“This is so unlike her,” Mother mumbled.
I looked up at her quickly. “It’s unlike me, too.”
“Yes,” she said, nodding. “Yes.”
Simon returned. “They’re on their way,” he said. “You don’t even know which direction she took?”
“She just told me they were meeting at a place he had decided on because it was close enough for her to go to his house and get back before the movie ended,” I replied, wiping the tears from my cheeks.
“To his house?” Mother said, the words taking a strong grip on her worst fears. “She went to his house, to a strange man’s house?”
“That was the plan she told me they had made.”
“Does he live alone? How old is he? How did she meet him on the Internet?”
“I don’t know any of that. She wouldn’t tell me that much,” I said.
“Men who do this sort of thing know how to find vulnerable young girls,” Simon said, nodding like some sort of expert on teenage girls. I looked at him with an expression that shouted, Shut up. You’re making it all worse. I guess I was effective. He backed up a step.
“How long has this been going on?” Mother asked.
“Maybe six weeks, maybe seven.”
“And you both kept this a secret from me that long?” she asked, her face now a portrait of disbelief. She looked like a little girl who had just learned that Santa Claus was not real, something I’d never believed. Most of life was a fairy tale. Who needed to add a fat man with a beard?
“You were . . .” I looked at Simon. “Busy with your own problems. At least, that was what Kaylee thought, and I did, too. She convinced me that you’d only start worrying so much about us that you would be unhappy again, and we were both upset at how horribly Daddy had treated you. She said that would all be my fault if I told.”
“This is so unlike them,” Mother told Simon. “They’ve never done anything even remotely like this.”
“Do you know his name?” Simon asked.
“She told me a name, but I’m not sure it’s his real name.”
“What does that mean?” Mother demanded.
“He could have made up a name,” Simon said, “or your sister could have made one up. Right?” he asked, as if I was now the expert.
“Maybe,” I said. I turned back to Mother. “He might be right. I don’t know if she wanted to tell me his real name, so she could have made it up just to shut me up because I kept asking her.”
“What name did she tell you?” Simon demanded.
“Bob Brukowski,” I said. “It never sounded real to me.”
“I can’t believe this,” Mother said, shaking her head. “This is not happening. It’s not happening.” She put her hands over her ears, as if she could simply block out reality and return to our perfect world by closing and opening her eyes.
“It’s a problem all over the country now,” Simon said. “Young girls being exploited through computers.”
She pulled her hands from her ears as if they had been glued to them and made two fists. “It’s not a problem for me! Or it shouldn’t be,” Mother said. The veins in her neck looked like they might burst. Her eyes were bulging, and her nostrils widened.
He pressed his thin lips together and nodded. A police patrol car pulled up to the curb, and two officers got out quickly. Simon turned and hurried to them, happy, I thought, to get away from her. He explained what was happening, and the officers came over to us.
“Mrs. Fitzgerald,” the taller one said, “I’m Officer Donald, and this is Officer Monday.” He took out a small notepad. “What’s your daughter’s name and age?”
“Her name is Kaylee Blossom Fitzgerald, and she’s sixteen. This is her sister, Haylee. They are identical twins, so you don’t need a photograph to recognize her,” Mother said. “Or you can take one of Haylee with your cell phone. There’s not an iota of difference between them, down to how many freckles they each have. They wear their hair the same way, and they are dressed in the same outfit, the same color tonight. They sound the same, too.”
Both policemen looked at me, astounded. The shorter one almost smiled at how ridiculous Mother sounded.
“Haylee,” Officer Donald said, “why don’t you tell us everything that went on between your sister and this man. Don’t leave out anything because you think it’s too small a detail or not important, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Why don’t you sit in our car?” he said, stepping to the side so I could do that.
