Isle

Laura van den Berg

The Isle of Youth

  1.

  I arrived at my sister’s apartment just before the hurricane. My plane had been one of the last to land at the Miami airport. From the taxi, I saw banks of black cloud settling on the horizon and palm trees bent from the wind. Bushes flapped like invisible hands were shaking them. The roads into downtown were empty. On the radio, a reporter said the hurricane would skim the coast before spinning into the Gulf of Mexico, that it would all be over by morning. I didn’t believe him. The sky looked frightening. I’d never been to Florida before. My sister, Sylvia, and I were identical twins. I had not seen her in over a year.

  “Does the hurricane have a name?” I asked the driver as we rolled down Sixth Street, scanning apartment buildings for the address I’d been given.

  “They’re always named after women,” he said.

  This wasn’t true. I remembered Hurricanes Andrew and Floyd, but figured he was trying to make a statement.

  He parked in front of my sister’s building. It was tall and made of bright orange stucco. I paid the driver and got out, pulling my carry-on behind me. In the front lobby and in the elevator, the lights buzzed and flickered.

  When Sylvia opened the door, I didn’t enter right away. She looked like me and she didn’t look like me. She had the same dainty nose and rounded chin, but she was thinner and had better posture. She had a ring in her bottom lip and carefully styled bangs. Sweatpants, a sheer white tank top, pink socks. Chipped black polish on her nails. I had no idea what my sister was doing for work. I was a research librarian and lived in D.C. My suits were poly-blend, and I hadn’t been to a hair salon in months. When my sister asked me to come, I had not considered our many differences. She said it was an emergency and I told her that I had some vacation days saved. I didn’t tell her that my husband and I were on the brink, and I’d been looking for something to take a chance on.

  “Sylvia,” I said. “How are you?”

  “Looks like you brought the weather with you.” She opened the door wider.

  Inside, unlit candles sat on top of the coffee table and the stereo and on the ledges of bookcases. I squeezed my suitcase handle, taking in everything: the sectional sofa and flat-screen TV to my left, the kitchen to my right, the balcony with sliding glass doors, legions of candles. Even with the lights on, the apartment was dim, the storm having brought on a premature night.

  “Is that safe?” I pointed to the bookcases. “To have candles so close to all that paper?”

  She shut the door. “You’ll thank me when the electricity goes out.”

  I asked my sister what I should do with my luggage. She pointed to a hallway past the kitchen. The guest room was empty, save for a futon bed, and had been converted into a storage space for musical equipment: a guitar, amps, stacks of records. I had to clear away cords and a plastic box of guitar picks to find the mattress.

  I found Sylvia on the balcony. I stood beside her and looked out at the empty streets and the windblown palm trees and the distant gray swirl of ocean.

  If someone were to ask about my sister, I would say she was a dangerous person. The signs started showing in junior high, when she sent a neighborhood boy, who was in love with her, into a catastrophic depression by sleeping with him and then his best friend. At thirty-four, she had been through three fiancés, countless jobs and cities and hair colors. Bankruptcy. Names. Call me Lisa Anne, she said one time. Call me Suzette, she said another. It wasn’t just that my sister behaved badly—she was a shape-shifter, someone who bounced from one life to the next like a drug-resistant virus changing hosts. The longer I went without seeing her, the more comfortable I had become with the idea that she simply didn’t exist, that I had no other half, no shadow self. But, after all those years, there she was, there she undeniably was, reaching for me at a time when I already felt like throwing myself under the rails.

  “What’s with all the music stuff in the bedroom?”

  “I used to be in a band,” she said. “But you wouldn’t know about that.”

  “No, I wouldn’t.”

  “We’ll have to board these up soon.” She pointed at the sliding doors behind us. “In case the glass breaks.”

  “Is this going to be a bad one?”

  “A Category Two,” she said. “Small potatoes around here.”

  I crossed my arms on top of the railing. “What’s this hurricane named?”

  “I’ve named her Marie Antoinette,” she said. “The weather people call it something else.”

  “Marie Antoinette? As in let them eat cake?”

  “More like off with their heads.”

  *

  The power went out at nine. We had already boarded the doors; I’d held small sheets of plywood across the glass while my sister pounded in the nails. When the apartment went dark, Sylvia started lighting the candles. She did it effortlessly, as though she had practiced walking around her apartment blindfolded.

  “That’s it,” she said. “Not much to do now but wait it out.”

  I sat on the couch, facing the bookcase filled with blazing candles. Rain and wind lashed the building. My sister stood in front of me and swayed. The ring in her lip glowed.

  “Will you need to call Mark?” she asked. “Sometimes the reception is spotty during a storm.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said.

  “I take it things aren’t so good at home?”

  I looked up at her. “How would you know?”

  “I’ve called a few times in the last month,” she said. “You weren’t around. Mark brought me up to speed.”

  I took one of the decorative pillows and tossed it across the room. It grazed Sylvia before hitting the floor. The last time my sister visited, she and Mark went out together one night, while I was working late. They came home drunk and vicious. They sought me out in the kitchen, where I was going through my day planner, and mocked me about everything from my thick-heeled pumps (Like a witch’s shoes!) to my habit of grinding coffee every night before bed (Look who’s so organized! So grown up!). Even after I left the room, my sister showed no mercy. She knew how to turn people, how to get someone to abandon loyalties, to change sides. She should have gone into espionage.

  “And what did Mark say?”

  “He said the marriage counselor suggested you take a vacation together.”

  “He told you we were seeing a counselor?”

  “He said she has this really annoying habit of saying ‘you see’ before making a point. Like ‘You see, you’re misdirecting your anger again,’ or ‘You see, now is a time for compassion.’” Sylvia sat on the floor and pulled her legs underneath her. “Where do you think you’ll go for this vacation?”

  “We don’t know.” I couldn’t help but feel, through these secret conversations with my husband, that my sister had gained a kind of power over me. “Did Mark sound like he wanted to go away with me?”

  “He said he was on the fence.”

  “We’re on the fence about a lot of things.”

  She asked if I wanted to hear a song she’d recorded with her old band. I nodded, trying to imagine my husband standing somewhere in our house and listening to my sister’s voice on the other end of the line.

  Sylvia slipped a CD into the stereo, battery-operated, on hand for the storms. When the song came on, I recognized it as the one we had danced to many years ago, when we were college students, and felt an awful pang.

  “Sylvia,” I said. “That’s David Bowie.”

  “Wrong track,” she said. “It’s a mix.” She pressed a button and turned up the volume. A woman’s voice overwhelmed the room. It was hollow, stretched thin, the words so elongated I couldn’t understand the lyrics. An electric guitar kicked in, then drums. Sylvia tapped her fingers against her thighs, bobbed her head. The woman’s voice grew shrill. I heard tambourines, another electric guitar. The song ended with the crash of cymbals.

