BRATS by Irene Katz Connelly

As a graduation present, Janie’s mother bought her a plane ticket to Budapest. “Not that I want to give my tourist dollars to those skinheads,” she said, referring to Hungarian society in general. “But someone needs to check on Eve.” She had not asked if Janie had other plans for the brief interval between receiving her diploma and starting her new life as a product manager, so the ticket felt less like a treat than an assignment: Janie was to convince her sister to leave Europe and find a job with benefits in the New York metro area. Over the phone, Janie chastised her mother briefly for treating her like a child. But she wasn’t busy, and she did have things to discuss with Eve.

Their mother believed that Eve was sharing a fin-de-siècle flat in the historic center of Pest with three French exchange students. She did not know about István, the actual Hungarian man in whose apartment Eve had apparently been living for several months. Neither did Janie, until Eve collected her from the airport and steered her toward a subway headed across the Danube to grubbier Buda. “We met at a reading,” she said in the loud and slightly languid voice that marked her, despite her best efforts, as having grown up in New Jersey. “He wants to improve his English so he can work abroad. I sent you some pictures of him, remember?”

“So none of us even have your real address?”

“You sound like Mom,” Eve said. “Do not tell her about this. And definitely not your father.” She said she would break the news when things got more serious. Janie asked what she meant. The train creaked into their stop and Eve busied herself dragging the suitcase onto the platform.

At the ticket kiosk, Eve explained that Janie could buy a week-long student pass that would save a lot of money.

“But I’m not a student anymore.” She showed Eve the conspicuous expiration date on her college ID.

“If someone comes on the train, you just flash it super quick. I use the student pass.” She was already negotiating with the machine, confidently parsing the Hungarian instructions until it spat out a hard, purple card.

Aboveground, Janie maneuvered her suitcase with difficulty over slanting slabs of pavement. They passed buildings of identical Soviet make, balconies overflowing with laundry and hardy plants. The uniformly blond pedestrians who paused to make way for the suitcase looked like they had done unspeakable things during World War II. Of course, most of them were no older than Eve. What Janie knew of Eastern Europe came from her grandparents, born in various towns that now existed under different names or not at all. In their infrequent stories, the weather and the food were always bad, and no road led anywhere good except the one that landed them among the synagogues and three-bedroom colonials outside Newark. Janie’s relatives were distressed when Eve returned to Hungary as an English teacher, and not just because she was far too old, at thirty, to be finding herself. In lowered voices, they asked: didn’t Eve feel strange, going back there? Their mother replied woefully that she certainly would.

They took turns carrying the suitcase up the four flights of stairs in Eve’s building. The landings sported gauzy portraits of the Virgin Mary and other, less identifiable saints, who gazed indifferently at them as they paused for breath. István, bearishly tall, opened the apartment door while Eve was still searching for her keys. He surprised Janie by kissing her on both cheeks.

“We are excited for you a long time.”

“Excited for you to come,” Eve amended. István’s body seemed to want to escape from the clothes that, at home, Janie and her friends—and especially Eve—would have derided as Eurotrash—knees bulging out of artfully torn jeans, chest hair teeming over his collar. But there was something potent to him, even in the careful way he arranged himself on the couch so as not to take up too much space. Janie could see why Eve was proud of him.

While István made coffee, Janie asked if she could connect to the WiFi. Eve said, “Can’t go an hour without talking to your girlfriend?”

“Exactly,” Janie said. Unaccustomed to traveling without Amy seeing her off, she had sent several texts and a rambling email before leaving home. On the plane, she bargained with herself, that if she kept her phone off until arriving at Eve’s, she would have a response waiting. But the messages remained unanswered, and not because her American phone wasn’t working; a text from her mother, reminding her to take pictures, had come through promptly.

Eve asked if there was anything special Janie wanted to do while she was in Budapest. Janie said, “People were telling me about the ruin bars.”

“Ruin bars.” Eve rolled her eyes. “I think we can spare you those.”

Instead, they took Janie to a shawarma place across from their building, where István had once gotten food poisoning. Janie’s jet-lagged body longed for her familiar dorm, the incense Amy burned. She found it difficult to be hungry. Eve requested all the toppings on her pita and ticked off the things Janie should see during the day while she and István worked: the National History Museum, the parks. When István mentioned the Holocaust memorial on the Danube, Eve countered that it was incredibly dreary. She and Janie, as Jews, should be exempt from visiting.

