It’s starting to sink in now.
Isabelle’s eyes and heart are in other people.
“Are we going to know who the people are?” I ask.
“We said we were open to hearing from them,” Dad says.
Them. My now partial twins? Mom and Dad’s now partial children? No matter how old they are. Or maybe it doesn’t even work that way.
I wonder where these people live, what languages they speak. Would having Isabelle’s heart mean that this person would love us, too? Would her corneas make the person who receives them want to see us, to be sure we’re okay?
“Remember you said it yourself that night,” Dad reminds Mom. “What if one of the girls needed a heart?”
“I know what I said,” Mom snaps back. “Doesn’t make it easier now.”
They don’t usually have full-blown fights in front of me, but now they seem to forget that I’m even standing there.
“Just don’t make it sound like I decided this on my own,” Dad says.
“I’m not angry,” Mom yells. “M pa fache.”
Even though it sounds like she is.
“I know what I agreed to,” she says. “But now I’ve changed my mind. I want it back. I want her heart back. I want her eyes back. I want all of her back.”
“Do you realize how crazy that sounds?” Dad asks. “Ou fou?”
“No crazier than her being dead,” Mom says. “Yes, I want all of her back.”
“Please,” Dad says. “Can we just sit and talk about this in a reasonable way?”
“There’s nothing reasonable about this situation,” Mom says.
“They told us to expect to feel conflicted,” Dad says.
“Conflicted? Are you kidding me? Conflicted?”
Mom walks back into their bedroom and slams the door shut behind her.
All the shouting and the door-slamming makes me feel like a giant mirror has just been smashed over my head.
“Are you all right?” Dad asks.
“I should lie down,” I say.
“Sorry you had to see that,” he says.
Even though Mom’s upset, I know Isabelle would have been thrilled about living on in somebody else’s body, if that’s what you can even call it.
“Iz would have approved,” I say. “She would have loved what you guys have done.”
“That was our feeling,” he says.
Isabelle’s body is now a nebula. It’s expanded into other spheres, other spaces. Her heart and corneas have been wept over, hoped and prayed for, even while they were still in her body. And even though she’d been broken that night, shattered, parts of her had landed somewhere safe.
THE NEXT MORNING, Officer Butler and Officer Sanchez drop by. Gloria Carlton/Janice Hill and her parents have disappeared.
After they received that email and a phone call from Dad, the officers went over to their apartment to ask them some questions and found out that they’d packed up and left.
The police still had their minivan, and found no other cars registered in their names either as Carltons or Hills. There were warrants put out for their arrests, but for now the police had no idea where they were.
We all huddle around the officers—Mom and Dad, Grandma Régine and Grandpa Marcus, and me—getting the details.
“Something strange is going on,” Officer Butler says. “Your tip was legit. The girl has several aliases and so do the parents. If they are her parents.”
I couldn’t wait to tell Jean Michel and Tina that they had Nancy Drewed it and cracked the case.
Grandpa Marcus mutters something in Creole. He pats his jacket where he keeps his cigarettes. Of everything he says, the only thing I understand is something he repeats over and over.
“Twòp. Twòp. Too much. This is too much.”
Grandma Régine points to the sliding glass door leading to the back porch, quietly suggesting that Grandpa Marcus step out before he gets more upset.
“What’s next?” Dad asks once Grandpa Marcus is gone.
“We’re going to find them,” Officer Butler says. “Both for your family’s sake and the sake of that girl. She might be in danger.”
“You think they might be holding the girl against her will?” Dad asks.
“We have to get her back here so she can answer some questions,” Officer Sanchez says.
Grandpa Marcus is still muttering under his breath when he returns from smoking his cigarette. He looks even more agitated than before. Grandma Régine follows him to the kitchen and takes out a kettle to make him some tea.
“We wanted to come and tell you what’s happening before it hits the news,” Officer Butler says. Her voice hasn’t changed much since I heard it for the first time in the hospital. It’s still an emotionless monotone.
