This is not my landscape: the desert below in miniature, the houses and roads rolled out on a brown grid, the sun skimming the black husks of volcanoes. I’ve lived here long enough not to be a tourist, yet I just disembarked from the world’s third largest aerial tramway with a dozen gaping sightseers. Leaning against the chipped red rail, I imagine going over it, my body shredding against the rocks, a broken doll tumbling down the mountain. I wonder if Lucy dreams of this place. I wonder if she dreams at all.
 
The gynecologist at the university health center—a place where they keep potholders over the stirrups, like your vagina’s a roast they’re going to pull out of the oven—recommended that I switch birth control pills. The vine of despair that tendriled up my body and around my throat said, okay. She prescribed a new pill, some super-reduced hormone kind with the word low in the title one too many times.
          At the end of the first pack, I didn’t get my period.
                                                      
In the checkout line at the hipster market, I study the ropy forearms of the cashier. His tattoo sleeves are little more than charcoal smudges faded into his leathery skin. My boyfriend, Pete, gestures to our carton of strawberries awaiting the scanner. “They say if there’s any fruit to buy organic, it should be strawberries. The pesticides on them cause cancer.”
          I want to be a person who cares about things like pesticides and probiotics and edamame, I do. But really, we’ve started shopping at this overpriced store with its warped wooden floor and signs that say things like, “Parents, please don’t let your children play in the beans,” because I let Pete believe that my sister died of malnutrition.
          The cashier shoves our food into a pink canvas bag and snorts. “You think that really matters? With everything that’s in the air anyway?”
          Pete scowls like he wants to get into it with the guy, but I touch his elbow and the ire goes out of him. We collect our groceries and walk outside into a breezy spring afternoon. The sky is an extraordinary blue, only interrupted by an ellipsis of cotton ball clouds. I take a deep breath, and wonder if it’s possible to taste things like nuclear particles.
 
The first time I got my period, I went to my sister. Lucy was seated at her desk, sewing a blue and gold pillow sham with unsteady hands. She laughed when I told her. “Wait,” she said as I turned to go. “It’s just—well, it’s weird because I haven’t gotten mine in a while.” 
          My eyes gravitated to the sapling branches that were her arms. Just before her first hospitalization, I saw a slideshow in health class of women whose bones strained against their translucent skin and I recognized my sister.
          “You can have mine,” I said. “I don’t want it.”
          Lucy smiled at me. “Thanks, Ruthie.”
 
“I may never graduate,” I told Pete when we started dating a year ago. I’d been in college for little over a year and changed my major half a dozen times—psychology (too judgmental), English (too unemployable), archeology (too many bones), liberal arts (too unfocused), and French (too much memorization). Pete was a second year mechanical engineering major and had never even been tempted to veer off this path. Once upon a time, I was the smart kid in my family, but now in college my only proficiency seems to be indecision. I’ve gone back to being an English major, but only because Pete asked me to try something for at least a year.
          Sometimes I like to imagine what my sister would say about some of the things I’m reading. “At least most of these people are dead, so they don’t have to be embarrassed by what they wrote.”
 
Growing up, Lucy and I were at war. She was pretty, I was smart, and I think the pranks started because we were jealous of what the other had. I hid all of the razors in the house and she had to go to homecoming with what she called “Sasquatch legs.”  She changed the answers on my history homework to include insults about the teacher. After a while, Mom and Dad stopped grounding us because we fought more when we were stuck at home together.
          I wished bad things on Lucy constantly, and then one day it happened. At sixteen, my sister had a miscarriage and the doctors told my parents that her heart was so weak, it was an actual miracle she hadn’t died. While she was in the hospital, all I could think of was the time I called her “fattie” when I caught her drinking a strawberry Slim Fast in the bathroom.
 
There’s a commercial on TV that begins, “Your father can tell that you’re pregnant before you can.” (What the fuck it’s meant to advertise, I have no idea). My dad lives thousands of miles away and exerts an unnatural amount of energy avoiding all things unpleasant, but I turn the channel anyway when I hear those words.
 
Pete’s mother invites us to Mass (Or is it just mass? I am a goddamned fraud of an English major). It’s unclear how she feels about me living with her son, but I imagine that the phrase in sin has come up more than a few times. The church is cavernous, and like most things in the city, brown stucco.
         It seems as though the ceremony was specifically designed to expose outsiders. People trace shapes in the air, kneel on the cushioned bar before us, and recite in unison prayers that I can’t locate in any of the books. I sit alone in our pew while everyone else opens their mouths wide for wafers of Christ given to them by a priest who looks like Macaulay Culkin fresh out of rehab.
         Over brunch at an upscale taqueria full of white people, Pete’s mother sips a margarita and taps the stem of the glass with her red lacquered nails. She asks if I know the story of my biblical (Biblical?) namesake. Yes, I lie. This seems to please her, and Pete kisses my cheek. I’ve never told him that my father named me after his favorite baseball player or that the farthest I’ve gotten into the Bible is halfway through Genesis.
 