When I started for it, Mother began to follow, but Officer Monday asked her to wait. I knew why. They thought I wouldn’t say things in front of my mother. Simon took her hand. When I looked back at them, their roles appeared reversed. She suddenly looked like his charity date. How ironic, I thought. He was the one using psychology on her. It brought a smile to my face that I wiped away instantly as I got into the patrol car. The two officers got in and turned to me.
“So,” Officer Donald began, “tell us how this all started and everything you know about the man. We understand your sister told you his name?”
“She told me a name, but as I told my mother, I don’t know if that’s his real name. It was Bob Brukowski.”
“Did he send her a picture of himself over the Internet?” Officer Monday asked.
“I guess he did, but I never saw anything on her computer. I know only what she told me about him. Maybe she thought if she showed me his picture, I’d tell her he was too old for her or something.”
“So tonight you just know she was meeting this Bob Brukowski somewhere in this neighborhood, and the man was definitely older, and he was going to take her to his house?”
“Yes. She made a big deal about him being an older man and not a high school student. She was bragging about how much a mature man was attracted to her. I kept warning her, but she wouldn’t listen.”
“So what happened tonight?” Officer Monday asked. “How was this all set up?
“She had a plan,” I began, and started to describe it. As I spoke, the belief that Kaylee really would never be back grew stronger and stronger. I half wished that I had been there hiding in the shadows and watching, like the director of a movie, when Kaylee had met him.
“Does your sister have a cell phone?” Officer Donald asked.
“Yes, we both do, but we didn’t take our cell phones tonight.” I shrugged. “I guess I should have made sure we did. I was just so nervous about it all that I forgot.”
“I’ve got a teenage sister,” Officer Monday said. “Like all her friends, she won’t even go to the bathroom without her cell phone.”
“We were too involved in my sister’s plan. We didn’t think,” I said more emphatically, and threw in a few well-placed sobs.
I knew now that it was over, that it was happening. I should have felt more remorse, but a little voice inside me asked, If your twin sister is gone, are you still a twin? Won’t people stop mixing you up? Won’t you become your own person finally?
I had to be careful not to let the policemen see my smile. They wouldn’t understand.
No one who didn’t know us and how our mother had brought us up would understand.
• • •
Even with all the warnings and the bad stories out there, whose mother wouldn’t have a hard time believing her daughter would do something like this? Everybody thinks they’re raising angels. I saw that from the way my friends’ parents talked about them. How could their daughter be doing something as terrible as carrying on a romance over the Internet with an older man? And right under their noses? This was all especially true for our mother.
Simon Adams was right. Examples of this were constantly on the news. But our mother was always very confident that we wouldn’t do anything that was so forbidden or stupid. In her eyes, we were such goody-goodies. I hated it when she bragged about us and people looked at us as if we were right out of a fairy tale about two identical princesses, Cinderella clones without so much as a blemish on ou
r behavior or complexions.
When we were little, both of us used to believe that we hadn’t been born. We had descended from a cloud of angels and just floated into the delivery room. The stork really did bring us.
Mother had no idea how many things we had done recently that she wouldn’t approve of, mainly things I had done and that my dear abused sister would have to go along with or at least keep secret. Kaylee would have been suspected less. After all, no matter what Mother told other people or even what she told us, I knew in my heart that she favored Kaylee, despite her effort not to show any bias.
However, I had no doubt that her favoring Kaylee gave her nightmares. What if I could tell that she did favor one of us over the other? How horrible for her. All our lives, she had made an effort to treat us equally and to think of us as halves of the same perfect image of a daughter she had created. The smallest thing that could make one of us different from the other was vigorously avoided. She was adamant about not loving one of us more than the other.
No one suffered more under this rule than Daddy, who sometimes accidentally and sometimes deliberately tried to treat us as individuals. I pretended to be as upset about that as Mother wanted us to be, but in my secret chest of feelings and thoughts, shut away from Mother’s eyes, I was pleased, even when he did something for Kaylee that I might envy. At least, in his thinking, there was a difference, and we weren’t simply duplicates or clones, as some of Mother’s friends occasionally referred to us. It always annoyed me that she didn’t mind when people said that. I did. Who wanted to be a clone?
