Her Husband's Hands and Other Stories

The Shallow End of the Pool

My Mom the Bitch lived in a desert fortress.

At least that’s what my father had always told me, sometimes whispering the words, sometimes slurring them, sometimes growing so tired with the same old stories that he spoke in a monotone, making the words sound like a prayer from a faith he could no longer believe.

She’d nursed me when I was born. But things had already gotten bad between my parents by then, so bad that after less than another full year of trying they split the kids between them. She took my twin brother Ethan, and Daddy took me, raising me to remember her as the Psycho Bitch she was.

I didn’t lay eyes on her again until the summer of the year I turned sixteen.

On that sweltering day in August my father and I flew to Vegas, rented a car, and drove four hours into the desert to a place where the local roads almost disappeared under the windswept sands. There we took an almost invisible turnoff, and navigated another forty minutes along an abandoned road to the skeleton of a sign that had, once upon a time, decades ago, advertised roadside cabins.

The resort had never been prosperous. It was just a place for travelers on a budget to rest their heads for the night. Now, it was a wreck, hidden behind a natural outcropping of stacked boulders that God had arranged to look like praying hands. Once, the rocks had protected the guests from road noise. These days the barrier hid the blackened skeleton of the main office, the three cabins still standing out of the original eight, a swimming pool that hadn’t seen water in years, and the mobile home where the Bitch lived with Ethan. I don’t know if the cabins were still officially owned by anybody, nor do I have any idea how the Bitch had ever managed to find such an isolated place to live.

We pulled up in a cloud of dust to find the Bitch on the mobile home steps, smoking a cigarette, dressed in faded jeans with torn knees, and a sleeveless white t-shirt. She’d aged since the last photograph I’d seen, which dated back to some months after my birth. She’d been young and pretty in that one. But her skin had leathered and her hair, once a shiny brown, had gone gray and stringy, with a long white lock that crossed her face in the shape of a question mark. When she grimaced at our arrival, she revealed a front tooth missing among others yellowed from tobacco and time.

Leaving the rental’s A/C was a shock. The outside temperature had been edging into the high nineties in Vegas, but here it was more like a hundred, in air that seemed more dust than oxygen.

Daddy said, “Hug your mother.”

I crossed the seventeen steps between myself and the stranger on the mobile home steps. She put her arms around me and called me honey, even as her fingers probed my back, testing the bunched muscles there for any signs of flab. “My God, Jen. I remember when you were just a baby.”

I cut the hug short. “I’m not a baby any more, Mom.”

“No. You’re not.” She squeezed my upper arm, testing its solidity with strength I would not have expected from her. “She’s an Amazon, Joe. Better than her pictures.”

And that was just hateful mockery, because I knew what an Amazon was, and what one wasn’t. An Amazon is tall: I was still three inches shorter than Daddy. An Amazon hacks off her right breast: I still had both of mine, and I daily cursed the hormones that had built them into a pair of fleshy curves softer by far than my bulging arms, my corded shoulders, and my granite abs. I was strong, and I was compact, I’d used diet and exercise to reduce those unwanted tits to the smallest size the genetic roll of the dice would allow, but I was still only a girl, the Amazon status we’d strived for a goal that would forever remain beyond my reach.

Daddy must have been thinking the same thing. “Where’s the boy?”

The Bitch raised the cigarette to her lips and took a drag so deep the paper sizzled. “Inside.”

“Call him out.”

The Bitch took another long, slow drag of her cigarette, just to demonstrate that she wouldn’t be hurried by the likes of us. “Ethan! Your father’s here!”

Ethan emerged from the mobile home, screen door slamming.

In all my life I’d seen less than thirty photographs of my brother. They were what Daddy gave me instead of birthday or Christmas presents. As per the agreement that had governed the relationship between parents since the day of their dissolution, the two of them provided each other with such updates twice a year, just to keep each side apprised of just how the other was developing. Our basement dojo has a wall, tracking Ethan’s metamorphosis from the chubby-cheeked toddler he was when last we saw each other, to the thick-jawed, iron-necked bruiser he was now. Watching that chest fill out, those arms swell, those muscles layer upon muscles, and those eyes grow dark as coals, in what amounted to time-lapse photography of a monster sprouting from a seed, had spurred me on more than any number of Daddy’s lectures or rewards or punishments. Nothing communicated the urgency of hard training more than those pictures. Nothing made my own situation look more and more hopeless, for while Ethan and I were twins, the nasty combination of gender and genetics had provided him with a body much more hospitable to muscular development than mine. His last measurements, sent with glee six months ago, had already declared him a foot taller and some fifty pounds heavier than myself, with less than one percent body fat.

He was even bigger now. The last six months had provided him with another growth spurt. He was stripped to the shorts, by design I think, his hairless pectorals gleaming with the sheen left by his latest workout. His face, tanned to near blackness by the brutal desert sun, was so dark that the unpleasant white glow of his teeth stood out like a searchlight at the bottom of a deep well. His greasy shoulder-length black hair completed any resemblance he might have had to Tarzan. Next to him, the Bitch was a wisp in danger of being blown away by the next strong wind. He dwarfed her, and dwarfed me.

If my father had raised an Amazon (a label I rejected), then the Bitch, with her exacting cruelty, had raised a Greek God.

There were flaws. The enlarged jaw and forehead testified to the hormonal imbalance inflicted by steroid abuse. I had a touch of that myself, and had endured taunts about my face in most of the schools I’d briefly attended. Like mine, his chest was lined with hairline scars from training accidents and, I think, punishments. Unlike me, he was so very muscle-bound that his flexibility had suffered. He moved with the clumsy deliberation of a stop-motion dinosaur in a fifties monster flick. I moved better than that. And, like the Bitch, he couldn’t really smile, at least not at us: the closest he could manage was an uneasy grimace.

“Hello,” I said.

His voice was thick, his consonants guttural. “Hello.”

Once upon a time, we had drifted together in the same womb, knowing nothing of the venom being passed between those who had brought us into this life.

The Bitch said, “Hug your father.”

My behemoth of a brother turned the head on his massive tree-trunk neck, and narrowed his eyes as he took in the figure of the man whose seed had provided half of him. Hatred burned in those eyes. He took two steps and enveloped Daddy in an embrace so tight that I half-expected to hear the crunch of shattering vertebrae. Unlike the Bitch, who had made a big show of hugging me back, Daddy just let his arms hang motionless at his sides. It was a brief hug. After a second or two my brother stepped back, his social obligations fulfilled.

Daddy said nothing.

The Bitch’s eyes glittered. “Aren’t you going to say I’ve done well?”

“I don’t have to say it. I can see it.”

“Then aren’t you going to say I should be proud?”

“I wouldn’t give you the satisfaction.”

“Bastard.” Her eyes turned to me: “I’m sure the two of you have a lot to talk about, after all these years. You can spend some time together this afternoon, if you’d like. Your father and I will need the rest of the day to finish work on the pool.”

Daddy could not have been happy about this development, as private time between my brother and me had never been part of the family agenda. But the state of war between my parents had not gotten to where it was by either showing fear in the face of a challenge. “I have no problem with that. She’ll need a few minutes to get ready, but after that, they can have the rest of the day if they want.”

I coughed. “No.”

Her head swiveled. “What?”

“This is just stupid. What are we fucking supposed to do, become friends now? That’s just psychological warfare. I want to get this bullshit over with.”

Ethan’s eyes glittered, but not with the anger I might have expected. “You sure? There’s plenty of time for that.”

Daddy said, “I suppose we could use your help setting up.”

I said, “There’s that, too.”

My mother and father let out a shared sigh.

“I’m sorry you feel that way,” said Ethan.

Damned if our parents didn’t look a little regretful too.

“All right,” Daddy said. “Give us about half an hour to get settled and take stock, and we’ll meet on the patio.”

“You can use Cabin Three,” the Bitch said.

I backed away from her and Ethan, staying between them and my father until I could get behind him and concentrate on retrieving our trunk from the back seat.

Ethan and the Bitch just stayed by sat the mobile home steps, watching us.

Measuring me.

Cabin Three turned out to be surprisingly well-preserved, given that so many of the others had either burned down or collapsed. I’d expected cobwebs, scorpions, and an inch and a half of dust. We got a freshly swept wooden floor with a pair of bare box-spring mattresses with fitted white sheets. There was no air conditioning, which meant that the temperature was stifling, but the walls seemed solid enough, and the fresh screening on all the windows promised some protection from the local flies. There was no toilet, but there was a note to the effect that Ethan had dug a fresh outhouse for us, a short walk into the desert. For a sink we had a porcelain basin and a gallon jug of warm bottled water.

Daddy and I had lived in worse during my endurance training in the Sierra Nevadas, one long summer about three years earlier. That place had been so rickety that my last task, on the last day, had been to demolish it with my bare hands. By the time I was halfway done my knuckles bled and my fingers were studded with splinters. He had called me his best girl.

Without a washroom, settling in amounted to little more than dumping the bags on the unmade beds, so I took care of that, changed into a fresh white t-shirt bearing the name of a dojo I’d attended in Seattle, and then went around back to inspect the empty swimming pool. A leftover from the roadside cabin days, it and the cracked, weed-ridden patio surrounding it were the only paved things in the Bitch’s entire homestead. It was kidney-shaped, three feet deep at the kiddie steps and thirteen feet below the rusted brackets that had once anchored the diving board. The bottom was pitted and streaked with years of windswept sand; there was also the corpse of a little black bird in the deep end, buzzing with flies. The air shimmered. Without any water to cut the sunlight, the walls had nothing to do but reflect the glare at one another, turning the entire bowl into a natural reservoir for heat.

Lifeguard chairs sat on both the concave and convex sides of the pool. They looked new, or at least recently wiped clean. So did the long and narrow tarpaulin, a few yards into the desert, there to keep the sun off a cylindrical shape three feet high and thirty feet across.

I asked, “That the chain-link?”

“That’s the chain-link.” Daddy licked his lips as he surveyed the deep end. “Check out that grate.”

I dropped to my knees, grabbed the lip of the pool and hopped in, landing on my feet. The grate Dad had seen was a rusty square a half-meter on each side, covering the ancient water filtration system. The metal was so hot from the sun that I recoiled from my first touch, but I swallowed my pain, slipped my fingers through the holes in the mesh, and pulled it loose. It weighed maybe thirty pounds. The drain beneath it narrowed and curved out of sight, marked only by more sand and the skeletal remains of a mouse.

