by Kim Powers
That was the last time she’d ever taken me there, horrified by me; maybe it was the last time she ever went. I never knew. We moved again, right after that.
I didn’t like going there then.
And I didn’t like going there now.
Something bad was there, or had been.
At the turn-off, the sign leading to the home was big, with a curlicue cutout on top, like some antebellum mansion. A few of the painted letters on it were peeling; it could have used a fresh coat of paint, but it wasn’t foreboding. It wasn’t something out of Dickens—as I had expected years ago. A curving driveway led up to the main building; it looked like stucco or some sort of concrete. An old English manor house, its exterior meant to survive the harsh winter. Windows were decorated with kid stuff, on display as much for the outside as the inside. Music posters and WWF wrestling. Hand-drawn signs and cutouts.
Now, it looked so . . . normal. A dorm, for kids. This place that I hadn’t thought of in years, until Sig had dug out those old letters. The “fan mail” I should have answered.
I’d brought them with me, for . . . I don’t know. Good luck? Evidence? To prove we weren’t crazy?
To prove someone in here had been crazy?
Mizell parked, and I got out from the passenger side door, hobbling toward the front entrance on a cane I’d borrowed from Sig. Every step hurt because of my twisted ankle; running at the petting zoo had just made it worse. Instead of walking up the four curving marble steps to the front porch, I took the wheelchair ramp, covered in black-ribbed rubber; it was easier to manage.
The door set off a tinkling bell; inside, the lobby looked like a nice European hotel. After the war. The kind of place you’d expect to have a little bell on the front counter, to ring the harried wife and proprietress with, and a guest book.
“Hello?” Mizell called out, already pulling out her badge. “Anybody home?” Her voice echoed off the marble of the entrance hall. The floors, polished to a high gloss. The smell of janitor stuff, left behind.
“I’ll be right with you,” someone called from inside.
A woman in her sixties came out from the back office, behind the front desk. She was a multi-tasker; as she moved, she was still looking back, to some helper in the room she had just left. “If you call the computer guy, then we can . . . ”
Her skin was powdery, jowly and soft, like biscuit dough before you pop it in the oven. Black hair, with some gray coming through—two weeks away from her hairdresser’s appointment. She was wearing slacks and a nice top; not a uniform, not a nurse uniform.
Then she stopped short, as she turned around and saw me over the counter.
Advancing slowly, carefully, on my cane. It gave me a strange, crab-like lope, leaning to one side, favoring the leg that was good.
“Oh sweet Jesus . . . ” she said, her hand flying to her heart, her face turning whiter than it already was. “Just one cane now! You’re doing so well!”
I looked at her, uncomprehending. So did Mizell.
“Now don’t go getting all bashful on me, just because you’re grown up! It’s your Mamarie. Your Mama. Your Marie. Your Ma-ma-rie. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten?”
“Who?”
Now it was her turn to step back, as afraid as I was beginning to feel. “I’m sorry, I . . . who are you?”
“Ethan Holt. Who . . . who did you think I was?”
“Aaron Holt.”
“What are you talking about? Who? No, it’s Ethan,” I said. Almost in horror. Dread.
“I’m sorry, hon,” the sweet old lady said to me. “I knew this day was going to come. Aaron Holt. He’s the one who was here. Your twin brother.”
My cane clattered to the floor, the only sound in the room, echoing against the marble.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
Skip must have finally fallen asleep because she was having a wonderful dream, where her father came to save her. He was actually in the room, and he was looking right into her eyes. She smiled, and he smiled back at her.
And then he didn’t.
His face collapsed. The mouth tried to lift into a smile, his cheeks struggled to hold up the corners of his lips, but something was off. Lopsided. So much like her father, but . . . not.
Everything she’d dreamed and prayed for, for days now, but . . . not.