  “Which part were you?” I asked.

  “The singer,” she said.

  The woman singing had sounded nothing like my sister.

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Fine,” she said. “I’ll play you another.”

  The next song opened with rapid-fire guitar and drums, breathless lyrics. I put my hands over my eyes and listened. I haven’t seen her in ages, I told myself. How would I know what her singing voice was like? But the more I listened, the more I knew it wasn’t her.

  I uncovered my eyes. Sylvia was dancing, in her sweatpants and socked feet and transparent shirt. The candles cast strange shadows onto her face; I could see the outline of her breasts. She raised her arms, and I caught the glint of the belly-button ring. She opened her mouth wide and words came out, her voice clashing with the singer on the stereo. Was this me in another life, me in an alternate ending? I’d heard stories about twins having secret languages and dreaming the same dreams, but I had no idea if my sister was happy or sad or terrified. She turned the volume even higher. The candles flickered. The apartment was hot.

  “Sylvia,” I shouted over the noise. I tried again and again. Finally I got up and put my face close to her face and called her name.

  “What?” she screamed back.

  “Why am I here?”

  *

  My sister told me that she wanted to change identities. I wouldn’t have to do much, just show up for her job at the Bortaga, a club on Miami Beach, and hang around the apartment for a few days. Sylvia explained this to me after she’d turned off the music and sat back down on the floor. I was still on the couch, studying her face as she spoke. There was a man. He was married. She’d been having an affair with him for the last year. His wife, suspicious, had hired a private detective, who had taken photographs. Once the wife knew what Sylvia looked like and where she lived, she’d started following her. Sylvia would leave her building and see this woman parked on the street, or look over her shoulder while on the sidewalk and spot the woman behind her. She had followed Sylvia to work, the grocery, the park, the post office, the beach, the hardware store, the hair salon. My sister and the married man had decided to end things, but they wanted one last fling. He wanted to take her to the Isle of Youth, an island off the coast of Cuba, Isla de la Juventud in Spanish. There were stories about the isle being a sacred area, a place that hurricanes always missed, a place on the right side of luck.

  “But you can’t leave because you have this woman following you,” I said. “And if you and her husband are gone at the same time, she’ll never believe he’s away on business or whatever he plans to tell her.”

  “Bingo,” Sylvia said.

  “I didn’t see anyone loitering outside your building,” I said. “I didn’t see any suspicious cars.”

  “I hope she’s not deranged enough to stalk me during a hurricane,” my sister said.

  “When were you planning to leave for this Isle of Youth?”

  “Tomorrow night, if I can get you on board.”

  “Will the airport be open by then?”

  “It’ll be open before noon,” she said. “We know how to recover quickly.”

  I heard a loud crash outside. A candle on the coffee table went out.

  “You won’t be able to wear the clothes you brought,” Sylvia said. “You’ll have to take things from my closet while I’m gone.”

  “What are you doing for work?”

  “Stamping hands at a nightclub. One of those ‘in the meantime’ things.”

  I stood and walked over to the boarded-up doors. “There’s no way I could pass for you in a nightclub.”

  “A comprehensive makeover is in order,” Sylvia said. “Hair, makeup, clothes. The way I’ll send you home will do more for your marriage than any romantic getaway.”

  “Speaking of Mark, what am I supposed to tell him?”

  “That you’ve decided to extend your stay. That we’re helping the city of Miami with hurricane cleanup. That I’m teaching you to snorkel. It doesn’t matter.”

  All of a sudden my sister was behind me. I knew she was there, felt her heat, without turning around. “I think Mark and I have lied to each other enough,” I said.

  “Deception is necessary. In marriage, in life. Otherwise the world will just sandblast us away. You have to keep something for yourself.”

  “There’s not one good reason why I should do this for you.”

  “Well, for one thing, you don’t like where you are right now. You’ve been wanting a change, an escape, for a while.” She put her chin on my shoulder. She touched my hair. “Here’s another one: you’ve always wanted to know what it would be like to be me.”

  *

  The makeover began at midnight. I sat on a stool in the kitchen. Sylvia placed her supplies—a makeup bag, comb, hair spray, scissors, a glass of water—on the counter. She propped a flashlight on top of the microwave, so it shone in my face. She dipped the comb in the water and picked at my hair until it hung straight. She took a few inches off my bangs and then used a white sponge for foundation, a big brush for powder and blush, little brushes for eye shadow. She tweezed my brows, pulled at the skin beneath my eyes as she smudged on black liner and laced mascara through my lashes. She used her thumb to apply red lipstick, another tiny brush for the gloss. She swept my bangs to the side with the comb and dusted them with hair spray. Through all this, we were silent, serious. By the time she finished, the candles were melting into wax stumps and the wind was still howling.

“You’ve got quite a collection of beauty products,” I said.

  “I used to work at a salon, before the band,” Sylvia said. “But you wouldn’t know about that, either.”

  She held a mirror in front of me. In the half-lit kitchen, it was like looking at myself in a carnival mirror: my face was slimmer, my cheekbones higher, my lips swollen with color, my bangs stiff with hair spray and curving over my left eye. My sister crouched beside me and squeezed her face into the frame. We looked identical. I brought my fingers to my mouth and Sylvia batted my hand away, saying I would mess up my lipstick.

  She put down the mirror and kneeled in front of me. She touched my bangs, almost tenderly. “The hair’s easy. Just brush your bangs to the side while you’re blow-drying in the morning, then spray, spray, spray.”

  “How will I remember all this on my own?”

  “I thought of that already,” she said. “I’ll write out instructions for you tomorrow.” She told me there was an envelope that had everything I would need to know, from directions to the club and the names of her co-workers to the description of the woman who had been following her to lists of what she usually bought at the grocery.

  “You’re being very organized about this.”

  “I love a good scheme,” Sylvia said. “I would have been a great criminal mastermind.”

  “What about when I’m at your job? What if I forget someone’s name or make a dumb mistake?”

  “People are used to me making dumb mistakes,” Sylvia said. “That’s the last thing that would make anyone think you’re not me.”

  At two in the morning, the electricity came back on. We blew out the candles and turned on the lights. The apartment was a mess: wax drippings, newspaper pinned beneath the stool in the kitchen, brushes and compacts and tubes on the counter, boarded windows. Sylvia said we would worry about cleaning in the morning. She put on cotton pajamas with martini glasses printed on them and tossed me a pair with flamingos. I had brought a T-shirt and sweatpants to sleep in, but didn’t protest; her pajamas were soft and smelled like perfume.

  She asked if I wanted to sleep with her, like we sometimes did when we were young, when our parents were shouting at each other and we were afraid. I said okay. In her room, she cleared away a mound of clothes and yanked out a trundle bed.

  “This is where I would make my boyfriends sleep when I was mad at them,” she said.

