Nan hefted her lipstick-pink Guerciotti over the third floor railing, detached the front wheel, gently lassoed the bike frame and railing with her bike chain, and clicked the lock shut. She found Iris sitting on the couch. The television displayed a blank blue screen. Iris was wearing the cat Ferguson like a shawl around her neck. Her crutches were stuck beneath the coffee table. She was tapping buttons on her pocket Yahtzee game.
          Nan unclipped the cell phone holster from her messenger bag and tossed holster and bag onto the couch beside Iris.
          Nan had lived with Iris for ten months. The sisters were both compact, with small feet and hands. They had the same asymmetrical chin, tipped to the left, noticeable only in photographs. Nan pulled off a beat-up pair of red leather gloves and her purple waterproof parka and kicked off her soggy gray sneakers. Wet feet and a runny nose had been constants since mid-November when the sun had disappeared for good. The Excel Legal Messenger dispatcher had started a pool for when the sun would reemerge. Nan had put a dollar on Iris’s birthday, two weeks away, what would be Day 101 of gloom.
          Nan flipped on the floor lamp beside the couch. “Do you want a cup of tea?” She glanced around the room for a sign of whether Iris had left the couch where she’d been sleeping when Nan left for work. But why bother? Say Iris had left the couch, perhaps sitting in the window seat for some minutes looking down at the street or at a bird in a tree. Say she had propped herself against the edge of the bathroom sink and studied her complexion. Those actions would in no way constitute a reputable indicator of Iris’s mental state. These days Iris and her actions were unnervingly mysterious, as though she could walk across wet sand or through snarled brush and leave no trace.
          While the water was coming to a boil, Nan ran back downstairs for the mail because there was no way for her to grab it on the way in while maneuvering the bike through the vestibule. Iris’s landlord, a snorter and tongue-clicker, regularly inspected the shabby walls and woodwork for new scratches and scrapes. Nan was extra-careful because she did not want to create even the slightest bit of trouble for Iris. The landlord was hirsute and smelled like burped beer. A gold stud poked out of a tuft of white hairs on his left earlobe. “How is your sister?” he asked whenever he saw her. He nodded smugly when she failed to answer. Bastard.
          There were coupons for pizza and video, the gas bill, and renewal notices for Money and Kiplinger’s. The envelope addressed to Nan from Berkeley would contain a letter wanting to know what she was going to do about her deferred law school admission. A typewritten envelope from their mother would contain a typewritten letter asking what she had done that was so horrible that her two children saw fit to ostracize her. At the bottom would be scrawled a wobbly MOMMY. Nan hid both letters beneath the silverware caddy and stuck the coupons to the fridge with an “I Love the Rain” magnet.
          She made the tea in two plain white mugs. Nan had relocated most of Iris’s mugs to the top shelf in the cupboard, out of sight – dozens of them emblazoned with logos from the PR firm Iris worked for and their clients’ logos, and several from the Humane Society where Iris had volunteered for five years. This was just one of the measures she’d taken while Iris was still in the hospital, things that must have seemed like they would help smooth Iris’s return, as though Nan was dutifully ticking off to-do items from a manual: “Preparing for the Suicide Attempter’s Homecoming.”
          Nan did a runner’s stretch while the tea brewed. She got the box of tissues with lotion from her bedroom and blew her nose. “Let’s make green curry tonight, okay? Nothing wrong with me that some coconut milk won’t cure!” She winced at her mock-heartiness.

          Nan set Iris up at the kitchen table with the better knife and the large wooden cutting board and assigned her the rudimentary vegetables, green and red bell peppers. Iris summarized the plot of Soylent Green which she had watched between naps. She cut the peppers into uniformly sized rectangles. Nan’s eyes cried from the onions. Her nose was still running. She imagined saying, This is fun. We should cook more often, and Iris stabbing her in the shoulder with the knife.
          Instead, she said, “Tim T. and a couple of the other guys are in a band called The Limpets. They’re recording a CD of originals about all the gray and rain. Gene Kelly goes post-Grunge.”
          “Almost everywhere is sunnier than here,” Iris said.
          “The weather doesn’t bother me.” Nan stuck a whole miniature ear of corn in her mouth. It tasted like the can.
