I stood in front of my old family home. A home for a family of which I was now the only member. Everyone gone now. I had been forced to come back to this place I thought I had left behind for good. There’s a comfort and a discomfort when coming home that’s hard to explain to people who have never lived in a small town. It’s the feeling of free diving into the ocean, hitting bottom and sitting there as the body slows its heart rate and uses every bit of its evolutionary intelligence to maintain consciousness for as long as possible. No matter the desire to stay forever, there is going to have to be a return to the surface eventually.

The house, which occupied a small lot, rose high, like most Key houses, over an ashen gravel driveway and shadowy carport. There was plenty of shade there but I’d decided to park my rental out along the side of the dead-end street. The place looked run-down, enough to make me suspect it could collapse at any moment. I might have been overreacting but I wouldn’t put it past fate to take two sisters inside one week. I knew that I could turn and leave whenever I wanted. I could drive right off Callus Key again and back to the rest of the world where things felt normal and lighter. Here the weight of memories pressed down on me from all directions, as if the air pressure on Callus was different, thicker, dense.

I looked up at the lonely old place. It was nothing more than a shack on stilts to my adopted West Coast sensibilities, standing like some giant, gangly sentinel on the edge of the water. But this was not just the old family house anymore. It wasn’t just where my sister had gone insane and taken herself out of the picture—it was the place where an unknown sense of patient destiny waited. It was impossible not to know it, not to feel it. No matter how far I had traveled, that sense had always remained. But I was a stubborn and defiant person, angry like my father and addicted to that anger. I had refused to answer my destiny at all. Until now.

It was as though time was slower here. I closed my eyes for a moment and felt the caress of the breeze, briny and fresh against my face. I took a slow breath in and opened my eyes again.

So, the house was still standing. It had outlasted Mom, Dad and now Melanie, my sister. I’d taken off ten years prior, deciding then that coming back to this place wasn’t something I was ever going to do. Fuck you! may have been the last thing I’d screamed from the cab as I’d pulled off all those years ago—but here I was. And all because my sister hadn’t been able to keep her shit together.

Oh wait. Possibly I’m cruel. Salty. Unreasonable. Well, that’s fine.

The house seemed smaller than I remembered. It still stood on its pillars, high and dry, with old grayed-out wooden steps leading up to the porch, which skirted the house all the way around. From where I stood below I could see the front door with its little four-paned window, the eyes of the place.

Something moved in the dull shadows beneath the house. A man stepped out of nowhere. One moment it was just the house looming over me and the next a fair-skinned, fair-haired guy was peeking out at me from behind one of the support pillars.

“Who the fuck are you?” I blurted, startled.

He didn’t answer at first, just stared at me like I was an alien who’d landed her mothership on Callus. As he stared, so did I, long enough for a tiny trickle of recognition to set in.

“Hi, Michelle,” he said. “It’s me. Nolan.”

As he’d spoken, his voice had gone from strange to familiar. Nolan. His tone was deeper and rougher than I remembered it and I barely recognized his face with the shaggy, dirty blond beard he was growing. Well, shit. Little Nolan was all grown up. Of course, he hadn’t been all that little when I’d left, but it seemed like even when we had been twenty, we had been kids. He’d been gangly back then but he was much broader now.

He moved very slowly from behind the post, arms at his sides, eyes bleak, still staring with a sweet look of sadness and wonder on his face. He’s the one who found her. My anxiety ramped up, partly because it was so odd to be confronting my past and partly because he was so damn handsome. My sister had been fucking a big, burly babe. Good for her.

“Why were you hiding?” I asked.

He slid his large hands into his jean pockets and took a few steps toward me. There was something off about him, something I didn’t remember being there before. I couldn’t define it but I felt it in my gut. Something troubling. I’d spent a lot of years out in the world learning that I was really good at stumbling upon people like him, sweet-seeming on the outside while hiding darkness and distress on the inside. My childhood memories of him differed though. I didn’t remember him seeming so…ghostly.

“You’re living here now?” I jerked my head toward the steps, and the house.

He didn’t take his eyes off me. “No. I still live six houses down.”

But he’d found her.

“Why were you hiding?” I asked again. My eyes flickered to the spot he’d slipped from behind, as if someone else might wander out too.

He was not in a hurry to answer my question. The staring began to irritate me but I couldn’t really blame him—he’d found my face dead a few days ago.

I stared right back at him, trying not to be distracted by the slight pulse of the water just beyond him. Nolan and I had been friends, pretty close friends, as kids. He and my sister and I had been a little trio of misfits, practically orphans. I frowned. Those were old memories, pointless to ponder.