  We got into our beds. Sylvia turned off the light. It was hot in the bedroom. I pushed the sheets down to my waist. I could still hear tree branches slapping the building and a terrible, tearing wind.

  “When the weather’s nice, I have drinks on the balcony,” Sylvia said. “There’s vodka in the freezer. You can do that, too, if you want.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll think about it.”

  We were quiet for a while. I couldn’t relax, couldn’t even think about sleep. There was an electricity in my body unlike anything I had felt in a long time.

  “I jumped off that balcony once,” Sylvia said. “About a year ago. I landed in the bushes. I broke two fingers. I got a concussion. I had to spend the night in the hospital.”

  I rolled toward her. On the wall, I saw the shadow of her raised arm. “Why didn’t someone from the hospital call me?”

  “I told them I didn’t have any family,” she said.

  “I would have helped.”

  “I couldn’t be sure, seeing as you told me to disappear the last time we talked.”

  She was referring to the time she phoned to say she was in love with Mark, and that she was going to tell him so, and that she thought there was a chance he was in love with her, too. I’d told her she was a sickness and I was cutting her out. After the call, I asked Mark if he was having an affair with Sylvia. He said “no” then and he said “no” later, in the office of our marriage counselor. But still I just had this feeling. Maybe it was my imagination, or maybe I wanted someone to blame. I was willing to entertain those possibilities. What I didn’t understand was why I couldn’t do anything more than stand around in pain.

  “You told me to stay away,” she said. “So I did.”

  A week after the balcony, Sylvia tried to hang herself in the bathroom, but the shower rod broke. She said that she didn’t even go to the hospital that time. All she had to show for her efforts was a ring of bruises around her neck.

  “I have the worst luck sometimes,” she said.

  “Some people would say you were lucky.”

  Neither of us said anything more, though something about my sister’s breathing told me she wanted to keep talking.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” she finally said.

  I’d heard that line before, always when I was doing whatever it was that Sylvia wanted.

  “It’s good that you called. Thanks for the trip to beauty school.”

  “Maybe you’ll like my life so much, you won’t want to give it back.”

  “We’ll see,” I said.

  2.

  My first day as Sylvia began at dusk. From the balcony, I watched my sister slip into a taxi. All afternoon we had been looking for the woman’s car, but the coast seemed clear. After Sylvia confirmed the airport was open and her rendezvous was on, a hushed phone call taken in her bedroom, we went over everything in the envelope, spreading lists of names and work schedules and addresses across the kitchen counter. She had even gotten a fake lip ring for me. It was shaped like a comma and came in a plastic baggie. She picked out an outfit for my shift at the Bortaga, a black minidress and red heels, and did my hair and makeup once more. When it was time for her to leave, we stood in the apartment doorway. I wished her luck. She put her arms around my neck and kissed my cheek. And then she was gone.

  After her taxi had disappeared down the street, I went into the bathroom and stood at the mirror. My face was bruised with makeup. My bangs drooped over my eye. I wedged the lip ring on. The metal felt strange inside my mouth. I couldn’t stop running my tongue over the thin silver curve. I studied the photo of Sylvia leaning against a palm tree that hung on the bathroom wall and wondered who had taken it. This man she was meeting? I stared at her toothless smile, her narrowed eyes, and tried out the same expression in the mirror.

  In the kitchen, I poured a vodka on the rocks. I stood on the balcony and watched the sun drop. There was sand on the concrete floor. The air was wet and heavy. I saw palm trees that were nothing but brown stalks and sagging power lines. Everywhere there was paper and glass and spears of wood, like the aftermath of a riot. Sylvia’s building made it through the storm without any damage, but others in her neighborhood, we’d heard on the news, had broken windows and leaks. I heard a rumbling and saw a street-cleaning machine inching down Sixth Street. I finished the drink. The sun was halfway below the horizon, a watery orange orb. It seemed much bigger than the sun in Washington, the heat radiating across the tops of buildings and into me.

  *

  I woke the next morning feeling groggy, as though I’d been asleep for days. I rose and showered, using Sylvia’s gardenia-scented soap and her pink pumice stone. Afterward, I put on a silk bathrobe and poked around in the medicine cabinet: a nail file, red polish, an eyelash curler, makeup sponges, pills. The bottle was labeled “lorazepam,” the same thing, incidentally, a psychiatrist had once given me for nerves. I would take one and be immune to anything my husband said, any argument. I opened the bottle and found all kinds: tiny blue ones, round orange ones, rectangular pink ones. I pushed them around with my index finger and took the one that looked the most familiar. I closed the medicine cabinet and watched in the mirror as the oblong pill bled white onto the pink of my tongue.

  I wrapped my hair in a towel, took the bottle of polish from the cabinet, and painted my toenails on the balcony. The streets were a little cleaner. It was hotter than before. The sky looked like a wet canvas someone had smudged with their fingers. I couldn’t remember the last time I had so many open days in front of me. Sylvia worked only three nights a week at the Bortaga. Her next shift was tomorrow. Today was training.

  Later I moved a hairdryer over my toes until the polish hardened. I found some jeans, low-rises with holes in the knees, and a purple tank top in the bedroom. I studied myself in Sylvia’s full-length mirror. My stomach wasn’t as flat and my arms were paler. I taped the beauty instructions she’d left, complete with a diagram of a face drawn in blue pen, to the bathroom mirror and did my hair and makeup. I wedged the lip ring on and looked myself over. The eyeliner was too thick, the lipstick a little heavy, but not bad. A decent imitation Sylvia.

  Before leaving the apartment, I picked up the grocery list and the car keys. My sister had an old Mazda Miata convertible. I was looking forward to putting the top down. In the lobby, I opened her mailbox with the tiny key she’d given me. It was empty.

  Outside, the car I’d been warned about was the first thing I saw: a beige Lincoln Town Car parked next to the Mazda. As I passed, I saw a woman with shoulder-length hair and sunglasses staring through the windshield. I started the Mazda and rolled down the top. I was a little drowsy from the pill and the sun hurt my eyes. I found rhinestone-studded sunglasses in the glove compartment and put them on. I headed to the grocery on Creston Avenue. The beige Lincoln followed.

  At the grocery, I parked and rolled up the convertible top. I pushed a cart toward the entrance. The woman trailed behind me, picking up a small basket inside. She kept her sunglasses on. She followed me up and down the aisles, never more than twenty or thirty feet away. In the frozen foods section, I kept an eye on her by looking at the reflections in freezer cases, like I once saw a character do in a detective movie. Her basket stayed empty. She dragged one of her ankles slightly. I went about my business and by the time I’d checked out, she was nowhere to be found.

  After the grocery, I stopped at Coco’s, a café on Miami Avenue. I wanted to keep practicing being Sylvia in public. The café had blue walls and a dusty black floor. A window was covered with plywood and a sign that read COCO VS. FLORA was taped to the sheets. I peered into a glass pastry case, trying to decide between a cupcake and a muffin. I went with the cupcake and a coffee because I thought that was what Sylvia would want.