She wasn’t dreaming. She couldn’t feel her body in a dream, and she felt every inch of it now. Trussed up on a rotten wood floor, her back pushed into the pebbly wall that had been painted over a million times. The only comfort she felt was at her left side, Wendy there, just beginning to wake up too. Both waking up from the same nightmare, because of who was looking back at them.
Skip’s father, but . . . not.
It was a version of him that was smushed: pudgier, slack, a choppy haircut, the pale skin of someone who never saw the sun, but his eyes were the same. Just attached to a different body, one that was twisted and malformed and sitting in a wheelchair.
“Who are you!” Skip didn’t care if she cried anymore. She didn’t care if she screamed. All her schemes and tricks had gone out of her head the minute she saw this man pretending to be her father.
“Iphicles. The twin brother Hercules forgot. But you can call me . . . Uncle Aaron. This little . . . ”—with difficulty, he raised his arms to display the handiwork that was all around him, all twelve murals of the Labors of Hercules—“gesture . . . is to help him remember.”
“You’re trying to . . . to fool us or something. He doesn’t have a twin. He’s an only child.”
“No. He became. An only child.”
He wheeled his chair next to one of the magazine clippings of her father, and posed, face to face. Skip almost couldn’t tell them apart. He pulled at his face to show it wasn’t a mask, but it almost looked like one, shipped from the factory before it was finished.
“The mirror doesn’t lie. It cracks, perhaps, when it sees this sad sight, but it doesn’t lie. Oh, I didn’t believe it either, not at first. But I did the research. At the orphanage. The home. Everything in my files. Names, addresses, cashed checks. The paper trail, to prove how my parents had given me away, at age three. After I got out, I talked to doctors. I read case studies. And it is possible. At that age, just three years, you can forget. And Ethan did. They came to visit . . . and then he forgot to come back.”
“Ethan doesn’t have a twin . . . I would’ve known . . . ” Wendy sputtered.
“Skip can fill you in. I’ve already told her the story. I just left out one crucial detail: that umbilical cord that was wrapped around my neck? Turning me into . . . this? That was his. His cord, cutting off my air. My brain. My legs. Choking the life out of me.”
“That’s . . . that’s just . . . how you were born then. He didn’t have anything to do with it. He was just a baby!” Skip couldn’t stop. “No. NO. He would’ve said. You can’t forget something like that.”
“Forget? Yes. Forgive? No. I was the . . . runt of the litter. Taken away. Given away. And soon, forgotten. My parents—his parents—told everyone I had died. And then I did, because they stopped coming. They stopped bringing him. Ethan. Because who likes to be reminded that a child is . . . less than perfect. Less than . . . Olympic material?”
“This is . . . insane. This can’t be,” Skip gasped.
“Really, for the daughter of a classics professor . . . let me set you straight. Once upon a time, the great god Zeus had sex. With a mortal, Alcmena. One of his many affairs. He was a very bad boy. Alcmena had twins, but only one of them was from Zeus. The other was from her . . . earthly husband. That would be me. The one who wasn’t . . . of the Gods.”
“His parents! They’re the ones that gave you away. Just tell him. Tell Daddy what you told us, he’ll . . . he’ll make everything okay.”
“This . . . cannot be. Made. Okay,” Aaron screamed at her. It had come back. The stop and start.
But Skip’s words came even faster and louder. The words of the teenager that Aaron Holt had
never gotten to be, the words he never dared to say, to anyone in power.
“FUCK YOU.”
His hands came flying to her face, almost knocking it off with its force. She buried her face in Wendy’s neck, to try to escape.
“Most people. In your situation. Would know. Not. To talk. Like that.”
“I’m not most people. I’m your niece,” she said, finally crying in front of him.
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
So many lives, crammed into so many file cabinets. An entire history of a person and the most heartbreaking moments of their young lives, scribbled on eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch forms, stuck inside manila folders, which in turn were stuck inside upright coffins of gunmetal gray. That’s what “Mamarie” was thumbing through now, to get the one she wanted to show us. Her fingernails were clipped short, so she flew through them quickly, every one of them a face, a person to her, not just a file.
