Untwine

  Traces of this story now come to me as I sink deeper under, aided by whatever is being pumped into my veins.

  When I was a baby, I never cried at all. When I was one and just learning to walk, I’d bump into things and not even wince. When I had my first ear infection at two, it didn’t bother me at all.

  It was the only time I had written myself on paper, even fictionally, as an only child. Sure, I had fantasized about it, imagining that I’d get two of everything if Isabelle wasn’t there, twice as much of my parents’ time and attention, twice the amount of clothes and toys.

  Our parents never tried to morph us, though. The only time we dressed alike was when we played dress-up and turned ourselves into identical princesses. Otherwise we are wearing different outfits in all our childhood pictures. Even when friends and family members gave us matching dresses, Mom and Dad would make sure that we wore them on different days. We never merged our names, either (Gisabelle), like some twins do, even though we have identical voices, which are impossible to tell apart on the phone.

  At school, Mom and Dad always asked that we be put in different classes so we could have our own sets of friends. They didn’t want us to spend all of our school hours using twin speak. Over time we each developed our own interests. We tried, for the most part, to be our own people.

  But now I don’t even know how Isabelle is feeling. I don’t even know whether she’s alive. Our bodies were shaken up in different ways. Our minds might have been, too. I can’t seem to stay focused on a single thought.

  I’m turning into my namesake, Grandma Sandrine, before she died. Grandma Sandrine had forgotten Mom and Dad and Aunt Leslie, but occasionally she’d still remember Isabelle and me.

  When she became sick, Grandma Sandrine, who’d been a nurse’s aide most of her life, decided she was a painter. At first she was horrible at it, just randomly throwing paint on the canvas and trashing her apartment in the process. But eventually, her canvases started to make a little bit of sense. She stacked up more than twenty-five of them. Later, we found out that her sudden creative urges came from the fact that part of her brain—the prefrontal cortex—was disappearing. Even though it was taking away her memory, this disease had made her an artist, until she couldn’t stand up or even sit up long enough to paint anymore.

  Once, when she was super medicated, Grandma Sandrine told Isabelle and me that Haiti produced so many artists and so much art that the art spilled over into nature and traveled in people’s veins. Grandma Sandrine just hadn’t realized that she was one of those people with acrylics, oils, and a color palette in her blood.

  Grandma Sandrine’s canvases are now in our garage. Isabelle likes to say that it wasn’t the brain disease or Grandma Sandrine’s Haitian veins that gave her that final rush of creativity. It was knowing she was going to die. This finally released the artist who’d been trapped inside of her while she was raising Mom and Aunt Leslie on her own.

  Isabelle knew before everyone else that Grandma Sandrine was going to die. Just as sitting in that car before the crash, each of us knew, in our own way, that our little fortress was crumbling. Not in the way it turned out, but in some other way that also seemed beyond repair. And now I’m learning that the person who’d shattered it meant to hurt us.

  What can I tell the policewoman about that? Do I know something, many things, that, as with Grandma Sandrine, have slipped my mind?

  I am trying very hard to hold on to the surface, trying hard to keep my head above water, trying against all odds to remember. But if by chance I can’t hold on, if by chance I can’t surface, I wonder if Grandma Sandrine will be at the other end of things, waiting for me. Will Isabelle? Mom and Dad?

  The day of Grandma Sandrine’s funeral, I found one of Isabelle’s short stories next to the sink, in the bathroom she and I share. At the top of the page, Isabelle had scribbled with a red marker, “To Be Put to Music One Day.”

  The story was called “The Language of the Palms.”

  On a lovely green block, two identical palm trees (Palm A and Palm B) often whispered to one another, especially when there was a breeze. Sometimes the people on the street could hear them whooshing in the wind, but since the people didn’t speak the language of the palms, they didn’t understand what they were saying. One day, the palms switched places, and no one noticed …

  Isabelle never got to put those words to music. She either lost interest or discovered that she couldn’t.

  Am I remembering all of this alone? Or is Isabelle remembering with me?

  PAIN, SO MUCH pain.