  “So the hurricane was named Flora?” I asked the woman behind the register. She had drawn-on eyebrows and cropped hair.

  “That’s what they call it on the news,” she said. “I call it something else.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Magdalena. After my mother.”

  I took a table facing the entrance. I scraped the icing off the cupcake with a plastic knife and ate it, just like Sylvia did when we were kids. The ceiling fan moved in lazy circles. I was finishing my coffee when the woman who had been trailing me came in and sat down. When I first saw her, I almost let the mug slip from my hands. In the grocery, she’d kept her distance. I expected her to wait on the sidewalk or in her car. I didn’t think she’d come so close.

  She took the booth by the covered window, facing me. She didn’t order anything; her sunglasses were still in place. She folded her hands on top of the table. I took my time finishing my coffee. The last few sips were bitter and thick.

  After the coffee was gone, I put my own sunglasses back on. I was worried the woman might detect a difference in my eyes. Then I went and sat across from her. Her brown hair was streaked with blond, her skin freckled and tan. She smelled like coconut oil. She wore a white T-shirt and jeans and a thick gold watch. I wondered if my sister had even gotten this close to the woman before. I liked the idea of being braver than Sylvia.

  “What’s your name?” I said.

  “My husband never told you?”

  “Never.”

  “I’ve been following you for a month and you’ve never said a word to me.” She crossed her arms, holding on to her elbows. “Why today?”

  “I want to know why you’re following me.”

  “You know plenty.”

  “I want to know when you’ll stop.”

  “I could hurt you. Right now. I really could.” She pressed her fingers against her forehead.

  “I’m going to the video store next, just to give you a heads-up,” I said. “It feels like a Hitchcock kind of night.”

  I left her sitting in the booth. I wasn’t sure she’d followed until I walked out of the video store, where I’d used my sister’s card to rent Vertigo, and saw the Lincoln in the parking lot. I waved to the woman before driving off.

  That evening, as I watched the movie on Sylvia’s TV, the phone rang. I ignored it, as I imagined Sylvia would. When I heard her voice on the machine, I paused the film. She was calling to give me the number of her hotel on the Isle of Youth. She said the island was split into two sections, the north and the south, and that a large swamp ran through the center. She said it was even hotter than Miami. There were green iguanas on the rocks and black coral in the ocean and if you dove at Los Barcos Hundidos, you could see the skeletons of sunken ships. She said it felt good to be seeing different things. Thank you. Sylvia paused. I heard bells in the background. I owe you big.

  *

  For my first night at the Bortaga, I put on the outfit Sylvia had given me and prepared my hair and makeup with extra care. At dusk, I drank a vodka on the balcony. The Miami skyline was a wall of pink light. Before leaving, I took a pill. In the car, I practiced saying my name was Sylvia.

  On the road, it was too dark to see if the Lincoln was following. I put the top down and let the wind roar through my hair. The bridge that led to Miami Beach was lit gold. I saw dark water below, heard music coming from party boats. My husband always said Sylvia was more fun, more freewheeling. I wondered what he would think if he was riding beside me, if he would be frightened when I hit the gas and screamed around a corner, if he would be surprised, if he would know who I was.

  I took a wrong turn near Española Way and got to the club late. I touched up my lipstick in the rearview, then gave the valet my car. I walked past the line outside and the black-shirted bouncers, trying not to wobble in my heels. When I entered the club, I was hit with cold air. A stainless steel bar stretched down one side of the room; on the other, a staircase spiraled into the darkness upstairs. In the back, DJs stood on a stage and people danced beneath streams of flashing light. The lights made the dancing bodies look fragmented and strange.

  I walked up to the woman sitting on a black stool and stamping the hands of people entering. She was pixieish and scowling. Her silver dress showed the dragon tattooed on the tops of her breasts. Her name was Lydia, according to my sister’s notes.

  “Sorry I’m late,” I said.

  “You’re always late.” She jammed the inkpad and stamp into my hands, then drifted over to the bar, where she sat for a minute before disappearing into the mass on the dance floor.

  My sister was right about one thing. Her job was easy. The people knew to stick out their hands, palms down; all I had to do was press on the phosphorescent stamp. I listened to the music. I thought about Sylvia on the Isle of Youth, with the black coral and the iguanas. I imagined my husband watching the news in our living room. He liked to turn all the lights off when he watched TV. He felt so far from me, now that I had slipped into this other dimension, this crack in the earth. All the questions that had plagued me on the flight to Miami—Does he want me to stay? To go?—felt remote, like background noise.

  I’d been stamping hands for an hour when I spotted the woman who had been following me. She wore a dress with a scoop neck and long sleeves, which looked out of place in the sea of naked bellies and shoulders and thighs. In the line, she looked straight ahead and held out her hand. I rolled on the stamp.

  “Won’t your husband wonder where you are?” I whispered.

  “He could care less.”

  She went to the bar. The bartender brought her a drink without being asked. She didn’t seem to be watching me very closely, which I took to mean she’d been to the Bortaga enough times to know what my sister did.

  I was looking at the woman when I felt a hand on my shoulder. A man in a gray suit stood over me. His hair fell to his chin and his eyes were different colors, one of them blue, the other hazel. He leaned down and pressed his lips against my ear.

  “Meet me upstairs in five,” he said.

  He went up the spiral staircase, vanishing into the darkness above. I was gazing upward when a bouncer called my sister’s name and pointed at the small group waiting for me to stamp their hands. I spotted Lydia and waved her over. Sweat had beaded on her temples.

  “I need you to cover me,” I said, handing her the inkpad and stamp.

  On the staircase, I put my hand on the cool steel railing and started to climb. What had my sister failed to tell me? It could be anything. That I knew.

  At the top of the stairs, there was a dark hallway with doors at each end. I could tell from the flat sheets of light shooting through the bottoms. The growl of heavy metal came from behind one of the doors. The man in the gray suit was waiting in the shadows, leaning against a wall. I stood next to him. My palms were damp. I felt on the verge of being exposed. Up close, would I sound like my sister, smell like my sister? I was grateful for the darkness.

  He moved in front of me and put his hands on my shoulders. He asked if I had it.

  “It?”

  “What we discussed.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I mean, I will.”

  “Sylvia.” He moved his hand over my face, closing my eyes. Then his fingers went down my stomach. I leaned into the wall, unsure if I was supposed to be frightened or enthralled.

  He said my sister’s name again. I asked what he wanted. I kept my eyes closed.

  “I need to know that you’ll be there,” he said.

  “There?”

  He pulled his hand away. “Don’t act stupid. It doesn’t become you.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll be there.”

  “With what we discussed?”

  “Right. With what we discussed.”

