My pillow was gone and the contents of the box of personal effects the police had given my parents was strewn across the bed. Next to everything lay dozens of my sketchpads, some going as far back as elementary school, when my artwork consisted of nothing more than a stick figure with a balloon for a head. I gathered them up in my arms, a few stray drawings falling to the floor. Circling the room, I looked for a place to hide them, to store them out of sight. The last thing I wanted was to look at them, to find myself absorbed in the sketches I’d poured my heart into as I replayed a past that was no longer mine.
The door at the end of the hall clicked shut, and I dropped my stuff on the bed, worried that Mom had been watching me. I knocked on her door and waited a half second to see if she would answer before I quietly turned the knob.
Mom didn’t hear me come in. She was busy picking up stuff from her floor. My pillow was there and my favorite pair of jeans—the ones I wore so often that they were frayed at the bottom and had a hole in one knee. My most recent sketchbook was there, the one that had the drawings I’d been working on for RISD. She had one torn out, half-taped to black cardboard matting, a glass frame sitting next to it.
I watched her for a minute, her hands shaking as she struggled to tear a strip of tape off. Tissues littered her floor and five half-drunk cups of coffee ringed the area she was sitting in. Mom was exhausted—I could tell by looking at her—but fighting sleep.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
Mom looked up at me, her gaze distant, as if she were seeing something that wasn’t there. The smile that eventually came to her face was sad and full of haunted hope. I knew that look, understood it more than she knew. Every morning when I woke up, for those first few seconds when my mind was still hazy with sleep, I would forget that Maddy was gone. Within minutes my mind would clear, reality setting back in, leaving me with the dark truth. Yet I lived for those precious few seconds, longed for them every time I closed my eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I choked out. I had no idea what to say, no idea how to wipe away the torture I could see flooding her eyes. “I’d do it differently if I could. You know that, right?”
That wasn’t a lie. I didn’t want to be Maddy. I wanted her back. I’d redo that entire night. I’d answer the phone the first time Maddy called. I’d refuse to go get her. I’d text Josh and make him bring her home. I’d do any of those “what ifs” were I given the chance.
“It’s not your fault, Maddy.” Mom quickly dried her eyes, the stoic mask she’d worn for weeks sliding back into place. I couldn’t help but wonder how long she’d been doing that, how many nights these past weeks she’d handed me a bowl of soup and promised me it was going to be okay, then retreated to her room to silently lose it.
She reached out to touch me, to wipe the tears I didn’t know were falling from my cheeks. I backed away, deserving no part of her comfort. “I miss her and I don’t know how to bring her back. I’m trying, I am, but it’s not working. I’m constantly screwing up.”
“No, you’re not.” I turned around at my father’s voice. I watched as his eyes drifted past me to my mom, then to the stack of baby pictures she had balanced on one of my journals. His next words drifted out on a sigh, and I didn’t know if they were meant for me or Mom. “You’re doing fine, better than anyone expected.”
“Why are you here?” I asked.
His briefcase was still in his hand, his tie loosened but still on. He’d gone to work the Monday after the burial service and went in early and worked late each night.
“The school called and said you skipped most of your classes. I called Alex, he couldn’t find you either. I tried your cell, but you didn’t pick up.”
I pulled my phone from my pocket and stared at it. Nine missed calls. Four from Dad. Four from Alex. And one from Josh. I hadn’t heard it ring. Ignoring the rest, I clicked on Josh’s number. No message. No nothing.
Dad’s hand wrapped around mine, squeezing gently to get my attention. “We need to talk about this, Maddy. The three of us need to work our way through this.”
I yanked my hand free and started to walk away. “Maddy, wait,” Dad called after me. “You can’t keep doing this. You can’t pretend everything is fine.”
“Do you ever wish Ella had lived?” It was an unfair question to ask, as there was no right answer. If they said yes, if they said they wished Ella was alive, it’s not like I was going to come clean and reveal who I was. And if they said no, if they said they were happy it was Maddy who had survived—either way their answer would crush me, leave me feeling more guilty, more trapped than before. But I asked it anyway. “Do you ever wonder what it would’ve been like if I had died and not her?”
Mom paled, and Dad took a step back. Neither of them spoke. They stared at me as if calculating what the proper response was supposed to be. That silence, that pause in time and the look of dread on their faces had me wondering if they’d thought about it, if I’d asked the one question that they secretly agonized over.
“Never,” Dad replied. “I wouldn’t trade you, either of you, for the other.”
“Maddy, please.” I heard the plea in Mom’s voice, knew that if I looked up, I’d see tears to match. “I’ve lost your sister. I can’t lose you, too.”
I don’t know what possessed me to say it. Perhaps I was looking for a way to tell them the truth without having to admit it, without the risk of them actually understanding what I was saying. Without giving a second thought to my words, I raised my eyes to meet my mother’s and said, “I’m already gone. I died that night on the side of that road with my sister.”
24
I walked the two miles to the cemetery. To my sister’s grave. To my grave. It was cold and starting to rain. I’d left my coat at home on the kitchen chair, but none of that mattered. I didn’t feel it—not the sting of the rain as it turned to ice or my hands shaking as they hung limply by my side. I kept walking, oblivious to everything.