“It is a very important work,” István said seriously. He explained to Janie that the monument consisted of dozens of bronze shoes arranged as if they had been scattered on the riverbank. “The shoes represent the lost children.”

“We know,” said Eve. They had studied the monument, sandwiched between others in interminable PowerPoints, at Hebrew school. She turned to Janie. “Why didn’t you want to bring Amy with you? It would be better if you had someone around for the tourist stuff.”

Janie said Amy had things going on.

“What happened, she got a job out of state? Are you breaking up?”

“We’re not breaking up.” Janie made a face to indicate that she wanted to talk about it later, without István.

Eve failed to interpret the face. “Amy and Janie,” she said, sing-song. She liked to quote from the cheerful, earnest book reviews Amy posted on Instagram and to mockingly repeat the mantra on Amy’s favorite tote bag, that a well-read woman was a dangerous creature.

Perceiving the need to change the subject, István pointed outside, where the owner of the restaurant was placing a dish of scraps out for the street cats. “He should not do that,” István said. “Already this year, they are having cases of rabies.”

“He’s always worried,” Eve said sagely. “I don’t even have to read the news, because he tells me everything bad that’s happening.”

“It’s because they are foreign,” István said, still looking outside. “Should I tell them?” Eve reached for the pickles. “Tell them that they’re foreign? I think they know.”

István appeared confused and opened his mouth as if to clarify. Then he realized that Eve was making a joke, and his face softened and he laughed and reached for her hand.

*

Janie covered attractions efficiently during her days alone. Instructed by a guidebook kept hidden from Eve, she ate goulash and strudel and bread filled with poppy seeds. She went to the Holocaust memorial and sent a picture to her mother, who responded immediately: How awful. She went to the expensive baths and the inexpensive baths, and wrote Amy an email in which she tried to capture the Ottoman grandeur of the pools, the Communist-era cafeteria, and the pile of construction debris in the middle of the women’s locker room, to which no one paid attention.

Each night, Eve made plans to go out with more friends than Janie had ever known her to possess: the abandoned roommates, customers of English-language bookstores, sturdy former classmates of István’s to whom, she advised, Janie should say nothing about having a girlfriend. Eve liked to sequester her friends for confidential gossip, her relentless questions allowing the interlocutors to unburden themselves. Janie wanted this for herself, the relief of being emptied of her secrets, which were more important than those of the roommates.

But Eve was not in the mood to provide this service to her. In the apartment, she retreated with István to their alcove bedroom. They had taped a sheet over the doorway—“for your privacy,” István said—as if that would prevent her from hearing them have sex. István said things to Eve in Hungarian, his voice thicker and older than when he spoke to Janie in English.

*

When the weekend arrived, they went to Visegrád, where there was a castle. As the train moved away from Budapest, the houses lining the tracks grew smaller and shabbier. Billboards endorsing right-wing politicians loomed close and disappeared as István translated the slogans. Eve, hunting in her bag for lipstick, tossed her passport and a handful of old receipts onto an empty seat. Janie picked up the passport before it slid onto the floor.

“That is a good passport,” István said, tapping the imperial red cover. “She can work anywhere in Europe, unless they do the Brexit. Do you have one?”

Janie shook her head. When they were children, Eve sometimes opened the sober desk drawer that contained their passports and laid them before Janie like playing cards: four blue ones and the fifth which she alone possessed, as a British citizen through her father. The red passport, she explained to Janie, entitled her to certain privileges. She could get a job in London when she grew up and stay there as long as she wanted. Moreover, if the Holocaust repeated itself in America, which they had been told was a definite possibility, she would have a place to go. Her innocuous English surname would allow her to cross the border. Janie’s, Klein, would certainly bring trouble.

Even on the train, Janie could easily picture the sunlight filtering through the sycamores outside and landing in golden splashes on the documents. She could not picture, at the time, anything worse than Eve traveling without her indefinitely.

