What illness could it be that had come upon her so violently and quickly? To me, she had seemed invincible. The thought of her in a hospital bed was almost impossible to contemplate.
“But she is human,” I reminded myself, speaking the words aloud in an effort to make them more convincing. “Somewhere she exists as a real person, subject to viruses and infections like the rest of us. But for him to say that she’ll never get better—”
How could that be? Had she been in an accident? Had she been stricken with some progressive disease? Surprisingly, this conjecture brought me no pleasure. It was a relief to feel unthreatened, and there should have been satisfaction in the thought that one who sought to injure others would receive punishment.
At the same time—
We are the two sides of a coin. We floated together in the same sea before birth.
Despite everything, the fact remained that Lia was my sister.
My sister.
If the other elements had not been there—if I hadn’t had some idea of where to search—if I hadn’t become, in some strange way, so close to her—still, I would have found her. I am as sure of that as I have ever been of anything. We were identical sisters, drawn together by a force that transcended logic.
“She’s nothing to you,” Mr. Abbott had said, “except for the fact that one woman gave birth to you.”
That was true. But it was enough.
It couldn’t be done right away. Megan was already shouting up the stairs that my French toast was getting cold. I entered the kitchen, and as though that were a signal, the electricity went off.
That was the catalyst that always triggered Mom’s decision to clean out drawers. It made sense, actually, because during normal times she and Dad were too occupied to think about such things, but when light was gone and the computer wouldn’t operate, they were left with all this creative energy and nothing to focus it on. So she got my father out of bed, and we all took candles and flashlights and shoveled out drawers in the kitchen and the bathrooms. It wasn’t dull work. We are a family that doesn’t throw things away. The drawers contained a multitude of notes recalling earlier times—“Gone to Kimmie’s—be back by 5”; “Agent called—Finnigan wants film option on Lord of the Stars”; “Defrost hamburger!” There were receipts and corks and empty toothpaste tubes and newspaper clippings. We filled two trash bags, and then Dad decided we had worked long enough, so he built a fire in the living room fireplace and suggested we tell stories.
Of course, he went first, and it was really a form of cheating because what he told was a book plot he was mulling over and wanted to try out on us. When he was done, Meg took the floor and gave us a tale about a day when the sun blew out and the world grew colder and colder until our whole family had to cram into the bathtub and turn on the hot water.
“And then that froze,” she continued, “and we were trapped there in the ice, and we starved to death because the box of cookies we had brought in with us was up on top of the sink.”
Neal’s story was about dragons, and it never went anywhere because he got so wrapped up in their physical description that he forgot to have them do anything.
The turn passed to me. I told a story about twin sisters who were separated at birth and who found each other because one of them knew a secret. She could lift herself from her body and fly.
“And she crossed the land,” I said, “and found her twin, in the far place where she lived, and she started by visiting her at night, so at first the other sister thought the whole thing was a dream. But then the visiting twin grew stronger in the use of her talent, and she was able to appear in the daylight. And she told her sister, ‘You can do this also, if you try. And you must try. You must learn, so that you will be able to travel the way I do, with the speed of thought, leaving your body behind.’”
Everyone was silent when I had finished. Then Neal said, “You make it sound almost like it’s true. It isn’t, is it? People can’t do that?”
“No, people can’t do that,” Mom said decidedly. She turned to me accusingly. “You just can’t let it drop, can you, Laurie? You’ve got to keep throwing it back at us. And what an unfair way to do it, during this family time!”
“Now, Shelly,” Dad said, “I’m sure Laurie didn’t mean it that way.”
“Yes, she did,” Mom insisted. “It’s the same awful story she tried to tell us that first day about visitations and dreams and spirits coming and going. She’s obsessed with the idea of locating her roots.”
“What roots?” Neal asked, his eyes brightening with interest.
“Now, see!” Mom said. “You’ve brought the children into it.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and meant it. I hadn’t imagined the story would upset her to this degree. “I’m not trying to ‘throw’ anything back at you. I swear it. Astral projection is a fact, Mom, and people from my sort of background are particularly adept at using it. I have books on the subject that you can read if you’d like to. And this morning I made a phone call—”
“Please, drop it,” Dad said quietly. “You know how your mother feels about the idea of digging up the past. Putting it into a fictional context doesn’t make it any more palatable to her. She’s right; it’s an unfair maneuver, and I can’t see what you think there is to gain by it. We’ve already given you all the information we have.”
“What if I told you it was true?” I said. “What if I could prove to you that Lia had really taught me—”
“That’s enough, Laurie,” Dad said emphatically. “Your turn is over. It’s come round to you, Shelly. What’s your story going to be about?”
“I can’t think of one,” Mom said in a strained voice. “We’ve spent enough time on this. How about lunch? Neal, bring the flashlight. The bulb won’t go on when we open the refrigerator, you know. It will be like playing Go Fish to find makings for sandwiches.”
They would never believe me. The realization struck me with a kind of hopeless finality. Their creativity—the very thing that should have made them receptive—was what closed them off. My parents were used to building worlds for other people, and they fashioned these like expert craftsmen, conscious always that what they were creating was not to be confused with reality. Stories were fiction—Meg’s frozen bathwater, Neal’s platoon of dragons. I was breaking the rules if I took the game beyond that and insisted that the incredible might be true.
