False Impressions

by Laura Caldwell

  She’d found a taxi but got out of the cab before it reached the building, wanted to walk, to do some kind of activity.

  She’d been somewhat distracted as she walked toward the Wrigley Building.

  So, when she saw someone near her building, it took her a moment to focus.

  The person was leaving her gallery foyer. The person was someone she thought she recognized.

  “That was as far as I got in my thoughts,” Madeline said. “I thought I recognized her.”

  “And?” I prompted.

  Madeline looked at the woman next to her. “We stopped when we saw each other.”

  Both women were quiet now; they stared at each other in a comfortable, yet adoring way that gave no sense of urgency. It was as if each felt they could stay that way forever.

  “Okay, ladies,” I said softly, not sure how to address them.

  Still, they stared at each other.

  “Madeline,” I said, a bit louder now.

  She looked at me.

  “Are you saying that you met your twin sister outside your gallery? A twin you didn’t know you had?” I wanted to add, Oh for Christ’s sake, c’mon!

  “Please,” the twin said then. She looked at me. “I will tell you how it started.” Her words had an empowered tone, as if she had a very good reason for what she’d done and very much needed to tell me.

  It had begun as an accident, the twin said.

  She spoke with a light accent, from where I wasn’t sure. Yet oddly, it was at the same register, the same volume as Madeline’s.

  The twin kept talking. She said she had come to Chicago to see how Madeline lived, to see what she’d been denied.

  “What you have been denied?” I said, pointing to the twin.

  She nodded. Madeline did, too, I noticed.

  She had been in Chicago for almost a year now, the twin continued.

  I blinked at her, confused. When she didn’t slow down, I stopped formulating questions and just tried to keep up with her words.

  She had found part-time work, she said, at a dry cleaner’s. And in her spare time, she practiced her own art and watched Madeline. She studied what she wore, she grew her hair so it looked the same and started to adopt her wardrobe. She found herself in a whirl of emotions—at once mesmerized by Madeline, full of hatred for the sister who had everything, and yet hating herself most of all.

  The twin shared Madeline’s sheets of long black hair and Madeline’s intense eyes.

  “What is your name?” I said to the person who claimed to be Madeline’s sister. The woman had gone from looking empowered a few moments ago to looking stricken now.

  She didn’t say anything at first. I saw her turn her head to Madeline for approval.

  “Please,” I said. “Please tell me your name.”

  “Ella,” she said. “It is a shortened version of my Asian name. But that’s what everyone calls me. Ella.”

  She continued telling her story.

  She often wandered outside Madeline’s gallery on Michigan Avenue, she said. “I liked when Madeline wasn’t there.”

  It was then, she said, she could really study the gallery, noticing what she had already suspected—that Madeline had everything. And flaunted everything. As if others weren’t entitled to that level of success, that degree of passion, that obvious amount of money.

  “The money,” I said.

  Both women nodded. They dipped their chins and then raised them again at the exact same pace.

  “The money was supposed to be hers, as well,” Madeline said.

  “Are you speaking about your inheritance?”

  Madeline squeezed her eyes shut. Ella’s gaze grew hard.

  “Yes.” No further explanation.

  Eventually, she started tempting fate, Ella said. “And then one night, I followed Madeline into a party at another gallery.”

  I looked at Madeline, whose eyes were still shut as if physically hurt by hearing the words.

  What would Vaughn do?

  Be gentle. That’s what I thought. But when had Vaughn ever been gentle? That was easy—when he was with me.

  “So what happened?” I said, my voice low. “At the party?”

  Still, Madeline’s eyes were closed.

  “No one noticed me,” she said. Devastation. That’s what I heard in her voice.

  Madeline exhaled loudly.

  “Maybe you only felt like that?” I said.

  She and Madeline shook their heads simultaneously.

  Ella continued to talk. She wanted to see how far she could go, she said. “I kept doing it.”

  She went to the same restaurants, the same bars, she said. Only she found that she was invisible.

