“Finish up, then.”

She pushed in the last spoonful.

“Come on,” I said. “Hurry.”

“Where are we going?” Lou said.

“Out,” I said.

“Why?”

“They said we could go wherever we wanted. During the daytime we can go wherever we want.”

I took her by the hand and pulled her out of the tent. We hurried through the camp. The sweaty faces were everywhere. Strangers, only strangers.

I had been surrounded by so many people. A wife. Two children. Parents, in-laws. A sister.

My big sister and I, my God, how we had argued when we were little. About everything. Alice never let me win. For a time I thought that she should have. She had the option. As the oldest, she had the power. The oldest always has the power. And the responsibility.

But letting me win would perhaps have meant breaking the rules of the game between us. Because we were supposed to argue, in a strange way I think we almost wanted to—siblings want to argue. It’s so easy, much easier than being good to each other.

She was much older than me. But after I had children, the age difference was sort of obliterated. It was strange that she still lived the life of a young person, while I changed diapers and heated nursing bottles. But now, after the past few months, I started thinking of her as my big sister again. Not older, but big.

Alice, my big sister . . . I didn’t know where she was either. That clever sister of mine, clever with words, clever with numbers, clever with her hands. She built things, all the time. No, not built—constructed—but she never had the chance to become an engineer as she had planned. The crisis took the march on her. She created so many things, a windmill in the garden, a solar-cell-powered dollhouse. She won an inventor’s contest at school. Where was she now?

My family. Alice, Mom, my aunts. Grandmother and grandfather. Eduard, the only one of my friends with whom I had cried. Where was he? Where were they?

And Dad . . . my elderly father. That feeble body of his, the unsteady gait—where was he? He was tougher than I’d thought—people like him usually didn’t survive the summers. Hundreds of thousands of elderly people had passed away in recent years because of the heat. The nights in particular took their toll, the extreme heat, the aging bodies never found rest. But Dad lived. The heat didn’t get to him, as it did with the rest of us; it didn’t have any effect on him.

I had been angry with him for so many years. Angry with him for having had children far too late in life. So late that he couldn’t bring himself to be a father. Couldn’t bring himself to do the things a daddy does, what the other daddies did. Toss me into the air over his head, wrestle with me, raise his voice when I did something I wasn’t supposed to do.