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* * * * *

         When he cascaded through the bowels of summer, the years were meaningless.
         The last time he wore shorts was at her house, the grass tickling his calves. From a distance she made fun of him, the way family did, the way they did when they never saw you and there was no other way for kids to connect. The rest of the family was so far away, seen through a telescope turned around the wrong way. Voices were wrong, distorted. He remembered a volleyball flying overhead, arcing far past his reach, outrunning even the blunted thud of the return serve, the object rocketing into the misshapen tree that acted as their mysterious, unmoving unspeaking fourth team member. As usual, it failed to pull its weight. He couldn’t see who had sent it back. They were alien, ascending. The sun in his eyes turned everything golden, the haze pulled him down. It was too warm here, too damn warm.
         Meaningless because time stopped in the heat, too tired to proceed. Winter only came by accident, an old enemy barging in the door and setting up shop. Only then did it all move forward again.
         And why don’t you? were the first words she said to him. Words congeal and condense, descending through layers of liquid memory. It might have been the first time she asked him about his habit of standing even with a multitude of chairs present. A private joke made public. Speaking what everyone was thinking. Her grin defused all anger. Later he watched them all slip into the pool, sliding into a pool of his own solitude, taking trails back in an effort to get himself lost. Where have you been, she asked from the second floor, carved in air conditioned splendor, her voice out of synch with all of it. Where do you go? Or maybe it was him. Maybe it was always him. Without words it was all dishonesty. But he had nothing else. He can’t remember what he eventually said. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps he had just walked away, deeper into thought.
         It wasn’t that he saw her only in the summer, it was just the way his memory worked. The science of kinetics. Only motion left an impression. The scarring of animated hope. A crowded room, a clatter of voices. Images frozen onto a deck of cards. Laid out, you’d never see the whole scene. In stillness she was the lone vibration. An odd pair is not a bruised fruit. Nobody ever understood that joke. He could only compensate by leaving the scene entirely, moving parallel to it, watching from behind frosted glass, trapped by his own freedom.
         I don’t get you, she might have told him, at eight, at thirteen, at seventeen. He wasn’t surprised at all to find that she made it through. As long as I live, I don’t think I’ll get you.
         The room twisted, images like cardboard slid from view, summer jerked, awoke and sprang upwards, fluttering ever toward the elusive sky.

* * * * *

         “Here,” she said, “let me help you with your excuse.” Cocking her head to the side slightly, she splashed a disarming grin on her face, saying in a gruff, innocent voice, “What? Can’t a guy take time to visit his favorite cousin?” Tristian stared back at her silently, as opaque as ever. “And of course I wouldn’t believe that, so now that we’re gotten it out of the way, we can skip right to the interesting part.” Leaning forward a little, she tapped the table lightly, as if trying to get his attention. He barely seemed there anymore, receding into a distant background. “People don’t visit people at this time of night, out of the blue for no reason at all.” Meeting his eyes wasn’t the same as seeing him. “Is it your parents, Tristian? Someone else in the family? Girl troubles?” She was so used to seeing him at parties and other family events where he had to be social that she had forgotten what he could be like sometimes, how he could simply close up to the point where nothing would escape. Talking to him required pulling each embedded fact out one by one, and sometimes in the tugging, some blood came with it. It couldn’t be helped. Not if you cared. “God dammit, Tristian, talk to me. You came here for a reason, why the hell would you come and just sit there-“
         ”I want to talk,” he spat out suddenly, like the very effort had dislodged something unpleasant. “I do, I want to, I . . .” he got up abruptly, nearly knocking the chair over in his haste. For a second she thought he was going to grab his coat and simply walk out, but instead he curved to her left, closer to the living room, the edge of the kitchen, the border of light and dark. “There are things that I . . . but I can’t just, you see . . .” his inability to finish a sentence was maddening. She didn’t dare stop him. Digging his hands into his pockets, he took a deep breath. He seemed to be making a great effort not to look at her. Letting the breath out slowly, he said, in a measured voice, “I’m not used to this type of thing, I . . . I have to ease myself into it.” She had no idea what he was talking about.
         “Then do that, Tristian,” she told him, changing position so that she was sitting crosslegged on the chair. “I don’t know why you make everything so damn difficult.” She tried to make the sentence as joking as possible, but she was being serious as well. Nothing was simple with him, he seemed to have only two modes, evasion and silence. Forcing him into a third option was enough to derail him completely. “I’m not a stranger . . . just say what you want. What’s so hard about that?” But of course he wasn’t going to answer that particular question.
