Double Identity

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  “I know, honey,” Mom says sorrowfully. “I don’t want to say good-bye either, but I understand now. Tomorrow is your birthday. We’ll lose you at thirteen too, just like Elizabeth. It’s just meant to be.”

  I’ve forgotten about my birthday; I’ve lost all track of days and dates since coming to Myrlie’s house. I can’t imagine birthdays anymore, or having such a simple life that I could blow out candles on a cake and believe that my wishes would come true.

  The way Mom says “birthday” gives me chills. It sounds like she’s expecting me to die.

  “No,” I say. “You don’t have to say good-bye. Come back—”

  “Don’t be sad,” Mom says. “I’m not sad now. We had you for almost thirteen years, and that was … more than we deserved. It was cheating. But I’ve loved every moment of your life, every second we had with you. You’re so special to us—”

  “Mom, listen,” I say. “It doesn’t have to be this way. None of this is meant to be. There’s still time for you and Daddy to save me. Let me talk to Daddy. I have to tell him—Dalton Van Dyne is here, here in Sanderfield, asking for Daddy. Please, Mom, if you really love me, you’ll let me talk to Daddy.”

  “I can’t …,” Mom begins.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see a huge streak of lightning; seconds later I hear such a loud boom of thunder that it seems like the whole world is being split in two. The lights in the kitchen flicker and dim and then zap out entirely, plunging the room into a dusky darkness.

  “Mom?” I shout into the phone. “Mom? Mom, please, answer me. Please.”

  Nothing but silence comes back to me. Silence and emptiness.

  The phone is dead.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  I whirl on Myrlie.

  “It’s all your fault!” I scream. “Having a stupid landline! A cell phone would still be working, I’d still be talking to my mom!” I’m pounding the receiver on the counter, so hard Myrlie probably can’t even hear my words over the banging. “She was going to let me talk to my dad—she was! They … love … me!”

  The hand that’s slamming the phone against the counter is throbbing now; I look down and see that I’ve missed the counter and scraped my knuckles. I’m bleeding.

  I’m losing Elizabeth’s blood, I think stupidly—stupidly, because isn’t it my blood now?

  “Now, Bethany …” Myrlie says soothingly, and that makes me madder because I don’t want to be soothed. I can barely see Myrlie in the dim light coming in from the windows, and that reminds me that the electricity is still out.

  “Oh, no!” I say. “What if Van Dyne cut the power lines and the phone lines, and now he’s going to attack us, when we can’t call for help. That’s how it always happens in movies….”

  “It was lightning,” Joss says calmly behind me. “Van Dyne can’t control the lightning.”

  She lays a hand on my shoulder and I shake it off.

  “She was calling to say good-bye,” I wail. “They’re giving up on me, letting me go—they’d let me die! They don’t care what happens to me anymore, they’re just gone….”

  “There, there,” Myrlie says, and she pats my shoulder, then slides her hands down to my arms. I feel like a wild beast being captured. I jerk away.

  “They can’t protect me now, nobody can protect me, he’s going to get me, it’s not safe….”

  I’m sobbing now, just like my mother. Except my sobs are loud—I’m surprised Dalton Van Dyne and the police and the FBI agents and all of Sanderfleld can’t hear me. I’m screaming and wailing and I don’t even realize I’ve begun to chant, “I am not Elizabeth! I am not Elizabeth!” until I hear the words echoing back to me.

  Joss and Myrlie aren’t trying to calm me down anymore. They’re just standing there waiting—waiting for the lights to come back on or for Van Dyne to attack or for me to pull myself together.

  “I can’t,” I whimper, not screaming or wailing or sobbing anymore only because I don’t have the energy for it. Pull myself together makes me think of a computer-animated skit I saw once of cartoon hands picking up cartoon arms and legs and feet and a head, and putting all the pieces together. The title of the skit was “A Self-made Man.” But I’m not self-made. I’m more like Humpty Dumpty: Now that I’ve fallen apart I don’t think anyone could put me back together again.

  Joss and Myrlie are still watching me.

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper.

