she asks. No answer. He heads down the street, veering farther into the road to get around a pickup truck hanging out of a parking spot muddied with rock salt; an oncoming car honks but does not swerve, passing perilously close to Max. This is stupid. “Can you stop for a second?” she calls after him.
He responds with more mindless marching—and probably more muttering too, as far as Kelly knows. So she cups her hands around her mouth. “Police!” she yells. “Apprehend that man! Get him out of the street!”
He looks back. “Why are you harassing me?”
“Because,” she says, taking a step forward, speaking to him over the chasm of the pickup’s bed, “it’s nice to see you.”
He stares at her, another drop of water falling down his glasses. Sweat. Now she knows. “It’s nice to see you too,” he says, so quietly she maybe imagines it.
She checks over her shoulder to make sure no car heads her way; then she walks into the street to get around the pickup. Face-to-face they stand. She curls her arms around him for a hug, but he doesn’t move, making her feel like a straitjacket. When she unwraps him, his face is all red, but not in a teary way. His face is red like something else—maybe the igniting match-head of his nasty temperature (one of Mom’s old malapropisms, saying temperature instead of temper, and one Kelly has never been able to avoid). Whatever his redness, Max avoids her eyes. “Let’s talk,” she says, watching for something—a twitch even—but his face appears frozen. “I need to crash.”
“No, no,” he says, “that won’t be possible. Not right now.”
She nods, feeling her lips tighten. Behind Max, something jingles, and Kelly sees a man dressed smugly in a floral scarf and a beret entering a shop, the decorative Christmas bells knocking against the glass. She looks at the sunlight glinting off the closing door as an excuse to not look at her brother, even as she says, “Let me put it differently. I’m not asking if I can stay with you.”
“But you can’t,” Max says. “It’s my place.”
“According to what? Mom left it to both of us.”
“It’s our place.”
“That’s right.”
“No, not yours and mine. I mean, I have a roommate. There’s no space.”
“You have a roommate?” Kelly asks, her voice cracking a bit, if even just a hairline crack. Max has never had a roommate before in his life. He could barely live with his own sister and mom. “What’s his name, your roommate?”
Max blinks. “Tobias,” he says.
“You have a roommate named Tobias? Who the hell is Tobias?”
“My roommate,” Max says flatly. “See, we’re in a pickle. Plus, it’s a bad time. I’m busy.”
“With what?”
“Just… stuff.” His eyes dart to the book he holds in his hand.
“What stuff? Being a bookworm?” She reaches for Max’s book and, curling her fingers around it, tries to snatch it away—just as a tease, just to see what he’ll do.
He pulls the book in the opposite direction, flinging his own body backward to keep his sister from what he holds. They struggle, feet sliding on the ground; the twins turn themselves around once, maybe twice. The book opens, and something slips out: a piece of newspaper, fluttering to the ground. “No,” Max snaps, voice sharp in the cold air, and it startles her. So she lets go, and Max falls backward against the pickup truck’s front mirror. He makes a farting sound with his lips that he probably didn’t mean to make, and then he springs forward again—but he’s too late: Kelly has already bent her knees, already picked up the strip of newspaper.
“It’s wet,” he says, reaching for it. “Lemme dry it.”
She pulls it away. “It means so much you wanna tear it?”
He growls. “None of your business what I have, what I do. Give it back. Give it back. This is harassment, listen, I’ll, uh, I’ll call the police.”
But Kelly already sees it. It’s a newspaper column with jagged edges, appearing cut out in a frenzy by shaking hands. At the top, a black-and-white photograph of a sunken-cheeked young woman with large, almost oblong eyes and hair pulled back into a ponytail, her mouth open in a garish smile—the expression of a jubilant wax figure in the middle of melting. The headline reads “Search for Missing Local Girl Intensifies.”
“Who is this?” Kelly says. But as soon as she says it, it clicks: the face of the girl, and the name, Evelyn Romanoff, even though when Kelly knew her before, the girl’s face never drooped. “Shit, man. This is your friend, yeah? Evelyn? The one who was in your movie in high school?”
Max stops panting, gets quiet.
“What happened to her?” she asks.
“Give it back,” Max mutters, reaching out again, his movement almost drunken.
She returns to the article, to the text. It’s short, so she scans it quickly and gets the gist: apparently nobody has seen Evelyn since last Friday—so, almost a week ago—when she neglected to show for work and then for a weekly wine bar date with a friend. The work thing didn’t raise any flags, really; according to the article, she’d been missing work a lot lately, was holding on to the job as a waitress at DiMillo’s only because she’d had it for so long and it’s always harder to fire somebody who has been around for a while. But missing the vino? Her friend (well, more like a guy she was casually sleeping with—so the article makes it sound like, anyhow) knew something was definitely wrong, so he went over to her apartment and found—well, didn’t find her. That’s the whole point. She was just gone.
From there, the article goes on to discuss the investigative efforts thus far, and how police have managed to assemble a vague timeline of her activities the day before. It was a rough afternoon for her: She went to go see a film at the Movies on Exchange—just around the corner from where Kelly and Max are right now—at noon. Then she paid a strange visit to Casco Bay Books, a coffee shop where she used to work. According to an employee, Evelyn used the bathroom and then claimed a table, where she opened a notebook and scribbled for thirty minutes without looking up, after which she tore out the pages, hit the parking lot, and burned them. Then, around four in the afternoon, witnesses saw her walking down Commercial Street, crying—
At this, Kelly looks up from the article, looks around at Commercial Street, with its shops and slushy roads, a smattering of winter people wandering in their heavy coats, window-shopping, pointing at cute trinkets inside stores and sighing—then she looks at her brother, who stares right back at her. “Is this what you’re doing out here?” Kelly asks. “Trying to find her?”
Max turns and rests his head against the pickup’s door. Is he about to cry? How the fuck could she possibly deal with that? She still feels on the verge of tears herself, and watching her brother lose it would trigger what happens when one little kid sees another little kid start to wail: all hell would break loose.
Then, his face pressed to the glass, she hears him mutter something she doesn’t quite catch.
“Hmm?”
He lifts his head from the pickup. “You’ve interfered with my schedule. My timing is all off now. So we might as well eat.”
Only when Max walks away from the pickup, leading the way to God knows where else, does Kelly notice a young boy inside, staring out at them behind tinted windows—a boy who was there all along, watching the foolishness of grown-ups with a smirk on his face.
The mirror in the pub’s bathroom reveals how awful Kelly looks. Not just awful, but—and this word has rattled in her head ever since Max used it on the street—dreadful. Eyes, lips, hair—everything droops, like Evelyn in the photograph. If Kelly were an idiot, she might also claim that her soul droops, but she’s not an idiot, or