  He stepped back. “I don’t want to see anything happen to you, Sylvia.”

  “I know,” I said. “Of course not.”

  He touched my neck, his fingers pressing into the little dip at the base, before walking down the hall and disappearing behind a door. When I went downstairs, into the blistering light, the ceiling was raining silver confetti.

  *

  At Sylvia’s apartment, I took the cordless phone onto the balcony and called her hotel. The front desk transferred me to her room and when she didn’t answer, I left a message. I told her about the gray-suited man, that she was supposed to have something for him, that some kind of meeting had been arranged. I said she had to tell me what was going on, that this wasn’t the kind of thing I could pretend my way through. I said she was wrong about what she’d told me earlier, that I hadn’t agreed to this because I wanted to know what it was like to be her. Couldn’t you see, I said, that I just wanted to get out of my life?

  The sky was black, the horizon electric. I heard the distant whoosh of the ocean. Even at night, the heat was crushing. I leaned over the railing and stared at the sidewalk. Cars lined the street; people drifted up and down the concrete strip. I tried to imagine Sylvia flinging herself over the iron barrier and dropping through the air like a meteor. Her apartment was only on the third floor. Thick hedges bordered the sidewalk; the lawn was green and soft. Certainly it was possible for someone to jump off the balcony and survive. I wondered what those first waking moments, on the grass or in the hedges, might have been like for Sylvia. I wondered, as I lived my own unhappy life hundreds of miles away, if any of those sudden, inexplicable pains—the ache in the belly, the cramp in the knee—was some primitive part of my brain registering that my other half was in peril.

  I went into the living room and dialed my husband’s number. We hadn’t spoken since I phoned to say I was extending my stay in Miami. But, I realized as the phone rang, I didn’t have to be the person calling him now.

  “Mark,” I said when he answered, adopting my sister’s higher pitch. “It’s Sylvia.”

  “How’s the weather?” he asked. “The storm?”

  “It’s passed.”

  “And my wife?”

  “She’s fine,” I said. “A bit difficult at times.”

  He paused. I thought I heard a door close. “Sylvia would never say ‘a bit difficult.’ She would say ‘she’s a pain in the ass’ or ‘she’s fucked in the head.’ She wouldn’t be delicate about it.”

  “You got me.” My voice slipped back to its usual tone. I lay on the floor, my legs stretching underneath the coffee table.

  “Why would you pretend to be Sylvia?” he asked. “After all you’ve been through with her?”

  “You mean after all we’ve been through with her.”

  “When are you coming home?”

  I nestled the phone between my chin and shoulder. “Soon. When Sylvia is done needing me.”

  “Since when do you care about Sylvia needing you?” he said. “I don’t understand why you went down there in the first place, let alone why you’re staying.”

  “Since when do you have conversations with my sister without telling me?”

  “It’s not what you think.”

  “How would you know what I think?”

  He was quiet for a moment. “Let’s not let this go the way it always goes.”

  I picked at the wax drippings that had solidified on the carpet. “When I get back, are we going to take that trip or what?”

  “Yes,” he said. “We’ll do it.”

  “You really want to?”

  “I really do.”

  “Sylvia said you weren’t sure.”

  “Sometimes we get frustrated. Sometimes we say things we don’t mean.” He sighed. “I don’t know what else to tell you.”

  “So much,” I said. “There’s so much more you could tell me.”

  “I’ve decided I want to go away with you,” he said. “Can’t we just leave it at that?”

  “That’s been our whole problem. Deciding to leave things at that.”

  “You’re making it impossible to talk.”

  “Fine. Where will we go? Tell me.” I listened to his breath on the line.

  “One summer, when I was in college, I visited a Tibetan monastery,” he said. “It was just outside of Lhasa. I sat in silence with the monks for three days. We could do something like that, something spiritual.”

  I already knew about this trip. He’d taken it in the company of his former girlfriend, whom he’d come close to marrying, but I didn’t bring that up. His voice reminded me of who I really was, of the deepness of my—our—unhappiness. When you’re married, our counselor had told us, happiness is like a joint banking account; it becomes full or depleted in tandem.

  “I was thinking an island might be nice,” I said.

  “I hate to swim. You know that about me.”

  I rested the phone against my chest. My husband started talking about practical things, how long we could afford to stay away, whether or not we should use a travel agent or buy insurance. His voice passed over me like wind.

  3.

  The next morning, when I went into the kitchen to make coffee, I found two men sitting on the living room sofa. They stood and introduced themselves as A2 and B2. They were broad-shouldered and bald. They both had round faces and squinty eyes. They wore black T-shirts and black slacks and boots. They told me that my name was no longer Sylvia Collins. To them, I was only the mark: C2.

  I hadn’t done my makeup or hair or put on the lip ring. I was naked underneath my sister’s silk bathrobe. I crossed my arms over my chest.

  “What’s with the names?” I said.

  “It’s the Pythagorean theorem,” A said. “We used to be mathematicians.”

  “You missed your meeting this morning,” B said, stepping closer to me. “You told Andre you’d be there and you weren’t. So we’ve been sent to keep an eye on you, to make sure you’re getting things in order, like you’ve told people you would.”

  “And to make sure you don’t split,” A said.

  I sat on the floor. My bathrobe gaped open. The whole picture was coming into focus, a blur in my periphery gradually taking shape, like when your sight starts recovering after getting eyedrops at the doctor’s office. I pressed my legs together. I felt like I was sinking into the floor.

  “This is a complicated situation,” I said.

  “Everyone tells us that,” A said.

  “Sylvia isn’t here right now. I mean, I’m not actually Sylvia.”

  “Everyone tells us that, too,” B said.

  I asked about making a call. The men shrugged. I dialed my sister’s hotel room and got the machine again. I told her that two men were in her apartment and she needed to take the next flight home. After hanging up, I turned to A and B, who were unimpressed.

  “Listen,” A said. “Nothing is going to happen to you. Not yet. It’s too soon for that sort of thing, we’ve been told.”

  “Just do what you’ve promised to do,” B said.

  “I didn’t promise anything,” I told them. “I’m not Sylvia.”

  “Whatever,” they said.

  *

  I made coffee and got dressed, taking the first thing I saw in the drawer: jean shorts and a red tube top. In the bathroom, I styled my bangs and did the makeup basics—lipstick, mascara, blush—and put on the lip ring. When I came back into the kitchen, A and B had emptied the coffeepot. They took up too much space in the apartment. I needed to get out.

  I drove to Coco’s with A and B in the backseat. Before leaving, I’d taken one of Sylvia’s pills, and when they realized what I was up to in the bathroom, they’d demanded a dose of their own. These kinds of jobs have their perks, A had said, knocking his back without any water. In the car, they squabbled over radio stations.

  “Are all people in your profession like this?” I asked.

  “Like what?” they said.

