Broken Glass

  I was going to say We don’t want any before she spoke, but she said, “I’m Mrs. Lofter.”

  That gave me no clue, of course. She could just as easily have said, “I’m Miss America.”

  “Are you with the police?” I asked. I had no idea why any other stranger would come here if not to sell something.

  “No. Dr. Bloom called me, and your father called this morning. I mean, I think he’s your father.”

  “Me, too,” I said dryly. Then it hit me. “Are you a nurse?” I still hadn’t backed away to let her in.

  “Yes, of course,” she said.

  “Daddy!” I screamed, standing there and still looking at her. He’d have to get off the phone now.

  Mrs. Lofter’s face exploded with surprise, her eyes bulging. I stepped back.

  “He didn’t tell me about you,” I said, as an excuse for my hard reception. “Daddy!”

  He hurried to the entryway. “Coming.” I imagined he thought it was the police at first. “Oh. Sorry. I was on the phone. Mrs. Lofter?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I’m Mason Fitzgerald, and this is my daughter Haylee,” he said, offering her his hand.

  I didn’t move.

  She looked at me as if we hadn’t met in the doorway or she still didn’t believe I was really his daughter.

  I had to practice that look of devastation, I thought.

  “So it’s your sister,” she said, not needing to finish the sentence.

  “Yes, my identical twin sister.” I didn’t think I ever told any stranger that Kaylee was my twin sister without adding identical. That was Mother’s influence. I decided I would start dropping the identical part now. No matter what happened, we would no longer be so exactly alike. I might even reduce it to just sister. Kaylee was sure to be changed if and when she returned.

  Of course, if she did return, I had all sorts of good answers and excuses rehearsed for what had happened.

  “How do we go about this?” Daddy asked. “I assume you’ve been made fully aware of the situation?”

  “Yes. We want to take care of our basic needs first,” she began, with the tone of someone who had been part of our family for years, if not always. There was strength and authority in her voice, but she didn’t sound as condescending as some of my teachers and my grandmother Clara Beth. However, she directed herself more to me than to my father.

  “The two of you have to remain as strong as you can and go about your daily lives as best you can. I’m here to help make sure you can do that. It will have a great influence on your mother’s condition.”

  “Our daily lives,” I said, as sourly as I could. We weren’t supposed to have daily lives right now, not with the whole world watching to see how things would turn out.

  “The more you work at keeping yourselves strong, the better results we’ll have keeping your mother well enough to go on,” she said, beginning her explanation. “Now is the time to give her moral support. There is nothing more devastating to a mother or a father than their child being in grave danger. It’s indescribable emotional pain.”

  “It hurts me, too,” I protested, my arms twisted together under my breasts. “It’s my twin sister, my identical twin sister. We’ve been together from the moment we were conceived. Sometimes I feel like I can’t breathe thinking about her.”

  “Haylee,” Daddy said, softly chiding.

  “Well, it’s true, Daddy.” I turned back to Mrs. Lofter. “I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say a mother feels it more because her daughter was literally part of her body once. Kaylee and I were as much a part of each other as any mother and daughter. We shared every part of our DNA. No one could tell who either of us was by simply testing our DNA.”

  My outburst didn’t even cause a wrinkle in her smooth face or make her step back. She looked as if she could seize hold of wherever she was and plant herself as tightly and firmly as an oak tree. “Nevertheless,” she began in a very calm and controlled voice, “I know you want what’s best for your mother in this circumstance. Don’t you? In the end, that will be helpful to all of you.”

  I hated the way teachers and doctors and now someone like Mrs. Lofter could play on your sense of guilt to get you to do what they wanted you to do. They made you feel like murder was less of a sin than selfishness.

  “Yes,” I said. “Of course.”

  “Then please help me to help you and your father and your mother.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  She looked at me so critically that I felt like a little girl again and wanted to step behind my father to hide from her eyes.

