Double Identity

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  “And were there?” I ask. I’m bracing myself for the end of this happy story, when I know Elizabeth is going to die.

  “Of course,” Myrlie says. Her fingers fidget with the edge of the placemat in front of her. “I know you’re going to think I’m just a proud mother, a proud aunt, but Joss and Elizabeth were good at gymnastics. Really good. Naturals, people said. Pretty soon we were driving them an hour away, a couple times a week, because there were better gymnastics teachers in Ridgetown. It … changed the way they were raised, them being gymnasts.”

  “That makes sense,” I say, though I’m wondering, Did swimming change anything about how I was raised?

  “You have to understand,” Myrlie says. “We had people telling us they were going to be the medal hopes for the ’ninety-two Olympics.”

  “They went to the Olympics?” In spite of myself, I’m impressed.

  Myrlie shakes her head.

  “We didn’t make it to ’ninety-two,” she says sadly, and at first I think that’s ridiculous. Myrlie’s in her fifties or sixties now—obviously she lived through 1992. Then I realize: She means Elizabeth. Elizabeth didn’t make it to ’92.

  “It was Elizabeth’s thirteenth birthday,” Myrlie says. Her voice has taken on a hypnotic quality, as if she has to tell this story now. And I have to listen. “June 13, 1991. A beautiful day. We took the girls to Sinclair Mountain to celebrate.”

  “Sinclair Mountain?” I say numbly. In my head, I’m replaying my mother’s voice on the phone: I had this horrible dream about her birthday at Sinclair Mountain….

  “It’s a big amusement park, west of here,” Myrlie says. “With rides and games and roller coasters—oh, how those girls loved the roller coasters! It was just the six of us who went, the two families. Walter and Thomas took the day off work. But we kept joking about how the girls didn’t really need us, they just checked in when they ran out of money. It was the first time we let them run around on their own like that.”

  Myrlie falls silent. I feel such a growing sense of dread that I prompt her: “And …?”

  “There was an accident when we were driving home. Thomas and Elizabeth were killed.” She says the words flat out, without emotion. She blinks, as if surprised that she’s come to the end of the story so quickly.

  I’m struggling to figure out what I feel. I was overwhelmed with sadness this afternoon looking at the memorial for Myrlie’s husband, even though I knew nothing about him. Elizabeth was my sister, my long-lost sister, almost exactly my same age when she died, a promising athlete cut down in her prime. And I feel nothing.

  It just doesn’t seem real.

  “So …” I say slowly. “My parents were really sad for a long time, I bet. But eventually they had me and that probably helped, didn’t it? Cheered them up?”

  I want so badly to turn this story around, to end on a happy note—with my birth, not Elizabeth’s death.

  Myrlie winces, and I think I’ve probably been insensitive, not saying anything about her husband.

  “I suppose,” she says slowly. “I only saw Hillary and Walter a few times after that. At the funerals. And then they left town…. It was too hard, I think, for them to stay here.”

  “You stayed,” I say, fiercely.

  “Well …,” Myrlie says. “I was away a lot at first, because Joss was hurt pretty badly in the accident, and she was in the hospital up in Chicago for a long time. I was there at her bedside pretty much around the clock. And then when she got out of the hospital, I didn’t think I had any choice but to come back here. I know it’s probably hard for you to understand, how we could go from being so close, to me not even knowing where Hillary and Walter lived. To them not even telling me when you were born. It’s just, we were all so … shattered by the accident. I think sometimes tragedies bring people together, and sometimes they pull them apart. And that’s what happened to us. The grief came between us.”

  “Didn’t Mom and Dad visit Joss in the hospital?” I ask, because I want to believe that my parents did something besides just showing up twenty years later to dump their new daughter out on Myrlie’s doorstep.

  But Myrlie shakes her head.

  “I don’t really blame them,” she says, as if she’s read my mind. “I did then—and that made things worse. But I think it was too hard on them to see that I still had a daughter, when theirs was dead. It was hard on me to see Hillary with Walter, when my husband was dead.”

  We’ve circled back to death again. Myrlie’s fiddling with the placemat once more.