  We passed high-rises and surf shops, snow-cone vendors and hot-dog stands. There was little sign of the storm by then, just the occasional ripped billboard or bare palm tree. In the rearview, I saw the Lincoln behind us. I rolled down the window and waved.

  “Who are you waving to?” A wanted to know.

  “No one,” I said.

  “Is this a convertible?” B asked.

  I nodded.

  “Put down the top,” he said.

  “I don’t feel like it.”

  A leaned over the console. His cologne reminded me of what my father used to wear. He had a silver stud in his ear. I felt his breath on my neck.

  “Who gives a fuck what you feel like?” he said.

  I put the top down. Wind raked through my hair. The breeze felt good. At a red light, I took my hands off the wheel and thrust my arms into the open air.

  *

  At Coco’s, A and B took a table in the corner and waited. The window was still boarded up. The boy behind the counter had a black eye. Ants crawled beneath the plastic dome covering a lemon meringue pie. While I was in line, the woman came in and took the same booth. She wore her sunglasses. A little orange scarf was tied around her neck. I got my coffee and joined her. This time, I kept my sunglasses off.

  I touched the boards covering the window. “I wonder how much longer these will be here.”

  “Who knows,” she said. “We’re used to seeing the mark of storms.”

  “Don’t you want something to eat?” I asked. “Something to drink?”

  She shook her head. I asked what she knew about the Isle of Youth.

  “Many years ago, I went there with my husband,” she said. “It was full of marshes and huge insects. The houses and hotels were falling in. It was anything but a paradise.”

  “I don’t know your husband, but he isn’t on a business trip, like he said.”

  She took off her sunglasses. Her eyes were a dull blue. “What are you talking about?”

  I looked past the woman, at A and B, who were huddled together at their table, watching. “I’m not sure how to explain this,” I began, and then I told her everything. That it was my sister, Sylvia, and not me, her twin, having the affair, that I was just filling in while they had one last hurrah. And now, thanks to my sister’s involvement in God-knows-what, I was being followed by two men who wouldn’t believe me when I said I wasn’t her.

  The woman cupped a hand over her eyes. “My husband hasn’t left town, on business or otherwise, since April.”

  “What?”

  “He lost his job,” she said. “I thought you knew about that.”

  “When did you see him last?”

  “This morning. I watched him do a crossword puzzle. He kept asking if I knew a synonym for ‘flummoxed.’”

  “You mean he’s home? Right now?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Right now.”

  On the radio, I caught the end of one of the songs Sylvia had played for me and claimed as her own. My cheeks tingled. I leaned back in the booth and tried to picture my next step.

  “Why do you even believe me?” I asked. “I mean, how do you know I’m not Sylvia?”

  “You walk like you’re not sure where you want to go. You’re nervous, unsure. Your sister acts like she has nothing but ice inside her.”

  I felt relieved that there might be a way to tell us apart after all.

  “Why would you do this for someone?” the woman asked. “Why would you agree to take over her life?”

  I considered telling her that I had wanted to help my sister, that I had wanted us to reconnect, even though that wasn’t it at all. I had always thought of Sylvia as being free—of responsibility, of decency, of career and home, of building the things you’re supposed to build, the things that everyone says are so important.

  “I wanted to feel free,” I said.

  “I don’t know why I’ve done what I’ve done.” The woman shook her head. “Why I didn’t just leave.”

  “I could say the same thing.”

  “Where are these men?” She leaned toward me. “The ones who are following you.”

  “Sitting behind you.”

  She nodded, but didn’t look over her shoulder. I admired her restraint.

  “What are you going to do about them? Should you call the police?”

  “I don’t think it works that way.” I stood up. I had the number for Sylvia’s hotel in my purse. I looked down at the woman, then over at A and B. The only time my husband ever followed me was on our second wedding anniversary. He waited outside the library and trailed me to the park where I usually ate lunch. I was unwrapping a tuna sandwich when he appeared from behind a tree, holding a white box with a cake inside. Flash forward five years, and he’d stopped chasing after me when I stormed out during our fights. As I looked at the three faces of my followers, I was hit with something almost like desire.

  I headed for the door. The men followed. The woman did not.

  *

  I went to a pay phone down the street, A and B in pursuit. I fished some quarters from my purse and dialed Sylvia’s number. She answered after one ring.

  “Hello,” I said. “It’s me.” The sky was bright. I put on the sunglasses.

  “Oh,” she said. “I thought you were going to be someone else.”

  “So here’s what I know: your lover is home, in Miami, and you’re in deep shit. Two men have been sent to keep an eye on you because you missed some kind of meeting.” A was leaning against a telephone pole. B was rolling a little gray rock around on the sidewalk with the toe of his boot.

  “I needed you.” She was quiet for a moment. “You wouldn’t have agreed to fill in for me if you knew what I was really doing.”

  “Which is?”

  “Correcting a supply problem.”

  “You cannot be serious.”

  “A and B are harmless. They’re never sent to do the dirty work.”

  “This is more than I can handle,” I said. “This is more than I agreed to. Are you even on the Isle of Youth?”

  “That part’s true,” she said. “But it’s not what I thought it would be like. It’s dirty and run-down.”

  “This trip hasn’t been what I thought it would be like either,” I said. “Not even close.”

  “I’m still coming back when I promised,” she said. “I’ll meet you at the apartment tomorrow night. Everything will get straightened out then.”

  “As soon as you walk through the door, I’m gone.”

  “You don’t care about what happens to me?”

  “You said everything would get straightened out.”

  “Wouldn’t you want to be sure?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Change of subject. What’s my life like these days?”

  “Lonely,” I said. “Very lonely.”

  “Tomorrow night.” She inhaled sharply, as though she was about to say something else, then hung up the phone.

  “See?” I said, turning to the men. “I’m not Sylvia. I’m her sister. I was just talking to Sylvia on the phone.”

  “Bravo,” A said.

  “Nice show.” B applauded.

  “You two should have stuck with math,” I said as we walked back to the car.

  *

  I drove around downtown Miami in a daze. The sky was clear; it was hard to believe a hurricane had blown through only a few days before. We kept the top down. A and B were bickering over the radio again. They finally agreed on NPR.

  “We like The Infinite Mind,” B told me. This week’s program featured a woman who, after brain surgery, woke up believing she was a nineteenth-century monk. Formerly a fifth-grade English teacher, the woman now recited details of her ascent through the order and her life in the monastery, all of which checked out with religious scholars. Soon her speech and motor skills began to decline, and the last word she spoke was megaloschemos, Greek for “great schema,” a term used for a monk who had reached the highest level of spiritual enlightenment.

  After the program ended, B said the story illustrated how speech is an inauthentic form of communication.

  “Think about it,” he said. “She reached, symbolically speaking, the highest level of enlightenment just before she stopped talking.”

