And I am here on the night before my wedding, not prostrating over the wheel of my rental car praying for an underworldly intercession, but instead waiting patiently in the passenger seat of my sister’s Prius, practicing the O my mouth will make when she drags me into the party.

          In that different world, my rehearsal dinner party is thrown by my parents, who are still together, my father never having remarried, at the ranch my sister and I grew up on, which is still in our family. Behind the house, horses’ necks stick out above wooden fences bloomed with lichen, none of them having been put down, and wisteria, purple and pendulous, planted by my mom and tended to by my sister, before one died and the other stopped speaking to me, hangs down from the latticed arch, because the flowers haven’t been ripped out by developers my dad sold the ranch to.

          In the real world, I pick up my head and undo my seat belt and walk slowly to the front door of what used to be our family’s ranch, where a general contractor answers the door and warily assents to my request to take a peek inside.

          In a different world, my sister brings me into my wedding rehearsal on her arm to an audience of our entire family. She glides up the stairs and breaks into a performance of “I Won’t Say I’m in Love,” her red hair piled on top of her head and the long skirt of her maid of honor dress clipped toga-like over her shoulder. My cousins emerge as her chorus, fanning their forearms in unison, and when they start shoo-dooping, my mother claps and cries and looks for me in the crowd, because in that world my mom is still here.

          In the real world, the ranch’s staircase has been stripped of its treads and risers. Empty space waits between wooden frames that could support no one’s weight, let alone an entire family’s.

          But in a different world, after my sister’s performance, we eat my great-grandma’s lasagna, because my mom didn’t get bucked from her horse and die before teaching me how to make the sauce, and my sister didn’t descend slowly into a vegan cult to heal our family’s karmic entanglement with the animal kingdom and move to Claremont to serve fake-meat gyros in a restaurant owned by her Supreme Master. In that world, my sister and I eat our wedding-eve lasagna on the Hercules plates we were obsessed with as children, the ones we were only allowed to use on Friday nights when my parents had date night downstairs in the living room and we were sent to the rec room with one cup of root beer and one plate of popcorn each. There, we metered out sips of heady sarsaparilla and split every kernel in two, my sister cracking the sharp petals under her molars and me sucking on the pillowy tops, and watched Hercules two, three, four times in a row, lulled into sleep by the soundtrack, coming slowly and subconsciously and incorrectly to believe that love would always be enough.

          In the real world, I follow the contractor to the kitchen and stare at the empty walls. The cast-iron stove slouched in a corner is the only thing I recognize. I am so unresponsive to inquiry that the contractor goes back out to my rental car and knocks on the window and asks my future husband to come help me out.

          In a different world, his is not the only face I think of when I think of family.

          And in that world, after the lasagna, my future husband and I kiss good night and separate. I sleep one last time in the room I shared with my sister. Under honeyed wooden beams, the two of us tucked under flowered sheets in twin beds turned at right angles to each other, we’re close enough to reach out and comfort each other if a raging river Styx or bucking horse thunders through our dreams. But in that world, they don’t, so we sleep through the night and wake up dewy and brush our teeth in the bumblebee-themed double vanity bathroom and walk downstairs so we can get me married.

          In the real world, I collapse into my future husband’s arms, and he holds me for 5, 10, 20 minutes. When I am once again able to form words, I give him an address in Claremont I’ve had memorized for months. It’s a 32-hour drive. He asks if I’m sure. I think of the wisteria, of the stairs, of the stove. Things fall apart all the time. I think of Meg dying in Hercules and the journey Hercules makes to pluck her soul from the Underworld with his own two hands. I tell my future husband that I can imagine many worlds and that I marry him in most of them, but that in none of them can I get married without my sister. He squeezes my hand so hard my bones move. Maybe we’ll get married in a couple of days by the ocean, then, he says. Either way, it’s not the end of the world.