by Darcey Bell
“Are you still there?” I asked, unnecessarily. I could hear my sister sniffling on the other end of the phone.
“More or less,” she said.
“Don’t hang up,” I said. “Please.”
“I won’t,” she said.
“Are you high?”
“Does it sound like I’m high?”
It did.
“Where are you going?” I said. “In Mother’s car?”
“I thought I’d go to the cabin. Up to the lake.”
My spirits lifted slightly. Maybe Evelyn was going to try and get clean. Leave her old life, make a fresh start. The lake house was our retreat, our place of safety. Our own private mental asylum.
“You going there to chill?” I said.
“You could say that.” She laughed bitterly. “I’m going there to kill myself.”
“Are you joking?”
“No,” she said. “I’m dead serious.” I could tell she meant it.
“Please, no,” I said. “Wait for me. Don’t do anything crazy. I’ll meet you there. I’ll get there as soon as I can. Promise me. No, swear to me.”
“I promise,” she said. “I promise I won’t do anything till you get here. But I’m going to do it. I’ve made up my mind.”
“Wait for me,” I repeated.
“Okay,” she said. “But make it fast.”
I stayed awake all night. By morning I knew what I was going to do and what was going to happen. I knew, and I didn’t know.
My sister possessed the key that unlocked the door to the prison, the magic spell that would slay our dragons. She was the secret player with the power to help Sean and me win our little game. I didn’t want my sister to die. I wasn’t going to help or encourage her to kill herself. I loved her. But I was going to do what she needed me to do, even if it meant losing her. Even if it meant admitting that I already had.
I had no time to lose. The next morning I got up early and packed. I booked a flight to San Francisco, which I had no intention of taking but which I hoped might briefly throw anyone who was looking for me off my trail.
I called Stephanie and asked if she’d do me a favor. A simple favor. Could Nicky spend the evening at her house? I’d pick him up when I got back from work. Of course I could have told her that I was planning to be away for a few days. But I wanted her to go into full panic mode as soon as possible. It would make my disappearance seem more credible, more alarming, more urgent. And when the insurance company looked into the case, there would have been a police investigation.
Perhaps there would be a body. A woman who had looked just like me and who had my DNA.
That morning I dropped Nicky off at school five minutes late so I wouldn’t run into Stephanie, who was always early. I didn’t want nosy Stephanie wondering why I was crying when I kissed Nicky goodbye.
I knew that I wouldn’t be seeing him for a long time, and my heart was breaking. I hugged him so hard he said, “Careful, Mom, that hurts!”
“Sorry,” I said. “I love you.”
“Love you too,” he said, not even looking back as he ran into school.
“See you later,” I said, so the last thing I said to him (for a while) wouldn’t be a lie.
I kept telling myself that Nicky would thank us later. Who wouldn’t want a childhood in the most beautiful spots in Europe? He would have a better childhood than his parents, who’d grown up in the boring suburbs of Detroit and the bleak north of England. Connecticut should have been good enough; I don’t know why it wasn’t. I guess it’s never enough.
I wanted to do something exciting. I wanted to feel alive.
I drove home and picked up Sean. We drove to the Metro-North station and took the train into the city. Then we took a taxi from Grand Central to the airport. We needed him to be on the plane to London before I went missing. I made a big production of standing on the sidewalk in front of the international departure entrance and kissing him goodbye in case the police located the driver who took us to JFK. But they never even tried—more proof that they weren’t looking for me all that hard. I asked the cab to wait while we said our loving goodbyes. We’d be on CCTV: a devoted couple, sorry to be leaving each other, even for a few days.
“This is it,” I whispered to Sean. “You know what to do.” In London, he would set up a few meetings with clients with whom he’d failed to get something going before, the ones who liked him and were genuinely sorry they couldn’t invest millions of their company’s money in Sean’s company’s real estate projects. They’d agree to have a drink with him—and give him an alibi.
“Where are you going?” he said. “What if I need to get in touch with you? What if there’s an emergency?” He sounded scared, like a kid. It was embarrassing.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “This is the emergency. No matter what you hear . . . I’m not dead. I’ll be back. Trust me. I won’t be dead.” I needed him to believe that.
“Okay,” he said dubiously.
“See you soon,” I said, very loudly in case anyone was listening. No one was.
“See you soon, darling,” he said.
I got back in the cab and went to the rental car agency.
I was on my way. I had that heady, bad-girl, wind-in-my-hair feeling about a scheme that might work, a plan that seemed like more fun than my current life, more fun than a job that many people would have seen as fun enough. I wanted something else.
I wouldn’t mind a break from Sean. I could use a time-out beside the lake. Wasn’t the whole point to step back from our overcommitted lives and disconnect and figure out what was important? Lots of people have that idea. But not everyone acts on it. Civilization would collapse if they did.
I was right to be uneasy about being separated from Nicky and—as it turned out—to be concerned about Sean’s sticking to our plan. I certainly never expected Sean to fuck the fish. I didn’t think that Stephanie would stalk me all the way to my mother’s.
Life is full of surprises.
