“Then why do you keep opening it?”
“I’m not. I haven’t.”
My mother frowned at something stuck at the bottom of a pot. “I don’t care if you go in there. Just keep the door closed.”
Later, after my mother went to bed, I went upstairs to use the bathroom. I haven’t been in my old room in weeks, not since I helped set up the bassinets. My mother’s door was closed, but the hall was bathed in a cold, pale light. The door to the babies’ room was open. With the tree gone, there’s nothing to block the moon. The window glowed a ghostly white. The curtains are in the wash, and the rug is in the attic, so it’s just the two basketlike beds with half-dome hoods.
I whispered my sister’s name. The floorboards creaked. I took a step and froze. Something was scratching in the closet. It sounded like our stupid cat. She must have been hiding when my mother shut the door. But then the sound shifted and grew. No, not Thing. Something bigger. Something flapping. The sound of wings beating. I prayed it wasn’t a bat. I shielded my face and cracked the door, waiting for it to swoop out. Nothing. I reached up and pulled the string. The light blazed. It was a bird. Not a real bird, though. A mythical one. The bare bulb shone on a girl in a field, a massive flaming creature rising up before her. It was the phoenix poster, the one Erika had given me, taped to the back wall.
eighty-three
Why can’t everyone stop talking about the future? Autumn’s been on a we-are-moving-to-the-city-after-we-graduate kick. She ordered some free maps and guides off the Internet, and now she’s plotting our escape in three years. But I can’t think that far ahead. At school, all anyone can talk about is the spring formal and the tryouts for some stupid musical that’s a month away. My mother’s just as bad. With her, it’s all about the babies. Furniture for the babies, clothes for the babies, and a thousand other things we need to get ready before they’re born. She toddles around the house preparing. Tomorrow means nothing to me. It’s a black hole. I’m in a holding pattern. All I can think about is Madeline and my damaged brain. What if everyone was right? What if all this really is just a chemical imbalance? My brain tripping for the last six months? The drugs put everything right, leveled it all out, and now I’m left with nothing but myself. Maybe I hung that poster in the back of the closet just like I supposedly sent that e-mail to Priscilla and sent myself that death threat and drew that picture of the baby on the bathroom wall and sliced my own hand and wrote all that stuff in my old journal. If I believe that, then what do I do with my mother’s reaction to the picture on the camera, with Autumn saying it was me who beat her up but it wasn’t, not really? I’m sick or I’m haunted. It can’t be both. There are things in this world that can’t be explained. Ordinary people encounter the strange and incredible every day: UFOs, premonitions, telekinesis, Bigfoot, God. Why not me? I didn’t think I’d miss Erika, but I do. She was someone to talk to, even if she was paid to listen.
I think Madeline is punishing me. She’s angry because I ruined the plan. I didn’t trust her. She wanted us to be together forever and I rejected her. She forgave me the first time, when I abandoned her in the In-Between, returning to my body, giving up her world for this one. I should’ve stayed dead. I know now that there’s nothing to fear. To lose this body wouldn’t be so bad. It’s scarred and broken, used up. Why am I so afraid to give up this shell? She either hates me and wants me to suffer, or she’s gone. For good. Dead like my father, never to return. The drugs killed her. She was poisoned. Maybe what I’m feeling—all this energy in my chest—is something else. Maybe my body is my body again.
eighty-four
It’s not your body. It never was.
eighty-five
I am the monster. Me. Elanor, I guess. I don’t know who I am anymore. It’s like that picture of a chalice, the one where if you shift your focus it becomes two faces. She carved into my chest, scratched into the ultrasound, but I was too blind to see. Not Madeline and Elanor … ME. Her. Fourteen years ago … two souls … one body. This body belongs to her. I am the possessor. I don’t deserve to be here. I have no right. I took what did not belong to me, stole my sister’s life. I took what wasn’t mine and ruined it the way Priscilla used to destroy the clothes she borrowed. That day when my mother pointed to the white bean in the ultrasound and said, “That’s you” … she was wrong. I was the void on the right, the one that shrank to a pinprick. I was the twin who vanished. My sister drew me into her, tried to save me, and I pushed her out. I’m a parasite. Worse than a parasite. I can live without her … but this isn’t living.
