That night, we didn’t talk about it. We just fell into bed holding each other, all of our emotions drained away and spent. The next day, I didn’t want to look at him, so I went out for a walk by that creek where all the vagabonds make their home at night. I walked for a long time until I wasn’t thinking about much but the bitter cold and my pounding headache. Somewhere along the path, I stopped and took one of the round white pills Vic had given me. But it didn’t seem to do much. I kept walking, ignoring the sight of gray hair spilling out from underneath heavy blankets piled atop a rotting mattress on the far side of the creek. This place was sad without Vic, wasn’t it?

When I got back to the car, I saw that I had missed a call from my mom. Shit. My head still felt scrambled. The stubborn dull ache would not go away. She left a message, but I didn’t feel up to listening to it just yet.

Vic was waiting for me when I got home with a fresh pot of coffee, flowers, and paczkis from the Polish bakery on the street below. “I’m sorry,” he said to me as he handed me the flowers. They were purple, orange, and white, all colors that reminded me of autumn. “I didn’t want you to ever see that. Sometimes, I have to do stuff, and… I need help forgetting.”

I set the flowers on the table and took a seat with my coffee. Vic sat across from me and stared down into his mug.

“You ever think about quitting?” I asked without looking up at him.

“Yeah. Sometimes. I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you?”

“Not that easy,” he said. “My life is fucked, Andi. It’s been fucked for a long time.”

“So unfuck it,” I said. “How long has it been since you even tried?”

“Right. Yeah. Listen. There’s a lot of shit. Shit I don’t tell you. About me, and um... I don’t really want to tell you. It’s just… You ever watch an egg frying in a pan, Andi?”

“Jesus, yeah,” I said impatiently. “You can’t unfry it. That what you’re trying to say? Your life is just one big entropic disaster or something?”

“No, not my life,” said Vic. “Me. I’m the egg. Everything in my head is… tangled. Fucked. But things don’t feel like that when I’m around you. I want to keep it like that. I want to keep things… nice.”

I shook my head as hot tears started to spill down my face again. “There’s other ways. There’s got to be other ways.”

“You tell me when you find one, Andi,” he said, and he looked down at a message alert flashing on his phone screen. “I got to go. I got a-”

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“A thing?” I said, not bothering to hide my anger at the expense of our tenuously brokered peace.

“Yeah.”

Vic stood up and walked out of the apartment without finishing his coffee or touching the paczkis. I was starting to feel stupid, like I’d fallen for the oldest trick in the book. There wasn’t anything glamorous or cool about this life I’d found myself in. This was scraping the bottom, fishing for scraps and barely making it in the cold, bleak wilderness. I realized then what I should have known all along but was just too stubborn to let myself understand. Everyone off that path I used to be on wanted the things that I had: a family, a future, a plan. And maybe Vic was a fried egg in a pan now, his life all tangled up in knots with the many vices and compromises he’d made along the way, but I could still see the way back. Maybe it wasn’t too late for me.

I thought about calling my mom, and then I remembered the voicemail I’d been too preoccupied to check before. I took my coffee over to the couch as I let the message play, still certain that in just a day or so, I’d be back at home and have this whole thing sorted. And who knows. Maybe Vic would head to rehab and get a job. Maybe in a month or so, we’d reconnect and work it out. Maybe, but first I needed to find my own way. One step at a time.

The first time I listened to the message, I felt the words rather than heard them. My mom’s voice sounded alien to me, as if the strong woman who had put herself through nursing school while raising twins had been replaced by a wailing and hysterical stranger. She told me that Jeremy was gone, that they’d called an ambulance when they found him, but it was too late. She said I needed to come home now and help them. Help them put my twin in the ground. Her voice broke off after that, and she sobbed a little into the receiver before the message ended. When it was over, I stared down at the phone and then at the coffee spilling out from the fragments of the broken mug I’d dropped on the floor.

Later, when Vic came home, he’d find me sitting in the bathtub, clothed and dry with a bloody gash on my leg where the cracked ceramic had sliced into me. I hadn’t even felt it, but I’d somehow managed to track the blood all across the apartment, he’d tell me. But then he’d look at my face and go quiet.

“Do you know what it’s like to lose half your soul?” I’d ask him later as I settled into a velvet soft low beside him on the sofa that night.

“No,” he’d tell me as he cut another line for me. “Maybe. Tell me.”

“It’s like dying. Only I’m still alive. I think I must be someone else now. I think I’m new.”

“That sounds like a good thing,” he’d say.

I’d shake my head no. “It’s not good,” I’d say. “It’s just a thing.”

Everything happens for a reason. That’s what my mom used to say. As I stand here and watch them lower you down, down, deep into the ground, I know the girl I used to be is going with you, and I get the feeling that this one out here still walking around won’t be far behind her. But that’s pessimistic, isn’t it? Maybe she’ll find her way back one day. Maybe if someone leaves a light on for her. But Jeremy was my light, I think, and I could have been his. Now, with every passing day I just feel more and more like a ghost. A fantoma. There is no reason for anything, is there? Just entropy.

Vic is waiting for me in the car with the heater on full blast even though he likes it cold. When the service is over, I’ll get in the passenger seat, and I’ll let my chauffeur carry me away.