I knew where the marker was. It was buried five rows deep amid a couple hundred other stones. They laid it yesterday. My parents asked if I wanted to go with them to see it last night, but I didn’t. There was something about seeing my name carved into granite that I didn’t think I was quite ready to handle.
But I hadn’t come here today for visual proof of what I had done, of the finality of the lie I had spun. I’d come to talk to the sister whose life I was trying desperately to figure out.
“Hey.” I ran my hand across the smooth stone, taking with it a puddle of water. I studied it for a second, watched the drops roll off my fingers and onto the ground. I couldn’t help but wonder if she was cold and wet, if she had been cold and wet the night the paramedics pulled her from the heated car and into the dark night.
I looked at the ground, my eyes following the line of the grass. They’d put it back in place, like a carpet they’d unrolled, but it was dying, brown and brittle. The lines where they’d peeled back the original sod gaped, as if it was retreating into itself, as if the grass had tried and failed miserably at reseeding itself.
Kind of like me.
“It’s raining again,” I said as I sank to the ground. The wet grass soaked the legs of my jeans. I watched, mesmerized as the light blue faded to dark, the edges inching out until I could feel the cold settling into my bones. Only then, when a violent chill had me moving to my heels, did I speak again. “It seems like it’s always raining when I see you. Always cold.”
I hadn’t been here since the day of her burial. I had refused each morning when Mom asked me if I wanted to go. She thought it might make things easier, that perhaps it would bring me some closure. Closure wasn’t what I needed. Advice was.
“I went to school today. Alex is great. He’s helping me figure my way around the stares,” I said, leaving out the part about him trying to kiss me the night before. Dead or not, I wasn’t quite sure how to bring up that topic with my sister.
“I still don’t get why you hang out with Jenna, though. She’s se
lfish and mean, and I don’t think she even likes you. I’m quite sure she’s actually working behind your back to screw you over,” I said as if Maddy was sitting right there next to me, as if we were having a conversation about something as mundane as what flavor cake we were going to have on our eighteenth birthday. “Alex told me that her parents are going to lose the house and her brother had to drop out of school to get a job. That kind of sucks for him.”
I swallowed the tinge of pity I felt for Jenna. I didn’t want to understand her behavior. I had no intention of forgiving her for years’ worth of snide remarks and intentional cruelty. Family problems aside, she was still mean and selfish.
“I think you got an A on your Lit test,” I said, laughing. “No worries, that won’t happen again. I’ll be sure to make enough mistakes to get you a solid C next time around.”
“Next time,” I muttered to myself. Those two words sounded foreign and remote. I’d been so focused on getting through one day, one hour, one minute as Maddy that I hadn’t thought about the simple fact that I’d have to get up and do it over again at school, in public, tomorrow.
I paused, shaking my head in disgust as I realized what I was doing. I could almost hear her scolding me, going on about how if I wanted to, I could be as pretty and popular as her. I’d disagree with her, remind her that she was the beautiful one, always had been.
I thought about the first time we had that recurring argument. It was in freshman year and it lasted three days—until Mom finally stepped in and told us either to knock it off or risk losing our phones for a week. Dad pulled me aside that Saturday after dinner. He sat me down in his study and took out his wallet; he showed me the pictures he’d accumulated of us over the years. They were cheesy-looking school pictures with fake fall foliage or blue backgrounds. He had one for each year we’d been in school.
I’d flipped through those pictures, groaning at the one where a gaping hole replaced my two front teeth, then tossed them back at him, completely confused as to what ten years of school photos had to do with anything.
He put his wallet on the desk next to his keys and told me to think about what Maddy had said and the words she had used. I thought about it for a half second, then left the room vowing to hate her forever.
“I’m an idiot. We’re identical twins.” I whispered those words to her now, finally getting what both Maddy and Dad had been trying to say.
“I miss you. I know we weren’t getting along lately, but I figured eventually we’d work it out. I never imagined we wouldn’t get the chance.”
I picked up a strand of dead grass and started peeling the fine threads apart. When one was shredded, I tossed it to the ground and started on another. “Mom’s losing it, and Dad thinks I need to talk to a shrink. Alex agrees.”
There was her sweet voice again, as clear as day, asking me what I’d expected to happen. The few times I’d come to her with a problem, she’d done that—rolled her eyes and told me to open my eyes and watch, stop thinking so much and watch how other people did it, then figure it out.
“Mom had my drawings. She was trying to frame one. It was a crappy one I had left over from my application to art school.”
I thought about my mother’s tears, the look of pure anguish that had clouded her eyes. I’d done that. In every way possible, I’d done that to her.
“Dad’s working a lot,” I continued. “Both he and Mom think the three of us need to talk”—I paused and waved my hand around the damp ground I was sitting on, my eyes landing on my own name etched in granite—“about this.”
Her words echoed through my mind with bittersweet clarity. And let me guess, Ella. You don’t want to talk about it. You want to curl up with your sketch pad and forget it happened.
“You’re right.” Talking about it wouldn’t make it go away, wouldn’t bring Maddy back. It would only make the pain clearer.
