Untwine

  If this was a different kind of situation, one in which people were allowed to laugh, I would have asked for a drumroll. But we don’t need a drumroll. Both my parents are looking down at the floor as Aunt Leslie flicks my right ear.

  My little bitty dot of a birthmark. Why would they even need to remember it? Mine is behind my right ear and Isabelle’s is behind her left ear. It’s one of the few ways our ­bodies are different. The other way I would have counted on, the different clothes we’d been wearing, had all been removed, erased by the crash. But this, my dot, thankfully was left.

  Alejandra moves closer to have a better look. While our faces are nearly touching, she winks at me like she wants me to know that she’s sure I’m in there, whoever I am.

  “This is definitely La Gemelita Número Dos, Gemelita Giz.”

  Alejandra liked to call Isabelle and me Las Gemelitas. Isabelle was La Gemelita Número Uno, Gemelita Iz, and I was La Gemelita Número Dos, Gemelita Giz. We loved the sound of the words gemelitas or mellizas, which she also sometimes called us.

  At least now they know who I am.

  I feel like I’ve been stranded on a desert island and someone has finally found me.

  “We have to change the records,” Aunt Leslie says.

  All the shouting must have drawn some attention. Finally a redheaded nurse arrives.

  “I’m afraid everyone needs a rest,” she says.

  Aunt Leslie and Uncle Patrick push my parents’ chairs as close to my bed as possible. While both Mom and Dad are looking at me, I know that they’re feeling guilty for having mixed up Isabelle and me at such a crucial time. I know, too, that they want to hold me, just like I want to hold them. I know they want to tell me that everything is going to be all right, that we’re now past the moment when we might have joined Isabelle.

  Still, there’s so much more I want to know. I want them to tell me exactly when Isabelle died. Will there be a funeral? Will I be able to go?

  “I want to give her a kiss,” Mom says.

  The redheaded nurse lowers the bed’s railing, and both Uncle Patrick and Aunt Leslie raise Mom from the wheelchair and carry her, it seems, all the way up to my face.

  Mom’s lips—wet, soft—feel hot against my skin, and that heat spreads throughout the rest of my body. Aunt Leslie and Uncle Patrick then help Mom back into her wheelchair, where she and Dad find themselves side by side. They reach out for each other’s good hands and hold on tight. They must know now that being mad at each other makes no sense. Who else in the world can understand better what the other one is feeling?

  Before Aunt Leslie and Uncle Patrick wheel them away, Dad lets go of Mom and blows me a kiss. “Goodbye, Giselle,” he says. “We will see you soon.”

  How soon? I wonder. Tomorrow? The day after? The day after that?

  ISABELLE AND I used to try to imagine what our parents’ days, especially school days, must have been like in Haiti.

  Our vision of our parents’ past is not totally made up. They had written each other letters when they were students in their first year of high school in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. In the pictures from that time, Mom looks like a fourteen-year-old nun in her long navy skirt and white long-sleeved blouse. In his pictures, Dad is a beanpole, with a hint of a mustache.

  Dad sat next to Mom in class, the year they started writing each other letters. In that class, the students were graded and ranked each week. Mom and Dad always took turns at being second and first.

  One day Dad wrote Mom a letter saying, I can no longer compete with you because I love you.

  Don’t try to distract me, Mom wrote back. My head won’t be turned so easily. I will not be fooled by your tricks.

  Dad: It’s no trick. I love you.

  Mom: What do you know about love? You’re only a boy.

  Dad: I didn’t know much about love before, but I do now. Whether you accept it or not, you’re teaching me both the sweetness and pain of love.

  “So corny.” Isabelle kept rolling her eyes while we read parts of the letters out loud.

  “Beyond corny,” I agreed, even though we both found these younger versions of our parents too cute for words.

  Dad fell behind in his studies.

  It’s your fault. He wrote a bunch of letters to Mom repeating the same thing. I spend so much time thinking about you that I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I can’t study. I can’t live without you.

