Phillips Jr. took me behind the counter and told me to stay put. He dialed a number on his cell phone. Maybe the handcuffed man would still be at the police station and together we could wait for my mother to come. Maybe she would take me in her arms and apologize for all the lies. Or maybe she would decide I was just like my father and, in the years to come, tell people stories about her daughter, Crystal, who disappeared into thin air one night, in the middle of a show.
After he hung up, Phillips Jr. brought me coffee in a foam cup. For a moment, I thought he might be softening his position, but it was clear from the way he stood by the door, phone still in hand, that he thought it was time for me to learn about consequences.
“You don’t have any doughnuts, do you?” Suddenly I was starving. I hadn’t eaten since lunch the day before. “Like a bear claw?”
“What kind of question is that?” He shook his head. Wing-shaped sweat marks darkened the back of his polo. “This isn’t a Seven-Eleven.”
A small fan stood on the counter. I leaned into the breeze. Once, I took a poetry class in school and even though I hadn’t been very good at writing poems, some of my similes came rushing back: time is like a house on fire; time is like water draining from a tub. I heard faraway sirens and started to worry about Merlin. If I went to jail, who would take care of him?
The door jingled, but it wasn’t a police officer: it was Bill, slouching and bleary-eyed. He was wearing the same clothes from the last time I saw him. His hair clung to his scalp. His ring was gone. My father could have been a man like this, I kept thinking.
“Well,” he said, sauntering over to the counter. “Look who it is.”
“Do you know her?” Phillips Jr. asked.
He rocked back on his heels. “I’m sorry to say that I do.”
“We’re waiting on the police and she just asked for a snack. Can you believe it?”
“Nothing would surprise me.” Bill picked up a six-pack and paid in cash. He asked Phillips Jr. if he could hang around for a while. He said what was about to happen would be too good to miss.
“What’s your real name?” I asked Bill, who of course didn’t know that all this time I’d been thinking of him as Bill. “Why did you carry around a picture of that tree?”
“It looked alive,” he said.
“Of course it’s alive,” I said. “But why else?”
“Crystal,” he said, popping open a beer. “What are you doing with your life?”
Here was another story my mother told me: once, my father hypnotized her and walked her up to the top of their apartment building in Toluca Lake. When he brought her out, she was standing on the edge of the roof. She blinked, cupped a hand over her eyes. She saw Hollywood in the distance, the sidewalk below. She felt an unfamiliar breeze, the sensation of her stomach dropping. What am I doing here? she asked, stepping back toward safety. Don’t worry, he said. I wouldn’t have let you fall. For years, I had believed the story demonstrated the power of his magic.
In the 1800s, Robert-Houdin dazzled all of Paris by casting a spell over his son that made him float. William Lance Burton conjured doves from his sleeves that perched on the shoulders of audiences. If David Copperfield could vanish the Statue of Liberty, couldn’t I make just one of these bottles disappear?
“Listen.” I took a whiskey out of my front pocket and placed it on the counter. “If I can make this disappear right now, before your very eyes, will you let me go?”
Phillips Jr. laughed. He looked at Bill, who raised his beer and shrugged.
“It’s a deal,” he said.
I closed my eyes. My feet were sweating. I curled my toes inside my sneakers. With my hands I made a circle around the bottle and tried to feel the workings of every nerve, every cell, every membrane. I tried to bring that energy upward, into my mind, where I was willing the bottle to disappear. Oh, how wonderful it would be to look at Bill, at Phillips Jr., and say: See what I can do.
I kept my breathing deep and slow. My fingertips burned. My hands were shaking. I had never concentrated so hard before. I heard voices ask if I was okay, and I felt myself whisper, My father is not a magician; my father is dead. All of it sounded very far away. I saw Merlin sitting on the theater stage, his nose twitching. I saw my mother aiming her wand at him and saying Shazam! I saw my father in an aquarium, his hands pressed against the glass, feeling weightless and free. I saw the bottle dematerializing with a faint hiss and a puff of smoke. I saw myself vibrate and glow before all my particles scattered like pollen in the air.
