Our mother wants to call our brother, tell him to come home, we have found our father, but we don’t have his number and it’s later in Spain than where we are now, hours ahead. The slut sleeping, dreaming of snow and her brothers and the pageantry of Christmas. Our brother with a girl in a car at the top of a hill where down below the sea can’t be seen through a milky-white mist. The condoms he’s used he ties into knots, sends them sailing out the window and over where he thinks they will land on the water, but they just collect on a ledge, along with others other men have worn while with their girls in the back seats of cars. The girl is correcting him while he is inside her again.

“Mierda,” she says and he says “mierda,” but it is not the same as hers, and she says it again for him and their breaths fog the windows and her sliding stockinged foot on the window glass leaves a streak they can see the rising sun through.

The slut wakes and goes down to the sea, bruising her bare feet on rocks. The snack stands are rolled shut, their metal half doors down and flush with the countertops strewn with churros and chocolate sauce birds make a meal out of, flying off with the churros in their mouths like leafless branches from some kind of greasy holy tree. The slut starts to swim to an island. The island is just rock and when she gets there she cannot find footing to climb its slippery sides. She drags herself up, her knees turning bloody from small scrapes. She looks at the rest of Spain from her rock island. Small cars and mopeds are buzzing down the streets.

Then she sees Cal on shore, standing at a bar drinking coffee and reading the paper. She dives into the water and swims as fast as she can. She screams out Cal’s name and swallows salt water and now all she can do is cough.

Still in her bathing suit she runs across the street, but just as she does, Cal walks to his car and drives off, taking a road that leads up to the mountains.

As the morning sun grows so strong her bare feet burn on the street she goes to her hotel to get our brother who is now sleeping. She knocks on his door, but he doesn’t open it, so she opens it herself. She shakes his shoulder. She calls his name.

Our brother wakes up.

He can still smell the girl’s perfume on his fingers and what may be the smell of her crotch, or his, he’s not sure. He remembers the sunrise as a band of red seeping upward into the gray of the predawn and he remembers driving the girl home to her house in a alley where the sidewalk was rubble and the streetlights flickered off. His mother once said you should make a wish if you drive by and they turn on, but what do you do, he thought, when you drive by and they turn off and you are in Spain? Do you un-wish something?

The slut puts her hand on his arm, trying to pull him up, telling him she has found his father. Her fingers are still cool, like ivory on piano keys and they are that pale and he looks at her face, drawn and pale too, and he asks her what she’s been doing all day.

“Here we are in Spain,” he says, “by the water at the beach, and you look like you’ve been living in a cave. Where is your hairbrush?” he says. “Where are your clothes?”

There’s a dark circle around her on the bed where she sits, her wet bathing suit soaking the sheets.

Our brother says mierda and the slut asks him to think of all the blood she lost from the baby and she asks him to think about the days she has spent going from door to door to door asking black-scarved gnarled old women if they have seen Cal.

Our brother at the wheel, they drive up the road the slut saw her Cal take. They pass through towns where they have to stop to let herds of goats cross the road, the slut holding her arm out the window, showing the herder the pictures of Cal and the herder shaking his head and the goats coming round to the driver’s side, nibbling at our brother’s sleeve.