Grandpa Marcus walks the officers to the door.
“Find those crazies,” he says.
I rush to the kitchen phone to call Tina. I forgot that it’s Sunday. Tina’s in church, but she answers anyway.
When I ask her if she can step out and patch in Jean Michel, she says, “We came out to answer the phone.”
“We?”
“Me and Jean Michel.”
“Really?”
“He’s right here next to me,” she says. “This morning he called and said he wanted to visit our church.”
I hang up. But why? They hadn’t told me that they were planning to go to church together.
I don’t answer the phone when they call back. I have bigger things to think about. When they call me again, I tell Grandma Régine to tell them I’m napping.
My parents’ fight continues.
“We should offer a reward,” Mom shouts, “so they can find these people.”
“Let the police do their jobs,” Dad says.
“And what do we do?” Mom asks.
“You want me to hire a professional killer?” Dad asks, escalating his sarcasm game. “Or do you want me to go find them and kill them myself?”
“You can get Moy to put more pressure on the police,” Mom says.
Grandpa Marcus steps between them, and they limp and hobble to different corners of the house.
When Dessalines curls himself around my feet, I grab him, put on my cat eyes, and walk out to the backyard with him in my arms. Sitting in the shade, on the pool deck, I can’t help but feel like he is my only friend. That is, until he dashes off yet again.
Our backyard is practically a pet cemetery. Buried there are Dessalines’s predecessors: a turtle named Pétion—we called him Pete—a rabbit named Toussaint, a guinea pig named Jefferson, an iguana named Lincoln, and a few random squirrels we’d found dead in the yard.
Dessalines ignores me still, so I walk into the garage alone. My parents don’t use the garage for cars unless we’re going away for a while. They mostly park on the street, in front of the house.
The walls of the garage are covered from floor to ceiling with boxes filled with our old things, ancient clothes and other mementos that Mom and Dad can’t part with. There are some new boxes full of cards and stuffed animals, and even some prayer rugs and healing quilts that Mrs. Clifton and her quilting group had made for us.
Against the back wall are four stacks of Grandma Sandrine’s paintings. I remember seeing them in her apartment when she was living there and later in the chapel at her wake. They look a lot different now, the ones I can see, the paint having settled into the canvases, which are wrapped up in plastic.
I can only see the four up front, but they’re pretty typical of Grandma Sandrine’s style. One looks like a bowl of spaghetti. The other looks like a bunch of random coffee stains. The third seems a bit more planned. There is a red circle in the middle of the large canvas and a bunch of bloody-looking feet (Grandma Sandrine’s feet?) walking away from that circle.
The last one is my favorite. Grandma Sandrine cut out and pasted hundreds of faces of brown-skinned old women from newspapers and magazines and collaged them into one massive head, which she then split right down the middle with a
line of thick black paint. This was one of her last paintings before she couldn’t paint anymore. Isabelle and I have always thought that it showed how torn she felt between wanting to live and wanting to die.
GRANDMA RÉGINE AND Grandpa Marcus take me to my scheduled appointment with Dr. Rosemay the next day. I am so over doctors—even Dr. Rosemay—that I willingly apply my short-term memory loss option to those visits.
Dr. Rosemay asks if I’m depressed.
I don’t know what she’s expecting me to say, but I say no so I can get out of there faster.
It used to be so nice to come see her when the worst thing that had ever happened to me was having a bad ear infection.
She gives me an eye test, a hearing test, and goes over all the cognitive things again, the counting backwards, the walking backwards. Now I just want to block her out, too.
That is until she says something I’ve been waiting to hear for a while.
After examining me, Dr. Rosemay says I should probably rule out going back to school for the rest of the school year. Not because I’m getting worse. I’m actually getting better, but summer is only a few short weeks away and the effort of trying to catch up would be too much. She’s going to call Dr. Aidoo and Mom and Dad and recommend that I go to summer school instead.
