In my case they keep asking, “How are we doing today, Isabelle?”
I AM NOT ISABELLE.
I AM GISELLE!
How can I let them know that I’m not Isabelle? Or what if I am Isabelle and don’t realize it? What if I’m the one who’s wrong? What if I’m the one who’s confused?
No, I don’t fully understand all the medical jargon, but I still know some very Giselle things. These are things I think a lot about, but that Isabelle wouldn’t give a second thought to, if she didn’t invade my brain sometimes.
I force myself to remember how much the earth weighs— 6.6 sextillion short tons. I think of the names of at least twenty-five of the presidents that came before the current president of the United States. Trying to remember the Pythagorean theorem makes my brain throb. I also retreat to mental pictures of things I’ve drawn, most of which I’ve saved in sketch pads at home.
Many of my sketch pads are filled with drawings of my family, especially of Isabelle, either playing her flute or swimming. Looking at Isabelle made my body feel a lot less mysterious to me. It was my only way of knowing what my body looks like not just from front and back, but from every possible angle. Having her with me also meant having a kind of loudspeaker for my thoughts, even before they came to me.
The week before the crash, Dad was in Honduras interviewing people for some asylum cases his law firm was working on. Mom, Isabelle, and I were standing in the cereal aisle in the middle of the Publix supermarket near our house in Midtown Miami when Mom suddenly began to cry.
At home, while we were putting the groceries away, we heard Mom still sobbing on the phone. She was talking to Tina’s mom, Mrs. Marshall, who is a social worker and thus very used to hysterics.
“It’s all beyond my comprehension,” Mom told Mrs. Marshall. “I thought I was doing okay.”
We unpacked all the groceries while Mom sat at the kitchen table near the sliding door that overlooked the backyard. In the dark, we couldn’t see the pool or the garden that Mom and Dad had planted together, the banana and papaya trees, and the row of sugarcane near the date palm, mango, avocado trees, and flower beds.
When she hung up with Mrs. Marshall, Mom stumbled over to the bedroom she and Dad had shared, before he’d moved into one of the guest rooms. She hadn’t made the bed since he left and wouldn’t let Josiane, our cleaning lady, make it, either.
Mom climbed on top of the crumpled sheets and curled herself into a ball.
“What am I doing?” Mom asked Isabelle and me, while pulling a dirty sheet over her head.
Dad called us that night from Honduras. Still lying in the unmade bed, Mom smiled from ear to ear, pretending she was okay. At times during the conversation, she lowered her voice to say some things to him that she didn’t want us to hear. Other times, she stayed quiet to listen to what he had to say.
Isabelle and I got in the bed with Mom and pressed our ears against her chest to listen to her heart’s reaction to whatever it was that Dad was saying.
“I spoke to Vee,” Mom told him.
Mrs. Marshall’s first name was Vera, but both my parents called her Vee.
“Vee still thinks we’re making a big mistake again,” Mom said.
She then handed the phone to Isabelle and said, “Go ahead, girls, say a few words to your father.”
Before they’d announced their separation, whenever Dad was away, it was always a struggle to pull the phone away from Mom, but that night she wanted to end the conversation quickly.
When it was our turn to speak to Dad, Isabelle put the phone on speaker. We listened for the hurt in Dad’s voice, yet his voice was strong and firm, just as it’s always been.
“How are you and your sister really doing?” he asked.
Isabelle and I were both angry at him.
“How do you think we’re doing?” Isabelle snapped. She wasn’t just speaking for us at that moment, she was also speaking for Mom.
“Girls!” Mom called out, as though she could read both our minds.
Isabelle and I had both hoped to make Dad feel too guilty to leave us for good.
“You were both way out of line,” Mom shouted, even though I hadn’t said a word.
“No, you and Dad are out of line,” I shouted back.
That night, Isabelle and I slept in the unmade bed with Mom. We tried to get used to the idea that it would eventually be just the three of us in the house. The only thing we were wrong about was just which three it would be.