I was tired of hearing how we were monozygotic twins developed from a single egg-and-sperm combination that splits a few days after conception, that our DNA originated from the same source. I didn’t even have my own DNA like most everyone else. I’d had to share everything with Kaylee from the moment I was conceived. Mother often told people that we even took up and used equal space in her womb and that everything that had come from her to nourish us was consumed in “perfectly equal amounts.” I never knew how she could know that, but she would say, “How else would they be so identical at birth?”
According to Mother’s logic and beliefs, how could I ever even exist without Kaylee? Our hearts beat with the same rhythm. We took the same number of breaths each day. If one of us sneezed, the other soon would, and that was true for every yawn, every ache, and every shiver. We were the mirror sisters; we lived in each other’s reflected image.
Well, maybe not now; maybe finally not now. I could walk away, and Kaylee would be stuck in the glass looking out. “Come back, come help me!” she would cry.
“Help yourself,” I would say. “I did. That’s why you’re trapped in the mirror.”
Another patrol car arrived on the scene, and before we went home, we all drove around, Mother in one car and me in the other, searching for any sign of Kaylee. Sometimes the police would stop to ask a pedestrian if they had seen a girl who looked like me, and I would have to make myself more visible. On one stop, I actually stepped out of the vehicle.
“She’s wearing the same clothes,” they told potential witnesses. They all shook their heads and apologized for not having seen Kaylee. One elderly man looked as if he might have something to tell them. He was studying me so closely. My heart stopped in anticipation, but after another moment, he shook his head and told us his eyesight wasn’t what it used to be.
It seemed like we drove for hours. At one point, we passed the closed-down coffee shop, and I held my breath again. Was Kaylee still there, maybe lying on the side of the road? How would I react to that? It was deserted. There was no one on the sidewalks, no one in the street, and no one sitting in any vehicle. Even the shadows looked lonely.
Simon was left behind to wait at the movie theater in case Kaylee showed up there. When we returned and saw him alone looking confused and helpless, Mother grew more frantic. She wanted more police, more cars, and insisted that they knock on every door within a mile of the movie theater.
“He wanted Kaylee to meet him nearby,” she said. “He has to live somewhere in this neighborhood.”
They tried to reason with her, but she spun around on Officer Donald, the first policeman who had arrived at the movie theater, and screamed, “Do something! Don’t you understand? My daughter’s been kidnapped, or she would have been back by now. She’s being held somewhere against her will or taken so far away we’ll never find her. Every minute that passes is terrible!”
“You’ve got to stay calm, Mrs. Fitzgerald,” he told her, and looked to me to do something to help her, but I just lowered my head and looked as powerless as they felt.
A policewoman arrived, probably called in by one of the other cops to help handle Mother. To be truthful, even I was shocked at how she was behaving. Kaylee and I had seen her upset many times, of course. She used to pound on herself so hard when she screamed that she would have black-and-blue marks, but she was lashing out now and throwing her arms about so wildly that I thought they would fly off her body. She began screaming at me again for keeping Kaylee’s secret.
“Don’t you understand that you’ve been kidnapped, too?” she cried.
Everyone looked at her oddly then. I had to explain what she meant, how she believed that nothing ever happened to either of us without it happening to the other. Of course, it still made no sense to the police. It was then that I told Officer Donald about Daddy and how Mother’s insisting on both of us being treated exactly the same had led to their divorce.
“It became too much for my father,” I said.
They looked sympathetic. They didn’t have to say it. I could see it in their faces. It would have been too much for them, too, maybe for anyone.
Officer Monday returned to the patrol car to see about getting in touch with Daddy.
At one point, Mother broke away and started running up the street, insisting that the search go on and that we shouldn’t wait for additional assistance. We were wasting precious time. She had started toward someone’s front door when they rushed up to her. She was pulling her own hair and had to be forcibly restrained. The policewoman, Officer Denker, asked me for the name of our doctor.