  “I can’t believe she fell for that stuff,” Isabelle said. Though we might have easily fallen for something like it ourselves.

  I notice you’re losing weight, Mom wrote to follow through. You’re skin and bones already. You can’t afford to lose any more weight. Let it not be said that I not only caused you to be kicked out of school, but caused you to die of starvation as well. I will be your girlfriend.

  Mom has all those letters in a box on the floor of their bedroom closet. Isabelle and I found them one day when Mom sent us to look for an old picture of Dad to turn into an invitation card for his fortieth birthday party.

  Every now and then, when she and Dad aren’t home, Isabelle and I look through those letters and use our French to decode them.

  I let this story of the way our parents fell in love sink under with me.

  I can almost feel the pieces of lined notebook paper they wrote their letters on in my hands. Some of the pages still have dried and flattened begonias glued to them.

  Dad’s letters, the ones with the flowers, are written in red ink in a firm handwriting that looks as though it had been practiced against a ruler. Mom’s words are large and disorderly, as if to show that she couldn’t care less.

  “SO, WE’VE BEEN calling you by the wrong name,” the head neurologist, duck doctor, says in a combo newscaster and game show host voice when he comes through with his line of student duckling interns. Unlike the ducklings, he doesn’t wear scrubs. He’s super well dressed under his white coat, all classic, textured pastel shirts and slim, bold-colored silk ties. From my slanted perspective, though, he still seems to be shaped like a duck, a dabbler, with his head always tipped in one direction or another, but never lined up in the middle.

  As he looks over my chart on his iPad, the head duck doctor starts telling interesting twin stories to the duckling interns.

  There was the woman who gave birth to one black twin and one white one.

  “Can anyone guess what the odds are of this happening even if both parents are biracial?” he asks the duckling interns while shining a light in my eyes for the umpteenth time.

  I want to raise my hand—if only my hand still worked—to offer a guess.

  Umm, let me see. A million to one.

  It’s always safe to go with a million to one for things like this.

  The odds of anything really unusual happening is always a million to one. The odds of my family heading out to a concert one night and ending up three broken and one dead are probably somewhere near a million to one. The odds of Isabelle dying and the rest of us being alive are probably a million to one, too.

  The head duck has now moved on to stories of twins raised apart, across the country, across the world, twins who end up basically living the same life, choosing the same profession, marrying the same kind of person, and having the same number of children, and giving them the same names. The separated twins in the duck doctor’s stories sometimes run into each other accidentally at an amusement park, or sometimes in a hospital ward, where they’re being treated for the same disease. Most of the time, they don’t even realize there’s a carbon copy of them out there until they come face-to-face.

  He then moves on to conjoined twins.

  “I’ve never had the pleasure of treating conjoined twins,” he says. “What would be the likelihood of them walking into this hospital one day and needing our services?”

  Oh me, me, me, I want to scream. Please pick me.

  A million to one! A million to one is the likelihood of conjoined twins walking into this hospital and taking over the be
d I’m in right now. Or would they need two beds?

  “We know that craniopagus twins share a brain, but do they also share a mind?” the head duck asks.

  That particular question is above everyone’s pay grade, including mine, so the head duck tackles it himself.

  “Some believe that identical twins share a single soul, so why wouldn’t sharing a mind be possible for conjoined twins?”

  “You mean the ones who share sensory input and impressions, where you prick one and the other cries?” a female duckling asks.

  “Indeed,” the head duck says. “Now, let’s get back to this patient.”

  Soon after that, I tune out the head duck because he’s offering less and less information I can use. I start paying attention again when he says this: “Don’t be so shy, young lady. We’re all eager to say hello. Old friends as well as new friends like me. You have nothing that a young brain like yours can’t shake off.”

  I know what he’s not saying. My sister took the brunt of it for me, for all of us. So I might as well do my part. I might as well get on with it. I might as well just snap out of it and wake up.

  I want to wake up, but I can’t. Because waking up might mean leaving Isabelle behind forever.