In the car, while driving us to school the next morning, Mom looked like she was already at the end of her day. Her white T-shirt was wrinkled and her jeans had quarter-size lipstick smudges from one of her jobs at the local TV station where she made up the anchors’ faces. Still, she managed to give us each a quick forehead kiss before we ran inside the school.
I felt like sneaking out of the building and skipping school that day. I was about to ask Isabelle to play hooky and come to the movies with me, like we’d done a few times, but one of the hall monitors noticed us and called out, “You’re late! You’re late!”
Isabelle and I waved goodbye to each other before running down the hall in opposite directions.
When I got to my homeroom, everyone was already seated and Madame Blaise, who doubles as both my homeroom and French teacher, was taking attendance. Isabelle’s friend Lois, who sits at the desk in front of me, was doing last-minute homework and chewing her gum way too loud. Lois is first chair for flute in the school orchestra. Isabelle is second flute. Lois and Isabelle have been friends since we were in middle school.
“Giselle, t’es en retard,” Madame Blaise called from behind her desk at the front of the room. Just as she might even if I were to show up now in my hospital gown.
Madame Blaise was the only teacher who pronounced my name like it was meant to be pronounced. She pronounced it Jee-Zell, rather than Jay-Zale, the way almost everyone else did. Madame Blaise once told me that Giselle, the ballet about a peasant girl who loses the man she loves, then dies of a broken heart, was one of her favorites.
Mom and Dad had taken Isabelle and me to see that ballet one summer when we were visiting Uncle Patrick in New York. We’ve seen pictures of ourselves sitting in our front-row seats, Isabelle in a pink, rose-petal-hemmed ballerina dress and me in a burgundy one. We both held our programs up for the camera. Neither of us remembers seeing the ballet. We might have slept through it. We were four years old.
Isabelle and I once looked up her name in a baby book. Next to her name were the words “loyal to God.”
“With a name like that, I should be a nun,” she said.
Here we were, the one who didn’t like dance named for a brokenhearted dancer and the one who was supposed to be faithful, standing on the margins between faith and disbelief.
We might have even been looking at her name in the baby book when she said that she was standing on the margins between faith and disbelief.
“Where’d you hear that?” I asked her. “And what does it mean anyway?”
“It means we can believe whatever we want,” she said.
After graduating from middle school, Isabelle and I decided to make a time capsule. We bought a plastic storage bin with a tight lid and filled it with all kinds of things, including our school caps and gowns and diplomas.
“What are we going to use middle school diplomas for anyway?” she said.
We also put in copies of family pictures from the time we were babies, copies of pictures of our parents holding us before we could walk on our own, both of them looking equally sleep deprived and exhausted.
We threw in some old CDs of our favorite songs—everything we used to blast in our rooms: rhythm and blues and hip-hop for me, and world music, gospel, and classical for Isabelle. We also put in some of the books we loved, the Nancy Drew mysteries, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Frankenstein, Little Women, and Alice in Wonderland.
I made a sketch of the two of us swimming, and we took the extra step of putting that
in a plastic bag and pressing it between our copies of Seventeen and Essence magazines. We were also supposed to write letters to the future.
Dear Future, mine began.
My name is Giselle and I am a twin. My twin’s name is Isabelle. My parents’ names are David and Sylvie Boyer. My best friend’s name is Tina Marshall.
Boring stuff.
Dear Future, Isabelle’s read.
Please stun me.
Astound me.
Flabbergast me.
Delight me.
Amaze me.
Astonish me!
She also copied a few pages from her journal, a series of short “To Be Put to Music One Day” entries I was never allowed to see.
On the container lid, she wrote with a fat permanent marker, “Not to be opened until the year 3000, when Isabelle and Giselle Boyer are long gone.”
That night while our parents were asleep, we went outside and with their gardening shovels dug a hole big enough to actually bury our time capsule, not just put it in the ground with a layer of dust on top.