The breeze rustled his hair. Living in a place like this, he ought to have had more color, but his skin was light, like gulf beach sand. His hair and eyebrows were almost as blond as when we were kids, with just a hint of the darkening that tragically comes with age in most natural blonds. His beard more or less matched. Below his eyebrows, blue-as-veins eyes peered out, glassy but unwavering, something haunting in them. He looked as though he was as likely to start crying as he was to go off into a rage, and either at the drop of a hat. I dug that. The fact he was wrapped in a physical sun-bleached, wholesome, boy-next-door package to clash with the sense of danger I smelled coming off him, well, it just made him hotter. I wasn’t surprised Melanie had been fucking him. She had always been more of a freak-magnet than I had, if only by a hop, skip and a jump.

“I’m sorry,” he said eventually not sounding at all like he was any such thing. “It’s just…you still look so much like her.” I stood in front of him but I might as well have been her. I wondered which memories were passing through his head.

I turned my back to him and looked up the stairs at the front door. “Is it locked?”

He laughed a little. “No. No one locks their doors here. Remember?”

My small-town habits had given way to big-city ones a long time ago. “Right.”

If anyone had ever designed a trailer on stilts, it would have looked something like my old family home. The stairs and outer walls were made of cheap wood planking, faded from decades in the elements. They creaked under my feet but felt firm enough to take my weight. Okay, maybe the house won’t fall while I’m in it. No visible repairs. Same front door, new little window curtain, off-white.

I stepped back in time for a moment when I crossed the threshold. Don’t slam the damn door, girls! Daddy used to say the same thing about every time we came in or went out, even when we didn’t slam it. It shut noisy, was all.

There was no foyer, no fancy entranceway. I just stepped half into the living room with the crap-brown, worn carpet and half into the kitchen with the old yellowish linoleum that had held up pretty well. The old jalousie windows were cracked open, letting the faintest smell of brine waft in on the breeze.

Some new furniture, some old, some I wasn’t sure about. A newer television than we’d had ten years ago, but still old by today’s standards. We’d never watched it very much anyway, most of its service having gone to accommodating Dad’s habit of passing out to whatever game happened to be on. I took a few steps in and turned to the right, surveying the kitchen. Nothing out of the ordinary—the old yellow-tiled counters, beat-up cabinets, potted plant in the window over the sink.

“How have you been?” He’d followed me up.

Behind me, the front door closed. Still noisy, the rattling of the little window panes in their slots producing an undesirable flit of visceral memories.

“Good, good,” I said.

I ran a hand over the tile on the counter where we had always sat on bar stools to eat. I couldn’t remember a time when we’d sat and eaten a meal as a family. No point, really. I looked back at Nolan. “Busy, actually. Training.”

He nodded and smiled. It dazzled me for a moment and brought back even more memories. “That’s right. Mel said you were a professional diver. Never gave it up, huh?”

I smiled back at him, couldn’t help it. “Once a fish, always a fish.”

His eyebrows quirked adorably.

I ventured a few steps farther.

“Who called you?” he asked.

His tone was off again. I wished he wouldn’t try so hard to make polite conversation.

“The lawyer. I was actually at my birthday party when he called.” It was true. I’d been watching my friends doing shots, wondering if I ought to have one just to rue another year, when my phone had buzzed in my pocket and brought me back to harsh reality. I never had gotten that shot.

The rumbling engine of a passing boat drew my attention. I glanced toward the windows on the west side of the living room.

“That’s just old Caster. He goes out fishing every day about this time,” said Nolan.

I chanced a look down the hallway. The first door on the right was a bathroom and beyond that, the old master. I clicked on the hall light, knowing without having to think about it that it would take about three and a half seconds for the fluorescents to jump to life. It irked me that over so many years, no one had thought to update or fix them. There was the room up the hall on the left—Mel’s and my old bedroom. I almost wanted to start tiptoeing down the hall. Don’t wake Daddy, he actually made it to bed to sleep tonight. Don’t want him knowing we’ve been out late, that we’re leaving wet footprints down the middle of the hall carpet, that we’re stark naked ‘cause he went crazy and trashed our swimsuits.

The groan of the fisherman’s engine died out completely.

“Are you all right, Michelle?” Nolan had stood so quietly behind me in the hall that I’d almost forgotten he was there. Giving me time to adjust, I guessed. Was I all right? Stupid question.

“Mic,” I said. “Call me Mic.”

He didn’t say anything.

“Which room did she do it in?”

He stepped beside me, almost touching my shoulder with his. I wished he would, then realized how inappropriate—but so appropriate for me—that would be.

“We slept in the master,” he said. “She’d been staying in there since your dad died.”

“Right.”

The door was closed. I didn’t want to go in. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been in there. Yes, I could. When Mama was alive.

Thankfully, Nolan went and pushed open the door, leading the way.