At the last stop before theirs, a transit worker in a purple vest boarded and worked his way up the aisle, checking tickets. Eve produced her battered college ID. “Hold it like this,” she said. “With your thumb over the date.”

The transit worker barely looked at István or Eve. But he lingered over Janie, who proffered her ID tentatively and at an awkward angle. Janie wondered what would happen if she were apprehended for using the reduced fare pass. István looked at the card casually and said something in Hungarian that made the transit worker laugh. When he moved on, Janie asked him to translate.

“I said that you made a mistake because Americans don’t know how to use trains.” He spoke sternly, although surely he knew that the reduced-fare pass was Eve’s idea.

“Good thing we have men around to sort things out,” Eve said serenely. “Shit. What did I do with my passport?”

“I have it,” Janie said.

Eve snatched the red file. “Oh come on,” she said. “Don’t act like you have to take care of me.”

Janie said she wasn’t acting like that.

“I wouldn’t have lost it,” Eve said.

*

The French former roommates all studied business and accounting. Through events hosted for international students, they had acquired various pseudo-boyfriends, also studying business and accounting. Traveling into Pest to meet them (at a ruin bar, because the roommates loved them), Eve seemed especially satisfied with herself. Some of the roommates were younger than her, some of them thinner and prettier. All of them would have enjoyed living in sin with a grown man, a man who didn’t complain about his master’s program because he had a job. Only Eve had pulled that off.

With the roommates competing to appear clever and fun, Janie noticed how fixedly István gazed at Eve, and how reluctantly he turned to anyone else. In the warmth of his regard, Eve seemed to unfurl, her hair gaining luster and her lips growing pinker. Janie wondered if she herself had ever appeared this beautiful when she caught Amy looking at her across a party. Although they had been dating for three years, veterans compared to their friends, that still sometimes happened. Janie decided she was going to force Eve to talk to her, even if she had to do it in a ruin bar. As she settled on this decision, the loudest roommate, Camille, produced a baggie of cocaine. Eve clapped her hands like a child presented with cake. Everyone took turns going to the bathroom except Janie and István, who said he didn’t like his thinking to be interrupted.

Eve asked, “What important things are you thinking about right now?” A pseudo-boyfriend, Phillipe, laughed. István explained stiffly that it wasn’t about the particular moment but the way he lived his life in general. Sensing that he was offended, Eve bent over his chair to kiss his forehead, letting her loose sweater hang open in front of his face. Unlike Janie, she had heavy, serious breasts, breasts which demanded underwire bras with many hooks. Their mother said that Janie should urge Eve to take up Pilates, which would make things easier for her in the long run. Had their mother been at the bar, she would have been forced to recognize the power Eve’s body could exert, for István was smiling shyly up at her breasts. When it was Eve’s turn in the bathroom, he observed to Janie that they were very close for half-sisters.

“I really just think of her as my sister.”

“Oh.” Istvan nodded. “Yes, of course.”

“Is that how Eve talks about us? Half-sisters?”

“Well, I don’t know.” He sipped his beer carefully. “It is hard living with a stepfather, no?”

Janie said that Eve had been living with Janie’s father since she was eight.

“I’m sure he is very nice,” István said. “I have stepmother too. It is maybe different with women.”

Janie asked István if he had any siblings and he said four, two younger sisters and then another set of girls that were his father’s by his second wife. Divorce carried a significant stigma in Hungary, so his mother had been very much alone as she raised them. From a young age, István had found himself the man of the family, navigating environments with which neither of his parents had any experience, like the university system, and providing guidance to the older girls. Both of them were studying to be doctors, and although István saw his father on holidays, they refused to come along; they found it too hard to see those other girls, who had only ever lived with two parents.

“I’m sorry,” Janie said. She was embarrassed that Eve had complained about their perfectly functional family to a man with real problems.

István shook his head. His eyes flicked to the bartender, who was marching grimly towards the bathroom. “We are going to be ejected,” he said, getting up to settle the bill. “Do you have any cash?”

Janie gave him all the forints in her wallet. While he waited at the bar, Eve emerged from the bathroom and draped herself over his shoulder. Although he was still shaking his head, he slid a hand under her sweater to rest on her bare back. Already Janie missed being touched in public like that.