Suddenly I wanted Jeff. He was the only one I could talk to, and I wanted him so desperately that I was tempted to rush out and brave the storm.
“I’m not hungry,” I told my parents. “I’ll get something later. I’m going upstairs to read for a while.”
I was halfway to the landing when I heard footsteps behind me.
“Laurie?” Megan asked. “Is ‘Lia’ the name of the ghosty?”
I turned. The round face, raised to mine, was solemn and worried, and the pale brows were drawn together in a frown.
“You believe me, Meg?” I asked her.
“Yes,” Megan said. “What I don’t understand, though, is why she wanted so much for you to learn how to go away.”
“Well, because—because—” To my surprise, I found that I was unable to come up with an answer. I had accepted Lia’s insistence without questioning it. “Try again, Laurie,” she had kept telling me. “Tired or not, you must keep trying.” Why had it mattered to her so much? I hadn’t known then, and I didn’t know now.
“It scares me,” Meg said.
“She can’t hurt me, honey.” I took three quick steps down the stairs and put my arms around her, pulling her sturdy body against me in a hard hug. “She’s far away and very sick. The part of her that comes here is just the thinking part. She can’t hurt people with that. It’s like—well, like a shadow maybe. A shadow can’t do anything, can it?”
“I guess not,” Meg said, but she sounded unconvinced. “You be careful, okay?”
“Of course I will.” That tone of reassurance, I can hear it now, ringing out confidently in that dark
ened hall. And beyond my voice, the sound of the wind, and beyond that—
Was there another sound? Muffled, as though a hand had been pressed quickly over unseen lips? Was it laughter?
Did Megan hear it? Was that the reason she clung to me so tightly for that extra moment after my own arms had released their hold?
“You be careful,” she said again before she left me, and, again, I assured her that I would be.
I climbed the rest of the stairs and went down the hall to my room. The wind was louder here, and the glass of the balcony doors was so plastered with snow that I had the disconcerting feeling I was sealed off from the world. Even so, I pulled the bedroom door shut and then reached automatically for the light switch. It made an ineffectual clicking sound, and the room seemed to grow even darker.
I groped my way across to the unmade bed and stretched myself out on top of the rumpled blankets.
“I’m coming to find you, sister,” I whispered to Lia.
The safe time, Jeff and I had decided, was the morning, but did that matter now? As I’d said to Megan, there was nothing Lia could do to hurt me. Just as her shadow could cause no harm to my body, there was no way her body could cause injury to my spirit self. I was wise to her. She couldn’t fool me with illusions. She couldn’t trick me into a disastrous situation as she had Jeff and Helen. I knew too much about her. I wouldn’t allow myself to be drawn into danger.
Laughter?
No, it was the wind. It was water rushing across the rocks beneath the window. It was the whisper of snow piling layer on layer on the slanted roof of Cliff House.
I closed my eyes and put my mind into focus. And like an arrow snapped from a bow, I went.
It was all so fast I had no chance to weigh what was happening. There was no entrance to make—I was simply there. The place was a hospital, but it wasn’t the same as the one where Helen had been. At first I couldn’t ascertain what the differences were. There were the same white walls, the same sterile atmosphere with the immaculate waxed surfaces of linoleum floors reflecting the glow of the fluorescent lights on the ceilings. Nurses and orderlies moved efficiently through the halls, carrying charts and hypodermics and wheeling trays of medications.
But there were no flowers, and that was surprising. At Duke the front desk had been loaded with them—baskets of blooms, vases of cut arrangements, potted plants—all tagged and awaiting delivery to patients.
Here there were none. The desk was bare. And the doors to the patients’ rooms were closed.
I moved slowly down the hall. Nurses passed me or walked straight through me, unaware of my existence. I no longer found this startling; it was what I expected. The doors were strange in that the upper portions of them were made of glass. I could look through and see the people in the rooms beyond, standing, sitting, staring out of the windows or at the walls or moving restlessly about. No one seemed ill in any serious way.
She’s sick—she’s not allowed visitors—
Mr. Abbott’s words came back to me, and I found it hard to make sense out of them. The people on this ward did not appear to be sick enough to warrant such a rule. Yet he was right. There were no visitors, and it was a time of day when there should have been.
I passed one door after another until I came to the one I was seeking. I didn’t have to look through the glass to know whose room it was. It was as though a voice were calling out to me.
I passed through the door and moved across to the bed and stood beside it, gazing down in wonder at the familiar figure.
She was a duplicate of myself.
She was sleeping so soundly that it hardly seemed possible that she was alive. Her chest didn’t appear to be moving, and there was no quiver of eyelids or nostrils. I bent closer to examine the contours of the face. The starkly defined bone structure, the olive complexion, the thick fringe of lashes lying motionless against the smooth cheek might well have been my own.
Yet there were differences.
