We find a cool spot under the tree, where the midday heat has not yet penetrated the ground. I try to show her how we can both hug the tree trunk and still not touch hands in the middle. She takes off her ladybug-shaped fanny pack and drops it on the ground so her entire body can touch the tree.
In the museum that day, I had been just as unrecognizable to her as I had been to myself.
“He likes you, not me,” she says again.
Sisters before dudes, after all.
She picks up her fanny pack from the ground.
“I called him to let him know I was coming here,” she says. “And he sent you something.”
I want to tell her how cute her ladybug fanny pack is, but I’m too excited to see what he’s sent me. My heart is beating too fast.
“Calm down,” she says. “It’s not a bar of gold.”
“And probably not a bar of soap.” I try to make a joke. “Nor a bar of candy, a candy bar.”
I realize how much I will miss her during the next school year, how much I will miss him, too. We won’t be making any college plans together and we won’t be going to our prom together, just as I will not be doing any of those things with Isabelle.
Tina hands me a framed picture, half the size of a postcard. In the red plastic frame is a shrunken copy of Frida Kahlo’s The Two Fridas.
The Fridas’ hearts, more than their faces, pop out at me, one heart crimson and pumping bright red blood and the other darkened, lifeless, and nearly drained.
I wonder which Frida he is.
I wonder which Frida I am.
“I almost didn’t bring it,” Tina says. “I know that’s his screen saver, but he didn’t send a note with it or anything. He just said you’d figure it out.”
It takes me a while to figure it out, but eventually I do. I think he’s trying to tell me what everyone’s been telling me in one way or another since Isabelle died, that I won’t be the bloodless Frida forever, that one day, my heart will be full of life again. He could also be telling me that Isabelle might have survived the crash, only to endure a life full of devastation and pain, something that still remains a possibility for the rest of us.
I run these theories by Tina, who says, “Why couldn’t he just text or email you? Or even write something down on a piece of paper? Or on the back of this thing? Not everything needs to remain unsaid.”
“He likes being cryptic.” I find myself defending him. “Maybe that’s why it was so easy for him to help us find Janice.”
Other people’s mysteries are sometimes easier to solve than our own.
Tina and I sit there, in that cool spot under the silk-cotton tree, for what feels like hours. I tell her everything that’s happened since I tried to ban her from my heart. I tell her about the organ donation letter, the flute case, the state attorney’s decision, all of which she already knows from her parents, who’ve been told everything by my parents.
We survey the horizon and look down at different parts of the city, the stacked houses below, the mountains, then the sea.
Soon, it starts raining over the sea, just as Isabelle and I had seen it rain many times before.
Tina and I walk to the edge of the property, as far as a steep cliff above a low concrete wall. We look out over the sea as a widening circle forms around the shrouded sun, in a hazy combination of lilac, emerald, scarlet, and gold.
“Is that some kind of rainbow?” Tina asks.
“It’s called a glory,” I say.
“That’s beyond cool,” she says.
“Isabelle and I have seen a lot of them.”
I remember Grandpa Marcus telling Isabelle and me how we’re able to see so many glories because of the height and angle of the property. Because he believed that architecture should be part of the physical poetry of everyday life, he’d picked the land and designed the house with natural wonders in mind, including rainbows and glories.
The first time Tina, Isabelle, and I all saw somebody die, we were seven years old. Our families were at the beach together near Aunt Leslie’s house in Orlando. A little girl, who looked like she was a year or two younger than us, had spent the entire morning digging a body-size hole for herself in the sand near the beach chairs where her mother and father were reading and sunbathing. The girl and her parents would take breaks, run to the water and swim for a while, but the little girl would come back and start digging again until she could sit in the hole without us seeing her head from a few feet away.
We weren’t looking when it happened, but at some point her sand hole collapsed. The hole quickly filled in around her and the little girl disappeared.
Mom, Dad, Aunt Leslie, the Marshalls, and a bunch of other people immediately joined the little girl’s parents and started digging for her with their bare hands. The sand must have shifted because the little girl was no longer where she was supposed to be.
Right before Fire Rescue arrived, Dad and Mr. Marshall found the little girl. When they pulled her out, she looked like a sand mummy doll. Aunt Leslie tried her best to resuscitate her, but it was too late.
