It’s six in the morning when I slip past my mom, who’s passed out on the couch, and walk out to the concrete stairwell and call Harry. He’s probably not up yet, but it’s the longest I could possibly wait. I haven’t slept all night.

He’s groggy when he answers. I say, “Did I wake you up?”

“No.”

He’s lying. I can’t tell from his voice, though, if it’s just that or that he doesn’t want to talk to me. Maybe, unlike me, he hasn’t been waiting for his phone to ring.

I tell him all of it, keeping my voice low, watching a pair of birds descend onto the dumpsters in the parking lot below. I feel like I’m talking forever. I can feel the force of his silence emanating back at me—that he’s stunned within it, at a loss, for once, for words.

Or maybe I’m wrong there. Maybe it’s just that I already lost him.

“I need to know if it’s her,” I say. “I can’t just sit here and wonder.”

“What are you going to do? Are you going to talk to her?”

I found out she’s stationed at the Tule Field Station on a fellowship. It’s in the Modoc National Forest, just outside Alturas, way up in the far northeast corner of the state four hundred miles from here. “She’s in California. I have to find a way to get to her.”

Silence on his end again. “Where is she exactly?”

“Near Oregon. It’s seven or eight hours by car.”

“Ah.”

The thing about asking someone for something huge is that you can’t take back the request—if they turn you down, you can’t ever pretend away that gap between what you stupidly thought they might give you and what you’re actually worth to them. I jam my free hand into my pocket and kick at a pebble on the concrete. “Will you take me?” I say to him, before I lose my nerve. “I know it’s far, but if it is really my sister—”

“It’s eight hours?”

“Yeah.”

He could hang up on me, and I’d probably deserve it. He could also make me wait, or he could try to extract something from me first. He does neither one.

“Yeah, sure, of course I’ll take you,” he says instead. “Just say when.”

I shower and pack an overnight bag just in case while I’m waiting for Harry. I try to contain the noise as much as I can, peeking out every couple minutes to check whether my mom is still sleeping.

In my room, I write a note: Going to Alturas with Harry. I’ll be careful, I promise. Don’t be worried. My phone lights up with Harry’s text telling me he’s downstairs.

I haven’t lived here long enough to learn the creaky parts of the floor, and I stay light on my feet. I hit a loud spot near the kitchen and freeze. My mom stirs, and my heart explodes against my chest. I stand perfectly still. She stays asleep.

I get to the door and reach for the deadbolt, turning it slowly and cringing at its soft metallic click. My mom stays asleep.

I turn the knob and the door creaks open. The couch springs groan.

“Daniel?” My mom sits up, squinting at me. “What are you doing?”

My heart slams into my throat. “I’m—” My voice cracks. I cough. “I’m taking out the trash,” I lie. She doesn’t have her glasses on; she can’t tell what I’m holding. I imagine her panic when she finds my empty bed, my phone and wallet gone, how she’ll hold her breath each time footsteps come falling down the hallway.

“Oh.” She yawns. “All right.” Then she mumbles something that sounds like be careful, but her voice slurs—the medication, probably—before dropping off. It has a deeper hold over her overnight. It’ll be a few hours before she wakes up and realizes I lied.

Harry’s car pulls into the lot just as I come out of the stairwell, and I am so happy to see him I feel weak. He leans over to unlock the passenger door. The air inside his car smells vaguely soapy, and his hair’s still wet.

“Thank you,” I say. I toss my bag into the back seat, buckle my seat belt and turn to face him. “Seriously, Harry, thank you. I owe you.”

“Nah, don’t worry about it.”

I swallow. I wish I’d never told him about the election. “And look—I’m sorry about—”

He looks away. “Don’t mention it.”

I know he means it, that he’d rather I didn’t. So I don’t.

I’d almost forgotten how quickly he can change the mood. But he does it—he adjusts his rearview mirror, then holds up a brown paper bag with grease spots on the bottom. “It’s your lucky day: I stopped at Donut Wheel on my way here.”

I’m so flooded with gratitude for him, for everything, it takes effort to sound normal. “Excellent.”

“Maple bar or cinnamon twist?”

“You pick.”

He breaks both donuts in half, holding the bag out to me. I take the half maple bar and eat it while he backs out of the parking spot and onto the street. We’re doing it; we’re officially on the way. The donut is pillowy and sweet.

“So where am I going?” he says. “Do you have an address?”

“Yeah,” I say, my mouth full. “It’s a field station. Here.” I reach for his phone, which is charging on the dashboard, and tap in his password and put the address in. “Eight hours. There’s some traffic.”

“You’re sure she’ll be there? You didn’t call her or anything, did you?”

“No, I couldn’t find a phone number, just the address. But I’m assuming she’s just living there.”

There’s a sort of a sense of magic that can envelop you, a sense of destiny, that feels vulnerable to parsing everything out carefully or overthinking things. I wonder fleetingly if maybe that’s what my dad always felt, and maybe that was his mistake—believing it would inoculate him. Whatever, though; that’s the whole thing about that feeling, that you have to leave it intact so it doesn’t evaporate on you. I change the subject. “Did you tell Regina you were coming?”

He doesn’t answer right away. “No.”

“How come?”

“I just didn’t.”

“What’d you tell your parents?”

“I didn’t tell them anything yet. I just said I was going to school.”

“Are you going to get in trouble?”

