Untwine

  When I look again through the pile, I concentrate on Gloria Carlton. The picture Officer Sanchez showed me is above one of the articles. There’s also a picture of Gloria Carlton and her parents leaving the police station. She has a sweatshirt draped over her head, and her parents are holding her elbows, guiding her towards a waiting car.

  Something about the picture seems odd to me, but I can’t immediately figure it out. After all, there’s nothing more common than people walking out of police stations with their faces covered. Who would want to be seen after what Gloria Carlton had done?

  I keep having to close and reopen my eyes to avoid the jabbing pain in them, but each time I look at the picture of Gloria and her parents leaving the police station, it still feels like I am looking at it for the first time.

  Is my short-term memory loss finally kicking in? Have I pushed my eyes, my brain too far?

  Something tells me to look at the picture again, and this time I see what’s catching my attention. Gloria Carlton’s father is digging his fingernails into her bare elbow. He is biting down on his lower lip and is frowning so hard that his bushy eyebrows meet in the middle of his forehead.

  Gloria’s mother has a fixed, nervous smile on her face. She’s pulling Gloria forward with one hand while waving the photographers away with the other. There’s a large gap between the three of them, as though the mother is trying to run away from both Gloria and her father.

  I ask Grandma Régine to read the tiny caption for me. She reads, “Teen emerges from police station after spending night in custody.”

  Just then we hear a key in the door. Grandma Régine quickly grabs the folder from me.

  Dad’s crutches hit the floor like tap shoes as he makes his way to the couch. Mom is looking a lot better than him. She now has a series of pretty knit berets that she uses to cover her ever-shrinking bandages.

  “What have you been up to?” Mom asks.

  They’re back to echoing each other’s sentences, so Dad adds, “Yeah, what have you been doing with yourselves?”

  Grandma Régine and I look at each other.

  “Not much,” Grandma Régine says.

  We nod to each other conspiratorially.

  That night I search Isabelle’s room for some clues about whether or not she’d known Gloria Carlton. There are no hidden diaries in her drawers, no secret letters in her closet. Everything I hadn’t already seen would either be on her laptop or cell phone.

  I look around her room for her school backpack, but it’s nowhere to be found. Maybe the police have it. Or maybe Mom and Dad do. They wouldn’t give me the phones anyway. Tina will have to help me.

  I use the house phone and call Tina while sitting on the kitchen floor in the dark. The call goes to voice mail. Tina’s probably asleep.

  As much as I try, I can’t remember Jean Michel’s cell number. I try a few guesses and end up getting wrong numbers.

  I’m tempted to go to Mom’s home office and use her computer, but I’m afraid that the light will be so blinding that I won’t get anywhere at all.

  “I’m not going to turn on the light,” I hear a voice say. “I’m just going to slide down here next to you.”

  It’s Aunt Leslie.

  She opens the freezer side of the refrigerator and pulls out a pint of ice cream, then sits down on the floor beside me. We pass around the little plastic spoon that comes with the ice cream and we gobble up all three flavors of the Neapolitan until the container is empty.

  “You have to follow the doctor’s instructions,” she says. “You have to comply. And that’s the doctor and not your aunt talking.”

  “It’s hard to just stay in the house and do nothing,” I say.

  “Was it better in the hospital?”

  “I’ll try to do better.”

  “You better do better,” she says and chuckles.

  “Thank you for hanging out with us so long,” I say.

  “That’s what family’s for,” she says, “to torture you and to love you and sometimes both at the same time.”

  I remember a few months back when Mom, Dad, Isabelle, and I went to spend a weekend at her house in Orlando. She and Mom disappeared for hours without telling any of us where they went. We thought they were planning something big, a surprise for Dad, or for all of us. Now I realize they might have been discussing Mom and Dad’s separation.

  Because Aunt Leslie always likes it when you get right to the point, I tell her, “I miss Izzie so much.”

  “I know,” she says. “Me, too.”

  “You think that girl was trying to hurt Izzie?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” she says.

  “Maybe she hated her or was jealous of her.”

  “Nobody could hate your sister,” she says.

  Because we loved Izzie so much, we couldn’t imagine anyone not loving her, too.

  “I need Izzie’s phone,” I say.

  “The police have your phones,” she says.

  “Izzie has a backup contact list online. Maybe this girl’s number’s on Izzie’s contact list.”

  “Do you know Izzie’s password?” she asks.

  “No.”

  “I thought twins were supposed to be able to read each other’s minds.”

  “Sometimes, but not all the time.”

  “There’s a lot I’m learning about you two,” she says.

  “Could you really not tell us apart?” I ask.

  “What makes you say that?”

  I want to tell her that I heard everything while I was under, but I know it would lead to her asking me all kinds of medical questions, so I don’t.

  “You two did have me fooled sometimes,” she says.

  “If we could find Izzie’s laptop,” I say.

  “The police have that, too,” she says. “They also have both your book bags.”

  “So they’re thinking this girl and Izzie might have known each other?”

  “It also could have been an accident,” she says. “But they want to be sure.