  A countered that it was a commentary on inborn knowledge, on how we hold inside ourselves ideas and experiences that exist on a plane far above our conscious minds.

  “For example,” he said, “the first time someone asked me to take a gun apart and put it back together, I did it automatically, even though I’d never been taught how. I’d been holding this knowledge inside me without knowing it.”

  “Maybe it’s a commentary on how badly this woman’s surgeon fucked up,” I said.

  “That’s just cynicism,” A said. “That’s too easy, too shallow.”

  “To look away from mystery is to look away from life itself,” B added.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said. “Why are you talking like that?”

  “It’s what distinguishes us in our profession,” B said. “Our thoughtfulness.”

  We passed kids riding low-slung bicycles and a bus full of nuns. I wondered what kind of inborn knowledge I might have inside me. I imagined a silver spiral sitting in my chest, waiting to be utilized. I had just turned onto Eleventh Street when the men began to criticize my driving.

  “You’re just driving around the same blocks,” B said. “You should be getting it together, sorting things out.”

  “I don’t know where to go,” I said. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Figure something out,” A said. “We’re getting bored back here.”

  I steered the car toward the one place I knew my sister stayed away from.

  *

  Sylvia never liked water. When we were twelve, our parents took us on a trip to Carmel. At night, in our resort room with dolphin-printed wallpaper, my sister was kept awake by nightmares about being swept out to sea. I had enjoyed the trip because it was one of the few times I was better at something; I swam with abandon, ducking underwater and holding my breath until I felt my lungs would burst.

  After parking the Mazda on the edge of Miami Beach, I took off my sandals. A and B lumbered along behind me. The beach was a great sweep of cerulean water and white sand; when I looked into the distance, I saw the peaks of boats. Striped umbrellas jutted from the ground. Yellow and lavender lifeguard towers dotted the shore. Girls lay facedown in the sand, their bronzed backs and legs gleaming. Since leaving Coco’s, there had been no sign of the woman and her beige Lincoln.

     I left my sandals in the sand and went in up to my ankles. The ocean was warm. I continued until the water reached the ragged hem of my shorts. I looked back at A and B. They were standing on the beach, in the shade of a palm tree, their arms crossed. I only needed to go a little farther to feel the bottom disappear, to feel nothing but water beneath me, but I liked the firm boundary under my feet. I stared at everything that lay beyond: blueness, escape, certain death. It felt strange to know that behind me stood such an immense and troubled city.

  I remembered once trying to convince my husband and Sylvia to spend a weekend at the beach, but he said he didn’t like the ocean, and Sylvia looked at him and smiled and then commented on how alike they were. I had been grating carrots for a salad. I put down the grater, confused. My husband and I had gone to the Eastern Shore all the time during the early years of our marriage. I’d never known he didn’t like the sea. Since when? I’d wanted to ask him. What changed? It seemed clear to me that my sister’s fear had infected him.

  I went back to that fear, to that seaside trip with our parents, which revealed a side of Sylvia I had never seen before: shivering, small, vulnerable. She always looked so unhappy when she emerged from the water, with her slicked-down hair and blue lips, like a cat that had been sprayed with a hose. On our last afternoon, Sylvia suggested we play a game where we held each other’s head underwater, to see who could stay down longer. Her only condition was that we didn’t go out past our waists. I agreed, certain I could win. Sylvia lasted twenty seconds before she pinched my leg, the signal to let go. I still remembered how slim and pale her limbs looked underneath the water, and the silken feeling of her wet hair between my fingers. When it was my turn, I made it forty seconds before running out of air, but when I pinched Sylvia’s leg, nothing happened. Her hands bore down against the back of my head. I swung my arms and legs, dug my fingernails into her knee. By the time she released, I was gasping, openmouthed, like a fish stranded on land. You didn’t follow the rules, I shouted, but she just went back to shore and ran down the beach, the shallow water spraying around her ankles, her power restored.

  Clouds were thickening along the horizon; the boats had disappeared from sight. The ocean looked choppy and gray. I wanted a jolt, something that would snap me back into a world I recognized. I bent over and dunked my head into the water. The salt stung my eyes.  *

  When the sky dimmed, I trudged out of the water and drove home. In the lobby, I checked the mailbox. There was a postcard of the Isle of Youth: a photo of a turquoise sea and a white sailboat. The back of the card had gotten wet and the ink had bled. I held it up to A and B.

  “Sylvia sent me this card,” I said. “She sent it from the Isle of Youth.”

  “I can’t read the message on the back,” A said.

  “You could have sent that card to yourself,” B added.

  I put the postcard back into the mailbox, then turned to the men and asked why they weren’t making me do whatever work Sylvia was supposed to be doing.

  “That’ll be someone else’s job,” A said.

  In the apartment, the men asked if there was any pizza, so I ordered one. Later we ate and watched Die Hard on TV. After the movie, I didn’t wrap the extra pizza in tinfoil and put it in the fridge, like I would have at home. I left the box on the kitchen counter, our glasses and plates and crumpled paper napkins on the coffee table.

  I slipped into the bedroom, where I changed into a pair of Sylvia’s pajamas and called my husband.

  “It’s me,” I said when he answered.

  “I know,” he said. “You don’t have to tell me.”

  I lay on the bed, facing the wall. “I’m in a situation.”

  “A situation?”

  “This is going to sound like a lot to ask, but I want you to come down to Florida tomorrow night. I want you to meet me at Sylvia’s apartment and take me home.”

  “You’ve never had much trouble coming and going.”

  “You don’t know what I’ve been through.”

  “Explain it to me.”

  “I’m being followed by three people,” I said, though my mind was already moving in a different direction entirely, back to certain times with my husband, when the fights were just starting to get dangerous, when every night, it seemed, we found ourselves on the brink of losing irretrievable ground. There were things people could say to each other that brought about a kind of death, in that you never get over it; you apologize and seek counseling, you tell people your marriage is “recovering,” but you’re presiding over a grave. Of course, I didn’t have such ideas back then, when we still had a chance. I thought we were like rubber. I thought everything would bounce off.

  “Who are these people that are following you?” my husband asked.

  “Well, actually, now I think it’s down to two.”

  “Did your sister get you stoned?”

  “I haven’t seen Sylvia in days.” I rubbed my eyes. “She went to the Isle of Youth. It’s an island near Cuba. It has black coral and iguanas.”

  Someone knocked on the bedroom door. I heard A’s voice. He wanted to know who I was talking to.

  “I have to go,” I said. “Please think about what I asked you to do.”

  “What’s that noise?”

  “I can’t go into it right now.”

  “If you think I’m going to drop everything and fly to Florida, you’re nuts.”

  “Do you think speech is inhibiting our spiritual enlightenment?”

  “What?” he huffed into the phone. “What, what, what?”

  The door opened. I hung up. A and B loomed in the doorway.

