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Prologue
Haylee always blamed our mother for everything that happened to us and everything terrible that we had done to each other—or I should say, everything terrible that she had done to me. Many times as we were growing up, she would tell me to my face that whatever hurtful thing she had done wasn’t her fault. It was because our mother wouldn’t let her be her own person. I suppose I should have been a little grateful. At least she was recognizing that whatever it was she had done was wrong.
Don’t misunderstand me. It wasn’t that she was suffering the needle-prick pains of conscience. In fact, I now believe my twin sister might never have felt any despite the agonized look she could put on and take off like a mask. We were not a religious family. Mother never warned either of us that God was watching. She was watching, and she thought that was enough.
I knew in my heart that Haylee was just trying to escape her own responsibility by blaming Mother for things she did herself. No one could shed their guilt like a snake sheds its skin as well as my identical twin. And afterward, she could look as innocent as a rabbit that had just devoured most of the vegetable garden. But that sweetness could turn into a flash of lightning rage when only I was looking at her, even when we were just babies.
One time when we were eleven and our mother wasn’t home and couldn’t hear her, Haylee stood in front of me with her arms tight against her sides, her fingers curled like claws. She stamped her foot and screamed, “I am not you! I’ll never be you! And you will never be me! Whatever you like, I will hate. If I have to, I’ll scar my face just to be different. Or,” she added, thinking more about it, “I’ll attack you when you’re sleeping and I’ll scar yours.”
The cruelty in her eyes stunned me so much I was speechless. She truly sounded as if she hated me enough to do just what she had said. Her threat kept me up nights, and it set the foundation for nightmares in which she would slink beside my bed with a razor between her fingers. To this day, I am certain she did stand by my bed, hovering over me and battling with the urge to act out her vicious promise.
To drive home her point this particular time, she seized the photo of us at our tenth birthday party, the party held in our backyard, where Mother had Daddy arrange for a party tent and had dressed us in identical pink chiffon dresses with pink saddle shoes. Haylee tore the picture into a dozen pieces, which she flushed down the toilet, screaming “Good riddance! If I never hear the word twin again, that will be too soon!” She stood there fuming. I could almost see steam coming out of her ears. My heart was pounding because in our house, saying something like that was like a nun declaring she never wanted to hear the word Jesus.
If I had any doubt that Haylee could get into a great rage without thinking of the consequences, her tearing up our picture should have convinced me, for how would we explain it not being there in our room, prominently displayed on our dresser? She knew I could never tell Mother what she had done. And she could never blame it on me. It was an unwritten rule, or rather, a rule Mother had carved into our very souls: we must never blame each other for anything, for that was like blaming ourselves.
Even if I did tell, it wouldn’t help. Haylee was better than I was when it came to winning sympathy and compassion for herself and justification for any evil or mean act she would commit. I could easily picture her on the witness stand in a courtroom, wringing her hands, tears streaming down her face as she wailed about how much she hadn’t wanted to do what she had done to me. She would look so distraught that she might even have me feeling sorry for her.
After she had calmed herself, she would quietly explain to the jury why our mother should be the one accused, certainly not her. She wasn’t all wrong. Once I was older, I had no doubt that Haylee would be able to find a psychiatrist eager and willing to testify on her behalf. Even back then, I wasn’t going to disagree with her about what our mother had done to us. I wanted to be my own person, too, but I didn’t want to have to hate Haylee the way she felt she had to hate me.
Yes, I would blame our mother, too, for what eventually happened to me, just as Daddy would. And I have no doubt that anyone reading this would agree, but despite it all, I still loved our mother very much. I knew how hurt she would be over what Haylee had done and the things she had said. Her heart would suffer spidery cracks like the face of the porcelain doll her father had given her when she was five. I would hold her hand and I would put my arm around her. I would lean my head against her shoulder, and I would cry with her, almost tear for tear, as she moaned, “What have I done to my precious twins? What have I done?”
1
There was nothing Mother worked harder at than keeping us from differing from each other, even in the smallest ways. From the day we were born, she made sure that we owned the exact same things, whether it was clothes, shoes, toys, or books—we even had the same color toothbrushes. Everything had to be bought in twos. Even our names had to have an equal number of letters, and that went for our middle names, too, which were exactly the same: Blossom. I was Kaylee Blossom Fitzgerald, and my sister was Haylee Blossom Fitzgerald. That was something Mother had insisted on. Daddy told us he hadn’t thought it was very significant at the time, so he’d put up little argument. I’m sure he regretted it later, as he came to regret so much he had failed to do.
Although neither of us had the courage to complain about our names, we both wished they were different. By the time we were sixteen, Haylee had gone so far as to tell people she had no middle name. When anyone looked to me for confirmation, I agreed. That was one of those little ways Haylee gradually got me to oppose things Mother had done. I was the reluctantly rebellious twin practically dragged by my hair into the fiery ring of defiance.
