Page 43 of Our Last Resort

And now it’s alive again.

I go to bed first. About ten minutes later, Gabriel slips into his own.

The day we arrived, seeing the two queen-size beds almost four feet apart, it was impossible not to think of the dorms. Of our bunk beds from the ages of ten to fourteen, Gabriel at the bottom, me at the top.

There’s a rustling on Gabriel’s side. Our suite glows faintly with LEDs, a tiny red eye on our dormant TV, green buttons on our AC control panel. In the darkness, I squint to see the white shape of his arm extracting itself from the sheets, reaching across the space between us.

That was our thing.

In the bunk beds.

If I reached down and he reached up, our index fingersmet for a few seconds. Our knuckles interlocked. We held our breaths; we waited.

Just long enough to think, not even say,Good night.

We never talked about it. That little gesture was not spoken of in the daytime. It was childish and pure and sincere, a quiet acknowledgment of all the ways we needed each other.

For five days, I’ve remembered this detail. For five days, I’ve wondered if Gabriel remembers, too.

I reach out my arm.

Time compresses. We’re ten years old again. My shoulder feels strange; the bone was wrenched out of its socket not too long ago. I’m learning about pain at the same time as I’m learning about love. We are eleven, twelve, thirteen. Soon we’ll learn how to get away with things. But for now, we are good. We do our chores. We obey. We share everything with everyone else. The one thing that belongs to us, our one secret, is the linking of our fingers at night. Later, I will look back on it and think,Maybe that was the first step. Maybe that’s how we realized that some things were allowed to exist, as long as we were the only two people to know about them.

But for now, I am thirteen. I am thirty-two. Gabriel’s hand is surprisingly soft—moisturized, cared for. It used to be calloused, back in Émile’s world, what with all the manual labor. But we’ve changed. Gabriel has changed. Maybe there isn’t a cell in his body left over from the boy he once was.

At the border between our two beds, my brother loops his index finger around mine.

15Escalante, Utah

The Sixth Day

Gabriel’s phone alarm goes off. He doesn’t snooze. We never formed the habit: Back in Émile’s world, when it was time to get up, we got up. Ditto in our early adulthood. Therewerethose six months when Gabriel didn’t get out of bed, but that wasn’t snoozing; that was depression.

When I come out of the bathroom, he’s looking out the window, sipping an orange juice from the minibar. He lines up his migraine meds on the desk, tilts his head back to swallow them.

“Ready?” he asks.

I am.

He shoulders his backpack; I wheel out my suitcase.

Fuck, I’m going to miss him.

I haven’t allowed myself to feel his absence too much over the past five years. That’s always been the deal: Sometimes in life you have to shed the people you love, the world you know.

We stop by the front desk. Catalina’s forehead wrinkles when she spots our bags.

“Are you leaving us?”

“We are,” Gabriel says. “We’ve had a lovely stay. It’s just…an emergency. At home.”

Catalina nods. She clearly doesn’t buy it, but she pecks diligently at her keyboard.

“I see your reservation was prepaid,” she says. “That means that, unfortunately, we won’t be able to refund you for the unused part of your stay.”

“That’s fine,” I say.

Forget about the money, Catalina. I’ll make more. Just let us out of here.

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