“I’m so sorry.” I know my words sound just as meaningless now as they did when strangers said them over and over to me when I was growing up. Language fails sometimes, but I am sorry for Hector. He’s old enough to remember everything. The battle wounds of his childhood. The loss of his sister, the confusion, the displacement. The pain. He’s me, and Lisa is Amy or Jason. Both. But now more loss has come. More tragedy.

“They should have told me they couldn’t take care of her,” he goes on about his parents. “I would have done it myself. We could have figured out something. At least we’d be together.” His pupils bloom black, dilating with emotion. “They brought her home from the hospital and that was the best day of my life. Before that, it was just me and these crazy people. But after? I took care of her.”

I want to cry listening. Instead I nod.

“We slept like puppies, on this mattress on the floor? I kept my arms around her like this.” He lifts his hands to show me. “We were always together. Anyone even looked at that girl and I was there. You know?”

I do know. The savage loyalty in his voice takes me all the way back to that Christmas alone with Jason and Amy. Those hours and days, which felt suspended in some sort of bubble, when nothing could touch us. “You protected her.”

He draws hard on the Camel, the paper collapsing with a hiss as he wrestles with the past. “I tried. Our parents were really messed up, but everyone is, right?”

Not everyone, I want to say, but also know he has no reason to believe me. “What kind of kid was she? Quiet?”

“Lisa?” His laugh chops out, hard and spontaneous. “That girl never stopped talking or dancing. She sang in the bathtub, running down the street. She would sit down under the mailbox and play with nothing. With rocks, you know? And she’d be singing.”

Suddenly I can see her, that girl. He’s called her up, and it makes me feel gutted. How can it happen in one life, to be stolen twice? “Do you remember anything ever happening, before you guys got split up?” I ask him. “Something that changed Lisa’s behavior? Did she ever get real quiet, or cry for no reason, or seem afraid?”

“Why? What are you thinking?”

“I’m not sure. I want you to look at something.” From my pocket I draw out Cameron’s missing poster and unfold it in front of him.

“Shit,” he whispers and puts his cigarette down. “That’s gotta be her.” He pulls the page near him, shaking his head back and forth, his eyes glistening. “I can’t believe it. She’s so pretty, so grown-up. You have to find her.”

“I’m doing everything I can. What else do you notice?”