He had not seen his sister in over a decade. When he’d left home, she’d been a sixteen-year-old girl with braces, just emerging from that ugly duckling stage, the beautiful woman she would become visible in the arrangement of her features but still a year or so away. It had been harder to leave Kristen than his parents or friends or anyone else, and it was for her that he’d almost stayed. He’d tried all that summer to convince her to come with him, to convince her that she could only escape by uprooting herself and running like hell as far away from Dry River as she could, but she’d told him that she didn’t want to escape, didn’t need to escape, was happy where she was.

Now she was dead.

In the back of his mind, he’d known it would come to this, and he felt guilty for not making more of an effort to save her, for not going back to talk to her. Of course, he’d sent letters, but that was not the same, and his letters had always been about himself, not her, about where he was, what he was doing, where he was going.

He had not felt bad when his father died. The information had come to him, he’d registered it, then gone on with his life. It was then that he should have gone back for Kristen. He’d thought about it. He’d been living in Colorado Springs at the time, working in a frame shop, and had been on his afternoon break, sitting on the steps in back of the shop, smoking, looking up at the clouds, when the knowledge came to him that his father was gone. He knew he should feel sad, and part of him had wanted to feel sad, but too much had happened over too long a time, and all he could feel was a slight regret that the two of them had not been able to make a closer connection.

He’d finished smoking his cigarette, ground out the butt with his boot, and gone back into the shop to finish his afternoon shift.

That was when he should have returned home. That was when he should have gone back for Kristen.

He’d considered it, and that night in his apartment he’d gotten as far as dialing the number of the house. Strange how he hadn’t forgotten the number after all those years. But he’d hung up after the first ring and had spent the rest of the evening staring at the phone. He’d half hoped that Kristen would call him, but of course she couldn’t. Even if she had sensed something, she didn’t know his current phone number.

The next day he’d quit his job at the frame shop, collected his last paycheck, and sent a postcard to Kristen as he headed toward Utah.

Kristen.