  “Okay, wait a minute?” I said, my voice nice, but stopping her, this time holding up my hand. Enough of gentle. Enough prodding. “One of you needs to start at the beginning, and tell me the whole story,” I said, I looked at Madeline.

  Madeline joined in the tale again.

  71

  “Our mother’s family,” Madeline said, “was Taiwanese, but moved to Japan shortly after our birth. Ella was told they went to seek work.”

  Ella shot Madeline a look.

  “And they were embarrassed about our mother’s pregnancy,” Madeline added.

  I thought of Vaughn again. What would he do now?

  The answer came quick. He would know when to shut up.

  “What Ella has told me,” Madeline said, “is that our father’s family was wealthy. And when they found out he’d gotten our mother pregnant, they funded her family to go to Japan to have the babies. Then they set up a trust fund to care for us, without knowing our mother would eventually give us up for adoption.”

  “They didn’t expect me to come back,” Ella said.

  “What?” I didn’t understand now and wasn’t afraid to show it.

  “Our grandmother—our mother’s mother—decided that our mother was too young to take care of us, and we were put up for adoption. Madeline was adopted first, by a couple in the United States,” the twin said. “Our mother agreed that we could be split up, if necessary. I remained behind, and our mother waited for me to be adopted, as well.”

  She spoke again. The family wasn’t doing well in Japan, and no one came forward to adopt Ella. Desperate, her mother went against her grandmother’s wishes and contacted the twins’ father. Their father, she said, was humane enough to realize his child shouldn’t be left abandoned. Against his family’s wishes, he picked Ella up from the airport. His family disowned them, cutting off all ties. Including removing Ella’s name from the trust fund so the father would never get a piece of it.

  “You’ve confirmed this?” I asked her. I couldn’t help it. My wariness about the whole thing crept into her tone.

  I wanted to say, c’mon! Because Madeline sounded very sure, like she was accepting a lot that this woman told her. And to my ears, it sounded like she might be accepting a whole lot of bullspit.

  “Yes.” Madeline took me in with her eyes. I saw them moving from my scalp to my face and down to my toes. “Izzy, meeting Ella last night was as shocking to me as it is to you now.”

  She looked at her twin then, as if in awe, faced with the most amazing artwork she would ever see. “This morning, I called the law firm that represented me when I got my inheritance. There wasn’t anyone there who had worked on the file, but I made them pull it from the archives.”

  “And?” I said.

  “They need to look further into it, but they confirmed that although the trust fund had originated in Japan, it had been funded by a bank account in Taiwan.”

  She and Ella glanced at each other, like two sides of the painting in Madeline’s gallery. If I let my cautiousness die away, it struck me that she was speaking a tale that had been waiting within both of them.

  “I often dream about it,” Ella said. “The flight home—did I feel happy? A little lost?”

  “She was raised by our father,” Madeline said, “who was just
a teenager himself. He tried, I imagine, but he did not know enough to raise Ella with any kind of love.”

  “He didn’t try that hard.” Ella’s words were biting. When I said nothing, she continued. “My father was wealthy.”

  Again, silence.

  “He threw money at the issue,” I said, prodding. I had a feeling that issues like these were universal in some ways, dealt with in similar fashion.

  They both said, “Yes,” at the same time.

  “I grew up thinking of him as an awful man,” Ella said.

  “He left her to be dealt with by different women he dated,” Madeline said.

  “I adored them,” Ella said, her voice softening.

  “Yes, but they resented you,” Madeline said.

  “Deeply,” the twin said.

  I decided to drop out of the conversation, to let the energy of the topic drop.

  Madeline and Ella, their words overlapping each other, told me the rest of the story. Like Madeline, Ella had always found joy in art, spending her time alone, painting. She had some talent, but her father had no interest in her work. Neither did the women who had cared for her. But it was one of those women who opened up her world when she was in her mid-twenties. She had told Ella about her sister—the one who had been taken to America. The one who had been acknowledged by their father’s family in a trust fund.

