“Are you lost?” the stranger asks.
Frozen in my tracks, I look around, hoping that my eyes can focus enough to find my sister’s face. Or not. It will certainly be better if I don’t find Anna here. Would I even recognize her in this condition? With a mess of unwashed hair instead of curls, an assortment of torn black clothes instead of purple bows and purple shoes? I’d watched her grow from adolescence into adulthood online. I knew it when I left. There is always a cost of leaving—my parents had sacrificed home and community, my grandparents had lost everything they’d ever owned and known over and over again—and being distant from my entire family, including my sister, was the cost I’d agreed, silently, to pay. It was the cost I’d wanted to pay. I was never going to stay in Milwaukee. If only I had stayed in touch with her more, though. Maybe I could have convinced her to join me in Israel. Standing there in the dark, surrounded by half-empty beer cans and aggressively angsty homeless youth who liked to imagine themselves vagabonds or perhaps superheroes on the right side of history, I can’t help but wonder if leaving had been worth it. I’d had friends who rode trains when I lived in Riverwest, sure, but it was more of an amusing anecdote, not a decision, not throwing your life away. And none of them had ever been junkies.
But no, there’s no point in wondering. After what happened to June, nothing on earth would have kept me in Milwaukee. For so long, until David really, who had experienced far more death than me and spent years telling me it wasn’t my fault until I finally believed it, I blamed myself. It was easy to do, since everyone else had. Would I blame myself now, too? For the condition I might find Anna in?
Suddenly I hear a familiar voice call out to me, and relief blooms in my chest for a brief moment. Then it turns back into dread. Because when I turn and look towards who has called my name, my eyes fall on Tristan.
Just Tristan, no Anna.
He stands up, wiping his dirty palms on his dirty jeans, and heads my way. I find myself at a loss for words. I was so certain she would be here. There are 7,000 languages on earth (almost 1,000 of those are in Papua New Guinea alone) and yet, it’s hard to find the right ones when you need them the most. There’s a language in Botswana that consists almost entirely of five clicking sounds. So many options and yet we humans are constantly failing at communicating properly.
Tristan, now close enough that I can smell several weeks of non-showering on him, motions for me to meet him farther away from the group, near a cluster of trees. I follow him. He may not be my sister, but he is the closest I am getting to her at the moment.
I get straight to the point. “Where’s Anna?”
“Anastasia? She’s long gone,” Tristan shrugs. At least this time he isn’t pretending not to know who I’m talking about. This is a step in the right direction.
“Gone where?” I ask.
Tristan shrugs again, but he must know more than he’s letting on. The fact that he’s calling her by her Russian name clues me in that their relationship is more serious than I previously thought.
“We, uh…” he pauses, looking a little bit ashamed. “Didn’t end things on a great note. Whatever. It happens.”
“So you haven’t spoken to her? Then why were you at my friend’s house yesterday?”
He shrugs. “It’s still a good idea. Your sister is hella smart,” he says.
I find myself scowling at him, then fix my face. It won’t help matters to show my disgust. “Yeah. Just imagine if she put that brain of hers to good use.”
Tristan’s eyes narrow at me. “How do you know she isn’t?” he says. Then abruptly his glance falls on something behind me. I turn, and Liam is there.
I frown. “What are you doing?” I ask Liam, before turning back to Tristan.
“She’s fine,” Tristan tells me, starting to back away. “Stop looking for her. She can take care of herself.”
“I can’t do that,” I say. “She’s my sister.”
He softens a little. “It’s really cool how much you care about her. I wish I had someone out there looking for me,” he mumbles. Then he shrugs again, backing away some more until he is almost too far to hear. “But if she doesn’t want to be found, you have to respect that.”
He has a point, but not one I particularly want to admit to right now. Tristan seems, despite his ragged appearance, to be a nice and loyal person. So maybe Anna isn’t so confused after all. Of everything going on in Milwaukee right now, her actions appear less and less terrible the more I learn of them. Except for the stealing anyway. But everything else? My dad’s appalling behavior could explain a lot of it.
Abruptly, I hear the sound of sticks breaking, and then Liam is propelling himself beyond me. He stands between us, a nervous laugh tumbling out of his mouth. “I have to give you some props,” he says to Tristan. “I’m tough to surprise.”
“Can you give us a second?” I ask him, annoyed that he followed me out there, after I specifically asked him, and he declined. Why did he change his mind? And right when I was getting somewhere. “Go back to the car.”
“Fuck no,” he says. He takes out the knife I’d seen moments earlier and points it in our direction. Tristan doesn’t even blink. He must have already noticed it. He raises his hands in the air innocently.
“Is there a problem here?” He lets out an arrow of smoke and then drops the half-finished cigarette on the ground. My heart rate begins to speed up. I have to keep reminding myself this is my life, that I’m not watching a movie play out in front of my eyes. This is me in the woods at night with two angry guys who look ready for a fight. This is me using nothing but moonlight and the smallest remainder of nerves to keep standing upright.
“Yes, we have a fucking problem. I want my goddamn money back, you fucking junkies,” Liam says, pointing the knife at Tristan’s face in a manner that makes it pretty clear he’d never aimed a weapon at anyone before. I know from Krav Maga and watching way too many detective movies with David that someone could make one move on Liam’s wrist and grab it in less than a second. More, I don’t buy it. He isn’t a violent person. For a moment it makes me less scared, remembering this. I am level-headed enough to ask him what’s going on.
Tristan sighs again. “Dude, you’re really not as interesting as you think you are,” he says. “Just because you were the cool guy in high school—”
“Can you put that thing down?” I ask Liam. “You don’t really intend to stab this guy for twenty bucks, do you?”
Liam snorts. “More like eight hundred bucks. She took it out of the drumhead in my closet when I was sleeping.” The ends of his mouth curled. “Like a whore.”
“She?” I ask.
“The fuck did you call—” Tristan starts.
“Yeah, I called your little girlfriend a whore, because that’s what she is,” Liam says.
“What? Are you talking about Anna?”
“Her name is Anastasia,” Tristan says. “She doesn’t like the name Anna.”
“Since when?”
“Since always.”
I move on to the more important questions: “Why would you keep that much money in a drumhead?” Then, confirming my growing suspicions, I ask, “Why was she there when you were sleeping?”
Liam shakes his head at me like I’m a moron, which, maybe I am. “Why do you think?”