Twins (4 page)

“It’s amazing that you and your twin could be so different,” said Mindy.

They don’t bother to use the name Mary Lee, thought Mary Lee. I’m not even a name to them. I’m a person not worth naming.

She willed them to say “Mary Lee” out loud, but they did not.

“I wish you were the one at school here, Madrigal,” said Bianca. “We’d have so much fun.”

The snow seemed to laugh. The entire mountain shook its head and snickered. The terrible cliff below the ski lifts was not rimmed with crags and rocks, but the razor teeth of sharks.

It’s too late, thought Mary Lee. I can’t get another chance. I’ve ruined it for Mary Lee. She isn’t interesting and she isn’t worth inviting anywhere.

Once these girls knew the truth, they would moan and groan and scatter. There would be no lasting friendships. Oh, Madrigal would get away with it; they would think she was funny; clever, even, to have pulled off such good mimicry. But the moment Madrigal left, Mary Lee’s life would be empty once more.

I don’t want Mindy and Bianca to like me because I’m somebody else. I really do want to be a separate person, the way Mother and Father said we need to be; and I want to be a
likeable
separate person. With friends of my own.

She truly saw the light, as if the snow and the sun had been laid out today to clear her eyes.

Mother and Father had been right; acting in kindness, not cruelty. Twinship had gotten unhealthy — two living and breathing and moving as one.

Next three-day weekend, she decided, I’ll go home. Argue with Mother and Father. Reverse their decision. Agree to anything. I’ll play horrible sports like field hockey and take hideous subjects like History of the Cold War. I’ll take over cleaning the toilets and learn how to change the oil in the cars. Anything. I just want to go home.

The sun hit the snow so hard, even sunglasses were no help. The glittering rays were as hard as metal.

The lifts continued to deposit skiers at the top of the mountain, and groups continued to spill out, ski down, whirl and flourish on the snow. A group in scarlet and black; a family whose children did not bother with poles; a row of brawny men, whose weight would surely crush the skis instead of cross the snow.

And then a pause.

A pause in which Mary Lee’s yearning to go home was so immense, so filling, it seemed to her it was written on the sky, as well as in her heart.

A pause in which the Mary Lee who was actually Madrigal seemed for a moment stuck on the lift. Stuck alone and friendless. Perhaps equally stuck in life.

The gondola in which the twin sat by herself leaped forward again, and the thin metal rod that curved over the top of the seat and held the gondola to the cables, snapped. Over the roar of the snowmakers and the shouts of the skiers, no sound was audible.

The gondola flipped, as if unearthly hands were shaking the contents out. The contents that were Mary Lee’s twin. Skis tangled, turquoise legs twisted, a knit cap caught on the protective bar, but the girl herself fell like a silent stone.

Madrigal! My twin! No!

“No!” screamed Mary Lee. She could not run. She wore skis. She who spoke to her twin without words shrieked every word she knew to stop the falling. “No! Hang on! Don’t fall!” She kicked one foot free of the thick shining ski boot, planning to burst away from Bianca and Mindy, run faster than anyone could, get beneath her tumbling sister, catch her, save her —

But she did not even get the second boot off.

Her twin’s body spiraled only once, and then, headfirst, fell prisoner to gravity. Not on soft snow, not neatly feet first, not easily into cushioning hands, but viciously, cruelly, horribly onto the rock scree which divided the bunny slope from the advanced.

The end of identical twins took only a moment.

The mountain had had no respect for their twinship. The rocks had not cared. Gravity had not given it a second thought.

Slick steep snow. So easy to ski down. So hard to run up. The gondola itself did not fall all the way, but hung, like a loose tooth, swinging lightly in the wind. Occupied by a ghost skier.

“Don’t look!” cried Mindy, holding her back.

“You mustn’t go over there,” said Bianca forcefully, pushing her away.

Mary Lee fought them. “It’s my sister,” she panted, “it’s my twin.”

The ski instructors turned swiftly into an emergency crew.

She has to be alive, thought Mary Lee. If Madrigal died, I would die, too. I feel it. My heart would stop, my brain would darken. So she’s alive, because I am.

