Silent Partner

by Jonathan Kellerman

  After tucking her back under the quilt and propping the pillow, she gave Shirlee's hair a hundred strokes with the tortoise-shell brush, wiped her face with a damp washcloth, dusted the collapsed cheeks with makeup and blush.

  “I want her to be as ladylike as possible. For her morale. Her feminine self-image.”

  She lifted one limp hand, inspected nails that were surprisingly long and healthy. “These are looking beautiful, Shirl.” Turning to me: “Hers are so healthy! They grow faster than mine do, Alex. Isn't that funny?”

  Later, we sat in the Alfa and Sharon cried for a while. Then she started to speak, in those same flat tones she'd used years ago, to tell me about her parents' deaths:

  “We were born absolutely identical. Carbon copies of each other—I mean, no one could tell us apart.” She laughed. “Sometimes we couldn't tell ourselves apart.”

  Remembering the photograph of the two little girls, I said, “One difference: mirror-image identical.”

  That seemed to jolt her. “Yes. That—she's a lefty; I'm a righty. And our hair whirls go in opposite directions.”

  She looked away from me, tapped the Alfa's wooden steering wheel. “Strange phenomenon, mirror-image monozygotes—from a scientific point of view. Biochemically, it makes no sense at all. Given an identical genetic structure in two individuals, there should be no differences at all, right? Let alone reversal of the cerebral hemispheres.”

  She got a dreamy look in her eyes and closed them.

  “Thank you so much for coming, Alex. It really means a lot to me.”

  “I'm glad.”

  She took my hand. Hers was shaking.

  I said, “Go on. You were talking about how similar the two of you were.”

  “Carbon copies,” she said. “And inseparable. We loved each other with a gut intensity. Lived for each other, did everything together, cried hysterically when anyone tried to separate us, until finally no one tried. We were more than sisters—more than twins. Partners. Psychic partners—sharing a consciousness. As if each of us could only be whole in the presence of the other. We had our own languages, two of them: a spoken one, and one based on gestures and secret looks. We never stopped communicating—even in our sleep we'd reach out and touch each other. And we shared the same intuitions, the same perceptions.”

  She stopped. “This probably sounds strange to you. It's hard to explain to someone who's never had a twin, Alex, but believe me, all those stories you hear about synchrony of sensation are true. They were certainly true for us. Even now, sometimes I'll wake in the middle of the night with an ache in my belly or a cramp in my arm. I'll call Elmo and find out Shirlee had a rough night.”

  “It doesn't sound strange. I've heard it before.”

  “Thanks for saying that.” She kissed my cheek. Tugged her earlobe. “When we were little, we had a wonderful life together. Mummy and Daddy, the big apartment on Park Avenue—all those rooms and cupboards and walk-in closets. We loved to hide—loved to hide from the world. But our favorite place was the summer house in Southampton. The property had been in our family for generations. Acres of grass and sand. A big old white-shingled monstrosity with creaky floors, wicker furniture that was coming apart, dusty old hooked rugs, a stone fireplace. It sat on top of a bluff that overlooked the ocean and sloped down to the water in a couple of places. Nothing elegant—just a few tortured old pines and tarry dunes. The beach hooked around in a crescent shape, all wide and wet and full of clam spouts. There was a dock with rowboats moored to it—it danced in the waves, slapped against all that warped wood. It scared us, but in a nice way—we loved to be scared, Shirl and me.

  “In autumn, the sky was always this wonderful shade of gray with silvery-yellow spots where the sun broke through. And the beach was full of horseshoe crabs and hermit crabs and jellyfish and strings of seaweed that would wash up in huge tangles. We'd throw ourselves into the tangles, wrap ourselves in it, all slimy, and pretend we were two little mermaid princesses in silken gowns and pearl necklaces.”

  She stopped, bit her lip, said, “Off to the south side of the property was a swimming pool. Big, rectangular, blue tiles, sea horses painted on the bottom. Mummy and Daddy never really decided whether they wanted an indoor or outdoor pool, so they compromised and built a pool house over it—white lattice with a retractable roof and devil ivy running through the lattice. We used it a lot during the summer, getting all salty in the ocean, then washing it off in fresh water. Daddy taught us to swim when we were two and we learned quickly—took to it like little tadpoles, he used to say.”