THE ISLE OF YOUTH
1.
I arrived at my sister’s apartment just before the hurricane. My plane had been one of the last to land at the Miami airport. From the taxi, I saw banks of black cloud settling on the horizon and palm trees bent from the wind. Bushes flapped like invisible hands were shaking them. The roads into downtown were empty. On the radio, a reporter said the hurricane would skim the coast before spinning into the Gulf of Mexico, that it would all be over by morning. I didn’t believe him. The sky looked frightening. I’d never been to Florida before. My sister, Sylvia, and I were identical twins. I had not seen her in over a year.
“Does the hurricane have a name?” I asked the driver as we rolled down Sixth Street, scanning apartment buildings for the address I’d been given.
“They’re always named after women,” he said.
This wasn’t true. I remembered Hurricanes Andrew and Floyd, but figured he was trying to make a statement.
He parked in front of my sister’s building. It was tall and made of bright orange stucco. I paid the driver and got out, pulling my carry-on behind me. In the front lobby and in the elevator, the lights buzzed and flickered.
When Sylvia opened the door, I didn’t enter right away. She looked like me and she didn’t look like me. She had the same dainty nose and rounded chin, but she was thinner and had better posture. She had a ring in her bottom lip and carefully styled bangs. Sweatpants, a sheer white tank top, pink socks. Chipped black polish on her nails. I had no idea what my sister was doing for work. I was a research librarian and lived in D.C. My suits were poly-blend, and I hadn’t been to a hair salon in months. When my sister asked me to come, I had not considered our many differences. She said it was an emergency and I told her that I had some vacation days saved. I didn’t tell her that my husband and I were on the brink, and I’d been looking for something to take a chance on.
“Sylvia,” I said. “How are you?”
“Looks like you brought the weather with you.” She opened the door wider.
Inside, unlit candles sat on top of the coffee table and the stereo and on the ledges of bookcases. I squeezed my suitcase handle, taking in everything: the sectional sofa and flat-screen TV to my left, the kitchen to my right, the balcony with sliding glass doors, legions of candles. Even with the lights on, the apartment was dim, the storm having brought on a premature night.
“Is that safe?” I pointed to the bookcases. “To have candles so close to all that paper?”
She shut the door. “You’ll thank me when the electricity goes out.”
I asked my sister what I should do with my luggage. She pointed to a hallway past the kitchen. The guest room was empty, save for a futon bed, and had been converted into a storage space for musical equipment: a guitar, amps, stacks of records. I had to clear away cords and a plastic box of guitar picks to find the mattress.
I found Sylvia on the balcony. I stood beside her and looked out at the empty streets and the windblown palm trees and the distant gray swirl of ocean.
If someone were to ask about my sister, I would say she was a dangerous person. The signs started showing in junior high, when she sent a neighborhood boy, who was in love with her, into a catastrophic depression by sleeping with him and then his best friend. At thirty-four, she had been through three fiancés, countless jobs and cities and hair colors. Bankruptcy. Names. Call me Lisa Anne, she said one time. Call me Suzette, she said another. It wasn’t just that my
sister behaved badly—she was a shape-shifter, someone who bounced from one life to the next like a drug-resistant virus changing hosts. The longer I went without seeing her, the more comfortable I had become with the idea that she simply didn’t exist, that I had no other half, no shadow self. But, after all those years, there she was, there she undeniably was, reaching for me at a time when I already felt like throwing myself under the rails.
“What’s with all the music stuff in the bedroom?”
“I used to be in a band,” she said. “But you wouldn’t know about that.”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
“We’ll have to board these up soon.” She pointed at the sliding doors behind us. “In case the glass breaks.”
“Is this going to be a bad one?”
“A Category Two,” she said. “Small potatoes around here.”