I’d brought books. The complete works of Charles Dickens, James M. Cain’s Serenade. A Highsmith novel I couldn’t remember reading, or maybe I’d forgotten. I bought enough food to last for a while—and a new CD player. I could play the music I liked without having to listen to Sean’s awful screaming British bands from his youth.
I made an effort to cover my tracks, stopping at convenience stores where I thought they might not have state-of-the-art surveillance cameras. Still, when they started looking for me, it should have been easier to find me. I assumed they weren’t looking that hard, whatever they might have been pretending and telling Sean.
I didn’t know that till later. The lake house had no internet and no TV.
* * *
I never imagined that our plan would involve my twin. Now, thinking back, I realize I needed my sister for it to work. I needed her, just as I’d always needed her, even when I tried to escape or deny or ignore it. I must have known all along that Evelyn would be part of it. But I didn’t want things to happen the way they did.
I must have known. My sister and I had always known things about the other without being able to explain or understand how we knew.
On the way to Michigan, I had a lot of time to think. Sometimes I thought like the decent human being I wanted to be. Sometimes I thought like the scheming maniac I really am. I spent the night in a motel in Sandusky. A Motel 6 where I could pay cash.
I reached the lake house the next day. Mother’s 1988 Buick was parked in the driveway. I wished it was just a car, any old car, but it was the car in which Mother had nearly killed us countless times during our childhood. After she’d had her license suspended for DWI, the car had remained in the garage. Bernice took it out every so often, to keep it running, but its forced retirement had preserved it with Mother’s nicks and dents. I told myself that the car was Evelyn’s now, but that only made me feel worse. Because I realized that pretty soon—too soon—the car might be mine. But what would I do with it? My sister would be dead, and
I would be in another country, a multimillionaire with no use for Mother’s beat-up Buick.
The cabin door was locked. I knocked. No answer. No one had fixed the torn screen on the porch, and I climbed through it. The house smelled like something had died in the walls. When that happened when Evelyn and I were kids, we’d scare each other by saying that a dead person was walled up in the cabin. Edgar Allan Poe was our favorite writer.
Usually it was a dead bat in the walls. All the bats were dying now. Dennis Nylon gave a benefit for a bat-disease research foundation to launch our Batgirl look. That was my idea. And, it occurred to me now, that was what I’d worked for: saving the lives of dead bats.
God, I hated being alone in the cabin. Had Evelyn changed her mind? She’d better be here. Don’t let her be dead.
On the kitchen counter, I saw the bottles of orange energy drink and the packages of the marshmallow cookies and potato chips that Evelyn ate when she was high, when she ate at all.
“Evelyn?”
“In here.”
I ran to the room where she slept when it got too cold to sleep on the porch. For years we’d shared the same room because it was so much fun to talk and tell stories and scare each other. Then for years we’d argued over which room was ours. Finally we settled on who would sleep where—the first of our separations.
I opened the door.
It’s always a shock, seeing your double. Like looking in the mirror but much, much more bizarre. The strangest thing now was that we looked so similar and so different. Evelyn’s hair was ratted as if a small animal was nesting inside. Her face was unevenly puffy, and her skin was a bluish skim milk pale. When she smiled at me, I saw that she was missing a front tooth. She wore several sweaters, one on top of the other. She’d crawled under the blankets, and still she was shivering.
She looked awful. I loved her. I always had and always would.
The strength of that love erased everything. The years of fights and worry. The crazed middle-of-the-night phone calls, the not knowing where she was, the dragging her into rehab, the disappointments and scares. All the resentments, frustrations, and fears were burned away by the happiness of being in the same room. Of her being alive. How could I have forgotten the most important person in my life? I had never loved anyone as I loved my twin. Anyone but Nicky. It was almost unbearably painful that my sister didn’t know him. That he didn’t know her. And maybe he never would.
I ran over and hugged Evelyn. I said, “You need a bath.”
“Bossy, bossy,” Evelyn said. She dragged herself up in bed. “What I need is a shot of bourbon, a beer, and two Vicodins.”
I sat on the edge of the bed. “You’re high.”
“You know me so well,” Evelyn said flatly.
Then she said, “I want to die.”
“You don’t,” I said. “You can’t.” I was crazy to have thought that it would help Sean and me if she died. I had forgotten how much I loved her, how much I wanted her to live. I’d think of something else. I’d bring her home with me, I’d tell Sean and Nicky the truth—
She said, “This is not going to be like that play where the girl spends the whole play telling her mom she’s going to kill herself. And then she does. Or doesn’t. I can’t remember. This is not going to be like that.”
“Tell me you’re not serious,” I said.
“This serious.” She pointed at the dresser behind my head where a dozen pill bottles were lined up like clear cylindrical bombs awaiting detonation. “I am not going about this like some amateur. This will not be messy, I promise.”
“I need you to stick around,” I said.
She said, “We’ve fallen out of touch, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“That can change. Starting now.”
“Everything can change. For example, I’ve gotten quite neat. I plan to clean up the kitchen. Make the bed. I won’t kill myself in the house, where you’d have to deal with my body. I plan to do it outside and let Mother Nature do the heavy lifting.”
I said, “You still think this is about whose turn it is to clean up the cabin?”