  Another pause to catch her breath. A long stretch of silence that made me wonder if she'd finished. When she spoke again, her voice was weaker.

  “When summer was over, no one paid much attention to the pool. The caretakers didn't always clean it properly and the water would get all green with algae, give off a stench. Shirl and I were forbidden to go there, but that only made it more appealing. The moment we were free we'd run straight there, peek through the lattice, see all that gooky water and imagine it was a lagoon full of monsters. Hideous monsters who could rise from the muck and attack us at any moment. We decided the smell was monsters filling the water with their excretions—monster poop.” She smiled, shook her head. “Pretty repulsive, huh? But exactly the kind of fantasies children get into, in order to master their fears, right?”

  I nodded.

  “The only problem, Alex, was that our monsters materialized.”

  She wiped her eyes, stuck her head out the window and breathed deeply.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “It's okay.”

  “No, it's not. I promised myself I'd maintain.” More deep breathing. “It was a cold day. A gray Saturday. Late autumn. We were three years old, wore matching wool dresses with thick, knitted leggings and brand-new patent-leather shoes that we'd pleaded with Mummy to let us wear on condition that we wouldn't scratch them on the sand. It was our last weekend on the Island until spring. We'd stayed longer than we should have—the house had poor heating and the chill was seeping right up from the ocean, that kind of sharp East Coast chill that gets right into your bones and stays there. The sky was so clogged with rain clouds it was almost black—had that old-penny smell a coastal sky gives off before a storm.

  “Our driver had gone into town to fill the car with gas and have it tuned before the drive back to the city. The rest of the help was busy closing up the house. Mummy and Daddy were sitting in the sun-room, wrapped in shawls, having a last martini. Shirl and I were off gallivanting from room to room, unpacking what had been packed, unfastening what had been fastened, giggling and teasing and just getting generally underfoot. Our mischief level was especially high because we knew we wouldn't be back for a while and were determined to squeeze every bit of fun out of the day. Finally, the help and Mummy had enough of us. They bundled us in heavy coats and put galoshes over our new shoes and sent us with a nanny to collect shells.

  “We ran down to the beach, but the tide was rising and it had washed away all the shells, and the seaweed was too cold to play with. The nanny started flirting with one of the gardeners. We snuck away, headed straight for the pool house.

  “The gate was closed but not locked—the lock lay on the ground. One of the caretakers had begun to drain and clean the pool—there were brushes and nets and chemicals and clumps of algae all around the deck—but he wasn't there. He'd forgotten to lock it. We snuck in. It was dark inside—only squares of black sky coming in through the lattice. The filthy water was being suctioned through a garden hose that ran out to a gravel sump. About three quarters of it remained—acid-green and bubbling, and stinking worse than it ever had, sulfur gas mixed in with all the chemicals the caretaker had dumped in. Our eyes started burning. We began to cough, then broke out into laughter. This was really monstrous—we loved it!

  “We began pretending the monsters were rising from the gook, started chasing each other around the pool, shrieking and giggling, making monster faces,
going faster and faster and working ourselves up into a frenzy—a hypnotic state. Everything blurred—we saw only each other.

  “The concrete decking was slippery from all the algae and the suds from the chemicals. Our galoshes were slick and we started skidding all over the place. We loved that, too, pretended we were at an ice rink, tried deliberately to skid. We were having a great time, lost in the moment, focused on our inner selves—as if we were one self. Round and round we went, hooting and slipping and sliding. Then all at once I saw Shirl take a big skid and keep skidding, saw a terrible look come on her face as she threw up her arms for balance. She called out for help. I knew this was no game and ran to grab her, but I fell on my butt and landed just as she let out a horrible scream and plunged, feet-first, into the pool.