          “We’ll see.”
          Nan stacked twenty basil leaves, aligning the edges, and then snipped them with the kitchen shears. “Here’s something. RC got clobbered by a bakery truck on his way home last night.”
          “He’s the one who wears the robes, right? And dreadlocks?”
          “Yep. He broke two ribs and totaled his bike.”
          “That’s tough,” Iris said without irony, though she’d broken five ribs and at least ten other bones in her body when she’d jumped from the Ship Canal Bridge eleven months previously.
          Nan re-sifted through the day’s events. Iris would never walk without crutches again much less ride a bike. “I got a warning for running a red light.”
          “Again?”
          “It’s only my second.”
          The officer’s police-issued bike shoes had been as soaked as Nan’s. "Didn't you see the light change?" she’d asked.
          "Your feet must be cold," Nan said.
          "The light. You have to obey the light."
          "I'll try harder. Sometimes I forget."
          The cop looked straight into Nan's eyes. Hers were navy blue behind rain-spattered glasses. "I'll be keeping a look out for you."

          “It could be spicier,” Nan said.
          “Theoretically that’s always true,” Iris said. “The question is edibility.”
          “This was two tablespoons of curry paste.”
          “It’s perfect,” Iris said. “Whose bakery truck nailed RC?”
          “But isn’t it unlikely that exactly two level tablespoons is the perfect amount?”
          Iris was tearing her napkin into tiny squares and sticking them into the candle flame. The little pieces of flaming paper were landing willy-nilly on the table and floor. “Sounds like a question for the Ouija board.” Iris pronounced it wee-gee, drawn out, like she had when they were kids.
          “You’re joking.”
          “And not for the first time tonight.”
          “You can be pretty damn subtle.”
          “I think you just forgot that I have a sense of humor,” Iris said.
          “No. I’d never forget that.” In high school, Iris’s sense of humor ran to pranks – water balloons and Superglue and plastic cockroaches. She’d enlist Nan’s help in rearranging the furniture around their mother, passed out in her recliner emitting raspy Seagram’s snores – turning the TV to face the wall or hemming her in with end tables pressed to her shins. Iris called this the “she who goes bump in the night trick.”
          “I hope you don’t think I need you here, babying me, waiting on me hand and foot,” Iris said.
          “What’d I do to piss you off?” Nan blew out the candle. Her eyes stung with tears.
          “Do you know what I most appreciate about you?” Iris asked.
          Nan reminded herself that she had started this – tried to make conversation. “No idea.” Nan tried to smile, to believe in a joke at the center of what was being said.
          “I appreciate that you don’t ask me why.”
          Nan knew exactly what Iris meant, and she knew, too, that she’d been played. Now it would be even harder to ask the questions that crowded her head. Why did you climb onto the bridge? Are you sorry you didn’t die?
          On the TV in her apartment in Oakland Nan had watched her sister plummet and re-plummet. Iris had become a national story thanks to the newsworthy lack of empathy displayed by some of the delayed motorists, who hollered obscenities and taunts as Iris weighed her options. Better behavior was expected of the residents of Seattle.
          Nan didn’t understand any of it. Did Iris want her to leave? She wanted to pound her fist on the table and shout why won’t you tell me?
          Why wasn’t she allowed to know?
          “There aren’t always answers to questions like that,” a therapist had told Nan early on. “Quite often survivors can’t remember exactly what got them to that point.”
          Iris was only on leave from her job; she hadn’t been demoted or fired, and she had received what appeared to be the appropriate number of cards, calls, and floral arrangements from friends and coworkers, although, as far as Nan could tell, Iris hadn’t responded to most of these. There was no evidence in the apartment of a romance, broken or otherwise. It had been tidy, just a bit dusty. Ferguson was hungry and pissed by the time she arrived, but fortunately he’d availed himself of the dripping faucet in the tub. No one had found or come forward with a suicide note, though there had been a blank pad of paper and a pen on the kitchen table. It bothered Nan that Iris didn’t seem to have made any arrangements for the cat. It bothered Nan that Iris’s people had been so easily rebuffed.
          “Did you hear me?” Iris said.
          “There’s nothing I can say to that,” Nan told her sister. That was the thing – what could she ever say that Iris couldn’t laugh at or dismiss?

