Gemini

by Sonya Mukherjee

  I scoffed, thinking this was some twisted joke, but Alek went on. “No, I’m dead serious. I thought they were the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. I don’t know why. They weren’t like anything I had ever seen in real life, all those little cottages and flower gardens. But there was something about them. I felt like I could stay in that gallery all day, staring at those pictures.”

  “Are you telling me your paintings are an homage?”

  Alek shook his head. He looked down at his hands, took a breath that sounded shaky, and went on, in a voice that had flattened into a monotone, as if he were reading from a script. “Then right after the gallery, my parents took me out for ice cream, and instead of letting me get a single scoop like normal, they let me get this giant hot fudge sundae, and just when I was starting to eat it, they told me my dad had cancer.”

  Cancer. In all the crazy rumors that I’d heard about Alek and his family, no one had ever mentioned cancer.

  “He lived for a year and a half,” Alek said. He took another long breath and met my eyes, and his voice seemed to float into something more like pain, but still a distant pain, a thing he was holding far away from himself. “He was in treatment the whole time. It was not a good year and a half. And it ruined ice cream forever, I can tell you that much.”

  A loud silence seemed to reverberate through my ears. Looking down at my knees, I murmured, “And Thomas Kinkade.”

  “And Thomas Kinkade,” Alek agreed. “It ruined a lot of things.”

  All those pictures he had drawn back in middle school, of men killed by monsters, vampires, wild creatures. The men always struggling heroically, and always losing the fight.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know.”

  Alek cleared his throat and sat up a little straighter. “It was a long time ago. The point is, I didn’t want you to think this stuff is some kind of sick fantasy where I’m into the gore and I think it’s cool or something.”

  I whispered, “But that picture . . .”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess it started with me wondering about it, you know? I mean,” he added quickly, “not wondering about you bleeding to death or anything, but wondering about, um, about separation. Why you hadn’t ever done that, and whether you ever would. But then I felt—” He stopped abruptly, looking away. After a moment he said, “Well, it seemed wrong to even wonder about it. Like I didn’t, um, have the right. And that was when I got this image.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want him to have ever wondered about separation. But wasn’t I being unreasonable, to ask that much—to ask for him never to have even thought about it? And here he was, backing down, admitting that he didn’t have a right to have thought about it at all. And claiming, maybe, that this was the whole point of his painting.

  But maybe he did have a right.

  If he liked me. If he liked me the way I liked him. Then maybe that was enough to give him the right—not to ask for this, not even to wish for it, but just to wonder.

  Was that it? Was it possible that he liked me that much?

  Silent, waiting for my thoughts to collect themselves, I breathed in the familiar scent of grass. All my life I’d been sitting on grass. But even when I was little, I’d never rolled down a grassy hill, like I’d seen other kids do, or done a somersault or a cartwheel across a grassy field. I had always really wanted to do a cartwheel.

  Alek stood up abruptly. “Okay, well, I guess I just wanted to explain that. Are you waiting for someone? Should I wait with you?”

  I shook my head. I knew there were things I should say to him, but I didn’t have a clue what they were.

  27

  Clara

  “We could do it, you know,” I blurted out, while Alek still hovered beside us on the grass. “We could talk to a surgeon. At least call someone. Set up an appointment. Get their opinion.”

  “Oh my God,” Hailey said. “You cannot be serious.”

  I closed my eyes, and behind my eyelids I could still see it, the image of Hailey bleeding out, without me. It shook me with its wrongness. I was revolted.

  And yet.

  And yet there was something else about it too. A terrifying sense of freedom. A sense that if only she could survive that moment, she would be able to walk away a new person, and then she would be able to walk toward so many things that she never could have before.

  And a small voice whispered inside my ear, But what if she wasn’t bleeding and alone? What if we both came out of it healthy and whole?

  And in the background of that whisper was an image of Max.

  But I couldn’t tell which voice was behind this little audiovisual brain campaign. Was it Idiot-Girl, or was it the Cynic?

