Her: A Memoir

by Christa Parravani

  But then we were rarely alone.

  Cara often stalked us.

  On the fourth day of our honeymoon in Cape Cod, just as we finished up brunch at our bed-and-breakfast, Cara called. Jedediah and I had stowed our cell phones in a drawer of a vanity in our suite. The world was to be shut out; the world meaning my sister. But Cara rang for me at the reception desk, and the innkeepers brought me to the phone.

  I knew who it was before I even said hello. There was not another friend or family member who would dare call.

  “Hi, Cara. What’s up?” I asked, short and measured.

  “How’d you know it was me?” She giggled, innocent as a girl.

  “Lucky guess.” I laughed back. “Who else would care enough to interrupt my honeymoon?”

  “Good point! I miss you.”

  “It’s only been a few days.”

  “You’re married now.” Cara’s voice cracked at “married.” “It’s different. I feel like you don’t need me anymore.”

  “Jesus, Cara. You’ve been married for over a year. Stop it.”

  I’d done my best even though it broke my heart to pair Cara off with Kahlil; they loved each other then. At their ceremony the summer before, I’d read a passage from the Bible on love and sharing, and had broken down in tears as I read, having to stop when I got to a line about parting from birth family into a new married one.

  On the phone Cara sniffled. “It’s not the same. Kahlil knows you’re the most important person in my life. Jedediah doesn’t care. Now you’re far away on your honeymoon and I’m stuck all by myself at home.”

  “Please don’t start this now,” I said. Cara had bullied Jedediah all through our wedding weekend, beginning on the night of our rehearsal dinner. She’d gotten falling-down drunk at a Catskill mountain lodge where Jedediah’s family hosted the meal, cornering him as he made his way to the bathroom. She pushed him up against a wall outside of the men’s room, standing on her tiptoes so the two were face-to-face. Cara told Jedediah that he’d better understand that marrying me meant marrying her, too. He was also to know that I would never love him as much as I loved her. These were the rules for marrying a twin, and she thought he should know. Her hair was crazy, windblown. She was unsteady on her feet, and Jedediah kindly held her up. She’d just come in from a smoke on the porch, her silky blouse had been pulled back over one shoulder when she’d taken off her coat, and she’d not adjusted it back into place. She’d had enough vodka, and not a care left for her tidiness. My husband-to-be didn’t comment on her rules for his marriage. He put his arm around her and walked her back to the table where a tall vanilla cake waited for the bride and groom. I held on to the cool handle of the cake knife and motioned for Jedediah to come over. He had placed his hand over mine and we had pushed the knife down through the layers of cake and kissed. Cara had poured herself a tall glass of water and a taller glass of wine.

  “How’s the lover’s nest?” Cara teased. Our Cape Cod honeymoon was about to end.

  “It’s cozy,” I sighed. A beach bag packed with towels and sunscreen sat at my feet. Jedediah had excused himself from our brunch table and stood near the reception counter, waiting to hear what Cara had in store. He’d propped the perfectly collapsed and tightly snapped beach umbrella on the railing to the stairs that led up to the second floor, to our room. He carried a paperback copy of Invisible Cities and a crisp black Moleskine notebook. “We’ve had a good time. Lots of fish and chips, and we still have four more days of what looks to be good weather,” I said.

  “I see.” My report wasn’t what Cara had hoped for. Her own honeymoon had been a disaster. They’d taken a cruise and were lodged in a windowless cabin. The food was lousy, and they’d both gotten serious cases of scabies. I could hear the usual compare and despair in her silence. “I’m lonely.”

  “Where’s Kahlil?”

  “Who knows? Busy, I guess.”

  “How about you write, or go visit Mom?”

  “I want to see the ocean.”

  I looked over at Jedediah. “She wants to come,” I mouthed. “What do I do?”

  Jedediah looked up from Invisible Cities, alarmed. “Hang up,” he whispered. “Hang up now, before she won’t take no for an answer.”

  Cara piped in. “I’ve already bought a bus ticket. I get in at eight o’clock tonight.”

  “What about our privacy?” I begged.