“Nothing hidden there?” Daddy asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

It had been worth checking out. There could have been anything in that little well. A knife. A gun. Even a big rock. Any number of possible hidden weapons.

“Better get up here, then.”

“All right.” I didn’t replace the grate, but instead used it to scrape the dead bird from the bottom of the pool, and hurl it over the side and into the desert. Not that I’m all that squeamish about having dead things around, but I prefer not to smell them when I don’t have to. After a moment’s further thought, I tossed the grate itself onto the patio, a safe distance from my father. “It’s pretty solid. It probably qualifies as a weapon.”

“It shouldn’t be an issue,” Daddy said. “Neither one of you will have arms free.”

“You know. In case.”

“Not saying it’s a bad idea, hon. Besides, it’s done.”

I grabbed the edge of the pool with my fingers and climbed back up. The temperature was well over a hundred on the patio, but even that was a relief after the sizzling conditions in the oven down below; my t-shirt was already so saturated with sweat that the cloth had gone transparent over my breasts. I peeled the material off my belly and fanned myself with it, once or twice, just to get some cooler air in there, but it didn’t help.

Daddy kneaded my shoulders. “Are you ready for this, Jen?”

“I guess I have to be.”

Wrong answer. “Are you ready for this, Jen?”

“Yes. Yes, Daddy, I’m ready.”

“You’re not scared?”

“Maybe a little.”

“Good. It helps to be scared. Fear is a survival trait. I wouldn’t let this go any further if you weren’t scared. But you’re also ready?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure? There’s no room for any doubt here.”

“I’m sure. I know why this is important.”

He really was proud of me. That was the main thing, which had carried us through all the years of hard work. He had invested everything he had in me, and I had invested everything in living up to what he wanted. I was still feeling a glow when his hand moved to the side of my head, and tugged at a braid. “What about this? Now or later.”

“Later’s fine,” I said. “We can do it last thing.”

“Okey-Dokey,” he said.

A few minutes later Ethan and the Bitch came around, and we set to work on the arena.

The chain-link was a high-quality, thick mesh, lighter than it looked but still a bitch to work with at the quantities we needed. It took all four of us, working in grim concert, more than an hour to unroll it from its resting place over the desert sand, past a section of patio, and over the pool itself, until it covered the basin entirely. Pronouncing the effects good, Ethan then went away and came back with the aluminum braces and steel bolts necessary to secure it against the patio. By the time we were had finished lashing it down, our shared mother and father had exhausted themselves and had retreated to their opposing lifeguard stations, eyeing each other over the construction with the resigned air of nations that had always been, and would always be, at war.

By then, of course, I knew that turning down the day of truce had been a good idea, not only because our parents wouldn’t have ever gotten this job finished, but because all this time working with Ethan had provided me an excellent opportunity to gauge his strength, his speed, his endurance, his dexterity, and most of all, his eagerness to begin.

Like me, he was hungry for this.

He might have dreaded it once, but his years of training had like my own worn away any of his own dreams and ambitions, and left him eager for nothing but the moment that we’d enter the pool together.

At about four o’clock, the sweat pouring down our bodies in waves, my brother and I used a pair of wire cutters to peel a three-sided flap away from a section over the steps leading to the shallow end. Descending, we explored the territory in the wader’s area on hands and knees, testing the feel of the concrete against our bare skin, determining just how close we could come to standing before chain-link scraped against our backs or the tops of our heads. My smaller size and greater flexibility gave me an advantage here. I could run about in a doubled-over crouch that still gave me several inches of clearance, in places where Ethan could only struggle along in a hunchbacked, half-crippled lurch confined by the low ceiling. That advantage vanished as we both moved on to the Deep End. In the Deep End, where we could both stand fully upright, unimpeded by any low ceiling, the advantage of weight and strength was entirely his own. The gaping hole left by the removal of the grating presented the only equalizer. Either one of us could stumble into that one without warning, if not breaking bones, then at least crippling us long enough to cede advantage to the other.

We circled that hole together, thinking the same thoughts, then parted.

After several minutes of contemplative silence, we addressed each other with our backs against opposite walls.

Ethan ran a hand through his hair. “You do good work.”

“Thanks. You too.”

“I’m sorry you didn’t want to come with me today. There’s some great rock formations about twenty miles from here. I figured we could do some climbing and have ourselves a little picnic on the summit.”

“That might have been fun,” I allowed.

“Yeah.” He kicked at the dust with the toe of one boot. “Would have been nice to have some fun. I don’t even remember what it’s like anymore.”

“Boo fucking hoo.”

“Yeah. I guess you know what it’s like.”

“And then some.”

He seemed to hoard his next question before letting it go, all in a rush. “I’m sorry, but I have to ask this. Did he ever fuck you?”

“Who?”

“The Bastard.”

Even then, it took me a second to figure out who he meant. “You mean, Daddy? Christ, no!”

“Did he ever make you blow him?”

If he didn’t stop this, I was going to break his neck right here and now. “Is that what she told you?”

He relaxed. “Don’t take it the wrong way or anything. I’m just saying, you never know. Not considering the kind of shit he used to do to her.”

“He never did anything to her but take what she dished out.”

“According to him.”

If he was trying to anger me, he was doing an awfully good job. “I don’t know what fucked-up stories she told you, but she’s lying. She was the bad one.”

“How do you know?” he countered. “Were you there?”

I thought of all the things Daddy had told me about her, from all the dreams she’d denied him, and all the petty betrayals she’d used to wound him, to all the words she’d used to castrate him. “What about you? Did you ever fuck the Bitch?”

He didn’t object to me calling her that. “She offered once. About four years ago. I was thirteen, and half out of my head from jerking off fourteen times a day. She was already working five nights a week at the Horny Jackal, putting away enough cash for my training, so helping me out too wouldn’t have meant all that much more. When I said I’d rather not, she didn’t push it. Instead she got one of her co-workers to pay me a visit every couple of weeks.”

“Ewww,” I said.

“It wasn’t too bad. But then she finally saved enough money to support us out here, and all that stopped.”

“What do you do now?”

“Nothing, I think those shots have done something to my balls. I don’t even think about it anymore.” He drew another line in the dirt. “You could just give up, you know. That’s what the rules say. Say you can’t beat me and we won’t have to do this. We can just go rock-climbing tomorrow instead of today.”

I shook my head. “I can’t do that to Daddy. Unless you want to give up instead?”

“Can’t do that,” he said. “Not all by myself. Not and miss the whole point of being born in the first place.”

“Yeah, well.” I shook my head, pushed myself away from the wall, and met him at the pool’s deepest point.

We clasped hands.

He said, “Nice meeting you, Jen.”

I said, “I’m gonna kill you, Ethan.”

Would you believe he looked hurt?

Why did he have to go ahead and make me feel shitty like that?

Daddy and I went back to the cabin so he could shave my head.

I can’t say I wasn’t bothered. I owed my hair a lot. For all too long, sitting in school among soft boys with flabby necks and skinny girls with toothpick wrists, all of whom indulged their pretend adolescent cruelties without assets enabling them to last thirty seconds against a genuine real-world enemy, I’d had to pretend that I didn’t hear the whispers. I heard them pointing out the crewcut and the enlarged jaw and my tree-trunk biceps and the nose flattened by a punch in the years before I’d learned to see an attack coming. Before Daddy relented and let me grow my hair long—always with the understanding that I’d have to cut it again for my match with Ethan—I’d heard them wonder just what the hell was I was supposed to be anyway. The long blonde hair helped, as if I wore it right it placed me within shouting distance of pretty. There’d even been a boy once, and sweaty gropings on the couch in his parent’s basement. It had been fun enough, though that had ended, painfully, the one time he put a hand on me without warning. Unfortunately, that incident happened on school property. Daddy had apologized and paid for the Emergency Room visit. I took the one-week suspension knowing that the lesson would not need to be taught again.

The hair was a loss. But I had always known I wouldn’t be wearing it long, around my brother. Long hair was dangerous. It could get in my eyes and blind me at a crucial moment. Maybe I’d have a chance to grow it back and maybe not.

Daddy sat me down on the bed, used a pair of scissors to cut my hair short, the electric shears to reduce what was left to stubble, and a straight razor with medicated shaving cream to make my scalp baby-smooth. By the time he was done the mattress was itchy from liberated blonde. Then, surprising me, he opened up the suitcase and showed me a big floppy white hat.

“For afterward,” he explained. “I think you’ll look pretty in it.”

My eyes welled. I hid it well, batting my eyes at him, in the manner of any southern belle.

By six we were still so far from sunset that the sky hadn’t even faded to a darker shade of blue. But more than half of the pool bottom was already in long shadow, the other half a surreal fresco of diamond-shapes cast by the fencing. Ethan and I had both consumed our last food and water and both taken our final opportunities for a civilized bathroom break. Daddy had given me my final instructions, which mostly consisted of strategies I already knew: to exhaust Ethan’s wind by keeping him on the move, to retreat to the shallow end whenever I needed a breather myself, to be careful around that gaping hole in the deep end and to lure him into it, if I could. I was kind enough to react to all of these suggestions as if they were new and exciting ideas.

When he was done he gave me yet another hug, told me that I was his special girl, and promised me that things would be different once this was over. He said I could have anything I wanted. He made the mistake of asking me to name the first thing I’d want for myself when we were done, and for the life of me I couldn’t think of anything. My life had never been about anything other than today and the idea of wanting something afterward was so ridiculous that it might have been spoken in another language entirely. When he pressed the point I couldn’t speak the first answer that came to mind, which was that chance to go rock-climbing with Ethan. That was just stupid. By definition, there’d be no Ethan. So I just said, “Maybe we’ll go shopping.”

He kissed me on the forehead and said, “Sure.”

By half past six, Ethan and I were stripped, greased, and in the process of being fitted with our respective hobbles.

Our parents had recognized, while Ethan and I were both still toddlers, that even with equal training he would probably still emerge with a substantial edge in brute strength. That appraisal had turned out to be an accurate one, but Daddy had pointed out that even Ethan wouldn’t be able to end the fight with a single punch, or crushing bear hug, if unable to use his arms. Mom had agreed to taking corrective measures on the single condition that I was prevented from fighting dirty, by which she meant the use of teeth or nails.