  “Mom and Dad would never sign off on that,” Hailey said.

  “We’ll be eighteen in a few months,” I said. “We’ll have the right to do what we want.” I hesitated before adding, “And you mean Mom wouldn’t sign off on it. Maybe Dad would.”

  “No.” Hailey shook her head. “I don’t care what he thought when we were babies. He wouldn’t sign off on it now.”

  “Would it be dangerous?” Alek asked. He sat back down in the grass.

  I looked at him, trying to figure out what he was thinking. Why he was asking.

  “Yes,” I said. “It would be dangerous, and I hate dangerous things. But if we did it . . .”

  I stopped. How dangerous was it, precisely? What were the odds that we would both make it through? What were the odds that one of us would? And if just one of us did, which one would it be? I didn’t know the answers to any of these questions. With our situation being as rare as it was, I wasn’t sure if the answers even existed.

  I cleared my throat. “If we both made it,” I said, “then all those things that are dangerous now would turn into safe things. Hailey could go to art school and just be like any other normal student. She could travel without having to worry about people staring or screaming or giving her a hard time. I know she wants to go all over the world.”

  I imagined her off at art school while I went to college somewhere else. I would talk to her on the phone, unable to see her, unable to feel her physical presence, her skin, the sensations in her legs and feet. The thought gave me a dizzy, nauseated sensation.

  But then I pictured her at the top of the Eiffel Tower, beaming out at the view that she had always wanted to see. I imagined her touring the Louvre, spending hours there, studying the paintings. Climbing its broad staircases straight up, with grace and confidence. And holding a hand that wasn’t mine. Maybe Alek’s, maybe someone else’s. But a hand that she had chosen.

  “And you could get a PhD and become a professor,” Hailey said, “and I wouldn’t slow you down. Right?”

  I tried to picture that. I saw myself in a dorm room with a roommate who wasn’t Hailey, a stranger. Sleeping alone in a twin bed, without the sound of Hailey’s breathing beside me, as strange a thought as not being able to feel the breath moving in and out of my own body. Lying on my stomach or my back—two things I’d never done.

  And I saw myself in the middle of the vast and empty desert, surrounded by telescopes that peered into the far corners of space, searching for radio signals, for proof that we’re not alone, but finding the same thing that my predecessors had been finding for years—nothing but silence.

  “But to answer your question,” Hailey said, “yes, it would be very dangerous.”

  “Well,” Alek said, “don’t get too carried away with the idea that everything else would turn safe if you did it. The rest of us don’t always feel safe all the time either, you know?”

  I studied his face. How could he not feel safe, walking around in that perfectly normal, solitary body? He could go anywhere he wanted and just blend in, like it was nothing.

  I waited for the meaning to sink in, but instead I kept picturing him slow dancing with Hailey in the high school gym, surrounded by other couples, without me. And a mass of confused feelings started to well up i
n me again, good ones and bad ones so intertwined and knotted together, they would be as difficult to disentangle as—well, as our entangled small intestines.

  “The surgery has a lot of risks,” Hailey said. “That’s why they didn’t do it in the first place. Not that the surgeons didn’t want to, but our parents wouldn’t let them. Mainly because our spinal cords are conjoined through the lower section. It’s a rare complication. Once you involve the nervous system, separation surgery gets really dicey.”

  “There have been a lot of conjoined twins born since us,” I said. “It seems like the surgeons are getting better all the time.”

  “But how many with our exact complications?” Hailey asked. “And then, also, we’re so old now. They like to do it on older babies, or toddlers. Sometimes they might do it on four-year-olds. We’re basically fully grown, like adults. They never separate adults.”

  “They separated the Bijanis,” I said.

  “They tried to separate them,” Hailey corrected me, “but both twins died in surgery, so I’m not sure how that helps your argument.”

  “The buh-who-whos?” Alek asked, his gaze darting back and forth between us.