          The female officer kept her promise. When Nan stepped onto her pedals, anticipating the light changing, the cop’s front wheel rolled into sight. When Nan sprinted down an alley or cut across Pine mid-block, there was the cop above her on the hill, tapping the side of her helmet with her forefinger as if in greeting. It was a disquieting gesture. Sometimes Nan had the odd sensation that the cop existed only for her.
          Half of downtown was under construction or destruction, the puddles strewn with rubble and rebar and vandal-shattered glass. Hand-painted signs directed pedestrians through jerrybuilt plywood corridors. Nan snaked between cars, her satchel bouncing lightly on her back. She heard a whistle shriek and a shout. "Hey you!"
          Three cars back a cop in a squad car pointed at her. For a moment there was nowhere to go as a trio of flanked SUVs hoarded their lanes. The squad car pulled up beside her, windshield wipers flapping.
          "Hey miss, I'm talking to you."
          A block ahead a concrete truck was backing into the street. A signal person had stopped traffic in both directions. Nan plunged between a forest green Explorer and a maroon Eddie Bauer Expedition and caromed left through the next intersection – the wrong way on a one-way street – veering in front of a UPS van. Her pant leg slid against the van’s bumper. The driver mimed disgust.
          She stayed against traffic, down two blocks, back up three. Her lungs burned. She was wet to her knees. She zipped through a yellow light and stopped to breathe. Between two silver office buildings sat the water, a dull pewter platter. Nan felt the woman cop’s presence first, then heard the squeak of bicycle brakes.
          "Well, well, well." The officer pulled between Nan and the water.
          "Please," Nan said, "You don't understand." Nan watched several raindrops stream down the side of the cop's helmet and drop onto her neck. The cop swiped at them with the back of her hand.
          "No. You're the one who doesn't understand. These laws are to protect you. It's a matter of safety. I’m going to have to write you up.”
          Nan wanted to laugh at the woman, to push her down. "I'm cold," she said. "Aren't you cold?"
          The officer sighed. "It’s February. What do you expect?” Her nametag said Officer Lynne.
          “Not much,” Nan said.
          “Are you trying to hurt yourself?”
          “I don’t know what that means.”
          For a moment, Nan thought this Officer Lynne person was going to ask her about Iris or tell her something important. Ridiculous—the bike chase must’ve drained all the blood from her brain.
          “Listen, I’m cold. Way too cold for this,” Lynne said.
          “I just wanted to say – ”
          “What? What in the hell are you trying to say?” The cop spun her pedal with her foot.
          “Forget it. I’m sure you were just trying to be nice.”
          “Nice, huh?” Officer Lynne’s lips were pressed shut against a smile.
          Nan looked back toward the water. A ferry was stalled in the Sound, a white and grey canapé stranded at the center of the silvery platter. A moment of perfect suspension. Then the ferry jerked once, almost imperceptibly, and slid resolutely toward the pier, as if she had imagined its stillness.
          “What are you waiting for?” Lynne asked her, waving the soggy ticket.
          Nan supposed she shouldn’t be surprised that this was the best the universe could do. Tired of her demanding answers, she was now to be delivered this banal epiphany – the ho-hum realization that she was ready to lurch forward just as the ferry had – metaphorically, she assumed, not hurtling down the hill on her bike.
          What the universe didn’t understand was that nothing made sense with Iris broken.
          “I can’t even read this,” Nan said, trying to decipher the blurred ink smears.
          “It doesn’t matter. It’s just a warning.”
          Iris had always been Nan’s protector. When they were kids Iris made sure Nan had lunch money and shoes that fit – she’d take tens and twenties right out of their mother’s purse. She convinced Nan to go away to college. “Don’t you dare spend one more day in that house than you have to,” was how she’d put it.
          “Thank you,” Nan said. “Really.”
          “Just try to stay out of trouble, would you?” Officer Lynne said.
          No one actually thought it was that simple did they?