“Wait,” said Evelyn. “Here’s an idea: Join me. One last swim in the lake. Two dead twins gone back to the element we came from. We won’t have to worry about each other. Or think about each other. Or dread getting old and dying. No more terrors in the middle of the night. Do you know how sweet that would be? No more worry, no anger, no boredom, no wanting, no sadness, no more—”
“That sounds tempting,” I said. And for a moment, it did. Dying with Evelyn would be the final big adventure, the ultimate “fuck you” to tedium and boredom. Deal with that, Sean and Stephanie and Dennis! But Nicky would need to deal with it too.
“Thanks, but I can’t. I’ve got Nicky.”
I was sorry as soon as I said it.
“And I don’t,” she said. “I don’t have the cute little person who needs me. The nephew you never let me meet.”
“I couldn’t . . . you were so . . . I never knew . . .”
“Don’t worry about it, Em. It’s a little late. So without the cute little person, all I have is the big ugly death wish.”
She put her wrist beside mine. The two barbed-wire bracelet tattoos made a squashed figure eight. My sister was always fond of theatrical gestures.
“No more fights,” she said.
“No more fights,” I said.
“Listen,” I said. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
“You don’t love Sean anymore,” she said. “Big surprise.”
“It’s not about him. Or maybe it is. A little. Listen. I’ve disappeared. I’m faking my death to collect insurance money.”
“Very Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray,” Evelyn said. “I like it.”
No one else would have said that. Not Sean, certainly not Stephanie. Maybe Nicky would, some day. But not for many years.
She said, “You’re totally insane. But wait, wait a second. I think I’m getting the picture. The signal’s coming in . . . It helps you, if I die. You can pretend you’re the dead one. A win-win situation. We both win. Right?”
“How can you even think that?” She was the only person who knew me.
“Because I know what you’re thinking.” She laughed. “I love that I’d be dying for you.”
“That’s not true,” I said.
“Joking,” Evelyn said. “Why were you always the one supposed to have the sense of humor? This is really rich. Perfect. Now we both get what we want. For the first time ever, maybe.”
I said, “Do you know that fifty percent of twins die in a few years after the death of their twin?”
“I do know that,” she said. “We read that on the internet together in your college dorm. And I’m sorry. You’ll survive. One of us is enough.”
“I always found you,” I said. “I always tried to help. You could find the right group and get sober and—”
She said, “Fuck you. You make amends. For crowding me. Since before we were born.”
“My God, you sound like Mother. Blaming me for what happened before we were born.”
“Don’t play dumb,” Evelyn said.
A silence fell. Evelyn wanted to say something else. She flexed her wrists and put her palms outward, as if pressing against something, and rocked back slightly. It was a signal we’d had as girls. We could send an SOS from across the room. Rescue me from this parent, this party guest, this guy.
She said, “If I had some horrible cancer or ALS and I asked you to help me die, I know—I know—you would. Well, the pain is as bad. It’s just not visible on the MRI.”
I said, “Okay. Enough. I’m tired. Will you promise me not to do anything crazy tonight?”
“Crazy?” she said. “I won’t drown myself, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“I love you,” I said. “But I need sleep.” I pushed Evelyn over and climbed into bed beside her. She smelled a little like a horse stable and a little like how she smelled as a kid.
&
nbsp; I didn’t sleep. Or maybe I slept a little. I kept waking up and putting my hand on her chest, the way I put my hand on newborn Nicky’s chest to make sure he was breathing.
I missed my child. If Evelyn had a child, she wouldn’t talk like this. But plenty of mothers kill themselves.
Evelyn was snoring lightly, a semi-peaceful alcohol-soaked snore. Her breathing was regular and shallow, broken by occasional hiccups.
For years all my feelings about my sister had tracked toward dread. It was as if I’d been preparing with endless rehearsals. I couldn’t stop thinking about our childhood, and about her saying that I would help her if she had a fatal illness. I tried not to dwell on the fact that her death was what Sean and I needed for our crazy plan.
It was morning when I woke. It took a while to remember where I was. I reached my arm out for Evelyn. I slapped the bed. She wasn’t there.
I ran into the kitchen. Evelyn was awake, sitting in the living room, nibbling a cookie.
She said, “Do you have any idea how loud you snore? You always were the loudest. Okay, good news, bad news. The strange thing is, it’s both. Good news: I’ve changed my mind. I’ve decided to live. Bad news: I’ve changed my mind and decided to live.”
My first response was pure joy. My sister would survive! I could put her into rehab, the right one this time. I could fix things so they would stay fixed. I’d introduce her to Sean and Nicky. Meet your sister-in-law. Meet your aunt.
“I’m so happy.” I hugged her.
She held on longer than I did.
That’s when I had a feeling I still can’t explain. It was as if, almost as if, I felt disappointed. Cheated. The most upset I’ve ever seen Nicky be, the closest he’s come to a tantrum, is when he expects something to happen, it’s all planned out in his head. He’s imagined the whole scenario. He’s practically lived it. And then it doesn’t happen.
That was how I felt about my sister’s death. I had imagined the whole thing, what I would do and say, up to and including the feelings I would have. I had it all worked out.
