**

It is their mom who breaks the news to them, one by one, Amy first

It is their mom who breaks the news to them, one by one, Amy first. It is July 26, 1997. Their dad is in Minnesota filling in for a friend at the Summer School of the Rochester Community and Technical College. It is strange to think that their father has so many friends, none of whom they really know. Amy and Zoe have often wondered where they came from.

She tells her. Amy says oh the way she’d say it to someone she didn’t know, like she means to say okay but forgot to finish.

Then their mother tries to give her a hug, but now Amy recoils, eyes bulging, blood cold. Their mother tries again. Amy pushes her away, hard as she can. Their mother staggers back, and for one split second, she doesn’t seem to know what she should do. Amy stares and backs away.

At first, before she blames herself, she blames their mother. Then Zoe walks into the room, and Amy and their mother turn to her, and the three of them just stand there, in silence, and then Amy runs out.

Amy runs out the front door and down the steps of the porch. She runs down the sidewalk and then down the driveway. She gets to the street, and she keeps running. She runs and runs and runs all the way down New Haven until it ends. She is all out of breath now and has a stitch in her side, but she can’t stop. She turns and does a dragging lope down a couple more blocks till she gets to Whiteside Park. She sits down in a swing.

She looks straight ahead of her and then slips out, sliding down onto the woodchips, with the swing sideways against the backs of her knees. She lets it go. She brings her knees to her chest.

Now it hits her, and she begins to apologize into the air, over and over: I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry. Because Amy is the one who did this. Amy is bad luck. Amy has infected everything she’s truly loved. Amy has poisoned them, and she should have known, and she should have done something. She should have done something. She should have done something.

How can it be too late?

As evening falls she tries to go home, but she has lost her sense of direction, and she drags herself down blocks that could be anywhere for what seems like it must be hours, until finally somehow she finds their long, squat house, the clumsy globs of gray between the rough red brick, and entering unnoticed she makes her way back to their bedroom and goes to sleep beneath their bed.

To get away from Zoe, Amy transfers all her operations to underneath the pear tree in between the front yard and the backyard

To get away from Zoe, Amy transfers all her operations to underneath the pear tree in between the front yard and the backyard.

Amy still expects for Sasha to come back. Their mom is a liar who tries to hurt them on purpose. Amy does Russian homework all day long as though invoking him. The sun beats down and brings her freckles out, an endless succession of freckles, impossible to count. The wind picks up. Amy completes every remaining task in the second-year textbook and then starts over.

She sees Zoe at mealtimes but doesn’t speak to her. She takes big bites of her food and then goes and spits it out into the toilet. She is on a hunger strike. She will not eat until Sasha comes back. At 3:28 on the following Thursday Sasha will knock on their door as though nothing has changed.

Amy and Zoe sleep stiffly, like strangers forced by some natural disaster to share a pallet. The catfish sucks at the small stones at the bottom of the tank while the little machine pumps oxygen into the water. The angelfish are too old now to lay eggs. They always ate them afterwards anyway.

Most of Amy’s sleeping she does outside, under the tree, during the day. She dreams of Sasha. She dreams that he tosses her up into the air and catches her, and then they spin around and around and around and around, faster and faster and faster and faster, and then they hold hands, chests heaving, and skate back to the center of the rink to take their bow. Then she wakes up and screams inside and tries to fall back asleep.

Sometimes she claws at the concrete. Sometimes all her muscles tense up so tight she gets terrified because what if she can never move again. She listens to the cars go by and tests out her fingers and wraps her hand around her throat.

Because Sasha shot himself in the mouth rather than at the temple, they are able to do an open-casket funeral

Because Sasha shot himself in the mouth rather than at the temple, they are able to do an open-casket funeral.

Amy and Zoe scour their closet for something black to wear. They ask their dad to take them to the mall so many times he finally relents. Amy and Zoe scour the sale racks for something black to wear. They purchase dresses. Both of them are sure that Sasha will come back. That this event is an event he’ll be attending, just like them. Thus they both want to look pretty.

People mill around on the sidewalk outside the parlor. Some of the college girls smoke cigarettes. Amy glances at Zoe, but Zoe keeps her eyes on the little bows at the toes of her shoes. Their mother walks ahead of them, puffed up, pushing through the crowd.

Inside some of the college girls are crying. Questions form in Amy’s brain, horror and adrenaline surging through her body. Amy and Zoe know next to nothing about Sasha’s life. Where is his family? Who are all these girls?

Then their mom works a space for them in the line to go up to the coffin. Amy goes first. She places a tidy pink envelope on his stomach just above his hands. Then she stands there and looks down at his face. His eyes are closed instead of sparkling. His hair is long, and she nearly reaches down to brush it off his forehead. Gripped by vertigo, she staggers back and hears, right before she faints, the sound of all things being torn in half, a resounding pulling apart that drowns out everything else.

Amy spends the next few days in bed as though she has a fever. Her sister ferries trays of food she doesn’t touch back and forth between the kitchen and their room. She begins to lay little notes beneath the juice glass. When Zoe isn’t looking, Amy takes them and unfolds them. They are written in a shaky hand, using Russian Cyrillic or the symbols of the earlier alphabets that Amy invented. Zoe has recovered the marks without the meanings.

But even though the notes say nothing, Amy begins to take sips of the juice, until finally one night in the middle of the night she gets up and rifles desperate through the fridge until she finds the big piece of leftover chocolate cake and eats it all standing up at the counter with a soup spoon. Then she feels sick, throws up, and goes back to bed. Zoe is still sleeping.