  “That wasn’t an authorized call,” A said. “I sincerely hope you weren’t calling the cops.”

  “I didn’t know I needed permission,” I said. “Anyway, I was just talking to my husband.”

  “They told us you weren’t married,” B said.

  “They wouldn’t know.” I put on a pink bathrobe and pushed past them, toward the balcony. I leaned against the railing. My hips dug into the metal. The skyline was brilliant with light.

  I recalled what Sylvia said that first night in her apartment, about me wanting to know what her life was like. I turned my head from side to side, looking at the men standing next to me. “Now I know how it feels to never be alone, but in absolutely the wrong kind of way.”

  “We’re probably no worse than most of the company you keep,” B said.

  “You might be right about that,” I said.

  I leaned over the edge of the balcony. The ground below looked dark and smooth, like the surface of another planet. I wanted to touch it, to feel the grass against my cheek. I kept leaning and leaning until I was weightless. As I went, I felt something—fingertips?—graze the bottom of my feet. I hit the lawn hard. My legs were tangled in the bushes, my arms sprawled across the grass, as though I were trying to crawl away from the scene. I wondered if this was where Sylvia had landed when she went over the edge. I pictured a chalk outline and my body filling the shape.

  My lip was bleeding. I was sweating underneath my pajamas and robe. The back of my head ached. I pressed my face into the grass, not looking up when I heard footsteps or voices. I imagined A and B trying to explain this to their boss: she was there and then she wasn’t.

  “There is something very wrong with you,” A said.

  I rolled onto my back. Blood had pooled below my bottom lip. I swallowed a mouthful of liquid and grit. The sky had that smudged look again. If my husband knew I’d gone over a balcony, would he come for me then?

  B kneeled next to me. He pressed two fingers against my throat.

  “The good news is that you’re going to live,” he said.

  “What’s the bad news?”

  They were going to have to take me back upstairs. I nodded.

  “We have to keep you safe,” B said. “No one will be able to make you do anything if your bones are already broken.”

  I nodded a second time.

  “Why did you do this?” he asked.

  “I had to do something.”

  A kneeled on my other side. He rested his palm on my forehead. “What hurts?”

  *

  In the apartment, A and B helped me down the hall and into Sylvia’s bed. They put a pillow underneath my left ankle, which was already swelling. They cleaned the dirt and grass from my face and hands with a warm washcloth. Using a Q-tip, A swabbed blood from my bottom lip, then peered into my mouth.

  “It’s just a cut.” He held out a coffee mug and I spat blood into the white bottom. “You don’t need any stitches.”

  “I feel like I’ve been shot,” I said.

  “No, you don’t.” B picked leaves from my hair.

  They bandaged my ankle and brought me two pills from Sylvia’s supply and a glass of water. I took the pills and gulped the water like it was the last thing I would ever drink. They turned out the lights. They told me that tomorrow was a new day.

  The door opened. I knew they were about to leave. I asked them to wait.

  “Why did you drop out of graduate school?” I asked. “Why didn’t you become mathematicians?”

  “What do you care?” they said.

  “I want to know something about you.”

  The room was dark. I blinked, trying to find their silhouettes. I listened for their voices.

  “It’s not a very interesting story,” A said before closing the door.

  *

  I woke in the middle of the night with a violent energy inside me. I had to get out of my sister’s room. I limped down the hall and locked myself in the bathroom. I padded the tub with towels and eased myself in. I pulled the shower curtain closed. I uncapped my sister’s gels and shampoos and sniffed the liquids. Everything smelled like a bad imitation of something else. My elbow was bruised. My cut lip throbbed. The back of my head still hurt. I wondered if my brain was bleeding. I heard A and B snoring in the living room, where they’d taken up residence for the night.

  I fell asleep in the bathtub. In the morning, I woke to the sound of A and B shouting. Finding my room empty, they thought I had slipped out of the apartment. I got up, using the tile walls for support, and splashed water on my face. There was a greenish bruise on my cheek and dried blood around my mouth. I imagined the previous day repeating itself over and over and that sick feeling returned. When I opened the door and hobbled into the living room, the men stopped yelling and stared.

  “I was in the bathroom,” I said.

  “The bathroom?” A said. “What were you doing in there?”

  “Who cares,” B said. “She was just in the bathroom. We didn’t lose her after all.”

  They looked at each other and laughed until they were red-faced and doubled over. I sat on the floor and leaned against the wall. I felt a strange pressure in my cheekbones.

  “How are you feeling?” they finally asked.

  “My sister is coming home tonight,” I said.

  “I’ll put on some coffee,” A said. “Looks like you need it.”

  I told them I wanted to make a call. They glanced at each other, then handed me the phone. I lay on my side and dialed my husband’s number. I thought of the stories I’d heard about adversity bringing couples back together. When the machine came on, I repeated his name until the line went dead.

  *

  After the sun had been swallowed by a phosphorescent night, I waited on the balcony for Sylvia, a vodka sweating in my hand. My ankle was still wrapped and I couldn’t put weight on it, so I stood with my foot slightly raised, like a flamingo. A and B stood with me, of course, complaining about the heat and the mosquitoes and all the trouble I had caused them.

  “Who are we waiting for again?” A asked.

  “My sister,” I said. “The person you’re really supposed to be following.”

  B slapped at a bug on his forearm. “Lady, has anyone ever told you that you have a reality perception problem?”

  I watched the street. A car parked in the shadows resembled the Lincoln, but it was too dark to know for sure. I thought of the last fight I had with my husband. It started in the kitchen and progressed to the bedroom. In a fury, I’d climbed out the bedroom window and onto the roof. My husband stuck his head outside and called to me. I ignored him. A little while later, he walked down the driveway and got in his car. He left and didn’t return until morning. I stayed on the rooftop for hours, watching the black sky. Once, a plane passed over me. I wanted badly to be on one and a few weeks later I was, bound for Miami. And even with all that had happened, with everything that had gone wrong, there was still a part of me saying, Please don’t send me back to where I came from.

  Before my sister appeared, a little black briefcase in hand, there were several false alarms—women who had the same slim silhouette, who walked with the same kind of swagger. It was startling to see how many people I mistook for my sister, stopping just short of leaning over the balcony and shouting her name; it was even more startling to realize that to mistake someone for Sylvia was to mistake them for myself, that there were so many women who, in the dark, could pass for me. And so when the real Sylvia got out of a taxi and moved like a shadow across the street, I didn’t call to her. I didn’t wave. Instead I remembered watching her run down that beach in Carmel, looking radiant and weightless, filling me with terror and awe.

  Sylvia stood on the sidewalk, beneath a streetlamp. The light fell on her in a perfect yellow dome. She looked like she was posing for a portrait. She bowed her head. Her body heaved with a mammoth sigh. “There she is,” I whispered to A and B just before she disappeared inside.