  “We can try a few guesses for Izzie’s password to get her contact list,” she adds. “But tomorrow. Not tonight.”

  “Why not tonight?”

  “We’re not going to do anything else tonight but go back to bed.”

  “Ever the doctor,” I say.

  “That’s one of your mother’s favorite things to say to me.”

  “I know.

  “Mom’s proud of you,” I add. “She’s always said that, too.”

  “Well, I’m proud of her for having raised such amazing daughters. I must remind you, though, oh you amazing daughter, that part of your recovery is resting and not working yourself up into a state like you did just now.”

  “I’m not in a state,” I say. “I’m calm.” Though that’s not really true. I’m more frustrated than anything else, by how little I’m able to do, both for my sister and for myself.

  “You know what’s going on with your parents—I mean their separation talk—you know that has nothing to do with you, right?” she says, changing the subject.

  “I’m not five years old,” I say.

  I know she understands why I’m snapping at her. I need someone to tell when nothing makes sense to me, and the person I’d be telling, my sister, is gone.

  “I know you’re not five years old,” she says. “I’m only letting you know that this is their MO.”

  “Their MO?”

  “Their modus operandi. Their mode of operation. Your parents often try to separate, like when he left Haiti, or when he went to the army, or for a couple of weeks when you and Izzie were too young to remember. Then they realize that they can’t live without each other. They write each other a bunch of sappy letters. I bet they write emails these days, which is too bad because I won’t have access to them. Then at some point they get back together. Your dad works less. Your mom finds another purpose in life. And all is well again. Then a few years later, it happens again. It’s so exhausting to watch. I think that’s why I’m not
married.”

  This is the best news I’ve heard in a while.

  “You promise?” I ask.

  “I can’t make any promises,” she says. “But I know them and I’d put some good money on it. Though you have to give them time. There’s losing your sister now. But even before everything they’ve just been through, your mom was already struggling with becoming a wife and mother so early in her life.”

  There were no letters about any of this in Mom and Dad’s box of letters. I never thought of Isabelle’s and my being born as having stopped Mom’s life in any way. But I guess it must have. Having a husband in school and two babies at home, all in her early twenties, couldn’t have been easy.

  Dad was going to law school for the first couple of years of our lives, Aunt Leslie says. And since Dad’s law specialty is not the most profitable one he could have chosen, Grandpa Marcus had to buy them this house. Once we were in school, Mom did the occasional odd job, which is how she learned to do makeup.

  “I didn’t know any of this,” I say.

  “Parents try to protect their children from a lot of things,” she says, “including their own failures and heartbreak.”

  “What did she want to do?” I ask.

  “She used to want to be a teacher.”

  “She can still do that.”

  “Then a pilot. Then an engineer. She’s not sure.”

  “Maybe they’re splitting up for real this time, then—”

  “So she can do all those things?”

  “Or one of them.”

  “Your parents may not realize this themselves,” she says, “but they love each other in this first love kind of way, and I think they’re afraid that it will become this friendship kind of thing, so the drama continues.”

  It was strange to think of my parents as these lost souls who were trying to live out some all-consuming love affair in boring everyday life.

  “This is all between us, of course,” Aunt Leslie says.

  “Of course,” I say.

  “With all secrets out of the way, I can now be your sidekick,” she says.

  “You promise?”

  “Pinkie promise.”

  We linked pinkies in the dark.

  “We’ll look up the stuff you need after your doctor’s visit,” she says. “Your folks asked me to take you.”

  I had completely forgotten about the doctor’s visit. Maybe I tried to block it out.

  “I’m so over doctors,” I say, “except you.”

  “I’m glad you said except me,” she says, “because I’m thinking of leaving the practice in Orlando and joining one in Miami. Your mom and I discussed it even before all this happened.”

  “For real?” I want to shriek with joy, but then I realize why she’s moving in the first place. It’s probably to look after Mom, which means that in spite of their MO, my parents might really end things this time.

  “I’ll be sad to leave my patients,” she says, “but it will be great to be near all of you.”

  She wraps her arms around my shoulder, and more than hugging her back, I try to disappear into her.

  “No one will ever replace Izzie in your life,” she says. “We’re not even going to try. But we still want to be here for you.”

  Of all the odd things that people—and by people I mean people like Aunt Leslie’s friend Dr. Aidoo—always want to tell twins, one is that there are tons of seemingly untwinned people who have been carrying some version of their unborn twins inside of them their whole lives. It’s called fetus in fetu. Some of these people are fetus-in-fetu marked, or have dark or hairy birthmarks to show for it, a micro-silhouette of their lost sibling. Others are walking around with parts of their twins inside of them, tiny lungs and spinal cords and even teeth.

  I have never liked fetus in fetu. I want twins that you can see, walking around. Alive.

  But what are you called when your twin dies?

  I want some name other than twinless twin. I want something simple, lyrical, sophisticated sounding. Even though I know it would never fully comfort me, I want something beautiful to now call myself.

  If we were Yoruba, because she came out first, Isabelle would have been Taiwo, or the one who first took in the world. I would have been Kehinde, the one who followed. Now that Isabelle is gone, someone would have carved a small statue of her, an effigy for me to keep with me at all times.