“Am I going to get in trouble?” he repeats, amused. “No, I think they’ll be super cool with me cutting class—while I’m still grounded, no less—to drive to basically Oregon without telling anyone. They love that kind of thing. Love it. It’ll be great.”

“You’re sure you want to do it?”

“I’m sure.”

I should ask him why. I should ask him if he’s really sure, maybe try to talk him out of it. The light changes, and we get onto the freeway.

“I could take the bus,” I say. “Or—”

“It’s fine. I wanted to come.” He licks sugar off his fingers and appraises me. “You snuck out, too, didn’t you? There’s no way your parents would’ve let you go.”

“Yeah, no, there’s no way they would’ve let me.”

“What are you going to do when they find out?”

“Nothing.” My phone’s stayed quiet—my mom’s probably still asleep. “I figure we’ll have at least an hour head start.”

“Ah.” He starts to say something else, reconsiders it, goes quiet.

I say, “What?”

“Nothing. It’s just—ah, forget it.”

“Should we do this a few more times before I tell you to just say it, or—”

“Like you never try to think before you say something. Okay, fine. It’s like—so I got into Princeton, right, and I guess I always thought if I did, everything would be different, and I’d be this different person, and all that time I thought everything would fall into place if I’d just get in.”

“And?”

“Nada. I feel nothing. So I was kind of glad you called,” he says. “This morning. Because then it was like, oh, okay, right, Princeton or not, I still have to figure out who I’m going to be. You know?”

He holds out the bag with the rest of the cinnamon twist. My fingers brush against his, and there’s a feeling like a pinwheel in my stomach, and then—something shifts.

All my life, I’ve always waited for signs. Like with art, like with everything, I’ve waited for things to fall into place and to feel right, to feel like the universe had given me its permission and its blessing.

But maybe you never really get that, or maybe only some of us do, if we’re lucky, if we’re born to the right people in the right circumstances at the right time, and even then, maybe not. And the rest of us—the world will tell you over and over you aren’t good enough, in as many ways as it knows how. Maybe you have to fight for your place in it no matter what, no matter who you are. And I know this—I always worried I hadn’t earned mine, that my sister should’ve taken it instead. But maybe she’s been here all along, and maybe that doesn’t mean anything so much as it creates an absence of meaning, a void I get to fill on my own. I know enough by now to know the rest of the world still goes on without you even if you try to retreat from it, that there’s only so long you can hide out. But I also believe that, if you’re lucky, what you share with someone can reshape the way the world contours itself around you. Or maybe it’s not that—maybe it’s just that it fortifies you so that you force the world to contort itself into new ways to fit you.

And Harry here like this, after I’d sort of given up on him, how he dropped everything and is risking getting massively in trouble for me: it is what it is. I feel the way I feel. Whatever it means, wherever it’ll go, I’m in it. And I need to find out if it’s at all like that for him, too.

For a long time when you drive through the bowels of the state it looks like nothing—flat and grassy, rural in a way people from out of state never associate with California, and it feels like you could drive for miles in any direction and find nothing at all.

We’ve been on the road for two and a half hours now and my parents still haven’t called. My mom must be wiped out. Or maybe, because I left my door closed, she just thinks I’m asleep.

That’s what I’m telling myself, anyway. That she’s there, that she’s safe, that when I get back they’ll both be there, immigration agents miles and miles away.

For now, at least, the road is solid and open beneath us, and I’m here with Harry, and I can stow those thoughts away. We’re on I-5 now, passing through small towns with names like Hershey and Harrington, towns that hide themselves off the highway so you feel like you could pull off the road and not find any of them. We hit Arbuckle, and Harry says, “Like Garfield,” and it makes me laugh. “All right, loser,” I say.

My nervousness is expanding with each mile we put behind us. If my parents were wrong and it isn’t her—but I won’t think about it. I know what it’s like to be sketching out rough lines, shading and stippling and crumpling up each attempt; I know what it’s like to watch something take shape in all the chaos. You learn to suspend the questions and give yourself over to the process. I do that now.

I feel hyperconscious of Harry next to me, the smooth outlines of his forearms, the scent of his shampoo. We’re mostly—uncharacteristically—quiet. Once, in Orland, we both reach for the radio dial at the same time and our fingers touch. When my family lived in Austin, every year for the Fourth of July we’d drive out into the country roads with the Parker-McEvoys and buy sparklers from wooden stands and we’d light them when it got dark. That crackling and heady scent of smoke, the way the sparks arced through the night so loud and bright and hot they made your heart race—Harry’s skin against mine feels just like that.

I keep trying to string the words together, what I’ll say to him. But Mr. X won’t leave me alone.

It’s one thing to feel a funny way. It’s another to put it out there in the open for everyone to have to see. You’re asking him to do a disgusting thing with you. If he isn’t funny about you the way you want him to be he won’t be too hot about being around you after this, you sniffing around him with those hungry eyes of yours.

I don’t care what hypothetical old white men think, I tell him. He tips back his head and laughs.

Hypothetical? You think you conjured me from nothing? I’m your neighbor. I’m your dentist. I’m your cop. I’m your congressman. I’m your boss. I’m your teacher. Don’t think for a minute—

My phone rings. I jump.

“Your parents?” Harry says.

It rings again. “Yep.”

“You going to answer it?”

“Yes?” I say. It rings again. “What else should I do, just ignore it?”