Our gags, which buckled tightly around the backs of our shaved heads, were steel bits sheathed in a layer of rubber thick enough for us to sink our teeth into. Our arms were cuffed behind our backs and held in place with canvas sheaths laced to the shoulders and fastened around our necks to prevent either one of us from curling into a ball to pass the cuffs under bent legs. The getup was confining, but I’d practiced in it for hours and could still high-kick without losing balance or strangling myself. Nor would it affect my stamina. Just six months ago I’d run the equivalent of a marathon with both arms tightly strapped behind my back.

I hadn’t ever worn the getup against a similarly-hobbled opponent tasked to kill me, but that was all right. By now, this felt far more natural to me than that sun bonnet. Ethan, standing at attention while the Bitch tugged at the laces binding the sheath to his arms, looked like he felt the same way. He even managed to wink at me, though I don’t know just what the hell he thought he was communicating.

Daddy announced that it was a quarter to seven. The sky was definitely a darker shade of blue now. The sunlight was just a thin slice of brighter concrete, beveled with distorted diamond-shapes, on the eastern edge of the pool. The Bitch led Ethan in through the cutaway flap above the Shallow End steps, escorted him all the way to the pool’s deepest point, kissed him on the top of the head, then withdrew. Daddy helped me down the same steps, sat me down in the Shallow End, told me that whatever happened I would always be his daughter and that he would always believe in me no matter what, then abandoned me as Ethan had been abandoned.

Neither one of us could see the other. It was, after all, a kidney-shaped pool, which meant that as long as we stayed at opposite ends we were hidden from one another by the curvature of the walls. Apart, neither one of us would be able to tell how the other was doing. The only way to tell was to risk meeting in the middle.

Above us, Daddy and the Bitch got to work repairing the flap so that neither of us would be able to use it to escape. It wasn’t a fancy patch. They just looped wire through the links, sewing the loose edges together. The two of them worked side by side, not speaking, not deigning to look at each other, but working as a unit just the same. Both their faces seemed shadowed, given the fading brightness of the sky. I wished I could see if Daddy was looking at me, but I couldn’t tell for sure. I didn’t think he was. Sweat stung my eyes and I had to look away.

Not long after that, our parents stood together and tugged at the flap. The fresh seal held. They turned their backs on each other and disappeared from my sky. A few seconds later, Daddy appeared again, this time sitting high on the lifeguard chair on the convex side of the pool. The Bitch took her own position on the lifeguard chair opposite him. I shifted position, got my feet under me, rose to a half-crouch, and waited.

Daddy said, “All right, kids. Make us proud.”

Ethan did not disappoint me.

He was too smart to come at a run. He came around the bend at a fast walk, his eyes dark as he searched for me, half-hoping I’d meet him halfway.

I remained where Daddy had left me, waiting.

Ethan was neither disappointed at my lack or initiative nor contemptuous of my cautious start. He slowed and stopped at the midway point separating the Shallow and Deep ends of the pool. He paced that invisible line between us, his muscles tensing, his shoulders cording from what must have been a hideous effort to wrest himself free of the sheath binding his arms. The sheath held, as he’d probably known that it would. He grimaced through his gag, mumbled a word his mouth was not able to properly form, then advanced another step uphill. Another two. His eyes rolled toward the sky, as he felt the space between the top of his head and the wire link narrow to inches. He bent his knees and advanced still further, still testing our battlefield, painfully aware that I would not just allow him to march up and put me out of my misery.

I still didn’t move.

Ethan advanced further. Now he had to crouch—not all the way, not so much he couldn’t keep both eyes firmly focused on me, but enough to unbalance him, enough that he could feel his advantage of height and weight diminishing with every step he took. I could see sweat cutting through the sheen at what would have been his hairline. He paused again, braced himself for the inevitable moment when I charged, and tried to persuade me with a look that hanging back was no good, because he was ready for any attack I could muster.

I didn’t move.

He advanced some more.

I saw his balls. I knew what balls looked like; I’d seen them close up, on that boy whose name I couldn’t even remember. These looked tiny and purple. The steroids had shrunken them to a fraction of their natural size.

Had I been able to talk, I would have mocked him for being a dickless wonder. It might have upset him, made him sloppy.

He took another step, reminding me that it was a waste of time to contemplate strategies I couldn’t use.

Another step.

I faked to the right.

He recognized my move as a feint, and anticipated a move in the other direction.

Another fake and I actually went right. A heartbeat before we collided I saw him brace for impact, but he expected me to hit him mid-body, at his center of gravity, where his superior weight allowed him to compensate. So instead I hurled myself at the ground and swept his legs with my own.

He went down.

Everybody’s fallen down. But few people appreciate just how much we rely on our arms to protect our heads from damage during a fall. Falling forward, we throw out our hands and take the damage there, turning a potential cracked skull into a mere pair of sprained wrists. Neither one of us had the option now. Ethan managed to compensate enough to take the bulk of the impact on his knees, but even that did not stop his fall, and when he landed flat on his chest, his head whipped forward, smashing nose and forehead against the hard concrete ground.

Without the knees, that fall might have been enough to finish him all by itself.

Daddy cried, “Good one, Jen!”

I managed a weak kick to Ethan’s calf as he rolled away, but didn’t waste time waiting to see where he went after that, not with life or death riding on who rose first. It was early, still. I got my feet under me and backed off, giving Ethan the space he needed to back against the wall and take stock of himself. His nose was broken and bubbling blood from both nostrils: good news, as that would obstruct breathing. There was more blood in the seams between the teeth clamped against his bit-gag. He couldn’t have bitten his tongue or cheeks, but maybe I’d loosened an incisor or two. Another advantage, in that he’d have that sickening taste to deal with.

But his eyes were still smiling.

Daddy yelled, “Don’t overestimate him, baby!”

Ethan came for me again.

I faked another dodge to the right, but he changed course without even trying hard, and I tried to duck and roll, but that was going for the same trick twice in a row, and he was ready for that, lowering his head and reaching me before I could move away.

He drove his head into the softer flesh below my ribs and drove me off my feet, the force of his charge carrying me all the way to the concrete wall of the pool. The impact drove the air from my lungs. I gasped as my head whipped back against the wall with a force that I experienced as a burst of blinding white light. Before I could recover he smashed the top of his head against my jaw, driving my skull against the concrete a second time. And then a third.

“Finish her!” yelled the Bitch.

He might have.

I only stayed up because Ethan’s body kept me from falling.

He rammed me again. My legs thrashed and my feet left the floor. He was bearing all my weight now, driving me into the concrete so hard that I didn’t have time to fall.

“Put him down, honey!” yelled Daddy.

If I’d had the use of my hands I could have taken out Ethan’s eyes. If I’d had the use of my teeth I could have ripped out his throat. I only had my legs, which didn’t have the proper angle for a worthwhile kick.

But I didn’t need to kick him to put him down, not when the wall was right behind me.

Not when he was keeping me from falling.

I braced the bare soles of my feet against the concrete, took another skull-rattling impact with the wall just to gather my fading strength, and at the moment when he pulled back for another power-driving charge pushed off with everything I had.

It wasn’t enough to send him flying backward, as I’d hoped. But it did throw him off balance. His greased skin lost traction against mine. He tried to shift, but then he fell left and I fell right and we both hit the bottom of the pool in a tangle.

I landed on top, driving my knee into his shriveled balls with a force that made him double in two.

“That’s a girl!” Daddy yelled. “Now finish him!”

But I was in no shape to risk more close contact, not with my vision going gray from the beating I’d taken. I rolled away, got my feet under me again, and managed to get to the opposite wall just as Ethan was also getting back to his feet.

He looked like hell, sweaty, out of breath and the entire lower half of his face gleaming with blood. I don’t know what I looked like, but as he went in and out of focus I knew that I had to look worse.

He shouted something through his gag, something that emerged as a series of bubbly roars. He could have been telling me to fuck myself. Or he could have been saying that I was his sister and he was sorry he couldn’t love me. Or he could have been describing all the ways he wanted to make me suffer before I died.

It didn’t matter what he wanted to say. Or what I wanted to say. Our vocabulary was limited. This fight was the only conversation we had left.

Fortunately, he’d had enough for now.

He looked away and staggered toward the Deep End.

I went for the Shallow.

Dad shouted encouragement from above. “That’s good, honey! Pick your opportunities! Don’t waste yourself going after him until you’re ready!”

The Bitch cried, “I love you, honey!”

And so came the night.

The stars surprised me.

It wasn’t the first time I’d spent the night outdoors. I’d had that summer in the Sierra Nevadas, and the endurance treks in the Mojave, and long nights shivering in tents on Alaskan glaciers. I’d been so far from cities that if anything had happened to me it would have taken days or weeks to make my way to the first emergency room capable of giving me so much as a single stitch. I’d learned just what the sky could look like in the rarefied places untouched by smog or the glare of neon lights. I’d seen those distant suns glowing by the thousands, each so bright that they might have been tiny campfires just beyond my reach. I had grown bored by them.

I had never seen stars as bright as the stars looked tonight. They were so brilliant that the sharpest stung my eyes and made my vision blur. Whenever I moved, some twinkled out of sight, eclipsed by chain-link. I had never seen them so close, so mysterious. I had never seen other eyes looking down, from those distant places, wondering about us the way I wondered about them. I had never known that some of them had to be fighting for their lives, to settle conflicts begun long before they were even born.

There was no moon. Daddy and the Bitch had decided that we shouldn’t schedule this for a night with a moon. But the stars still provided enough glow to reveal the shape of the cracked white concrete walls. I could see the way the concave side curved off into the distance. The shadows were deep enough and large enough to provide any number of possible hiding places for my brother, but I could hear his bubbling snorks—representing a constant effort to keep his nostrils clear—and as far as I could tell it came from all the way around the bend. We were still at opposite corners.

I was thirsty. When I leaned the back of my head against the wall, my skin stuck, revealing a dried clotted mass back there. My teeth ached from biting into rubber for so long. My arms were in agony. I was nauseated, but didn’t dare throw up, not when the gag would have forced me to swallow it or choke. I hadn’t heard Daddy or the Bitch shout their little encouragements for quite a while, and couldn’t tell from the shapes of lifeguard chairs silhouetted against the night sky if they were still up there watching.