  Then Ella learned everything she could about the United States. She fantasized about what Madeline was like—carefree and rich and able to do anything she wanted. Everyone knew you could do anything you wanted in the United States.

  When she started learning more about Madeline, she found she was right. And that, she said, was the beginning of an obsession.

  For years, she researched Madeline’s world any way she could. As they grew older, she studied and she learned. Ella could quote, by heart, bios of Madeline’s artists, the names of the artworks, the inspirations behind them. She programmed her computer to send an alert every time Madeline’s website was updated.

  I exhaled and looked away from the two women. The sight and the story was overwhelming, and my thoughts no longer knew where to land.

  Finally, it was Ella who spoke. “Madeline.”

  We all looked at her.

  “Madeline,” Ella said, as if testing her voice. “You claimed on your website that you believe everything is an art form.”

  “Yes,” Madeline said simply.

  “But really, you only focus on what is right in front of you.” There was an accusatory tone to her voice.

  “Yes,” Madeline said again.

  “Your life is viewed in pieces.”

  Madeline threw her head back, flipping one side of her hair over her shoulder, as if wanting to clear anything that might obstruct her thoughts.

  “You are right,” Madeline said. “But I only see such pieces because I can’t bring too much content into focus. I am not that emotionally capable. I get confused. So I focus in.” She raised one of her small hands and lightly tapped her chest.

  “Yes,” her twin said. “And then you focus in. Always away from everyone else.”

  Madeline dropped her gaze, and I couldn’t tell if she was ashamed or trying to restrain herself.

  The twin kept talking. At first, she said, she had watched Madeline at a distance.

  But her desire to get close to her sister, to slip into Madeline’s world undetected, grew intense and brought her the most pain. Because hiding in plain sight meant she was not noticed by Madeline. And eventually, the pain turned into anger.

  72

  The night it really began, Ella said, she decided to walk by the gallery one more time.

  “It was last summer, a beautiful night,” Madeline said. “I remember that night.” It seemed as if she was trying to help her twin, by telling part of her story.

  It was balmy that night, Ella said, but dark black, the street lights making only shallow wells around themselves. When Ella reached the end of the block she turned around and walked past the gallery again. When she reached the end of that block she did it again.

  Back and forth she walked in front of the gallery, going only as far as the block’s end each time. She had done this many times. But suddenly, that night, she couldn’t stand it anymore; she had to at least peer through the inside glass at some of the artwork while Madeline wasn’t there.

  “Did you know there was a security guard?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Ella said. She figured she would keep her head down, tell the security guard that she was one of the gallery’s customers, that she was debating about a piece and wanting to look in the windows. She’d been ignored so many times before.

  To her delight—and shock—the guard had mistaken her for Madeline.

  “Forget your keys?” he’d said to her.

  She’d put her hands in her jacket pockets and moved them around as if searching for something and nodded.

  “Need to be let in?”

  “Yes,” she had said.

  She had gotten in. And every time she went back, it got easier. They didn’t blink when she took artwork out through the back alley. She only removed pieces that were made with acrylic or charcoal, materials that didn’t require long drying times.

  The pieces fell into place for me.

  “And then I saw you,” I said. “After I’d been with Axel Tredstone.” I pointed at Madeline. “I thought you were at the gallery that night. I came here around eight at night, and I found you in the back room. You were distant to me.” The twins nodded in unison.

  “Izzy, do you understand why I couldn’t tell you this morning?” Madeline said. “You know why I couldn’t let John Mayburn go outside our circle?”

  “You mean, to call the cops?” I asked.

  “Yes. I had just found Ella, last night.”

  Madeline looked at me. “Do you want to know the strangest thing for me?”

  “Yes,” I said quickly. It was hard to imagine a time when I didn’t want to get a glimpse inside Madeline Saga’s mind.

  “I’ve been fascinated by sisterhood, by women at other times in their lives,” Madeline said

  I nodded with my head toward the gallery. “Hence the painting with two women in two different time periods.”

