The Dragon at the Bottom of the Sea

The bus from San Jose takes forever, but I don’t care. I’m not thinking about much and my brother isn’t talking much. Stepping off at the stop in this Costa Rican beach town, Tom and I walk with our tall backpacks down the dusty yellow road toward the center of Tamarindo. Passing a tall sign for a hotel named after the town, he says, “Hey look: Tom-Marin-Do.” His name and mine. He smiles, pleased with his observation. I beam at him, at his odd cleverness and more than that, because it feels like for a moment he has come near to me.

We are pausing in Costa Rica before working our way down to Panama for Christmas. I plan to linger here with Tom for several weeks before joining our father and sisters. Because someone needs to spend some time with Tom, and I am the one who can. I’m single, with a seasonal job. And he trusts me. I am one of two big sisters who have seen everything he has seen.

The road is lined with concrete buildings and restaurant patios. It ends in a roundabout with a park bench in the middle, an entrance to the beach at our right, a side street to our left, and an open-fronted, thatch-roofed bar directly in front of us where a good-looking young Rasta man lounges by the door.

Not far down the side street we find a cheap backpackers’ motel, a crumbling one-story compound recommended in our Lonely Planet guide. We get a dark, airless room with two small mattresses on springs, a couple of low tables, and an electric fan. Old sheets cover the window, which looks out on the street and across the blazing day toward more dingy concrete buildings. “This is perfect,” I tell him. All the other rooms are taken by young surfers and travelers, the kind that spend six months wandering through five countries. Our kind, I tell myself. I take comfort these days in the things I tell myself.

It is 2002. Tom is a good-looking kid, with a square jaw, a wide smile, and almond-shaped eyes that are a kind of hazel that shifts in concentric rings from blue to green to yellow to orange to brown. I like to say he has rainbow eyes.

Tom is delightful in a sharp-witted way. He talks about Picasso, Conrad, Bruce Lee. In recent years he has done things like make $20,000 day-trading on the Internet. I joke about how we’ll spend his money when he’s a millionaire. A lean, strong 24-year-old, he climbs mountains too, and less than a year ago he scaled the icy Alaskan crag known as the Moose’s Tooth. We are from Alaska, so this is a point of pride for me.

I like to tell people these things, but really I don’t care what Tom does as long as he’s Tom. He is more like me than either of our two sisters. By that I mean the way he thinks—he’s as analytical as he is intuitive. As teenagers the two of us spent untold hours playing computer games together. A couple of years ago, watching us finish each other’s sentences while deciphering the instructions for a GPS device, a friend made the comment that we had the same brain.

But we don’t. Unlike me, he seems to be fearless. I’m hypersensitive, easily overwhelmed. When I feel strong emotions I go numb. And for the past few years, winter’s darkness has been shutting me down. I have a lot of feelings about the brain, most of which I can’t articulate. What I know about the brain is not information I remember in a way that lends itself to sharing: it is remembered in my body, and when it comes to the surface it does not come in words. It takes me back to our mother’s house, where we took care of each other and escaped together into...