I don’t see how my parents could deny me that, given all that’s happened. Besides, my mind isn’t going to be on English and math, French and social studies, or even art, anyway. It’s going to be on Isabelle, and on my parents’ fights, on Janice Hill’s disappearance, and on Tina and Jean Michel growing closer to each other and further away from me.
When we get home from the doctor’s office, we find Mom and Dad sitting at the kitchen table with Isabelle’s urn between them. The urn reminds me of a copper teapot, without the spout.
Isabelle’s full name, Isabelle Régine Boyer, is carved into it along with the dates of her birth and death, which is one of the days I was under.
When we join them at the table, Grandma Régine’s eyes fill up with tears. She’s the one who picked out this urn.
When you’re a twin, people tend to think that you’re most like only one other person on earth. Isabelle had a bit of all of us in her, but a whole lot of Grandma Régine. Both she and Grandma Régine wanted to carve their own paths, but were never fully sure how to clearly express it.
We all sit there for what seems like hours, and we stare at the urn until the kitchen phone rings.
Grandpa Marcus walks over and picks it up. He holds the phone away from his mouth and says to Mom, “It’s your friend. Madame Marshall.”
“Tell her I’ll call her later,” Mom says.
“Elle dit que c’est urgent,” Grandpa Marcus says. “She says to turn on the news.”
Mom takes the urn with her as she walks over to the living room. Dad follows, hobbling behind us on his crutches. Grandpa Marcus turns on the TV.
I know it’s serious because no one is telling me not to look at the TV. Grandpa Marcus flips through the channels until he lands in the middle of the four o’clock news.
Even before hearing the newscaster’s voice, we see the scroll.
BREAKING NEWS: TEEN TWIN KILLER CAUGHT
They make it sound like there’s been a manhunt when actually Janice Hill and her parents were simply identified by a Greyhound bus driver on a bus heading to Atlanta. The bus driver called the police, and the police pulled the bus over and arrested them. This, I realize, is probably how most mysteries are solved, by ordinary people, rather than the Nancy Drew way. The police cruiser was trailed by a news van, so the entire thing was recorded for TV.
In the footage of the family getting off the bus, Janice doesn’t look nervous at all. She even smiles a little, a restrained but real smile. A smile of relief.
Maybe I’m the only who sees it, but she looks like someone who’s taking a deep breath. And when one of the reporters shoves a microphone in her face and asks, “What do you have to say to Isabelle Boyer’s family?” She looks up for a moment and stares directly into the camera. Her eyes get all cloudy and her lips tremble. She takes another deep breath, then says in a very soft voice, “I would change places with her if I could.”
Except for the sound of her voice, there is total silence around me. Her voice is so soft that the reporter has to repeat her words.
Later, when that clip is played over and over again, the news stations will add subtitles so everyone can understand what she says.
I imagine being one of those reporters and having a chance to ask her another question.
“What exactly do you mean when you say that you would trade places with Isabelle?” I’d ask.
“I would die instead,” I’d make her say. “I would crash into a wall somewhere, not into Isabelle, and it would be my head that would smash into the glass, not Isabelle’s, and my organs, and not hers, would be in other people’s bodies right now.”
I’d make her say all this, because that’s what I want to say about myself, too.
I don’t know why, but I believe her. I believe she means what she says to that reporter, that she would change places with Isabelle if she could. I need to believe something, anything. So I believe her.
After all, aren’t we equally guilty, Janice and me?
If we’d left the house fifteen minutes earlier, we would have missed her altogether.
When the news broadcast moves on to another even more gruesome subject, Mom groans loudly.
Dad lowers his head. Grandpa Marcus and Grandma Régine reach for each other’s hands.
Before the newscast is even over, people start calling us nonstop. Aunt Leslie calls from Orlando. Uncle Patrick from New York. Alejandra from Los Angeles. Mrs. Marshall and Tina show up at our door, along with a couple of news trucks and half the neighborhood.