Ring. “I mean, what are you going to tell them? I won’t pick up if my parents call.”

The phone feels hot in my hand. It rings again. Then it stops, and I feel—inexplicably—desperate for it to be ringing again, to have the chance to answer still.

I wanted that, though, didn’t I? Otherwise I would’ve just picked up.

On her voicemail, my mom is frantic. “Daniel, where are you? Pick up your phone. Call me right now. I’m going to call you again.” She does. I silence it. There’s a pit in my stomach.

And then the guilt comes flooding into the car, heady and loud, slinking around my shoulders like a cat. What if something happens to them while I’m gone? I could come back and find the apartment empty, and I’ll be stuck forever with the image of her praying I’ll pick up as the phone rings and rings.

I sink back against the seat. “I should’ve picked up.”

“Call her back, then.”

“I can’t.”

“How come?”

“I just—I can’t.” I crack the window. The air outside feels dusty and hot. I open up his glove compartment and stick my phone inside. I’ll keep it off, let the messages I’m sure she’s leaving pile up.

I shouldn’t let them worry more than they need to. I know that. All the same, though—I’m not proud that the thought occurs to me the way it does, blaring neon in my mind, but all the same, there was a lot they let me worry about and mourn and believe. And none of it was ever true.

Traffic slows to a trickle as we lose a lane to construction, and then the road releases us back into open lanes and Harry sets his cruise control. In the distance you can see Mount Shasta starting to come into focus, towering over the valley. We drive toward it, the grasses and flatlands blurring past the windows.

It’s funny about being in a car with someone—all those miles you plow into the road tie you to each other somehow, intertwine your fates at least temporarily, and they blur the borders between your two existences and etch away at whatever was keeping you so separate and distinct. I have a weirdly certain feeling that if I touched him again right now both of us would get shocked. I can feel the charge building up in the air, how it ratchets higher every time the road dips and we get jostled closer together. I know that feeling with him, what it’s like when every time you touch the rest of your body stops existing and all of you funnels itself into that shivery point of contact.

I make a deal with myself: in five minutes, I’ll say something. I won’t practice or overthink it like I always do. I’ll just start talking. The truth will come out.

But then five minutes go by—I watch them tick off on his dashboard—and I can’t do it. I make the same deal with myself for ten minutes, then fifteen, holding it there in front of me the whole time we’re talking. But I can’t do it. What if he never wants to see me again?

Around Redding I start to get jittery. It’s flatter out here, more fields and trees and open space than the Bay Area, and Mount Shasta has been expanding in the windshield a while now, massive and looming and covered in snow. We stop at an A&W, where a white man in a hat watches us openly and a white mom with her kids pretends not to, and get burgers and root beer floats. Harry doesn’t finish his.

“I’m too amped,” he says to me, clearing the table for us. “Your sister you didn’t even know was alive, and you’re going to see her—how are you even functional right now?”

It’s twelve-forty-five by the time we leave, and it’s supposed to be just three or four hours from here. We pass through an abandoned mining town, and soon the road drops down to two lanes. It’s not like Redding felt especially crowded, but without all its buildings and roads the land starts to feel naked, kind of, and barren—long fields of dying grass pockmarked with trees. Here the trees are tall and huge and old and leafless, their branches wizened and sort of gothic-looking. The cars come fewer and fewer between, and even though I know it’s not true, it feels like being in a place where no one’s ever been.

We pass through Montgomery Creek, which isn’t a town so much as a few old farmhouse-looking houses that overlook the highway and a speed limit that slows to fifty-five as you go through the fields. The fields give way to forest, and you feel small.

I lose a battle with myself and turn my phone on, wondering if it’s worse if my parents have been calling and calling or worse if they haven’t. Then there are seven new messages—I listen to each one, my mom crying by the last three—and that emphatically answers my question: it’s worse that they did.

I imagine staying home with them next year, dodging endless awkward reunions at Target and Ranch 99, making up stupid excuses when people ask why I’m still here. I imagine being forty and telling everyone how once upon a time I had an acceptance to the best art school in the nation. And I imagine losing Harry. He’d call sometimes, probably, but he’d feel guilty and embarrassed about how crappy my life was turning out—he’d do that loud talking where he tries to get you to laugh, where there’s no room in the conversation for any of your sadness to leak out, and he’d have his roommate and his fratty friends there and he’d be a reasonably short plane ride away from Regina and—

I have to stop. When I really let myself think about not being with him next year, about just fading out of his life, I can hardly breathe.

“I just wish they’d told me sooner,” I say abruptly. “I spent literally my whole life being lied to. They should’ve been honest with me. And then maybe—”

He waits for me to finish, and when I don’t he says, “And then maybe what?”

And then maybe I wouldn’t have spent my whole life pierced by a grief I couldn’t ever talk about; I wouldn’t have carried the guilt of having outlived her with me everywhere. And then maybe I would’ve been more careful at school. And then maybe I would’ve understood why they were so panicked about the principal and I wouldn’t have been as angry as I was, and then I would never have lost control driving. And then maybe it wouldn’t feel like this now, this massive debt I’ll never—because it’s still my fault, I still have to blame myself—be able to pay back.

They shouldn’t have lied to me. And if they’re waiting at home right now, worried, frantic each time they get my voicemail—then maybe it makes them they wish they would’ve just told me the truth, too. I don’t have it in me to spare them that.