  Flesh exploding pain.

  Pins and needles pain.

  Fiery hot pain.

  Cold pain.

  Hammer pounding on your head pain.

  Hammer pounding on your bones pain.

  Star-blinding pain.

  Pain that makes it impossible to even scream.

  The most painful thing about this kind of pain is that you never know how long it’s going to last. Somehow, when you’re right in the middle of it, your whole body feels locked in, as though the pain is going to last forever.

  I want to be under, way under, in a dark but pain-free world. In a class full of beautiful paintings and beautiful boys. I want to be at all sixteen of the birthday parties that Isabelle and I have had, at all the wonderful vacations we’ve had with our parents, at all the first days of school, at all the church services, even the ones we found so boring. At all the swimming and tennis classes, at all the art and creative writing camps. I want to be home with Mom and Dad and Isabelle and Dessalines. I want to be back in my life, even when it was starting to fall apart.

  I’m in a different room when I wake up this time. This room has a bunch of glass bricks on the wall, filtering the light through.

  I catch a word, a phrase, here and there. Heart rate. Blood pressure. Even though I’m not always sure where it’s coming from. The words begin to merge like a song. Heart rate. Blood pressure. Lazarus.

  “Lazarus” doesn’t fit somehow until I realize that our minister, Pastor Ben, must have come through at some point when I was under. The only thing Pastor Ben likes more than his cotton guayabera shirts is to pull on his long white beard and talk about Lazarus.

  Pastor Ben’s eggplant-colored face, with the shock of silver hair that tops it and the matching silver beard that frames it, swings in and out of my view.

  I hear him say something about twenty-four hours, then Lazarus. Has it been twenty-four hours already? Is he calling me Lazarus? After the man who came back from the dead? Wasn’t there ever a girl who came back from the dead? A set of twins? An entire family?

  I can’t remember now the last time I saw Pastor Ben. It might have been the Sunday before.

  Or the one before that.

  On the most recent Sunday, Dad was away, so we skipped church. Mom didn’t like the idea of showing up at church just the three of us, without Dad.

  Mom, Isabelle, and I had the croque-madame special at Café de l’Amour, the French bistro near our house. Then we went to the Bass Museum on Miami Beach to see an exhibit of pentimento paintings.

  I remember the day Mr. Rhys introduced our class to pentimento paintings. I fell in love immediately. Beyond the image on the surface of the painting, there was also an old image you could still see. It was as if the artist wanted you to know that nothing came out perfect. Something had been there first, then had been erased, though not all the way.

  In Italian, pentimento means “repentance,” Mr. Rhys had told us. In painting over his or her old work, the artist was not just repainting, but also repenting.

  Because I knew they would love it, too, I spat out all this information to Mom and Isabelle at the Bass Museum that Sunday afternoon. They were just as excited as I was, looking for buried images in the paintings.

  Mom said that the paintings were playing hide-and-seek with us. Kash kash liben, as she called it in Creole. In some cases, the top image had nearly disappeared and what was underneath, the under draw
ing, became the main painting. Other times, the images merged, creating something totally unexpected.

  An elephant crawling out of someone’s heart.

  A woman’s face as a tombstone.

  Lazarus. Lazarus. Lazarus.

  Pastor Ben must have been standing there in the room with the glass bricks, saying something to me.

  Now Aunt Leslie, the policewoman with the star on her chest, Pastor Ben, Mom, Dad, and Isabelle are all pentimento.

  If I could paint a bunch of pentimento paintings, they would show Aunt Leslie sobbing while standing on top of the policewoman’s star. They would show Pastor Ben praying for me to a God that I could probably reach out and touch now, since I feel so far from actual people, and so close to the unknown. They would show me and Isabelle and Mom and Dad inside Dad’s SUV. My pentimento paintings would all show me with the people I love, slipping in and out of view, with people who are trying hard to hold on to me while I’m fighting not to let go.