Actually, when I think about it, we were lucky to have two different first names. We couldn’t be Haylee One and Haylee Two or Kaylee One and Kaylee Two based on who was born first, either. Mother would never tell us who was first, and Daddy hadn’t been in the delivery room. He’d been on a business trip. I don’t know if he ever asked her which one of us was born first, but I doubt she would have told him anyway. She’d pretend not to know, or maybe she really believed we were born together, hugging and clinging to each other with our tiny pink hands and arms as we were cast out of her womb and into the world, both of us harmonizing in a cry of fear. Whenever Mother described our birth, she always said that the doctor practically had to pry us apart.
“I thought there was only one of you at first. That’s how in sync your cries were. One voice,” she would say, and she’d look starry-eyed, with that soft smile of wonder that fascinated both Haylee and me when we would sit on the floor in front of her and listen to the story of ourselves. As we grew older, she wove the magical fabric in which we would be dressed, wove it into a fantasy about the perfect twins. There was one rule that if broken would bring about disaster: we had to be loved equally, or some dragon monster would destroy our enchantment.
Daddy wasn’t anywhere nearly as obsessed about treating us equally in every way. There was never a doubt in my mind that it was something he believed Mother would grow out of as we grew older. He humored her with his smiles and nods and especially with his favorite response to what she would demand: “Whatever you say, Keri.”
He admitted that he was excited about having twins, but at first, he didn’t see any additional burdens that other parents of more than one child had. Even as very small children, we coul
d see that he was nowhere as uptight about it, which only infuriated Mother more. During our early years, if he forgot and bought something for me and not for Haylee, or vice versa, our mother would become so upset that, in a violent rage during which I would swear I felt a whirlwind around us, she would tear up or throw out whatever he had bought. Haylee felt the whirlwind, too, and, watching Mother, we would cling to each other as tightly as we supposedly had the day we were born.
There was simply no excuse Daddy could use for what he had done that would satisfy her. For example, he couldn’t say one of us liked a certain color more or was more interested in something and he had just happened to come upon it during his travels, like someone else’s father. Oh, no. Mother would look as if she had accidentally put her finger in an electric socket and would tell him he was wrong and had done a terrible thing.
In his defense, he pleaded, “For God’s sake, Keri, this isn’t a capital offense.”
“Not a capital offense?” she fired back, her voice shrill. “How can you not see them for what they are?”
“They’re little girls,” he declared.
“No, no, no, these are not just two little girls. These are perfect twins. They see the world through the same eyes, hear it through the same ears, and smell it through the same nose.”
He shook his head, smiling but concerned. I looked at Haylee. Was Mother right? To anyone watching us, it did look as if we liked the same foods, the same flavor of ice cream, the same candy. It was true that when we were very young, anything one of us liked, the other did, too, and anything one of us hated, the other hated. Maybe we felt we were supposed to or we would lose our mystical powers. Nevertheless, Mother was shocked Daddy didn’t realize that.
“I think you’re exaggerating,” Daddy told her.
“Exaggerating? Are you in the same house, Mason? Do you see your own children?” she asked him in what, even as a young girl, I thought was a terribly condescending tone. She sounded more like she did when she chastised us.
Mother also had a habit of smacking her right fist against her right thigh when she started her responses to things that upset her this much. Sometimes, she did it so hard that both Haylee and I would flinch as if we felt the blows. After one of her more dramatic outbursts, I saw her thigh when she was getting ready to take a shower. It had a bright red circle where she had pounded it. Later it turned black-and-blue, and when Daddy mentioned it, she said, “It’s your fault, Mason. You might as well have struck me there yourself.”
Finally, Daddy always managed to stammer an excuse, but he still couldn’t ever get away with “I’ll buy the other one something tomorrow.” Whatever it was that he had bought one of us and not the other, it was gone that day, no matter what he had promised. Sometimes he would take it back and have his secretary return it to the store, but most times, after Mother had destroyed it or thrown it out, he would go back when he could and buy two this time, so he could give both of us whatever it was he thought one of us had wanted. He never looked happy about it. That satisfied Mother, though, and brought what Daddy called “a fragile armistice where we tiptoed on a floor of eggshells.” We were all smiles again. Our pounding hearts relaxed and the electric sizzle in the air disappeared, for a while anyway.
In our house, stings, burns, and aches ran around just behind the walls and just under the floors like termites. Haylee and I were in the center of continuous little tornadoes. Sometimes I thought Haylee did things deliberately so she could see these storms brew between Daddy and Mother. It was one of the differences I sensed early between us. Haylee had an impish delight in causing little explosions between our parents.
But she was far from the main cause of it all in the beginning. It wasn’t difficult to understand why this turmoil was happening around Haylee and me. In our mother’s mind, a minute after we were born, all thoughts about one of us had to be about the two of us simultaneously. She claimed it was practically blasphemous to do otherwise, because the biggest danger for any parent of identical twins was that somehow, some way, he or she would favor one over the other and destroy the confidence of the one not favored.