eighty-six
The nervous energy is back, the grinding in my head. I can’t sleep. Today I skipped lunch and went to the drugstore and bought more pills and hid them in my bag. I bought a box of matches, too. I don’t know why.
eighty-seven
My mother knows that what happened today is not possible. I’m not superhuman. She’ll try to explain it away, like the picture on the camera, but she can’t. The furniture didn’t move itself. Tomorrow she’ll say I’m stronger than I look. She’ll say I got help. Someone came over while she was out. The joke’s over, she’ll say. You can just call up Autumn, or whoever, and tell them your mother said you need to put everything back.
But I can’t undo it because it wasn’t me. Earlier I’d taken a pill to stop the grinding in my head. I was asleep on the couch. It was dark and the TV was blaring and my mother had gone to town for milk and gas because a storm is coming. She wasn’t gone long—forty minutes, maybe an hour. There wasn’t time. She knows that. Through the fog of pills, I heard her come home. She stomped her boots, put the groceries away, and climbed the stairs. I heard her in the hall. I heard her call my name and shout about the door being open again. Before I could say I didn’t do it, my mother was coming back down, shouting about “last straws.”
“You think that’s funny? You’re trying to be funny?”
I forced my eyes open. My mother was standing over me, her face purple with rage, her hands gripping the sides of her belly like it was a ball she was about to pass.
“What are you talking about?”
“Don’t play stupid with me,” she said, dragging me off the couch and up the stairs, her razor-sharp nails digging into my skin.
I tried to pull away. “Get off me!” I screamed. “I didn’t do anything!”
When she showed me—shoved me through the door and into the room—I felt sick to my stomach. My legs went weak. It was the same cold tingling on the back of my neck that I used to feel when Scilla and I stayed too late in the cemetery and had to run past the crypts in the dark. All the heat left my hands and feet. Cold air was coming from somewhere. My mother was losing it, touching my things and crying: “What is this about, Ellie? Talk to me. Please just talk to me.” But I couldn’t because I can’t tell her what I know. I can’t tell her that her daughter, my sister—the one who should be living this life—wants what is hers. I can’t tell her that I’m not supposed to be here, that this body is not my body. I stole it.
I’m sleeping downstairs tonight, on the couch. All the lights are on. My mother’s freaked out, too, but she won’t admit it. She unscrewed the hook-and-eye latch on the basement door and put it on the door to the babies’ room. She said it’s to keep the cat out, but I’m not stupid. The cat won’t go near the babies’ room, which is my room again until we get everything moved back downstairs. The paneled room off the hall off the kitchen is empty. Everything I own is back in the Nacho-Cheese-and-Chips room—my bed, my desk, my dresser. It looks exactly like it used to except for the bassinets. They’re still in there, pushed up against the wall, under the window. The message is clear: That’s her room.
eighty-eight
We’re in the middle of a blizzard. We’re stuck in this house, hemmed in by drifts. Snow hisses against the windows, churns hypnotic spirals in the sky. The front yard looked pure and clean and white until the guy across the road plowed. Now the driveway looks like an open grave. I don’t know why he b
othered. There’s nowhere to go. Listen to the radio: the roads are closed, schools are closed. Even the mail was three hours late. The snow is erasing everything. The mountains, the woods behind our house, the houses on our road. All of it’s gone, buried beneath a dull white blanket that melts into a dull white sky. It’s deafening, the quiet. Only death and destruction rip through the muffled silence—gunfire, a baby shrieking.
Babies dying. Elanor’s crying. Concentrate. Concentrate.
The gunfire is tree branches snapping under all that weight. The baby? My mother thinks it was a rabbit. We heard the dogs last night, howling, calling, and then the screaming, choked and desperate.