It must have been about midnight that I squirmed away from the steps, which had been the closest thing I had to a refuge, got my feet underneath me, and padded over to the gentle curve to my immediate right. I crouched there, hesitated to make sure I was alone, and peed. Drizzle ricocheting off the puddle peppered my right ankle. A rivulet flowing downstream puddled against my heel. I wondered not for the first time how female dogs managed to keep their paws dry. After a few seconds, feeling better, I straightened out and put some distance between myself and the only toilet I’d have for as long as this battle lasted.

A million miles away, Ethan snorked again.

With his nose obstructed by the break, just breathing had to be exhausting him. It would deny him sleep, deny him rest, deny him even enough air to stay strong. He could get some around the gag, but it wouldn’t be enough to keep him going forever. Even if I did nothing at all, and stayed out of his way, his probable life expectancy in the pool must have already been cut in half. I only wished I could be sure that what was left was still shorter than mine. After all, I’d suffered a head injury. The nausea and dizziness was a sure symptom of a concussion capable of deepening into coma as soon as I drifted off.

I had to make another go for him.

Padding along the warm concrete floor of the pool, which had not yet given up all the heat of the day, I made my way toward him, stopping every step or so to keep him from triangulating my position from the sound of my breath. Not that stealth mattered all that much. The thin layer of grit at the bottom of the pool made every step crunch like an old-fashioned soft-shoe.

I tried not to think about how big he was and how badly he’d hurt me the last time we’d faced each other.

In my head, he’d grown to twice his actual size.

In my head, he was an ogre, towering over me like any other creature of old fantasies, with arms the size of tree trunks and a head that blotted out the sky. In my head, I only came up to his waist.

An image from an old stop-motion movie intruded, painting Ethan as a roaring Cyclops, scooping up badly-imposed sailors to bite in half with one chomp of his oversized jaws.

I cursed my imagination. This was stupid. He was nothing but a big, stupid, overdeveloped boy too clumsy for his own good.

He was just my brother.

Daddy had said, “You’re better than him, honey.”

He had said, “You’ll win as long as you have heart.”

He had said, “I have faith in you, Jen.”

The Bitch might have said any number of things like that to Ethan, but then, she was the Bitch, and she was used to lies and deceit. Just look at all the things she had done to Daddy.

When Daddy said things like that, he told the truth.

I made it to the line that separated the Deep and Shallow ends. The bowl ahead of me was inkier and, it seemed, deeper than it had any right to be. I couldn’t see the far wall. There was too much shadow there even to admit the distant light of the stars. It was too black to see Ethan, but I could still hear his breathing, somewhere ahead of me. It was ragged, wet, and labored. It didn’t sound like he was lying down. I got the clear impression that he was standing against the far wall, beneath what would have been the diving board, confident in his own ability to meet my advance with a strength that trumped my own.

He was accurate enough there. If he was waiting for me, I should turn back.

I took another step to be sure.

Something nearby smelled like a sewer.

I still couldn’t see him. I listened for him and all of a sudden couldn’t hear him either.

I couldn’t bring myself to hope that he’d died in the last few seconds. More likely, he’d realized I was close and was holding his breath and long as he was able, to keep me from being able to track him.

That trick worked for two as well as one. I couldn’t close my mouth or pinch my nostrils shut, but I held my diaphragm tight and held my next breath as long as I could, counting off the seconds.

Ten. Thirty.

One minute.

I could hold my breath for two.

More, since my life depended on it.

Ninety Seconds. Still no sound from him.

He couldn’t be dead. I could feel him.

Was he moving toward me?

Coming up on two minutes. My heart was pounding.

Two minutes. Still silence.

Would I even be able to hear him over the roar of the blood in my ears?

Two minutes ten.

It was not breath that alerted me. It may have been a soft, padding thump or a rush of air or the instinctive connection between siblings, but I knew I was being charged.

I spun, not knowing which way to dodge. Something massive struck a glancing blow against my right side, and kept going, the impact enough to make me lurch to the left in a clumsy dance that barely kept me on my feet.

I heard a metallic clang.

Rushing past me, he’d scraped the top of his head against chain link.

That had to hurt.

It didn’t knock him down, but it did make him grunt.

I gasped as best I could, and whirled to face him in case he made another charge. I saw a gleaming wetness at just about eye-level and identified it as his gag, slick from hours of blood and drool. I had just enough time to register him racing toward me at terminal velocity. I went to my knees, looked up, caught another glimpse of an Ethan-shape occluding the sectioned starscape, and for just a heartbeat knew what it must have been like, in Jurassic times, to be a tiny animal cowering at the tyrannosaur shadow standing between me and the primordial sky.

He went over me hard.

I heard a thud, a crack, and a subsequent moan.

That had to have killed him. He had rushed me too hard and gone over me in what felt like a somersault. He would have had to smash his head again, maybe broken his neck, at the very least dislocated his shoulders or fractured a leg. He must have sustained some kind of injury, maybe even something internal that would seep his life away.

I peered into the shadows and saw a huge form, glistening from wounds and other liquids, dragging itself toward the farthest wall. The snorking breath started again. He wasn’t dead, then, only hurt. And there was no way of telling how hurt. It would be just like him to fake something worse if that meant drawing me close.

I thought of how large he’d seemed in the darkness, and more than just gathering thirst filled my throat with sand.

I’d peed all I had just a few minutes ago, but I lost another couple of drops now.

I couldn’t go after him again. Not while it was still dark. There’d be more light in the morning.

I retreated, refusing to turn my back on the giant in the darkness, not feeling safe again until I was on my knees again, curling up beside the steps that represented my only refuge. The stars above still twinkled in and out of existence when eclipsed by the overhead wire.

All at once, they blurred.

I didn’t want to kill him anymore.

I wanted to kill the Bitch. I wanted to grab her by her stupid witchy hair and smash her face into the concrete again and again until her head staved in and the pavement turned red from blood and brains. I wanted to scream at her, call her names worse than the obvious cunt and whore and demand to know where the fuck she got off doing this to her son and her daughter when we’d both be so much better off if she’d just close her withered lips around a double-gauge.

I wanted Daddy. He had done the same thing. But he was Daddy.

“You can’t cry,” he’d told me. I’d been flat on my back pressing weights and he’d been spotting me. “You’re strong and you’re brave and you have more heart than anybody I’ve ever known, but if you don’t get him right away and it goes into hours or days, then at some point it’ll all be too much for you and you’re going to want to cry. You’ll know what it means because it’ll be the first sign that you’re losing heart. You can’t let it happen. You’ll have to shut it down, wall it off, put it away before it takes over and it’s all you have left. You have to make yourself too hard to break.” I’d told him I would and he’d said, “That’s a good girl.”

When he called me a good girl, I felt capable of anything.

But I hadn’t heard his voice in hours.

Had the Bitch done something to him?

Or were things even worse than that?

Was all this just a joke to them? Or, worse, foreplay? Were they together in that shithole of a mobile home sharing six-packs and nuzzling each other’s necks while they laughed over the big hilarious joke they’d played on the kids?

Were they in the car together, lighting out for parts unknown while wondering which of their two science experiments fell first?

“You’ll even lose faith in me,” he’d said. “But you’ll know I love you, honey.”

Unless that was just another part of the trick.

I couldn’t cry. But there were too many hours between now and morning, and my eyes were burning.

I don’t think I fell asleep. I think I passed out.

I saw myself running, the summer Daddy and I spent in the Cascades. I rose before dawn, performed three hundred pushups, then donned my wrist and ankle weights and hit the woods for a twenty mile run. It was the time of day when the chill left over from the night before turned the dew into frost, and the grass into stiff needles. The air ripped at my lungs like fire and my breath trailed behind me in a necklace of little clouds. Daddy had pointed out one ravine that could be leaped as long as I used a fallen tree propped up against a living one as an acceleration ramp. It was a tricky stunt even in perfect light and an almost suicidal one in woods still marked by the failing shadows of the previous night, but I’d mastered it, always landing in a duck-and-roll that plastered dirt and leaves to my back in a mortar of warm sweat. Even a perfect landing was hard enough to knock the breath out of me, but I always got up and kept going, As a younger girl, running other courses in other environments, I’d cracked ribs and once or twice broken fingers, once even run headlong into a low-hanging branch that ripped a gash in my forehead and freed hot burning blood to seep down into my eyes. It hadn’t slowed me down. I’d been blinded but I’d returned home without slowing down. I couldn’t depend on vision when so many possible attacks depended on targeting the eyes.

When I woke the sun had arrived, illuminating a sky that the wire above us sectioned into little diamonds. I was curled by the concrete steps, my skull pounding, my throat burning, my arms numb from lack of circulation and my jaw aching like a dead thing attached to my skull with six-inch nails. I would have expected Ethan and I to collapse in opposite corners, but instead we’d fallen only a few feet apart, in a togetherness unexpected for two people who wanted each other dead. His eyes were already open, and though it was hard to tell through all the gear on his face, he seemed to be smiling.

His nostrils weren’t bubbling. I wondered if he was dead.

I shifted position and prodded him with a toe.

He blinked. The gagged smile broadened. He murmured a series of vowels that should have been indistinguishable as words, but which his sunny tone communicated perfectly.

“Unnnh Aww Innh.”

And good morning to you, too.

I couldn’t make myself believe that he’d been too injured to chance attacking me as I slept. Or that he’d been too afraid. More likely he’d experienced a spell as lost and as despairing as mine, and had wanted nothing more than to spend the remaining hours of darkness close to another living being. Even if that person happened to be me. Maybe especially if that person happened to be me.

I wasn’t ready, either physically or emotionally, to take advantage just yet. I just nodded hello, squirmed and crawled my way to a safe distance, and then got to my feet. Dizziness, thirst, and whatever damage the concussion had inflicted made me wobble, but I managed to stay upright.

I took a deep breath and almost gagged on it. Even with half the pool still in shadow the air was still so warm it felt more like soup.

We could stay in the narrowing shadows on the eastern side of the pool for most of the morning, moving west when they were replaced by the lengthening shadows of the late afternoon. It wouldn’t protect us from the heat, but it might save us from being burned to a crisp by the sun.