         “There are ways of doing things,” Tristian replied, hinting at a sideways smile, “and then there’s my way.” Taking his hands out of his pockets, he stood with a nervous tilt to his posture, anxiously massaging one wrist. “And, ah, lately I’ve found that . . . maybe I’m just getting older but . . . I can only do things my way. It’s just a quirk, I guess. That’s all.” He pivoted to face her, and for the first time she got a decent glimpse of the object at his belt. It hard to not stare at it, it barely seemed natural at all. But it was probably just a fancy flashlight. Didn’t he have that one friend who was always into that weird toys. He probably got it for Tristian as a birthday present. Her cousin was still talking. “So you’ll, ah, have to just bear with me, I’m afraid, I . . .”
         There was something oddly physical about his gaze, his eyes exerting an uncomfortable pressure. Apparently sensing it, he turned away abruptly, clasping his hands behind his back, finding something inherently fascinating in her cabinets.
         “This is the first time I’ve been here, you know,” he announced to nobody at all. “When did you move here? Last year? This is the first time.”
         “Well you’ve got me beat,” she said with a quick smile, “because I’ve never been to your place.” It wasn’t clear at all where this was going. “So do I have permission to show up at any old time, you know, in return for this surprise?”
         “Sure. Anytime,” he said simply. His back was still to her, she couldn’t see his face. “Anytime you want.” Rotating slowly on one heel, his eyes swept the place, not really seeming to take in anything. “This is a nice place though, I really like it. Are you here all by yourself?”
         “Relatively speaking,” she answered, watching him as he paced lazily around the room, sticking to a tight half-circle in the kitchen. Silently she counted the seconds until his wandering would start to drive her nuts and she made him sit back in the chair. That’s the way it had always been with Tristian, he only listened for so long. You could yell at him, but it would wear off. “I mostly just sleep here lately, between work and going out with friends . . .” she flashed a grin at him that might have been a warning. “Just because I live alone doesn’t mean I have to sit here by myself all day.”
         “Point taken,” he might have muttered after a moment, although it wasn’t quite clear. “That’s good . . . good to hear. That was my fear when I moved out . . . that I’d just spend most of my time alone, you know . . .”
         “I imagine your friends drag you out on a regular basis . . .” she said with a light laugh. Was this what he came here to talk about? It was hard to say. Dammit. “I’ve met some of them, remember? If there’s one thing they’re not, it’s shy, hm?”
         “No, no they’re not,” Tristian replied with a matching laugh. “They definitely aren’t. They keep me busy, most of the time . . .” his fingers were idly tapping the flashlight at his belt. From her angle it looked like an armored insect attached to his hip, drawing blood from him at every step. Maybe that was why he was so pale. “Or they try.” The last was said softly. “It seems to me that I’m not the easiest person in the world to get along with.”
         “No kidding,” she said with a gentle, if probing, laugh. “But I don’t you’re worse than anyone else out there.” She waited a second before adding, “Even me,” although she really wasn’t sure how true that was. She wasn’t perfect but neither did she have her cousin’s insistent idiosyncracies. In that sense, he was in a class by himself.
         “Thanks,” he said tersely, drawing his mouth in a tight line. For a second she thought she might have offended him. His body language was incomprehensible. Nothing escaped. Nothing at all. He started to wander back toward the chair, a motion she silently cheered on. When he reached the table he merely placed both palms flat on the surface, exhaling a quick breath, as if the short distance had taken more than the usual effort. He bowed his head briefly and then looked up at her. His grin might not have been entirely natural. “Look at us, on our own finally. We’ve come a long way . . .” for some reason he sounded like he was talking only to himself, leaving her with the disquieting sense that she was eavesdropping. Looking at her again, his gaze shifting back into focus, he added wryly, “Seems like just yesterday you were trying to shove me into the pool, eh?”
         The words triggered a memory unbidden and she had no choice but to smile in response. “I’d never seen you swim before. We were eleven, I figured it was past time you learned.” Slipping one elbow back so it rested on the back of the chair, she shook a finger idly at him, saying, “You were a slippery thing back then, though.”
         “I made up in agility what I lacked in social graces,” Tristian said modestly. “Was it true that my parents paid you to try that?”