  “I got up, saw her hand sticking out, her fingers flexing, unflexing, threw myself at her, couldn't reach her, started crying and screaming for help. I stumbled again, went down on my butt again, finally got to my feet and ran to the edge. The hand was gone. I screamed her name—it brought the nanny. How she'd looked—the surprise, the terror as she'd gone under—stayed with me and I kept screaming as the nanny asked me where she was. I couldn't answer. I'd absorbed her, become her. I knew she was drowning, could feel myself choking and suffocating, taste the putrid water clogging my nose and my mouth and my lungs!

  “The nanny was shaking me, slapping my face. I was hyperventilating, but somehow I managed to point to the pool.

  “Then Mummy was there and Daddy, some of the help. The nanny jumped in. Mummy was screaming ‘My baby, oh, my baby!' and biting her fingers—they bled all over her clothes. The nanny was thrashing around, coming up gasping, covered with muck. Daddy kicked off his shoes, tore off his jacket, and dove in. A graceful dive. A moment later he surfaced with Shirlee in his arms. She was limp, all covered with filth, pale and dead-looking. Daddy tried to give her artificial respiration. Mummy was still panting—her fingers were running with blood. The nanny was lying on the ground, looking dead herself. The maids were sobbing. The caretakers were staring. At me, I thought. They were blaming me! I started to howl and claw at them. Someone said, ‘Take her out,' and everything went black.”

  Telling the story had made her break out in a sweat. I gave her my handkerchief. She took it without comment, wiped herself, said, “I woke up back on Park Avenue. It was the next day; someone must have sedated me. They told me Shirlee had died, had been buried. Nothing more was ever said about her. My life was changed, empty—but I don't want to talk about that. Even now; I can't talk about that. It's enough to say I had to reconstruct myself. Learn to be a new person. A partner without a partner. I came to accept, lived in my head, away from the world. Eventually I stopped thinking about Shirlee—consciously stopped. I went through the motions, being a good girl, getting good grades, never raising my voice. But I was empty—missing something. I decided to become a psychologist, to learn why. I moved out here, met you, started to really live. Then, everything changed—Mummy and Daddy dying. I had to go back East to talk to their lawyer. He was nice. A handsome, fatherly man—I remembered him vaguely from parties. He took me out to the Russian Tea Room and told me about my trust fund, the house, talked a lot about new responsibilities, but wouldn't come out and say what they were. When I asked him what he meant, he looked uneasy, called for the check.

  “We left the restaurant, took a walk down Fifth Avenue, past all the fine shops that Mummy had always loved. We walked in silence for several blocks and then he told me about Shirlee. That she'd never died, had been comatose when Daddy pulled her out of the pool, remained that way—damaged, with minimal cerebral functioning. All the time I'd thought her dead, she'd been living in an institution in Connecticut. Mummy was a perfect lady, very genteel, but she wasn't strong, couldn't cope with adversity.

  “The lawyer said he knew it had to come as a shock, he was sorry I'd been lied to, but Mummy and Daddy had felt it best. Now, however, they were gone, and since I was next of kin, Shirlee was my legal responsibility. Not that that had to burden me. He—the law firm—would assume her guardianship, handle all the finances, administer her trust fund so that her medical expenses would continue to be paid. There was absolutely no need for me to disrupt my life. He had papers for me to sign and it would all be taken care of.

  “I filled with an anger I didn't know I was capable of, started yelling at him right there on Fifth Avenue, demanding to see her. He tried to talk me out of it, said I should wait until the shock subsided. But I insisted. I had to see her right now. He called for a limousine. We drove to Connecticut. The place was big and nice-looking—an old stone mansion, well-kept lawns, a big sun porch, nurses in starched uniforms, doctors with German accents. But she needed more than that—she needed her partner. I told the lawyer she'd be returning with me to California, to have her ready for travel within a week.

  “He tried again to talk me out of it. Said he'd seen this kind of thing before—survivor guilt. The more he talked, the angrier I got, the poor man. And since I'd reached my majority, he had no choice. I returned to L.A. feeling righteous with purpose—no longer just another grad student caught up in the grind, I was a woman with a mission. But the moment I stepped into my dorm room, the enormity of everything hit me. I realized my life would never be the same, never be normal. I dealt with it by staying busy, ordering the lawyer around, moving into the house, signing papers. Convincing myself, Alex, that I was in control. I found this place—it doesn't look that great on the outside, but they really treat her special. Elmo is fantastic, totally oriented toward one-on-one care.”

