by Darcey Bell
Not to this day. She thought they were both alive.
Unless Emily had told her sister what I’d told her at the county fair, it was Emily who had called. And it was Evelyn’s body that had washed up on shore.
“Where did you say Emily’s sister lived?”
“Last I heard, Seattle.”
“Anything more exact than that?” I asked. “Do you have an address?”
“I wish I knew. Bernice helps me with the birthday cards. I just sent one to Emily in Connecticut. But the last address we have for Evelyn is an awfully seedy motel in Seattle. Bernice googled it, and we saw.”
She leaned forward. “What business is this of yours? Remind me, dear.”
She’d said dear like a witch in a fairy tale. Threatening and insulting.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m sorry . . .”
All through my visit, it seemed as if she could turn the lights on and off behind her eyes. Now they’d clouded over again. Night, night. Nobody home.
“I’m tired,” she said.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t meant to . . . thank you.” I stood up from the pink and white couch, looking behind me to see if I’d dirtied or messed it up. “It was kind of you to let me visit.”
“Remind me why you wanted to meet me?”
“Curiosity,” I said.
“Killed the cat,” she said. I heard a note in her voice—like Emily’s. I felt another chill. I shivered. The old woman noticed. She liked it. She tilted her chin and laughed almost girlishly. She was present again, for the moment.
“I’ll be leaving now,” I said. “Do you want me to . . . call someone?”
“She’s leaving!” said Mrs. Nelson.
I heard footsteps. A tall and still beautiful woman in her fifties wearing dark blue nursing scrubs and a tangle of gray dreads tied behind her neck appeared in the doorway.
“This is Bernice,” said Mrs. Nelson. “And this is—?”
“Stephanie,” I said. “Nice to meet you, Bernice.”
Bernice gave me a neutral, forgiving look. I sensed that she had been monitoring her employer’s conversation and approved of, or at least hadn’t minded, our talk. First Mrs. Nelson, then Bernice held out their hands for me to shake. I shook their hands and thanked them.
Bernice walked me to the door then closed it softly behind her, and we stood on the front porch.
I said, “I understand the police spoke with you. I’m so sorry about Emily.”
“If it is Emily,” Bernice said. “They never could tell those girls apart, maybe not even in death.”
All this new information, these new theories and new suspicions were a lot to process at once. I thought of Miles, which always calms me.
I asked Bernice, “Did you mention your suspicions to the police? Did you tell them about Evelyn?”
“I let them think what they want to. This is Detroit, baby. Rich white Detroit, but still . . . Best not to contradict or come up with anything new. The less you mess with the police, the better off you are. I tried to call Emily and figure out what was what, but she never picked up her cell. Her mama’s better not knowing. I don’t want the poor thing to suffer any more than she already has. Sometimes she thinks she has two daughters, sometimes none, sometimes one . . . I can never predict what will stick with her and what will slide right off. Lots of times she surprises me with what she remembers . . . Did she mention the car?”
“What car?”
“She remembers that. Evelyn stole her car a while back. Both the girls had car keys. And one of them got into the garage and drove the car away in the middle of the night. My bet, it was Evelyn. Emily can rent any car she wants. Am I right?”
I nodded. That sounded right, and yet it made everything even more confusing. I wanted to stay here and ask Bernice questions all day. At the same time I wanted to hurry back to my hotel room and think about what I’d heard.
“Mrs. Nelson was hysterical. She kept asking me how she would get around. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that she hadn’t driven for years. I said we’d take taxis, like we always did. I told her not to worry. I helped her send Emily’s birthday card, just like I have for years.”
“She’s lucky to have you, Bernice,” I said.
Bernice made a face. I was afraid that I’d insulted her. But she wasn’t thinking about me.
“She deserves some good luck,” she said. “She’s had such bad luck with those girls. In the islands, we’re careful around twins. You watch yourself.” She listened for sounds from inside the house. “I’ve got to get back in there . . . There’s no telling what she’ll . . . You have a safe trip back.”
There was no time to ask her what she meant by being careful and watching myself.
Once I left the suburbs, it was a bumpy ride. Considering that Detroit was the home of the auto, I was surprised that the roads were so bad. Steering around the potholes made me focus and kept me from freaking out over what I’d just heard.
Emily was a twin.
I was so jumpy that when I pulled into the rental place and the guys in uniform swarmed all over the car, one of them asked if I was okay.
I said, “I’m fine! Why is everyone asking?”
I got rid of the car and took the shuttle to the Detroit Metro airport hotel. I was glad I hadn’t gone for the cheapest option, glad there was a minibar, glad I could drink two little bottles of bourbon, one right after the other. I was glad the bed was nice and clean so I could get under the covers with all my clothes on. Glad I was together enough to call down and ask the desk clerk to phone my room in plenty of time for an early flight.
I pulled the blanket over my head and closed my eyes. The Diane Arbus photo of the twins swam up from the darkness. I saw it more clearly, I remembered it better than Emily’s mother’s snapshots. I could still see their party dresses, but I couldn’t recall what Emily and her sister were wearing in the family photos. They weren’t dressed identically. Was that something their mother told me? She never dressed them alike. Or was that something I’d figured out? What difference did it make?
