by Amy Knupp
“Be my guest,” Rachel said, stuffing the wrap into a container to take with her to work because she now had zero desire to eat. “Like I said, don’t hold back.”
“You’re right that something’s changed between us, Rachel. And I hate it. You’re on edge all of the time. I know you’ve just started your job and that’s stressful. But you’ve always thrived with that kind of challenge.” Her mom shook her head.
“So all the tension in the house is my fault,” Rachel stated.
“I’m worried about you, sweetie. You seem...stuck.”
Some chopped vegetables would go nicely with her mangled wrap. Rachel removed the butcher knife from the knife block, set it on the counter by the mayo mess and took out a bag of raw celery and carrots from the refrigerator. She grabbed a cutting board from the lower cabinet, and, once she’d washed off a couple of giant carrots, she set about whacking them into snack-size sticks.
“This is the first time you’ve spent any real time at home since Noelle died.”
“You know I couldn’t just walk away from my residency, Mom—”
“Of course not. What I mean is that now you’ve been forced back here, where it’s hard to pretend it didn’t happen.”
“Pretend?” Rachel knew she’d miscalculated with the knife a full second before the pain in her finger registered. Damn! She closed her eyes, not in favor of the sight of her own blood, and reached for a paper towel. Wrapping the paper around her left index finger without inspecting the damage, she attempted to act as if nothing had happened.
“I didn’t say that. You’re twisting my words. Dammit, Rachel, I’m worried about you! You do nothing but work and read medical journals.”
“You’re taking me to task for working too much? Where do you think I learned that?”
“I don’t think you’re processing her death, honey. You’re not coping with it. Not dealing with it. You’re just...working. Overworking.”
“I’m new at my job. I don’t like being the peon. The only way I know how to change that is by working my butt off.”
“As you said, I’m the ex-queen of workaholism, but I’m starting to become pretty damn convinced that your situation is more than that. Maybe it’s by design, so that you can avoid the big, nasty truth. You’re hiding out from everything, either at work or in your brother’s room.”
“I can look for a place to live.”
“That’s not what I mean, Rachel. You’re being deliberately obtuse. I like the idea of you living here for as long as you want to or need to. But if you’re going to stay, criminy, Rachel, get rid of the Yoda and the other teenage-boy decor! Is there nothing in your old room that you care enough about to go in there after? A flowered blanket? Some pillows? If not, go to the store and buy a couple things. Show me you’re alive!”
“I’ve been in there,” Rachel said in a low, crisp voice, finally daring to study the cut on her finger, only half seeing it. “When you were out of town. I started going through her stuff. Somebody had to. I sorted through her half-used makeup. Read the inscription on the book I gave her for what turned out to be her last birthday. Threw away her out-of-date magazine stash. How’s that for pretending she’s not dead?” She silently damned the tears that reliably sprang up in her eyes.
She could feel her mom’s entire demeanor morph from self-righteous to sympathetic. Rachel didn’t handle pity very well. Never had, never would. So when her mom tried to put her arm around her, she sidestepped and opened a drawer on the other side of the kitchen in search of a plastic bag for her veggies.
“I thought...” Her mom broke off. “It was your room, too, Rachel. I didn’t think it was my place to barge in and go through her things.”
“Right. That or you couldn’t handle it?”
“All this anger is so unlike you, Rach.” Her mom’s voice had become a swell combo of pity and concern.
“You know what?” Rachel said, making eye contact. “I have to get to work. I’m out of here.”
“Dammit, Rachel!”
As Rachel turned away, an ear-piercing crash stopped her. Her mom had shoved the pan with the bread on it across the surface of the stove into the back of the range. Bread lay scattered across the counter. “You’re doing it again. Running away from it all.”
Rage pumped through her, and she whirled around to face her mom again. “Me? What do you suggest I do instead? Take up baking and golf? Cut out of work early whenever possible? Is that the proper way to handle that my sister is dead?”
“Sweetie—”
“Don’t ‘sweetie’ me.”
“I’ve grieved for her every day of the nineteen and a half months since she died,” her mom said, her voice cracking, which made Rachel soften a little toward her. “I had a lot of major regrets to work through. It took me a long time. I’m still working through them, I suppose. But I absolutely do not use my hobbies to block out the hard stuff, Rachel.”
“Everybody is quick to tell me how screwed up I am, but you’re not even the same person anymore.”
“I am.”
“The mom I used to know? She did not cook or play recreational sports in her spare time. She didn’t have spare time. She was a lot like me—driven, dedicated to her career.”
Her mom nodded pensively. “I suppose I do seem like I’ve had a lobotomy, huh?” She smiled sadly but Rachel didn’t return it. Her mom leaned her backside against the counter. “When Noelle died, it did something to me. Did a lot of things to me, but what I’m talking about is the regrets. She’d been living here in this house for years, and yet I missed so much time with her. Because I was only focused on one thing.”
“Work,” Rachel guessed.
“You got it. Maybe it sounds clichéd, but it made me take a look at my life and decide what’s most important to me.”
“Healing people isn’t important?”
“Of course it is. I still love my career.”
Rachel narrowed her eyes at her.