  “I am not unhappy now,” she says carefully, patting the placemat back into place. “I have a good life—lots of friends, a fulfilling job. A daughter. I miss Tom, but I’m not sad anymore. The hole in my life has been not knowing about Hillary and Walter.”

  I feel like Myrlie’s trying to tell me something beyond the simple meaning of her words.

  “Did you ever try to find them?” I ask.

  “I thought they didn’t want to be found. They knew where I was. I’ve had the same phone number since 1977.”

  I think about all the times my parents and I have moved: when I was one, when I was two, when I was six and nine and eleven. Were we moving so Myrlie couldn’t track us down? But then why would Dad drive back here and leave me—just me—with Myrlie?

  “There’s something else I should tell you ….” Myrlie says hesitantly. “Something that might help you understand. That night when we were coming back from Sinclair Mountain … your mother was driving. She thought the accident was her fault.”

  “Was it?” I ask. I think about how my mother drives on the rare occasions she gets behind the wheel of our car: hunched over, with a pinched look on her face. Now that I think about it, I don’t believe she’s driven even once since school was out last June.

  June.

  “Was it her fault?” I ask again.

  Myrlie gestures helplessly.

  “Nobody knows,” she says. “Nobody will ever know.”

  FOURTEEN

  It’s nearly five in the morning when I crawl back into my bed, feeling like a totally different person than when I left it.

  “Sleep as late as you want,” Myrlie says from the doorway. “I won’t wake you.”

  She turns out the light and shuts the door, but I don’t fall asleep. I’m replaying every word she said, recasting everything I thought I knew. Every single one of my memories seems different now. I’ve spent my entire life with a ghost haunting my family, and I didn’t even know it. Or did I?

  “I’m the bestest girl ever, aren’t I?” I remember asking my mother one afternoon when I was four or five, when I’d finished what I thought was a particularly beautiful finger painting.

  “Of course,” Mom said. But the next time I looked up from my finger paints, she was gone. I tiptoed around the corner and found her sprawled across her bed, sobbing into her pillow.

  “Are you okay, Mommy?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes,” she sniffed. “I just got something in my eye.”

  Or maybe that wasn’t the excuse she used—maybe it was “My allergies are acting up again,” or “This cold makes my eyes water,” or “This always happens when I’m chopping onions.” She’s used all sorts of different explanations over the years.

  But I think that must have been the first time I didn’t believe her. I remember standing there watching her pretend she wasn’t crying, and inside me a little voice was whispering, You’re not the bestest. I accidentally left a little smudge of black finger paint on the wall that afternoon, and as long as we lived in that house, looking at that smudge could make me feel bad. Anytime I sat at the kitchen table after that, I had to keep my back to the smudge, and even then I knew it was there.

  And now I understand.

  I couldn’t be Mom’s “bestest girl ever” because Elizabeth had been that first, I think.

  I remember another time, when my father caught me riding my bicycle without a helmet. My parents did everything but provide airbags when I used
a trike or a bike or a scooter; I had kneepads and elbow pads and wrist guards and even special gloves that gave me extra grip. One of the neighborhood dads used to think it was funny to ask if my parents were suiting me up for the NFL. Maybe that’s why I decided to break the rules that particular day; maybe I just liked to feel the wind streaming through my hair, free and unencumbered. But when my father found me, he yanked me off the bike, his hands shaking, his voice trembling as he yelled, “Don’t you know you could be killed?”

  And I laughed.

  “No, Daddy. Kids don’t die. Just old people.”

  He jerked back, like I’d slapped him.

  “Oh, honey,” he said, his voice so full of ache that even as a self-centered, insensitive, spoiled little kid, I felt sorry for him. I wrapped my arms around his shoulders and gave him a big kiss on the cheek and I promised that I would never, ever, ever forget my helmet again.

  Why didn’t he tell me about Elizabeth then? Why didn’t he tell me this summer, when Mom started crying all the time? Why didn’t he tell me before we came to Sanderfield?