  She lifted my hand to her cheek, then placed it in her lap and held it tight.

  “Now you, Alex. Your entree to this mess. The night you found me holding the snapshot was soon after Shirlee had been flown out—what a job, just getting her off the plane and into a van. I hadn't slept for days, was wired and fatigued. The photo had come in a box with other family papers; it had been in Mummy's purse the day she died.

  “I started staring at it, fell into it, like Alice down the hole. I was trying to integrate everything, remember the good days. But so angry that I'd been deceived, that my whole life had been a deceit—every moment colored by lies. I felt sick, Alex. Nauseous. My stomach was heaving. As if the photo was capturing me—eating me up, the way the pool had eaten Shirlee. I freaked out, stayed freaked for days—I was hanging by a thread when you came in.

  “I never heard you, Alex. Not until you were standing over me. And you seemed angry—judging me. Disapproving. When you picked the picture up off the floor and examined it, it was as if you'd invaded me—forced your way into my private pain. I wanted the pain all to myself—wanted something all to myself. I just blew. I'm so sorry.”

  I returned the pressure of her hand. “It's all right.”

  “The next couple of weeks were horrible, just a nightmare. I worried what I'd done to you and me, but frankly, I was too drained to do anything about it and guilty because I couldn't get myself to care more about it. I had so much to deal with: my rage at my parents for lying to me, my grief at losing them, my rage at Shirlee for coming back so damaged, for being unable to respond to my love. At the time I didn't realize that she was vibrating, trying to communicate with me. So many changes all at once, Alex. Like a jumble of crisscrossing live wires burning into my brain. I got help.”

  “Kruse.”

  “Despite what you think of him, he helped me, Alex. Helped put me back together again. And he told me you'd come looking for me, which let me know you cared. I cared about you—that's why I finally forced myself to get together with you, even though Paul said I wasn't ready. And he was right. I came on like a nympho because I was feeling worthless, out of control, felt I owed you something. Acting like a sexpot made me feel in charge, as if I were stepping out of my personality and adopting a new one. But just for a short while. Later, while you slept, I despised what I'd done, despised you. I dumped on you because you were there.”

  She
looked away. “And because you were good. I ruined what we had because I was unable to tolerate goodness, Alex. I didn't feel I deserved goodness. And after all these years, I still regret that.”

  I sat there, trying to take it all in.

  She leaned over and kissed me. Gradually, the kiss took on heat and depth and we were pressed against each other, groping, our tongues dancing. Then we both pulled away.

  “Sharon—”

  “Yes, I know,” she said. “Not again. How could you ever know you'd be safe?”

  “I—”

  She placed a finger over my lips.

  “No reason to explain, Alex. Ancient history. I just wanted to show you that I'm not all bad.”

  I kept quiet, didn't say what had passed through my mind. That maybe we could start again—slowly. Carefully. Now that both of us had grown up.

  She said, “I'll let you go now.”

  We drove away in separate cars.

  Back from Kruse's house, I sat in my living room with the lights out and turned it over, again and again. Park Avenue, Southampton summers. Mummy and Daddy. Martinis in the sun-room. Genteel cardboard cutouts.

  But a nasty little scrap of celluloid said Mummy had been anything but genteel. A rich man's party girl who'd made love on film, probably used it for blackmail.

  My whole life had been a deceit—every moment colored by lies.

  I thought about Shirlee Ransom. Vegetative. Squeaking. Wondered if any part of the story had been true.

  If she loved her twin, how could she kill herself, abandon a helpless cripple?

  Unless Shirlee was dead too.

  S and S, silent partners.

  A pair of little girls, beautiful, black-haired. Mountains in the background. Ice cream cones in opposite hands.

  Mirror-image twins. She's a lefty; I'm a righty.

  Suddenly I realized what had bothered me about the porn loop—the tip-of-the-mind incongruity that stayed under my skin.