  “Oh, sorry,” Hailey said. She explained that Ladan and Laleh Bijani were Iranian women who had been in their twenties when, in 2003, they’d finally found surgeons willing to undertake the risky surgery to separate them. They had been warned, and had fully understood, that the surgery might kill them—and it had.

  “But they were conjoined at the head,” I said. “Even their brains were involved. It was much more dangerous than us.”

  “But the spinal cord,” Alek said. “That sounds like pretty serious stuff.”

  “The truth,” Hailey said quietly, “is that we don’t know how dangerous it is. Nobody can tell us exactly what chance we’d have of being okay. Pygopagus twins with major involvement of the spinal cord and the gastrointestinal system, operated on in the last ten years? That’s not the kind of thing that anybody has meaningful statistics on.”

  “Fully grown pygopagus twins,” I added.

  “Right,” Hailey said. “I don’t think that’s ever been done before. So who knows? It could kill us or paralyze us, or who knows what else. Honestly, even if it was nothing that catastrophic, I’m pretty sure there’s a good chance of some complication that would make us less healthy than we are now. Considering that right now we’re totally fine. And then there’s the money. You think that’s covered by our HMO?”

  “I’m sure there’s a way,” I said. “People do it all the time, and they’re not all rich. They get it paid for somehow.”

  I glanced over at the building that we’d just exited, and jumped; my mother was coming out the door. She was only a few feet away. Surely not within hearing distance. I hoped.

  Moments later she stood in front of us. “What happened to you? I was waiting and waiting for you to come out of your appointment. I finally asked someone, and they said you were already out. Didn’t you know better than to run off like that? Didn’t you know how much that would scare me?”

  Belatedly her head snapped in Alek’s direction. “What are you doing here?” she demanded.

  Alek had stood up as she’d approached. “I’m sorry about that,” he told her. “I didn’t realize you were waiting for them inside.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Hailey told him.

  “Was he bothering you again?” my mother asked, looking back and forth between me and Hailey.

  “No,” Hailey said, “he’s not bothering us. It’s a long story.”

  Alek backed up slowly. “Um, I’ll see you around, okay?”

  He was looking at Hailey, but she didn’t respond.

  He looked at my mom, but she was looking at Hailey.

  And then my mom’s head snapped up and over to the right. “Oh no!” she shouted.

  A girl at the end of the concrete walkway was holding up her phone like a camera, pointing it at us. My mother’s brain apparently had some internal sensor that set off an alarm if anyone pulled out a camera within five hundred feet of us.

  “You put that away!” my mother shouted, walking toward her.

  The girl, looking alarmed, slipped the phone into her pocket. “Sorry,” she said, “I was just—”

  “No!” my mother answered, as if she were rebuking a small child. “Did you take a picture?”

  “No, I didn’t take one yet,” the girl assured her, palms out. She looked scared. “Honestly. I’m sorry about that. I promise I won’t.”

  Hailey leaned toward Alek. “Mom’s in rare form. You may want to take off.”

  He nodded. “I’ll see you tomorrow, right? At school? Unless you think we can still make it to art class this afternoon?”

  Hailey shook her head. “I have some shopping to do,” she told him, half-whispering as Mom continued to harass the hapless camera girl. “I’ve got to buy a dress for the dance.”

  I caught my breath. So we were going to the dance after all. I hated the thought of going, hated the idea of being on the dance floor in front of all our classmates, but if it meant that Hailey and Alek really did have a chance, then I could find a way to get through it.

  Alek looked surprised for just a second. Then he smiled. “Any particular color tie you want me to buy?”

  “Black,” she said. “Black will do just fine.”

  28

  Hailey

  “So,” I said as the minivan pulled out of the parking lot, “we need to stop at the mall to buy a couple of dresses.”

  I tried to make this sound like the sort of normal, casual thing that I might say on any ordinary weekday. Never mind that we had never been to a mall in our lives. Mostly we shopped online.