But it doesn’t matter, I guess, whether they regret it or not. It’s all too late for that. I pull my seat belt tighter around myself. “Eh, it’s not important. I’m going to withdraw from RISD.”

“You’re—wait, what, what the hell? Why are you withdrawing? Because of your parents?”

“Yes and no. It’s because—” I hesitate. I thought I’d never tell anybody this. “It’s because we wouldn’t have gotten into the car accident if not for me. The accident was my fault.”

“How was it your fault?”

I tell him. It sounds even worse when I say it out loud.

“You definitely can’t withdraw,” he says.

That surprises me, actually—I kind of expected he’d say Yes, obviously, of course you don’t deserve to go, and also maybe and get the hell out of my car. “My parents are pretty fucked, Harry. And I made it so much worse. They had to give the police their car registration, and now they have no car, and my mom got hurt. I have to stay here.”

“Danny—you didn’t know.”

“Yeah, well, when you deliberately crash a car it doesn’t really matter what you know.”

“I mean—okay, yes, I’ll give you that. But what if—what if it really is your sister? If they have their daughter back, doesn’t that make up for literally anything?”

I hadn’t quite let myself form those thoughts. But they’ve been kindling, because as soon as he says it they catch flame. What if it is her? And what if she only knows a false version of the story and I tell her the truth, I tell her what really happened and how they’ve never stopped wishing for her back—can I balance that, somehow, that and all those years they lied to me, the anger I probably shouldn’t feel but do, against my guilt?

“It doesn’t change their situation,” I say finally. “Even if it somehow makes up for some of it—they’re still in the same boat. It doesn’t change anything.” This is the part I’ll have to carry alone, though: that a part of me will always resent them for this. Always.

“That’s literally been your dream for as long as I’ve known you, Danny.”

“It has.”

“You really think you can fix anything by not going? You honestly think that’s better?”

Of course I don’t think it’s better. But you don’t always get better—sometimes you just get less bad. Sometimes you just get right. “I don’t know if I can fix anything no matter what. Neither one of them are perfect options, but if I just bail on my parents I don’t think I can live with myself.”

A lesser friend, I think, would try harder to talk me out of it whether or not he believed it, unfurling a safe, attractive future I could map myself into in order to make me feel better in the moment, so he could duck away from how it feels. Harry doesn’t, though. He says, “Is.”

“Excuse me?”

“Neither one of them is a perfect option.” He reaches out and claps his hand against my thigh, and leaves it there. “Subject-verb.”

Then he grins, holding it until, in spite of myself, and in spite of the fact that his eyes are sad, I smile back.

And I almost tell him then. I almost do.

I don’t, though. He puts his hand back on the wheel, and the letdown that floods me, like a wave receding and then crashing back, makes me wonder if maybe I can’t. Maybe I just won’t ever. I try to tell myself I will, that I still have time—but time always almost feels like it belongs to you, like you can stretch and sculpt it to make it what you need it to be, but that’s a lesson I hope I never need to learn again: you belong to it, and not the other way around.

In Burney—a stretch of flat buildings lining the side of the road, a section carved out of the forest—we stop to get gas. A white woman in a pickup truck at the pump behind us scrutinizes us, leaning against her truck with her arms crossed, and I feel that old mixture—maybe it’s not justified, but a lot of times it probably is—of defiance and pity and shame. She lifts her cigarette to her lips and I watch her cheeks hollow and then fill back in as she inhales.

Everything feels different when we start driving again. The clumps of trees thicken, mostly pine now, and as you climb higher sometimes you come through a bend and the trees open up and you can see small valleys spread out below you, blanketed in a green that stretches across to the tree line, peaks rising up bluish in the distance. The air’s thinner up here and the sunlight streams through the sky differently, landing on the windshield in a way that looks clearer than how it does at home. Mostly, though, I think it feels different because I know that was our last stop, because the next time we get out of the car it’ll be to find Joy.

My pulse has been higher ever since the gas station. I try to tell myself it’s that there’s less oxygen up here, but I know I’m just nervous. I can’t quite sit still, either—I fiddle with the radio, tap my hands on my knees. I wish I’d brought my sketchbook, even though trying to draw in the car always makes me carsick. I would draw us, though, I think: me and Harry in the car. I’d draw the way the light keeps glancing off the rearview mirror and the way the world outside the window looks like a painting and the way inside the car we feel kind of buffered from it all, how really everything that matters is right here inside. For now, at least.

“So,” I say, when we drive through Fall River Mills, a flat stretch with mountains that rise up in the distance, “I still haven’t exactly put together a solid game plan. I was going to just kind of show up and try to talk to her.”

“Sounds good to me.”

“Does it really? Because it’s starting to sound pretty bad to me.”

He shrugs. “If it’s her, do you really need a plan?”

My pulse picks up again, thudding in time to the bumps on the road. Outside a cluster of cows is grazing in a grass clearing. The sun is so bright it makes the grass look almost neon.

We could still turn around, I tell myself. There’s nothing stopping us. “I don’t know. Who knows. It could end up not being her. Or who even knows.” Then I tell myself: I’m going to do it. Now. “Hey, Harry?”

“Yeah.”

My heart is pounding so hard it feels impossible that he wouldn’t hear it. My vision goes soft around the edges.

“Ah—never mind. Forgot what I was going to say.”