“I do. I just love the other parts of my life, as well.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t have an established career to rest on. I have to fight for it.”
“That’s fine. Just...be sure you’re working your butt off to achieve something as opposed to hiding from something.” Her knowing look made Rachel squirm, and that renewed her irritation.
She’d gone in the damn bedroom. She’d started going through her sister’s stuff. She was working on it. At her own pace.
“I have to go,” she said, her jaw tight. “I guess I can only hope to someday be as enlightened as you.”
Grabbing her to-go dinner, such as it was, Rachel stormed out of the house before her mom could try to straighten her out anymore.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
SLEEPING MORE THAN two hours was apparently not in the cards for Rachel the next day. On the bright side, her mom was at work and would be for a few more hours. Rachel wasn’t in a hurry to run into her after last night’s let’s-talk-about-how-screwed-up-Rachel-is session.
After twisting in her sheets for close to an hour, she climbed out of bed, irritated. The cause of her insomnia wasn’t tough to figure out. Every second, she was still affected by the profound rawness of the emotions the past few days had brought to the surface. Even when she’d been working last night, when she’d been occupied by a patient or an emergency situation, the underlying heaviness was always there, weighing her down.
The thing was, she admitted to herself as she threw her hair into a ponytail, her mom was right. Sawyer was right. Everyone who suspected she’d avoided grieving for her sister was 100 percent correct. She’d had to, to protect herself, she supposed, though she wasn’t sure she’d ever made a conscious decision to forego it. She’d just instinctively fought it. Every day for the past nineteen months plus.
So the question was, what the hell was she supposed to do about it? Feel like slow-moving, depressed crap for the rest of eternity? So holding it all in had been a mistake. Was she supposed to walk around blubbering no
w? For all her education—in the medical field, no less—she didn’t have a clue how to get through this.
Frankly, it pissed her off. She wasn’t accustomed to not being able to puzzle through a problem.
Her mother’s accusations echoing rampantly through her mind, Rachel stomped across the hall to her and Noelle’s bedroom, determined to put a real dent in it. Show it who was boss and who was no longer going to be accused of hiding from the tough stuff.
As soon as she walked in, Noelle’s diary caught her attention as if it had flashing neon lights where she’d left it on the rumpled bed.
“Nope, not going there today,” she said out loud. “Not hiding. Need to make some visible progress so people quit accusing me of avoiding.”
It sounded perfectly logical to her, even if there was an underlying nagging in her gut.
As she worked her way through Noelle’s side of the closet, her back facing the bed, she felt it, though. Felt the diary sitting there on the bed as if it were a living, breathing being. Accusing. Taunting. Just like the door used to do.
She continued her sorting, making her pace deliberate and slow, as if to signal to the universe and that stupid book that she wasn’t being intimidated, wasn’t going to rush through the job just to get out of that room.
When she finished the closet, she stood and stretched, feeling stiff and about eighty years old from the lack of sleep and the overdose of emotions. Again, the book caught her eye.
Opening it would be brutal. Seeing her sister in every word, in every scrawled letter, would knock her on her newly grieving butt quicker than she could say privacy issues. Just reading the note in the front that Noelle had directed at her had sent her mind plummeting into momentary confusion. The warning was ages old, timeless. Familiar. The ongoing threat between sisters—particularly twin sisters. Give me my space. Leave my innermost thoughts alone. Respect my boundaries.
It said so much about the connection they’d had and made Rachel believe, if only for a second and only on some distant subconscious level, that her sister was still here. The next second was ruined with the yet-again realization that it was an illusion.
Traumatizing, to be sure.
And yet the diary begged to be opened. Rachel longed for that nanosecond of connection with her sister, in spite of understanding that it would, indeed, turn out to be false in the end.
No. She was still paying the price from her last run-in with the diary. Maybe in a few days she would be better able to handle it.
Swearing, she snatched up the book and slammed it down on the empty top shelf of the bookcase. The resounding smack wasn’t satisfying, but she stopped herself from picking it up again and winging it against the wall. That would be uncivilized. And more importantly, it would reek of weakness.
Rachel bit her lip, burrowed both hands in her hair and pulled till her scalp burned. Catching her reflection in the mirror, she relaxed her grip and took a step toward the vanity, slightly horrified by her appearance. She was unusually pale. Her eyes looked like hollowed-out holes in her head, complete with heavy shadows beneath. Her hair was a scraggly, overgrown mess that, come to think of it, she hadn’t done a thing with since she’d been back in town. Yes, she was busy, but that was no reason to scare patients in the E.R.—let alone herself when she looked in the mirror.
Feeling more in control than she had since the last time she’d forced herself into this bedroom, she marched out with purpose and went to find a current phone book. Unlike so many elements of her life, her hair was easily managed.
* * *
“I THINK YOU’RE GOING to adore this.” Angel the peppy stylist’s voice bubbled with excitement while Rachel’s nerves stretched even more taut.
The salon chair swiveled around so Rachel could see her reflection in the mirror for the first time since the job was finished. Her eyes took in the short, jet-black hair then zoomed downward to locate the faded U2 concert shirt that Rachel knew she had worn today. Check.
Holy smokes.