The master bedroom was different. The furniture was all new, more modern. The curtains had changed to blinds, carpet had been switched out from brown to a medium-hued wood laminate and a king bed had replaced the old-fashioned twin. The entry to the bathroom was halfway open, but dark enough that I couldn’t make out the inside very well. The closet to the right was closed, but the doors were new.

It didn’t take long to notice the red stain on the floor a couple of feet from the bathroom. Morbid, I know, but I approached, crouched and studied it—bothered that it hadn’t come completely off the wood grain. My gut rolled a little with subdued anger.

I couldn’t keep my big mouth shut. “Wrist slitting is so…passé. I would have thought she would have gone out with a little more bang, something more creative, you know? Drowning. Self-immolation, maybe.”

I rose from my crouch to find that Nolan looked like he’d taken a hard slap across his face. His big turquoise eyes were even bigger. Then he looked back down at the floor, tucked a blond tuft of hair behind one ear and crossed his arms over his chest. They bulged with tension.

“Sorry,” I mumbled.

How embarrassing, apologizing to someone for my own sister’s death. My connection to her—and this place—suddenly seemed like it was hanging by a strand.

He frowned down at the stain. “I doubt she’d been planning it for long.”

The room wobbled. It was just for a split second, but it wobbled. A warning. Get the fuck out of here, Mic, before the whale opens its mouth and swallows you whole. I sat on the edge of the tightly made bed. The top sheet was crisp and white, but all I could see was red. Red and world wobble. And Nolan.

An empty glass sat by the lamp on the side table, kept company by a sickly orange pill bottle, which was also empty.

“What are these?” I picked up and waved the plastic bottle at him.

“Anti-seizure med. She started having seizures a few months ago.”

Something heavy settled in my gut. Dread. “Seizures?”

“The doctor said it was from alcohol withdrawal. Then when they kept happening, even after she hadn’t had a drink for a long time, he said it was probably the result of brain damage from her past drug use.” Nolan’s voice was flat, as though he didn’t believe what he was saying.

So, even from thousands of miles away, Mel and I had still managed to compete for World’s Worst Fuck-Up.

“And you thought the doctor was full of shit?”

“You shouldn’t curse,” he said, less flat this time.

I looked at him. He hadn’t been mean saying it, but had spoken in an authoritative way. I ignored him and put the bottle back on the side table where I’d found it. “Well, did you?” I asked again.

“No.”

Liar. I raised my eyebrows at him and added an eyeroll in case he didn’t catch my silent sarcasm. He frowned disapproval but also half-smirked. The response thrust me even further back in time.

“I thought maybe it was a side effect of the lithium.”

“The lithium? Oh, this just keeps getting better and better.”

“Mel had a lot of problems, but she was trying to be happy.” He growled the words at me in a ferocious tone I didn’t recognize. His words were aggressive but he came and sat on the foot of the bed. The way his shoulders hung, the way he barely seemed to be holding himself up—he seemed a lot older all of a sudden. “I was trying to convince her to get off them, but she was so stubborn.”

“Yeah. Runs in the family. Among other things.”

He looked up at me and cracked another half-smile. Maddeningly cute. Beach boy, light freckles, would have seemed a lot bigger when he wasn’t slouching. I could see why she’d ended up engaged to him. He was checking me out too, gaze drifting up to my face and settling on my lips. A sad cloud of grief passed over his features. The smile disappeared but he still looked at my lips. I could imagine the memories my likeness stirred in him.

Descending hundreds of feet beneath the ocean’s surface on a single breath requires a lot of concentration. Sometimes that concentration takes the form of free-flowing consciousness. My technique was to think of something, a single thing, and let my mind go with it. The roaring silence of the underwater realm was hypnotic, even entrancing when paired with the almost robot-like muscle memory of the firm kicking motions of descent. Far enough into the deep and the only light would be the one tied to my wrist. Over impossibly long minutes down and back up, I’d learned that the current of memories tended to surge, building upon itself the more the remembering went on. Time is like a deep ocean of layered memories, all connected and fluid and clear when you let yourself hold your breath.

I looked now at Nolan, watched him lose himself in the moment. I had no doubt his train of thought on my lips had inspired a memory of her smile. My sister and I, we had great smiles. Our lips were plentiful and a natural darker tint than the standard nude. Our upper lips bowed a little more than normal and the bottoms were slightly plump. After a couple of seconds, I’d bet, his memories had evolved to times he’d kissed her, his excitement at feeling those lips against his own weather-chapped mouth. She would have liked the roughness of them and would have opened up farther, hoping that his tongue would be rougher on her too. Except that I remembered him as the shy type, and she definitely wasn’t. She would have been impatient, put a hand on the back of his head and sucked the living breath out of him, took his tongue into her mouth to show him that she liked it, that she wanted him. Then, in his mind, the memories of her possessive kisses would have morphed to the first time she’d put those lithe lips over the head of his cock. Those big, round eyes of hers would have looked up at him, seeking approval and love. He would be remembering how their blue depths made him shudder. Ghost-feelings from those memories would be racking his crotch, porno playback images of my sister pumping him with one hand and mouthing it, all in one smooth motion. It would be making him hard right where he sat.