  “I know,” Myrlie says. “We are too.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  I fall asleep. This is my way of letting go, of giving up. If I’m Elizabeth’s clone, so be it; if my parents are never coming back, so be it; if Van Dyne is about to reveal my identity, what can I do to stop him? I lie on the couch in the living room and drift in and out of consciousness. Myrlie and Joss tiptoe by, carrying candles, because the lights still aren’t back on.

  I don’t know how many hours later it is when Joss leans over me.

  “Okay, that’s enough,” she says. “Time’s up.”

  “What?” I say. I struggle to sit up, but my head is too woozy. I fall back against the cushion.

  “Believe me, I know all about wallowing in misery,” Joss says. “I was something of an expert in it myself, twenty years ago. But you’ve got to set some limits. Get up.”

  She slides her hands under my shoulders, pries me up into a sitting position. My head spins, then clears.

  “Here’s what we’re going to do,” Joss says. “First, you’re going to get dressed. Mom has already used my cell phone to order pizza from a place that still has electricity. So we’re going to have a great dinner. And then we’re going out.”

  “Out?” I repeat. I glance down at my clothes. I’m still wearing pajamas. I’ve had them on all day.

  “Out,” Joss says firmly. “Sanderfleld has a Harvest Festival every year, the day after Halloween. I just checked online—using the last of the laptop’s batteries, I might add—and the festival is still on. They have electricity downtown, the rain’s stopped, we’re going.”

  I reach up and cover my face with my hands.

  “People will see me,” I say. “They’ll ask questions, like that woman at the Y did.”

  “Lots of kids wear costumes and masks to this. We can find something to disguise you, if you want.”

  I think about how Dalton Van Dyne still knew who I was the night before, when I was wearing the Raggedy Ann hair and the fake nose.

  “What if Van Dyne finds out where we’re going?” I ask.

  Joss shakes her head sadly.

  “Van Dyne knows where you are right now. If he wanted to do something …”

  Joss doesn’t have to finish that sentence.

  “What if my mom calls again while we’re gone and we miss it?” I ask.

  “The phone lines are still down,” Joss says. “She can’t call.”

  I’m out of arguments. It’s not that I want to go anywhere, but I don’t have the will to resist. I put on clothes—blue jeans, a striped rugby shirt—all from my old life, my old self. They hang on me as if I’m a scarecrow.

  The pizza arrives and it’s so thick and greasy I can barely swallow. But in the candlelight, Joss and Myrlie pretend not to notice. They try to joke around and be merry, telling stories about how the owner of Sanderfleld Pizza went to Italy once and pronounced all the food there “horrible and unfit for human consumption.”

  “And that explains a lot about the pizza we’re eating right now,” Joss laughs.

  “It’s not bad,” Myrlie protests. “It’s just not very authentic.”

  I don’t laugh along. I don’t even talk. But when the dishes are cleared away and Myrlie’s grabbing her purse and her car keys, I say one word: “Mask.”

  “Oh, that’s right,” Joss says. “Bethany wanted to go in costume.”

  “No problem,” Myrlie says.

  She goes down to the basement and pulls out the same box of costumes we used last night. Myrlie has practically every theme covered: witches and fairy princ
esses and flower faces and hippies and the Cat in the Hat.

  “What can I say? Thirty years of teaching kindergarten, you accumulate quite a collection,” Myrlie tells me. “You should see all my ‘Apple for the Teacher’ stationery.”

  I sort through the box twice, and end up making my first independent decision of the evening. When we settle into Myrlie’s car fifteen minutes later, I’m wearing my swim cap and swim goggles.

  “Can you see well enough out of those things?” Myrlie asks. “Without your glasses, I mean.”

  “They’re prescription goggles,” I say, and it’s like I’m claiming some piece of my old identity. I’m a serious enough swimmer that I own prescription swim goggles. I’m a swimmer, and Elizabeth would never dip a toe in the water.

  It’s a short drive to the Harvest Festival, because it’s held in the town square.

  “We should have just walked,” Myrlie complains when we have to park a block and a half away, after circling the blocked-off streets twice.

