Adapted from Fade Out, a Kindle single that can be purchased here.

It is true that one day my brother lived in Santa Cruz and the next he took off for Mexico without telling anyone. But he didn’t disappear as sharply as I like to say he did. I felt like I was losing him before that. I remember saying those exact words to my mom on the phone. “We’re going to lose him,” I told her. It was less of a warning and more of a fact. It’s not that I was prescient about the move to Mexico or anything like that. What I meant was more along the lines of “We are going to lose him to whatever place he’s in that’s making him so angry, listless, and far away from the person he seemed to be not so long ago.”

In 2012, at the age of 33, Jarrett Schaefer took off from Santa Cruz, Calif., without telling anyone he was moving, and abandoned his career, his family, and his life. And his was no ordinary life. In the span of five years, while I patiently pursued a career on the fringes of the magazine world, he’d shot to success as a filmmaker and achieved a minor level of celebrity in Hollywood. The first movie he’d written and directed had won awards and attention at the Sundance Film Festival and gotten respectable reviews in wide release some months later. The movie, Chapter 27, chronicled the three days Mark David Chapman spent in New York before killing John Lennon, and starred future Oscar winner Jared Leto as Chapman.

Now he was somewhere in Mexico. Maybe. I didn’t have any more information than that.

My brother is younger than me, but only by 15 months. He was my first friend, and I was his. There’s a picture of us when we’re little in which I’m painting him green. I’m holding up the brush gleefully, and he looks really happy about it.

We grew up in Grapevine, Texas. When we started school, my mom went back to work full-time as a Spanish teacher, and my dad was a business manager for a company in nearby Dallas. So my brother and I were by ourselves in the afternoons. We’d microwave Bagel Bites, and he’d watch Designing Women with me or I’d watch Star Trek with him. Most Friday nights, we’d go to the movies as a family, sort of. My parents would see a movie for grown-ups, and we’d see one for kids. On Saturdays, we’d play Nintendo in his room or go outside to re-create the summer Olympics or the pioneer days.

I never had to search for someone who thought I was rad no matter what. My brother was always there. In middle school, he’d even dumped a boyfriend of mine for me—on the phone—because I was too much of an asshole to do it myself. “Kayleen wants to break up with you,” he told the poor guy when he called. “I’m serious, bro.”

He was my favorite person. If my brother suggested I listen to certain music, I did. He introduced me to the Beastie Boys, Radiohead, and Biggie Smalls.

It never occurred to me to not be friends with my brother. I’m sure when a lot of siblings are freed from having to hang out with each other—when they get a car or go to college—they never look back. But even as we got our first bursts of independence, we stayed together.

I was proud to be his sister; it was as much as part of my identity as my name, and I think he felt the same way. In high school, I helped him with the first film he made, at age 16, Jonah and the Snake Oil Salesman, a movie I don’t remember much from except that there was a scene in which a character gets shot while sitting on the tailgate of his truck while strumming a guitar.

About a year after Sundance, in March 2008, the company that bought the movie released it in about 10 theaters. That’s a bigger reach than many people get, but it wasn’t what my brother had hoped for. He never said he was disappointed, and I didn’t ask, because that seemed like a dick thing to do. But it felt like he was frustrated that the movie wasn’t being seen the way he’d wanted or intended it to be, or not being seen at all.

He said that J.D. Salinger and the Beatles had always made him feel less alone, and he wanted to write about how someone could be inspired to kill anyone as a result of their work. There was plenty of critical praise. But in general, my brother (like me) always hears the bad stuff the loudest—and it was out there, especially in an online boycott of the film. He didn’t cold-shoulder the negativity like I thought he should have.

The few years after Chapter 27 was released are some that I clump in a big, shoved-aside place of not knowing what the fuck was going on with my brother or what to do about it. I don’t have a lot of distinct memories from then, just a general feeling of each visit to Santa Cruz being worse than the last. What he did there was a mystery.

He became more prickly and bitter than I had ever known him to be. Often, he’d seethe and shout and say things so terrible that I couldn’t hold them in my mind for more than a minute. Sort of like how I always close my eyes at some point during a horror movie. He didn’t usually direct these things at me, but sometimes he did, and all we did was struggle with each other.

My brother has always been extremely committed to whatever he was doing, and for now, this was it. Just because I thought he was letting himself get lost didn’t mean I got to relocate him. Whenever I’d question if he was writing, or ask if he’d thought about moving back to L.A., he’d act like I was a jerk for judging what he was choosing to do now. I’m sure the expression on my face whenever I was there toggled between skeptical and sneering.

I was always searching for a good reason for him being so angry and unknowable, anything that would help explain what was going on, but couldn’t find a clear one. I wish I’d been able to break everything down better for both of us back then. What I really wanted to say was, “I’m scared of what’s happening,” or to ask if he needed help in a way that didn’t make it seem like I was doing it from someplace up high where I didn’t need help, too.

Instead, I’d ask, “Are you okay?”

He’d respond, “Are you okay?”

The last time I saw him there was about a month before he moved to Mexico. It was dark when we said goodbye, and I remember the outline of him as he leaned in the doorway. I thought that might be the last time I saw him there, and it was.

Jared Leto wrote back in 30 minutes. I’d sent him an e-mail early one morning last June telling him Jarrett was somewhere in Mexico and asking to talk with him about what I might not have known about my brother’s experience on Chapter 27.