“She has to be calmed down. She could hurt herself,” she told me.
I gave her Dr. Bloom’s name. Simon Adams stood off to the side now, looking too stunned to speak. I laughed to myself, imagining that he was thinking, What did I get myself into? I was surprised when Officer Monday came over to tell me they had located my father and that he was going to meet us at our house. I had thought for sure he was on some business trip miles and miles away.
We hadn’t had much contact with Daddy after the divorce had been finalized. Mother seemed to keep up with the news about him and his girlfriend. Apparently, from the last we were told, that romance had ended, and Daddy was living in an apartment by himself. We were supposed to go to dinner with him a week from now. Almost daily, Mother warned us that he would try to play on our sympathies.
“Poor him,” she said. “He’s alone again. But he’s always been alone. He prefers it, no matter what he tells you. He’s too selfish to be with anyone,” she assured us. “Don’t waste a tear on him.”
Mother had practically passed out by this time, emotionally exhausted. Officer Denker was with her in the rear of one of the patrol cars, commiserating. I had heard her tell Mother that she, too, had a teenage daughter. Mother looked at her and shook her head. Kaylee wasn’t simply a teenage daughter. Didn’t she understand? Kaylee and I were special.
Naturally, all the police activity in front of the movie theater had drawn a crowd. Anyone who showed up was questioned, but as I had expected and hoped, no one knew anything. Two plainclothes detectives arrived, and I had to tell my story again. A Lieutenant Cowan asked the questions. He was older than Detective Simpson, who I didn’t think was much older than a college student. He was by far better-looking, with sort of rusty light brown hair and greenish-brown eyes. Every time I answered one of Lieutenant Cowan’s questions, I
looked at Detective Simpson to see his reaction. I even smiled at him once.
“We’ll need your sister’s computer,” Lieutenant Cowan said. “Your dad’s on his way, and your family doctor is coming to your home for your mother, so why don’t you ride back with us and keep telling us all you know, all you remember?”
“I’d better ask my mother,” I said, looking at the patrol car she was in.
“Better to just come along,” Lieutenant Cowan said. “She’s calmed a bit. They’ll start for your house.”
I shrugged and followed them to their car. Before I got in, I looked at Simon Adams. He appeared to be totally lost now and not sure if he should remain waiting.
“My mother’s date doesn’t know anything,” I told Detective Simpson. “Maybe you should tell him to go home. My father’s coming,” I added, implying that this might be a problem.
He looked at Simon and then at Lieutenant Cowan, who nodded.
“Get his name, address, and contact numbers,” he told him.
I got into the backseat.
The patrol car taking my mother started to leave. When it pulled in front of us, I saw her spin around in the backseat and press her face to the rear window, looking as if she was clawing at it with her hands while she screamed. I looked down quickly, mostly embarrassed by her. Everyone would see how pathetic she was, but the good news was that most would feel sorry for me, I thought. Not only had I probably lost my sister, my other half, but my mother wouldn’t be the same.
They’d be right about that. Mother was going to need me. She’d need me twice as much as she ever had, especially with Daddy not living with us. I’d have to be more like Kaylee sometimes, but that was all right, because I could go right back to being myself. Without Kaylee there, I could do many new things, and everything I wore would seem to be mine alone. There would be no one imitating me, duplicating me.
ABOUT
One of the most popular authors of all time, V.C. Andrews has been a bestselling phenomenon since the publication of Flowers in the Attic, first in the renowned Dollanganger family series, which includes Petals on the Wind, If There Be Thorns, Seeds of Yesterday, and Garden of Shadows. The family saga continues with Christopher’s Diary: Secrets of Foxworth, Christopher’s Diary: Echoes of Dollanganger, and Secret Brother. V.C. Andrews has written more than seventy novels, which have sold over 106 million copies worldwide and have been translated into twenty-five foreign languages.