I imagine Aunt Leslie saying similar things to my parents. Thinking that I am Isabelle, she’d probably say, “David, Sylvie, I don’t want you to worry about Isabelle.”
But what about the real Isabelle?
Aunt Leslie’s moving away, the scent, the voice slipping away without her saying anything about Isabelle.
And that’s when I know.
She doesn’t have to say it.
Isabelle is gone.
Isabelle is dead.
Maybe it’s because things are becoming clearer, but I can hear her more clearly, too, even as she moves farther away from me and begins to cry again.
“Oh my God, oh my God!” Her head is bobbing up and down. Her words sound like real pleas to God, not just declarations of her astonishment.
My sister, Isabelle, is dead. And somehow everyone’s thinking that I am her. So they’re thinking I’m dead.
“Isabelle,” Aunt Leslie is saying now. She’s slipping back into doctor mode. “They did everything possible for Giselle. Just like they did for you and your parents. But she had some terrible head and neck injuries. She was broken.”
Too broken for me to even feel?
I’m now grateful for the day or two that I didn’t know the truth. But now Aunt Leslie thinks knowing the truth is better.
I can’t even cry. I can’t make tears. But rather than wanting to coil up in a ball—something I couldn’t physically do anyway—rather than wanting to stay there and die, rather than wanting to close my eyes and sink deeper under, I imagine myself shedding my own skin and walking away to wherever Isabelle is and holding her hand.
How could I not have known? Maybe I didn’t want to know. Maybe I needed to not know.
“Isabelle.” Aunt Leslie is standing with her back to me. Too sad, maybe, to look at me. She’s looking at the glass bricks on the wall.
I can tell from the way some tree branches sway behind the glass that right outside are treetops, green, healthy treetops. We are on the second or third floor of the building. There is a world outside. Sun. Trees. Clouds. People are going about their lives, just as we had been. They’re thinking that nothing bad can ever happen to them.
I am now in some place that feels like the VIP section of the hospital ward, a place that, if I knew exactly where I was, might signal to me that I am already getting better. And hearing Aunt Leslie call me by my sister’s name is now comforting me. As long as everyone thinks that Isabelle is me, then Isabelle is also getting better. She is still here, in this room, in the world.
“I’m so sorry, Izzie,” Aunt Leslie says with her back still turned to me.
I can tell that she’s on the verge of telling me more that she’s not supposed to. The way she told Isabelle and me about sex some years back, about it being something that happened between a man and a woman, rather than between bees and birds. We were nine years old then and were mostly unsure of what she was talking about. But somehow we couldn’t imagine our father pollinating our mother, either.
Aunt Leslie is about to become my confidante again. I can feel it. She walks back to my bedside, then grabs my hand. She holds on too tight, but I welcome her grip. I don’t want her to let go.
“Izzie,” she says. “You’re in there, I can tell. When you wake up, you’ll be okay. You just have to try a little bit harder now.”
This sounds more like a wish than a medical opinion. She seems to be hoping that lying here with a bruised brain is all that is wrong with me, that I will be myself again as soon as I wake up. But why wake up when Isabelle won’t be here?
I will never see Isabelle again, except maybe when I look in the mirror and pretend, just as everyone is saying, that I am her, and she is me. Who would I be? Who could I be without her? Who would I watch different versions of Little Women with?
“I’m to be a famous musician myself, and all creation is to rush to hear me.” We would always shout along with whichever actor was playing Laurie.
Then Jo: “I want to do something splendid before I go … and mean to astonish you all someday.”
We didn’t need to say these lines out loud. We both knew that’s how Isabelle felt, that’s who she wanted to be, someone who would do something incredible one day, someone who would put words, pictures, feelings to music in a way that no one had ever done before, someone who would astonish the world.
I will never see her put her crazy, unfinished fables to music. I will never again hear her talk about the types of music that few kids our age were into: strings, jazz, new age, opera. How could I even be here when she is gone? How could I not have felt her leaving me?
