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intensive-care unit, because there was no returning from her charity.
    Consequently, Isabel became the Death Torch, though the moniker wasn’t entirely accurate.
    Her days began before classes, at four-thirty in the morning, when she arrived at Jude the Apostle. She traveled from room to room by candlelight, moving through the hospice center first and the hospital ICU last, praying for the souls of the unconscious or horribly afflicted. She would touch the patients on the forehead or take them by the hand or feed them ice or change the channel on the television, and her classmates never again asked to borrow a pencil or pen from her. Of course, the dying did not always die when Isabel visited, but she was so diligent that unless a body passed during the school day or at night between ten and four-thirty, she was there. By the time the twins finished high school, Ulises’s sister had witnessed ninety-eight deaths.
    —
    Ulises was busy that spring and early summer working in the opposite direction, trying to draw life and tobacco from the thawing Connecticut soil. The rumors at school bothered him tremendously, and he found himself defending his sister even though he thought her habit maniacal. He’d not gone so far as to throw a punch, but once he pushed his nose into the face of another senior, a much larger senior, and said he was not above breaking the larger boy’s spine with the swift snap of his neck. The classmate backed off immediately, but Ulises felt the repercussions of his brotherly love at graduation when he realized that people were afraid to approach him and wish him well—he was enrolled in the University of Hartford for the fall—with his sister at his side. There were, of course, jokes about good and evil twins, and next to Isabel in the school auditorium Ulises wondered at how the bad always poisoned the decent and never the other way around.
    It hadn’t bothered him as much as it might have in the past, however. The previous winter, during the time of Isabel’s religious crisis and the flourishing of his mother’s love for Henri Willems, Ulises had steadily lost interest in school and in his classmates. Many of them were excited to start college in the fall, but Ulises, at the time aerating small portions of Willems’s frozen fields by hand, discovered a satisfaction in the tangible results of manual labor. For the first time in his life he had useful arms. They sprang out from his shoulders after three months of cracking ice, digging through frost, and shoveling snow off tobacco rows. They were not especially thick, but they were dense, something like cold rubber when he tensed, and Ulises looked forward to the new planting, imagining two seed sacks, one atop each shoulder, and the glow of the sun on his back. He strained his new muscles every day and was amazed to see how they reacted, how they grew almost overnight. For once he took pleasure in living on the surface of things. He forgot his studies as summer approached, and Latin slid away from him like an oil slick gliding down the slower tributaries of the Connecticut River.
    By June, Ulises realized he would need a new wardrobe. Dressing for an awards ceremony in Isabel’s honor, he could not fasten the top button of his white oxford, and crossing his arms strained the fabric around his shoulders. The ceremony took place in St. Anthony’s cafeteria, which had more room than Jude the Apostle’s. There, Ulises sat uncomfortably upright alongside his mother and Willems while a low-level administrator, a tall man with narrow shoulders, expounded upon the many good works of his sister. The bulk of his comments centered on what he called the little acts of mercy by Isabel, namely the scrubbing out of bedpans and the fluffing of pillows, and he seemed instructed to avoid, if possible, too much mentioning of Isabel’s presence during the hours of death.
    Sister B was in attendance as well, and she sat next to Isabel to the right of the podium,