When my parents took Lucy out of school, she started collecting antique sewing kits. She had dozens of these little wooden and tortoiseshell boxes filled with thimbles, pin cushions, bone-handled scissors, and a dozen other tools I couldn’t even name. She made me a quilt embroidered with the Peanuts characters to take to college. All of her sewing paraphernalia went to me when she died. I promised myself I would learn to sew before I reached nineteen, the last age Lucy saw. I’m a year overdue now and the kits are still stashed all over the apartment, unopened.
 
I can’t sleep, so I talk Pete into getting out of bed in the middle of the night and sneaking into our complex’s discolored pool. He still knows nothing about my lack of a period. It’s probably just a fluke anyway. Still, I can hide fear better in my voice than my face, so telling him while we swim in the dark seems like the best option. The chain-link fence glows an eerie yellow-green color under the single florescent light overhead. We make it over okay, but as soon as our feet hit the pavement, there’s a splash. Another couple. Pete says hello while I climb back over the fence. I’ll tell him later.
 
My mother likes to make sure I know that she and my father are hurt by my decision to go to school two thousand miles away from them. She googles things like Albuquerque crime and poverty rates, and then finds ways to work them into our phone conversations.
         “You only get eleven inches of rain per year there,” she notes.
         “It’s the desert,” I spit back. “We have three hundred days of sun.”
         When she calls from Connecticut, I imagine the things she’s touching in my childhood bedroom while we talk: the Victorian dollhouse, the posters of Joan Didion and Leonardo DiCaprio, the upright bass I played in high school. My bedroom is just as much a shrine as Lucy’s.
 
I have decided I need to get out of my comfort zone, maybe even make some friends. The English department is holding an open mic at a coffee shop across the street from the university, and I only tell Pete about it last minute. He says he can blow off Madden with his friends, but I tell him it’s fine, that it’s something I need to do on my own. Pete smiles and folds me into his arms like flagging dough. I want to tell him I am hearty, an heirloom yeast, that I just need a little time.
         The café is more crowded than I’d like and all they seem to serve is things like coconut milk chai lattes and chia hemp seed oatmeal cookies. I order a cup of herbal tea, scrawl my name on the sign-up sheet, and find an empty seat in the back. As the first reader begins a poem about entropy, a brown, curly-haired girl with a septum nose ring gestures to the empty seat beside me and I nod.
         My tablemate ends up being the fourth to the mic. I’m expecting something about a cross-country road trip with her pet snakes or about making cheese with a guy she met at the co-op, but instead she reads an essay about losing her virginity at summer camp. The audience is still, hanging on every word of her adolescent tale about campfire sing-alongs, prank wars, and canoe trysts. I stare down at my handwritten story until the words run together, a spiral of angry ants.
         The crowd claps politely, and then my own name bounces through the mic.
         I wind my way to the stage and stare out at the sea of faces, expectant and kind. Part of me wants to go full Fiona Apple, but I square my shoulders, clutch my crumpled pages and read my meaningless story, never once pausing to breathe or look up at anyone. When it’s over, I flee past the clapping audience, through the door, and out into the dark desert night.
 
My father sends me a letter. I wonder when the last time we actually spoke was. I sometimes hear him in the background when I’m on the phone with my mother, but if I say I want to talk to him, she tells me he’s out. In his letter, he mentions a tree that almost fell on the house during a storm and inquires when I’m bringing “Patrick” home for a visit. Patrick was my sister’s on and off boyfriend in high school. The one who got her pregnant.
 
“I wish I could have met Lucy,” Pete says, pulling me against him in our swaybacked double bed. As soon as he graduates and gets a real job, he says the first thing he’s going to buy is a new bed: king size, Tempur-Pedic, “whatever the most expensive one is.” I gaze down at the image of Linus, his blanket pressed to his face, and I ache to carry my own blanket through all of life, too.
          “She was like me, only pretty and sick,” I murmur.
          “Don’t do that.”
         “You’re right,” I say. “I’m probably sick, too.”
 
People know my sister had heart problems stemming from anorexia and that she died young. As far as everyone understands, her heart gave out. There are very few people who know that one winter night she took an overdose of her anxiety and depression meds and choked on her own vomit. I don’t know much about Catholics, but I’m pretty clear on their beliefs about suicide and Hell. If it turns out I am pregnant, I’ll have to tell Pete what really happened to Lucy and why I won’t raise our child in his mother’s religion.
 
I have no idea how it’s come up, but my mom is on this tear about how so many young people in committed relationships are opting to have babies without actually getting married. “I just don’t understand it,” she says. “Where’s the benefit in that situation?” It occurs to me that my mom and Pete’s would get along. She continues her rant and I picture my father nearby, nodding along as he dries the dishes or reads the paper.
           Just as quickly as out of wedlock has come up, Mom drops it and moves on to talking about my grandmother’s knee replacement. At least for the moment she isn’t pressing me about why I’m still living way out in God’s country or when I’m going to choose a path in life.
 