  “Don’t worry. I booked a room down the street. You’ll barely know I’m there.”

  Cara hung up before I could protest anymore.

  She arrived on that evening’s bus as promised. I picked her up from the station and Jedediah waited at the bed-and-breakfast. She descended the bus stairs with an overstuffed backpack and a bouquet of my favorite flowers. “For the bride,” she said and smelled the bunch of purple hydrangea and red roses. How could I tell my husband that I wanted her with us? It was difficult to appreciate the ocean without my twin; to see the world apart from her was to be there only by half.

  In the end, Cara kept her promise to Jedediah: his marriage to me was all she’d said it would be. She called whenever she liked. She showed up whenever she liked. She still had me, like he never could.

  Chapter 10

  I try to understand the truths and see how what-ifs and if-onlys have altered my memories. I remember in plain terms what I could have done and didn’t, what I did and fumbled. I see my sister’s life through the veil of my failure to save her.

  It’s as simple as this memory: the day after my sister’s attack, I refused to get her a glass of water. The pain medicines caused her thirst; her nose was broken so she breathed through her mouth; she’d wept herself dry. I had been with her through the night—she’d allowed no other inside her room. I sat beside her and held her up as she struggled to swallow, put a soft pillow at the small of her back. The next morning I heard her call my name and pretended not to hear. I couldn’t bring myself to see her battered face in the daylight. What would have happened to Cara had I answered her call? Not just that one, all that I missed?

  The moment my sister fell under her rapist’s hand, he untwinned us: the bodies were the same but Cara became lost in hers. My body became a vessel of guilt, reminded us both of the past: the free, easy, joyful giving of sex, ripe exposed youth, and the naive belly that still tickles at touch.

  It’s not like this old, boring question: When something happens to your twin, can you feel it?

  It’s more like this: you’ve eaten something spoiled and it’s made its way into every part of you, itching the skin, and you can’t get at it. Or it’s like a withered phantom limb you can’t see, but you can feel every inch. It’s your broken bedridden twin, sobbing as you attempt to comb the knots from her hair. You try but you can’t reach the tangles: her neck, it’s been twisted too hard. She can’t turn her head. She hates you for reminding her of what she was. You fear her for showing you what you could become.

  * * *

  The events of October 18 are a patchwork. I went inside from the backyard when the sun went down and decided to color my hair. I heard the phone ring from the kitchen and ran for it, thinking it was Cara calling me to tell me how her story had been critiqued in class. But it was several hours too early for that call. She shouldn’t have been home yet.

  My hair was still goopy and wet and weighty with coloring, slicked up and twisted into a knot. I lifted the receiver to my ear and then pulled it back; I left a murky ring of L’Oreal Midnight circled on the earpiece.

  “Christa?” Kahlil asked for me, said my name as if he were apologizing.

  “Heya Tall Glass of Water.” I liked to nickname him. He usually had one to toss back at me. Not this time.

  “I’ve got some terrible news,” Kahlil said. “Cara was attacked.”

  “Attacked?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She was raped.” He said the word as if he didn’t understand what it meant—and he didn’t. It would take two years and
the dissolution of his marriage before he understood.

  I fell back as if I’d taken a blow. “Was she out with the dog?” I hated that doofy dog. I’d told my sister again and again not to walk the dog in the woods; she never listened.

  “Yes.”

  “By herself?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where were you?” The question landed like a bomb.

  “I was home playing video games.” But not like my husband, I thought. Kahlil didn’t just play games; he escaped into them, abandoning common sense and all responsibility as he played. The man was a boy.

  I sped toward Holyoke to get to Cara. Before I left I called my mother, who was still at work on an evening shift. Then I tried to reach Jedediah, who was home playing his own game. The phone was busy. I wouldn’t reach him for hours. I sped west to east on the thruway; I remember that. Memory plays tricks, and when I try to recall that evening I see Jedediah beside me in the car. I can’t remember how and if he held my hand, what was said or wasn’t, how he consoled me. What I see is my young husband looking out the passenger’s side window tapping his finger lightly against the glass, humming softly to the radio. In my memory of Cara’s rape I’ve put him in the place I needed him at that moment, beside me.

