by Lois Duncan
Gordon stared at me, incredulous—more startled, I think, by my lack of emotion than by the words themselves. I stared back at him, surprised myself by the fact that I could let the whole thing go so easily when it had once meant so much.
But I was another person now. I had nothing to invest in Gordon. Everything within me was channeled toward Lia.
I’d like to be able to explain what it was like for me during that time. I wish I could put it into writing, that strange feeling of being consumed and enveloped by another being. But I’m not my father’s blood daughter, as Megan is. I don’t have his gift with words.
Maybe I could say that it was a bit like falling in love. When I first started going with Gordon, he was all I could think about. I got up in the morning with his name on my lips—“Gordon—Gordon—today I’ll see Gordon!”—and I fell asleep at night with his face superimposed upon the inside of my closed lids. Now it was Lia’s face—my own face—that filled my consciousness. What I was experiencing was, in a way, like falling in love with myself.
What was I thinking and feeling last November on those long evenings when I sat here with Lia, my sister? I can remember the things that were said, but I can’t remember our voices. I can remember the fact of her presence—the curve of her lips, the tilt of her head, the stillness of her. But did I see her with my eyes or with my mind? Was she, in truth, there by the window, or was the sight of her an illusion, something I saw because I wanted so desperately to see it?
I ask this now, because as I’m thinking back, I believe that there were times in my room when the lights were not on. But still, I saw her.
“Tell me,” I said, “about our mother.”
“She was beautiful,” Lia said. “Very slender, with long black hair and quiet eyes. And she never smiled.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because the world was cruel to her,” Lia said, and she told me the story, making it far away and sad like some sort of fairy tale from another place and time. I can’t recall the exact words she used, but I can remember the story itself.
There was once a young Navajo girl, Lia said, so lovely that all the men in her village wanted to marry her, and she was married at the age of thirteen to the son of the Chief. So without having known girlhood, she settled down to be a wife. Then one day when she was seventeen, the same age we are now, a trader came through the village in a pickup truck buying turquoise and silver jewelry. He was handsome and fair, with hair the color of sunshine, and the girl took one look at him and fell violently in love. He asked her to come away with him. She told him that was impossible. But suddenly, when she realized that he was really leaving, she climbed into the cab beside him and rode away with him, leaving everything she owned behind in her husband’s house.
“I belong to you now,” she told the trader. “I will love you and stay beside you until the day I die.”
But the trader was a casual man who was used to willing girls and good times, and after several months with his Navajo maiden he grew tired of her.
“Go back to your people,” he said. “That’s where you belong.”
“I can’t,” the girl told him. “My husband would never take me back. Besides, I am going to bear your child.”
“That’s your problem, not mine,” the trader said.
She thought he was joking. But that night he did not come home to her. She sat for three days in their apartment, waiting, until finally she had to realize that he had left her. In the top drawer of his dresser she found an envelope with money in it and a note that told her to put the baby up for adoption. Enclosed was the address of the Hastings Agency.
The “baby” turned out to be twin girls with the trader’s fine features. They had lighter skin than their mother’s, but had inherited her hair and eyes. Obeying the instructions in the note, the young mother took them to the agency.
“Won’t your family help you raise them?” the director, Mrs. Hastings, asked. “The Navajo people always take care of their own.”
The girl explained that she could not return to the reservation with children from another man.
“The people would drive me out,” she said. “I am married to the son of the Chief.”
So Mrs. Hastings agreed to try to find homes for the babies. There was a couple arriving that week from New York City, a writer married to an artist. They could not qualify as adoptive parents in their own state and were anxious to adopt in the Southwest. They might be persuaded to take the twins.
But this couple decided to take only one of the babies.
“I don’t understand it,” Mrs. Hastings told the mother. “At first I was certain they were going to want them both. Then, after holding them, the woman seemed to change her mind.”
Months passed, and no adoptive family turned up for the second twin. So the mother reclaimed her tiny daughter and set out to try to raise her alone.
“Where did you live?” I asked Lia.
“In one low-cost apartment complex after another.”
“And how did you live? Did your father send support money?”
“Not that I know of. Our mother worked cleaning houses.”
“Like Mrs. DeWitt?” Plump, round-shouldered Edna DeWitt came out from the village on Thursdays to do the windows and floors and bathrooms at Cliff House. Mom called her “the greatest thing that’s happened to us since instant coffee.”
“Who?” Lia asked, seemingly puzzled.
“The lady who cleans for us,” I explained. I had never questioned the fact that Mrs. DeWitt made her living by cleaning houses, but then, she was not by any stretch of the imagination the wife-of-the-son-of-the-Chief. A woman with that title should certainly not be on her knees scrubbing other people’s toilet bowls.
“She would take me with her into all those beautiful homes,” Lia told me, “and then at the end of the day we would go back to our apartment. We would eat and go to bed. There was nothing else to do in the evening.” She could recall, she told me, how in summer the light would slant through the cracks in the blinds for hours after her bedtime. The heat would be heavy in the room, and her pillow would be drenched with sweat. On the ceiling of one of the apartments they lived in, there had been a fan. It had moved slowly around, stirring the heat into lazy waves. Lia would lie on her back and stare up at the revolving blades and feel those waves rolling over her and would pretend they were green and cool like the ocean.
