RAIN

There were things my sister told me before she left, and there were things she didn't tell me. In our family, secrets were like cracks in the walls of an old house. You try to plaster them over, but they're so deep in the foundation, it's just a matter of time before they pop up again. My dad was a secret like that for a long time. I didn't even know his name until I heard my mother screaming at him on the phone one night, in her native Spanish, that it was time to pay her the child support he had promised before he left.

I rocked in the corner the whole time, crying, begging silently for her to hang up. For the screaming to stop. Amalia left. She went out the window. She didn't come back until very late at night, and by then my mother had lit a candle in the living room so we could pray for her. Amalia went straight to her room when she came home, and my mother said, "Acuéstate. Es tarde." Go to bed. It's late. I did as I was told, and we never mentioned my father again.

His name is Raul, by the way.

And he never sent the money.

One of the things my sister told me was that I could choose to spend my life angry at a man, or I could choose not to care. Men, after all, come and go, and they are always replaceable. When she said that to me, one day after school when I was crying because Mom seemed so sad, I thought that what she meant was that men don't matter, but sisters do. Mothers and daughters do. We do. Amalia and I, we matter.

That's what I thought, anyway, when I was seven and she was ten, and she made me an ice-cream sundae in the kitchen before Mom got home from her job at the landscaping company. But if we had really mattered to each other—if I had really mattered to Amalia—wouldn't she have come back for me by now?

It's like she died. That's how I feel about her. Whenever she calls these days, which is only about once every other month, and always when she knows Mom will be at work so she won't have to talk to her, I feel this shock when I hear her voice. It's like I have to remind myself: Oh, that's right. She's not dead.

When you have an older sibling like that, someone you really look up to, someone you thought would be with you and protect you, shelter you from the cracks in the walls, and they disappear... part of you goes with them. Part of you dies, too.

Someday, when I have kids of my own, I'll make sure they never know what this is like. They'll be best friends, and they'll take care of each other. I can feel that in my bones.

But that's not really why I'm writing this down.

I'm writing this down, I'm making this record of it now, because in case anything happens to me—to us, to John and me—I want there to be a record of the things Amalia told me, and the things she didn't.

She told me about the three doors. I don't know how she knew about them. I don't know who first took her down there. But she warned me to stay away from them. This was right before she left. She was 16, and something had clearly shifted inside of her. It was weird. One minute, she was fine. She was starring in the school play, she was happy, getting good grades.

The next thing I knew, she was barely sleeping. When she told me about the doors, it was the middle of the night. She had come into my room, pacing, anxious. She woke me up, going on about the boiler room, the science lab. I thought she had lost her mind.

I was thirteen then, still in junior high. I didn't know what she was talking about. I didn't know what a boiler room was.

I don't think I've ever been so scared.

She made me promise to stay away. Two weeks later, school let out. She told Mom she was going to a concert with this guy. I only met him once, but he was clearly just some dude she'd picked up at the mall or something. He stared at her like she was the love of his life, and she didn't even look at him. I honestly think she had chosen him because he had a car.

She drove away on a Saturday morning at nine a.m. She never came back.

For the first year of high school, I would close my eyes whenever I walked past the door to the boiler room, like it was haunted. I studied hard and kept my head down. I did everything Amalia had told me to.

And then sophomore year, I met John, whose parents had just moved to town. It's funny, he wasn't even sixteen yet, but he carried himself like a man. Like he knew exactly who he was, and what power he deserved. I had never met anyone like that. I started to think about him more and more, and my sister's warnings, both about the doors and about men, started to fade.

I told John about the doors during study hall on a Wednesday. That afternoon, we went down for the first time.

I think a lot about that night when Amalia came into my room. I try to remember what she said, the exact words. "The door on the left takes you back," I remember her saying. "Back to what?" I asked, but she had already moved on.

"The door in the middle shows you another life."

I think I was crying by then, scared that she was losing her mind.

"The door on the right is closed." I remember this part perfectly—she said it was closed. But then she shook her head, like she was trying to get the thought straight.

She left my room after that and never mentioned the doors again.

But now we get to the part she didn't tell me.

I don't know if it was because she was protecting me, or because she simply didn't know, but the one thing she never talked about was the train. She never told me what could happen when the train came into town. She never told me about the split second when it passed an invisible threshold a few hundred feet from the station. She never told me that when that happens, everything in the world can disappear.

When the train comes into town, it turns out, the tracks reveal secrets of their own.