A feeling—ugly, jealous—floated to the surface. I licked my lips intentionally and sucked my bottom lip in a little before letting it pop out in one obscene gesture. His back straightened and without warning he grabbed my hair and tilted my head back a little.

“You’ve been gone a long time, Mic. I know you always hated it here but don’t pretend to be better than the rest of us.”

I almost shivered but didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. “All right. I’m sorry, Nolan.”

So I’d read him wrong, all wrong. He wasn’t the shy Nolan I remembered from our teenage years. He was something more, much more. Something aggressive and controlled. Something that made me ache for him to push my head into his crotch and order me to lick it. Instead he looked away, released me and stood up. He was blushing, but I was pretty sure it was from unfulfilled desire rather than humility.

I needed to get myself under control. I took a sharp breath.

“Why wasn’t she happy?” I asked, glancing back down at the blood. “She had you, right?”

His jaw flexed as he thought. “It’s just…” He hesitated. After a moment he said, “She was sick, but not so much that she couldn’t function. We were happy, you know, in little moments. Overall, I think she was afraid. I think that made her sick.”

His honesty was disconcerting. I wished he’d lied and said she was crazy, or that her doctor was right or something. Those were simple but believable answers. Of course I knew she had been afraid. It was all we’d ever felt on Callus Key. Fear of not being able to escape. Fear of ending up like Dad. Or worse, like Mom. But the room had wobbled just a few minutes ago and I sure as hell didn’t want it to start wobbling again. So I wished he would start lying to me.

I rose from the bed. Something deep inside told me to stop asking after it, but I couldn’t. “Afraid of what?”

“That she’d never be right.” He said it like it was a no-brainer, like I ought to know.

Don’t you know your own fucking sister, Mic? Your twin? Your own flesh and blood? How could you not know?

The humidity in the house was stifling. The air conditioning wasn’t on. The windows were open, letting the perpetually damp air in. It just felt so airless and wet in there all of a sudden.

“If she’d wanted to be happy, she should have fled this fucking shithole,” I spat out before I even registered what I was saying.

“Watch your language,” Nolan said, furious.

I looked down at the floor and kicked at the crimson stain with the toe of my boot. Dried chips of blood flew up, the flakes fluttering in a random pattern and falling nearby. My stomach half-turned over like a bad engine jolting. I had thought the redness was only a stain.

I looked up at Nolan, livid. “Nobody cleaned this shit up?” My chest tightened.

He had been looking away but now turned and glanced down near my feet. His face was very red, as though he was barely containing his own outrage. “The cleaning crew couldn’t make it until tomorrow.”

“The cleaning crew? You couldn’t do it yourself? You left it here?”

“Why don’t you clean it up? Where were you? You’re her fucking sister!”

See ya, barely contained, somewhat sweet Nolan. Hello, roaring, teeth-bared uber-babe.

Any other fight and I would have locked him in a tight kiss while the rage still boiled. Nothing like an angry kiss to get the juices flowing. But the blood was there between us, a puddle of whatever my sister had been trying so desperately to get out of her.

“This is totally fucked!” I yelled. I had to escape the damn house. It was just as ugly, rundown and decayed as I remembered from my childhood. Fuck.

I turned from the room, kept my eyes half-shut as I walked back down the hall, past the bathroom, through the split between the living room and the tiny kitchen and made a beeline for the front door. The room was already swaying, but I was sure I could make it to solid ground before I totally lost it. I heard the vague sound of Nolan calling out behind me. He sounded like he was talking underwater.

The screech of the noisy door opening cut into me but the fresh air was a plus. The porch was jelly under my feet. I put a hand on the stair railing and made myself start down the stairs all the same. I was going to get out or die trying. The neutral sound of the outdoors was replaced by a low bass of blood throbbing in my ears. I ignored it, rushing down. Just a few more steps and there would be actual earth under me. I had come to appreciate actual, real, solid earth in the past couple of months.

There it was, the driveway, a few steps below. Splendid white ashy gravel composed of crushed, eon-solidified skeletons of tiny sea creatures. Limestone, the foundation of the entire Key. As soon as my feet hit the ground I turned to the little green bushes next to the stairs and vomited.

Happy birthday, sis. And happy fucking birthday to me.