“You had seen the ocean?” I asked in surprise.
“No, but our mother had. She told me about it. She went there many times to search.”
“To search for what?”
“For our father, of course,” Lia responded. Was she irritated at my stupidity or at something else? I felt the vibrations of anger, but I couldn’t assess them. “She had sworn to remain beside him.”
“But if she was taking care of you and working every day, when did she ever have the chance?”
“At night. She would stretch herself on the bed across from me, and then she would—go.”
“Oh,” I said with a rush of understanding. “The way you come here.”
“At first I would hear her breathing, slow and heavy,” Lia said. “Then everything would go still. It would happen. She would be gone. Sometimes I would turn on the light by the bed and stand looking down at the shell of her, lying there so beautiful and quiet. Her chest would not be moving. I would place my fingers under her nostrils, and I could feel no breath.
“In the morning when I woke she would be back. She would fix us breakfast, and while I ate she would tell me where she had been.”
“Where did she go?” I could feel myself, the small Lia, so terribly alone there by my mother’s bedside.
“It was usually to California,” said Lia. “The trader had told her once that he wanted to go there. Native American jewelry was in demand on the Coast, and the people had money to spend for it. She went from city to city. She could move so quickly that distance made no problem. She was sure that she would find
him.”
“And did she?” I breathed, so caught up in the story that it had become my own.
“I suppose so,” Lia said. “There came a day when she didn’t return.”
“And you? What about you? Where are you now?”
To that there was never an answer.
I try now to recall that time, and it’s like trying to remember something that occurred in a dream. You know you did and said certain things that seemed reasonable to you then, but in the light of day, they appear otherwise. In looking back, I realize that I was not in touch with reality. I was living at Cliff House with my family, but whole days would go by when I was hardly aware of their existence.
My parents were worried. I could see it in their faces and hear it in their voices.
“Breaking up with a boyfriend isn’t the end of the world, honey,” Mom told me. “You learn from the experience. When the right person for you comes along, you’ll be better able to love him for having had a chance to practice first.”
My father was less gentle.
“Pull yourself together,” he said. “When the girls in my novels get broken hearts, I allow them exactly one week to mend. Then, if they’re still mooning around, I bring in a monster from outer space to put them out of their misery.”
“I’m not ‘mooning,’” I told him. “I was as responsible for the breakup as Gordon.”
I could tell by his eyes that he didn’t believe me.
At school I was unable to keep my mind on my classes. I daydreamed through them, and wandered through the halls as though I were in a foreign country. My grades slipped from their usual A’s to B’s, and from B’s to C’s. In algebra I pulled the first D of my life.
Some of my teachers were concerned. Others were merely irritated.
“It’s too early in the year for senioritis,” my algebra teacher remarked crisply.
I could do nothing but nod in agreement. There was no excuse I could offer. How could I have explained that on those evenings when I was supposed to have been studying I had been meeting with the astral image of my sister?
The one person I could talk to was Helen. She was the receptacle into which I poured all my newfound information, the sounding board upon which I bounced the strange thoughts that were a constant tangle in my mind. I expected her to respond with the same wonder and excitement I was experiencing.
Instead, she seemed decidedly unenthusiastic.
“It’s not good for you to get so wrapped up in this,” she said. “Like Mrs. Kelsey said in her letter, it’s a part of your life that’s over. Actually, it was never a part of your life. You were only a couple of weeks old when the Strattons adopted you. Whatever went on with Lia and her mother is part of their history, not yours.”
“That woman was as much my mother as Lia’s,” I said stiffly. “Of course what happened to her is important to me. The whole thing’s like a romantic novel, with a beautiful, abandoned woman searching the world over for the man she loves.”
“I don’t think it’s romantic,” Helen said. “I think it’s sad and stupid.”
“What do you mean?”
“A woman leaves her husband for another man, gets pregnant, and gets dumped,” Helen said flatly. “It happens all the time. To me the real story is your adoptive parents.”
“It’s not a put-down to them if I’m interested in my other family,” I said defensively. “Lia’s my twin. She’s closer to me than anyone in the world.”
“You don’t know a thing about her,” Helen said.
“How can you say that? I know myself, don’t I? We’re identical.”
“In looks,” Helen said. “But not in other ways. Your mother sensed a difference. That’s why she chose to adopt only one of you. I felt it, too, that night I spent at Cliff House.”
“You’re jealous,” I accused her. “You don’t want me to have a closer friend than you.”
It was a cruel thing to say. I could see the hurt flash deep in Helen’s eyes, but she kept her voice steady.
“Maybe that’s true,” she admitted. “It’s more than that, though. I’m scared for you, Laurie. You’re in this too deep. It’s dangerous.”
That was Friday.
Saturday I slept late. It was ten fifteen when Mom came to wake me and to tell me that Helen was in critical condition at Saint Joseph’s Hospital.