It was one thing to praise one of your children because he or she had done something spectacular. Everyone knew stories about fathers who favored one son over another because he was a hero on the football field or got good grades. The same was true for a daughter who might please her mother more by being more responsible, being talented in music or art, or maybe just being prettier.
But none of this could apply to identical twins, not in our mother’s way of thinking.
According to Mother, Haylee had no talents that I didn’t have, and I had none that she didn’t have. Certainly, neither of us could be prettier than the other. Our voices were so similar that people never knew which one had answered the phone. Even Daddy was confused sometimes when he called. There was always a question mark in the air first. “Haylee? Kaylee?”
When we were a little older, Haylee often pretended to be me on the phone. I think she worried that Daddy liked me more and wanted to see how he would speak if he thought I was the one answering the phone. I suspected he did like me more than he liked her, and she knew it. Once she said, “If he doesn’t know which one of us it is, he’ll say your name because he hopes it’s you.” I didn’t know if she was right. I didn’t keep as close a count as she did.
Maybe it was simply because he wasn’t around us as much as he should have been, but if I suddenly came upon him while he was reading or if Haylee did, Daddy would look at whoever it was, and his eyes would blink for a moment as his mind settled on which one of us was there. Anyone could see that he was struggling with it because Mother had him terrified about calling me Haylee or calling her Kaylee. Mother insisted that he must know which of us was which.
After all, how could our own father not know us? He agreed, and when he did get it wrong, he blamed himself for not concentrating or paying attention enough. However, he admitted that there were times when he was actually mistaken even though he was concentrating.
“They’re so alike!” he cried, hoping to be excused when Mother blew up at him for it, but all that did was prove her point and make her even more obsessive about how we were supposed to be treated.
“Of course they’re so alike. That’s always been my point. You have to try even harder, Mason, and be more careful about it,” she told him. “You never liked it when your father called you by your brother’s name, and you weren’t even twins. He is two years older than you are, but how did you feel, Mason? Go on, confess. You felt he was thinking more of him than he was of you, right?”
Daddy had admitted that to her once, so what could he do but retreat with the look of a punished puppy? I always felt sorrier for him than I did for us. Sometimes I pretended I was Haylee if he called me that, just so he would get away with it, but if Mother was there, that was impossible. She never made a mistake. I never knew why not, except to think that it was true that mothers knew their children better.
There were so many rules of behavior toward us that Mother laid down, with the power and importance of the U.S. Constitution, our own Ten Commandments:
Thou shalt not call Haylee “Kaylee,” or vice versa.
Thou shalt not buy one a gift you do not buy the other.
Thou shalt not take one somewhere and not the other.
Thou shalt not kiss one without kissing the other.
Thou shalt not hug or hold the hand of one without hugging or holding the hand of the other.
Thou shalt not say good morning or good night to one without saying it to the other.
Thou shalt not ask one a question you do not ask the other.
Thou shalt not introduce one to someone without introducing the other.
Thou shalt not tell one a story without telling it to the other.
Thou shalt not smile at one without smiling at the other.
Because of all the rules, I often thought our house was more of a laboratory than a home. I think Daddy di
d, too. Even Haylee admitted to feeling as if we were under observation in a glass bubble while strange new experiments on bringing up identical twins were being conducted. Many of Mother and Daddy’s friends often also seemed to believe that. I once heard someone whisper that maybe Mother was giving reports to a special government agency. I know that, like me, Haylee felt this all made us seem strange to anyone who witnessed our upbringing. There were other twins in our community, even on our street, but they were not identical, and they seemed no different from kids who had no twins. They were permitted to wear different clothes and do different things, and their mothers weren’t so uptight about potentially devastating personality complexes.
But our mother would point or nod at them and say, “Look how competitive their parents have made them. They enjoy making each other feel bad. You’ll never do that,” she would add with a confident smile. “You will always consider each other’s feelings first.” She had no idea about what was coming, crawling along on the tails of shadows toward our home and our family as we grew older.
It was difficult, if not impossible, not to feel that we really were unique, and not just because we happened to be identical twins. Haylee liked to think we did have special powers, and for a long time, I believed it, too. We looked so alike that we could pretend we were looking in a mirror when we looked at each other. In fact, we rehearsed facing each other and moving our hands to points of our faces as if we were looking into a mirror. Mother’s friends would roar with laughter, and Mother would look very proud when she had them over for a lunch during our younger years.
“They’re so perfect,” she’d whisper, her eyes fixed on us. “So perfect, down to every strand of hair.”
She would seize our right hands and turn them up so others could see our palms and then say, “Look at the lines in their hands, how exact they are in depth and length. Not all identical twins are this exact,” she’d explain.