course we’d searched the site of that party time and again, we’d paced between the trees in widening rings, kicked up the dirt outside the clearing. No one liked to say it, but after a while I realized they were testing for churned soil. For a shallow and hasty grave.
You know I won’t live that long, Kezzer, Josh had said. We need to be happy while we can. His voice kept incanting those words in my head while we searched, until I thought my flashlight beam could claw up the ground.
We’d found nothing: not a dropped cup, not a scarf, not even the scuffs of dancing feet. I was half aware, or more than half, that the lack of any sign of those strangers made me look bad, like I’d invented the whole thing. I could hear people murmuring doubtfully just out of view, behind the trunks or hidden by boulders, and I almost wished I’d faked some kind of evidence. I knew it had happened, I knew it was true, and I wanted them to feel it with me—quickly, before they stopped imagining that they’d seen pink dreadlocks hanging out of a van’s window—at a traffic light, that was it, down on Fulton Street.
But that wasn’t why I felt the need to search one more time, alone.
What was it in the night—something like a quality of reserve or shyness, something like a voice not quite ready to speak—that gave me the sense that the time wasn’t right for Josh to turn up, but that he might soon? That, even if he was injured or unconscious, the swarm of people stomping around and yelling for him might have scared him off?
No matter how irrationally, I thought I might have better luck alone. I sat down, cross-legged, just where I’d seen him squeezed by the two strangers, swaying with them. Muggy blue air; dripping stars snagged in the branches. Shrill intermittent wind.
“Josh?” I said. “It’s me. You can come out now. Even if you’re…”
But I didn’t know how to finish the sentence—what did I think he would be, if not a warmly smiling, chubby boy with dyed-red bangs and long wavy hair layered blond over chocolate? I felt like there was something I needed to say, but I couldn’t guess what. I gave up and waited. I felt the ground until its coolness smacked my own pulse back at my palms.
Some time went by, I couldn’t tell how much. My thoughts began to list in my head like foundering ships. My bowler hat tipped over my face.
Then I heard a voice crying out. I sprang to my feet still in a state of flawed, sleep-smudged consciousness, shoving my hat back, and spun in the direction it had come from: a mess of moonish trunks and slotted darkness, just like every other direction.
I knew the voice didn’t sound like Josh’s, not really. It was more like a little girl’s, distraught and weeping. But it didn’t feel like a meaningful distinction. In that darkness, anyone in trouble seemed like Josh to me. I went in pursuit.
I went in desperately, thrashing at the undergrowth and shouting. At first I completely forgot there was a flashlight in my pocket, and stumbled on in the moon-specked dark. The voice wailed again and I shoved forward, crying to her that I was coming, I was coming, and I wouldn’t let anyone hurt her.
That was when I caught the side of my foot against a stone. My ankle twisted under me with a brisk twinge and I went down, onto my hip and then my ass. The back of my neck took a scraping thwack from a branch, and then I was sprawled against the sticky roots, gasping and laughing.
Because as I’d fallen the voice had come into focus in my head and I’d recognized that it wasn’t a sobbing child at all. Some kind of night bird, its call filtered through my longing for someone I could help. The bird cackled again and I wondered how I’d made it into something human, something that was almost my missing brother.
I turned on my flashlight, scooped up my fallen hat, dragged myself upright. The ankle wasn’t so bad, just tweaked enough to give little chirps of pain when I circled my foot. That was good, since I had to walk the three miles home.
Once I was alone in the lighted kitchen I tried calling Josh one more time, and heard the bells pealing. They made me sick. I needed sleep. I stretched out on the sofa near the front door instead of going to my room, just in case he came back.
In the morning the cops came rapping on the glass beside my head. Would I answer some questions.
Sure I would, Officer.
It felt like I’d heard them in my sleep: the things they were thinking. I felt like I’d been eavesdropping on their mental process in my dreams, so I wasn’t surprised. I didn’t ask what the problem was. I didn’t ask for anything, not even time to get changed. I’d gone to sleep in my clothes—a ruffled vintage tuxedo shirt, gray skinny jeans—and that was what I wore to the station. I probably stank.
When they stopped for coffee and doughnuts, they got some for me too. From that I knew they hadn’t entirely made up their minds.
They sat me at their table, in their little bright box of a room. They told me I wasn’t in trouble, but some things had come up. Some questions needed straightening out.
The dark cop with the pudding cheeks asked, “So, you’d gone to sleep by the door? Why weren’t you in bed, Ksenia?” His voice wobbled, gargling and liquid. The woman had left and we were on our own. For the first time, then, I took in the name on his chest. Rodriguez.
“I was waiting for my brother. I thought he might come back.”
People complain about me, that I’m distant, or cold. I don’t intend to come across that way. But to most people, honesty seems like coldness. That’s what I think. Warmth is usually a performance, a way of covering up for something deeper. Something frozen. Inside us it’s like the ocean: the temperature drops as you go down. And if that wasn’t how it was with Josh, if he was warm all the way through? Well, he wasn’t normal.
“But Joshua Korensky isn’t actually your brother.”
I bristled. “Of course he is.”
