or Sisters,” no matter what we did, apparently.
Would my visiting her now change any of it? Even when my father’s anger simmered down to a low boil, he didn’t push for me to visit Haylee and certainly never even suggested that I find a way to forgive her. In fact, he said, “If you never wanted to see or talk to her again, I’d understand. Who wouldn’t?”
However, even though time has a way of frustrating vengeance, I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t want to see her where she was suffering for what she had done and enjoy her pain. During the early days after my rescue, when I was in the hospital, I found relief in raging about Haylee. Dr. Sacks thought that was healthy. “Get it out. It’s like steam. You need the release,” she said. But even before that week ended, I was tempering the things I was saying about my sister, and if I did say something nasty, I always added, “But I bet she’s sorry now.”
I guess I was hoping that she was. Was I being stupid? I always looked quickly at Dr. Sacks to see if she would tell me any reason I should think Haylee was feeling sorry, but she either had no knowledge of Haylee’s situation or didn’t think it was wise to say. Whenever I asked my father about her, he would only say, “She’s being processed through the system.” That made it sound as if she were some sort of product being manufactured. She was placed on the assembly line of rehabilitation. What about me? Could I ever really be rehabilitated? Haylee could finally realize her guilt and feel remorse, maybe, but how would I really recover? The nightmares might hibernate, but they’d be back. I could go to another school, but could I make new friends? Would I ever trust anyone again? Friendships needed trust. Love especially needed it.
As my rage subsided, though, my curiosity about Haylee increased. Just what sort of state of mind was she in now? Did she really regret anything? And if she did, did she regret it only because she had been caught? What had been her real intentions for me? Did she want me gone forever, or in the back of her mind had she been planning to rescue me herself and become a hero instead of a villain? How much was she really hurting now?
Once, after I had come home from the hospital and after my father had visited Haylee for some legal reason, I asked him, “Did she ask about me?”
“I wouldn’t let her,” he said.
“What’s that mean?”
“I made it clear to her from the start that I wouldn’t believe she was asking sincerely about your condition, and I didn’t volunteer any information. She’s never going to work me again. I can assure you of that. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”
His eyes were steely cold.
I understood what he was saying, of course, but I also believed he had been away from us too long after the divorce to tell whether either of us was speaking sincerely. Haylee had burned him badly with her shrewd performance after Anthony Cabot had abducted me. My father described how she cried and went to my room to embrace my pillow and sob for hours. She broke everyone’s heart by playing the piano while her face was streaked with tears, moaning that she could still hear me playing on mine and that it tore her heart. We had two pianos, and she and I would do duets. One of us never played without the other. Of course, she knew that. My father described how she had milked our friends of their sympathy and had taken advantage of everyone she could, getting classmates to do her homework for her and having them bring her gifts whenever they did visit. She was the “suffering princess,” while I was practically being waterboarded by a psychopath.
My father listed the details like a prosecutor before a jury, a jury of one, me. If I mentioned something that reminded him of one of her conniving achievements, he went on and on from that example to another and then another.
“She had me up nights crying for her,” he moaned, now feeling sorry for himself, too. “I couldn’t work; I couldn’t think. I did all sorts of things to get her not to worry about you and bought her all sorts of things, jewelry, dresses. I was even setting her up with her own car!”
He was still smarting from all that. He never stopped talking about it. It took little to set him off like a firecracker.
I knew that he was thinking she had made a terrible fool of him in the community. His reputation and self-respect were seriously damaged. He had to face the police, his friends, and his fellow employees and somehow explain how his own daughter had pulled the wool over his eyes. The memory of every call he had made demanding more action and more attention after I had been abducted stung him now. He had the answer to the mystery living in the same house with him all the time and didn’t know it. If Haylee hadn’t gone too far with her wild behavior, he might never have gone to her computer and discovered what she had done. I was sure that realization also gave him additional nightmares.
He insisted on keeping the door to her room shut now. He suggested that he might sell the second piano. He considered giving away all our duplicated toys from the past—iPads, cell phones, even her jewelry and especially anything new he had gotten for her. Of course, Mother would never give away anything, even after all this. Everything, no matter how small, carried an important memory for her.