         “No, they offered me five bucks later to try it again,” she replied mischeviously. “But you never went back near the pool and I couldn’t lure you. Your parents promised to send me pictures if you they ever managed to get you in the water.”
         He beat her to it. “Still waiting, I take it?”
         “Yeah, but I have faith . . . sometime before I die, I’ll see it.” His lips twitched but he didn’t respond immediately. “Even if I have to flood your basement and push you into it.” He gave a sharp exhalation of amusement at that image. She let it settle and fade before launching into her next question. “How’d they take it? Your parents, I mean. About you moving out?”
         “All right, I guess,” he replied with a shrug. Something about his stance made her wonder how much attention he had been paying at the time. “I moved out in stages and kept shuttling back and forth between the two places, so it was pretty gradual. One day I just stopped going back and forth. I’m not sure if my parents really noticed . . .” he trailed off, shook his head. “That didn’t come out right . . . I mean, they did notice, but I’m . . . I’m not really a man with much presence, so even when I was home, I never left much of an impression. I kept my own hours and habits, like a glorified boarder or something.” He was trying to hide his resignation and only partially succeeding. “They miss me being around, I’m sure but . . . they’re probably not sure what it is exactly that they’re missing.” He said it so matter of factly that she wasn’t sure how to respond to it. “I guess it’s better than my mother calling me every night and crying how much she wants me around. We’re all adults, we all move on.” His words were taut and detached.
         You came here to talk, but you haven’t said what’s wrong. These are only symptoms. She never saw herself as extraordinarily perceptive and yet with every word it was like he was trying to blur the air around himself, distort his image until everyone forgot what he looked like. But that couldn’t be right. Why would anyone do that to themselves?
         “Were your parents any better?” he asked suddenly, the first real initiative he had shown all night. Distantly she could hear the coffeepot bubbling. It’d be ready soon. But words were taking her, driving her along. “You know, when you left? Did they deal with it all right?”
         ”They were okay . . .” she ventured, shrugging briefly before slipping off the seat to deal with the furiously percolating coffee. The strong scent wafted through the room, brushing away whatever vestiges of weariness remained. An old mug was still in the sink and she rinsed it out quickly as she opened the cabinets above the sink to look for another cup for Tristian. She found one that stated in no uncertain terms “I hate Mondays” along with a cheesy smiley face might have been a sticker somebody had put on. “It took a while for me, too, only because I spent so long looking for a place that my folks had plenty of time to get used to the idea.” She giggled a little. “Honestly, I think they believed it more than I did, I took so damn long.” She poured the coffee into the two cups with practiced ease, not bothering to add anything else to it. Generally she took her coffee black and she honestly doubted Tristian was really going to drink his before it became cold and she didn’t have that much milk to begin with. If he wanted it, let him get it. “But when I moved, I did it all at once, we boxed everything up the day before and then went and did it . . .” as she transferred first one, then the other cup to the table, she looked sideways at Tristian and said, “Are you sure you weren’t there? Half the family showed up, I’m pretty sure I coerced you into helping out somehow.”
         “I don’t even think I was in the area at the time,” he said vaguely, eyeing the coffeecup with veiled intent, as if debating whether he was going to shock the hell out of her and actually drink it. “If I was, I would have helped.” Vague humor skidded across his face. “I mean, what kind of an excuse would I have had . . . I’m within walking distance.”
         “You are,” she agreed cordially, taking a sip of the hot liquid to test it, putting it down a second later. Still a bit too warm. Another few minutes. She had time. Tristian was still staring at his, trying to read patterns in the steam. “A good thing too, I wouldn’t have to walk as far to kick your ass.” Her fingernails tapped a tinkling rhythm on the ceramic. “Your parents actually stopped by, they said you weren’t around but they didn’t know where you went. Your father almost gave himself a hernia picking up a box of books. He must have thought it was make-up or something.”
         “Sorry I missed it . . .” Tristian replied offhandedly. He started to pick up the cup and abruptly put it down with a quiet clatter. Too hot for him, maybe.