After the ejection, Camille hesitantly suggested moving to an acclaimed strip club which was unknown to most foreigners. The club was located underground, in a former bunker of Cold War significance. The men appeared studiously indifferent. Probably it was their idea.

“It’s not the trashy kind,” Phillipe assured Janie. “It’s more like performance art. Right, István?”

Grudgingly acknowledging that he had heard of the club, István said it would be hard to get there. “It is in completely different neighborhood.”

“I don’t mind a little walk,” said Eve, who, not having to worry about maintaining her grip on a pseudo-boyfriend, could contemplate the idea in perfect good cheer. She linked arms with Janie for the first time. It felt like an opportunity.

Camille led the way resolutely. Philippe, addressing István like a grandfather in decline, asked questions about the neighborhood’s history. Janie slowed her steps until she could hardly hear. Eve asked if she was tired.

“No,” Janie said. “I have to talk to you.”

“Janie, we’re out. We’re about to be in a literal strip club.”

Janie said they were always out.

“Yes, because I’m trying to show you the city where I live.” She let out a breath. “What is it? I know you haven’t been talking to Amy.”

Already the conversation was deviating from Janie’s vision. She thought she could shock Eve into sympathy, but her sister had already intuited the problem and failed to display even the nosy interest she extended to her friends. Still, Janie could not prevent herself from confirming that yes, the problem was Amy. Nor could she pause to wonder why, despite years of experience with Eve, she had imagined such a different scene. She had come to her sister for help and the words were already climbing out of her dry throat, into her mouth.

*

A month earlier their parents had hosted a graduation party, ostensibly in Janie’s honor but really for their own friends. No matter what Eve was doing with her life, they had successfully dragged one daughter from the swamp of adolescence to the firmer terrain of employed adulthood. Amy and Janie spent the afternoon scooping ice into the crystal buckets Janie’s mother had received on the occasion of her first marriage and pragmatically declined to discard. They didn’t mind; earlier, they had been looking on Facebook for one-bedroom sublets.

When the wine supply was dwindling towards the end, Janie’s father asked Amy to help him bring more bottles from the cellar. (“This part, obviously, I wasn’t there,” Janie said. “I’m just telling you what she told me.” Eve lit a cigarette.) He opened the refrigerator that kept the reds at the correct temperature and asked absently, in the manner of making small talk, if she had only ever dated women.

“Yes,” said Amy. She was wedged between the washing machine and the open door of the refrigerator. Though she was startled, she knew that Janie’s parents were prone to making comments, and she reminded herself that they had always been kind to her.

“Not like Janie,” he said, reaching around the door to put one and then two and three bottles into Amy’s arms. “She always had boyfriends in high school.”

Amy wondered if she could somehow maneuver herself out from behind the fridge, but that would involve either squeezing by Janie’s father or telling him explicitly to move away from her, which seemed dramatic. He took three more bottles out of the fridge and closed the door clumsily. Amy decided he was tipsy.

“After you,” said Janie’s father. Amy preceded him up the stairs. Midway up, something that felt like a hand grazed her back pocket. Amy stopped. The bottles in her arms clinked.

“Can you see?” he asked. He spoke so casually that Amy decided she must have been mistaken. But as soon as she resumed climbing it happened again, something skimming across her jeans. Amy stumbled. Janie’s father said, “Let me get the flashlight on my phone.”

“That’s okay.” Amy had done bystander intervention training and attended campus speak- outs on sexual harassment, but her learning now seemed abstract. She couldn’t remember what she was supposed to do. On the other side of the basement door, she heard the jangle of women’s voices. She breached the door and stumbled into the sudden brightness, blinking as the light dissolved the man who had perhaps pursued her up the stairs and reassembled him into the innocuous parent she knew.

“And then what?” said Eve.

“I mean, nothing.” The party wound down and Janie, believing that Amy was tired, reminded her that she could rest upstairs. But Amy didn’t rest. She replayed the afternoon’s events, shaping them into a story. She waited until later that night, when they were alone in the bed which—since they couldn’t get each other pregnant—Janie’s mother happily let them share. Only then did Amy reveal what she believed had happened.