You see Alturas before you reach it. You come to a peak and there below you is the whole city clustered together in a pocket of valley, and as you drive into it you lose sight of it until you’re practically there. The sky out here is huge. The land goes on and on, tall grasses that wave in the wind and pull your eyes along the horizon line, drawing them up the mountains hovering in the near distance. When we see a sign for Alturas, population 2,827, the nervousness hits me. My mouth goes dry and my hands are sweaty against the wheel. Harry reaches over and taps my knee; he can feel it, I think, what that sign means to me. Maybe it didn’t feel real before this.

We stopped really talking thirty or forty minutes ago, not in a way that felt like things were done but more that we were leaving them suspended, balancing carefully above us so we’d tiptoe under their shadows without upending anything. Since then we’ve been mostly quiet.

And I still haven’t said anything to him. What would happen if I just never do? I’ll regret it forever, I know that. My life will radiate out and out from this moment and I’ll always wish I could have it back to do over.

But then won’t I feel that, too, if I tell him and it ruins everything?

We pass into the city limits. I take a deep breath and hold out my arms a little from my sides to see if I can feel anything different. Do my atoms know I’m here, this close to her? Could you measure something different in me? I let them back down.

“For whatever it’s worth,” Harry says, “I think it’s a good thing you’re doing.”

“That doesn’t always mean a good outcome, though.”

“I know,” he says. “That’s the part about the world I never know how to live with. But it’s not nothing, either.”

We drive through town—it takes all of sixty seconds, old buildings with flat facades that remind me of the Gold Rush and squarish brick buildings mashed against the kind of newer building that masquerades as older, hastily built—and keep going out past town on a dirt road into the grasslands. I can barely swallow. But I try to watch everything carefully, not just for directions but also because this is the life my sister inhabits, because I want to collect all the texture and details.

It’s seven or eight miles on the back roads, but it feels like longer because you can’t go very fast. The grass is taller out here, in some stretches nearly as tall as the car, and it makes it look like the mountains behind it could be anywhere from five to five hundred miles away. There’s a layer of dust building on the windshield. We don’t pass a single other car, and more than once Harry says, “You’re sure this is right?”

“I’m pretty sure. The map looks right.” Besides that, I’m starting to feel it—some tingling in my limbs that means we’re getting closer, something that brings me back to what it felt like in my dad’s lab that morning all those years ago. And then we go up over a crest and then we see it in the clearing down below: the field station. Where my sister is.

The field station is two portables situated in a T. There are some trucks parked kind of haphazardly in front. All around is high yellow grass and occasionally trees, and it stretches about as far as you can see. Thirty or forty yards from the far portable is what I’m pretty sure from the map is the Pit River cutting through the grass, a wooden footbridge going across it.

The heat outside seeps into the car as soon as Harry cuts the engine. I drink some of the water we got at the gas station. When we get out my legs feel heavy after sitting so long, and the dried grass is brittle under our feet. It’s hot out here, and so quiet—no cars, no planes, no city noises. The sun has an easier time finding you, too.

I both can’t wait a second longer and would not feel ready if I had a hundred years. Harry says, “You ready?”

“Sort of.”

I feel kind of dizzy. I close my eyes and try to reenvision the world as one where I’m brave, and ready, and can do this, a world where everything ends well. And I try to remember what it feels like in this moment, too, because I know it’s one that’ll define the rest of my life—sever everything into a distinct before and after.

“You okay?”

There’s a buzzing in my ears. I keep my eyes closed. “Yeah.”

Tell him, I order myself. Just do it. Do it now.

“You want me to wait in the car?”

I open my eyes again. It’s so bright here I have to squint, the world constricting. “What? No.”

He grins. “I was hoping you’d say that.”

I’ll tell him later, then. I feel blurred, like if you looked at me I’d be wavering, a heat mirage rising off the asphalt.

I go up the portable’s two metal steps, my legs like gelatin. My footsteps are loud, and I cringe. I don’t want anyone to come out before I’m ready, and it feels—even though we aren’t—like sneaking around. No one comes out, though. I knock.

A white guy in his mid- to late twenties answers the door, and when I look behind him, my eyes scanning for her, there’s no one but another guy about the same age sitting at a computer pushed against the wall.

“Uh, hi,” he says. He glances back toward the other guy. They must not get many drop-in visitors here. “Can I help you?”

“Hi,” I say. “I’m here to see Joy.” When they look at me blankly, I say, “Joy Ballard?”

“You’re here to see Joy?” the one at the computer says. Both guys look at me strangely, then at each other. “She know you’re coming?”

“Kind of.” He keeps looking at me, his eyebrows raised, so I say, “Probably not specifically today, though.”

“Huh. Okay.” He glances at the clock. “Well, she’s out in the field, but I think she’ll be back any minute now. You want to come inside?”

“Ah—” I glance back toward Harry. Already this is veering off of the scene I’d drawn out in my head. But that’s fine, that’s how life goes; you adapt. “We’ll just hang out and wait out here. I don’t want to bug you guys.”

He shrugs. “All right, cool. She should be back soon.”

I have a brief intuition (Regina’s legacy in my life) that if they were women, this would be different—they’d vet me differently (/at all). I feel a twinge of annoyance at them for not doing that on her behalf. We’re two random guys who showed up out of nowhere wanting to see Joy, and they don’t blink an eye. But I can’t exactly trust that annoyance in the same way I can’t trust anything right now—because a bunch of different feelings are veering wildly all over the place inside me, tilting around like windmills. My muscles feel rubbery and soft.