Flying fingernails.
My daughter’s fingernails.
A.H.
Aaron Holt.
My twin.
I put my head down between my legs to keep from throwing up.
“Your brother used to do that too. All the time. He got sick at the push of a button. I’d get him a Coca-Cola and let him stay in here and help me file, just to get away from . . . ” She didn’t finish the thought. “Well, things are pretty good now, but I can’t promise they always were. Not when I started here.”
In a corner of the room, Mizell was on her phone, filling her team in on the news. She was cupping her hand over the phone to shield what she was saying, but I could see it in her eyes. She couldn’t believe it either.
“I still can’t believe it . . . I had . . . I have a twin brother? Who was here? It’s not possible. I’d know. I’d remember. I couldn’t just . . . forget my own flesh and blood. It’s a mistake, it’s gotta be . . . ”
“Children don’t remember much of anything before three years old, and that’s when Aaron came here. That’s when his parents . . . well, your parents . . . I guess that’s when they finally gave up. They just couldn’t cope with his condition.”
“Or didn’t want to.” I suddenly saw it, why my father had pushed me so hard. I had to be perfect, physically perfect. I was living for two, except I’d never known it.
“You wouldn’t believe the grownups I’ve met who didn’t know they had a brother or sister who was given away. It’s not your fault,” Mamarie said, trying to make me feel better. “You were too little. There’s no way you could remember . . . ”
“But I should have . . . somebody I shared the womb with?”
“They brought you here a few times to visit. Well, your mother did. Your father almost never came. It’s in the visitors’ logs, you can check if you want to, but . . . so many kids over the years, some get adopted, some don’t, but I remember him like my very own. All he needed was some love, and I tried to give it to him, but I think a child knows who’s a parent and who isn’t. I tried to make up for it, though . . . ”
A paper cut. “Shoot.” She sucked at the blood as she put the file out on the table in front of me. “Here we go.”
Inside, a life. His life.
Forms and copies of cashed checks and report cards and medical forms. Pictures of Aaron, growing up. I could almost visualize myself next to him in every picture, the two-for-one that twins should have, except he didn’t. I’d been left out of the picture.
He’d been left out of the picture.
“Oh my God. Look,” I said to Mizell, pointing to one of them.
He was smiling at the camera, so proud, wearing the very same cowboy shirt I had. The one he’d left for me, as the last clue at the kiddie farm.
“She must have brought him one too, your mother,” Mizell said.
And then, a change coming over him.
We were identical and then, we weren’t.
Instead of seeing him grow up like me, the photos showed him getting weaker and weaker. One of his eyes, drooping. His chin, falling. His head, tilting. His legs, giving up.
“We moved a lot when I was little. I guess that’s why. My parents cut any ties with anyone who knew. So I wouldn’t find out. So nobody would find out.”
“And then, after they died, there were no other relatives . . . ” Mamarie continued.
I completed her thought. “ . . . who even knew he was here.”
“Nobody ever adopted him, so we just let him stay here. He helped us out. We all loved him. He was here into his twenties. The caretaker, helping all the other little kids . . . he was so good.”
“But where is he now?” Mizell asked. “That’s what we’ve got to find out. Fast.”
“There’s something else I want to show you,” Mamarie said, getting up. “It might help. Or at least help you understand.”
She was wrong. Nothing could make me understand this.
“Call it that . . . connection that twins have. I knew he was my twin, my blood, my other, the first time I saw his picture. Mamarie showed it to me, all the way back in high school, when I was still at the home. When I was a . . . client there. We looked alike, but it was more than that. It was like . . . I saw him, and knew . . . I’ve found my real home.”
As long as he was talking, he was breathing, and so were they.
“Of course, no one believed he could be my twin, my other half, because we looked so . . . different. The same, but . . . not.”