“What do you think?” Again, the annoyingly perky Angel person’s voice buzzed at her like a gnat.
What had she done?
“Umm.” Rachel tried clearing her throat against the panic that was inexplicably welling up. “It’s...different.” Her eyes widened as she continued to stare without blinking.
“It’ll take a couple days to get used to, huh?” Angel said, grinning widely.
“How...?” She didn’t even know what she wanted to say. “Yeah,” she finally responded. “Yeah.”
She looked away. Noticed the seventy-ish woman across the room who was having the same curl put into her hair she’d probably had done for the past thirty years staring at her as if Rachel was a freak show.
Darting her own glance back to the mirror, she saw someone else sitting there. A decently attractive woman she’d never seen before. Someone with hair so black it looked almost blue in places. Hair that was cut into a pixie style so short the woman in the mirror would be hard-pressed to run her fingers through it. She would be hard-pressed to run her fingers through her new hair.
“Are you okay, hon?” Angel switched from admiring her client in the mirror to sticking her head in front of Rachel directly.
Rachel had come to this salon, to this stylist, because she was anonymous here. Unlike the hair salon where she, Noelle and their mother had gone practically since the twins’ birth, no one knew her here. No one knew she had an identical twin sister. Used to have one...
“Want a mirror to see the back? God, you look good in that cut. Not many women can pull that off.”
Rachel robotically took the hand mirror as Angel spun her around to see the back.
Yep. Killer short.
“Okay,” she said, trying to breathe. “Yeah, nice job.” She knew she didn’t sound as if she meant it, but it wasn’t every day a natural blonde with chin-length hair went pixie and jet-black. On a whim.
“I need to get that,” Angel said, and Rachel belatedly registered a ringing phone in the background.
Being left in the wake of the ever-chattering hairstylist did nothing to lessen the churning in Rachel’s stomach. Using her foot on the white-tiled floor, she pushed herself back around to stare at the front again. She immediately averted her gaze and located her purse on the floor next to the styling station. Grabbing it, she whipped open her wallet and counted out cash. Lots of it. Hopefully enough to cover the cut and color. She anchored the money below a heavy bottle of hair product on Angel’s station and then, avoiding that mirror as if it could reach out and choke her, she walked out of the salon, attempting to look as nonchalant as possible...and likely failing miserably.
She’d thought when she’d woken up this morning that a radical change would be a good thing. A daring, bold move that showed she was in control.
What she hadn’t taken into consideration, though, was that when she looked into the mirror, no matter how hard she squinted, she could no longer find Noelle.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“IT’S YOUR day, Mom,” Cale said as he climbed into the driver’s seat of his parents’ conversion van. “Whatever you want to do tonight, we’ll do it. You only turn sixty-seven once.”
“She’s probably too embarrassed to say, but she told me she wants to go to the gentlemen’s club,” Cale’s dad said from his chair in the back.
“Oh, good heavens, Ted.” She swiveled enough in the passenger seat to shoot her husband a scolding frown, which made him cackle. “I’d like to see your condo, Cale.”
“You notice she didn’t say your home,” Mariah said from the back, where she sat next to their dad.
“I’m getting there,” Cale said. He knew his sister was kidding, but after the work he’d put in these past few days to try to finish it, the subject was a sore one. “Why do you want to see it, Mom? It’s not done yet.”
“You’ve owned it for, what, two years? And I’ve lived here for almost two months and you’ve never showed it to me once. I’m just curious to
see the work you’ve done.”
“We can stop by after dinner, then,” Cale said.
“We’re a block away,” Mariah said. “Let’s do it now. They can see it in daylight and then we can relax and enjoy dinner.”
“That sounds perfect,” Ronnie said.
“Dad?” Cale met his father’s bushy-browed eyes in the rearview mirror. “You up for it?”
“Hell, if the women made up their minds, then that’s what we do. I’ve been married for forty-eight years, son. You learn these things.”
“Forty-nine,” Ronnie said. “You’ve been married for forty-nine years, Ted.”
“Forty-eight, forty-nine. When you have that much bliss, it’s hard to keep track, my dear.”
Cale pulled into his assigned parking spot outside of his condo. Getting his dad and his chair out took a while, and once again, Cale marveled that his mother had taken care of him by herself for so long, to say nothing of putting up with his blunt humor.
“Can I get in there?” his dad asked after rolling down the short ramp from the van.
“It’s on the first floor.” Lucky thing. His dad had still been mobile when he’d bought the place.
Cale unlocked the door and his dad waited for his mom to go in first. She gasped, first thing.
“It’s beautiful, Cale. I love this tile floor.”
“You remember Evan from the department? He helped me put it in on our day off. Then Clay helped me finish up the cabinets yesterday.” He looked at the kitchen—which was fully in view now that the wall was down and the cabinets moved to their places along the outside walls—through his mother’s eyes and realized she was right. It looked pretty damn good for a bunch of amateurs. It looked nice and new and contemporary, just like he and Noelle had discussed. Strangely, though, it didn’t feel like home. Of course, living in his sister’s apartment for so long, what did he know about home?
“Are these custom cabinets?” his mom, having moved into the kitchen proper, asked.