         “It was a long day,” she continued, her hand forming a tent over the top of the cup, the warmth tickling her palm. She wasn’t staring at him anymore, but at his coat directly across from her. It was a different coat, she thought, but it looked the same. Maybe that was his secret, he just kept replacing all his belongings with newer versions. Maybe that was the trick to staying young. “We did it all in one day and at the end of it I went back to the house to take one last look and make sure I didn’t, you know, forget anything.” She took a deep breath. For some reason, these memories always made her chest hurt. “And I went into my old room and it was . . . it was empty, all the stuff, I moved it all here, it was in boxes and sitting somewhere else. And without any of my stuff there, it felt just . . . hollow, it was just four walls that happened to meet by circumstance. If I talked I could hear the echo of my voice, like I was falling away.” Tristian had stopped moving, ceased pacing. Finally. “And it hit me then . . . it hit me that my life was changing.” She tried the coffee again, found it much better, let it roll down her throat, bitter and just short of scalding. “You don’t think about when you go through school and grow up because everything around you in the same, it never seems to change and so you can sort of convince yourself that . . . you’re just trapped in this . . . stasis and it’ll be the same forever.” The heat scraped her voice into something hoarse and she took a moment to swallow and recover. Did she ever tell anyone this? Is she telling anyone now? “And I was standing there in my room, my empty room, not even really mine anymore and I realized I didn’t live there anymore, I was going to be sleeping somewhere else . . . maybe not for the rest of my life but definitely never there again.” Tristian hadn’t sat down again but he had moved closer to the table. His waist was eye level again. The flashlight dangled before her eyes, just out of reach. What was it, really? Why did it seem like such a part of him? “And I turned around to leave, because I didn’t want to stand there getting depressed all night, and I saw my mother standing in the doorway. I’d never seen her face like that before, I didn’t even know how to describe it. I was hoping . . . I wanted her to say something cliche and typical, like you’ll always have a place here or you’ll never stop being my girl but she just . . . she made this sound and walked away. I think she went into her bedroom. Later, I walked by and the door was shut and I heard this noise inside.” Her voice was clogged, unwieldy. The coffee was searing her nostrils. “I realized . . . I think I realized that . . . it’s not until everything changes that you realize that you’re changing with it . . . and it’s even worse for parents, I think because when they have kids they convince themselves that . . . that they’re not getting older and then we go and . . . we go and move out and leave and . . . they realize, they see that the whole time we’ve been growing up, they’ve been getting older, nothing stops for them. I think we all delude ourselves into thinking nothing ever changes, until . . . until stuff happens that we can’t ignore and . . .” She had to hold the cup with both hands and the coffee barely seemed to have any taste. “I like it here,” she pronounced with quiet fervor, “I like living here and I like being on my own. But it’s . . . it’s a devil’s bargain because, to get to this place, to have this freedom, you have to accept getting older and once you accept it, it’s a ball that won’t stop rolling.” Looking up at him she found that he had moved, he was standing on the other side of the chair, as if trying to see if she looked different from an alternate angle. Meeting his eyes, she said, “So we’re getting older. What are we supposed to do about it?”
         Tristian pursed his lips, appeared to think about it. Out of time with his actions, he suddenly said, “Keep doing it, I imagine.” There was strained conviction to his voice, forced persuasion for a person who wasn’t there.
         All this talking had left her feeling drained, her vitality leaving with her words. What the hell time was it? She couldn’t see the clock from her chair. It was too hard to tell. There was a fragile melancholy settling over her heart. Tristian’s influence of course. She never thought about this crap. How did he do it?
         Trying to brush it away, she said archly, “But enough of my babbling . . . I thought you came here to talk and all you’ve done is let me ramble about old stuff.” Gesturing toward the cooling cup of coffee. “So come on, have a seat, don’t let this nice beverage go to waste. Do you even know what the price of coffee is these days?” He didn’t move. His eyes sought the physical form of nothing. “Have a seat, Tristian, and talk, if that’s what you want to do.”
         “That’s what . . .” he started to say and then realized he was merely parroting her words. With careless fingers he snatched up the cup, took three hard steps across the kitchen toward the living room, drained half the cup in a gulp that nearly made his neck bulge outward. She half-expected to see steam spill from his ears, so rash was the action. But it was over before she could even hope to stop him. That was the thing with Tristian, he either gave you plenty of warning, or none at all. Setting the cup down on the counter, he leaned against the wall, staring out toward the door, not looking at her. “You like change, don’t you?” The question was weirdly rhetorical. The answer was supposed to be obvious but she had no idea. “I mean, for all our talk of growing up and older . . . you like change, right?”