  “For one thing, get dressed. Look and act as strong as you can. Your mother and your father,” she added, looking at Daddy, “are hanging on a thread of hope. From what I’ve been told, your mother is seriously disturbed. She’s more than just as terrified as any mother would be. We want to surround her now with a sense of normalcy so she can remain optimistic, so you all can.”

  “You want me to get dressed and act like everything’s normal?”

  “I’m not telling you to look like you’re at a party, but for your mother’s sake, do what you can to give her a sense of stability,” she said. “If she sees that you’re in great difficulty, that will wear on her, too. I’m not saying you should behave that way with anyone outside this house. Right now, all she can do is think of terrible things and cry. We can’t keep her on tranquilizers forever, and we want her to keep up her strength. I’ll be spending all my time with her, but I can’t do it alone.”

  “We understand,” Daddy said, looking sternly at me. “Thank you, Mrs. Lofter.”

  “Please take me to her now, Mr. Fitzgerald. We’ll look after my things after I spend a little time with her and decide whether I can be of any help,” she told him.

  She glanced at me again. She had yet to offer an expression of sympathy or even a soft, compassionate smile. Perhaps it was because I had come on too strong and she didn’t think I was really as upset as I claimed to be. I vowed I’d make her see that I was suffering, too. She and Daddy went to the stairway. I went to the kitchen and grabbed a chocolate-covered cookie and went up after them to my room. In a way, I was glad she had come and demanded that we behave normally for Mother’s sake. I would take a shower, wash my hair, and put on some lipstick now. I might even start answering my phone calls. If anyone was critical or surprised that I was so put together, I could easily say that our special psychiatric nurse had ordered me to be so for my mother’s sake.

  When I had come out of the shower and finished blow-drying my hair, I heard a knock on my door and tightened the bath towel around myself.

  “Yes,” I called, wondering if it was Mrs. Lofter with a list of things she had forgotten to demand from me.

  It was Daddy. “She’s very good,” he said immediately. “I watched her with your mother. She’s already gotten her to eat something, and she’s talking her into taking a shower and changing into other clothes.”

  “Where has she worked?” I asked.

  “She did most of her nursing in a mental clinic, and then she semiretired to do private-duty jobs. We lucked out there.”

  “Mental clinic?”

  “That’s good. She’s really what is called a mental-health nurse practitioner, Haylee. They do many of the same things a psychiatrist does, like diagnosing and prescribing medication, and from what Dr. Bloom tells me, she’s had experience with people suffering what we’re suffering.”

  I grimaced and nodded. “You’re right, Daddy. I suppose we all need help dealing with it,” I said. Then I looked at myself in the mirror and considered what I would wear. People would be stopping by. I had now decided to greet them and tear their hearts apart with my deeply felt sorrow.

  Daddy was still there, watching me.

  “You always thought Mother was nuts, didn’t you, Daddy?” I asked, without looking at him.

  “Don’t say such a thing, Haylee, especially not now.”

  I
spun on him. “Kaylee wouldn’t have been so intense about being different, and it wouldn’t have driven her to carry on with some older man on the Internet, if she wasn’t so insane about us being exact sisters. You shouldn’t have left us.” I hammered at him. “You should have stayed here and helped us.”

  He flinched as much as he would have if I had slapped him across the face. “It won’t do anyone any good to rake up all of that now. We have to concentrate on doing what we can to help your mother and the police.”

  “Whatever,” I said. “I’m doing what Dr. Nurse says. I’m getting dressed so I look presentable. Is she going to stay here all day and all night, too?”

  “Yes. She’ll take the guest room. I’ve brought in her suitcase. I’ve got to run out for a while, a few hours. Call me on the cell phone if you need me or you hear something,” he said. “Maybe I’ll pick up something for dinner. What would you like?”

  I hesitated. Despite what our psychiatric nurse advised, I still thought it was better if I didn’t show too much enthusiasm too soon. “I don’t care,” I said. “Food is the least important thing.” I really wanted Chinese.

  “Okay. I’ll think of something.”