That was funny. Us. Like we were a team or something.

And either way, there’d be no shadows at noon.

We were going to cook.

The two lifeguard chairs were still unoccupied.

They’d left. Daddy and the Bitch had patched together their differences and were now sipping champagne in their jacuzzi in some swank resort in Reno. Daddy must be saying, too bad about the kids. Yes, what a shame. They were both so respectful. Do you know, May, I once asked her to go fifteen days without food, as a survival exercise, and she just did it, without even arguing? That’s right. She sat in her room, growing paler and paler, her cheeks growing gaunt and her skin going pale, and in all that time, May, all that time, she never one said, Daddy, I can’t do this anymore, I need something, just a little soup, just a little bread, just something to stop my stomach from cramping? It was enough to make me wonder, May, just what the hell else I could ask her to do. Would she have put out her eyes? Cut off her own hand? Press the right side of her face against a hot frying pan and not move even as she felt her skin scar and sizzle from the heat? We should be proud of ourselves, May. The way we raised them, and all.

Daddy wouldn’t talk that way. The Bitch would, but Daddy wouldn’t.

Daddy was better than that.

Daddy loved me.

The world grayed. I shook the spots away and stumbled forward, walking the perimeter. I noted the drying blood stains on the floor and on the walls, I found a crack emitting a battalion of ants and, at the moment I entered the Deep End, a dead rattlesnake, its head and midsection crushed almost flat. It puzzled me for a while until I figured out the story. The concrete of the patio above, with its talent for sucking up heat during the day and radiating it slowly at night, rendered it a natural beacon for snakes. They must have loved the place, and with the empty pool considerably warmer, it must have been just as natural for them to crawl in, from time to time, their idiot reptilian brains too shortsighted to realize that once they made the drop they would not be up to the task of finding a way out. Ethan and the Bitch must have had their hands full, clearing the place of pissed-off rattlers without getting bitten themselves. And of course, they hadn’t bothered to warn us of the danger: not when a fortuitously-stranded snake could spell defeat for a girl who hadn’t been told.

This one must have taken Ethan by surprise.

Had it bitten him?

I couldn’t be that lucky.

I looked over my shoulder and confirmed that he was still curled by the Shallow End steps. The sweat and the grease had plastered the sand to his body, giving him a white, powdery appearance. But he didn’t seem sick. He’d rolled over and was watching me with a calm, unbothered curiosity.

My eyes burned.

I went deeper, not knowing what I was looking for. The deep end was just a filthy oval, covered with dust and bird shit and brilliant in the morning glare. When I reached its lowest point I caught a whiff of something foul, and followed the odor to the drain hole, where I found pretty much what I should have expected to find. Removing the grate had been doing Ethan a favor. It had given him a place to do his daily business without having to worry about stepping in it. Looking closer, wrinkling my nose as I was hit by the awful rising stink, I further noted that he’d suffered diarrhea. This was disgusting, but good news for me, as the single greatest factor in living through this was probably surviving dehydration, and he’d have no chance to replenish what he’d lost.

As if on cue, my own stomach gurgled.

Christ.

The heat and the conditions were doing the same thing to me that they were doing to him.

I considered making use of the drain, decided not, and went back to the Shallow End.

The sun was higher in the sky now. The shadows cast by the pool’s eastern curve now covered less than a third of the pool bottom. I made the mistake of glancing at the sun and recoiled, my vision a purple blob. That sun wasn’t golden. It was white. It was pure, malevolent heat, pounding down on us like a thousand hammers. How high was the temperature going to rise today, before the shadows came back? A hundred ten? More?

Ethan had settled in under the shadows, his bound arms against the convex wall, his knees curled up against his chest. He looked at me, then at the empty space beside him, and then at me again. He repeated himself, and when I failed to get it, repeated himself a third time.

I got it.

It was stupid to fight now. Not with shelter a more immediate need.

Might as well wait out the day, survive if we could, and make another go at each other tonight. We’d both be weaker then, but that only meant that we’d both be that much closer to finishing this.

If there was a finish. If Daddy and the Bitch came back.

I selected a spot two body-lengths from Ethan, put my back to the wall, and lowered myself into a bent-kneed squat. It was as relaxed a position as I was willing to attempt, around him, one that would allow me to jump away in a heartbeat if he went for me.

I didn’t think he would.

If we couldn’t outlive the day, what was the point?

The hours crawled. The sun rose in the cloudless sky. The air grew hot, then sweltering, then brutal, then hellish. Our refuge of shadow narrowed, the razor-thin line between mere unbearable heat and deadly sunlight drawing closer to our curled legs. The sweat pouring down my face collected against my lips, investing the rubber bit with a foul, salty taste. My tongue swelled. I tried not to look at the opposite wall, already so bright from reflected glare that my eyes compensated by conjuring gray spots at the edges.

The shadow wasn’t protecting us enough.

Sunburns don’t only happen to those who expose themselves to direct sunlight. Sometimes it’s possible to hide in the shade, all day long, and still suffer painful burns. It all depends on the reflectivity of the surrounding surfaces.

Ethan and I were in a big white bowl, facing one of its big white walls. Spared the worst of the sunlight, we were still absorbing enough reflected radiation to cook us more slowly. Ethan, who was darker than me and had the base tan one would expect from a boy who had spent years training under this sun, would tolerate it better than I would, with my much fairer skin. But we were both burning. By the time the zone of shadow came within a finger’s-length of his knees, his face had turned lobster-red, and sprouted the first of what would soon be many sun-blisters on his forehead.

He didn’t move, though. He didn’t shift position, to protect the parts already burned with the parts that had spent these hours protected by canvas and shadow. He didn’t even lower his head. He just faced forward, his eyes closed, his expression serene and confident even as his lips cracked and the sweat pooled in the furrows between his muscles began to shine like tiny sun lamps. Not once did he let me see that it was bothering him.

By then I already knew that I was losing.

My skin was on fire. My tongue was a dry, swollen worm scraping the roof of my mouth like sandpaper. Something had gripped my bowels and twisted, turning everything inside me to acid. I’d fouled myself and not even realized it. When I moved, I could feel the stored heat rising from me in waves.

I felt snakes crawling over me. They were burning snakes, with razors instead of scales, and when they slithered over my breasts they left gaping wounds behind. They went away and were replaced by flies, each as hot as embers snatched from a fire, each with little buzzsaw wings that, twitching, shredded whatever remained. Then came the worms and the maggots. I threw up, choked on it, managed to get it down again, decided that the long day had to be over after all these hours of hell and looked down to see that the cutting edge of that line of direct sunlight hadn’t moved any closer to me in the year or so I’d been hallucinating.

I cried. I don’t know how many tears came out, but I cried. I didn’t care if Ethan heard me. He knew how much this was hurting.

I couldn’t fool him about that.

Even if I’d lied to him about Daddy.

“You have to be a rock,” Daddy said. He had come to me early in the morning of my twelfth birthday, his eyes dark and his thing dangling from his thatch like a blind, rooted worm. “You have to take whatever happens to you. A broken nose is nothing. A broken leg is nothing. A broken rib is nothing. A lost eye is nothing. Days without sleep or rest, more pain than you can imagine, it’s all nothing. He will hurt you any way he can, everywhere that you’re soft enough to be hurt. He can even try to rape you, if he wants—after all, he’s a boy, and that’s always been one of the best ways for boys to hurt girls. It’ll be even worse for you if it happens, because you’ll know all along that it’s your own brother doing it. Of course, if you’re strong enough, he won’t be able to. You can make it more work than it’s worth. You might even make it the last dirty thing he ever tries. But even if he does manage to pin you down, and hurt you in that special way, you’ll have a chance as long as you know that you can get past it. And the only way to know that is to know that you’ve been past it before.”

He’d only done it that one time.

And I knew almost immediately that it hurt him as much as much as it hurt me, because when I tiptoed to his room the next morning, clutching the carving knife I’d plucked from its rack in our kitchen, thinking only of not letting him do that to me again, planning to separate him from the thing he’d jammed up inside me, I’d found him sitting on the edge of his bed, his head in his hands, his shoulders wracked by convulsive sobs. He hadn’t seen me as I’d padded up behind him, not so fired by certainty now, my right arm trembling as the knife grip grew heavier and heavier and the sobs coming from the broken figure before me resolved into self-recriminations about what kind of monster he was. And I’d thought about burying that knife between his shoulder blades and watching his life blood seep into the sheets as he fell over dying but not dying so fast that he couldn’t turn his head and gaze at me and see that I was the one who had done this to him, his stunned expression betraying a hurt a thousand times worse than the pain of the wound or the violation I’d suffered for a few short minutes in the middle of the night. He really did love me. He was my Daddy. And so I dropped the knife and threw my arms around his shoulders and wept, “I’m sorry, Daddy, I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” and he grabbed me back and buried his head in my shoulders and cried, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I had to, I didn’t want to but I had to, you had to experience it once,” and I said, “I know, I know, I know,” and then it was all about him feeling bad and me trying to make him feel better, because I loved him, as he loved me, which meant that I would have to let him do it to me again if he thought it would help. He just wanted to make me strong, that’s all.

I was a rock. Nothing could hurt me.

I looked down through the haze and thought I saw little plumes of steam rising from skin that now seemed scarlet enough to have been dipped in blood. I recoiled, gasped as the burns I already had chafed against the concrete and the sodden canvas of my arm restraints, and shifted position to pull my knees a few inches further away. It wasn’t much of a reprieve, I knew. It would give me, at most, a few extra minutes of relative protection.

The line advanced, and touched skin again.

I hadn’t seen Ethan move, but he was lying down now, pressed against the curve of the wall with the paler skin of his back, partially obscured by the canvas restraints binding his arms, presented to the sun that would soon be attacking both of us with all its considerable force. The skin on the top of his head was also fire-engine red, and popping with blisters. He was so still that he could have been dead. But I could tell from the corded tension in his shoulders that he was still alert, still strong, still aware of the toll this was taking on me. I should have been mad at him for not grunting or something, just to make sure I followed his example, but I couldn’t blame him. He was my brother.

