Prologue
Haylee always blamed our mother for everything that happened to us and everything terrible that we had done to each other—or I should say, everything terrible that she had done to me. Many times as we were growing up, she would tell me to my face that whatever hurtful thing she had done wasn’t her fault. It was because our mother wouldn’t let her be her own person. I suppose I should have been a little grateful. At least she was recognizing that whatever it was she had done was wrong.
Don’t misunderstand me. It wasn’t that she was suffering the needle-prick pains of conscience. In fact, I now believe my twin sister might never have felt any despite the agonized look she could put on and take off like a mask. We were not a religious family. Mother never warned either of us that God was watching. She was watching, and she thought that was enough.
I knew in my heart that Haylee was just trying to escape her own responsibility by blaming Mother for things she did herself. No one could shed their guilt like a snake sheds its skin as well as my identical twin. And afterward, she could look as innocent as a rabbit that had just devoured most of the vegetable garden. But that sweetness could turn into a flash of lightning rage when only I was looking at her, even when we were just babies.
One time when we were eleven and our mother wasn’t home and couldn’t hear her, Haylee stood in front of me with her arms tight against her sides, her fingers curled like claws. She stamped her foot and screamed, “I am not you! I’ll never be you! And you will never be me! Whatever you like, I will hate. If I have to, I’ll scar my face just to be different. Or,” she added, thinking more about it, “I’ll attack you when you’re sleeping and I’ll scar yours.”
The cruelty in her eyes stunned me so much I was speechless. She truly sounded as if she hated me enough to do just what she had said. Her threat kept me up nights, and it set the foundation for nightmares in which she would slink beside my bed with a razor between her fingers. To this day, I am certain she did stand by my bed, hovering over me and battling with the urge to act out her vicious promise.
To drive home her point this particular time, she seized the photo of us at our tenth birthday party, the party held in our backyard, where Mother had Daddy arrange for a party tent and had dressed us in identical pink chiffon dresses with pink saddle shoes. Haylee tore the picture into a dozen pieces, which she flushed down the toilet, screaming “Good riddance! If I never hear the word twin again, that will be too soon!” She stood there fuming. I could almost see steam coming out of her ears. My heart was pounding because in our house, saying something like that was like a nun declaring she never wanted to hear the word Jesus.
If I had any doubt that Haylee could get into a great rage without thinking of the consequences, her tearing up our picture should have convinced me, for how would we explain it not being there in our room, prominently displayed on our dresser? She knew I could never tell Mother what she had done. And she could never blame it on me. It was an unwritten rule, or rather, a rule Mother had carved into our very souls: we must never blame each other for anything, for that was like blaming ourselves.
Even if I did tell, it wouldn’t help. Haylee was better than I was when it came to winning sympathy and compassion for herself and justification for any evil or mean act she would commit. I could easily picture her on the witness stand in a courtroom, wringing her hands, tears streaming down her face as she wailed about how much she hadn’t wanted to do what she had done to me. She would look so distraught that she might even have me feeling sorry for her.
After she had calmed herself, she would quietly explain to the jury why our mother should be the one accused, certainly not her. She wasn’t all wrong. Once I was older, I had no doubt that Haylee would be able to find a psychiatrist eager and willing to testify on her behalf. Even back then, I wasn’t going to disagree with her about what our mother had done to us. I wanted to be my own person, too, but I didn’t want to have to hate Haylee the way she felt she had to hate me.
Yes, I would blame our mother, too, for what eventually happened to me, just as Daddy would. And I have no doubt that anyone reading this would agree, but despite it all, I still loved our mother very much. I knew how hurt she would be over what Haylee had done and the things she had said. Her heart would suffer spidery cracks like the face of the porcelain doll her father had given her when she was five. I would hold her hand and I would put my arm around her. I would lean my head against her shoulder, and I would cry with her, almost tear for tear, as she moaned, “What have I done to my precious twins? What have I done?”
1
There was nothing Mother worked harder at than keeping us from differing from each other, even in the smallest ways. From the day we were born, she made sure that we owned the exact same things, whether it was clothes, shoes, toys, or books—we even had the same color toothbrushes. Everything had to be bought in twos. Even our names had to have an equal number of letters, and that went for our middle names, too, which were exactly the same: Blossom. I was Kaylee Blossom Fitzgerald, and my sister was Haylee Blossom Fitzgerald. That was something Mother had insisted on. Daddy told us he hadn’t thought it was very significant at the time, so he’d put up little argument. I’m sure he regretted it later, as he came to regret so much he had failed to do.
Although neither of us had the courage to complain about our names, we both wished they were different. By the time we were sixteen, Haylee had gone so far as to tell people she had no middle name. When anyone looked to me for confirmation, I agreed. That was one of those little ways Haylee gradually got me to oppose things Mother had done. I was the reluctantly rebellious twin practically dragged by my hair into the fiery ring of defiance.
Actually, when I think about it, we were lucky to have two different first names. We couldn’t be Haylee One and Haylee Two or Kaylee One and Kaylee Two based on who was born first, either. Mother would never tell us who was first, and Daddy hadn’t been in the delivery room. He’d been on a business trip. I don’t know if he ever asked her which one of us was born first, but I doubt she would have told him anyway. She’d pretend not to know, or maybe she really believed we were born together, hugging and clinging to each other with our tiny pink hands and arms as we were cast out of her womb and into the world, both of us harmonizing in a cry of fear. Whenever Mother described our birth, she always said that the doctor practically had to pry us apart.
“I thought there was only one of you at first. That’s how in sync your cries were. One voice,” she would say, and she’d look starry-eyed, with that soft smile of wonder that fascinated both Haylee and me when we would sit on the floor in front of her and listen to the story of ourselves. As we grew older, she wove the magical fabric in which we would be dressed, wove it into a fantasy about the perfect twins. There was one rule that if broken would bring about disaster: we had to be loved equally, or some dragon monster would destroy our enchantment.
Daddy wasn’t anywhere nearly as obsessed about treating us equally in every way. There was never a doubt in my mind that it was something he believed Mother would grow out of as we grew older. He humored her with his smiles and nods and especially with his favorite response to what she would demand: “Whatever you say, Keri.”
He admitted that he was excited about having twins, but at first, he didn’t see any additional burdens that other parents of more than one child had. Even as very small children, we coul
d see that he was nowhere as uptight about it, which only infuriated Mother more. During our early years, if he forgot and bought something for me and not for Haylee, or vice versa, our mother would become so upset that, in a violent rage during which I would swear I felt a whirlwind around us, she would tear up or throw out whatever he had bought. Haylee felt the whirlwind, too, and, watching Mother, we would cling to each other as tightly as we supposedly had the day we were born.
There was simply no excuse Daddy could use for what he had done that would satisfy her. For example, he couldn’t say one of us liked a certain color more or was more interested in something and he had just happened to come upon it during his travels, like someone else’s father. Oh, no. Mother would look as if she had accidentally put her finger in an electric socket and would tell him he was wrong and had done a terrible thing.
In his defense, he pleaded, “For God’s sake, Keri, this isn’t a capital offense.”
“Not a capital offense?” she fired back, her voice shrill. “How can you not see them for what they are?”
“They’re little girls,” he declared.
“No, no, no, these are not just two little girls. These are perfect twins. They see the world through the same eyes, hear it through the same ears, and smell it through the same nose.”