It has been a while, but as I recall, they were horses, for the most part, they were not cows, the animals that Nicholas and I saw burning in the ditches off the roads.

It was the thought of my brother walking to the ruins to be photographed in the robe that made me wonder, while I was filling the champagne glass with the last of the tequila, which it would have been that Nicholas might have had to pass, a burning horse or a burning cow.

I am in the doorway with the glass, and as I look into the room at the photograph, I realize that it would have been neither horse nor cow, because it comes to me that it was not in Chichén Itzá that we saw the animals on fire.

I was wrong.

We saw the animals on fire in the mountains, outside Acapulco on the way to Cuernavaca. We saw the animals on fire years before we ever went to Chichén Itzá. We were with our mother and our father when we saw the animals on fire.

I remember our father telling me to cover my brother’s eyes.

I remember covering them.

I sit on the bed with the glass. I settle on the cashmere blanket. The cigarette burn in it fits around my finger like a ring.

I am wondering how Nicholas could sleep in this room.

In the mirrored frame, under the glass, even the photograph of my brother becomes a mirror.

In the same mirrored frame, on the same mirrored wall, I cannot say which one of us, my brother or myself, would keep me more awake.

The mirrors make me wonder how Nicholas felt when he looked at himself. I wonder if Nicholas really believed that cheekbones have bad days. I wonder to what extent, exactly, a slack jawline could make him feel like a milestone or a transition.

Then I catch my own face in the lacquer.

God help me, I look like Edith Head.

Earlier today, before I came into these rooms, I picked up the keys from the woman who called me two days ago in California to tell me about Nicholas. The night before she called me, Nicholas had not shown up at the woman’s house for dinner. It was like him, the woman explained, to appear an hour late, but not like him to not appear at all. Over the telephone, I did not tell the woman that she did not need to tell me what was and was not like him. When he did not answer his telephone that night or the next day, the woman let herself in with the keys that Nicholas had left with her, so that he would always have a spare, so that the woman could check his mail and look after his jade trees and use his garden, if she wanted, when he was away. The woman explained that for years Nicholas had had a man come to the house to look after the garden, the jade trees, the plants on the roof, but that he did not trust the man to be in the house when he was away. The woman explained all this—why she happened to have keys—and said that when she let herself in with the keys she happened to have, she found my brother on his bed with contusions on his neck.