  In the hospital room, I try to take in as much as I can. Before I slip under, I hear someone say that I was moved out of the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit because I have a concussion but no life-threatening internal injuries, no broken bones. Then all those other injuries—the fractures, the contusions and lacerations, the tube, the missing teeth—must have been Isabelle’s and hers alone.

  Once, when we were around five or six, a much bigger (and dumber) park playmate shoved us together so he could “mash us into one person.” Before our parents could intervene, Isabelle threw her body in front of mine and said, superhero-like, “Don’t worry, Giz, I’ll protect you.” She then returned the boy’s shove, made a fist, reached up, and punched the boy smack in the middle of his chin. In her mind, Isabelle always had to stand between me and danger.

  Seems like she had protected me again.

  The things I do remember are what’s keeping me on the surface. Happy or sad, these memories are mine. They are what I want to go back to when I am well again. If I am ever truly well again. This must also be true for Isabelle. How could it not be? Our lives began with one cell. We are almost the same person. So if I am alive, she must be, too.

  At least the pain is dying down. On a scale from one million to a billion—as Dr. Rosemay, our pediatrician, used to ask Isabelle and me before going to the usual one to ten range—I went from about a billion to a million.

  Sometimes, lying there, I hear the faint sound of a female newscaster, either coming from the nurses’ station, or from one of the rooms nearby. The occasional between-stations static makes it sound more like a radio than a TV. I try to concentrate on the calm, even-toned newscaster’s voice to hear whether something will be said about my family or me. I only learn that it is Saturday night, eighty degrees, partly cloudy, with a 25 percent chance of showers.

  The next time I’m awake, the male nurse who’s checking my IV stops now and then to look at the glass bricks on the walls. He has a scratchy voice even as he is mumbling to himself. And it seems that I’m drifting off again, because all of a sudden, I feel his hand on the tips of my fingers and he’s gently shaking them the way someone might nudge a person who’s nodding off in class, or at church.

  “Isabelle.” He calls me by my sister’s name. “Try to keep those eyes open.”

  I open my mouth out of shock, but it must seem to him like I am yawning. Some drool drips past the side of my mouth and makes it onto the front of my hospital gown. The rest he quickly catches with a napkin, and I can’t help but feel very small, like a baby.

  My mouth does have teeth. I still have all my teeth.

  “Isabelle.” The male nurse says it again. Then I realize that he thinks I’m my sister. He thinks I’m Isabelle.

  This has happened to me all my life, but nowhere and at no time is it more important not to be mistaken for Isabelle. At no time is it more important for her to be her. And for me to be me.

  He thinks I am Isabelle. How do I tell him who I am when no words are coming out of my mouth?

  I wish he’d say something else. Something clarifying like “Keep your eyes open and stay alive because your family is alive and is waiting for you.” Or “Keep your eyes closed because you’re the only one left.” Why won’t he just explain everything to me? I can’t ask. The crash has taken my voice away. And now this nurse thinks I am Isabelle. Does Aunt Leslie think so, too?

  Maybe I’m the one who’s all turned around and I actually am Isabelle. Maybe it’s all part of having this concussion. How do I even know for sure that I’m not Isabelle?

  I look down and try to move my arms. They are as black and blue as a stormy sky. I try to clench my jaws as the nurse wipes more drool off my face.

  I want my body to be a life raft back to my family, and back to my sister, the real Isabelle, who may be somewhere out there, wounded, worried, confused. Just like I am.

  AUNT LESLIE’S BACK. This time she’s not wearing her doctor’s coat. Instead, she’s crying. Her body’s shaking, unable to remain still. Her pretty fingernails are down to nubs.

  Usually I would praise my own attention to detail, but there are no details. Only large, massive things are happening. The way Aunt Leslie’s mumbling to herself, though, makes me feel like we’d been talking for a while and I’ve forgotten some of the things she’s said.

  Aunt Leslie has always known Isabelle and me so well. She’s even wearing our favorite color, an indigo blue dress with sheer short sleeves. She’s beautiful, like Mom is beautiful, but in a more reserved way. When they were little, people used to call her and Mom “les bonnes soeurs,” or “the nuns.”