I lay down and rolled against the wall, pressing my face against the gentle curve that marked the junction between pool wall and pool floor. The seam, seen up close, turned out to be littered with the curled, blackened forms of ants, similar to the living ones I’d seen before, these baked to a crisp by previous mornings or afternoons. Their thoraxes pressed against their abdomens in pretend fetus positions, their little legs outhrust as if in protest. If they all came from the same colony, which was likely, then they all had the same mother, and they’d all died here, as we were dying here, as the siblings they were.

Ethan and I had more in common with them than with anybody else on the planet.

My throat thickened.

When the line of fire touched my skin again, there was no longer any safe place to retreat.

I don’t know how long I was unconscious, but as I came to there was a dead weight, several times my size, pressing down on me.

I didn’t care. If I was buried alive at least I’d soon be dead. If I was being attacked at least I’d soon be dead. If I was being raped at least I’d soon be dead. I was beyond feeling or wanting anything at all.

After a long time I registered the slippery feel of bare flesh, slick with sweat. It took me a while to identify it, because my nerve endings were all on fire, but eventually I registered as a naked human being, taller and broader than myself, covering me, shielding my head, my torso, my bound arms, and most of my legs, from the direct rays of the sun. I was still burning alive, and still dying of thirst, but the sun itself was no longer touching me, not even in reflection.

The weight made me protest. “Unnnh!”

The heavy body bore down, pinning me, but not making any further move as long as I refrained from struggling.

I passed out again.

My mind wasn’t working very well, because it wasn’t until much later that I realized it was Ethan protecting me.

It didn’t make any sense to me. He had tried to kill me last night. If we survived the day he would no doubt try to kill me again. The sooner I fell, the better off he was—at least, as long as Daddy and the Bitch intended on ever coming back for us, which was far from certain.

Had I been able to talk, I would have asked him just what the hell he thought he was doing. Had he been able to talk, he might have told me.

I might have thanked him. I might have called him stupid.

But we weren’t able to talk. And I was in so much pain by then that I might not have made any sense anyway.

The sun climbed as high as the sun ever goes, and began to climb back down.

As soon as there were shadows worth inhabiting he stood and nudged me with his toe until I managed to rise. We swayed together, in an inferno, the air rising in waves between us. He was seared black, his face an unhappy landscape of dried blood, blisters, and peeling skin. He had puffy half-moons under both eyes, and a dry scab sealing one nostril: the reason I hadn’t heard any snorking for a while, and the chief reason why, with his mouth gagged the way it was, his ability to breathe at all qualified as a miracle. I didn’t like what his expression had to say about the way I looked, but at least he didn’t try to keep me from seeing it.

I didn’t have to see what I looked like, though. I could already tell. I could see the baked red of my breasts and the big fat sun blister forming on the tip of my nose. I’d been sick and I’d been feverish and at some point in the last hour or so my bowels had erupted with more liquid waste that hadn’t had anywhere to go but except down my legs. All of it was peppered with grit and sand and packed together with congealing grease. I don’t know how much body weight I’d lost from sweat, stress, and illness, just over the past few hours, but if it didn’t show on my frame it must have shown in my face, and in my eyes, the same way it showed in his. We were both the walking dead, and we both looked it.

And it was as the walking dead that we shuffled together, across an infinite wasteland of burning concrete, the few short steps to the narrow strip of blessed shade that had begun to swell against the opposite wall of the pool.

We put our backs to that wall and slid downward, this time sitting side by side, secure in a truce that would last until the sun was no longer a common threat.

I forgot who said it. Maybe Daddy did. But whoever put the words together knew what he was talking about, when he said that sometimes Paradise can be nothing more than a Hell not quite as bad as a Hell you’ve already known.

It must have still been well over a hundred degrees in the shade, but I could already feel the temperature start to drop, and that made it Paradise.

At least until our insides felt the change, and the chills began to wrack us.

I asked him, all of once, why we couldn’t just hide from her.

I must have been six at the time. I couldn’t have been much older. I know that I’d been hearing the horror stories of my mother for as long as I could remember, and that it hadn’t been all that long since I’d been able to place her in a category removed from Rumpelstiltskin and the Wicked Witch and the Evil Stepmother and the other imaginary monsters of the fairy tales that I’d somehow managed to pick up without my father’s notice.

I’d had bad dreams since the night I realized the Bitch was real.

So I asked him. Did I really have to visit her someday? Couldn’t we just go somewhere far, far away? Wouldn’t she just get tired of looking for us, and go away?

He’d gotten very serious and very sad.

“Just how many years do you think you’d have to hide?”

I felt them burning me before I had any idea what they were.

I’d spent the last few hours with my back against the pool wall, my legs curled against my chest in what would have been a fetal position had my arms been free to link fingers around my knees. My internal thermostat had been veering from one extreme to the other for some time now, alternating the wonderful sensations of being burned alive with those of everything inside me being turned to ice. I’d popped sweat after sweat, feeling steam rise from my skin as the rivulets of perspiration poured down my sides in waves; and then, reacting, I’d shivered with a fever that turned the world around me arctic. For hours on end my teeth would have chattered if they could have touched at all. My throat continued to ache for water, and the shadows, lurching toward the opposite wall to reclaim our battlefield for night, gained ground in a herky-jerky rhythm that served to emphasize just how much of the day I was spending too far gone to notice the passage of time.

Sometime after the shadows advanced to within a foot of the opposite wall, I was attacked by balls of fire.

There were dozens of them, each as hot as molten iron, each as solid as ball bearings, each impacting against my skin at the same instant: most striking my face and legs, but some hitting the top of my head and others burrowing down my back to burn my spine like acidic flame. The agony was so profound that I convulsed, shrieking through my gag, hurling myself against the pool floor with a desperation to escape that superseded any worries over how much the impact was going to hurt. I smashed my head again and didn’t care. I heard Ethan roaring in equal pain, somewhere to my immediate left, his deeper cries as inarticulate and just as uncomprehending as mine.

More acid fell. It didn’t stop falling. I felt my skin shriveling, turning black, peeling away from the bone, becoming flakes of ash which blew away like little embers.

Then a little made its way past my lips, somehow making its way past the gag and past my still-clamped teeth, and I found myself sucking at it with something like awe.

It was water.

It didn’t feel like water, not against my skin, but against my tongue and dribbling down my throat it was just warm, refreshing water, tinny to the taste but better than wine.

A dribble went down the wrong pipe and I started to gag. I raged at myself for choking on this wonderful gift I had begun to think I’d never know again, forced the coughs to silence after only a minute or two of nonstop hacking, and stood, raising my face to the wonderful shower. Drops seemed to sizzle as they struck my ravaged cheeks and forehead. They still felt like acid against my burned flesh, but I didn’t care. Thirst trumped Pain. I could feel my strength coming back with every drop I sucked down.

Somewhere above me, Daddy said, “Don’t swallow too much, little girl. You’ll get sick. Just turn around and I’ll clean you off!”

I couldn’t see him, as the water had washed the salt caked on my forehead into my eyes, but I staggered about in a circle, as he’d commanded. All at once the flow concentrated, no longer a diffuse spray but a tight, burning stream, battering my buttocks and my inner thighs to force away all of the day’s collected filth. The agony of the moment was enough to make my guts clench. I staggered a step or two away, driven by the instinctive urge to escape the source of the suffering, but Daddy kept the stream focused and on target until every bit of the foulness was gone.

Then he turned off the water, leaving me wracked and trembling. There was vapor rising from the concrete.

“There,” Daddy said.

I could still hear water patter against concrete. Looking up, I saw Ethan, still being hosed off. The current stream targeted his face, in order to wash away all the dried blood. The force of it rippled his cheeks, maybe making it easier for him to drink some. As he turned, the pool dust, washing off his muscled skin in waves, revealed shoulders turned so scarlet from the sun that he might as well have been dipped in blood. The top of his head, and the arc of his shoulders, had become a mass of popped blisters. His nose had swollen to almost twice its original size, and had a distinct blue tinge that worried me.

I don’t know why it worried me. I should have wanted him to die.

Daddy said, “Come over to the steps. I want to take a look at you.”

I pulled my eyes away from Ethan and staggered back to the shallow end, forgetting to duck as the chain-link grew low enough to scrape the top of my head. The contact with it felt like being branded. I groaned, went to my knees, and scrambled as best I could to the Shallow End steps.

Daddy was kneeling just above the wire. He wore a red-and-yellow Hawaiian shirt, mirrored sunglasses, khakis, and a big straw hat. He looked tanned and rested and proud. When he saw me close up his mouth made a little O of sympathy. “Looks like you had a rough day, honey. I’m sorry to see it.”

I tried to speak through my gag. “Wheeehhh wuhh oo?”

He understood me. “This dump has no running water and no well. The Bitch has to drive to town every couple of days, to fill up gallon jugs, and she was already almost out.”

“Unnh! Wheehhhh wuhhh OO?”

“Calm down, kiddo. You have every right to be a little annoyed. But it’s about a ninety minute drive, each way, and she wasn’t about to go all by herself when she was afraid I’d take advantage of her absence to help you out when her back was turned. We had to be fair about this. So I had to go along to help. And then while we were there we decided to surprise you by renting a tanker and hose, and the place made us wait almost four hours before one was available.” His mouth went grim. “Try to spend four hours with the Bitch trying to be civil in public. Just try. We even had to make nice over lunch in some diner with a one-eyed waitress. That was an ordeal you should be happy you missed.”

Something hiccupped in the back of my throat. My vision blurred. I didn’t know whether I was going to throw up or scream until the sound came out and it turned out to be laughter. It was the one-eyed waitress that did it, I think. I couldn’t help picturing a fat woman in pirate gear, complete with patch, parrot, and peg-leg, slinging hash while Daddy and the Bitch exchanged small talk over the menu. I even wondered if they’d tipped well. Probably. I didn’t know my Mom’s custom in that regard, but Daddy knew how to charm the ladies. He just didn’t know how to pick a good one.

Daddy perked up. “Anyhow, we’re both back for the duration now, and now that we’re here it looks like you’ve given as good as you got. You have a bit of an owie on the back of your head, but it looks worse than it is, and he’s got to be suffering from that mess you made of his face. Plus his burn seems to be shaping up even worse than yours. Pick your moment tonight, or at the very worst sometime late tomorrow, and I’m sure you’ll have no trouble putting him down for good.”

