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and stuff.”
    He was wearing an old T-shirt and a pair of khaki shorts, and he looked as if he were made of balsa wood. His elbow knobs and knees jutted out in hard points, like the edges of furniture you catch yourself on over and over. Claire thought it was the saddest question ever asked. How could she possibly be frightened of him? You can be frightened of death, but not of doom. It was easy to tell the difference: death does not have arms and legs as hairless and pale as a chihuahua, or fingernails bitten down to tiny smiles.
    “No,” Claire said. “I’m not afraid of you.”
    She leaned into him then, in a way she had not done in a long time. Born two years earlier than she, Seth had never been a forceful older brother. Neighborhood brothers—lifeguards, varsity soccer stars—had bent down and lifted their younger sisters up into the air in one fell swoop, and Claire had always been envious. During games of Running Bases in the backyard, she would charge into Seth as hard as she could, only to feel him sway and give like a tarpaulin in a storm.
    Now he hugged her tightly, pulling her down next to him. “Oh,” he said, the word coming from somewhere deep in his throat. “Oh.” First Claire thought there was only despair in his voice, the lowing of a cow being carted off to the marketplace, but then she realized, as he hugged her even tighter, that there was also need. Seth’s arm curved around her and drew her smack up to him. They were both high; this was craziness. “Claire,” he whispered, “I can’t take it.”
    She understood, in that one terrible moment, that he was somehow depending on her. She shivered, thinking that if she were to squeeze him as hard as he was squeezing her, he would snap cleanly, split apart down some invisible seam.
    Seth was going to die; this was something she couldn’t change. She felt the magnitude of it then, and it made her ache. She had grown up thinking that it was good to be close to people. There were times when the two of them had had pillow fights, had played board games, had had their photographs taken in one of those little booths together, contorting their faces in different ways for every frame. She had always been told that this kind of closeness was good, and her parents weredelighted that she and Seth were real friends. Most siblings seemed to hate each other. The older kid was often a dictator, the younger one a whiner. It had never been that way with Claire and Seth.
    But now she wished desperately that they had never been close in the first place. Maybe that way she wouldn’t be feeling so awful now, so sad. For the first time in her life she wanted to keep a certain distance from him. There was already a space there, the kind of wall that separates the sick from the healthy. She and Seth were pressed together but it was not enough, and never could be. There was dead air between them; she could feel it.
    Seth brought his face up to hers and kissed her mouth, fully. His breath was as sweet as a baby’s—too sweet, as though he had been eating sugar beets. She kissed him back then because it appeared to be her responsibility, her calling.
    Claire had once seen a woman die. She was nine and spending the day in the city with her mother. They were buying Italian ices from a vendor on Seventh Avenue when it happened. The woman who had been before them on line took one lick of her cherry ice, then walked out into the afternoon traffic. For weeks afterward Claire would think, I could have told her to be careful. I could have offered to help her across the street. I could have done something.
    In the core of the bystander there is always a false sense of power, of responsibility. There was nothing she could do—not a laying on of hands, nothing. She lay in her brother’s arms, his heartbeat frantic, his frame like a kite, and she eased away from him gently, thinking, I cannot save you.
    —
    C laire did not tell Julian that he reminded her of her brother. In