“But what did Mom say?” Eve flicked her cigarette, launching the ash away from her boots with casual accuracy. She still did not seem shocked.

Janie felt that Eve wasn’t processing the situation. But neither had she, at first.

“I didn’t say anything to her.”

Eve raised her eyebrows.

“She didn’t know if it really felt like a hand. And he was acting completely normal. He would have to be—he would have to be a completely different person.”

Eve continued to say nothing, which was not her usual style. The silence prodded Janie forward, forcing her to admit that she had promised to have a conversation with her father, just to clear things up, but that she had not actually done so and that as a result Amy was no longer speaking to her. 

“Oh.” Eve arrived at the filter, which she crushed under her heel. “I get it.”

“What do you get?”

“You want me to say you did the right thing.”

Automatically, Janie said that was not what she wanted.

“I mean, it’s not that I love Amy so much—”

“What a surprise.”

“But I didn’t foresee you getting dumped because your father’s a lech. And I really didn’t foresee you spilling your fucking guts to me because you think I’m going to be okay with it.”

“Don’t fucking talk about him like that.” The swear squeaked out, reminding her infuriatingly of her childhood: whatever Eve did, she would do, too. They had grown up eating at the same table, enjoying the same privileges. Only in Eve’s absence did Janie’s father occasionally complain that he’d paid her entire college tuition and got no credit. And yet Eve had always acted like she could simply remove herself from the family through the power of her own scorn.

“Janie, he hits on everyone.”

Janie said that he did not.

“You know what Mom said to me once? We were at his literal birthday party, and he was falling all over that woman—who’s the one from business school who keeps horses?”

“Marianne.”

“Yeah, Marianne. Anyway, he was practically looking down her shirt, it was so obvious Mom couldn’t ignore it, and she just shrugged and said, I married a charming man.”

Eve didn’t just think she could remove herself, Janie realized. With very little effort, Eve could marry István, wriggle out of holidays, and ask after your father on the phone.

“So,” Eve prompted, not completely unkindly. “What’s the situation now?”

“I don’t know. We really need to find an apartment this month.”

“She’s breaking up with you?”

“She’s not breaking up. She’s just not talking to me at the moment.”

“I would break up with you, if I was her,” Eve said.

*

When they caught up with the others, the roommates were huddled by the steps leading down to the club, shuffling out their IDs.

“Men only,” said one of the bouncers, shaking his head.

Camille laughed. “Seriously?

“The girls don’t like it. Men only.”

“Fine.” Annoyed but not seriously so, Camille turned to leave. The boyfriends did not follow. They were conferring, and through Phillipe they announced that they were going to go in—just for a little while, to see what it was like.

“You’re actually going without us?” Camille said. Phillipe mouthed something unintelligible. “Guys, that’s gross.”

“I am not going,” István said. Camille didn’t appear to care.

“Okay,” said Eve, addressing the bouncer. “What about the men and me?”

“Men and you,” said the bouncer, considering. The cold air had made Eve’s face paler and her pink cheeks more striking. Her black hair, blown out earlier, was just beginning to curl. When Eve looked so messily beautiful, Janie could hardly believe they were related.

“I won’t cause any trouble,” she said, clasping her hands meekly. “You’ll hardly know I’m there.”

“What the fuck,” Camille said. The bouncer hesitated. Then he waved Eve in.

Outside, in the unknown neighborhood, the remaining women were dependent on István, who led them to a bar that was authentic in the wrong way. If the night was to be salvaged and the pseudo-boyfriends faced in the morning, the episode needed to be laundered into a fun anecdote. No one seemed capable of the verbal effort.

István said, “Eve is safe. They don’t like women because they come just to look. They don’t want to pay.” Janie realized her mouth must be set in the same fixed way as Camille’s. She was not worried about Eve’s safety. She raised her eyebrows at István, causing him a moment of visible panic. He said, “Most women.”

Janie announced that she was going home.

“Now?” István glanced toward the club, toward Eve. “How will you find the way?”

“I have data,” Janie lied. She didn’t know where the tram was, and she wished that István would offer to take her. But he knew Eve well, knew that she would want him to wait for her, at anyone’s expense.