  Joss gives her a look, and this is the first sign I’ve seen all night that they’re afraid too, beneath their masks of jokes and fake merriment. If we’d walked, we would have been alone and defenseless for four or five blocks, on dark streets with dead streetlights, under stark, leafless trees.

  We get out of the car and join the crowds streaming toward the square. People seem to be in high spirits, laughing off the violent storm and the power outage.

  “Oh, Myrlie, I’m so sorry you used up a whole personal day,” a woman in the crowd says to Myrlie. “We were only at school about an hour and then they sent us all home.”

  “Oh, well,” Myrlie says gamely.

  We turn the corner into town square, and it’s been transformed. A small Ferris wheel, a merry-go-round, and a Tilt-A-Whirl are scattered around the blocked-off streets, between booths selling lemonade, cotton candy, Elephant Ears, and deep-fried Snickers. Because I am seeing everything through my swim goggles, I feel like I am underwater. Kids in monster masks float up beside me then stream away into the crowd. The lights of the Ferris wheel spin before my eyes; shrieks rise up from the Tilt-A-Whirl. One child stops screaming only long enough to beg, “Mommy, can I ride it again?”

  It is strange to be out of the house. It is strange to be walking around, but hidden beneath my cap and goggles. It is strange to see a crowd gathered around a “Show Your Strength—Amaze Your Friends” game on the very spot where I fell two nights ago, just inches from the memorial to Tom Wilker.

  If it’s strange for me, how strange is it for Myrlie, to see people laughing and playing practically on top of the tribute to her husband’s death?

  I watch a teenage boy, all swagger and attitude, as he grips the hammer and swings it over his shoulder, bringing it down squarely on the target. A ball shoots to the top, ringing the bell. Lights flash up and down the pole, and a barker cries out, “Ladies and gentlemen! We have a winner!”

  I want to play my “If I were a movie set designer” game, because this scene would be perfect for some heartwarming Disney family drama, some story of a small-town carnival where the worst danger anyone faces is from eating too much cotton candy and maybe getting a stomachache. But I know too much about this scene. I know it’s built on top of a tombstone and sorrow and pain; I know Myrlie and Joss are scared, walking beside me; I know I would not be brave enough to be here if I couldn’t hide behind my goggles. I find I can blink and see the world around me in many different ways. Blink once and I see an innocent, lighthearted carnival, the lights of the Ferris wheel arcing high overhead, the merry-go-round music tooting happily. Blink again and all the monster masks leer at me, the darkened buildings beyond the carnival hunch ominously at the edge of my vision, the newly bared tree limbs reach desperately for the sky.

  I blink again, and I see my parents.

  FORTY

  They are Stumbling toward me: two sad, old people clutching one another. If my father looked wrong on Myrlie’s cheerful porch a week ago, the two of them are totally out of place at this festival. They’re like apparitions. For a minute, I think I am imagining them, my vision distorted by the goggles. But the crowd divides around them, giving wide berth to such a pathetic, broken, defeated-looking pair. If I am imagining them, so is everyone else.

  Then my parents see me and their faces light up with joy and relief, with an echo of grief, just like always. At least I understand the mix of joy and grief, now. It’s because when they see me, they also see Elizabeth.

  My mother mouths something—maybe “I told him,” maybe “I love you.” Really, I’ve known all along that they love me. It’s just that their love has always been rooted in sorrow and fear.

  “You came,” I say. “You came to protect me.”

  I’m not sure they can hear me over the noise of the crowd, the shouts of glee and mock terror coming from the Tilt-A-Whirl. They aren’t looking at me anymore. They’re looking beyond me, behind me. I turn around. A tall, bulky man with gray, grizzled hair raises one eyebrow in my direction.

  Dalton Van Dyne has been following me.

  But he’s looking past me too; he’s staring at my parents. I realize too late that I was the true decoy. I might not have been in any danger at all from Van Dyne—he’d scared me just to get to my parents. He must have known I would have panicked; he must have known that I would have pleaded, “Come back! Save me!”

  I freeze, watching Van Dyne. I have a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. I’m half-expecting him to pull a gun out of his pocket, to kill us all. But he only stops and yells at my parents, “Where is he?”