  I want to believe that I now have all the puzzle pieces turned right side up, that figuring out my parents is just a matter of slipping the pieces into place. I can see Elizabeth’s face taking form. (Hazily—I can’t bear to think of her looking too much like me.) I can see why Mom would start crying on the anniversary of Elizabeth’s birth and death, and why she would have trouble shaking her sorrow as I edge toward thirteen, the age Elizabeth was when she died. I’m a little creeped out about my birthday right now, myself. But why drive from Pennsylvania to Illinois? Why leave me with Myrlie? Why cancel our cell phone service? Why erase us from public information?

  I remember an essay a kid in my English class wrote, that got a lot of attention. The title was something like “Teenagers Get a Bad Rap,” and his whole point was that society is wrong to blame kids for becoming mouthy and irresponsible and impulsive and rebellious during their teen years. He argued that the true problem is that parents go psycho worrying about their kids.

  “They force us to act the way we do, in self-defense,” was one of his lines.

  “My parents have always been psycho,” I whisper into the darkness. “Because of Elizabeth. And because …”

  But I can’t finish my sentence, because there’s still too much I don’t know.

  How much does Myrlie know?

  FIFTEEN

  It’s nearly noon when I stumble down the stairs and into the kitchen the next morning. I’m still rubbing sleep from my eyes, trying to make them focus. My glasses bounce up and down, making my vision sharp and blurry, sharp and blurry. I slide into a chair across from Myrlie, who’s sipping coffee and reading a new Sanderfield Reporter.

  “Did Dad call again? Did I miss it?” I ask.

  Myrlie puts down the paper.

  “He hasn’t called,” she says. “How’d you sleep?” “Okay, I guess,” I say, because it’s simpler than explaining that I feel like I had nightmares all night long, though I can’t remember any of them now. I notice that she’s still wearing her red bathrobe. “Did you take off work again?”

  “It’s Saturday,” Myrlie says.

  “Oh.” I feel stupid. I was able to keep track of the days back home, but I did more than change time zones when I came to Sanderfield. I slipped into an alternate universe. How was I to know that the days of the week stayed the same?

  “I’ve been thinking,” Myrlie says, leaning across the table. “Now that you know about Elizabeth, I think you should meet Joss.”

  “Joss? Your daughter?” I don’t know why I say that like a question. Every word Myrlie spoke to me last night is firmly engrained in my memory. I could just as easily recite, like a reference-robot: “Joss Wilker. Born August 1978 to Myrlie and Thomas Wilker. Child gymnast and best friend of her cousin Elizabeth. Survived June 1991 accident that killed Elizabeth and Joss’s father. Hospitalized for a long time afterward.” Suddenly, I realize that I don’t know much about Joss since 1991, except that she’s the one who recommended that Myrlie buy her hybrid gas-electric car. And she isn’t married.

  “Yes, Joss, my daughter,” Myrlie says. “She lives over in St. Louis, so she doesn’t get back to visit too often. But … you are cousins. You should know one another.”

  Myrlie has such a hopeful look on her face, I can’t tell her that I don’t feel like meeting anyone.

  “All right,” I say. I’m having a hard time remembering that Joss is a grown-up now, as old as Tammy at the Y with her little girl and her pregnant belly.

  Someone else to be amazed by how much I look like Elizabeth, I think. I don’t like looking like Elizabeth—I wish she’d had dark hair and dark eyes and had taken after some entirely opposite branch of the family.

  “What does Joss do?” I ask, trying to distract myself. I have a feeling she never made it to the ’92 Olympics, either, or Myrlie would have said so. Maybe I would have even heard of her. But I’m still picturing her as a tiny gymnast in a leotard.

  “Oh, she’s a minister,” Myrlie says. “She’ll have to preach tomorrow morning, so she can’t come today. But she usually has Mondays off, so she could probably come tomorrow afternoon and spend the night. I’ll give her a call a little later.”

  I’m trying to mentally replace the gymnast’s leotard with a liturgical robe, and it’s not working very well. I glance down at the newspaper on the table to distract myself. Today’s Sanderfield Reporter has yet another article about the Chicago embezzler, and something else about the President. It’s weird that the newspaper is still reporting the same news, when my whole world changed overnight.