Leaving Dad to stay with Meg and Neal, Mom and I caught the eleven o’clock ferry across to the mainland. From the pier we took a taxi to the hospital.
The traffic was heavy, and the sidewalks were crowded with bustling hordes of holiday shoppers. I stared out at them through the dirty window of the cab, feeling as though I were waking from a dream. I had been so absorbed with my own concerns that I had totally lost track of the fact that Christmas was approaching. Now, suddenly, it surrounded us. Strings of bright, colored lights crisscrossed the main streets of town, and bearded Salvation Army Santas jangled their bells on corners. Carols blared gaily from loudspeakers, and in the lobby of Saint Joseph’s Hospital a gigantic fir tree glowed resplendent in red bows and striped candy canes.
We checked at the information desk and then took the elevator to the fifth floor. The first person we saw when the doors drew open was Jeff Rankin. He sat slouched in a chair across from the elevators, looking as though he had molded himself to his seat and taken root there. His eyes had the glitter that comes from lack of sleep. I wondered how long he had been there and how he had learned about Helen so much sooner than I had.
“How is she?” I asked him by way of greeting.
“Not good.” He didn’t seem surprised to see us. “She’s been unconscious ever since they brought her in at seven this morning.” He paused. “Her parents are over there in a sort of waiting room across from Intensive Care. They let them go in and look at her for five minutes every hour.”
“Oh, god,” Mom said softly. “How terrible.”
She put her arm around me, and we walked together down the corridor to the door Jeff had indicated. It stood open. The Tuttles were the only ones in the little room, sitting side by side on a brown leather sofa.
When I had first met them, I had thought they looked too young to have a daughter who was a high school senior. I could no longer say that. They looked as though they had aged a million years.
Mrs. Tuttle’s eyes were red from weeping. It seemed to take her a moment to recognize me, and then she said, “Oh—it’s Laurie” in an expressionless voice.
“I phoned the Strattons a couple of hours ago,” Mr. Tuttle told her. “I thought Helen’s best friend should be told before she learned about it from the papers or on the news. You were good to come, Laurie.” His eyes moved past me. “Is this your mother?”
“Yes, I’m Shelly Stratton,” Mom said before I could make introductions. “I’m so very sorry about Helen’s accident. She’s such a warm, lovely person. She just has to be all right.”
“Keep thinking that way,” Mr. Tuttle said. “Think positive. That’s all any of us can do right now. She’s got good doctors. They’re doing everything they can for her. And she’s a strong girl. If she weren’t she’d never have survived the exposure.”
“What exactly happened?” I asked hesitantly. “Mom said you didn’t tell her much—just that Helen fell and hit her head.”
“We don’t even know that, really,” Mr. Tuttle said. “It seems like the only thing that could have happened, but, of course, she hasn’t been able to tell us anything. A man who was taking a shortcut on his way to work found her this morning in the little park across the street from our town house. To think she’d been there all night and we didn’t know it! She could have died there, a hundred yards away from us.”
“What was she doing in the park at night?” I asked. “That doesn’t sound like Helen.”
“She was with that boy,” Mrs. Tuttle said. It was her first contribution to the discussion, and her voice shrilled unnaturally. “That creepy boy. They went out together last night, and Helen never came b
ack. He was with her. He was responsible.”
“Jeff wasn’t with her in the park,” Helen’s father said gently.
“How can we know that? How can we know anything until Helen gets well enough to tell us?” The dull, dead look was gone from her face now, and it was contorted with pain. “All we do know is that Jeff Rankin took our Helen out at seven thirty and at half past midnight, when she hadn’t come home, you called out to the island. Jeff was there. He was in the shower, his father said. When he called back a few minutes later, he said that he’d left Helen all by herself downtown.”
“He didn’t just ‘leave her,’” Mr. Tuttle said. “He put her in a taxi.”
“Then why was she in the park? Laurie’s right. There’s no reason Helen would go into the park alone at that ungodly hour of the night. Girls don’t do that. Girls don’t jump out of taxis in front of their houses and go running off somewhere else. If it was true, what Jeff said—if he did send her home in a taxi—then she would have paid the driver and come directly into the house.”
“We can’t question her reasons right now,” Mr. Tuttle said. “We know that she did go into the park and something happened to her there. From what the police tell us, she slipped on an icy path and hit her head on one of the iron benches. At any rate”—he directed himself to Mom and me—“she didn’t come home. When it got to be twelve thirty I called the Rankins. Jeff said he’d put Helen into a cab at around eleven and given her money to pay for it. That meant she should have been home by eleven thirty at the latest.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Mom said in a low voice. “What you must have gone through.”
“We called the police, of course,” Mr. Tuttle said. “They came out to the house and took Helen’s description and all that. Then they sent a patrol boat to pick up Jeff. Everything they did took such a long time. It seemed like they weren’t even worried. One policeman had the gall to suggest that Helen had run away. ‘She’s that age,’ he told us. ‘We get reports like this all the time. Usually it turns out the girl’s had a fight with her parents or her boyfriend and just wants to shake people up a little.’”
