I am already mosquito bitten and sunburned when I reach my brother’s cabin in the middle of fucking nowhere, though “cabin” is too generous, “dump” or “shithole” might be more accurate — roughly the size of the backyard shed where my parents still keep their rotting croquet set and patio chairs and the old push mower, or maybe smaller, with rickety front steps, a flat roof sagging in the middle, and a creek running behind it, and a dirt path curling off through thick trees, and my brother, frustrated at me being here, defensive — “Mom sent you, didn’t she?” — and of course she did, I’m the oldest of five, I spent my whole life mothering even before I had children, dreaming of babies, hoping that pushing them out would fill me up, and here is my brother, twenty-six, bone thin, wearing a sweaty tank top and vintage shorts with suspenders, his sense of irony thriving even with no one around to see it, and he invites me in, offers to make coffee while I scan his one-room shithole for proof that this is even possible, noticing a hot plate and a wood-burning stove — maybe one of these would work? — and not much else, a basin sink, a twin bed, an antique desk with pigeonholes, and once we’re settled in I begin my speech, the one I practiced on the four-hour drive north — yes, it was a bad break-up, yes, bad break-ups are the fucking worst, but he doesn’t need to prove anything to anyone, and especially not like this, not with the outhouse or the spotty cell service or the pipes that freeze in winter, and let’s face it, he’s been texting our parents every week with some new catastrophe, raging or depressed or near hysterical — hundreds of ants swarming through the cracks, drawn in by the poisoned traps that fail to kill them, the sink clogged and stinking with thick black sludge, a wild animal at the front steps all night long, scritching and scratching like claws on a coffin, and him too jumpy to even open the door, see what’s there — but before I can speak, he points at my ankle, just above the butterfly tattoo, once a shimmery cerulean, faded now, and I see what he’s pointing at — brown and bulbous, like a cancerous mole — and I shriek like a child, thirty-two years old, mother of three, still undone by things that creep and crawl and bite, and my brother retrieves a pair of stainless steel tweezers from his desk, swabs them with rubbing alcohol, tells me to hold still — ”You want to grab them as close to the mouthparts as you can,” he says, leaning close, bending his task lamp toward my compromised skin, “Don’t squeeze its body or it’ll pop like a pimple, it’s nasty shit” — and he yanks hard, the tick ripping loose, and I am too shaken, too grateful, to tell him that he’s making a mistake, that his little coffee bean of a car will never make it to town through the inevitable heaps of snow in January, that he’s never chopped wood a day in his life, that he doesn’t need a rustic deathtrap of a cabin to create a sense of purpose, the shell of a romantic life, that there are easier and less dangerous methods — though at least his way is cheaper, they say the average cost to raise a child is $230,000, not including college, they say kids and stress grow like weeds, grow together until they’re all tangled up — but I don’t want my brother to starve in winter or chop off his thumb, and besides, my parents are counting on me, but for now I’m trying not to faint as he drops the blood-swollen tick into an empty beer bottle, and he takes my hand like when I was ten and he was four and he had a new drawing or a many-legged bug to show me (his hair blonder back then, his heart as soft and porous as it is now), he leads me down to the sparkling, whispering creek, pronounced “crick,” around here, but neither of us is from around here, and I see a porcelain teacup tied to a tree branch, and my brother slides the teacup loose and dips it into the creek, hands it to me. “Here,” he says, and like a fool, I drink, and the water is cold, impossibly sweet, and when it’s gone I scoop up more.

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