This girl’s ears were pierced, and mine were not. Mom and I had gone through a few rounds on that issue, and she had won. “There are enough natural holes in a person’s anatomy,” she had said firmly, “so that it’s a sacrilege to make new ones unless you absolutely have to.” I didn’t agree, but it hadn’t seemed worth waging an all-out battle. It would be easy enough to get the job done when I went off to college.
There was a tiny scar on the chin that might have been nothing more than the result of scratching an insect bite, but it was a scar that I didn’t have.
There was a mole on the neck at a spot where I had no mole.
I continued my inspection. The girl lay on her side with her knees drawn up against her stomach. She was covered with a blanket, and one hand was curled around its edge. She had perfect fingernails, the kind that had always filled me with envy. My own had a scraggly look, not exactly “bitten to the quick,” but “slightly gnawed.”
Small things. Unimportant. Almost unnoticeable, yet they spelled the difference between Lia Abbott and Laurie Stratton. This body was not mine, and the girl who dwelt in it was someone else. Her genetic makeup might be identical, but she had lived a different life and made her own marks upon the body’s surface.
“Lia?” I spoke the name, but no sound came.
Could she hear me? I wondered. I had heard her when I was sleeping. Her voice had become a part of my dreaming and as it had grown stronger had expanded into my waking consciousness.
“Lia?” I said again.
Behind me there was a tiny, metallic sound. The door swung open, and a nurse came into the room. She crossed to the foot of the bed and stood there a moment, staring down at the figure of the sleeping girl. Then she turned and left. She pulled the door closed and paused on its far side to glance back through the glass.
There was another sharp click, as though a key were being turned in a lock. Was it possible, I asked myself incredulously, that they were locking Lia in?
I couldn’t test the door, but I could move through it out into the corridor beyond. It was true. The nurse was holding a ring of keys. She went back to the desk and handed them to another uniformed woman, who placed them in a drawer.
“So how’s our little wildcat?” the second woman asked.
“Sound asleep. I don’t know why you call her that. I’ve never seen her move a muscle. It’s almost like she was in a coma.”
“You’re on swing shift.” The woman at the desk was obviously the older of the two. A network of fine lines branched out from the corners of her eyes, and her short hair was a pepper-and-salt mixture of black and gray. “I was on duty the morning they brought her in. You should have seen her then! They had to use a straitjacket. This sleeping thing makes me nervous. It’s just not natural.”
“It’s afternoon siesta time,” the younger nurse said lightly. “I wish they were all this accommodating, especially the old gal down in 512 who does all that yelling.”
“I’m serious. This doesn’t fit any pattern I’ve seen before. The ones who go comatose tend to stay that way. This one’s alert in the mornings. She has the session with her doctor and goes from there to occupational therapy. You’d swear she was as normal as apple pie if you didn’t know better.”
“That doesn’t sound like a wildcat.”
“No, she sits on that. Keeps it tucked down under. Then, suddenly—wham! All hell breaks loose. And then—zonk— she’s asleep again. Like a dead thing. Have you ever tried to wake her when she’s out like that?”
“No way! I believe in letting well enough alone. When they’re sleeping they can’t give us any trouble.” The younger woman paused. “She’s such a pretty kid, so sort of sweet looking. It’s hard to imagine her doing something all that terrible.”
“And she’s so young too—only seventeen. If they’d been able to try her as an adult, I bet she’d be in the state pen instead of here. ‘Innocent by reason of insanity’! That was a cop-out, if you ask me. It got them off the hook as far as not having to stick her in a de
tention home. They couldn’t take that risk. You don’t put a piranha in with a bowlful of goldfish.”
“Do you really think she’s that dangerous?”
“Let’s put it this way—I sure wouldn’t want her moving in with me.” The older nurse shook her head. “That poor Katherine Abbott. It said in the paper that she landed with the horse on top of her. It’s a wonder she lived long enough to tell what happened.”
“Lia forced her off the cliff ?”
“That’s what Katherine said before she died. She said the girl came riding right at her, waving her sweater in the air and screaming like a banshee. The Abbott girl was riding a high-strung show horse. It started rearing and—this is what the paper said, but it’s never made much sense to me—Lia pulled her own horse to a stop right before it reached them, but Lia herself, she just seemed to keep on coming.”
“That’s crazy,” the young nurse said. “You mean, she was thrown forward?”
“She must have meant that, although the way the newspaper had it, it didn’t sound that way. The way Katherine was quoted, she saw one girl slumped over in the saddle and another zooming at her through the air. And then she was falling.”
“That must have been a misprint.”
“Or the girl was hallucinating. Either way, Lia rode on home just like nothing had happened. She told Mrs. Abbott that Katherine had decided to stay out longer and ride up to one of the higher pastures. When she wasn’t back by dinnertime, her father took Lia’s horse and went out looking for her. He’s the one who found her.”
“The poor man!” The young nurse shuddered. “You said the horse was on top of her?”
“And the girl was still conscious! It was one of those one-in-a-million possibilities. The hoofprints on the trail substantiated her story. There were other things, really weird ones, that kept coming out at the trial, though the judge called them immaterial. There had been other families she’d lived with where people had had accidents. In one of them a baby, an only child, had suffocated in its crib, and in another a little boy—”
I could listen no longer.