Never Turn Back

a heavy sigh. “I didn’t count on Frankie and his loyalty to you. It’s as deep as any that he has to me.” He puts his hand on my back, just below my neck, and while part of me wants to shove it away and scream in his face, I stay there in my seat, head in my hands, my uncle’s hand heavy on me. “Your sister wasn’t faking. She would have jumped off that bridge if you hadn’t been there. She told me that after you saved her, she was going to commit herself at the hospital. But when she heard about your student who took those pills because of Marisa, I think it was the last straw. She felt she had to do something.” Uncle Gavin pauses. “But I am sorry, Ethan. I’m sorry I lied to you. I was doing what I thought was best.”

I take my hands from my face, take a deep breath, and let a shaky breath out. “I know,” I say, and I do. I know my uncle was trying to protect us. It’s not enough for me to forgive him, not yet, but I know why he did it.

Uncle Gavin squeezes my shoulder, then withdraws his hand. “Where is she now?” he asks. “Your sister?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “She left.”

And we have nothing else to say.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The last Saturday of spring break, I walk down my driveway to my mailbox. It’s late afternoon, and the sun touches the clouds and sets them afire as it lowers in the west. Birds are singing, trees are budding, and tender shoots of grass are poking out of the ground, rejoicing that winter is finally gone. My hand still looks like someone went after it with a chain saw, but the gauze and bandage are off and the skin held together by the stitches is healing, pink as a newborn’s.

I open my mailbox, and there with the catalogs and other junk mail is a white envelope with ETHAN handwritten across it.

Sitting on the front porch of my house, I open the envelope. It contains two pieces of paper. One is a letter, and I read that first:

Dear Ethan,

I’m sorry. And I’m okay, or will be.

She was like a cancer, a virus that would find a place inside of you and just grow and grow until there wasn’t anything left but her. I’m not sorry for that.

I’ve found everyone I wanted to find. Now I just have to find myself. (Insert barf emoji here.) The last person I’ve left here for you, if you want.

You’re my brother. Always. Even if you don’t like Dirt Plow. I mean, seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you?

Please don’t try to find me.

There is no signature.

The second sheet of paper, to my surprise, is a poem:

The ancient Norse, white-haired, eyes lashed with frost,

dreamt the world as a mighty tree of ash,

its branches reaching to heaven, its roots

bound in the darkness of the underworld,

while humankind scrambled upon the bark

of the trunk, not knowing which way they went,

toward heaven or into hell. In my dreams

I see a tree as well, a living oak.

From roots to crown one half is green and young;

the other half burns, charred limbs, black bones,

the flames red tongues that lick the living side.

I do not know which vision I accept.

In both are yoked together life and death.

Yet only one springs from my own dark thoughts,

and so I claim it as my very own

as one would claim one’s offspring, darkling child.

Instead of crawling toward my final doom

I choose both green and flame, to suffer each.

Yet at the end one only will remain.

But shall I claim your ever-living half,

or shall I grasp at last the burning branch?

The poem is signed S.

I sit on my porch and sip cold beer from a bottle and read my sister’s poem again. A tree half-alive and green, the other half burning. Life and death, green and flame. I choose both green and flame, to suffer each. That’s my sister. I raise my beer. “To Suzie,” I say, saluting the setting sun, and I drink, then brush the tears from my eyes.

My phone rings, and the screen says it’s my vet. God. They have been so kind about Wilson having gone missing, even offering to send me meals, which I’ve declined. Now they’ve probably found half a bag of kibble I’ve left with them and they’re calling to ask me what to do with it. I put down my beer and answer the phone, not wanting to deal with a voice mail, and there’s an explosion of babble on the line. It’s Nora, the purple-haired girl who runs the office, and it takes me several seconds to get her to slow down so I can understand.

“She brought him in,” she says, breathless, nearly hysterical, as if she’s close to tears. “Said she was your sister; she found him on Craigslist—can you believe that? Someone in Brookhaven found him in their yard—how did he get all the way to Brookhaven?—they were looking for the owner and posted an ad on Craigslist, and your sister just walked in here and dropped him off, she wouldn’t stay—”

I stand. “What are you saying? What—”

“It’s Wilson, Mr. Faulkner,” Nora says, and she’s definitely crying. “She found Wilson.”

I run for the car.

WILSON IS FILTHY and he has a scratch on his nose and his ribs are bruised on one side where the vet thinks someone kicked him, but when I enter the exam room where the vet is checking him out, Wilson raises his head and gives this little howl, and both the vet and I burst into tears. When I crouch to get to Wilson’s level on the exam table, he licks the tears off my face and pats at me with his paws.

After petting Wilson and baby-talking him for about half an hour, I leave him at the vet so they can give him a thorough checkup and observe him overnight. Nora can’t tell me anything