  When the head duck and the ducklings walk out, I’m happy to have some relief from the heat of the flashlight on my pupils, but also the heat of the head duck’s breath on my face. I could tell, for one thing, that he’d just had breakfast. Something sweet, strawberries. Maybe I’m smelling strawberries now after these twins stories because Isabelle loved strawberries. She loved strawberries like I loved Jean Michel Brun.

  In the classroom I imagine myself in that afternoon, Jean Michel Brun is sitting where he always is, between me and my best friend, Tina. He’s doing something he often does, drawing us, or alternate versions of us.

  That afternoon, he draws us in tutus, like ballerinas.

  He passes me a note again.

  DO YOU WANT TO MEET LATER?

  This time I write back.

  Tina’s house?

  Cool, he scribbles at the bottom of the paper.

  Jean Michel, Tina, and I became a trio when we were actually grouped together for an assignment for Mr. Rhys’s class. Tina is Pastor Ben’s granddaughter. She and I have known each other our whole lives. She is the person I take all the same classes with and wear the same kind of clothes with. If Isabelle wasn’t in the same school, people might have called Tina my twin.

  When Tina, Isabelle, and I were together, Tina was just as likely to finish my sentences as Isabelle was.

  Tina and her parents were supposed to meet us at the spring orchestra concert the evening of the crash. We’d agreed that whoever got there first would save seats for the others. Jean Michel was coming to the concert, too, and Tina and I were going to watch out for him.

  Before we left the house, Tina and I had spoken on the phone. I had a cell phone. Where is my cell phone now? Where’s Isabelle’s cell phone? Our phones were in Mom’s purse during the car ride.

  Mom made us give her our phones before we pulled away from the house. She didn’t want us to spend the whole car ride texting. She’d give them back to us after the concert, she said.

  “I’ll see you soon,” I’d told Tina on the cell phone before we left the house.

  “Soon,” she’d said.

  I wonder if Tina has come to see me in the hospital. I wonder if Jean Michel has been at my bedside without me realizing it.

  DO YOU WANT TO MEET LATER?

  Tina’s house!

  Jean Michel, Tina, and I met at Tina’s house for our assignment for Mr. Rhys’s class. They were also working on another assignment for their computer science lab. Even though both Jean Michel and Tina were practically Internet geniuses, Mr. Rhys still insisted that we use index cards for our group presentation.

  When I arrived, the rainbow pack index cards were lined up on Tina’s dining room table next to Jean Michel’s and Tina’s laptops. Our presentation was going to be on Jean Michel’s namesake, Jean-Michel Basquiat.

  I tried to keep my eyes off Jean Michel Brun’s face as we worked, leaning in real close to copy facts off his laptop.

  Did we know that Jean-Michel Basquiat threw a pie in his high school principal’s face? our Jean Michel asked.

  Tina already knew this, but she couldn’t stop laughing. Tina’s laughter is so loud that it’s traveling through time and filling up my hospital room. I think I feel Tina’s always cold hands on top of mine in the hospital room and I see her egg-shaped face leaning down close to mine and I hear her full-of-bells voice telling me something I can’t quite grasp. I think I see Jean Michel, too. I see both of them standing on opposite sides of my hospital bed, trying to help me remember that afternoon at Tina’s house.

  Then I feel Jean Michel’s lips brush against mine, right there in the hospital room. He’s trying to breathe words and pictures into my mouth. My body registers this as not just a jolt, but as a long, slow-motion glide down a waterslide, with Jean Michel right behind me, on a school trip. Or as his open palm grazing my shoulder while he walks to his seat in our classroom. Or those Narcissus-level stares.

  Jean Michel’s lips rest on top of mine for a few seconds, and I do my best to raise my head so the kiss can last longer. So he and I can last longer. But I remain the other Sleeping Beauty, the one who will not be awakened by a kiss.

  “I can’t even imagine being so famous,” Jean Michel said that afternoon at Tina’s house. That’s when I heard his slight stutter for the first time.