Maybe she died in the car before they pulled us out? Maybe she died when her head hit the side window? When the flute case kept banging into her?
“Isabelle, you’re very lucky,” Aunt Leslie is saying now. Ever the doctor again. She’s giving me information, telling me things to encourage me, to help me wake up.
Lucky?
How could I be lucky?
Lucky would be to have Isabelle with me.
“Pastor Ben’s right,” she adds. “You’re going to wake up. Like Lazarus.”
Science is her anchor, but when it comes to family she’ll take faith. She’ll take Lazarus. Between my sister and me, I am Lazarus. I have returned from the dead.
But what good was returning from the dead without Isabelle?
“I can’t wait to see what kind of women you two turn out to be,” Dad would randomly exclaim now and then.
Neither one of us knew what kind of women we were going to be. And now Isabelle will never become a woman at all.
I want to become a woman. I have to become a woman. Not just for me, but for Isabelle, too. But my head feels too heavy now. My body is much weaker than my will. I sink under again. It’s the only way I know to escape all this, to avoid having another star explode in my head.
It’s the only way I know to avoid this other kind of pain, the kind for which if I was asked for a number and a level of agony, I would say a sextillion.
LAST CHRISTMAS, MOM and Dad went on a couple’s holiday cruise to Alaska and dropped Isabelle and me off at Uncle Patrick’s, in New York, for the week between Christmas and New Year’s. Uncle Patrick isn’t married but has a longtime girlfriend, a music producer named Alejandra. They live in a twelfth-floor loft in Brooklyn, in a neighborhood called Dumbo, which is short for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. Their building used to be an old paint factory, and from their wraparound wall-to-ceiling windows, you can see the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, as well as the East River and a nearby park.
Half-buried in the cobblestoned streets outside their building are railroad tracks, which were once used by a local train to carry merchandise from the river to some old factories.
“That was a long time ago,” Uncle Patrick told us when we arrived, “before people like us moved in. Back then the immigrants were factory workers, not owners here.”
Still, Uncle Patrick is very proud of the apartment. He loves New York more than any city in the world, even Port-au-Prince, where he was born and which he left with Dad when they were teenagers.
Uncle Patrick had discovered a once-famous rap duo called the Expats, which is made up of a Haitian American brother and sister. The Expats had been most famous when Isabelle and I were little, too young to appreciate their sound or the strong political messages for which they were known.
“They were basically doing the same thing your dad’s been doing since he left the army and started studying law,” Uncle Patrick told us. “They were defending the rights of immigrants.”
During that visit, Uncle Patrick gave us yet another tour of his place—we got a tour each time we went there—and showed us some more recent Expats posters in his home office.
Throughout our stay, we listened nonstop to both of the Expats albums. Their sound was a mix of lively Haitian konpa, reggae, and hip-hop. Though I loved the Expats, Isabelle didn’t like their music.
“They’re no Emelin
e,” she said, citing her favorite bluesy Haitian singer.
During our week in New York, Alejandra was visiting her family in Venezuela, so Isabelle and I saw a lot of New York City with Uncle Patrick. He took us to the Empire State Building to see the city from up high, and, in spite of the cold, we spent hours standing in front of the store windows along Fifth Avenue. We visited the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center, which seemed like it was a hundred feet tall. Then we went ice-skating, or “ice-falling,” as Isabelle called it, in the packed skating rink beneath the plaza. We had front-row seats at the Rockettes show at Radio City Music Hall and to The Nutcracker at Lincoln Center.
We even sat in on a recording session for an up-and-coming group that Uncle Patrick was working with, a multinational teen girl a cappella group he told us was going to be huge but that we’d not heard anything about since.
Our favorite memory, though, was of the New Year’s Eve blizzard. We had never seen so much snow in our entire lives. The snow had begun falling while we were asleep and by the time we woke up, there were a couple of feet of it on the ground.