His words were going somewhere beyond them, to a mirror in his head. To his memory. It seemed to make him happy; his voice was even and smooth again. Or maybe it was just the new shot he gave himself, in front of them. He waited a moment for it to take effect, then began anew.
“So I had to prove it. Unlike this place, which I selected for its privacy, the one thing I didn’t have at the home was privacy. A dorm, bunk beds. Shared with so many other . . . lost boys. I learned to snap open my eyes in an instant if I heard someone moving near me in the dark; I learned to keep weapons under my pillow. The one thing I didn’t learn to hide—and you might call this my tragic flaw: my pride; it goeth before a fall, and how many times I fell—were the photos of my brother, that Mamarie gave to me. There was no denying him, us, our kinship; even to the boys who said no and you can’t and you’re a liar and it’s not true. They only had to look at the pictures to see it was true. We were identical, except for . . . our styles of walking.”
He gripped the side of the chair, to steady himself, and went on.
“One night, one of the boys stole one of the photos of him I kept inside my locker. They started passing it, making fun of a boy who had a pin-up. They made me hobble around to get it back, slipping and sliding on my crutches. But when I finally did get it, I tore it into pieces . . . so they couldn’t make fun anymore.”
He stopped; he was back there, at the home, a teenager, just like Skip was now.
“I tore it into pieces . . . to make the other boy eat it. And when he balked, I started hitting him in the head with my crutch. The other boys cheered. The sound of applause . . . just like my brother was getting, on the track field. My tormentor’s face was bloody on the concrete floor, he was crying, and . . . and Iphicles was born.”
“Mamarie” was taking us down the main hallway, to the thing she wanted to show us. I looked at every picture on the wall, every tile on the floor, trying to force a memory of visiting here with my mother. Being shown off to the kids. Showing them how to play sports, how to toss a football, when most of them could barely get around.
All I could remember was them looking at me: You get to go home. You have a home.
“We didn’t even have a school here then, or classrooms,” Mamarie said, playing tour guide. “They had to be bussed somewhere else. When Aaron was here, he was the only one smart enough to go . . . science, machines, poetry, art . . . he could do everything. When he aged out and it was time for him to leave, he didn’t have anywhere to go, so we kept him on here as a handyman. He could fix everything. Machines, computers. You
name it.”
Mizell was on her cell as we walked, checking in with the FBI guys, but I got the sense that she was also trying to give me my privacy. To let everything soak in, to see if any memory came back. It was something I could only do by myself.
She clicked off her phone and shook her head at me. “They can’t find anything. No records, no social, no last known address, no anything. He’s completely off the grid . . . ”
“But his Facebook?”
“Anybody can make up an account, and we’ve gotta move heaven and earth to subpoena their records.”
At the end of the hall, Mamarie took us into an art room. Bright, alive with color. Grade school kids, some in wheelchairs, working on Play-Doh art projects with a hip young teacher. I smiled at her, but the minute she turned away, I broke. In every little face around the tables—mouths in concentration, hands gluey with tempera—I could see my brother.
I saw myself, what could have been. “This is . . . I don’t know if I can do this.”
Mamarie squeezed my hand. “You can. This is a gift, what these children can teach us. Just remember that. They’re the gift.”
She walked us through the kids and their little tables and little chairs, past the effusive art teacher, and took us to a smaller side room, a sort of walk-in closet.
“This is what I wanted you to see.”
In his darkened control room, Aaron punched on his bank of monitors, and several screens lit up. One of them was filled with people. An entire stadium of them, as a video of Ethan at the Olympics came up.
Family movies, of the family Aaron never had.
Ethan, his little brother by all of five minutes, preparing for the pole vault at Sydney.
An entire stadium, breathing with his brother, who was not breathing at all, but frozen in anticipation.
Aaron’s lungs were bounding out of his chest, pushing against his rib cage, watching him. He couldn’t get his breath. Then, or now. It was always the same. His brother was always somewhere unreachable.