         
          A few days later, Nan woke with a serious sore throat. Midmorning she got a flat tire at the bottom of Pine Street and had to walk the bike up six steep blocks to snag a patch from Tim. A plump redheaded baby hanging in a sling on its mother’s back knocked Nan’s latte off the counter, dousing her feet and splashing hot coffee up her shins. All of which could be interpreted as signs that she should go home early. Nan wasn’t so sure. Every day, for all these months now, she had been at least a bit braced for disaster whenever she opened the apartment door. Why wouldn’t she find the kitchen table piled with ashes, Iris having found and burned their mother’s letters? Or all those mugs smashed to bits on the kitchen floor? The TV’s flat stupid face smashed in? Or and this was the real fear, right? – Iris dead on the couch. Nan had never found a way to ration Iris’s pain pills. The two bottles sat on the coffee table all day every day. Maybe that was the point of going home early today. Maybe this was the day Iris was making pretty piles of Oxycontin and Darvon on top of the TV Guide.
          Plucking her bike from the jaws of the bus rack and setting it on the pavement, Nan found that the rear tire had gone flat again. Her throat burned. Even so, she began walking the bike along the longer route to Iris’s building, around the block instead of through the grimy alley. Halfway down the street she nearly plowed into a sandwich board sitting in the middle of the sidewalk: Polly’s Baked Good and Coffee Shop. How long had it been since she’d taken this way home? She wondered, because – surely it hadn’t been more than a couple of weeks ago – there’d been no such place then, no fancy black sign with its magenta script font and typo. A triple note chimed as a customer entered the coffee shop and joined a queue which nearly reached the door.
          The coffee shop appeared to have about a dozen tables, most of them filled, as if this was suddenly the hot spot in the neighborhood. Nan peered in, undecided. A fresh hot cinnamon bun and a glass of cold water sounded like just the thing, but there was no bike rack, not even a good place to lean her bike while she ran in. Polly wasn’t going to get her business like that. Nan watched a man and a woman balancing plates and cups as they made their way to a table by the window. The couple looked at her curiously and she shook her head at them – please stop – and they turned away.
          Then, as though this was what she had been standing there for, another customer stepped away from the counter and Nan could clearly see the woman at the head of the line – Iris! Nan balanced her bike against the sign, which threatened to topple, and stepped toward the coffee shop. Iris was leaning her weight onto her right crutch while she completed her transaction. The left crutch rested against the bakery case. Iris took her change, grabbed the other crutch, and hobbled toward the far end of the shop. Nan knew she wasn’t dreaming, but that’s what this felt like – improbable and distorted.
          A young man wearing a white apron placed a cup and saucer and a small pastry-filled plate on Iris’s table. He leaned in to say something to her and Iris responded with a big laugh, mouth open. She briefly touched his elbow.
          Nan felt alarm. Though she’d been trying and trying to figure Iris out, compiling what scant evidence existed regarding Iris’s mood and outlook and motives, she didn’t want to be caught spying. Back-stepping from the window she tripped and fell, landing hard and succeeding this time in knocking over her bike and the sign. The couple at the window and Iris and a few other customers stared at the embarrassed heap that was Nan. She scolded herself. She wasn’t a clumsy person but here she was putting on a show!
          Nan stood and made exaggerated brushing off her clothes gestures and curtsied to her audience. She righted the sign. She looked to Iris. Iris wiggled her fingers, a shy wave. Their eyes met. Nan’s right elbow and shoulder throbbed. Then Iris broke the moment and bowed her head.
          Nan quickly rolled the bike out of sight and pulled it between the next two buildings. She waited for her heartbeat and breath to slow. She dug three Ibuprofen tablets from her pocket and swallowed them dry. Staying close to the building, she crept back to the coffee shop. From the very edge of the window, she had a dim oblique view of Iris, who was eating her pastry. Nan wished she could tell if it was a chocolate croissant. She loved how Iris, her Iris, would always deliberate over a menu or a wine list and then order what she always ordered.
          Nan took another step forward. This corner of the coffee shop held only a large rattan basket holding an unkempt stack of newspapers. Nan could see that the table Iris had chosen was near the wall and her crutches stood behind her. Iris was raising her cup as if to toast someone. The handsome server? Nan felt tumbly inside.
          She replayed Iris’s wave. Recreating that moment it seemed as though Iris had been waving at her across a considerable breadth of time and space, as though she was waving at a past-Nan or a future-Nan, and Iris herself was her past or future self. Which was it? How could she know?