His eyes softened, turning moist in the way they only did in training, whenever I’d broken some new boundary with sweat and blood and back-breaking effort. He pressed his hand against the chain-link, and extended his fingers through the diagonal windows between the wires; I raised my head to feel the touch of his hand and almost moaned at the way even that soft contact tortured the taut skin of my scalp. He couldn’t tell that I wasn’t craving his love. I was just hoping that if I was nice enough he’d remove my gag and give me a nice, cold cup of water. The few drops I’d sucked down hadn’t come close to satisfying me, and the mere thought of enduring any more time without another taste was almost more than I could stand.

I argued my case through the gag, but my voice trailed off in a mouthful of dust.

“I’m so proud of you,” he whispered, turning away all at once so I wouldn’t see him cry.

The real suffering didn’t manifest until after the air cooled. But as the sky turned purple and then black, every part of me caught on fire, raging at the slightest physical contact. I could avoid most of the pain by simply not moving, but the straps that held the canvas bindings around my arms and the bit gag firmly planted in my mouth both felt like razors heated over an open flame. I couldn’t focus past it. It was like a landscape larger than myself, so vast in every direction that I couldn’t even see its furthest horizons. It only ceased to overwhelm when I moved an arm or leg and in that way distracted myself with some other pain just as large, just as unbearable. Daddy and the Bitch, who had returned to watching the show from their respective lifeguard chairs, must have been bored beyond reason for much of the early evening, as both Ethan and I spent those hours at opposite ends of the pool, unconscious more often than we were awake, trembling with chills even as we panted from the heat.

We must have resisted the inevitable for hours.

I don’t know what time it was when I crawled from the Shallow End steps, found the strength to get to my feet again and stagger, in a precarious lurch with only distant relation to the upright, to the invisible line separating the Shallow and Deep Ends.

Daddy called down from above. “Thattagirl. Show him what you’re made of.”

The Bitch summoned her own champion. “Don’t give up, Ethan! I’m proud of you!”

After a long, snuffling pause, my brother shuffled out of the darkness.

The darkness spared me actual eye contact, or even a clear look at his face. All I saw was a vague, threatening presence, still larger than myself, still more formidable than myself. All I heard was ragged breath and a weak, liquid bubbling that may have been heralded the return of the blockage in his nostrils. The stench was the worst, all sour sweat and festering waste, the perfume of a creature all but dead who had yet to lie down.

“Come on, honey!” the Bitch cried. “You can do it!”

Ethan shuffled forward another step, and then stopped, swaying.

I couldn’t see his eyes.

But the last day and a half had been a silent conversation between us, punctuated by moments of equally incomprehensible brutality and mercy. I didn’t need to see his eyes to know something I hadn’t really appreciated before.

He hadn’t ever really wanted to do this.

He’d offered me a way out, at the start, but I’d imagined it the kind of formality one warrior exchanges with another, in the last few minutes before any duel to the death. I’d believed him when he’d said that he had no other reasons for being born. But now that I’d spent twenty-four hours with him, in the shared hell we’d been training for all our lives, I found I knew differently. He’d meant what he said. He’d taken his last opportunity for escape, and I’d thrown it back in his face.

Had I accepted his offer of a quiet afternoon together, on our last day before our descent into the pit, he wouldn’t have stopped the jeep at those rock formations twenty miles away. He would have kept going, picking up a main road and staying on it until long after we’d left the State and the swimming pool behind. Daddy and the Bitch would have set up the chain-link barriers together, waited in vain for our return, and then come to the shared conclusion that we weren’t coming back. They might have been upset and they might have been disappointed and they might have been relieved that the contract between them had finally been broken by somebody other than themselves. They might have flayed each other with recriminations, each blaming the other for raising a child disloyal enough to break free. They might have parted as bitter enemies who no longer possessed the weapons they had honed to hurt each other. Or they might have descended into the pool themselves, with or without the hobbles they’d chosen for us, to finally face each other without proxies, on a battlefield that would have put a period to everything that had turned the air toxic between them. Whatever happened to them, I realized, would not have mattered. Not with Ethan and I already miles away, and adding more distance between our lives and theirs with every moment we breathed free.

He had tried to shock me awake, asking questions he’d already known the answers to.

I just hadn’t been ready to hear him.

We shuffled the last few steps toward each other. I rested my forehead against his shoulder and murmured something useless. He made a noise no more articulate.

“What the hell is this?” the Bitch demanded.

“Come on, kids!” Daddy urged. “Mix it up already!”

We were both sorry.

But we both knew this couldn’t end until it ended the only way it was allowed to.

I reared back and slammed my forehead into Ethan’s broken nose, feeling it collapse again under the impact, hearing the crunch of cartilage and the gasp of pain.

“Good one!” Daddy yelled.

Ethan staggered back a step, but recovered quickly, advancing with a speed I could not have expected, to drive his knee into my gut. It hurt even more than most belly-shots because my gag cut off most of my air’s natural escape route, making my cheeks balloon from a mouthful of exhaled breath unable to leave as fast as its force demanded. I doubled over, spun, and fell over on my side, hitting the pool bottom with a thud that rattled my entire spine. My spine exploded again as he spun and slammed his right heel against my lower ribs. I felt something crack, as my eyes tried to well with tears but couldn’t come up with the moisture they needed to cry.

The Bitch yelled, “Finish her!”

Daddy screamed. “Get up, get up, get up!”

I arched my back, whipped my legs up and around, and delivered a pile-driver kick to Ethan’s crotch. I would have recognized the impact as solid even if the pain of impact hadn’t rebounded all the way to my waist. I would have heard it in his liquid gurgle and in the blind thud of his next clumsy steps.

From the way he staggered, those stunted balls of his were just as sensitive to pain as the normal kind. It’d only take him another second or two to shrug it off, and come after me again, but I had no intention of giving him that much time.

I pinwheeled my legs, flipped to my feet, lowered my head, and charged him, striking his midsection with my right shoulder. He was already off balance and struggling to remain upright. The tackle drove him off his feet, his legs flailing against the pool bottom, his arms straining at their canvas binding as his body obeyed the urge to regain balance.

We both screamed through our respective gags: Ethan because he knew what was happening and myself because a tidal wave of white agony had flared down my back at the moment of impact. Daddy and the Bitch were screaming too, but at the moment I no longer gave a shit about them. I no longer gave a shit about anything.

The only thing that mattered, in this last second before the ground gave way, was driving Ethan back, further into the Deep End.

Then his left foot sought solid ground where there was none.

He didn’t fall backward right away, which might have been better for him. He had just enough balance left to compensate as the pool bottom disappeared beneath him. His left leg sank into the drain hole, and his right slipped out from under him.

He took the bulk of the initial impact just under his left knee.

Even as I heard the wet splat of the first blood freed by the break, he was still off-balance, still falling backward.

I spun away and lost track of up and down as my feet pounded concrete trying to use up the momentum that remained. I tipped over and started to fall.

Ethan took the brunt of the impact on his bound arms. Something, maybe an elbow or one of the bones in his hands, made a sound like cracking ice. There was another crack, louder and more final, as his neck whipped back and slammed his head against the concrete.

I slowed and regained control just a hair too slowly to avoid a painful face-first encounter with the wall. I felt the cartilage in my nose release.

Behind me, Ethan wailed through his gag, making sounds that could have been words and could have been inarticulate cries of pain. They sounded the same. When he tried to pull his leg out of the drain, something razored ground against something obstinate, and he wailed again, in a voice suddenly gone as high as a baby’s.

Still dizzied from my collision with the wall, and freshly sickened by the taste of blood, I lurched away, tripped over an invisible Ethan, came far too close to another potentially deadly pratfall, then regained my balance and approached Ethan again, triangulating his position from his moans of pain. When I was sure I knew where his head was, I spun like a top and drove my heel into the side of his face. I felt his jaw leave its track. His cry went wet and bubbling, with a nasty undercurrent of fresh rage, all the shared understanding between us forgotten as I became nothing more than an enemy, beating him to death in the dark.

I couldn’t see his eyes but I knew they had to be reproaching me.

We owed each other more than this. This may have been the only currency we’d been empowered to pay, but it wouldn’t settle any of the debts that really mattered. Those would stay on the books forever.

The Bitch yelled, “Ethan! Oh, please, honey! Get up!”

Another voice, all but drowning her out, swelled with pride: “Show him who’s boss, Jen!”

The blood bubbled in Ethan’s throat. His mouth must have been full of it, but there was no place for it to go but down, filling his windpipe and cutting him off from what he needed to live. He would have been fine without the gag, but with it, he was just a man in a noose, struggling for breath a mere layer of skin from all the air he could ever need or want. He was still strong enough. If I left him alone with his will to live he might even manage to keep snatching breath for hours.

I circled him again, exhausted, unwilling to take the logical next step.

The Bitch cried, “Ethan! Baby!”

Daddy yelled, “Jenny!”

I needed a drink of water so very much.

“Ethan! Get up! Do something!”

“Jenny! Finish him! Now!”

Their voices ran over one another, melding, becoming a single shrill command in a voice that sank knives into the base of my spine.

Had I been able to say anything intelligible, I might have apologized to my brother.

Instead, I prodded him with my toe, determining his position, figuring out the most efficient way of doing what needed to be done. He lay on his back, his spine arched because of the bound arms that prevented him from lying entirely flat. His head hung backward, his spasming throat as exposed to me as that of a defeated dog offering itself to the mercies of its pack leader. When he felt the weight of my knee, resting without any particular pressure on his neck, before I made the commitment to bear down, he whipped his head to the right in a final, instinctive attempt to shake me off. I shushed him with a sound my gag transformed into a reptilian hiss, tried to send him the silent message to the effect that what I did now was being done with all possible respect, and bore down, wishing that the knee was his and the crushed windpipe mine.

The next few days passed in a delirium of shifting light, moist compresses dripping cold water into my eyes, fevers so brutal that I came out of them astonished at being alive, the agony of every glancing touch, and the uncertain comfort of female hands spreading ointment on my face, shoulders, breasts, belly, and legs.

It must have been two or three wakings before I grew used to the realization that I was in a bed with sheets, and maybe another couple after that before I registered that my arms, while restrained, were no longer drawn behind my back and were instead chained by the wrists to the bed frame.