I want to believe that I can go home, sneak out of bed, and feel my way through the dark with Isabelle next to me. We’d pick up our parents’ shovels and dig up the dirt, still muddy from the sprinklers. This time, we wouldn’t muffle our laughter or dive behind the bushes when the motion sensor lights came on. And her hands would still be there to reach for me when my feet would catch on weeds or vines.
But I couldn’t dig up that time capsule anyway. It was buried deeper into the earth by the construction people when our pool was put in a couple of years ago.
I THINK I’M dreaming when Mom and Dad are wheeled into the hospital room the next day. The bed is raised to what I’ve started calling the daytime half-sitting angle when Mom comes through the door. Then Dad.
Aunt Leslie is pushing Mom’s wheelchair and Uncle Patrick is pushing Dad’s. Both Mom and Dad are wearing hospital gowns, matching light blue ones, just like the one I have on. Mom is sitting with her feet resting on the wheelchair’s footplates.
Dad’s left leg is stretched out in front of him, a cast rising from his ankle to slightly above the knee and another one from his left shoulder down to his wrist. He is most hurt on his left side, where the car slammed into us. Isabelle was sitting behind him. Mom and I, it seems, were on the good side, or at least the better side, of things.
Mom edges forward as if to jump out of the chair, but instead she nearly folds in two, and when she raises her head again she’s grimacing in pain.
Dad motions for Uncle Patrick to push his chair next to hers, and Dad reaches out and uses his good hand to take Mom’s hand in his, in a way that reminds me of how they used to hold hands when Isabelle and I were little, almost like they didn’t even realize they were doing it. Maybe it’s because they’re upright now, but they don’t look as bad as they did in the pictures. Dad’s face is not a pincushion after all. Mom’s buzz cut looks just as bad. Her forehead is covered with a bandage the size of a dollar bill.
Mom looks over at Dad and he holds her gaze, too, and a million words seem to flow between them, at a speed and in a language that no one else in the room can possibly understand. Their way of communicating is a lot like Isabelle’s and mine. Speaking out loud isn’t always necessary. A single touch, a glance from Dad can always calm Mom down.
“You have to avoid sudden movements like that. Your bruised ribs can’t take all that yet,” Aunt Leslie tells Mom.
Mom’s main issue seems to be the cut across her forehead and her bruised ribs. Based on the plaster, it looks like Dad’s left arm and leg are broken.
“Are you ready?” Uncle Patrick asks Dad.
Dad tries very hard to keep a single expression on his face, one that maybe he thinks will be comforting to everyone in the room, including me. He’s trying to look strong, army strong, “stop bleeding and keep marching” strong, but as Uncle Patrick wheels him forward, his face crumples and he puts up too much of a fight with his tears.
I want to jump out of the bed and run to him, to both him and Mom. I want to wrap my arms all the way around them and never let go again. But like my dad’s leg, I am now cumbersome, heavy.
Uncle Patrick pushes Dad’s wheelchair as close to my bed as possible. Mom slowly rises from hers, puts her hospital sock–covered feet on the ground, and begins walking towards me. Aunt Leslie holds her hands out behind Mom’s back, as if to catch her should she fall.
Mom stops next to Dad. She gently rubs her palm against the top of his head, something she did more often when he used to shave his entire head bald, before he started letting it grow an inch or so.
“You shouldn’t be on your feet,” Dad says.
“No, you shouldn’t be on your feet,” she says and smiles. Her voice sounds hoarse, probably from all the screaming in the car. And maybe even more screaming after that. After learning about Isabelle.
“Oh, I get it,” Dad says, looking down at his cast.
Maybe these were their first words to each other since the crash, since even before giving each other the silent treatment in the car. But that couldn’t be. They must have talked about Isabelle. I wonder if they also think I’m Isabelle.
Every now and then Isabelle and I would trick our parents for fun. At church or at a party, we’d go into the bathroom and change our clothes, everything down to our shoes and the scrunchies in our hair.