Harry and I sit in the car with the doors open. There’s a breeze that picks up every so often, but mostly the air is still. I feel bizarrely aware of my breath, like I have to keep paying attention to keep it going, and also just aware of all the invisible mechanisms going on to keep my lungs filled. I was as ready as I was ever going to be walking up those stairs, but the waiting feels harder, somehow, now that it’s dragged into another round.

We hear her car before we see it. Harry sits up straighter. Then a Jeep pulls up from over the hill, heralded by dust, and I think even if there were other cars here, even if we weren’t out in the far reaches of the state this way, I’d know it was her. A soft buzzing starts in my fingertips, radiates up through my arms and into my spine.

Harry turns to get out of the car.

“Wait,” I say. “I need to tell you—I have to—”

I run out of words. I reach out and take his hand.

At first he kind of laughs and starts to take his hand back. But then he sees my face, and I’m sure it looks as nakedly uncertain as I feel, and he stops laughing. He looks down at our hands and then up at me again, a kind of understanding passing across his face. “Are you—”

I swallow. “Yes.”

“You—” He lets go. My heart throws itself weakly against my rib cage and then slumps inside my chest. “Um,” he says. A panic goes into his eyes. “Danny—”

Oh God. I can’t breathe. But then a car door slams, and it breaks apart the moment, and we both get out of the car. Joy’s parked in front of the portables. Harry smooths his hands over his thighs, refusing to look at me. My palms are sweating. And then Joy gets out of the car and there she is, less than ten feet from me.

She’s wearing khaki pants and a long-sleeved shirt and a sun hat, lace-up hiking boots, small gold earrings. And in person I recognize her, not just because I’ve seen pictures, but in a way that makes me think I would’ve known her anywhere, in any context, and I feel certain then: it’s her. She has my dad’s forehead and my mom’s cheekbones, my same mouth and eyes.

I think she knows who I am. I can see it in her face, the way that same recognition sparks, and also she looks less surprised than I would’ve expected. But she says, politely, “Can I help you?”

“I’m Danny,” I say. “This is kind of a long story. But I think—I think we might be related.”

“You think—oh.” She takes off her hat and twists the brim in her fingers. “Wow, I wasn’t…expecting you. Ah, and what brings you here?”

That should be obvious, shouldn’t it? “I needed to talk to you.”

“Right,” she says again. She looks back toward the portable. Then she gives a little wave to Harry. “I’m Joy.”

“Harry.” He manufactures a smile and takes a step forward to extend his hand. “It’s nice to meet you.”

I thought the words would show up the same time we did—that when I saw her everything would click into place and I’d know what it was I was supposed to say. It’s the opposite, though—it’s like all the words I’ve ever known are slipping away from me, and I have to clutch at ones that fit.

“My dad is Tseng Huabo,” I say. The sheer fact of her is dizzying. All this time she lived less than fifty miles from me. “Now he goes by Joseph Cheng and my mom goes by Anna Cheng. They had a daughter who was kidnapped in China about twenty-two years ago.”

“Ah,” she says. She looks around again. Aside from the two guys in the trailer, we could probably drive for twenty minutes before we encountered another human being. It feels the way it always did in Texas when there were lightning storms and you tried to get out of clearings and parking lots, make sure you weren’t the tallest thing around.

“Okay, well—” I can sense her making a decision. “There’s nowhere to really go here. Do you guys want to get dinner in town? I was going to go eat anyway.”

My heart picks up, the beats like the wind catching and scattering a pile of leaves. “Yes, sure, definitely, that would be perfect. That would be great.”

“Okay.” She goes up the steps and opens the door and says into it, “I’m going into town. You guys want anything?” I can’t hear their answer, but she says, “Yeah, I’m fine. I’ll explain later. Maybe.”

Her voice was different when she talked to them. Regina does that, too—she has a slightly higher-pitched voice in public, something smoother and a little more friendly-sounding, which is how Joy sounded with us.

Joy opens the door to one of the Jeeps. I open the passenger door and start to get in the back, but Harry motions to me to take the front seat. He’s careful not to touch me as he gets in.

Joy takes a long time buckling her seat belt and adjusting the mirrors. She looks calm, but I keep getting a sense that she isn’t, actually. I can’t tell what she’s thinking.

But it’s her, right? It’s her? She hasn’t technically confirmed it, but she would’ve told me if it wasn’t. I wonder if it would be different if Harry weren’t here—if she doesn’t want to say anything in front of him right away. Which is fair; she has no idea who he is.

To be fair, maybe I don’t, entirely, either. I haven’t been able to meet his eyes since the car. Pretending things are fine is a physical effort. If I ruined everything—but I won’t think about that yet. I erase it from my mind, visualize scrubbing the eraser dust to wipe the paper clean, and focus on Joy. My sister. I can hardly breathe.

Joy starts the car and we pull out onto the dirt road. “Your car did okay on the way in?” she says pleasantly. “All of ours have all-wheel drive. It’s pretty bumpy out here.”

“Yeah, it was okay.” I add, “It’s really beautiful out here.”