Sometimes I heard canned laughter from a nearby low-volume television, other times I heard whispers saturated in venom. Sometimes I vomited. Sometimes, out of sheer malice, I soiled the bed and exulted in silent triumph when the soft, caring hands had to deal with my filth. Sometimes I dreamed I was still in the Deep End with Ethan. Some of the dreams bordered on the erotic, allowing me to have my way with him in every possible position despite a disapproving inner voice that insisted on reminding me that this would now be necrophilia as well as incest. Sometimes, when I told myself that, the dreams compensated by giving him Daddy’s face instead, but I hated when that happened. I’d been there, and much preferred nonsensical fantasies about Ethan, even when those fantasies faded into detailed replays of the battle’s final moments.

Sometimes, I returned to rationality long enough to understand that both my Mommy and Daddy were with me, whispering that I’d been a good girl, and that they loved me. I cried when Mommy kissed my forehead and told me I was beautiful. I cried harder when my Daddy told me about Ethan’s burial in the desert, and of the words they’d written on notebook paper and interred with him, as of course there could not be a stone. The paper read, Beloved Son, Beloved Brother. Had I been consulted, I might have added, Warrior.

When, after a couple of days, I came back to myself long enough to realize that the restraints had been removed, I sat up, reeled from the worst dizzy spell I’d ever known, and somehow managed to focus. The tiny bedroom had faux-wood paneling, aluminum trim, shelving bolted to the faux-wood panel of the walls, and a miniature pop-down vanity complete with a perimeter of tiny light bulbs. The space between the single bed I occupied and that vanity was a narrow strip of floor just large enough to stand in. There were no photos, no personal items anywhere in sight. There was a gallon jug of water. Daylight, though sealed off by the aluminum blinds covering the only window, rested on the opposite wall in a single glowing sliver. The air was warm, but cooler than it had a right to be.

I looked down at the bed and saw a sheet liberally peppered with flakes of skin.

I swung my legs over the edge of the mattress, winced at flesh that insisted on complaining from every move, and hauled myself from the bed to the chair adjoining the vanity.

The mirror depicted a patchwork girl. Some patches of skin were still lobster-red, or tanned to near-blackness, but the worst of the burns had peeled, revealing irregular patches of pale new skin behind the dried flaps and healing blisters. Two even paler bands, reflecting the places where the leather straps of my gag had protected my skin from the sun, extended from the chapped corners of my lips, across my cheeks, and around as far back as I could see. My jaw was a mass of faded gray bruises. My eyes were red and underlined with a pair of gray half-moons. My cheeks seemed gaunt. My hair had started to grow back, though it hadn’t established itself as more than a transparent blonde down, establishing the places where a full head of hair would appear once time and biology had done its work. Right now some of the bristles impaled loose flakes of skin, displaying them like butterflies on pins.

It could have been worse.

I drank some water from the jug. Slept. Then drank some more. Then slept.

After a while, I drifted back to consciousness and heard a woman laughing, somewhere right outside.

A few seconds of searching and I found the clothes they’d left for me, neatly folded on the dresser, with a note to the effect that I could come outside if I felt up to the walk. In addition to one of my bras and one of my pairs of panties, there was also an oversized white t-shirt that must have belonged to Ethan, an oversized Hawaiian shirt I also identified as his to wear over it, an ankle-length skirt with belt to cinch them tight, the sun bonnet my father had bought for me, and a pair of flip-flop sandals. The gestalt may have been random as fashion but it was all loose, all selected for maximum sun protection while offering the greatest degree of comfort for skin still so sensitive that it hated glancing contact with cotton sheets. This struck me as uncommonly thoughtful. I eschewed the bra out of reluctance to feel those shoulder straps but otherwise accepted the rest of the suggested outfit, dressing gingerly and some four times slower than I was used to.

The screen door slammed as I bopped down the steps of the mobile home. It was still hot outside, but not sweltering: maybe somewhere in the upper eighties, not all that much warmer than that. My parents, who were about twenty feet away occupying a pair of chaise lounges under a huge beach umbrella angled to catch the morning sun, both looked tanned and happy to see me. Both wore oversized amber sunglasses and big floppy straw hats. The Bitch was reading something by Carole Nelson Douglas, Daddy something by John Grisham. Both seemed delighted to see me. They waved.

“There’s the sleepyhead,” said Daddy.

“She looks better already,” said the Bitch. To me, she added: “Better hurry up and get under the umbrella. You don’t want to overdo.”

There was a mesh folding chair just inside the umbrella’s oval shadow.

I winced as I sat down, winced again as I edged the chair a few inches closer to my parents.

“You want something to eat?” inquired the Bitch. “I can fix something. You’ve been off solids for a bit, but you look like you’re ready to keep something down.”

My stomach bubbled dangerously. “Maybe later.”

“Don’t wait too long,” she advised.

“I won’t.”

“You have to keep up your strength.”

“Why?” I asked. “The fight’s over.”

“Just to take care of yourself,” the Bitch said. “We care about these things, even if you don’t.”

Daddy winked at me, retrieved his own mimosa from the gutter between their lounges, and sucked a single dainty sip through a bent straw before returning the glass to its resting place. “You listen to your Mom,” he advised. “She knows what’s best.”

I swallowed, wincing at the sudden surge of pain from a throat still too dry and raw. “Does she?”

The Bitch looked away, her right hand covering the fresh scowl twisting her lips. Daddy sighed, sat up, and removed his sunglasses so I could see his eyes, which were very pale and very blue and so very much like Ethan’s that everything since my birth took hold of my heart and twisted hard. “Now, pumpkin,” he said. “I thought you knew better than that. Your mother and I did need to settle our differences. We couldn’t do it by ourselves. We know that because we tried, again and again, and the more we argued the more we kept going over the same patches of ground. We couldn’t move on without settling who was right and who was wrong. It’s too bad about Ethan, of course, but now that everything’s resolved, there’s no reason for any more pointless animosity. We can get along. We can even be a family again, if you’d like. We could move your Mom out of this place and get a nice house somewhere with trees and a lake. We could even get a dog. You like golden retrievers, don’t you? I thought so. Just like I always promised you, I’ll get you anything you want. We’ll make it work.”

The impossible fantasy loomed before me, beautiful and horrifying and irresistible and repugnant all at the same time, drawing me in with a gravity greater than my own capacity to resist it. I’d missed so many things, but I still had a couple of years left before I turned eighteen. Maybe it wasn’t too late for me, to have the things other kids had.

I couldn’t help it. I wanted to cry. Daddy had been rough on me during my training, but if he’d been less demanding I might not have survived. And Mommy might not be such a Bitch anymore, now that Daddy and I had established the order of things. I could love them and they could love me. It could happen. Stranger things had.

Thirsting for more than just water, I licked my lips and felt the sting as they cracked. “What if you two have another fight?”

Daddy winced as if stung. “We’ve taken that into account.”

Mommy retrieved her mimosa and treated herself to another dainty sip, before returning the glass to the paving-stone by her side. “I went through the change already,” she said, with what seemed infinite regret at the lost opportunities of her youth. “But you can still bear children. And twins run in the family.”

I didn’t know I’d risen from my chair with enough force to tip it backward, until Daddy said, “What?”

Then I moved.

Seven hours later, with the afternoon dying, the desert far behind me, and the approach of night turning the sky a shade of indigo, I pulled the rental up to a diner marked by a twenty-foot neon cowboy whose right arm wobbled to and fro in perpetual friendly wave. I would have preferred to drive still further, putting even more distance between myself and the struggle now taking place in the swimming pool, but the hunger I’d denied all day long had just settled in for good. I had to feed it or risk going off the road.

The waitress must have gotten her hair and her lipstick out of the same bottle. “I’m sorry to ask, honey, but what happened to you?”

“My ATV broke down in the desert,” I said. “I couldn’t get a signal on my cell, so I had to walk about twenty miles for the nearest tow truck.”

She clucked. “People have died that way. You should have taken cover under the vehicle and done your walking at night.”

“Yeah, well, that’s what they told me at the Emergency Room.”

“Are you sure you’re all right to travel?”

“They said I was fine when they released me,” I said. “Won’t be winning any beauty pageants for a while, but I’ll be good as new in a week or two.”

She shook her head. “I gotta hand it to you. You’re one tough kid.”

“Believe me, not as tough as some.”

She brought me a turkey sandwich and threw in a slice of apple pie out of sympathy.

I didn’t need the charity. Between what I’d taken from Daddy’s wallet, and the cache I’d found in Mommy’s underwear drawer, I had a couple of thousand to fool around with. The burns, the buzz-cut, and my physique would help, too. They made me look older than I was, which would free me of any embarrassing questions about family.

I’d been better than them, in the end. I’d shown enough mercy to leave them the umbrella, and five one-gallon bottles of water. I’d also left them ungagged, with one free arm apiece, so they could drink as much as they wanted for as long as their supply held out. Of course, that gesture had been less about indulging their thirst than respecting their right to therapeutic communication. Now that they were speaking again for the first time in almost sixteen years, it would be a shame to deny them the time and voice they needed to catch up. There would be some awfully entertaining discussions going on between now and however long it would take for their voices to fall silent, and since I’d taken care to secure each of them well out of reach of the other, those conversations would all have a chance to play themselves out at proper length. It would have been interesting to stick around and listen, just to hear how often my own name was mentioned, and in what context, but I reasoned that they’d be more likely to release their inhibitions without me around. I was sure the privacy would lead to any number of fruitful epiphanies, some appreciated and some not.

I wished them well. At least, in the short term.

In the long term I hoped they fried.

Midway through my second cup of coffee, a family of four came in. Daddy was a scrawny thing with a prominent chin and weary blue eyes. Mommy, who was shorter, with frizzy blonde hair and a pointed nose, bore the grimace of any woman who had endured too many complaints for too many years. The boy and girl, who were six and five, didn’t want to eat anything but french fries and had to be seated on opposite sides of their booth when the boy persisted in tapping his sister on the shoulder, again and again, a crime she found unbearable and which made her screech, “Mo-OMMM! He’s touching me!” Daddy ended up slapping the boy and Mommy ended up informing both kids that were in big trouble if they dared make another noise: a disciplinary measure that lasted all of thirty seconds before wails and spilled water escalated the warfare, and the noise, to the next level.

As soon as I could I paid the bill and drove away, the lights of nearby homes blurring in the distance.

Maybe someday I’d be done with missing them.