We’d giggle endlessly while doing this, even as Isabelle was making fun of my body odor. I wonder if our parents, or anybody else, knew that our bodies had different smells.
Isabelle most often smelled like ginger and sometimes like the beach. No matter how hard I tried to fight it and wash it away, every now and then I would smell like sour milk. After we’d changed into each other’s clothes, we’d wait for our parents to figure out what we had done. They never did.
We never went as far as sitting in on each other’s classes, or taking each other’s tests, but people thought we did anyway.
Two years ago, we punished a boy. His name was Joseph and he was the church youth choir director’s nephew. He lived in Guadeloupe, where he was some kind of track star and was in their equivalent of junior year of high school. He’d come to Miami for a few months to learn English.
Isabelle and I would see him at choir rehearsal every Saturday, and he’d sing with the choir on Sundays. He was actually a decent singer, a good baritone. He thought he was being slick and asked us both out.
One Saturday evening, after choir rehearsal, we followed him down the church hallway and cursed him out in stereo. He was so shocked he never spoke to either of us again.
After that night, Isabelle and I made a pact. We would never let a guy come between us.
She made me pinkie swear.
“Sisters before dudes,” she said.
I wonder if Joseph has heard about what happened. Is he now mourning Isabelle? I mean me.
This would be a good time to tell my parents about Isabelle and me having sometimes switched places to mess with them just a little. This is when I could say, I’m not playing now. This is for real. I’m not Isabelle. I’m Giselle.
Then, just as I am thinking this, I hear Mom shriek. She’s breathing real hard and trying to get the words out.
“We made a mistake. A terrible mistake,” she says.
“What is it?” Aunt Leslie asks her.
“Calm down, Sylvie,” Dad says.
Mom leans over the bed railing. Her face is so close to mine that I can feel the warm spittle from her mouth spraying down on my face. Aunt Leslie and Alejandra try to pull her back so she can stop pressing her rib cage against the bed’s railing.
“That’s not Izzie!” Mom is shouting now. “This is not Isabelle. It’s Giselle.”
“What do you mean?” Dad shouts back.
Dad motions for Uncle Patrick to push his wheelchair even closer to where my head is. He takes me in, the swollen face and the body that won’t move.
I imagine myself nodding, encouragin
g him, encouraging all of them to see me. I try to make my unmoving body stir, to show them a sign. I pretend that I can smile, even though I know my mouth isn’t moving. I move my eyelids quickly, blink as much as possible.
Mom takes a few steps backwards and slides into her wheelchair.
“What are you saying?” Uncle Patrick asks her.
He, too, is trying to get a better look at my face.
“That’s Giselle,” Mom says without looking up.
“How can you be sure?” Aunt Leslie asks.
“How can you not be?” Mom says.
That’s right, I want to say. You go, Mom! How could they not know who I am?
“Dave?” Uncle Patrick asks, seeking a second opinion from Dad.
“It’s Giz,” Dad says.
“You think?” Mom says, her sarcasm, which Isabelle inherited more than I, thankfully still intact.
“How do you tell them apart?” Aunt Leslie asks.
I never thought Aunt Leslie had trouble telling us apart. Either she’d been very good at faking it or we had always given her great clues.
“The little line from the stitches on her forehead,” Mom says. “From that fall down the stairs at school.”
“I don’t see it,” Dad says.
“How can you not see it?” Mom says. “Of course, you’ve been spending so little time at home. How would you even know?”
Are Mom and Dad now turning back into the couple they have been the past few weeks, the one whose every habit bothered the other, the one who’s separating?
“We have to ask them to change the records,” Mom says. “This is Giselle, not Isabelle.”
“It’s Giselle,” Dad says, now sounding sure. Still, his whole body recoils. He begins coughing, loudly, painfully, the way Mom was coughing in the car during the crash, and when he stops coughing, he says, “They each have a black dot behind their ears, but on opposite sides. Look behind her ear and it’s probably going to be on the right side.”