WHEN I CAME back to the house, Olga was not in the garden, and when I went upstairs to hang my wet towel over the balcony railing I noticed that the door to her bedroom was open. I couldn’t resist the temptation to go in. If not now, when? I had never seen the room before and soon I would never see it.

A striking detail, her bed: washed-out stains of blood on the sheets.

The room was small. There was a dresser, but she didn’t seem to make use of it: a suitcase lay open on the floor, her stuff spewing from it, clothes, books, earphones. The sweet fragrance of sweat lay in the air.

One of the room’s two windows, the one whose glow I would watch in the evenings, was shut. The other was open to a little landing, the fire escape. I called out; no answer. I looked at the garden through the closed window. It was blurry with the glass as intermediary, a dream. I called her name again, yelling as loud as I could, and this time I thought I heard her voice responding from some indeterminate point above. When I climbed through the open window and up the fire escape, the sunlight forced me to blink. There she was, on the roof: lying belly down on a towel, dressed in a bikini, resting her chin in her fists. She looked like she’d been waiting for me in that position.

I sat down by her side, cross-legged. You scared me, I said, and it was only when I uttered the words that the images came, the fear that had gripped me the moment I saw her open door: that she’d disappeared, that something had happened to her, that the moment I came home from my swim and stepped through the door would have come to represent the final moment of innocence, before something life-changing took over. Close call.

Beneath my shirt my swimsuit was still damp, cutting into my groin. Olga sat up. Is my mom home? No. She seemed relieved by this information: she lay down again, on her back, put her head in her hands, arms stretched in a triangle. The hair in her armpits was dark and wild and shiny with sweat, like seaweed. I asked if she’d let me stay for a while. I wanted to look at the view. OK, she said, the word split into its letters the way I’d heard Helena say it: Oh Kay. There’s something on your foot.

I looked. I didn’t understand and thought she was teasing me. I found my feet embarrassing, they were dusty from walking in sandals, unevenly tanned, ugly from the crimson mosquito bites. Thick, raised veins ran across them like river deltas.

She put out her hand and touched my sole. There. A startling jolt of pleasure coursed through me. She said: you’ve got a stain.

I looked where she’d indicated. It wasn’t a stain, it was a star, one single star remained from the tattoo Josef had drawn several years earlier. I hadn’t thought about it in a long while. I hadn’t noticed that the other stars had faded or worn off beneath my feet. I told her. Which constellation? I could no longer recall. I realized that I might never have known. I said I could find out for her. Please.

She closed her eyes against the sun. It made her look so innocent, a little troubled; the thick eyebrows shaded her eyelids. I sat by her side and regarded the sea and the sky that surrounded us, the sun, the clouds, the horizon vaulting itself in front of me.