  All that crying could not be for me alone. She must know that I would know this. I breathe in her expensive lavender-scented perfume as she walks over to the bed. I’m surprised I can still smell. I’m glad I can still see, though my head feels too heavy to move.

  My whole body can’t move. I can’t speak, but I can see Aunt Leslie and the glass bricks on the walls. Seeing the filtered light form a halo around her reminds me of her early sixteenth birthday present to Isabelle and me, a trip to a monarch butterfly sanctuary with her and Mom and Dad.

  The monarch sanctuary was high in the mountains of Central Mexico, at the entrance to a pine forest, full of butterfly-covered fir and eucalyptus trees. Isabelle and I had always been fascinated by monarch butterflies. Most of our elementary and middle school projects were about them. But when we got near the butterfly trees, the flapping wings sounded like buzz saws in our ears and we both started sneezing nonstop, scaring hundreds of them away.

  The Aztecs, whose land we were standing on, believed that the monarch butterflies were the spirits of dead children returned to life. It was all too much for us to take up close.

  Back at the bed-and-breakfast where we were staying, we both broke out in hives all over our arms and legs.

  “Thank God we have a doctor with us,” Mom said.

  It turned out we weren’t the first people to be allergic to a monarch typhoon. The B&B had everything from EpiPens to Benadryl. Aunt Leslie prescribed Benadryl.

  Later that night, even after taking the Benadryl, we couldn’t fall asleep. When Isabelle finally did, I dreamed that I’d turned into a butterfly-covered fir. Isabelle did, too. We’d both been so excited about the trip and the possibility of seeing all the butterflies. Our monarch fantasies had turned into nightmares.

  When we woke up the next morning, we were already on to our next favorite thing in the guidebook, another one of our common passions: cathedrals. We asked to visit one of our grandfather’s favorite places, the sixteenth-century cathedrals of Guanajuato, a wish that, given our blisters and swollen faces, Aunt Leslie and our parents were happy to oblige.

  We liked the cathedrals a lot more than the monarchs. We liked the way the outside towers loomed over us, as though they were built to make the rest of the world feel small. We liked the way the light traveled through the stained-glass windows to create a golden glow. We liked the hundreds of tiny candles, each representing a person
’s deepest desires. We liked watching people bow, then cross themselves, then dab their faces with a bit of holy water, the water of life. We liked wowing Mom and Dad and Aunt Leslie with everything Grandpa Marcus had taught us about cathedrals. We liked experiencing all of this together.

  In the hospital room, my necklace is now hanging on a tack on the dark green wall across from me.

  Is it Sunday morning?

  What was this thing they always said on all the police shows? The more time passes without news, the more likely an outcome you don’t want to have.

  “Isabelle,” Aunt Leslie says. “I know you have many questions.”

  So Aunt Leslie does think I’m Isabelle.

  I’m not Isabelle, I want to scream. I am Giselle.

  Though why does it even matter?

  It seems as if she’s going to tell me something important. Like maybe she will finally tell me about my family.

  “Isabelle,” she says, the melodic voice and her lavender perfume blending into some worldly “je ne sais quoi” irresistible essence that one day I want to have.

  “Isabelle … don’t want … worry … parents … because … okay,” I hear her say.

  I’m not catching every word immediately. The words must travel a little, then echo back before they fully sink in. I have to piece them together. Otherwise they’ll all be lost like so many words must have already been lost on me. So many doctors’ visits. Pastor Ben’s visits and who knows who else.

  So I don’t have to worry about my parents, because they’re okay? But why haven’t they come to see me?

  “Know … wondering … where … you are?”

  You bet I’m wondering where I am, I want to say.

  “Children’s wing … Jackson. Parents … same hospital … across … the bridge … adult wing.”

  So I am still in Miami. My parents are in the same hospital but across some kind of bridge. She must mean across the walkway, the one that joins the adult part of the hospital to the children’s wing. Either Mom or Dad drives us under that walkway almost every single day on our way to and from school. I never thought of it before as a possible lifeline, a bridge, between wounded parents and their children.