The last picture seemed to have been taken at their high school graduation. They were wearing caps and gowns. They both looked young and hopeful.
What happened after that? Mrs. Nelson thought Evelyn was in Seattle. But she had no address. How long before the old woman forgot them both? Was this something Emily knew and counted on to help her do what she was doing?
Whatever that was.
I could have reacted in all sorts of ways. I got angry. As if I was the one who’d been wronged. I knew some people might fault me for sleeping with Emily’s husband. But I felt as if she’d done something to me first, tricked me, used me . . . not telling me she was a twin. Letting me and Sean—or maybe only me—think that she was dead.
And then deciding to let me know that she was alive.
The dominant twin. She had all the power.
Did Sean know she had a twin? He’d never mentioned it. Had she managed to keep that secret even from her husband?
I lay there thinking of how to let Emily know that I knew.
After a while it came to me. Emily had slipped up. She shouldn’t have let me know that she read my blog. That was how I could get in touch with her. It gave me a little control, a way to be heard. And I didn’t have to worry about Sean, who didn’t read my blog.
I lay awake working out the wording to my blog post. How could I let Emily know that I’d been to her mother’s and I knew her secret—but without revealing what it was?
32
Stephanie's Blog
On Closure
Hi, moms!
I could write a whole blog about closure. Or I could tell you a story about closure around the tragic accidental death of my best friend.
It’s a complicated story, but here are the basics:
I visited Emily’s mother at Emily’s childhood home in a suburb of Detroit. I met her thoughtful and lovely caretaker, Bernice. I sat on the old-fashioned pink-and-wh
ite-striped silk sofa, and Emily’s mother showed me a photo album full of pictures of Emily when she was a little girl.
It’s hard to explain. But as we looked at the childhood photos together, I felt that I was being given a moment of understanding, a clear window into my friend’s childhood. As Emily’s mother and I remembered and celebrated Emily’s life, I felt I understood everything. And I realized that Emily’s story was twice as interesting as I could possibly have imagined.
And I could finally let my beloved friend Emily go.
Moms, please feel free to post about your own most moving and satisfying moments of closure.
Love,
Stephanie
33
Emily
I always knew that something bad would happen in the cabin. Maybe that was why I was so afraid of being there alone. I often dreamed of some evil . . . presence waiting for me on the screened-in sleeping porch where my sister and I spent so many childhood nights whispering in the dark, telling stories, inventing the fantasy kingdom (population: two) where we could live together forever without any grown-ups to ruin our fun or tell us what to do.
Our favorite song was “Octopus’s Garden.” We sang it over and over, faster and faster until our throats hurt and we couldn’t stop laughing. It makes me cry now. What if one of us met the octopus first?
The night before I disappeared, the phone rang. Sean and I were asleep.
“Who is it?” Sean mumbled.
“Dennis,” I said. It was not uncommon for Dennis Nylon to call at odd hours. It meant he was on another binge, spiraling toward another stint in rehab. He dialed through all the names on his work-contacts list till someone answered. I always answered because I knew that if no one else picked up, he’d move on to his next list: press and media people. I was the one who would have to deal with the ensuing shit storm. It was easier to talk Dennis down, to let him ramble until I heard him snoring on the other end of the phone. Then I could go back to sleep.
“I’ll take it in the hall,” I told Sean.
I practically sprinted down the stairs. I knew it wasn’t Dennis.
“Will you accept a collect call from Eve?”
I always did.
Eve and Em were the not-so-secret names that my sister and I had for each other. No one else—no one—was allowed to call us that. Once, early in our relationship, Sean called me Em, and I told him I would kill him if he ever called me that again. I think he believed I meant it. And maybe I did.
I had to leave the room to accept a phone call from my sister. Sean didn’t know I had a sister. No one did. No one but Mother, if she still remembered, and Bernice and people who’d known us in high school. But who cared about them? I’d had to get rid of a lot of old snapshots. At that point, I was still talking to Mother, so I sent them back to her with the excuse that I was moving a lot and I didn’t want to lose them.
“Hi, Eve,” I said.
“Hi, Em,” she said. And we both began to cry.
I don’t remember exactly when I stopped telling people that I had a sister. More or less around the time I moved to New York. I was sick of saying that I was a twin and having strangers pry or think they knew something about me. Didn’t they see how it bored me when everyone asked the same questions? Fraternal or identical? Did you dress alike? Are you close? Did you have a secret language? Was it weird, being a twin?
It was weird, and it’s still weird. But not in any way I could—or wanted to—explain. Sometimes, after I’d started pretending that I didn’t have a sister, I could almost forget I had one. Out of sight, out of mind. It was easier. Less pain, less guilt, less grief, less worry.
No one at work knew I had a twin. The first time Sean and I played our “Who had the unhappier childhood?” game, he told me that he was an only child, and I said, “Oh, poor you! Me, too!” After that, it became too complicated to explain how I could have forgotten I have a sister. It was easier, in every way, to keep Evelyn’s existence a secret. If she showed up at my house, I would have some serious explaining to do. That never happened. By then, my job had made me an expert at explaining the inexplicable—controlling information.
