Double Identity

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  I can see her as a kindergarten teacher, all cheerful and patient and, “Now, let’s try ‘The Wheels on the Bus,’ one more time, boys and girls. I know you can do it!” But her answer gives me a little pang for the year of school I missed, all because my mother said, “I’m just not ready to send Bethany out into the world all by herself yet”—as if kindergarten were full of brigands and murderers and thieves, not chunky books and brightly colored blocks and little girls in frilly socks who might have been my friends.

  “It’s Meadow Elementary, just a few blocks away,” Myrlie is saying. “I taught … Oh, never mind.”

  I bend over my cereal and pretend to be searching for raisins. But really I’m adding up the number of times Myrlie has broken off her words in the middle of a sentence. Last night: “You just look so much like …” Up on the stairs: “Someone who could sleep the whole morning away like …” And now: “I taught…” I tell myself I want just one more word in one of those sentences. But it probably wouldn’t be enough.

  Myrlie has fallen silent again.

  I take a sip of my orange juice, which is thick and full of pulp. I absolutely despise pulpy orange juice, but I swallow it anyway, as though that earns me the right to ask another question. A braver question.

  “Whose room was I sleeping in?”

  Myrlie frowns ruefully.

  “I guess you could say it’s set up for grandchildren to come and visit, but I don’t have any yet. My daughter’s not even married, and she says there are no prospects right now, so it’ll be a while.” She shrugs. “The furniture used to be my daughter’s, when she was a little girl. She always wanted two beds in her room so she could have sleepovers with … friends.”

  Myrlie’s words come out slower and slower as she comes to the end of her sentence, and she practically whispers the last word. A shadow crosses her face, like an echo of long-ago pain. And in that instant she looks incredibly familiar.

  “You’re my mother’s sister, aren’t you?” I blurt out. Even though she’s taller, plumper, and older, Myrlie has the same straight nose, the same wide mouth, the same intense eyes as my mother. Myrlie just had to look sad for me to see the resemblance.

  Her plaintive expression deepens.

  “They didn’t even tell you that?” she whispers.

  We stare at each other, my cereal forgotten. It’s as if we’ve just crashed through the skeletal bridge I was trying to build between us with my pitiful little questions. We’re in free fall, waiting to crash into whatever lies below.

  The phone rings instead.

  We both jump, and Myrlie says, “I’ll get it,” as if there’s some possibility that I’d race her for it.

  She stands at the counter and offers a wary “Hello?” into the receiver. She listens, then says, “She’s right here, Walter. But I’d like to talk to you too, before you hang up.”

  And then I am racing for the phone. I grab it from her, rudely, because I’m suddenly terrified that she’ll get her conversation in first, and there won’t be any time left for me.

  “Daddy,” I say, and Myrlie backs away. She puts away the Raisin Bran box, takes dishes to the sink. But she doesn’t leave the kitchen.

  “Oh, honey, it’s so good to hear your voice,” he says. His voice sounds tinny and artificial and far away. I feel like I can hear the distance between us over the phone.

  “Where are you?” I say.

  “I think it’s better if I don’t tell you that.”

  I can practically count on one hand the number of times my father has refused me any toy or CD or cool outfit or jewelry. But what I want now isn’t a thing. Tears swarm in my eyes.

  “Daddy …” I dart a glance toward Myrlie. She has her back to me; she’s bent over the sink washing dishes. “Daddy, come back and get me. I can … I can wait with you while Mom gets help. I’ll be quiet. I’ll be good.”

  “No,” he says, and his voice is like rock now. We were learning about Mohs Hardness Scale in school, right before I left home, and now I think, Mr. Rodnow is wrong, diamond is not the hardest substance. My father’s voice should be the standard.

  “I’m sorry,” my father says, relenting a little. “But it’s best this way. You’re safe there.”

  Safe? I think I’ve been picturing my parents at some kind of psychiatric institution for very sad people. How could that not be safe? Are some of the other patients dangerous?

  “Why is it safe for you if it isn’t safe for me?” I ask, an edge of brattiness creeping into my voice.