“You would sell the piano?” I asked him when he rattled off his list.
“Why would we still need two? I can’t imagine hearing another duet,” he said. “I can’t even imagine her back in this house! I want to get all her things out of here and nail the door to her room shut.”
“Daddy, stop!” I cried. “You’re worrying me!”
He calmed. I really was concerned. He might give himself a heart attack, and then what would happen to me? I couldn’t imagine living with my grandparents or my uncles and aunts. I couldn’t imagine them wanting me. I was damaged goods.
Of course, I understood his personal rage and why he blamed himself as well. On more than one occasion, he told me that a parent should know his own child well enough to realize when she is lying to him. I didn’t come right out and say it, but I didn’t think he should feel stupid for missing any clues. I just didn’t know how to say it without making it look like Haylee had some special talent or gift, making it look like I still admired her for something.
But the truth was that even if he hadn’t been away from us as long as he was, he wouldn’t have been able to tell whether Haylee was lying. Haylee and I were truly closer to each other than any two sisters could be. Mother had brought us up thinking and behaving as if we were halves of one person. If I was fooled, why should he be surprised that he was?
Maybe Haylee did have a special talent for lying, although talent seems like the wrong word. That should be reserved for good things, but some people were gifted when it came to deception. They were born politicians, diplomats, and poker faces. Haylee was especially good at lying and looking innocent. Sometimes when we were very little, she was able to get me out of trouble when I accidentally had done something wrong or had forgotten something Mother wanted neither of us ever to forget.
I had listened to Haylee twist the truth often. She did it so well that I almost believed her myself sometimes. Perhaps I was just as guilty of encouraging her because I appreciated the results she was able to achieve. I did admire her for how easily she could get people to believe what she wanted or question any criticism made of us, especially when we were permitted to attend public school at grade three after being homeschooled so long. She was always able to distort things to make us look better to the other students and our teachers.
Few would challenge her, and I did feel sorry for those who had. Woe be unto the person who triggered Haylee’s ire, I’d think, by the time we were in junior high. She would find ways to get that person in trouble either with our teachers or with other students. I’d seen her do it successfully many times. Her picture was right beside the word manipulator in the dictionary.
But when I analyzed it all, I realized it was really my love for her more than her skill in deception that blinded me to what she had been planning for me with Anthony Cabot, the man who had abducted me. She wouldn’t have been able to hook onto my concern for her and cleverly manipulate me to put myself in danger if I didn’t love her as much as I did. It wasn’t that I trusted her so much as that I was worried about her. Foolish me, I wanted to protect her. It was my chance to do something for her. I wanted so much to do it, when all along she had set the trap well.
Anthony Cabot was convinced that I was the one who had tempted him on that computer and promised him we’d have a life together. Many times in his basement apartment, my dungeon, he threw that back at me to justify what he was doing to me. I quickly realized that Haylee had told him that her name was Kaylee. When I tried to explain, he didn’t even believe I had an identical twin sister, especially one that clever. How she must have laughed at my attempts to keep her safe—me, Kaylee Blossom Fitzgerald, trying to shelter her from trouble, pain, and even death itself, when all the while it was going to be my own life that was placed in danger.
Was she still laughing? Had she finally realized what a terrible thing she had done? How was she explaining it, justifying it, in her therapy sessions? What clever twist of the truth had she tried this time? Could she even manipulate psychiatrists? How evil was my sister after all? I couldn’t stop wondering.
“I think I’m ready to see and speak to her, Daddy,” I finally concluded one day.
Mother was making progress. Dr. Jaffe, her therapist, was talking about her being released soon, but with home care for a while, of course. As soon as she’d come home, I imagined her asking me about Haylee. She would be troubled that I knew nothing more about Haylee than what others had told her. How could I not be interested in my sister’s fate, no matter what? How could I not find ways to know more? I was sure that to Mother it was still like my being interested in myself.