  “Exactly.” She smiled. She faced me, her whole body. “And then you came into my life, Izzy. And I have been fortunate to know you. I feel like we will always be friends. Sisters.”

  I smiled back.

  Madeline looked from me to Ella.

  Ella said nothing.

  “Then, on my way into the gallery last night,” Madeline said, looking at me, “I ran into not only my sister. I felt I met myself, the rest of me.”

  “We looked into each other’s eyes,” Ella said.

  “Right there,” Madeline said.

  Madeline smiled then, an open, light, almost playful smile I’d never seen before. She was a passionate woman, of course, but also an intense one.

  “We stood there for a long time,” Madeline said, about the moment she and Ella met. They had entered the gallery together, as if in a womb.

  Madeline looked at her sister. “I never knew. But I always sensed you.” A few silent moments passed.

  Then Ella began to cry.

  The sounds were small at first. And I thought, Finally, because how was she containing all this emotion that she must have?

  Then she started to cry harder, to wail really.

  As her cries got louder something in the room seemed to become unmoored, as if the back room of the gallery was a ship whose ropes had been cut loose.

  I reached out my hand to the nearest counter to steady myself.

  Madeline did the same. But then she launched herself at her sister. And hugged her fiercely.

  73

  At Bunny’s bar the next month, Mayburn and I did our final debrief, as Mayburn liked to call it, of the Madeline Saga case.

  When Madeline joined us, Mayburn asked, “Are you sure you don’t want to bring in the author
ities?”

  Madeline made a face, disapproving. We were seated at a booth in the back, the walls decorated with shellacked photos of musicians from the early ’80s—Duran Duran, George Thorogood, Flock of Seagulls.

  I looked across the bar. Bunny Loveland, God love her, was talking to Ella. Sort of. Actually, she was yelling at her. “You haven’t been to Murphy’s?”

  Poor Ella just shook her head.

  “The bar by Wrigley?” Bunny yelled. She was astounded; you could hear it in her voice. “Then you haven’t been to Chicago! Just scratch off the last year.”

  Ella glanced over at us. Mayburn and I gave her a thumbs up, while Madeline smiled her assent.

  “I do not want to talk to anyone about this,” Madeline said. “I will not.”

  There was no misjudging the tone in her voice, either. Madeline knew what she wanted.

  I thought of that night again, just Madeline and me in her gallery, me entirely painted. Now I was at peace with it. Mostly, when I thought about it now, I remembered what we talked about—how Madeline believed that as human beings we could hold many different experiences, maybe even more than one person, in our mind and our hearts, and still be complete.

  If that was true, then I could be livid at Ella for what she’d done to Madeline—stealing, stalking, making her feel unstable and terrified. I could despise her for the heartache she’d brought my friend.

  Yet, I suppose, I could also feel happy for the two of them. Because Madeline was no longer scared. Not in the slightest. And if there had been a hole in my friend’s heart, as Madeline said—a place that was empty, that knew something was missing—that hole seemed repaired now. Some part of Madeline’s heart and life had flowered. The twins were so elated together.

  I glanced around. If I continued to believe in this concept of multifaceted emotional acceptance, I could feel many things about the man who had just walked up to our table.

  “Hi, Dad,” I said.

  My father smiled under his copper glasses. He shed a wool coat and nodded at Mayburn. He shook hands with Madeline, whom he’d met once before, and then my father slid into the booth next to me.

  I felt the warmth of him, even through his clothes, as his forearm touched mine. If I believed in that multi-emotional concept then I could, I realized, hold many things about him in my mind, never having to go with only one. I could feel a little conflicted about the fact that my father was growing close with my mother’s best friend, Cassandra. (I felt a little like a piece of him was being taken away before I had a chance to enjoy it.) And yet I could be happy for him, too. I could be happy for the kids in me and Charlie, who were both thrilled that our father was around and that, for now, he wasn’t leaving Chicago.