I crossed my arms on top of the railing. “What’s this hurricane named?”
“I’ve named her Marie Antoinette,” she said. “The weather people call it something else.”
“Marie Antoinette? As in let them eat cake?”
“More like off with their heads.”
* * *
The power went out at nine. We had already boarded the doors; I’d held small sheets of plywood across the glass while my sister pounded in the nails. When the apartment went dark, Sylvia started lighting the candles. She did it effortlessly, as though she had practiced walking around her apartment blindfolded.
“That’s it,” she said. “Not much to do now but wait it out.”
I sat on the couch, facing the bookcase filled with blazing candles. Rain and wind lashed the building. My sister stood in front of me and swayed. The ring in her lip glowed.
“Will you need to call Mark?” she asked. “Sometimes the reception is spotty during a storm.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
“I take it things aren’t so good at home?”
I looked up at her. “How would you know?”
“I’ve called a few times in the last month,” she said. “You weren’t around. Mark brought me up to speed.”
I took one of the decorative pillows and tossed it across the room. It grazed Sylvia before hitting the floor. The last time my sister visited, she and Mark went out together one night, while I was working late. They came home drunk and vicious. They sought me out in the kitchen, where I was going through my day planner, and mocked me about everything from my thick-heeled pumps (Like a witch’s shoes!) to my habit of grinding coffee every night before bed (Look who’s so organized! So grown up!). Even after I left the room, my sister showed no mercy. She knew how to turn people, how to get someone to abandon loyalties, to change sides. She should have gone into espionage.
“And what did Mark say?”
“He said the marriage counselor suggested you take a vacation together.”
“He told you we were seeing a counselor?”
“He said she has this really annoying habit of saying ‘you see’ before making a point. Like ‘You see, you’re misdirecting your anger again,’ or ‘You see, now is a time for compassion.’” Sylvia sat on the floor and pulled her legs underneath her. “Where do you think you’ll go for this vacation?”
“We don’t know.” I couldn’t help but feel, through these secret conversations with my husband, that my sister had gained a kind of power over me. “Did Mark sound like he wanted to go away with me?”
“He said he was on the fence.”
“We’re on the fence about a lot of things.”
She asked if I wanted to hear a song she’d recorded with her old band. I nodded, trying to imagine my husband standing somewhere in our house and listening to my sister’s voice on the other end of the line.
Sylvia slipped a CD into the stereo, battery-operated, on hand for the storms. When the song came on, I recognized it as the one we had danced to many years ago, when we were college students, and felt an awful pang.
“Sylvia,” I said. “That’s David Bowie.”
“Wrong track,” she said. “It’s a mix.” She pressed a button and turned up the volume. A woman’s voice overwhelmed the room. It was hollow, stretched thin, the words so elongated I couldn’t understand the lyrics. An electric guitar kicked in, then drums. Sylvia tapped her fingers against her thighs, bobbed her head. The woman’s voice grew shrill. I heard tambourines, another electric guitar. The song ended with the crash of cymbals.
“Which part were you?” I asked.
“The singer,” she said.
The woman singing had sounded nothing like my sister.
“You don’t believe me?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Fine,” she said. “I’ll play you another.”
The next song opened with rapid-fire guitar and drums, breathless lyrics. I put my hands over my eyes and listened. I haven’t seen her in ages, I told myself. How would I know what her singing voice was like? But the more I listened, the more I knew it wasn’t her.
I uncovered my eyes. Sylvia was dancing, in her sweatpants and socked feet and transparent shirt. The candles cast strange shadows onto her face; I could see the outline of her breasts. She raised her arms, and I caught the glint of the belly-button ring. She opened her mouth wide and words came out, her voice clashing with the singer on the stereo. Was this me in another life, me in an alternate ending? I’d heard stories about twins having secret languages and dreaming the same dreams, but I had no idea if my sister was happy or sad or terrified. She turned the volume even higher. The candles flickered. The apartment was hot.