We went out in front of Uncle Patrick’s building, played snow baseball and made snow angels. Our parents called later that morning as we were thawing out in Uncle Patrick’s apartment. Standing between the two of us, Uncle Patrick looked down at the city blanketed with snow, then at our awestruck faces, and told our parents, “I have never seen them happier.”
But now Uncle Patrick is standing in this room with the glass bricks on the wall. He’s standing there looking down at me in the hospital bed. Alejandra—with her baby face and high cheekbones combo that Uncle Patrick said won him over—is beside him, and they’re both looking down at me with their penny-colored faces. They look like they want to cry.
I wish I was still sitting on Uncle Patrick’s living room couch under a thick wool blanket as he, Isabelle, and I watched the television news on mute and tried to guess, from the words and images in the little box next to the anchor’s head, what the news anchor was talking about. Whenever Alejandra was around, we’d pretend we were voice-over artists while watching nature documentaries, and out of all of us, Alejandra—her voice throaty and well paced—had the best documentary voice.
“I’ve never seen her so sad,” Uncle Patrick is now saying on the phone while looking down at me on the hospital bed.
Who is he talking to? Is it Aunt Leslie? Dad? Mom?
I wish I could talk to Uncle Patrick. I wish he could hear me.
When Uncle Patrick gets off the phone, he walks closer to my face and puts the phone in front of it. The glare from the phone is so bright it reminds me of all the penlights, which are constantly being beamed into my eyes by the different head doctors. I do my best to concentrate, squinting to see better.
Does he want me to say something to the person on the other end of the phone?
He’s trying to show me a picture on his screen.
The screen makes my eyes feel so hot that the light seems to be burning through them, but on it is a close-up of Dad’s post-crash face, which I really want to see.
Dad’s face is turned sideways, so I can only make out one side. From the profile, I can tell that his face is still kind of round, except now his cheeks are drooping a little around his cheekbones. There are little marks, too, all over his cheek, as if it had been poked with an ice pick in half a dozen places. Many of the little dots still look raw, like they’ve just been bleeding. This is probably from the shattered glass, the hundreds of tiny pieces of it that kept coming at us in the car. Small and large specks of glass were flying at us from every direction. At one point, I had to close my eyes. I suppose some of the glass landed on Dad’s face.
I must have avoided some of it because even though I can’t touch my face, I don’t feel what I imagine I might feel if pieces of glass had been buried under my skin. I imagine my face might feel itchy if it had been full of glass. But I am out so much that maybe my face looks exactly like Dad’s and I don’t know it. Maybe even Dad doesn’t realize that his face, or at least half of it, looks like a pincushion.
I wish I could see a picture of Dad’s body. Can he walk? Can he talk? Can he call my name? Isabelle’s name? Mom’s name? Does he remember us?
Mom’s face looks a little bit worse when Uncle Patrick switches to her picture. She’s looking straight into the camera, though. Her head is shaved on one side and there’s a line of stitches across her forehead, about twelve or fifteen of them. A few curls hang where her corkscrew twists used to be, making it look like she’s sporting a Mohawk. She looks as if her forehead has been sewn back together by a mad scientist, like she’s the Bride of Frankenstein.
Aren’t they all mad scientists here, though? These doctors and their students in their white coats and pink and blue scrubs. I am starting to think of them as ducks and ducklings. There are many different ways of putting people back together. They seem to have put Mom back together with staples and stitches.
I had stitches before, once, after tumbling down the steep staircase by the gym at school. I’d cut my forehead four stitches’ worth. While lying there at the bottom of the staircase, waiting for the school nurse to come, I panicked and thought I was going to die. There was so much blood on the floor next to me, I thought there was none left in my head.
“It looks worse than it is,” the nurse said once she cleaned me up. “These kinds of cuts produce a lot of blood.”
But she thought it serious enough to call my parents and have them meet me in the ER, where I would have a head scan.
“Can you get my sister?” I asked the nurse.
I knew that seeing Isabelle would be like seeing a calmer, unwounded version of myself, and that would reassure me.