“You didn’t have to come,” Dad says to all of them.
Then, looking at the urn in my mother’s arms, Mrs. Marshall and a few people say, “Oh, yes we did. We certainly had to come.”
Tina and I haven’t spoken to each other since that Sunday she and Jean Michel went to church together. I have less and less to say to everyone now, including her. I don’t have much strength or energy left for it.
As the house fills up with people, I close my eyes, allowing our visitors to float around me. Every now and then, though, I open my eyes and see more people there. Some of the people are stroking the urn in Mom’s arms as Dad unsuccessfully tries to pry it away from her.
The light outside grows dimmer as the house becomes more crowded, and I’m not even sure anymore whether it’s dawn or dusk, whether I’m myself or Isabelle, whether I’m at home or still in that car again, heading to the spring orchestra concert on a Friday afternoon just like this one.
Soon the light coming through the windows fades. Grandpa Marcus and Grandma Régine turn on the house lights, and I realize that this moment of suddenly going from semidarkness to nearly blinding light unexpectedly feels a lot like the crash.
At this very hour that Friday evening, Isabelle was supposed to arrive at the school auditorium, say hi to her friends, warm up with her flute, then go onstage and play one of her favorite pieces of music with the school orchestra.
In one corner of the room, I see Moy talking to Dad. Maybe Commissioner Moy, as we now call him, had something to do with the police working so hard on our case. Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t, but Dad sure seems happy to see him. They are smiling and shaking hands, almost doing victory fist pumps.
On the other side of the room, I see Tina and Jean Michel standing together and talking, and I’m not even angry at them. I’m not mad. I’m not even jealous of the little sparks going off between them, sparks they may not even realize are there.
Tina and Jean Michel are doing something I can’t even think of doing right now. Their lives are taking them somewhere I’m not able to go. Besides, maybe if I hadn’t been so concerned about looking pretty for Jean Michel that night, my sister might still be alive. Tina and
Jean Michel and all these people crowding around me now all feel like something out of a nightmare, something I need to leave behind. They all feel pentimento.
One of the possible lifelong effects of hitting my head so hard in the car, Dr. Aidoo told Aunt Leslie and me during our most recent visit with him, is that I might develop something called pseudobulbar affect, a neurological condition that might make me laugh, or cry, or both, suddenly, out of the blue.
Sitting there in the living room, with all of those people around me, I feel something like that coming. A fou rire, or crazy laugh, as my grandparents would call it, the kind of mixed laughing and crying Isabelle and I sometimes saw people do at funerals, in the cathedrals that Grandpa Marcus would take us to in Haiti. The grief was always intense, but sometimes you couldn’t tell whether people were laughing or crying. It was as if both their joy and their sadness were coming from the same spot, as if losing someone had temporarily fused every nerve in their brains together.
I try my best to force my laughter and tears to cancel each other out. So all I’m left with is a kind of numbness, an Amazon-length river running through that empty cave inside of me.
I keep wondering what Isabelle would be doing now if she were sitting here in my place. Maybe she’d be vowing to go out and fight a war for me. Maybe she’d be losing it and yelling at everyone, asking them to leave. Her fou rire would have probably crushed this numbness I can’t shake.
We keep the TV on and watch the news repeat itself. Each time a news anchor or reporter mentions Isabelle, he or she says that Isabelle is “survived” by us, her family.
She is survived by her mother, father, and her twin sister.
“Survived by” doesn’t sound quite right.
How can she be survived by us?
By some strange twist of fate that killed her, we came out all right. We survived. She had removed her seat belt for a minute and her head had smashed into the car window, but we had survived.
Finally, Tina and Jean Michel come over and sit next to me. Maybe I would feel better if Tina, Jean Michel, and I had solved the entire mystery together. Maybe I would be happier if we had figured out every single part of it, all the way through.