My mother thinks it’s peaceful. She’s enjoying this surprise break from school and studying. She waddles around the house with a dust rag and a can of lemon polish, cleaning, organizing, making everything perfect. She’s nesting, she says. All pregnant women do it. It’s another one of those weird urges they get. We’ve talked about The Day. It’s not far off, only a few months. Everything’s moving so fast. Next month my mother takes the test to get her real estate license. We’ve talked about that, too, how she’s planning to go to work for the woman who sold us this house. We’ve talked about the summer, and how I can watch the babies while she’s off showing properties. We’ve talked about next fall, and how she’s going to have to find a good babysitter—maybe Autumn’s grandma can do it, or else she’ll have to put an ad in the paper.
What we haven’t talked about is the room. We haven’t talked about the latch on the door. We haven’t talked about how the couch has become my bed or how I’m going through all our batteries sleeping with the flashlight shining on my face. We pretend everything is normal, like there’s nothing strange about the way Thing startles for no reason, puffing her tail and arching her back.
Maybe it doesn’t matter. The snow is swallowing everything. Maybe I won’t have to make a decision, which is good, I guess, because I don’t know what to do. I feel like my life is some twisted game show. Curtain number one is a lifetime supply of drugs. Curtain number two … a shiny new blade with my name on it.
eighty-nine
I felt her before I saw her. Felt her weight on the end of the couch. I aimed the light at my feet. Madeline was standing on the arm, her arms spread wide for balance, her skin so bright it hurt my eyes. She’d been adding to the feathers. She’s covered in ink. My stone angel. Wings black as coal. I’m here for you, she said, and my fears dissolved. She’s not evil or mean or vindictive. She had to do the things she did so I wouldn’t get too attached to this life. There’s a plan. I have to trust her. I was flooded with warmth and calm and something deeper than happiness. Peace. Something absolute and without end. The same feeling I used to get when my father would take me out to that field to watch the stars moving through the night sky. Her eyes burned, threaded with flames. I knew that look, the feeling behind it. The feeling of wanting to be wanted.
We didn’t speak. We didn’t have to. Madeline crawled toward me, along the length of the couch, then slipped into the space between my body and the cushions, folding me in her arms. Her breath on my cheek had the electric smell of a storm coming. The flashlight on her face illuminated the ugly little scars identical to mine. I thought of her wrists and those perfect white strokes. Every pain I’d ever inflicted on myself I’d inflicted on her, too. I could hear my own heart, a sickly hollow thumping sound. This body has too much history. Madeline kissed my tears (her tears) pooling along the bridge of my nose (her nose). She stroked my ear (her ear), smoothed my hair (her hair).
She pulled the comforter over our heads and switched off the light. Side by side, safe and warm in the dark and in the silence, I remembered what it was like in the beginning, before my body vanished, before the two became one, and the one was just me, alone and lost, searching for what could never be again. We want the same thing, to end this aching loneliness, this always longing to be whole.
I’ve missed you. I love you.
I love you, too.
I’m sorry. I know what I’ve done. I never want to lose you again.
You won’t.
I want to be with you always, but I’m afraid to die.
Who said anything about dying? It’s not too late. There’s time. The stars are waiting.
ninety
You think you know how this ends. You think it ends in the closet, with my old wounds reopened, The Last Song playing. You think it ends in blood, but it doesn’t. It ends in flames. No body. No bones. Just a pile of ash. Some things can’t be explained, like the bond between twins. I’m here to tell you there are no endings, only beginnings.
Today I said good-bye—silently, in my heart—to Rad and Jess and Kylie, to my teachers and Coach Buffman and Ms. Merrill. I wish I could tell them it’s not their fault, no one’s to blame. All of this was meant to be. I thought about sending something to Scilla, but that was a past life. Soon this will be a past life, too. The plan is the same. My mother was pregnant when I died—our bodies were pinpricks of light, distant stars—but then I didn’t die, and everything got so complicated. It would’ve been easier if I’d resisted the tug of this world when I had one foot in the grave. Easier for everyone. For Autumn. For my mother. She’s the one I’m worried about. Autumn will understand—eventually. She will believe. I’ve told her everything—about Madeline and the body that’s not mine and the cycle as my sister explained it. I showed her the feathers—I’m covered in feathers now, too. Last night, Madeline finished my back. I showed Autumn as proof. I told her everything. Almost. I didn’t tell her about the clubhouse, how Madeline’s been working every night, building a nest of twigs and sticks, and how it’s ready.