  “Bethany …” my father says helplessly, and the tears come back to my eyes. I don’t want my father to be helpless. I want him to be fearless and in charge. My protector.

  “I couldn’t even call you last night,” I complained. “I tried your cell phone, and there’s something wrong, the telephone company said it was out of service. And so was my number, and Mom’s, and—”

  “Don’t call those numbers ever again!” My father shouts. He’s panicked. “In fact, just stay away from the phone unless I call. And I will call, as much as I can. I promise. I … I’ll try to call once a day.”

  “What if I need you more often than that?” I whimper, and my vision blurs as the tears take over. The toaster I’m staring at seems to tremble before my eyes.

  “Let me talk to Myrlie,” my father says.

  Somehow Myrlie must know that my part of the conversation is over, because she’s suddenly beside me, holding out her hand for the phone.

  “Why don’t you go take a shower while I’m on the phone?” she says brightly, as if she can’t see that I’m crying. As if I can’t tell that that’s just a ploy for privacy.

  Numbly, I push my way out the kitchen door and trudge up the stairs. I’m nearly at the top when I hear the kitchen door latch firmly.

  I stand still for a second, deciding. In my mind, I can see the cord tethering the phone into the wall, ensuring that Myrlie can’t roam while she talks. Silently, I tiptoe back down the stairs and press my ear against the kitchen door.

  FIVE

  “She needs to know about Elizabeth,” Myrlie is saying, ever so faintly, on the other side of the door.

  She’s quiet for a long time, and I worry that I’m missing huge chunks of conversation. Or that that was the end of the conversation, and she’s about to come scurrying out of the kitchen, slamming the door into my ear.

  “Well, of course it would be best if you and Hilary told her yourselves, but you’re not here right now, are you?” Myrlie explodes.

  I revise my opinion of her as the gentle, grandmotherly kindergarten teacher. I bet the kids in her class don’t get away with anything.

  There’s silence again, but I know it’s just because my father’s talking. I’ve got no hope of hearing his side of this conversation.

  “I’m sorry. I do understand that this must be tremendously difficult for the two of you,” Myrlie says. “But I have to be so careful about what I say around Bethany…. If you remember, I never was very good at keeping secrets. Or lying.”

  Another silence, longer this time. I study the warp of the hardwood floor beneath my feet.

  “Yeah, well, I haven’t had thirteen years of practice, have I?” Myrlie says. “Look, I’m happy to have Bethany stay here as long as she needs to. But she’s not just some trinket you can stow away on a shelf until it’s convenient for you to come back.”

  I’m still trying to imagine my father’s response to that when Myrlie says, “Okay, we’ll talk again tomorrow.”

  I spring back from the door and scramble up the stairs and into the bathroom. I turn on the water in the shower full blast. I peer into the mirror over the sink.

  “Who is Elizabeth?” I mutter.

  But the mirror offers me no reply except my own flushed, guilty reflection. And then the steam from the shower thickens, and obscures even that.

  SIX

  Myrlie is waiting for me in the living room when I creep down the stairs again, my hair wet, my face only slightly less f
lushed. She’s holding a newspaper, but she lays it down on the couch when she hears me coming.

  “I was just checking to see what’s going on around town today,” she says. “Something you might want to do.”

  I sit down on the edge of the couch and glance down at the paper. Its masthead reads THE SANDERFIELD REPORTER, with the words THE BEST SOURCE OF NEWS IN SANDERFIELD, ILLINOIS in smaller type below. It’s amazing how relieved I feel, that I won’t have to ask like some amnesia victim in a soap opera, “Where am I?” I’m in Sanderfield, Illinois. Not Indiana. Not Iowa. Illinois.

  One small mystery solved, who knows how many huge mysteries still gaping in front of me.

  “I didn’t know if there were any movies you wanted to see…,” Myrlie says.

  She lets her voice trail off, leaving an opening for my answer. I could say, “I don’t care about movies. I want you to tell me who Elizabeth is.” I could say, “I want you to explain why my parents are acting so weird.” But I open my mouth and I can’t make those words come out.