  “Did you call the police to see what’s happening?”

  “Can’t keep calling them too often, Haylee. Best to let them do their work. They’ll call us the moment they get a lead or something.”

  “I doubt that she did, but maybe Kaylee said something to one of our friends that will give them some sort of clue when they interview them,” I told him. “I might invite someone over to see what others out there know.”

  “I don’t think that’s wise just yet,” he said. “Let’s wait until we get your mother settled down a bit more, okay?”

  “Okay. I’ll just talk to them on the phone.”

  He left.

  As if it had heard me speak, my phone lit up. I had forgotten that I had turned off the ringer. From the caller ID, I saw that it was Sarah Morgan, a girl whose family had moved here just three months ago. This was her first change of school and the first time she had to find new friends. The principal had assigned Kaylee to be her “big sister” and show her around, introduce her to other girls in the class, and help her adjust. Mother had been planning to complain about that, to call the principal and ask her why she didn’t assign both of us to be Sarah’s big sisters, but I had talked her out of it because I really didn’t want to be burdened with being big sister to anyone. To get Mother to calm down about it, I had told her it didn’t matter. Whatever Kaylee did with her, I would be doing anyway.

  “It would be impossible, after all, to hang out with one of us and not the other, right?” I’d said.

  Mother had accepted that. Nevertheless, Kaylee did most of the big-sister nonsense.

  Actually, I thought they were made for each other. Sarah was a meek, doll-like girl with light-brown eyes that might as well be exclamation points. She was always shocked by anything I said, especially if it was about any of the boys in our school. Although she said her family wasn’t particularly religious, her parents had sent her and her younger brother, Ruben, to a private school outside of Pittsburgh called Sacred Hills. She had to wear a school uniform there. Apparently, our school had a good enough reputation for her parents not to seek out another private one.

  When I had first met her, I’d felt a little like Satan in the Garden of Eden. I couldn’t believe how innocent and naive she was, and I had enjoyed destroying that. Kaylee had tried to shield her from being “corrupted” too quickly, as she told me, but it wasn’t long before I had her dressing sexier, wearing some makeup, and cursing in the girls’ room with the rest of us. Her previous boyfriends at her old school sounded more like cut-out dolls.

  “Stop teasing her,” Kaylee would tell me, or, “No, Chuck Benson is not the right boyfriend for her. Don’t encourage him or her.”

  However, I had gotten her to go on a date with Chuck to a party at Marsha Bowman’s house. It had been her first experience with real drinking. Kaylee had had a hard time getting her sobered up enough to go home and blamed it all on me, of course, and not Chuck, because, she’d said, “He doesn’t know any better, but you do!”

  My goody-goody sister, always lecturing me. How goody-goody was she right now? I wondered as I picked up the receiver.

  In as dead a voice as I could create, I said, “Haylee Fitzgerald.”

  “Oh, Haylee,” Sarah began. “I’ve been praying for Kaylee all day.”

  “Pray for us all,” I said.

  “I have, I have. How are you? I’m so sorry. How are you? Your mother must be so sick with worry. My parents wanted me to tell you how sorry they are, too.”

  “No one can even begin to understand what we’re going through unless they’ve lived through something similar themselves,” I said. I remembered that line from a movie I had seen recently. I felt like a dairy farmer. Milk it, I thought. Every little bit helps.

  “I know. Any news about her?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m sorry. I just can’t talk anymore without crying. Tell everyone thanks.”

  I heard her start to cry.

  “Good-bye, good-bye,” I said, and hung up. For a moment, I actually did feel bad. I heard a knock on my partially opened door. Was Daddy back?

  “Sorry to bother you,” Mrs. Lofter said, keeping her gaze down. I was still wrapped in a towel. “But your mother’s asking for you.”

  “For me? She asked for me specifically?”

  Mrs. Lofter looked so surprised that it was nearly comical. “Why is that so unusual?”