I’m sitting in traffic after a night class when a siren rings out. Cars squeeze to the sides of the road as much as they can and a white police SUV slips past, lights pinwheeling. My clenched hands on the steering wheel go red, blue, red, blue.
          That Connecticut winter night, two police vans were parked in front of our house. Snow fell, giving the vehicles a gauzy, ethereal look. The workers pulled bags from the back of the first one, the one labeled CSI. How weird, I thought, if those shows weren’t on TV, would I even know what that meant? Had there been a crime? Were they there to investigate what remained?
          Meanwhile, it was my mother who was making a scene. Why hadn’t they stayed, she demanded of the ambulance crew, now long gone. My father pulling her from the room. Shh. Shh. I sat in my sister’s closet with the door cracked, slipped on my headphones, turned on the audiobook I had been listening to before. Sissy Spacek drawled in my ears, doing her most earnest Scout Finch while a group of strangers in white suits handled my sister with cold, methodical gestures.
          When one of them opened the closet door and they all stared down at me, when I could no longer hear Sissy, I knew I was screaming.
 
I imagined being on my own would help me to know myself. If I could crawl out from under my sister’s shadow, then everything would fall into place. This is me! I would call out, doing a little shuffle for good measure. But seasons slip past and I’ve found that the world cares just as little about me as I do about it. I write story after story, pinning words in place, but when I return to them, all I want is to crush the ideas I once found so beautiful, smash them underfoot like empty spun sugar sculptures.
          Pete loves my stories, asks me to read them aloud. “Do the one about the girl trapped inside the old stereo,” he says, kissing my bare shoulder, and I do, wishing I too could disappear into a disused appliance. When someone found the old device and turned the dial, my voice would ripple through the static, an unknowable scratch.
           
Lucy had climbed out her bedroom window and was sitting on the roof. Normally I would have just left her alone, but I felt this pull to her that night. When she didn’t yell at me to go away, I perched beside her. The only sound between us was her rough heels scraping back and forth against the shingles.
          “Remember that camp I went to when I was thirteen?” she asked, still staring ahead as the setting sun burned a watery orange hole through the trees.
          I nodded.
          “That’s when it started.”
          I didn’t press her because she never talked like this. We were never those book sisters, TV sisters, the ones who held each other down when shit went bad. But in that moment, we were Jo and Amy March, calling a truce to see where it led.
          “The other girls were so—they just had so much control over their lives, their bodies. I had never wanted to be—just, someone so badly.”
          I cast a sidelong glance at my sister, but still said nothing. I was part of the chimney, the pink wisps of sky, inanimate.
          “We were all in love with this counselor, James. It was like this competition, trying to get his attention. The last night—” She laughs, her voice thick. “The last night, I won.”
          “How?” I whispered.
          She shook her head and looked away from me. Was she crying?
          I tried again. “How—old was he?”
          “I’m not really sure,” she whispered, her head still turned. “Probably nineteen or twenty?”
          I scooted closer and she leaned her head back on my shoulder. “Jesus, Luce,” I said, my arms circling her shoulders as she sobbed.
          I wish that we had just left then, gotten in the car and gone away together.
          She was dead a week later.
 
Pete helps me take the test. I make him count because I worry that I can’t aim my pee and count to five at the same time. One-Mississippi. Two-Mississippi. Three-Mississippi. Four-Mississippi. Five-Mississippi. I replace the cap and lay the stick on the counter.
          “How long?” he asks.
          “Two to five minutes.”
 
I go walking late at night, look for Lucy in the sky. She never came to the desert, but maybe I’ll find her. There is her face strung in the stars. There is her name spilling out in the moonlight.
          She is a galaxy, an atom, nothing. I pore through Shakespeare, Proust, Morrison, Allende, beckoning voices to call her back, to unlearn the grief that sinks its teeth into my bones at 3 a.m. Your child will never know her, a voice whispers, and I want to wake up, but I’m not asleep.
 
It’s been about thirty seconds. I pull one of Lucy’s sewing kits out from under the sink and place the stick I just peed on inside of it. Pete watches me lower the lid.
          “What are you doing?”
          I sit on the closed toilet and run my fingers over the wooden box’s clean, angular grooves. Pete kneels before me. “Hey, look at me. What is it?”
          “I can’t,” I whisper.
          He strokes my cheek, nods.
          After several minutes have gone by, he gently tugs the box from my grasp. He raises the lid and stares down inside for a long time. I think of Lucy, who never traveled or had a real boyfriend or went to college, whose own pregnancy ended inside her broken body. How could I believe that wherever she is now is worse than her short life?
          Pete begins to cry and I hang my head.