“It is, isn’t it? It’s also so dry. High desert. I get eczema.” My mom does, too. “Unfortunately, ticks love it here too. All the grass. Byron—that was one of the guys you just met—got bitten last week and had to get tested for Lyme disease. Negative, fortunately.”

She chatters about that, the ticks and the Lyme disease and the native grasses here, the whole ride back into town. I don’t know what I expected her to be like—like me, maybe, or maybe like my parents—but it’s odd fitting the reality of someone around your (unfounded) expectations. She’s nice, though, talkative and self-assured, but she also seems on edge. Which I want her to not be. I want her to not be small-talking like we’re strangers at a bus station, to not be creating a kind of hedge of pleasantries around herself so that it would be strange for me to bust past that with everything we actually need to talk about.

But maybe she’s just nervous. It’s hard to blame her. I mean, I’m nervous as hell. So I’m polite in return, and I tell myself that I’ll wait until we’re settled in the restaurant and then we’ll talk, and then everything will be fine. There are years and years to catch up on.

By the time we’ve pulled back onto paved roads again I’ve learned more than I ever would’ve imagined myself knowing about the ecosystem of the high desert up here, but basically nothing about Joy except that she’s really into all this. There is—improbably—a Thai restaurant in the middle of downtown, and when we go in they exclaim over Joy (she must come a lot) and ask who her visitors are. She introduces us by name, not by description. When we sit down Joy says, “I’d recommend the drunken noodles. That’s what I’m getting.”

“You’re getting—oh.” Ordering a plate of noodles for yourself that way instead of family-style is something I’ve only ever seen white people do, and I don’t know why that feels so jarring. I guess it’s because for as much as she looks like me, I can still feel on the periphery all those little fractures I can’t quite put my finger on. Like that Harry and I could speak Chinese in front of her (me crappily, but still) and for all I know Joy wouldn’t understand a word, like all those missing commonalities I can’t assume about her past.

It feels weird to get basically anything on the menu and eat it just by myself, but I don’t want to try to negotiate splitting anything on the menu with Harry in front of her, or maybe at all. When the woman who greeted us comes back to take our orders I get a green curry, my mom’s favorite, and Harry gets pad thai. And then the woman goes back, and then there’s a lull.

I take a long breath and try to gather all the things I’ve been practicing saying. Exactly at the same time, though, Joy says, “So you’re both in high school?”

“Yeah, seniors.”

“And what are you doing next year?” The question’s polite still, the way it would come from a friend of the family, an adult making conversation at the store.

Harry tips his head toward me. “Harry’s going to Princeton,” I say. “And I’m, ah, still deciding.”

“Isn’t the deadline pretty soon? My sister did the college application thing a few years ago, so it’s fresh in my memory.”

My sister. That aches. “Yeah, it’s next week. I’m trying to figure some things out with family first, actually. Which is part of why—that’s a big part of how I even found out about you.”

Her expression shifts almost imperceptibly, fast enough that I only see the quick cover-up and not whatever’s lying underneath. “It must be a huge choice!” she says brightly. “I remember trying to pick colleges. It’s hard to picture what a place is really like until you actually go there. Everything looks so different in the brochures than in real life.”

“Yeah. Look, Joy—my parents—it’s kind of a complicated situation right now. They’ve had a rough year and we’re all kind of trying to figure out what comes next, and—”

“I see.” She reaches for her glass of water and drinks half of it. Her expression is anything but inviting, but I pretend not to notice.

“But they finally sat me down and told me the truth about everything that happened with their daughter that they lost and then with the Ballards. Which—it’s you, right?”

“Excuse me.” Joy stands abruptly, pushing back her chair so hard the arms get caught on the table, rattling it. Our waters slosh over the sides. She’s out the door before I can mentally gather myself enough to stand up.

“Do you think she’s leaving?” I say. “Crap.” I should’ve led up to things better. Or I should’ve practiced this more, or maybe I should’ve said more in my message to her so this didn’t feel as abrupt. I had eight hours in the car I could’ve been preparing.

“I don’t know.” Harry watches through the window, and for a second it feels like we always do, the two of us united against all the forces of the world. “No, she’s just outside.”

“Should I go after her?”

“I don’t know. No, probably not. I think you should just give her some space.”

“I can’t just sit here, though. She’s right there, and she’s my sister. I’m sure it’s her.”

“I know, but—it isn’t always better to be there, even if you’re trying to help. Sometimes you just have to back off.”

I feel my skin flush all the way down to my navel, a sick feeling worming into my stomach. How much am I supposed to read into that? “Yeah, but—” Whatever. I get up. I don’t believe that. Because this is what I always hoped for my life when I thought my sister had died: that somehow by being the one who was still here I’d figure things out. That it does mean something to be there, that the world is intrinsically different by you being in it, and that whatever ways it spins around you, you can take something from that and make it better, somehow, than it was.

And maybe now that sounds like wanting to just get credit for showing up. But it’s not nothing, right? Some people never show up. Or they start to and then they’re gone, or they want something bigger or flashier and less steady than the work of putting yourself there even when it’s not comfortable. I don’t want that to be true about me.

I find Joy outside crouched on the ground, breathing into cupped hands. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“Do you need me to call someone?”

She closes her eyes. She looks so much like my mom when she does that, and without warning it makes me wish with all my heart my mom were here right now. She’d know what to say.

It’s just me, though, and I have no idea. I crouch next to Joy. “Can I bring you some water? I can order you some tea.”