  In my memory we drove together through the night without talking. I nervously flicked through the stations to find music that could both soothe my nerves and help keep us awake. In reality, I rolled down both windows all the way, a shock of cold air stinging the side of my face, helping me focus on driving and not the violent thing I was about to see.

  Mom called after eight o’clock. I was nearly halfway to Cara. She told me she was making good time. She didn’t know what to expect, she said. She’d called Kahlil to try to understand what had happened. He’d said that Cara had been raped, which confused her. It’s not possible, Mom said again and again. Could we check with the police that a mistake hadn’t been made? Maybe Cara had only been beat up a little? There must have been a misunderstanding? Cara had probably just been involved in a scuffle and hurt a bit, a pride-bruising black eye, a snatched purse?

  I followed the glowing white median and watched the mileposts pass. I was alone; Jedediah wasn’t with me. Cara had been raped; this was the new reality.

  I arrived at the hospital before nine. I pushed through the carousel doors into the crowded emergency room and saw her right away; the curtain to her room had been left open. She was sitting in bed, still dressed, talking to the police. Kahlil stood to the side. Cara cried upon sight of me. I barely recognized her. Where was my face in her broken one? Her jaw was bumpy and distorted by purple and gold welts. Swelling had nearly shut both her eyes. Her front teeth were jagged, chipped; I didn’t know then how many were missing.

  I thought about all of the years we’d been competing to be the prettier twin.

  “She’s refusing to undress for the nurses,” Kahlil said. “She says she doesn’t want to take her clothes off.”

  The hospital waiting room was crowded with patients. Cara had been there for hours and was yet to be seen by the attending physician. Nurses dressed the deepest wounds on her face with strips of gauze and gently tried to convince her to undergo an exam.

  “You’ve got to cooperate with the doctors so we can get you home.” I put my hand on her shoulder and she flinched.

  “I don’t want to go home.” Cara looked up accusingly at Kahlil. “What if that guy is there?”

  I didn’t have an answer for this. She was right. I thought of climbing the three flights of stairs to her apartment door, wondering if the rapist would be waiting in the hall. Then it occurred to me: except for the bruises, he would certainly think I was Cara.

  “We’ll escort you home,” one of the police said, his hat in his lap.

  Cara agreed to undress for her doctors. She removed her tattered red pants, the black cardigan she’d taken from my closet, a pair of yellow ankle socks stitched with racing horses, and her bloodied, dirty, white rainbow-adorned panties and placed each into an evidence bag. She stepped into a blue hospital gown. She was administered a rape kit. Afterward, the detectives and a rape advocate were called back in.

  * * *

  When we arrived home Cara insisted I wash her clean. I closed the door on us to the clicking sound of the loose doorknob.

  I brought my sister to the tub for a bath and helped her undress. I filled the tub with water hot enough to soothe, tepid enough not to scald. The nurses sent Cara home wearing scrubs and a white T-shirt. She turned her back to me and pulled off her shirt. I saw the mirrored marks: crescent-shaped gouges her assailant made with his teeth: more than a dozen deep bites. Cara turned to face me, asked me to undo the string on her pants. Her fingers and knuckles were bruised from fighting. Her pants fell around her ankles and she stepped out of them, into the tub. She settled in and reached for my hand, pulling me fully clothed into the tub with her.

  I splashed water on my face and rested my wet forehead at the base of her neck. There were too many bites to clean. I poured peroxide, watched her wounds fizz white. I cleaned her with a soft cloth and lavender wash.

  I bathed my sister, just as she’d asked.

  “I floated outside of my body,” Cara told me in the tub.

  I imagined my sister’s airborne soul, the back of the rapist’s round head, Cara pushing him away at the chest: 250 pounds thundering down against her, snapping back her wrists like flower stems. I see the hulk of him pinning Cara against the soggy autumn earth, turning her over, pushing her onto her knees, and taking what she’ll never have again: amazement at the sight of the world.

  “I watched myself die,” Cara said. “I would have been happy to go, to leave—but then I saw our grandmother. She said I needed to stay put, to live.”

