Liv knew that Ru would know where to find her, if not consciously then instinctively. Liv had picked Ru up at this airport twenty years earlier—when Ru was sixteen and had disappeared for twenty-one days. Just like last time, Liv parked her mother’s wood-paneled Wagoneer in a handicap spot in the short-term lot and smoked a cigarette out the open window.

Liv was nervous because she was always nervous. She missed the quiet routine of the spa-like rehab center—the persistent smell of tea tree oil, the quiet watercolor painting lessons, the soothing blink of the EMDR lights, and the long, winding conversations about her childhood—the one she invented bit by bit, loosely based on her own past. Ru wasn’t the family’s only storyteller! Liv didn’t tell her therapists her main secret, that she was lucky—weirdly, perversely, and oddly lucky. Yes, she worked for things here and there, but overall the world extended offers she couldn’t explain, and she took them. She simply had learned to accept it.

Frankly, she didn’t trust therapists, and she’d hated the rehab center’s trust-based activities—trusting addicts is counterintuitive. She didn’t really fully trust anyone, and certainly not herself.

She was taking an antidepressant, and the occasional Xanax for spikes of anxiety. She’d scored a few Valiums—her favorite antiques, as she called them—from a friend whom she visited briefly after rehab for the express purpose of possibly scoring her favorite antiques. She took a Xanax now—not wanting to waste a Valium—and lit another cigarette. She was well aware that Ru had taken her place as the youngest in the family, the baby, and hadn’t even had the courtesy to be the opposite gender, which would have allowed Liv to be the baby daughter, if not the actual baby. On top of that thievery, Ru had also been a bit of a genius though airheaded and impractical in that way geniuses are allowed to be. It was Liv’s lifelong job to take Ru down a few pegs, to keep her humble, to make sure that she had firm footing in the real world.

It was exhausting and didn’t make Liv feel like a good person, deep down. But that was her role and so she stuck with it. Changing roles at this stage would only disrupt all of the familial patterns, causing great upset to everyone involved, and wouldn’t actually last. The old roles were like ruts in a well-traveled dirt road. Eventually they would be drawn back to them.

With the motor running and the air-conditioning on full blast, Liv put out her cigarette and thought of her mother’s house, her childhood home. Did she secretly wish it had been washed away by the hurricane? She wasn’t able to decide. She knew it was time to go back, but mainly because she had nowhere else to go.

The end of her stint at the Caledonia had been a bad scene. It was the real estate agent who did the dirty work. The agent, middle-aged with a recent face-lift, was terrified that Liv would attack her so she called the cops. Liv had only left the apartment once in sixteen days—to eat her favorite meal at her favorite restaurant—but mainly during this stretch of time she’d remained drunk and high, plotting cherry-picked marriages on the walls in Sharpie. (One of the cops was a single woman and had actually asked some earnest follow-up questions about Liv’s method on the ride to the station, which was slightly vindicating.)

It didn’t help that she’d found one of her ex’s dismantled hunting guns—he came from pheasant-hunting types—and had tried to put it together in case the post-Sandy fallout turned to civil unrest. She was trying to explain this, slurringly, to the cops and real estate agent, whose face was propped with gauze, but only made things worse by picking up the parts of the weapon and swinging them around.

But it was all okay. The world would forgive her. It always did and it would show it by offering her something soon.

In fact, her oversized Louis Vuitton bag was filled with engagement pages pulled from her mother’s New York Times and Washington Posts. She fiddled with the leather drawstring but resisted opening her bag. She’d taken them just to feel close to one of her old addictions, not to fall back into it.

“The universe loves me and will provide,” she whispered. It felt like a comforting little dinner bell jingling in her chest, and then she lay down on the front seat, curled up, and fell asleep.

She was woken up by a knock on the window.

There was Ru’s face. She wore no makeup. Her brown hair was unkempt, not dyed. She was wearing a long cotton wraparound skirt, a tank top, and some kind of weird shawl. “Christ,” Liv muttered.

She sat up and rolled down the window.

“What the hell?” Ru said. “Why didn’t you meet me in baggage claim?”

“I thought we’d meet in our usual spot.”

Ru cocked her head.

“This isn’t my first time picking you up at an airport after you’ve run away.”

“I was doing research,” Ru said, too quickly not to have touched on a sore spot.

Liv shrugged.

“You fell asleep,” Ru said.

“I’m taking a lot of antidepressants.”

“Why?” Ru gripped the door where the window had been rolled down, and Liv noticed her engagement ring. If Liv had to guess—and she knew diamond rings—it looked like it weighed in at around thirty thousand dollars, and she also knew that Ru probably had no idea what it cost and therefore didn’t seem to deserve it. And why wasn’t the fiancé picking her up?

“I’m depressed,” Liv said.

“Why?” Ru asked again.

“Don’t ask why like a toddler. People are always going to think of you as a baby if you act like a three-year-old.”

“You’re the only person who thinks of me as a baby.”

“I’m not the only one.”

“What if you aren’t depressed and you’re just sad?”

“Sadness is an appropriate response when things are going badly. Depression is feeling bad even when things are going very well.”

“Are things going very well?”

Liv squinted through the windshield. “In fact, no.” Then she looked at Ru through the open window. “You’re wearing a blanket.”

“Unlock the fucking doors, please.”

“Oh, look!” Liv said. “And now you’re going to throw a temper tantrum?”

“I’m speaking in a very normal voice,” Ru said slowly and calmly, but not in a normal voice at all. She was thinking of elephants—the way they roared to intimidate one another and sometimes when they were joyfully reuniting with another elephant, returning. She couldn’t ever really differentiate between the two roars. “I’m thirty-six years old,” she said to her sister. “Can you please unlock the fucking doors?”

Liv had forgotten that she was in the car and Ru was locked out of it and that they were actually heading home.