“I don’t need anything. It’s just—you can’t just show up out of the blue like this,” she says. “Without any warning, without even asking—my God.” She drops her hands and takes more long breaths.

Oh. There’s a hollow spot in my chest where my heart should go. “I’m really sorry—I didn’t mean—”

“I just need to breathe a little while.” She does. There are a few people on the other side of the sidewalk outside what looks like a hardware store, and they’re watching us. One calls, “You okay over there?” and Joy waves him off. This street we’re on is basically the whole town and it makes it feel lonely here, kind of, way off on the edge of the world. Not a single car has driven by since we’ve been out here.

She takes two more long breaths and then she stands, unsteadily. I offer my hand to pull her up, but she ignores it, and I tuck it behind my back.

“I didn’t mean to freak out on you. But I was just having a normal day at work, and then all of a sudden out of nowhere you show up to drag up all these extremely personal things about my past—”

“I’m really sorry. I really didn’t mean for it to be like that for you. I thought—I guess I was just so excited to see you, and I thought you’d—”

She sighs. “They like me here,” she says, and it takes me a few seconds to understand that she means the restaurant. “They always bring my orders out right away. Our food is probably ready. Let’s just go back inside.”

When we go back in our food has come, and Joy sits down, almost mechanically, and resolutely picks up her fork. I can tell somehow that it’s important to her to pull herself together and sit through this meal, like maybe she’ll look back on this as a moment she had to be strong, a shitty time she had to get through and she gathered herself together and pulled it off.

I feel loose, like all my joints and cartilage are in danger of splitting and just coming apart, rendering me into dust. I can’t taste my curry. None of this is what I imagined. It didn’t occur to me that it would be her and she wouldn’t want to see me, that the sight of me would traumatize her.

All of us pick at our food, and Joy asks a little more about college. Everything I say she treats as mildly interesting trivia, roughly the same way Regina reacts when Harry sends her YouTube clips he thought were funny. Mostly, though, she talks to Harry, because apparently she considered doing a postdoc at Princeton and loved the area. And also I think because it’s probably easier—Harry doesn’t matter to her. Harry she’ll never have to think about again.

I think about my parents waiting back at home, and I imagine telling them about this: I went to see her and gave her a panic attack and then we came back. When the check comes, I reach for it, but Joy takes it before I can. “I can—”

“No, no,” she says breezily. “I’m a regular here.” Which isn’t exactly a reason, but—my Asianness fails me—I also don’t have the energy to fight for it. Joy pays. In her car on the way back she turns on the radio just loud enough that you’d have to raise your voice to talk over it, so we don’t.

When the paved road ends and we’re back on the dirt and gravel the car jostles us around, and I lean my head against the backrest and close my eyes and try to unravel all the moments leading to this one, imagine what I could’ve done differently, what I could still do. Maybe if I tell her more about what it’s been like for my parents, or if I tell her the whole story. Or maybe—

“Do you guys need anything for your drive back?” Joy says as we pull back in sight of the portables. “There’s not much open right now in town, but we have some water bottles and Red Bulls and trail mix.”

I say yes just to prolong things. How is it that I came all the way here and I’ll leave with nothing? We follow her into the portable, where Byron (at least I think it’s Byron; they’re both white guys in their twenties with short hair) nods at us from where he’s sitting in front of one of the computers wearing heavy-duty headphones. Joy pulls down a box from one of the plastic shelves and starts to rummage through it.

While we’re standing there, a strange looks goes over Harry’s face. I follow his gaze to the wall, and there next to a whiteboard is the portrait of my mom, the one I drew. It’s an impossible feeling to see it here in this context. It stuns me in place. I must stare at it a good minute, the rest of the room fading out in the periphery.

“I was home visiting my parents and I thought I’d stop by your art showing. I read about it online,” Joy says quietly.

I jump; I didn’t even notice she’d come closer to me. “How did you even hear about it?”

“I was—” She glances back toward not-Byron. “I was looking you up. You really should be more careful about online privacy.”

“You were looking me up?”

“I was curious. I’m a scientist. I was curious about any biological ties.”

I was certain already, but hearing her say it is staggering nonetheless, too much and too big to absorb right away. I will replay that for the rest of my life.

“They would love to talk to you,” I say. “I’m pretty sure they’d give anything at all just to hear your voice, even just for a few seconds. Anything you want to know or anything you want to say to them—I could call them right now if you want.”

Byron/not-Byron are watching us with their arms crossed, and in the portable’s small space I feel how little room there is right now for me. We’ve worn out our welcome, I know that.

She starts to say something, then stops herself. I can see her struggling. But I understand that struggle for what it is—she’s not choosing between two different parts of herself, I don’t think. She made her choice. The struggle now is just that she’s a nice person and will feel bad if she hurts me, not because of who I am, but just because of who she is.

“I’m not open to talking to them,” she says. “I’m sorry to hear they aren’t doing well, and for your sake I hope things clear up soon.”

She’s gathered some water bottles and granola bars, a few cans of Red Bull, and she puts them in a bag now and hands it to me. I can sense her lightening, having nearly disposed of us. A part of my heart curls like a pencil shaving and peels off.

“Drive safely back,” she says. “I’m glad to know you’ve been doing well. Really. You have a lot of talent. Good luck with everything. It was nice to meet you both.”