  “Can I still call myself a twin?” I ask Aunt Leslie.

  She seems stumped. According to Dr. Aidoo, some people think that twins share a single soul. If this is true, then where is my soul now?

  “I imagine you’ll be a twin forever,” Aunt Leslie says.

  She reaches for Isabelle’s necklace, which is hanging around her neck, and holds the Hand of Fatima pendant in the palm of her hand.

  “Your mother said I could wear this until you wanted it,” she says.

  Before I can say anything, she takes the necklace off and puts it around my neck.

  Now I am wearing both.

  “Believe it or not,” she says while stroking her neck where the necklace was, “one day you’ll be able to think of her, smile, tell jokes, and laugh.”

  “That’s hard to imagine right now,” I say.

  “Sometimes it comes even sooner than you expect,” she says.

  “How do you know all of this?” I ask.

  “Not all my patients grow up,” she says.

  I never thought of that.

  “I often have to think of what to say to their parents and siblings,” she says.

  “What’s the best thing you’ve ever said?”

  “It depends on the parent. The child. The sibling.”

  “What would you say to me?”

  “What would I say?”

  She rubs her chin for effect.

  “Apparently, in many places in the universe, when one twin dies, the gods turn the other one’s sadness into stars.”

  This is a kind of thing that Isabelle might have loved hearing about, that we might have loved hearing about together.

  “Is that all you got?” I ask, teasing Aunt Leslie.

  “I’m afraid it is,” she says.

  “What if I don’t have those types of godly connections?” I ask her.

  “You mean you don’t know any gods that can hook you up?” she says.

  “You did not just say ‘hook up.’ ”

  “My bad,” she says.

  “You did not just say ‘my bad,’ either.”

  “Guilty as charged,” she says.

  “Do you talk to your patients this way?”

  “I try to stay au courant, yes.”

  She laughs and I’m surprised how easy that laughter comes, how easy laughter has always come to people in our family, even when we are arguing, or fighting, or even mourning. I love sitting on the kitchen floor, eating ice cream and giggling with my aunt, the way she, Isabelle, and I have done so many times before, while talking about schools, boys, and even while complaining about our parents.

  “Do you want to speak to someone on a regular basis?” she asks.

  “I’m speaking to you,” I say.

  “I mean a social worker. Counselor?”

  “I’m talking to you,” I repeat.

  “I failed you,” she says.

  “Why would you say that?”

  “In the hospital that day, I shouldn’t have let you know that Isabelle died. I wasn’t planning to. I just wanted you to wake up so bad. I messed up.”

  “I needed to know,” I say. “So that thing with the gods and the stars could start happening.”

  I think now that I might have felt the moment Isabelle died.

  It was most likely when Officer Butler’s badge exploded in my head, when those red and auburn stars burst before my eyes. The beeps and alarms must have been for Isabelle and not me. Everyone must have been racing to save her. The feeling of lightning hitting my chest must have been from the resuscitation paddles they’d used to try to restart her heart. And w
hen that final beep faded, Isabelle must have taken her last breath. Then she must have pulled me under, carrying me away with her for a while.

  I AM BEGINNING to lose track of the school-related flow of time, but I know that it’s the last day of school before Easter break.

  “Are you still quarantined?” Tina calls on the house phone to ask. “Whenever Jean Michel and I call, your mom says you can’t talk. I can’t wait for you to have your phone back.”

  At breakfast, Mom and Dad seem worried when I ask if Tina and Jean Michel can come over and visit me. It’s as if suddenly everyone is suspect. Everyone can hurt me.

  Ever the mediator, Aunt Leslie asks if, after taking me to see Dr. Aidoo, she can take me to visit my school. That way I can see my friends there, even for a little while.

  “I don’t see how that’s going to help,” Mom says.

  “Who’s the doctor here?” Aunt Leslie asks.

  “It will do her some good,” Dad agrees.

  Grandpa Marcus tries to distract us by spreading out the plans for his cathedral in the middle of the breakfast table. Construction is set to begin in the summer. Grandpa Marcus had been working on some adjustments early that morning. The plans are too large and much too detailed for any of us to understand.

  “Why don’t you make 3-D versions of these plans?” I tell Grandpa Marcus.

  “I’ve been waiting for it,” Dad says. “I’ve been waiting for it.”

  “What?” Mom asks.

  “What Giz just said. This is exactly what Izzie would have said at this very moment.”

  I walk over, wrap my arms around Mom’s shoulder, then Dad’s good side, and I squeeze them both as hard as I can manage and as hard as they can take. They both seem surprised, but reach back and hold me even tighter. This is my way of thanking them for Isabelle and me, for everything they had to give up because of us.

  Dr. Aidoo greets me like an old friend, a really old friend.

  He gets up from behind his desk to pull out a chair for me. He and Aunt Leslie do small talk, during which I learn from her asking about his mother and father in Accra that he is from Ghana. I also learn that he has an ex-wife. The ex part seems to make Aunt Leslie smile.