  “Don’t be silly,” Mom said. “It’s November. You don’t need any dresses in November.”

  “I meant formal dresses,” I explained patiently. “For the Sadie Hawkins dance. I’m going with Alek. And I thought Clara just might want to tag along, so she’ll need a dress too.”

  Mom didn’t answer. I gave Clara a sidelong glance, worried that she would side with Mom, but she didn’t say a word. In fact, if I wasn’t mistaken, she was smiling faintly.

  “Yes,” she said, “I think I’d like to get a dress for that.”

  I didn’t understand what was going on with Clara today. But at the moment I definitely liked it.

  “Absolutely not,” Mom snapped. “You are not going to any dance with that boy, Hailey. And I do not want you spending any more time around him.”

  “Really?” I gave a short, bitter laugh. “Why, what did he do to you?”

  Mom glowered at me in the rearview mirror. “That was the same boy who came to our house all covered in blood the other day. You were angry at him. You were telling him to leave. You sounded like you never wanted to speak to him again. And now you’re going to a dance with that boy? I don’t think so.”

  “Alek,” I said. “His name is Alek, not ‘that boy.’”

  “Well, you’re not to talk to him anymore,” Mom said. “He’s bad news. I can tell.”

  “Oh, you can tell,” I spit out. “That’s a good one, Mom.”

  “Hailey!” Mom turned around to glare at me over her shoulder.

  “What do you want me to say?” I demanded as she turned her attention back to the road. “‘Gee, Mom, sure, I’ll stay away from this guy because you don’t like the look of him.’ Because that’s what you’ve taught us all our lives. That’s what you’ve preached to the whole town, right, that if someone looks weird, you should definitely avoid them? You know, he’s the only one who—Oh, forget it.”

  “What?” Mom demanded sharply. “The only one who what?”

  I shook my head. There was no point trying to explain.

  No, that wasn’t it. It wasn’t that there was no point. It was that I didn’t want to. I wanted to hold this feeling inside myself and not share it with her. Not even share it with Clara. I didn’t want to try to put it into words, even for myself.


  Mom looked at Clara in the rearview mirror and asked, “What was she going to say?”

  “I can’t read her mind, Mom,” Clara said bitterly. “You should know that.”

  Mom gripped the steering wheel tightly, her knuckles white. “I never said it was based on how he looked. It’s the conversation that went on at our house. I don’t want any more of that sort of thing going on.”

  I stared at my reflection in the window, then decided to try a different tack. “What if I went with a different boy? Then could I go?”

  “To the dance?” Mom exhaled sharply. “Why do you need to go to this dance so badly?”

  “I’m just trying to figure out your exact policy on dating,” I said. “Am I allowed to date other boys, as long as they’re not Alek?”

  “I’m sure you could go to this dance without a date,” Mom said. “They allow that, don’t they?”

  “Why won’t you just answer the question?”

  There was no response.

  “Well, look. One way or another, we are going. If you and Dad won’t drive us, we’ll get Juanita or Bridget to drive us. You’re not going to physically stop us from leaving the house, are you?”

  Mom hit the brakes, hard. It took me a second to realize that this was because we’d arrived at a traffic light.

  We sat there, silent, as the light stayed red. And stayed red. And kept staying red.

  Up until now my mother had never expressly forbidden us to date. But I think she had assumed it would never come up.

  When we were little, Clara and I sometimes played with baby dolls. We would pretend to bathe them in a little doll bathtub, push them in a double stroller, and take them to the “beach” at one end of our living room. And sometimes we would talk about “when we’re mommies someday.”

  I’m not sure exactly how old we were when Mom started to quietly shut the fantasy down. It seems to me that when we were little, she would smile when we talked about what we would do with our babies someday and what we would name them, and then later she stopped smiling, and later still she stopped meeting our eyes.

  But maybe that’s not even true. Maybe she had always had that same pinched, closed-off look when we brought it up, and it just took us a while to notice.