by Sarah Porter
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.
i’m a stranger here myself
For all that day, and the next, the search parties went out, and I went with them. But I could feel what everyone was thinking, their rising futility, and I had to clench my hands. After the first day, they’d all stopped believing we would find him. He’d run away, maybe, or else his body was moldering in a ditch somewhere far outside our town.
Somebody muttered, “She’s the one who chucked the body, so why doesn’t she just show us where it is? Save us all some time.” People hushed him, watched me sidelong. “Well, have you seen her crying? You ask me, girl seems way too calm.”
Sun throbbed in the leaves. We went over the same ground. The clearing was well trampled now, but only by our feet.
Sometime on the third afternoon, Josh’s friend Derrick cornered me out
side a gas station bathroom. A lanky redhead with the all-American face you’d expect above an assault rifle: a perfect face for shooting up malls. He’d been growing out the hair to look cooler, started a lousy band, but I didn’t think it was helping much.
“It’s your fault Josh went off with those people,” Derrick hissed. “If he did, if that’s what happened. You know he only did that stuff because he couldn’t stand waiting for you.”
There was the tingling stink of gas and stale urine. A filthy sparrow bashing its beak on a peanut M&M, blue. Why did they choose such an ugly, snappy blue?
“It’s my fault, that Josh did exactly what he wanted to do?” I said. Except that Derrick was partly right: right that I never should have let it happen.
“He loved you,” Derrick said.
“He still does,” I corrected. “He loves me now.” Start talking like he’s dead, and I’ll find a way to make you suffer for it. I didn’t say the words, but I signaled them with my eyes. And Derrick backed off, slinking around the brick wall.
Ooh, Kezzer’s getting scary! Josh laughed in my mind. And Mitch: When you get in these moods, Kezz, you look just like a young David Bowie.
Shut up, both of you, I thought back. Josh, just come home, and then you can be as ridiculous as you want. I’ll listen to anything you tell me. Hours of it.
Reports had gone out on the news: the missing boy, the frantic search. And still Mitch and Emma didn’t call. It seemed increasingly awkward for me to call them. They were busy with their vacation, obviously not bothering to think about us, and Josh was my concern.
And so we came to the third night, and everyone but me went home. It was sixty-eight hours since Josh had vanished, then sixty-nine, seventy, seventy-one. I went back to the glade. Clouds were rolling in and it was cold for June. I could smell the air starting to think about rain.
I didn’t care.
If I wept, it might mean I truly had something to grieve for. Since Josh must be fine, wherever he was, I couldn’t risk crying. But it was getting harder not to.
Drops started pocking down. I sat with my knees bent up, back to a trunk. Blunt, dumb rain tapping at my upturned face. It came in waves, thicker and harder.
“Josh,” I said. “Enough already. If you’re punishing me. If this is some kind of game. Enough. Just come back to me.”
And then I heard a moan.
I didn’t jump up this time. Instead I stilled, every muscle drawn tight as a chain. I remembered that psych-out with the sobbing bird, how I’d sprung after it. It seemed like something awful would happen, if I let myself be fooled that way again.
A surge of rain came, shaking all the leaves. There was a popping and rebounding everywhere, a stir of mud on the ground.
And then someone who was clearly human moaned, just out of sight to my left, and I felt Josh’s dusky tenor taking the shape of each of my organs, liver and heart and guts. I was up, and the dimness became his foot sticking out. Then it became his whole body. He was huddled on his side, drenched and trembling.
I dropped down and uncurled him, opened his arms, and now I was free to cry. His skin was slick with rain and fever, his face was bloated. They’d done something terrible to him.
“Josh,” I said. “Baby, it’s me. You’re safe now, I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”
He snaked his arms around my neck. His eyes were void and rolling and for a moment I thought he would strangle me.
“Keyshaun,” he said, woozily. “Welcome back.”
It was a horrible time to be making such a stupid joke, but I couldn’t get angry. Or maybe he wasn’t joking. Maybe it was delirium.
“It’s me,” I said again. “Ksenia. Kezzer.” He still looked blank. “Ksenia Adderley? Your foster sister?”
“Ksenia!” Josh exclaimed. It seemed like my name brought him more into focus, stopped his eyes from tilting around in their sockets. He wrapped himself around me, pressed his mouth against my neck, so I couldn’t see his face. His shivers clattered through us both, his teeth clicked; it was a brisk night, but not that cold. I had to get him home. Or, no—to the hospital.
“Yes,” I said. I wanted to ask what had happened, but I knew it wasn’t the time for that yet. “Oh, baby, I’m so glad I found you. I was so afraid.”
“Ksenia, derived from xenos. The Greek word for stranger.”
“Okay,” I said. Though if that was true, how would he know? And why would he bring it up now?
“I’m a stranger here myself!” Josh squealed, and laughed uproariously.