I wasn’t sure he’d respond, and I definitely didn’t expect him to do so quickly.

He wrote:

Hi Kayleen let’s jump on a quick call to talk.

The Jared I got to know during Chapter 27 was always earnest and thoughtful, but I’d forgotten just how intense he is until he was on the phone. He has a way of talking that suggests that, of the million conversations going on right now, he’s having the most important one.

He said he understood what I was feeling, from his own experience. “It’s tough to go through this,” he said. “I’ve learned how it is to have someone disappear and not be able to control that, and to have that real fear of losing someone forever.” I felt water in my eyes when he said that. I swallowed.

“We’re going to go to Mexico to try to find him,” I said. “But we’re not sure what city he’s in. The last I knew, he was in Mazatlán,” I told him this mostly because I wanted to make it clear that I was doing something to locate Jarrett and wasn’t just letting my brother go.

The more we talked, and the more positive he said I should be, the bleaker I felt. I was thinking that I used to know pretty much what my brother did every day, and now I didn’t even know where he lived.

“Did you ever talk to Jarrett about the movie?” I asked, both because I wanted to know and to change the direction of the conversation. “I never really knew how he felt about it after it was done. Was he not pleased with it?”

“I didn’t talk to him after the film came out,” Jared said, “but it was a film that was very polarizing. There were a lot of problems on the shoot itself, and being a first-time director with budget constraints and other issues, that was probably really challenging. I know he had some frustrations about the process, and I think he acknowledged that, that it was a frustrating process.”

Jared said he’d write Jarrett and see if he’d tell him anything about his life. “You’ve got to have hope, and wonderful things can happen,” he said. “I will send him a note.”

A few days after we talked, Jared forwarded me Jarrett’s response. Part of it said:

Estoy Yann Martel-ing en Mazatlan, Mehico. Muy bonito.

I smiled. He was making reference to Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, in which the shipwrecked titular character spends 227 days in a lifeboat, lost at sea with a Bengal tiger. I thought it meant he was having some kind of primal adventure.

My mom and I had talked about hiring a private detective to help find Jarrett, and now that I knew for sure he was in Mazatlán, I started trying to do just that. One firm told me the job was too big; another said it was too small. Finally, one company representative put me in touch with someone he said the firm “used for field work in investigations.” I guess he wasn’t an actual detective, but that’s what my mom and I called him anyway. He e-mailed me in English but spoke on the phone in Spanish to my mom, and together we filled him in on Jarrett’s physical description and when we were planning to come, around the time of Jarrett’s birthday.

A woman named Monica helped with the search, and finally, she found him near this hotel. She had recognized his face from the pictures I sent. I couldn’t believe she had seen my brother, and it was so strange to me that she had been so near to him. I saw the hotel for the first time when the detective e-mailed me pictures of it.

He wrote, “The hotel is in a quiet area, but it does not look good.”

Our flight to Mazatlán was on a Tuesday morning in July, in a small plane that was only half full. I wondered about Jarrett’s trip there. I assumed he’d taken a bus from Santa Cruz. Customs agents checked our passports more times than seemed necessary; I wonder if the same thing had happened to him. What had he been thinking about as he went?

It was brutally hot when we landed; my pants felt 10 times heavier than they had in the U.S. I had learned a little about Mazatlán. There was a beach, and everyone I had asked said it was a safe town, particularly if we stayed in the tourist area where our hotel was. The area was called the Golden Zone, which I thought sounded pleasant and calm.

The morning of Jarrett’s birthday, we took a cab to a grocery store a few blocks from his hotel (groceries were as good a present as anything else), and my mom asked too many questions about what kind of tortillas we should get. We’d decided that we’d just say “happy birthday” and then, if he didn’t want us to stay, we would go. I was pretty sure this was good-bye.

We started walking on the side of the busy road his hotel was on, carrying the groceries. My mom said, “We’re just like the Mexicans,” and I laughed, and the two of us kept going with our about-to-break plastic bags full of cans of tuna and boxes of Pop-Tarts. Every step we took was toward something that was probably going to turn out badly.

When we got to the hotel, we went to the office and said we were Jarrett’s mom and sister, and was he around? He wasn’t, but a guy named Juan Ramon, who said he was a friend of my brother’s, volunteered to take the groceries up to his room. We followed him upstairs. It was just a second, only enough time for Juan Ramon to throw the bags in, but the scent in the room was my brother’s. Any space he’d ever been in developed it.

Juan Ramon shut the door and looked at us.

“You’re his hermana?” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“You look like him,” he said.

“I know,” I said.

We waited downstairs, standing in front of the hotel like we’d locked ourselves out of our room, and hoped he’d be back soon. After about half an hour, we saw him walking toward us. He was a little thinner and a lot tanner than I remembered, but it was him. As soon as he was close enough to hear us, we said, “Happy birthday.”

He didn’t respond.

“Okay, we’re going to go,” I said in a terse voice.

He grabbed my mom’s hand.

“Please don’t go,” he said.

Kayleen Schaefer writes for Vogue, New York, The New York Times, ELLE, The New Yorker, Lucky, ESPN The Magazine, BuzzFeed, and many other publications. She is a contributing editor at Details. You can follow her on Twitter @kayleener or on kayleenschaefer.com.

You can buy Fade Out on Amazon.

Image via AP