“Sylvia,” I shouted over the noise. I tried again and again. Finally I got up and put my face close to her face and called her name.
“What?” she screamed back.
“Why am I here?”
* * *
My sister told me that she wanted to change identities. I wouldn’t have to do much, just show up for her job at the Bortaga, a club on Miami Beach, and hang around the apartment for a few days. Sylvia explained this to me after she’d turned off the music and sat back down on the floor. I was still on the couch, studying her face as she spoke. There was a man. He was married. She’d been having an affair with him for the last year. His wife, suspicious, had hired a private detective, who had taken photographs. Once the wife knew what Sylvia looked like and where she lived, she’d started following her. Sylvia would leave her building and see this woman parked on the street, or look over her shoulder while on the sidewalk and spot the woman behind her. She had followed Sylvia to work, the grocery, the park, the post office, the beach, the hardware store, the hair salon. My sister and the married man had decided to end things, but they wanted one last fling. He wanted to take her to the Isle of Youth, an island off the coast of Cuba, Isla de la Juventud in Spanish. There were stories about the isle being a sacred area, a place that hurricanes always missed, a place on the right side of luck.
“But you can’t leave because you have this woman following you,” I said. “And if you and her husband are gone at the same time, she’ll never believe he’s away on business or whatever he plans to tell her.”
“Bingo,” Sylvia said.
“I didn’t see anyone loitering outside your building,” I said. “I didn’t see any suspicious cars.”
“I hope she’s not deranged enough to stalk me during a hurricane,” my sister said.
“When were you planning to leave for this Isle of Youth?”
“Tomorrow night, if I can get you on board.”
“Will the airport be open by then?”
“It’ll be open before noon,” she said. “We know how to recover quickly.”
I heard a loud crash outside. A candle on the coffee table went out.
“You won’t be able to wear the clothes you brought,” Sylvia said. “You’ll have to take things from my closet while I’m gone.”
“What are you doing for work?”
“Stamping hands at a nightclub. One of those ‘in the meantime’ thin
gs.”
I stood and walked over to the boarded-up doors. “There’s no way I could pass for you in a nightclub.”
“A comprehensive makeover is in order,” Sylvia said. “Hair, makeup, clothes. The way I’ll send you home will do more for your marriage than any romantic getaway.”
“Speaking of Mark, what am I supposed to tell him?”
“That you’ve decided to extend your stay. That we’re helping the city of Miami with hurricane cleanup. That I’m teaching you to snorkel. It doesn’t matter.”
All of a sudden my sister was behind me. I knew she was there, felt her heat, without turning around. “I think Mark and I have lied to each other enough,” I said.
“Deception is necessary. In marriage, in life. Otherwise the world will just sandblast us away. You have to keep something for yourself.”
“There’s not one good reason why I should do this for you.”
“Well, for one thing, you don’t like where you are right now. You’ve been wanting a change, an escape, for a while.” She put her chin on my shoulder. She touched my hair. “Here’s another one: you’ve always wanted to know what it would be like to be me.”
* * *
The makeover began at midnight. I sat on a stool in the kitchen. Sylvia placed her supplies—a makeup bag, comb, hair spray, scissors, a glass of water—on the counter. She propped a flashlight on top of the microwave, so it shone in my face. She dipped the comb in the water and picked at my hair until it hung straight. She took a few inches off my bangs and then used a white sponge for foundation, a big brush for powder and blush, little brushes for eye shadow. She tweezed my brows, pulled at the skin beneath my eyes as she smudged on black liner and laced mascara through my lashes. She used her thumb to apply red lipstick, another tiny brush for the gloss. She swept my bangs to the side with the comb and dusted them with hair spray. Through all this, we were silent, serious. By the time she finished, the candles were melting into wax stumps and the wind was still howling.
The Isle of Youth: Stories Page 14