Rain spattered hard on both of us, trickles tangled us up like spider webs. I was trying to lift him to his feet, but he hung limp from my neck, dragging me down. He wasn’t in his right mind. I dug out my phone, called 911. Josh sagged passively against me, one hand pawing at my face, while I explained the situation. They told me not to move him. They said they’d come find us. We weren’t so far from the road.
“Where did everybody go?” Josh asked when I’d hung up the phone. He seemed a little less insane, now. His tone wasn’t as sharp; more the purr I was used to. “Kezzer, I thought they really liked us! Why did they leave? Weren’t we all having fun?”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “You’ve been gone for three days. Those creeps vanished, and they took you. They must have dropped you back here.” Dumped you like garbage. Once they were finished with you.
He tipped back to look at me, and I used my phone to light his face. It was flaccid, bruised along one side, streaked with dirt. His lips looked like a crushed plum. Brown eyes moon-round and searching inside me.
“But we were just dancing, Kezzer,” he argued. “Just now. It was all so beautiful.”
He didn’t remember anything. Three whole days wiped out.
I was already wondering how I could hurt them, those glamorous scumbags who’d done this to sweet Josh. How I could track them down, and what would be the worst thing I could do. Though technically, I should do it to myself too. I hadn’t protected him.
I had precisely one function, one excuse to be alive, and I had failed at it.
“Kezzer?” he said. All at once he was getting hysterical, maybe slipping out of his trance. “You have to hold on to me. Tighter. Hold me as tight as you can!”
I didn’t know what kind of injuries he had, was the problem. But he clung and begged and whimpered until I gave in and squeezed. And when the EMTs came stomping through the woods he flailed at them.
“You can’t take me away from her! We can’t be separated, not ever again! I made sure of that. I made sure!”
“Relax,” they said. “Don’t worry. Your … sister? She’ll be right there with you. She’ll be with you the whole time.”
I held his hand in the ambulance. When we got to the hospital, though, they had to sedate him to make him let go of me. I sat in the glare of the waiting room. The fluorescence skidded over me: a quality of light that feels wet, impenetrable, enameled. My nails dug into my palms. I pictured the boy from the glade, the one with the whitely shining jacket who’d guessed Josh’s name, stalking into the room and blanching in fear when he saw me. I pictured my hand raw-knuckled, gripping the key to our front door, and the fleshy blurt as the key punctured his throat. I could smell his blood. It gargled up, gluey and frothing like a chemical reaction. And it wasn’t red, but violet.
As Mitch would say, the vision was compensatory. As if I could pay back the world for what I hadn’t done. But it kept me occupied while the TV blared vacantly and the three Hispanic kids wept silently across the room. I gathered that their father had been in a car crash; they were waiting to hear if he’d live. Their tears held the light in pale ribbons.
I deflected their grief, familiar as it was. Didn’t let it touch me. I had enough of my own. Josh, of course, would have gone to them. Maybe read to them from one of the children’s books that were scattered around. I even considered it: trying to be him, do what he would do, in case it helped anything. But I couldn’t, and even if I’d tried I wouldn’t
have done it right, wouldn’t have managed to comfort them.
After a while words came to me, carried by white coats from the room where they’d taken him. Concussion, contusions; fever, irregular heartbeat, severe dehydration. Concern about the possibility of internal bleeding, but nothing broken. As to why he’d lost his memory, they had nothing. He couldn’t tell them anything, but none of the obvious markers had turned up in his blood. Not even alcohol. He was asleep now. I should go home and get some rest.
I slept in my chair instead. When he woke up, when he asked for me, I would be at his side immediately.
Once I looked up, and the kids were gone. I never learned if their dad survived. Apart from me, the waiting room had emptied out.
Even with my eyes shut, that awful light skated relentlessly over my lids. It burst like flares, signaling for help, and I was still searching for Josh. He was in a room just down the hall, even in my doze I knew that, but now it was the whole room that had gone missing, folded over or under some complication of the greasy blue-tiled floors, or tucked into an extradimensional pleat in the brightness. Not one of the nurses could remember where they’d put his room, and I screamed at them that they had to remember, that Josh was still inside it.
The next time I looked up, the light was blocked by the same cop, Rodriguez. The pudding face who thought I was an incestuous killer, but only because that was the quickest explanation to hand. He saw me pulling out of sleep. Jumped a little at the sight of my opening eyes.
“Just when we’d gone to the trouble of getting a search warrant,” he said, and brayed with laughter. “Now what are we supposed to do with it?”
It struck me as an unprofessional thing to say.
“Are you sorry that Josh turned up alive? It was more entertaining to suspect me of his murder?” It’s a bad idea to talk to cops that way, but I was feeling unhinged from the stress of the past few days. Now that Josh was found, I couldn’t keep myself locked down anymore.
He jerked his head in the direction of Josh’s room. His cheeks shook like there was some kind of small flying animal, a bat or a giant moth, crashing around inside them. “If that’s what you call alive!” He was still chortling. “Well—the doctor said—anyway, young Joshua is back, and aren’t we all so relieved? I’ll be around again later, to talk to him.”