On the tram, there was only one shaggy man sleeping and two old women whose stiff postures expressed chagrin at having to resort to public transit so late. Janie sprawled across two seats. She opened her camera roll and flicked through her recent photos, which seemed studied and tense. She looked through her texts with Amy and her texts with Eve and her spam emails. She wished she had data. She wished she could stop feeling bad for herself. She wished she could tell Eve she was being a total cunt, to use the word as their mother occasionally did, without any feminist misgivings diluting her tone.

Just over the river, at the stop by the Széchenyi Baths, a transit worker boarded the tram.

Watching him chat with the old ladies, Janie felt entrapped. She extracted her student ID and practiced the nonchalant placement of her thumb over the expiration date.

When the transit worker finally reached her, he snatched the ID from her hand so quickly she couldn’t even consider tugging it back. Shaking his head, he said something reproving in Hungarian.

“I’m really sorry. I only speak English.”

“You are not student,” the transit worker said, widening his stance as the tram hit a bump.

Janie jostled in her seat.

“I am a student,” she said slowly. “That date is when they gave me the ID.”

“No,” said the worker. “No, no. Pay fine.”

“I don’t want to pay a fine.” Indignation came so easily that Janie almost forgot she was lying. “I’m a student.”

“Not valid,” said the transit worker, closing his hand around the card. “Pay fine.”

“I’m not going to pay a fine,” Janie said, summoning the contemptuous voice her father used when a flight was canceled and he wanted the maximum number of points. She would run off the train at the next stop.

“Okay.” He shrugged agreeably. “I call police. We arrest.” He called out to the tram driver, who immediately slowed. One of the old women turned and made a displeased clucking noise, looking not at the transit worker but at Janie.

“Ten thousand forint,” said the transit worker. About thirty dollars. Janie opened her wallet and remembered she had given her cash to István.

“I don’t have ten thousand,” she said triumphantly, taking out the loose change from the bottom of her wallet. He was hardly going to follow her to an ATM.

“Dollars,” said the transit worker, pointing at the wallet. Janie looked down and saw she had inadvertently revealed the sheaf of American bills her father had handed her at the airport.

“Fine.” She withdrew forty dollars, which would more than cover the fine. The transit worker folded them messily into his pocket but kept his hand outstretched. He was demanding a bribe. She glanced at the tram door and the transit worker shifted so that he blocked it. The other passengers, who surely could see what was happening, appeared not surprised or outraged but merely bored. The transit worker beckoned with his hand.

Janie handed over two more twenties and tried to close her wallet, but the worker knew there was more and remained politely but implacably blocking the door. Janie’s father always gave her money when she traveled alone, delivering a stack of twenties with a lecture on the importance of carrying cash. From the uniform crispness of the bills, which she could feel as she handed them one by one to the transit worker, she knew that her father got them directly from the bank. Only when her wallet was empty did the transit worker call out to the driver, who opened the door.

“This isn’t my stop,” Janie said.

“Buy new pass,” the transit worker said, tucking the dollars into his purple vest. “Goodnight.”

Janie stepped unsteadily from the tram. One of the women rose heavily and followed her, assisted on the step by the transit worker. The tram heaved off. In its absence, only the Gothic sconces outside the baths offered weak light.

Janie fished for her phone before remembering she had no data. She would have to follow the tracks until she saw Eve’s street. The old woman walked confidently in the other direction. As she passed Janie, she veered unnecessarily close and murmured, “Slut.” Her handbag, leather and substantial, slapped against Janie’s elbow. Janie looked down at her jeans and wrinkled T-shirt. It must have been the best, most potent English word the woman could summon.

*

She did not expect to find her sister sitting on the building’s dirty steps, intermittently illuminated by the motion-sensing light. Eve was eating a biscuit, the kind that came individually wrapped with cappuccinos. Briefly, Janie imagined Eve chastising István for allowing her sister to leave alone, hailing a cab to drive up and down nearby streets, searching.

“Were you looking for me?”

But no, Eve was equally surprised to see her. She had gotten bored with the boys, who acted like meatheads in the strip club, and only realized after wandering home that she was missing her key. Eve brushed crumbs off her coat, and a street cat materialized instantly to collect them. “Why are you all by yourself?”

“What was I supposed to do?” Janie pointed out that she had been abandoned.