“I’m still prettier than you,” I joked to Isabelle after a plastic surgeon, at Mom’s insistence, had meticulously sewn up my cut so that it basically healed scarless.
Later, Isabelle told Mom and Dad that she knew I’d be okay when I made my first silly remark about being prettier than her.
If things had turned out even a little differently, we all might crack jokes about Mom’s picture, telling her that at least the Bride of Frankenstein had nice waves in her hair. But all I could think of were the stitches across her forehead.
Uncle Patrick wants me to know that my parents are alive. These pictures must have been taken just for me so I could see them, so I could know they’re still alive.
Soon, Uncle Patrick begins clicking away, too, at my face. I can’t tell what angle he’s aiming for, but I think he’s trying to show me in the best light. He wants them to see the best of me.
He then turns the phone around so I can see myself. My face looks as puffy and uneven as a deflating blimp. My eyes look tiny, my skin ashy. I don’t want to see any more. I close my tiny eyes. I feel like I’m looking at a stranger. Some third person who no longer looks like me or Isabelle.
“Proof of life,” they call it in the kidnapping movies. Uncle Patrick is trying to get proof of life. But there will be no proof of life for Isabelle.
Uncle Patrick doesn’t call me by anyone’s name, so I can’t tell who he thinks I am. But there are no pictures of Isabelle for me to see.
ISABELLE AND I used to want to be detectives when we were younger. We wanted to be like Nancy Drew, going around the world solving crimes.
Now I need amateur detective skills to solve the mystery of my own body. But what I know best is not all the medical jargon, but Isabelle, Mom and Dad, and home. And Dessalines.
Poor Dessalines. I hope Aunt Leslie and Uncle Patrick have found him.
Isabelle was the one who thought we should take in newborn Dessalines after his owner, one of Dad’s clients, lost his asylum case and was deported to Pakistan. Isabelle wanted us to take in the whole litter, as well as the mother, but they were adopted by different people in Dad’s office.
I wonder if Dessalines will understand that Isabelle, like his Dad’s client, has also left him behind. Has he ever been able to
tell Izzie and me apart? How will he react when she doesn’t come home? Will he jump on me, claw my eyes out, peel my skin off, and try to find Isabelle underneath?
No, I don’t understand the small chance of permanent brain damage that I hear the doctor discuss with the dozen or so medical students who walk in and out behind him. I keep hoping each time they poke the bottom of my feet that my toes will wriggle. I keep wishing I could scream, to either give them some hope or make them stop.
The head doctor writes some things down on his iPad, the iPad that holds my file—Isabelle’s file—and he leads the pack out and they follow him like he’s the mother duck and they are ducklings, terrified of getting lost.
After they leave me, I imagine them sitting in a conference room somewhere and talking in heavy medical jargon, about my toes and how they couldn’t make them move. Or maybe they’re saying that it’s going to be impossible to ever make my toes move. Or maybe I’m misunderstanding all of this. Maybe they’ll say that I have “turned the tide,” that I’m better.
Before nightfall, the duck and ducklings gather near my head on the hour, it seems. And my eyes travel from one duckling’s face to the next. The ducklings, the baby doctors, all look so eager, so young. They look only a few years older than Isabelle and me.
Every now and then Aunt Leslie stands there with the ducklings, next to the head duck. Then they walk out of the room together, ahead of everyone else. I feel like a prisoner in one of those movies where someone is being tortured but has to hide it when the congressional delegation comes to visit. Who do I whisper “Help” to if Aunt Leslie has joined them? Who do I pass my SOS note to, saying I want out?
I do want out of this unmoving body. I do want out of this place. I do want my life back. I want my parents back. I want my sister back.
Why haven’t my parents come to see me? Maybe they’re pinned to a bed, while doctors keep coming through. They, too, might be wondering when their toes will wiggle in a way that will make everyone happy. Or maybe they’re also hoping that their voices will surprise them and actually be heard by the doctors who keep asking when they walk in the room, “How are we doing today?”