I used to think I didn’t belong in this world. But I do, just not here, not now, not in this body. It wasn’t mine to begin with. This life I borrowed—stole—was a disaster. I’m not deluding myself. My new life won’t be perfect. I am who I am—that won’t change. It’ll still be me but in a different body—my own body—but this time I won’t have to go through life alone. It’s not like this for everyone. Everyone doesn’t get a second chance. My father didn’t.
I would be lying if I said I wasn’t afraid. I took some extra pills and now my eyelids are heavy, my heart is slow and sure. The girls are outside—the girls that are our future—standing in the driveway, staring up at my window. They’re wearing identical dresses, like they’re going to a party. But it’s midnight and cold, the kind that rips the air from your lungs, and they’re not wearing coats. They’ll be warm soon. Madeline strikes a match. Her breath smells like gasoline. If I can get to the nest and go to sleep, Madeline will take care of the rest.
Autumn will smell the smoke first—the sharp tang of burning wood. She’ll look out her window and see a flickering, and then flames rising—higher and higher—scorching the bare branches. The woods behind her house will glow bright as dawn. No one will try to stop the fire. It’s too far back, far enough from the house and the barn. They’ll let it burn down to ash. My mother will come in to wake me tomorrow, to tell me about Autumn’s clubhouse, but my bed will be empty. She’ll sit at my desk and pick up this journal and read what I have written. She will check the closet anyway, wonder at the poster taped to the back wall, then wander the house calling my name. When I do not answer, she’ll run stumbling through the snow through the woods to the still-smoldering clubhouse and drop to her knees like she’s been shot. She will rock back and forth, clutching her belly, and scream. She will feel like the world is ending, collapsing. She will feel her heart kick and think she’s dying.
And then she will feel me kick inside her.
She’ll want to believe but can she? In the end, it’s all about believing.
Before I understood everything, before my dawning, Madeline asked me what I wanted most in this world. I knew the answer then and it is the same answer today. It will be the same answer always. I want to be whole. I want to be loved. Everything is temporary—happiness, pain, grief, sadness—everythin
g except this longing.
We have to go now.
I’m ready. It’s a moonless night, but Madeline will be my eyes. She will guide me—my stone angel—through the dark woods and into the light.
ninety-one
I’m still here.
I should feel like one of those people who decide at the last minute not to get on a plane that ends up crashing. Lucky. But I don’t feel lucky. Maybe someday. Not now. It’s too soon to tell if I made the right decision. Everything happened so fast, there was no time to think. My mother was calling. Madeline was calling. I had to choose and I chose my mother. She needed me. She was bleeding. Not a lot, but enough to scare me. I thought she was dying. But it wasn’t her blood. It was my blood. Not from this body, but the other one. Because I’m still here.
Madeline is gone. The clubhouse is in ashes. I have to believe I belong here, in this world. Right here. Right now. I hope so. There’s no going back.
ninety-two
My mother is hooked up to machines that monitor the baby, the one that survived—Madeline. I’m with them now, in the chair beside the bed, listening to my sister’s heartbeat. She’s no longer a ghost, a lost soul. She’s flesh and blood and bone. Losing her is hard. Because I have lost her, in a way. Things will be different now. The bond has been broken. My sister is still my sister, but she’s not my twin. We will never be that close again. Everything we share is gone: our history, our dreams, our scars. There’s so much she’ll never know, never understand, about me, about us. I’ll be the big sister, with my own life, separate from hers. It’ll be me watching over her instead of the other way around. I can’t fail her, not again. I can’t fail my mother, either. I’m trying to be a good daughter. I bring her milkshakes from the cafeteria, magazines from the gift shop. This morning, before Autumn’s mom drove me to the hospital, I cleaned up all the blood.
The In-Between Page 16
