She was locking herself up in herself.
And in a way, she was finally escaping.
But to what?
4
My father left the day my mother was sent home, and almost immediately, there were shadows within shadows in our house. Lights were often not turned on or were kept dim for most of the day. Mother felt safer and happier in the darkness. She wrapped it around herself the way someone would snuggle in a warm blanket on cold evenings, and she was not eager to have her curtains drawn open in the morning. She knew she would be shocked by the reality that came pouring in on the back of the sunlight, a reality she’d rather not face: none of it was simply a bad dream.
When Haylee and I were little and still shared a room and a bed, Mother was always up ahead of us and eager to sing us the “Good Morning Song,” telling us how nice it was to have us there with her each day. Many times she said she wished she could freeze time so we would never grow older and nothing would ever change. She would kiss us each twice and stroke our hair twice before dressing us in the duplicate outfits she had chosen for us the night before. Afterward, when we were standing for her inspection so she could make sure that everything about us was the same, she would clap her hands and say, “You are like the sunshine warming my heart.”
We were often compared to the sunshine in one way or another. Our faces lit up her day. One look at us wiped away the dark clouds that came from whatever worry or problem she had at the time. Like a planet, she was held in orbit around us. Neither Haylee nor I could deny that the exaggerated and happy way she described us made us feel extra special, even though the odds of having twins were far greater than for any other type of multiple births and the odds of having identical twins were about the same for every couple wherever they lived in the world. Because the reason one fertilized egg, or zygote, would split into two was still a mystery, Mother believed it was something spiritual and extraordinary.
Perhaps Haylee soaked up all the praise more, and more deeply, than I did, but because of the way Mother displayed us in public and talked about us, we believed that anyone looking at us would surely think, There go two diamond-studded little girls, dazzling whomever they meet.
Now, however, the early sunlight didn’t tiptoe softly into our house and gently wake the sleeping walls the way Mother surely remembered. Like a clumsy bull in a shop of fragile antiques, it pushed its way through the rooms and hallways, up the stairway, and to our bedrooms, smashing aside the contents of any obscure, dark corner in which Mother might hover to find relief from her haunting dreams.
For hours after the sun went down, she would avoid turning on the lights or asking Irene Granford—her forty-two-year-old live-in nurse and caretaker, someone her therapist, Dr. Jaffe, believed she still needed, at least for the immediate future—or me, when I was home, to turn them on. A mere table lamp had become a powerful spotlight forcing her to face blinding reality. It made it more difficult for her to escape behind the fortress of her memories, where she could see and hear Haylee and me the way she wanted, even now, as two identical and perfect little girls, with dark brown hair so light and fluffy that it seemed woven from clouds, two identical and perfect little girls with our mother’s amber eyes, who loved each other as much as they could love themselves, two identical and perfect little girls who had the same thoughts, had the same tastes and feelings, and dreamed the same dreams.
Whenever Mother did sit in a well-lit room, she spent most of her time thumbing slowly through albums filled with pictures of us from birth up to the year before my abduction. There were also many videos of us that my father had taken before our parents divorced. In every picture and in every video, we wore the exact same clothes and had our hair trimmed and brushed in the same sty
le, not a strand on either of us longer than on the other. When I stood in the background and watched Mother looking at those pictures or saw her watching the videos with her face frozen in that nostalgic and sad expression, I felt as though Haylee and I were long dead and gone. In her mind, we might very well be, at least the two daughters she had once cherished. The girls who existed now were practically strangers, invaders trespassing in the bodies of her precious, perfect children.
I could see it in the way she looked at me whenever I came into a room. Gone was that deep familiarity and love, that obsessive attachment to every movement in my face and body, to every word I said, and to every breath I took. It always had been the same whenever she had turned or looked up to see Haylee enter. Now, after all that had happened, there was coolness, indifference, her kisses sitting on plastic lips, her touch almost always accidental.
In the past, whenever she would see one of us without the other, the first thing she would ask was “Where is your sister?” Regardless of the time of day or the circumstance, whenever one of us appeared without the other, her eyes would flame with fear. We could never claim that we didn’t know. She had us believing we’d feel each other’s heartbeats in another room, even outside the house. It was as if she had a premonition from the day we were born, a vision of us separated, one of us lost forever. And of course, there was that deep-seated belief that one of us couldn’t exist without the other. That idea was embedded in her so firmly that accepting any alternative was not only impossible but, to her, practically murder.
During the days that followed her return, I could easily read the desperate thoughts in her eyes. This current situation we were all swimming in frantically couldn’t last; it was only a temporary hiccup. All that had happened would be wiped away, vacuumed into the bag of things forgotten forever and ever. How she could look at me and have any thought similar to that was incredible, but this was the hope that sustained her. It was now the only dream she had left, in a house where dreams had once swum as gracefully as so many goldfish in a bowl.
Mother’s mental breakdown had begun when I first disappeared. After my rescue and before she returned home from the hospital, Dr. Jaffe, her psychiatrist, had assured my father and me that she finally had come to accept all that had happened and fully understood what Haylee had done to cause my abduction. She realized and acknowledged that Haylee had been lying and had been deceitful, from that first night in front of the movie theater from which I had disappeared through every minute, every hour, every day, and every week that had followed. Now she knew that lies, not dreams, had been swimming around her, and she had nearly drowned in them. Every ugly fact she faced was another jellyfish sting. I had no doubt that when she first heard them, she winced with real pain.