  Maybe I don’t quite want to know?

  You’re safe there, my father said over the phone. What did he mean? Am I safer being ignorant? What is he trying to keep me safe from?

  Myrlie is watching me. She seems to have worked up to being able to stare directly at me. I imagine us spending the entire day this way: her studying me, me tongue-tied and terrified.

  “Is there anywhere around here to swim?” I ask.

  Myrlie does a double take.

  “You like swimming?” she asks incredulously, as if I’ve announced that I want to go skydiving or bungee-jumping.

  “I’m on a swim team,” I say. “If I get out of practice, it could ruin my times for the entire season.”

  Coach Dinkle would be proud of my dedication, but it’s not really my times I’m worried about. I just need to be in water right now. I’ve never tried to explain this feeling to anybody, not even the other kids on my swim team, who tend to be as obsessed about times and personal bests as Coach Dinkle is. But it’s different for me.

  I can remember the first time my parents took me to a swimming pool. I was three years old. Mom and Dad stood in the shallow end with me, their legs forming a protective circle around me so none of the other little kids would splash me. But something happened—maybe I slipped, maybe a little wave made it past the barrier of their bodies and knocked me down. Anyhow, my face slid under. Strangely, I wasn’t scared. I didn’t try to gulp in air—maybe I’d just taken a big breath already, by chance. So I opened my eyes wide and calmly looked around. The underwater world delighted me: the refraction of sunlight in the water currents, the crispness of the colors, the distortion of sound, the way every movement seemed to be in slow motion. I felt like I’d discovered a new universe, the one where I truly belonged.

  My father plucked me out of the water and immediately began trying to soothe me: “There, there, Daddy won’t let that bad old water get you. You’re okay—”

  I pushed him away.

  “Again! Again!” I cried, trying to dive down out of his arms.

  Mom and Dad stared at me in astonishment, sort of the same way Myrlie was staring at me now. I began howling, and nothing would satisfy me until they let me plunge back down into the water. That time I did choke a little on the water, but I didn’t care. I surfaced again only long enough to get air.

  “What if she drowns?” I remember Mom asking in a quavery voice.

  “I guess we’ll just have to teach her about holding her breath,” Dad said, his voice cracking with amazement.

  All the way home from the pool that day, I chanted in a singsongy voice, “I’m a mermaid, I’m a mermaid, I’m a mermaid….”

  I remember this mostly because of the way my parents sat so silently in the front seat of the car. They didn’t keep turning around to smile at me, the way they usually did when I sang in the backseat.

  Had they wanted me to be scared of the water?

  It probably didn’t help that I kept nagging them to go back to the pool after that—nagged and begged and pleaded until I was signed up for my first swimming lesson, only a week or so later.

  Even if they hadn’t wanted me to swim, they hadn’t been able to refuse me.

  From Myrlie’s expression now, though, I’m kind of expecting her to tell me no.

  “You’d need an indoor pool, this time of year,” she says doubtfully. “I guess there’s one at the Y, but I’m not a member. Let me check their guest policies.”

  She stands up and heads for the phone in the kitchen. I follow her because I don’t know what else to do.

  “This is Myrlie Wilker,” she says after looking up the number and dialing. “I have a… uh… visitor staying with me who would like to go swimming. Is there any way …?”

  I’ve been studying the stenciled border that runs around the top of the kitchen walls—one painstakingly painted basket of pink and yellow and purple flowers after another. But I look at Myrlie when she says that one word: “visitor.”

  Why didn’t she say “niece”? I wonder, and maybe the question shows up in my eyes because Myrlie’s gaze darts nervously away.

  “You would do that for me?” she says into the phone. “Well, thanks. We’ll be there in a little bit.” She hangs up and asks me, “I guess it’s possible, after all. You have a swimsuit with you?”

  “Sure,” I say.

  “You don’t mind swimming after you just finished taking a shower?”

  I shrug. “I don’t feel like myself if I don’t smell like chlorine,” I say.

  Myrlie laughs, but she has an odd expression on her face. What’s so baffling about a twelve-year-old girl’s wanting to swim?