I reached out, my hand meeting the cold, hard side of the gravestone. “I don’t want to remember any of it,” I said, as tears pooled in my eyes. “I want to change it. I want you back.”
“Have you talked to anybody about it? Since the day you woke up in that hospital bed, have you spoken of it?”
My whole world stopped at the sound of his voice. Everything froze as I fought to speak the lie I’d entrenched myself in. “Josh, it’s not—”
“Don’t,” he said as he held his hand up for me to stop. “Don’t say that I’m wrong or that I don’t know who I’m looking at.”
I shook my head, not knowing what to say. “I can’t do this now. Not with you.”
“Not with anybody if you have your way.” Josh backed up and pulled a wrinkled piece of paper from his pocket. His gaze was fixed on mine, like he was giving me one last chance to say he was wrong. He mumbled something under his breath when I stayed quiet, then dropped the piece of paper and walked away.
25
It was wrinkled, like it had been crumpled into a ball, then smoothed out and neatly folded. The paper was thin, blue-lined, the jagged pieces from where it had been torn from a notebook still hanging on.
I carefully unfolded it and smoothed it across the granite marker. The dampness started to seep through the paper, curling the edges and blotching the middle. But I didn’t need it to be perfect to recognize it. I knew what it was—a crude drawing I’d made thousands of times before. I didn’t remember sketching this particular version, but I recognized the length of the lines, the gentle curve of the strokes, the darkened pressure marks where each line started. It was one of my drawings, no question about that.
I wondered where Josh had gotten it and why he was carrying it around. I had fifty of these at home, each one better than this. Why would he bother to keep this one?
“Maddy?” I swung around at the sound of my father’s voice. “You okay?”
No was the truthful answer, but I shrugged. “I’m fine. What are you doing here?”
“Looking for you. I tried Alex’s first, thinking maybe you would’ve gone there when you left the house.”
“I didn’t,” I said. Alex’s was the last place I would go. He was half the reason I had left school early—I couldn’t figure him out and was terrified I’d screw up.
“I passed Josh on the way in,” Dad continued. “You know he comes here every day like me.”
I nodded, not sure what to say. I knew Dad stopped here on his way home from work. As for Josh … well, I wasn’t exactly surprised.
Before the accident, I’d hardly ever lied to my dad. Now it seemed all I did was lie to him. To everybody. “Josh wanted to talk to Ella,” I said, vaguely sticking to the truth.
“Is that why you’re here? To talk to your sister?”
“Yes.”
“I was hoping maybe you could talk to me,” he said, “but you left before we had a chance.”
“Because there is nothing to talk about.”
Typical of Dad, he nodded and changed his line of questioning, coming at me from a different angle. “Everything okay at school?”
“Yup. I didn’t feel well, so I went home.” He knew that was a lie. I’d insisted I felt good enough to return to school last night when we argued about it. They wanted me to take a few more days, meet with the counselor before I went back.
“Your mother is worried about you. I’m worried about you.”
“I’m fine, Dad. Honestly. But I don’t want to talk about it. Not yet.”
“Are you talking to Alex at least?”
Alex had stopped asking me about the accident after my first day home. I’d clam up or sometimes cry whenever he mentioned it at the hospital. By the time I’d gotten home, he probably figured it was safer not to ask. “Yeah. I guess.”
We stood there, neither one of us knowing what to say to break the heavy silence that surrounded us. The rain had nearly stopped, a few scattered drops staining the paper. My eyes drifted to the drawing I clutched in my hand.
“What do you have there?” Dad asked as he reached for the drawing.
“She loved to draw. I swear she learned how to use a crayon before mastering a fork,” Dad said, chuckling. I hadn’t heard that sound in weeks. It made me smile and remember how when I was a kid, I’d made him enough drawings to completely cover his office walls. Every single one of them courtesy of Crayola.
“I miss her.” It was the first honest thing I’d said to him since I woke up in the hospital. I missed her hogging the shower in the morning and the smell of nail polish remover overtaking the bathroom. I wanted to hear her yelling for me to come down for dinner and teasing me when I tried to explain to Mom why I had no desire to go to prom.
And I missed me—Ella. I missed sitting at the lunch table with Josh, laughing to myself as Kim vied for his attention. I missed our Saturday-afternoon movie marathons and his moronic texts asking me how to handle Kim.
“I miss her too. More than you can ever know.”
Those last words were whispered. I don’t think he intended to speak them aloud, but they stunned me all the same. I couldn’t help myself—I asked, “What do you miss most about her?”
He stepped back, his face going pale. “I don’t blame you, Maddy. Nobody blames you. Please don’t think—”
“I don’t,” I interrupted. “I’m trying to figure her out. Ella, you know. What people thought of her. Who she really was.”
“Quiet,” was Dad’s first response. “Beautiful, and quiet, and so incredibly talented, but you already know that, don’t you?”
I thought about asking him what, exactly, he meant. Luckily, I didn’t have to. He answered before I could speak. “She was your twin sister, Maddy. I remember when you two were little. You were inseparable, even insisting on sleeping in the same room, in the same bed. You probably knew her better than anybody.”
The Secrets We Keep Page 12