  “Isn’t she still quite mixed up? I mean, she did forget that Kaylee’s been abducted, you know. That was part of why my father called you, wasn’t it? I thought she would be asking for us both.”

  “She goes in and out for now,” she said. “It’s the mind’s defense mechanism to deny the painful reality. Eventually, it will pass.” There was that hateful word again, eventually.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “I guess you know. You’re the psychiatric nurse,” I said. “I’ll be right there as soon as I dress.”

  She nodded and backed out, closing the door. Could this woman be that effective already? How good was she when it came to understanding what her patients were thinking and, more important, what the patient’s relatives were thinking?

  I struggled over what to wear. It couldn’t be too flashy, too sexy, and yet I didn’t want to look drab, either. Maybe Detective Simpson would stop by. Some of the clothes Mother had bought us were so dull and uninteresting that criminals would feel safe wearing them in an identification lineup. I settled on an older blouse that looked a bit faded. It was a pink gauze long-sleeved shirt I usually would roll up to my elbows once we were out of the house. Right now, I kept it buttoned at the wrist and put on a pair of new blue jeans and blue Cleatskins. Realizing that my first stop was going to be Mother’s room, I checked my lipstick once more to be sure I didn’t look too radiant. Normally, she would jump all over that, so she might very well do it now, I thought, and then went to her room.

  She was sitting up in the upholstered wing chair that matched the bedroom set. Mrs. Lofter was brushing her hair when I entered. She would never let one of us brush her hair; otherwise, she’d have to mess it up again and let the other sister do it. Mrs. Lofter paused in her brushing and nodded at me. I stepped forward slowly. Mother was focused as closely on me as ever, just the way she would be when she suspected one of us had done something wrong.

  “Tell me why,” she said. “Tell me why she would put herself in such danger.”

  I shrugged, relieved that it wasn’t me she was accusing of anything. “I told you, Mother.”

  Mrs. Lofter stepped back but didn’t leave. She stood there watching me, waiting to hear me elaborate.

  “It was exciting to her, I guess. She was finally doing something only she wanted to do. She knew I didn’t want to do it, but she did it anyway.”

  Mother
shook her head. “She never hid anything from me like this.”

  “That’s why she did it,” I said. “She wanted to do something dangerous, I suppose. I told her many times to stop. She thought I was jealous.” I looked at Mrs. Lofter. She was making me nervous with her staring. Did she realize I was lying? “My sister and I always checked with each other first before we did any social things. It was the way we were brought up,” I told her.

  She said nothing.

  “You’re helping them find her for us, aren’t you, Haylee?” Mother asked. “You’re doing everything you can?”

  “I told them all I knew, Mother. I offered to go out and look, too, but Daddy didn’t want me to. All I can do is wait to hear from the police. I made Daddy some breakfast and had something to eat myself. I’m glad you’re eating,” I added, nodding at the dish and the empty cup. “We’ve got to stay strong so we can be here for Kaylee.”

  “How sweet. See how sweet my daughters are?” she asked Mrs. Lofter, who smiled. Mother shook her head. “But I see,” she continued. “You’re so lost, aren’t you? It’s like you’ve been taken away as well, isn’t it?”

  I nodded, but this time, when I looked at Mrs. Lofter, I thought she looked skeptical, even suspicious. She shouldn’t be here when I spoke personally with my mother, I thought. I intended to tell Daddy.

  “I’m trying to be strong for all of us, Mother,” I repeated, more for Mrs. Lofter than for Mother. “I’m helping Daddy in every way I can, too. We’ve got to keep hoping they’ll find her.”

  “Yes, that’s a good girl. My girls are good girls,” she said. She finally smiled and looked at Mrs. Lofter.

  “Of course, Mrs. Fitzgerald,” she said. “That’s why things will turn out just fine.”

  “Where is your father?” Mother asked.

  “He’s out doing things he has to do.”

  “What sort of things?”

  “Things. I don’t know. He’ll be home soon. Nana Clara Beth called,” I said, remembering.