Every so often, I tested myself, my luck, and the people around me, daring them to guess the truth. Was Sean curious about why I spent a fortune on that Diane Arbus photo of the twins? Why I loved it so much? Of course not. It was a work of art. A good investment, he probably thought. The truth would have made him wonder what kind of person he married. That is, he would have wondered more than he did.
The first time Stephanie came to visit, I made a point of showing her the photo and saying that I cared about it more than anything in my house. But she just thought it proved that I had very good—very expensive—taste. Millions of people admire that picture, normal people who don’t look at the image and wonder which of the twins they are.
I was the dominant twin. I pushed my way out first. I walked and talked first. I grabbed Evelyn’s toys. I made her cry. I protected her. I put her at risk. I was the one who showed her where to find Mother’s gin bottles and replace the gin with water. I lit her first joint and invited her to smoke weed with me and my friends. I was the one who split our first tab of acid, who gave Evelyn her first Ecstasy pill, who took her to her first rave in Detroit.
How was I supposed to know that she would like getting high even more than I did? Or that she would find it harder to stay sober? Or that the terror of boredom that I felt would also torment her but in a different and more harmful way? She was the weaker twin.
I took the phone into the kitchen and turned on the light. It was cold, but I was afraid to put the phone down long enough to put on a sweater. I was afraid she’d hang up or disappear. Again.
“Where are you?” I said.
“I don’t know. Somewhere in Michigan. Guess what? I stole Mother’s car.”
“Nice,” I said. “We can all rest easy knowing the world is a safer place.”
She laughed. “I guess Mother hasn’t been driving it all that much.”
“Thank God for that,” I said. “Remember that time she backed off our driveway and fell into a ditch, and we had to call a tow truck with chains to pull her out?”
“I don’t remember much,” said Evelyn, “but I do remember that.” I was thinking, and my sister was too, that we were the only people who remembered that. I looked at my hand, holding the phone, and focused on the tattoo I hardly see anymore. Now I could see Evelyn, her wrist, her tattoo.
We got the tattoos after our worst fight ever. I’d found her kit in her bureau drawer—a hypodermic, cotton wool, a spoon, rubber tubing. Oh, and a packet of white powder.
We were seventeen.
I’d been suspicious for a while. She’d started wearing long sleeves, and she’d always had beautiful arms, nicer than mine; I get freckles in the sun. I’d known what I was going to find before I found it. But I was shocked when I did. This was real. My sister wasn’t joking.
I began to shout at her, yelling that she couldn’t do this to herself. To me. She said it was none of my business. We weren’t the same.
By then we were yelling so loud I was afraid that Mother might hear. But Mother was floating on a warm, cottony substance cloud of her own.
I slapped my sister. She slapped me back. We stepped away from each other, horrified. We hadn’t hit one another since we were little girls.
The next day we got our tattoos. We stole a handful of Mother’s painkillers to make it hurt less. Neither of us was promising to stop getting high. That would have been too much to ask—and we would only have lied to each other. We were promising that we would never fight like that again. And we never did. We never have.
Mother always thought the argument was about a boy. But no boy would have been worth it.
What was happening to my sister began to seem like something I’d done wrong. A mistake I’d made. When we left home—Evelyn for the West Coast, me for the East—and I outgrew the drugs and she didn’t, distance made it easier to
believe that her problems weren’t my fault. I missed her—and I made myself stop missing her.
We can control how we think and feel.
I was good at not missing people. Mother, for example. The last time I saw Mother was at Dad’s funeral. Evelyn didn’t make it home. Mother got extremely drunk (even for her) and blew up at me, saying that my sister’s problem was the result of my heartless, selfish dominance. I said it wasn’t fair to blame me for something that started before I was born. It was a fight I could never win. I stopped speaking to Mother. I didn’t need to hear her say what I feared.
It wasn’t as if I hadn’t tried to help Evelyn—to save her. I happen to know a great deal about the pros and cons of various rehab facilities. Working at Dennis Nylon has been an education. I’ve lost count of how many times I flew out west, faking some business trip to fool Sean, faking some family emergency to deceive the people at work. It was a family emergency.
I’d find Evelyn wherever she was. Luckily, she always wanted to be found—that’s why she’d called me, in the middle of the night, always scared. Those plane trips lasted forever. I’d find her in some crappy motel, usually shacked up with a halfway-hot guy she hardly knew. I’d check her into rehab. Mother paid for that. It was the least she could do. After Evelyn got out, she’d call regularly. She’d tell me how amazing it felt to be sober, how much better food tasted, how she could enjoy a sunny day without her eyes hurting.
Then the calls would stop.
Everyone who has ever loved an addict or had one in the family knows how it goes, the hopes and disappointments, the plot turns always circling back to the same story. People get tired.
The last I heard from Evelyn was a postcard from Seattle with nothing written on it but my Connecticut address and, on the front, a brightly colored tourist photo of fish, beautifully arranged on ice in the Pike Place market. Dead fish: Evelyn’s sense of humor.