  “Now. Would you prefer breakfast or lunch?” Myrlie asks. “Since it’s eleven fifty-two, I think you have your choice.”

  “Breakfast,” I say. “I can get it.”

  I walk to the cupboard where I saw Myrlie put the Raisin Bran the day before. Now it’s got company: a yellow box of Corn Pops and a red box of Froot Loops. I grab the Froot Loops and carry it over to Myrlie at arm’s length, as if it’s evidence in a criminal case.

  “How did you know?” I ask. “How did you know I’d like FrootLoops?”

  Myrlie looks troubled, probably because I’m practically shouting at her.

  “I didn’t,” she said. “It was just a guess. Elizabeth always loved Froot Loops, and I don’t know, you just remind me so much of her, it made me feel good to buy Froot Loops for you. I figured if you didn’t like them, I could always donate the box to charity.”

  “Elizabeth must not have liked nuts, huh?” I say. I try to remember what else Myrlie had seemed to know too easily about me the day before, when she was making her grocery list. “And she must have loved blueberry muffins, and peachesand-cream oatmeal….”

  “Right,” Myrlie says. “Yesterday when I was asking you what you liked and didn’t like, I suddenly felt like you were Elizabeth and she’d come back and I was getting a chance to feed her…. I’m sorry. This is probably sounding too strange to you. Am I making you uncomfortable? Probably some food preferences are genetic, and you inherited some of the same genes as her. Then, too, Hillary would have cooked the same foods for you that she cooked for Elizabeth…. And it’s not like you like everything the same, not if you hate peaches-and-cream oatmeal. Elizabeth loved that. She’d choose it over chocolate.”

  “Really?” I don’t tell Myrlie I lied yesterday. But I put the box of Froot Loops back in the cupboard and eat the Corn Pops instead. They’re too hard and too sweet and too full of puffed air. I eat a whole bowlful and still feel totally empty inside.

  SIXTEEN

  My father doesn’t call again the entire rest of the day.

  “Maybe he thought that call in the middle of the night counted as today’s call,” Myrlie says.

  We’re in front of the TV watching the evening news, something Myrlie says she tries to do every day. This strikes me as odd, since my parents never watch the news, never read the newspaper. Maybe Dad checks out the events of t
he day online, when he’s working, but if he does he never tells me or Mom about it. It’s as if my parents would like to forget the rest of the world exists.

  I don’t want to think about my parents, or the reasons my father hasn’t called. I concentrate on the TV. The newscaster’s talking about that embezzler who just got out of prison. Dalton Van Dyne’s his name.

  “Six million dollars disappeared from Digispur during Van Dyne’s tenure as CEO,” the newscaster says. “Most of the money has never been found.”

  I’m thinking that the big words used in the news—tenure, embezzler—sound like they should be fun, but they have such boring meanings. “Embezzler” should be someone who goes around buzzing a kazoo all the time. Not someone who steals money.

  Myrlie sighs.

  “Crime is so complicated nowadays,” she says. “Did I tell you my husband was a lawyer? He always said it was scary how stupid most criminals were. I guess they have to be smarter now.” She gets a faraway look in her eye. “I remember when Tom and I got engaged, my parents were so proud because they were going to have a doctor and a lawyer as sons-in-law. It’s funny, how stuff like that used to matter so much.”

  I’m busy trying to think of a more imaginative definition for “tenure,” so I almost miss the news hidden in Myrlie’s reminiscing. Then it registers.

  “Wait a minute,” I say. “My dad was your parents’ other son-in-law. Dad’s not a doctor.”

  Myrlie gives me a baffled look.

  “He was,” she says.

  I try to picture my father as a guy in a white coat or green scrubs. It’s easier to imagine him blowing a kazoo.

  “He’s a money manager,” I say. “He sits at the computer all day long.”

  Myrlie opens her mouth to disagree, as if we’re playing some childish game of “I know Walter Cole better than you know Walter Cole.” Then she seems to reconsider.

  “Maybe,” she says carefully, “it was too hard for him to continue in medicine after what happened to Elizabeth. Too hard to watch other children die. I seem to remember Hillary saying something about him maybe switching into medical research—I guess even that hit a little too close to home.”