“Not everything is about you.” Eve had needed to escape István and his ceaseless instructions. It was her own fault, she admitted, because she used to think it was cute when he told her what to do. She spoke unhurriedly, as if Janie had asked for a comprehensive account of her problems. The cat ventured forward and Eve put out a hand. Janie stomped her foot, sending him skittering out of the light.

“They have diseases,” Janie said.

Eve said that maybe Janie ought to date István. Janie said that he certainly deserved a nicer girlfriend, the way Eve walked all over him.

“Honestly, you’re being a huge brat,” Janie said. “I came here to talk to you.”

“Oh, I’m the brat? I’m a bad girlfriend? Amy got groped by—” Eve didn’t say who had groped Amy. The cat returned, ignoring them in the search for remaining crumbs. “She was harassed in our own house. And you’re mad at me because I’m telling you that if you want her to stay with you, you have to do something about it.”

Eve was not listening, Janie said. She was trying to explain that Amy had come to believe an impossible thing.

Having exhausted the offering, the cat rubbed its head along Eve’s ankle. Eve brushed its head, then crumbled the remainder of the biscuit and extended her hand. “So you had to talk to me because nothing happened.”

Janie felt that she was being deliberately misunderstood, but she couldn’t say exactly how.

“Seriously.” The cat nosed around Eve’s hand. Eve looked at Janie. “Did you really come here to tell me nothing happened?”

Janie began to speak, to say she didn’t know what. Then Eve snatched her hand from the cat. “Did it bite you?”

“Just a little nip,” Eve said. “It didn’t break the skin.”

“They literally have rabies.” Janie sat down and examined Eve’s forearm, seeded like her own with ineradicable dark hairs. No scratch was visible yet, but she thought they should go to the hospital.

Eve said that István had made her paranoid, that people sat in cafés with street cats in their laps. She said, “I thought you wanted to talk. Now we’re talking.”

“I do want to talk, but you’re—”

“There is no way Amy will stay with you if you don’t listen to her.”

Janie put down her sister’s arm. She had hoped to be understood by the lazy, prurient Eve, not the sister who now fixed her with a dissecting regard, who was willing to remake her own life, to strike out again and again, when her expectations were not met. Even had she been disposed to, Eve couldn’t deliver the comfort Janie wanted, only guide her toward that free and lonely territory where she lived, ungoverned. Janie did not want to join her there. She didn’t want to think about a future without Amy, but she already knew how it might unfold. Soon, she would be arranging first dates at bars with four or more stars on Google Reviews.

“What am I supposed to do?” Janie said. “They’re my parents.”

Eve looked away and put an arm around Janie, an uncomfortable pose familiar mostly from photos. “They are your parents.”

They sat quietly in the concrete night. Eve’s phone vibrated. She conceded that Janie should call István regarding their whereabouts and possibly the cat bite.

In the coming weeks and months, Janie would try not to remember the night too well. Her mind recoiled from her own insufficiency, what Eve only barely refrained from calling cowardice, until only fragments of the conversation remained. Eventually the trip receded into the ocean of things she had forgotten, breaching her thoughts only occasionally while she flirted with a woman who knew nothing of Amy, or when she sat on the subway, staring at a stranger’s shoes. In these instances, although she knew the moment only accrued significance in hindsight, Janie recalled that when she pulled up his contact that night on the steps (no surname, just István, Budapest), she saw the future piling up before her. The phone rang, the foreign pattern of trills and silences drawing her into the future, and she felt she had already watched Eve tire of István and return home. She’d helped their mother rustle up a job for Eve. She had become familiar with the kind of arrogant, striving man her sister perversely favored in New York, and assured her own more suitable girlfriends that they would come to love her sister. She’d weathered the lapses in communication that could mushroom into months for no reason at all, and coaxed Eve into anchoring one corner of the chuppah at her wedding. She’d called after her father’s cancer diagnosis, demanded and received Eve’s help shuttling him between specialists. She’d suppressed the urge to ask for any more explicit reassurance, and Eve never offered.

The phone stopped ringing and the motion-sensing light switched off, drenching them in darkness. Jane heard a cough, and István announced himself on the other end of the line.