  Ten minutes later, we’re sitting in Myrlie’s car, backing out of her driveway. My seven-inch growth spurt in the past year brought me to the grand height of five feet five, which I think is supposed to be about average for an adult woman. But it’s too much for Myrlie’s car. My knees are practically in my ears.

  “Sorry,” Myrlie mutters, seeing me squirm. “This is one of the earlier gas-electric cars, and they hadn’t quite worked out the size issues back then.”

  I look over and see that Myrlie’s knees fit in perfectly under the doll-sized steering wheel. I hadn’t really noticed before how much I tower over Myrlie. It’s strange, since I was the shortest kid in my class from first grade through sixth grade, but I always kind of felt like I was destined to be tall. I don’t dwell on it as much as I could.

  “Usually it’s just me driving around by myself,” Myrlie is saying, still sounding apologetic. “That’s why Joss talked me into buying this.”

  “Joss?” I say.

  “My daughter.” Myrlie swings her head around, checking for cars as she turns into the street. “Oh, wait, let’s go the other way so you can see downtown. I’ll give you the minitour of town—it won’t take long.”

  She turns down an alley and I feel like she’s changed the subject on purpose. I don’t want a tour of Sanderfield; I want a roadmap of forbidden topics. Elizabeth. Joss. My parents’ current location. Their reason for leaving me with Myrlie. Their reason for never mentioning her to me before last night. Her reason for not calling me her niece over the phone.

  I’m just not sure if I want that roadmap so I can avoid those topics or so I can explore them.

  “Abraham Lincoln once spent the night in that house over there, but it was just because his carriage wheel broke on the outskirts of town,” Myrlie’s saying.

  She babbles a little more about historic houses and Civil War troop movements, and then we’re in the town square my parents and I drove through last night, when I thought the whole place was hibernating. It doesn’t look much livelier this morning, though now the lights are on in the shops: a furniture store, a florist, a Dollar General, and something called Prairie Expressions.

  “Our downtown has had quite a revitalization in the past few years,” Myrlie says, sounding proud. “It had kind of gone downhill there for a while�
��we were all really worried about our little town.”

  We pass the flaking-away billboard that I noticed last night, and a man is standing on a ladder beside it, peeling off its layers of years-old advertisements.

  “Wonderful!” Myrlie says. “I’m so glad they’re finally taking care of that eyesore. We’ll be in great shape, now.”

  My parents and I have moved around a lot, but we’ve always lived in suburbs of some East Coast city. I’m used to gleaming new malls, fancy restaurants, beautifully landscaped parks. By those standards, Sanderfield—with or without the billboard—looks rundown and pathetic and forgotten. But there’s something I envy in Myrlie’s voice: the pride, the way she says “we.” I’ve never lived anywhere that inspired that tone in anyone’s voice. The only “we” my family’s ever been part of, really, is the three of us.

  “I helped plant those flowers on the courthouse lawn,” Myrlie says, pointing. “The chrysanthemums, see?”

  I look, and the chrysanthemums are glorious splashes of yellow and orange, bursting across the lawn in arcs from a stone marker.

  “Is there some kind of plaque over there?” I ask, squinting at a square of bronze on the marker. “What, do they engrave your name in bronze every time you plant a couple flowers?”

  It’s a stupid crack, but I’m surprised when Myrlie doesn’t answer right away.

  I glance over, and she’s frozen, her fingers clenched on the steering wheel, her gaze fixed straight ahead. Then she winces, and that breaks the spell.

  “No, that’s… a memorial,” she says slowly. “A memorial for someone who died a long time ago.”

  I can hear the effort she’s making to sound nonchalant, to pass off the plaque as just another dusty historical marker that doesn’t matter to anyone anymore. But she’s not a very good actress.

  “Who?” I want to ask. “Who’s it a memorial to? Who died a long time ago?”

  For a moment I think I actually have asked those questions aloud, because Myrlie glances at me quickly, her face a troubled mask. Then she goes back to staring at the street ahead, as if she’s wearing blinders.