  “You didn’t die,” I reminded her.

  “That’s easy for you to say.”

  “Did you think of me?”

  “No,” she said into the water.

  Fuck her, I thought. If I’d been dying in the woods, she’d have been the one I thought about.

  Cara sat up, rigid in the bath, her knees bent. I tried to recline to avoid touching her. My legs rubbed against the sides of her thighs. She was cradled between my legs and stared past the faucet, beyond the tile, through the wall.

  I cried every day when we were children. I used to try to count the days that I didn’t cry when I was a kid. I was seven and had a calendar full of failed days when I cried and shouldn’t have. Nothing and everything brought tears. I had every reason to weep as a child, yet I couldn’t as an adult, in this tragedy; I couldn’t find tears when I needed them.

  I got out of the tub and wrapped myself in a towel. I went in search of a cotton nightgown in Cara’s bureau, picking up the softest, whitest one she had. I left her alone to dress.

  Chapter 11

  I want my sweater back. I want my black cashmere cardigan returned. It has flat black buttons and it’s fitted at the wrists. The sweater was neither too big nor too small. A good cardigan is hard to find. It was sexy over a wiggle dress, or homey with jeans and a belt. It was an every-dayer, a hip-accentuating waist-whittler. Cara and I both wanted my sweater. We stole it back and forth. The sweater traveled from city to city, closet to closet.

  I bought the sweater on sale and wore it more often than I should have. The first time Cara spied the cardigan, I was wearing it to fight off an early autumn chill.

  “I like that.” Cara looked at the sweater, not in appreciation, but in need. She flipped the tag up at the neck. “Cashmere?”

  “It was on sale.”

  “Fits perfectly.” Cara examined the sweater’s lapel. “I’ve looked forever but haven’t found a sweater I don’t feel like a square body in. We have thick waists.”

  “Speak for yourself. I’m not thick-waisted. I’m short-waisted.” I curled my fingers around a belt loop in Cara’s jeans and tugged, teasing her. “And, don’t you dare talk about my twin that way.” I shook her back and forth, shimmying her
hips, and kissed her cheek.

  “Can I wear it tomorrow?” Cara asked.

  “Nope. You think I trust you to give it back?” I took the sweater off that evening, folded it up, and hid it at the bottom of my suitcase, beneath boxes of film and a well-worn copy of Van Gogh’s letters. I unpacked the suitcase at home in Manhattan, no sweater to be found. Cara left a decoy in its place: a faded black cotton cardigan, frayed at the cuffs. A loose button dangled from the collar; fabric pilled beneath the neck; the right side stretched out at the shoulder; a side pocket was coming unstitched, flapping down where the thread had given way, and inside the pocket there was a smoked-down and stubbed-out cigarette. Her ribbed sweater, size medium, was my sweater’s sorry replacement. It wasn’t meant to fool, but left to teach a lesson: twins should have identical things. I was too selfish to share and had broken code—the sweater Cara left was punishment.

  Cara was in the habit of taking my things, not just sweaters; lipstick, belts, dresses, and books were also ripe for lifting. The tradition kept up after the rape, right up until she died. Stealing didn’t only go one way. I felt free to help myself to anything that was hers as well. I took from her often. But Cara’s need for identical possessions went beyond sisterly borrowing. She deployed straight-out mimicry. She hoped that if we possessed the same things, we’d have exact lives. I wasn’t similarly motivated. Her life never looked good enough to me to try to make it for myself.

  Jedediah and I were gifted a full set of dinnerware for eight for our wedding. We were given every kitchen item on our registry. We stacked the tiki green salad plates rimmed in earthy brown on top of the dinner plates. Deep soup bowls painted in matching hues and finished in shining glazes were pantry neighbors to the plates, and to a taupe sugar and creamer set embossed with flowers. The ceramic edges of the plates, mugs, and bowls chipped over the years, each half moon’s chalky exposure revealing the brittle insides of the dishware. As time went on and our marriage progressed, I was more and more careless: too many clumsy slips of the hand, and setting after setting crashed, enamel pecking off in the sink.