         “Sure I do,” she answered carefully, trying to follow the tortuous path of his logic. “Without change I’d still be living at home, or dating that dick who thought I was going to keep his place neat for him because that’s what women do . . . or forever working as a waitress, or a million other things.” A wicked smile crept to her face. “I mean, without change I’d never know how good mint toothpaste tastes after you wake up hungover.”
         He laughed quietly at that. “Nice to see that you’ve learned something this week.”
         She made a face at him, although his expression didn’t change remarkably. “It was last week, I’ll have you know,” she responded with a grin. When that didn’t warrant a response, she tried again. Brushing some hair out of her face, she said, “If you’re trying to say that not all change is good, I agree, Tristian, I do . . .” pausing to take another sip of the cooling coffee, she added, “Remember when my grandmother sold her house to move into the smaller one . . .”
         Something glittered in his eyes, an awakening of memory. “That’s right, the one with the deck . . .”
         “On the second floor, right, right,” she confirmed, pleased that he still remembered. Sometimes memories felt so lonely, less real. Knowing someone else shared them was oddly comforting. It validated a tiny part of her existence. “It was all enclosed and nobody ever wanted us to go up there because, I don’t know, they felt like the floor would break or something . . .”
         “You convinced me to sneak up there with you anyway,” Tristian recalled, his hands in his pockets now. Getting him to sit was obviously going to be a futile endeavor.
         “I think it was the other way around,” she countered playfully.
         “Maybe,” he answered gamely. He was staring at his feet now, his expression intent. “I remember looking through the screen, at everyone so far below . . .”
         “We were only one floor up, dear,” she teased gently.
         “I know,” he laughed, “but I was a lot smaller then, it all seemed so much further away. Everything was cut up into little squares. The whole family was so tiny. It was like being in an airplane. I felt so separate from everything. Someone waved to us and I couldn’t tell who it was.”
         “It was your mother, telling us to get the hell out of there,” she told him with a giggle. “I think grandma locked the door in afterwards.” She sat back and crossed her arms, sniffed. “Figures. I so wanted to try launching some water balloons from there.”
         “And then she moved and it was gone . . .” he noted, almost mournfully.
         “Yeah, grandma couldn’t move around as well and so she went to the ranch house . . .” she finished the memory for him. “The new house was never as much fun, but what can you do?”
         “Things change,” he murmured, taking one hand out of his pocket to grasp the opposite shoulder.
         “We already established that,” she said dryly. And then, in a softer tone, “Tristian, we know change is good and bad. We’re not six anymore. We know this . . .” He was staring at her without moving his head, his eyes patient. “The question is . . . the kind of change that happened to you . . . which is it?”
         Tristian didn’t say anything at first. Instead he pushed him off from the wall, slipped his hands into his pockets, started to walk across the room. Halfway to the door he stopped and doubled back, snatched the coffee cup off the counter with deliberate care.
         Without moving, she heard him say quietly, “I’m not sure.”
         And then, in a violent flurry of motion, he spun around, the cup already back on the counter, his face paralyzed by animation. “Do you . . . do you remember what I said about . . . about this . . .” and suddenly the flashlight was in his hand, in a motion so fast that it seemed to just appear there. How long had he practiced that for? No more samurai movies for him, definitely. “When you asked me before, do you remember what I said?”
         She actually had to think about that one. How long ago had it been? Time was out of step with her. “You . . . you said a lot of stuff . . .” he really didn’t but she didn’t know what else to say. “About aliens and . . . fighting and . . .” This was ridiculous. Where was he going with this? Had he finally lost it?
         Something in his eyes told her otherwise. There was fevered honesty there, far short of madness, nestled with the experience of a vision that was just coming forth now. “What are you trying to tell me, Tristian? That all of that was true?”
         “And what if it was?” he asked, his voice as slippery as he used to be, almost siblant. “What would you say then?”
         She pulled her legs in so that she was curled up as small as possible. It wasn’t fear. She was just more comfortable this way. “I wouldn’t say anything,” she told her cousin. “I like to keep an open mind.” What was she saying?
         He was pivoting almost lazily, his gait absurdly controlled, the flashlight resting easily in his left hand. “Good, because . . . because I don’t know what to say either, I came here to talk and I don’t know how to say what I, how to . . .” He was facing the living room, his eyes half-closed, concentrating intently.
         And then in a sharp, quick motion, he stepped forward, whispered harshly, “Don’t say a word . . .” and thrust the arm holding the flashlight into the living room.
         Someone flicked a switch, and painted the air crimson.