Although acknowledging the whole truth helped lift her out of the dark pool of mental illness that had made it impossible for her to have any sort of sensible daily life at the time, it did not return her to the person she had been. There were too many scars, too many deeply felt wounds in her heart. Reluctantly, she had swallowed the ugly facts like bitter medicine or sour milk. In one sense, she had recuperated. She no longer denied what Haylee had done, but the side effects left her crippled in so many other ways. For the time being, we were alike in that sense.
Sometimes when I saw her step out of the shadows now, she looked like she had absorbed them. Her eyes were gloomy, her eyelids half-open. She seemed to drift, to slide along the walls, seeking the darkest places, periodically glancing back to be sure the light or the sunshine wasn’t following her and, along with it, the ugly truth: one of her precious daughters had nearly destroyed the other. Frantically, her gaze darted around the room she was about to enter. She looked like a frightened mouse quickly seeking a safe haven, a place to hide, a place that would serve as a sanctuary. But how did you flee from reality forever?
When Mother wasn’t reminiscing through photographs or videos, she would spend hours at a time simply sitting and staring out a window, turning her extended fingers clockwise and counterclockwise, as if she were winding an old watch, perhaps hoping she could turn back time and would see us both returning from school. She slept a great deal, and when she was up and was somewhat energetic, she would talk about us constantly, eager to describe what we had been to her—but not how we now were. Usually, I slipped away.
Irene was her audience most of the time. For a woman nearly six feet tall, with manly shoulders and large hands, with long, thin fingers that reminded me of spider legs, Irene was surprisingly gentle, even graceful. Her patience and compassion were something to behold. I thought it was more than simply her good training. She sincerely liked Mother and appreciated the pain she had suffered and continued to endure. Early on, I suspected there was something dark in Irene’s own past that enabled her to empathize, but she didn’t like to talk about herself. “Let’s concentrate on your mother,” she would say, if our conversation drifted too far into her past. Everyone has secrets, I thought.
In any case, she was better at sympathizing than I was, because despite the truth she had accepted, Mother still searched for ways to excuse Haylee for what she had done to me—and to her. The blame was as easy to spread as warm butter. To her, my father was obviously the one who bore the most guilt. After all, he had chosen to desert us, to divorce her. How could she have been expected to carry the burden of bringing up two young girls with such extraordinary needs on her own? No wonder something unfortunate had happened.
Unfortunate? I would think. That sounds too much like something accidental. There was nothing accidental about this.
Nevertheless, this sort of logic of blaming my father settled in her mind and comforted her, even though she knew that from day one of our lives, she had instructed him about how he should behave toward us, and she had presented herself as an expert on girls who shared the design of every cell in their bodies. So the truth was that he couldn’t contradict her; sometimes he couldn’t even ask questions. Whether she wanted to face it or not, she was, in fact, bringing us up on her own and always had been. It was a major part of what eventually drove my father out of the house and into his new life.
And then there was the blame that stained me. Somehow, in Mother’s mind, I had failed my sister by not directly addressing her growing jealousies. Mother had repeatedly told me that I should have revealed what Haylee had been doing on the Internet with the man who had abducted me. Keeping it a secret from Mother was to her as good as causing what had happened. There was, after all, such a thing as a conspiracy of silence.
Didn’t I understand? Haylee had needed our help. Because of my silence, the sickness of sibling rivalry was permitted to grow and get stronger. Identical twins were far more susceptible to it than ordinary siblings. It was the bogeyman Mother had feared the most. He was always there in the shadows, waiting for his opportunity to pounce on us, and by not seeking Mother’s help early, I had helped give him that opportunity. To Mother’s way of thinking, Haylee was just as much a victim as I was. Mother once said, “She really didn’t want to do that to you. She couldn’t help herself. Just like you wouldn’t have been able to help yourself if the roles were reversed.”
But the roles weren’t reversed and never could be! I wanted to shout back at her. I would never put my sister into a spider’s web.
However, Irene, my father, and Dr. Jaffe advised me never to argue with Mother and warned me especially against giving her any nitty-gritty details of my abduction. She was still too fragile. One more nightmare would crack her like a fresh egg.
Yet I always wondered how she was able to cope with my having to have therapy, too. Why didn’t she want to know why I needed it so long after I had been rescued and still needed it from time to time? Why didn’t she ask more questions about my abduction? How could she not worry about how it had all changed me, damaged me? She never even asked me if I had been raped. Shouldn’t that have been her first concern? She didn’t ask about my hair, why I was nearly bald, or why I was so thin. When I think back about it all, I can’t recall a moment when she had shed a tear over what had happened to me. Where was the mother I needed when I needed a mother the most? When was it her turn to be sympathetic? Wasn’t that a big part of who she was supposed to be?
And when my father had decided, along with my therapist, that my attending a private prep school rather than returning to my high school for the new school year was a good idea, why didn’t she question the reason? After all, I was being sent away. I’d be out of the house again. Why didn’t she wonder why I was so eager to do it? Why didn’t she fight for me to stay with her?
In my heart, I concluded that she understood but simply would rather avoid facing up to it. That much self-denial she couldn’t keep hidden. Otherwise, she would only end up back in the hospital, not that she was making much of an attempt to return to the world.