I think this is why Mom and Dad didn’t want Isabelle to be buried. They didn’t want her beneath the ground where nature’s wrath might further attack her body and where things like this glory might be kept from her view.
I imagine Isabelle seeing more glories now, and many more things that the rest of us still have no idea how to name. I imagine her making beautiful things, too, out of whatever brush or brew that you’re given to paint the sky with when you die.
Tina and I stare at the glory until the rain stops falling into the sea and the sun starts crawling out from behind the clouds. The glory begins to fade and all the colors blur into a dull grey. Like when you’re twirling a rainbow-colored spinning top and all the shades merge into one, because the colors are moving too quickly for your eyes to keep up.
My whole world has been like that for a while. Spinning too fast for both my brain and my heart to keep up. I close my eyes and try to make the glory last, knowing that when I open them again, it will be gone.
“Close your eyes, too,” I tell Tina.
“What?”
“Just do it,” I say and she does.
“Are you going to push me down this mountain?” she asks anyway.
“It’s not a mountain,” I say. “And I’m not going to push you off of it. Just keep your eyes closed.”
“What are we doing?” she asks.
“We’re each going to say half a goodbye to the glory.”
“I didn’t realize we’d said hello to it,” she says.
“Just do it,” I say.
“How’s that?”
“It’s for Isabelle,” I say, knowing that she’d start making fun of me otherwise.
I tell her about Isabelle always not wanting to say a full goodbye to the glory, so that it would keep coming back.
“Okay, then,” Tina says, still not sounding fully convinced.
“You will say ‘Good,’ ” I say. “And I will say ‘Bye.’ And each of us will have said only half a goodbye, and not a full one.”
When she finally gets the hang of it, I let her go first.
I keep my eyes closed and try to keep the glory fully and colorfully alive in my memory.
“Good?” Tina whispers.
“Bye,” I say.
Thanks to Lisa Sandell for writing me out of the blue one day to see if I might have a book like this in me. I am also deeply grateful to the beloved twins in my life: Alexis and Zoë Danticat, and Natalie and Adele Austin, for allowing me to directly and indirectly observe twin life. May they never have to go through anything remotely like the things that happen in this book.
I am grateful to Aimee Ferrer, Maggie Austin, and Kathy Strobach for all their help with legal information. Thank you, Patricia Engel, for some crucial advice. Thank you Fedo, Mira, Leila, and Madame Boyer for every second of every day. And thank you Manman, my Isabelle, for showing me what love, hope, and courage look like until the very
end.
EDWIDGE DANTICAT is the author of many award-winning books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah’s Book Club pick; Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist; and Brother, I’m Dying, a National Book Critics Circle Award winner. In 2009 she was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow. Edwidge lives with her family in Miami, Florida.
Copyright © 2015 by Edwidge Danticat
All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Press, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC, SCHOLASTIC PRESS, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Danticat, Edwidge, author.
Untwine : a novel / Edwidge Danticat.—First edition.
pages cm
Summary: Identical twin teenagers Giselle and Isabelle Boyer have always been inseparable, and expected to stay that way even though their Haitian American parents are separating—but when the entire family is caught in a car crash, everyone’s world is shattered forever.
ISBN 978-0-545-42303-8 (jacketed hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Twins—Juvenile fiction. 2. Sisters—Juvenile fiction. 3. Haitian American families—Florida—Miami—Juvenile fiction. 4. Bereavement—Juvenile fiction. 5. Grief—Juvenile fiction. 6. Traffic accidents—Juvenile fiction. 7. Miami (Fla.)—Juvenile fiction. [1. Twins—Fiction. 2. Sisters—Fiction. 3. Grief—Fiction. 4. Traffic accidents—Fiction. 5. Miami (Fla.)—Fiction. 6. Haitian Americans—Fiction. 7. Family life—Florida—Miami—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.D2385Un 2015
813.54—dc23
[Fic]
2014046787
First edition, October 2015
Author photo by Mark Dellas
Cover art © 2015 by Sara Wood
Cover design by Elizabeth B. Parisi
e-ISBN 978-0-545-84331-7
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.
Edwidge Danticat, Untwine
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