  My father stiffens, then shakes my mother’s hand from his arm and tries to pull himself up to his full height. The way he’s standing reminds me of the buildings in Western movies, with two-story facades in the front and crumbling one-story shacks in the back.

  “I don’t owe you anything,” my father says. “I sent back your money.”

  “I don’t care about the money,” Van Dyne says. “Where is he?”

  My father doesn’t answer.

  Behind Van Dyne, a few men step forward, and I realize they must be the FBI agents. Plainclothesmen, I think, the word coming from some old book I must have read a long time ago. Agents going incognito. But they’re the only ones who step forward; everyone else in the crowd seems to shift away, as if they sense danger. I know from books and movies and TV that the FBI agents probably have tiny tape recorders hidden in their pockets, copying down every word, every sound.

  “All I thought about the past thirteen years was my boy,” Van Dyne says, his voice choked with pain. “Did he know where I was? Would he be ashamed?”

  The carnival noise seems to recede behind me. I’m straining to hear Van Dyne’s every word. It’s like we’re in a fishbowl now. People are staring.

  “On bad days, I worried that he was having the same kind of childhood I’d had, all beatings, no hugs,” Van Dyne says, stepping closer to me, to my parents. “On good days, I imagined that he was with better parents than I could ever be. But I checked around, and I could never find a trace of him. You hid him so well. I only want my son. I’ll never bother you again if you give him back. Please, I beg of you, tell me where he is.” For a second it seems like he’s about to reach out and grab my father by the shoulders, maybe to shake him, maybe to punch him. But then Van Dyne drops his arms, drops his head and mutters, “I have to find him, to warn him. I have to find my … younger self.”

  Perhaps I am the only one close enough to hear his final words. We’ve formed an odd geometry in the midst of the crowd: Joss and Myrlie are flanking my parents now, the FBI agents are hovering behind Van Dyne, and I am caught in the middle. But the balance shifts when I hear those words. I suddenly understand what Van Dyne wants from my parents. I suddenly understand how my old theories were wrong.

  “You paid him to clone you,” I whisper to Van Dyne. “You’re looking for your clone.”

  I remember Joss pointing out Van Dyne’s quote on the computer scree
n: Don’t you think the world needs about fifty more of me? I remember how conceited and self-centered he’d been, thirteen years ago.

  I look back at my parents, and they seem to be shrinking before my eyes. That’s what my dad lied about, I think. This is the moment he’s been afraid of for my entire life. That’s why they’re cowering in fear. They think they deserve whatever Van Dyne is going to do to them.

  I step closer to Van Dyne. All this time I’ve been wondering who I really am, what my actual last name is, whether I’m just a lesser copy of Elizabeth. But none of that matters now. My identity doesn’t depend on names or genes. It depends on what I do—what I do right now, to protect my parents.

  I whip the swim cap and goggles from my head. My hair unfurls behind me, flowing freely in the breeze. Around me I hear gasps and whispers, “She looks just like Elizabeth, the girl who died…. How can it be?”

  I stare straight into Van Dyne’s eyes.

  “Your clone doesn’t exist,” I tell him. “They made me instead. I am the clone.”

  I am not used to looking at the world without goggles or glasses or anything else hiding me, changing the way I look, changing the way I see. So much around me is a blur—the FBI agents, the crowd, the games, the lights of the Ferris wheel. But I’m close enough to see Van Dyne clearly—Dalton Van Dyne the powerful, the terrifying, my own personal bogeyman.

  And Dalton Van Dyne is crying.

  EPILOGUE

  I am thirteen now. My birthday was the strangest one of my life—no cake, no candles, no presents. It turns out there were reporters as well as FBI agents following Van Dyne, and they heard every word I said. So on my birthday we were under siege at Myrlie’s house: the phone ringing constantly, the reporters and photographers pounding at the door. Finally, my father went out late in the afternoon to tell them all, “I have no comment to make. Please leave my family alone.”

  “But, Dr. Krull—it is Krull, isn’t it? Don’t you want to prove this incredible claim your daughter made?” a reporter yelled at him. “Don’t you want to take your place with the great scientists of history?”