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hoping, on my birthday and on his, at Christmastime, anytime I saw a little blue car drive by, that he would walk out of the ether and back into my life. I tried convincing myself that those hours in the car were the last we’d ever spend together and that somehow, some way, we’d had a simple, good time. That it was a normal and amicable parting.
    We were like brothers, I told myself, who lived in different countries, separated only by busy lives and thousands of miles. But Danny haunted me. I should’ve known that he would. I’d always believed his lies more easily than I believed my own.
    During the years he was gone, rumors about him trickled under my door like the shadows of passersby. I heard he was clean, and I tried not to hope. I heard that he was alive but rotting from the inside out in a Brooklyn shooting gallery. I heard more than once that he’d died: suicide, murder, OD. When I heard these things, I tried not to despair. When I visited our parents, I told them nothing. I refused to believe anything about him. I couldn’t picture any scenario the rumors described. I had a hard time, in fact, picturing him any way at all. I couldn’t see his life beyond that night in the car.
    In my imagination, Danny’s life seemed to stop after his car turned the corner. I hoped it was a failure on my part to let go of him and not that, in my heart somewhere, I knew he had no future. I felt as if that Escort had dropped off the edge of the Earth. Or maybe I just felt Danny had left my life like he had come into it that night, high, lonely, and desperate, lost in some eternal present where the night never ended and tomorrow never came. It seemed, in the depths of his addiction, that the never-ending night was what he both wanted and feared the most.
    Then, one warm October night, three years and six months after I last saw him, I walked out of that same apartment building and there he stood on the sidewalk. He seemed shocked to see me. We were both shocked.
    He pointed at the intercom beside me. “There are no names. I couldn’t remember which apartment was yours.”
    “Three years,” I said. “It’s a long time to remember your brother’s address. You also forgot the phone number. Mom and Dad’s, too?”
    He looked so different from the last time I’d seen him. No longer bloated and pimpled from heroin, no longer pale from the nocturnal, nomadic existence it commanded, he looked to me like he always should have. Like a six-foot, deep-chested, wide-shouldered version of the tough, funny, Irish kid I knew when we were boys. He looked like a fit and sturdy young man. Clean and well fed, rested, happy.
    Danny wore a black suit jacket over a dark green T-shirt, a new pair of jeans and black motorcycle boots. Gone was the white T-shirt stained with blood, vomit, and iced tea. Gone were the dirty jeans with the black scorch marks from his spoons. His brown hair was no longer sweaty and filthy, clinging in clumps to his forehead. It was cut short and clean, parted in the middle and gelled at the sides. His blue eyes were clear. He looked healthier than I had ever seen him.
    My relief at seeing him alive and breathing nearly knocked me on my ass. Seeing him looking that good made me ecstatic. I wanted to leap down the stairs and crush him in a hug, but I held back. I couldn’t make it too easy for him. Easy had never done Danny any good, and I wanted to hang on to my pride for a few more seconds. I looked up and down the block, but there was no sign of the Escort.
    He looked up the stairs at me from his spot on the sidewalk. “I owe you a beer.”
    It took me a minute to recall what he was referring to; I was surprised he remembered anything about that night. “You owe me more than that.”
    “I know, Kev,” Danny said. He opened his arms. “That’s what I’m here to talk about. I got a lot to make up for. I’m back and I’m staying this time.”
    “I’ve heard that before,” I said. “It’s gonna be a long