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By Root 948 0

contemplating the grass outside the asylum where surely he was headed. But rather than defeating him, these thoughts had actually fueled Wolf with determination. Fuck it, he’d think, if he had to go down, he sure as hell wasn’t going without a fight. And Faith was part of that feeling. Come on, he’d imagine her saying, have some guts, the last thing I want is to bring you down—although later he’d wonder if thoughts like these were merely self-serving. And gradually, as a life of sorts took shape around him, he’d started having them less, not that he’d resolved anything, he just didn’t think so much. But meeting Phoebe that morning weeks ago on the stairs, Wolf had heard a voice that said, You knew it was coming; well, here it is. And he’d felt relieved.

“I promised myself a thousand times—until the second I opened my mouth—that I’d never tell you what happened up here.” Wolf said. “But maybe I always knew that’s where we were headed.”

Phoebe looked at the wall, searching her mind for some question to draw Wolf out. But her mind was empty.

She shut her eyes and leaned her head against the church. Something unbearable was happening inside her, a sensation like despair, only deeper, more wrenching. The wind blew dust in her face. She felt as if she were dying, as if this pain were the pain of her soul being torn from her body. In fear she opened her eyes. The wind filled them with dust but it didn’t matter, that pain, it was so small. It felt almost good.

Faith was gone. She was gone. Her absence felt as fresh to Phoebe as if she’d watched her sister dive from this cliff.

She tasted metal, the peculiar taste that follows a sudden sharp blow to the skull. A stunning emptiness blinked around her.

Wait, she thought. Wait.

In vain Phoebe tried to push her way clear, but her own thoughts seemed faint beside the vast finality of her sister’s act. It whirled like a vortex, dragging every part of Phoebe irresistibly toward itself, swallowing her whole. She couldn’t breathe.

Wait, she thought. But I always knew what happened.

Yet in all this time the reality of Faith’s act, its brutal finality, had never really touched her. It was cloaked in gauze, in light, a terrific flash of light that left in its wake a soft orb.

Phoebe opened her eyes. The bright empty sky made a buzzing noise. The very air seemed full of panic, a tingling whiteness.

“Come on,” Faith had said, reaching for Wolf. Phoebe wanted to follow them, but the door was closed. “Can you feel it?” Candlelight on the kitchen walls. “Can you?” Faith asked. “Can you?” And Phoebe did, at seven years old. She knew what it was.

“Come on,” Faith said. Something behind that door. Faith opened every door she found, but Phoebe was afraid to.

A flash of light. Then a long glow.

Faith opened every door.

One gesture. Everything distilled.

Faith spent herself. She gave herself away. And time stopped.

She killed us both, Phoebe thought. Killed all of us.

Phoebe’s limbs hurt. She wanted to move. She stood up.

The sea opened before her, wide and still. Cowed to stillness, Phoebe thought, the sea and everything else. She walked toward it.

“Stop!” Wolf cried.

Phoebe gave a violent start. Turning, she saw Wolf on his feet, poised to spring at her. She opened her mouth to speak but found she could not; her own astonishment silenced her. Wolf actually thought she would jump. Phoebe strained to imagine it—standing here, making that choice—but her mind veered away in disgust.

“I’d never do it,” she said, staring at Wolf in disbelief. “Never. I would never do it.” And as she spoke, Phoebe’s perception of the act itself began to shift. It was a choice that appalled her.

Huddling with her mother and Barry on the cliff near the Golden Gate Bridge, releasing Faith’s ashes to the wind. Feeling so small, just the three of them together—hardly even a family. And her sister chose this.

“What about us?” Phoebe said. “What did she say about us?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Something, though? She said something?”

“I don’t know.” He looked uneasy.

“But I mean, what did she think?”

There