  “Obviously your parents could imagine it,” Tina said. “They named you after the other Jean-Michel.”

  “My mom was my age when he died from that drug overdose,” our Jean Michel said. “She was kind of in love with him.”

  Tina bowed her head in deference, as though she wanted to call for a moment of silence for Basquiat’s drug overdose. But then she quickly perked up and added, “If you can’t imagine being that famous, then you’ll never be.”

  “That’s the preacher’s granddaughter speaking,” I said. “Tina’s heard too many sermons.”

  “None that you haven’t heard,” Tina said.

  “You guys go to church?” Jean Michel asked.

  “Almost every Sunday,” Tina said.

  “I’d like to come sometime,” he said. Then I saw him staring at me long and hard for once. He was looking at me like I was the church, the pew, the choir, all of it. He was looking at me like he would be coming to me.

  Tina cleared her throat, then coughed. Jean Michel smiled and looked away.

  “We love having folks at church,” Tina said, sounding for a moment like her grandfather recruiting from his pulpit.

  After Jean Michel left, Tina raised her hand to her forehead and fake swooned.

  “There goes Jean Michel Brun,” she said. “The great and eternal love of your life.”

  MOM COMES BACK to see me the next day.

  She’s alone, without Dad or Aunt Leslie or Uncle Patrick. From the time she’s wheeled through the front door by a super hunky male nurse, she never stops talking.

  “You can come back for me later,” she tells him, waving him off. “I’m going to be here a while.”

  He wheels her as close to my IV pole as possible, then he walks away.

  Mom looks calmer than the last time I saw her, after she realized that I wasn’t Isabelle. Even the bandages across her forehead seem less strange to me now, as though they have become a normal part of her.

  “Leslie had to go back to Orlando for the day,” she says, “to see about one of her critical patients. Seems like we’re not the only critical patients in the world.”

  Yes! Her sarcasm is in full force, what Dad calls her ironic humor. This means that she’s holding up well. She’s getting stronger.

  “I told Patrick and Alejandra to go back to the house and get some rest,” she says. “Soon everyone will have to go back to their lives and it will be just you, me, and Dad.”
r />   Where’s Dad, I wonder. Why hadn’t he come, too?

  “Dad’s in surgery,” she says, her voice rising with real-­sounding cheerfulness. She puts both her hands in her lap, tugging at her hospital gown now and then.

  Dad, in surgery?

  From the chair, she can see my face. She can see all of me, which I imagine is nothing cheerful, though perhaps it might be a bit more hopeful than the alternative. I am alive, after all.

  I imagine, too, that she can read my face, even though it’s impossible for me to move any part of it, impossible for me to speak, to ask questions.

  So she’s sitting there and trying to read me. That’s the only way we can have a conversation now. She’ll have to sit there and try to read my mind.

  “Something was off in your dad’s arm,” she says. “They had to go back and reset the bone.”

  She pauses as if waiting for me to react, as if waiting for me to raise my voice and respond.

  Poor Dad.

  “Poor David,” she says. “He’s lucky he didn’t break more bones.”

  Lucky, lucky. Everyone is so lucky. Everyone except Isabelle.

  “Lucky may not be the right word, uh?” she says.

  So it’s working. She is reading me, understanding me, like Isabelle might if she was sitting there.

  “Dad will be okay,” she says.

  I can tell that she’s doing her best not to bring up Isabelle. But how can she not bring up Isabelle? Every day from now on will be a day without Isabelle, every ordinary day, as well as every special day.

  “My ribs were bruised, but they’re going to heal,” she says. “They tell me I might be able to go home tomorrow. There are no casts for ribs.”

  No casts indeed. But I am starting to understand that some internal injuries are worse than the ones you can actually see.

  “Soon we’ll all, well, the three of us will be able to go home,” she says.

  Does that mean that she and Dad would now stay together? Has something that was meant to kill us, something that’s killed Isabelle, reunited them? Has the crash brought them back together?