The cop waved a file full of papers. I knew enough to guess that those pages were blank, that he’d just yanked a stack from the copier. “Some of the kids from your school seem to think that he’s a whole lot more than that to you. Good friends of Joshua’s. They would know.”
I didn’t take off my hat. I didn’t run fingers through my hair. I sat with my hands folded politely on the tabletop, very calm, and stared at him. It was deliberate: physical repose, full eye contact, those are supposedly signs that you’re telling the truth.
“What do you mean?”
“So that’s why I bring it up, that he isn’t your brother. Just in foster care with you. You never laid eyes on him before you were twelve, isn’t that right? And young kids, thrown together … hormones raging … it’s understandable, am I right, Ksenia? Outsiders might not be so sympathetic, but it’s not actually incest at all.”
I knew what he was doing. You don’t spend your early years with a mother like mine, and not know. She’d taught me. See, Sennie, they’ll make your excuses for you, so you think it’s safe to come out and admit it. Like, see, if they think a guy raped somebody, the cop will be the one to say, “Hot little number walking around in a skirt like that, of course you thought she wanted it!” And then she’d cackled. Just like that bird.
“You think I had sex with my brother?” I asked, indignant. “Officer, that’s a disgusting thing to say. And it would totally be incest, anyway. Family isn’t just who you’re blood-related to.”
He looked perplexed. Waved his folder. “That’s not what his friends told me. They say he said that you two were in love. Going to be together forever.”
Maybe he did. And it wasn’t Lexi who’d repeated it, I knew that much; somebody else had blabbed.
“Then his friends are liars,” I said.
Because I knew where this would go. Josh was always sleeping around, and that hurt you, didn’t it, Ksenia? You couldn’t take it anymore, could you? So you did what you had to do, to make the pain go away.
He left the room, probably to discuss what next to try on me. And the truth wasn’t what he thought, but it also wasn’t what I’d said.
The truth was deep nights, a lot more than one, when Mitch and Emma were fast asleep and Josh came crawling into my bed and nuzzled close and tried to get started with me. And I’d say, No, baby, it would be wrong. You’re younger. I’d feel like I was taking advantage of you.
But you literally can’t take advantage of me, Kezzer! Because it’s my choice if I love you, and I do. Oh, why do you have to be the only one who worries about that?
Besides, I’d say, we’re basically brother and sister. Incest is frowned upon.
What about when I’m eighteen? he’d ask. When we’re together for real and it’s just you and me? Then there won’t be anybody to be all frowning-upon anything we do. They won’t even know how we grew up together.
Maybe when you’re twenty-one, I’d finally told him. Just a week ago, and it was the first time I’d given in. If you still feel this way, then.
And that was a tactical error, because he’d bounced like a maniac all over my bed and then thrown himself across me, wrapping my face in his arms and peering down. Oho! So you’re saying it won’t be incest anymore, once I’m twenty-one?
It won’t be incest anymore, once you don’t need me to take care of you.
Maybe you should let me be the one to take care of you, Kezz. I just want to be with you till I die. His voice had broken, but at the same time he’d reached to pull up my tank top. And I’d stopped him, grabbed his hand, but I didn’t kick him out. He’d slept in my arms. Beautiful and soft, my shoulder damp under his mouth.
But the cop didn’t need to know any of that.
What they were looking for were reasons why I might have murdered my brother, and since I hadn’t murdered anyone I didn’t think the rest of it mattered.
I’d never been that jealous of the people Josh messed with, anyway. Not even when he made a display of it, tried hard to get a reaction from me. The thing is, Josh had lost so much that he could be a little compulsive about pulling people in. He’d use whatever worked. It would have been stupid, even heartless, to hold that against him.
Why should I care? I was the one he loved. He loved me more than anything.
He’d always said so.
When the cop came back in he seemed a little confused. Disoriented. It was like he’d lost his train of thought while he was in the hallway. Couldn’t remember what we’d been talking about, or what I was supposed to be guilty of having done.
He tried to cover it up, but I could tell. He thanked me too heartily for coming in, for my help with the investigation.
“Sure,” I said. “Just so you find my brother. Bring him home.”
For an uncomfortable moment I could have sworn he didn’t know what I was talking about, or whom. Maybe there was something wrong with him, like early Alzheimer’s. “Your brother.”
“Joshua Korensky,” I reminded him. “We spent all day yesterday going around with search parties? Looking for him?”
“Young Joshua!” he said, with blank enthusiasm. “When we find him I’ll be sure to tell him how lucky he is, to have a terrific big sister like you. One who cares so danged much about him.”
He showed me out. They had no evidence against me, anyway. Even if I’d done it, I would have had to be an idiot to confess.
They had no evidence of anything at all. Just a lacuna, an emptiness big enough to fit one plump sixteen-year-old and the makeup always running down his cheeks. Would it really have been so hard for him to take off his mascara before bed? He’d left flakes all over my pillows, whenever he snuck in.
Don’t make me wait until I’m twenty-one! Five whole years? You know I won’t live that long, Kezzer. We need to be happy while we can.
Sure you’ll live, I’d said. Of course you will. Why wouldn’t you?
I’m just not that kind of boy, Josh had told me. And then I’d realized he was crying.