The place filled with grown-ups of the most obnoxious kind. People trying to make her go into the lodge and sit down. People trying to block her view. People saying she couldn’t help. “Stop this!” she shrieked at them, pummeling with her fists, kicking with her fat, useless boots. “Let me through!”

They were too padded to feel her blows, and the boots were too heavy for her to bruise any shins. She might have been a rag doll for all she accomplished.

Mrs. Spinney, who coached the girls’ ski team as well as teaching English, skied right down into the group. “Who was hurt?” she shouted, clutching at everybody.

“Mary Lee,” said Bianca. “Oh, Mrs. Spinney, it was Mary Lee, and she was never happy here.” Bianca began crying horribly.

The rescue crew had an orange sled, long and scooped out, like an Indian canoe, and into this they strapped the victim. When the rescuers dragged the sled the rest of the way down the slope, people drew back, as if in the presence of something special. And they were. For whoever had lived and breathed, whoever had suffered and rejoiced, no longer occupied that body. The girl on the stretcher was only a series of rises beneath a dark brown blanket.

“Is she — ?” began Mrs. Spinney. “Is she — ?”

“Dead,” whispered Bianca.

Dead.

Mary Lee tried to think about that word, but it could not have a connection to her and her family. Certainly not to her twin. The high scream of the siren seemed very important. They were rushing to save Madrigal, of course. Because they had to save Madrigal, of course. Because this was her identical twin, of course, and life could not go on for Mary Lee unless Madrigal were there.

The headmaster of the boys’ school was the most senior available adult. “Madrigal?” he said to her gently.

She shook her head. “Mary Lee.”

“Yes,” he said. “Mary Lee had a terrible accident. Mary Lee” — even the headmaster, who had been in Vietnam, and whose gory stories thrilled his boys, had trouble ending the sentence. But he did — “is dead.”

“No,” she said numbly. “No, she’s not. You see …”

But he did not see. He decided it would be best for her grieving process (he actually said this) for her to look upon and touch the body of her sister, to see the terrible wounds and know that her sister really was dead.

This turned out not to be the right step in the grieving process, for the remaining twin began shrieking and sobbing when she saw the ruin that had been her darling sister. “No, no, no!” screamed Mary Lee.

When the ambulance arrived, the crew assessed the situation and took the living sister, not the dead one, to the hospital.

“Now, Maddy,” said the nurse soothingly. “Your friends are all here, waiting to sit with you. We’ve phoned your parents, and they’re arranging a flight to get here. This little shot will just relax you enough to get you through the rest of the night, that’s all.”

“Mary Lee,” she said for the thousandth time.

“Yes,” agreed the nurse. “It’s very very sad. I’m not a twin, myself, although I always wanted to be, you know, and when I was pregnant each time, I said to myself, I said, maybe it’ll be twins. I would have loved twins.”

The shot took effect very fast, and Mary Lee, swirling down into the darkness, thought perhaps death had felt like this. A swirling down. Perhaps at the bottom she would find Madrigal, or perhaps she was asleep during this, dreaming a terrible cruel nightmare, and the swirling would waken her, and Madrigal would be there, laughing and lovely.

I’ll have to tell Jon Pear, thought Mary Lee, just before she lost awareness. He loves her, and I’ll have to tell him she no longer exists.

The tranquilizer was worthy of the name. She slipped into the comfort of knowing nothing.

When Mary Lee awoke in the morning, she was in a vanilla-plain room, under crispy sheets, with white waffled blankets. Next to her bed was its identical twin. White and waffled. Waiting.

I want Madrigal in that bed, thought Mary Lee. I want Madrigal to be alive. I want the ski slope to be a nightmare. Is this the psych ward? If I’ve done something terrible or shameful, it’s okay, as long as my twin is alive.

A nurse walked in, smiling. A doll-like smile, pursed and red. “Good morning, Maddy.”

“Mary Lee,” she said for the hundredth time.

The nurse was followed by a doctor, and the two women looked weirdly alike, the same steady lipsticky smile coating the doctor’s face.

“Yes,” said the doctor, taking Mary Lee’s hand as if to console her, but turning her wrist and taking her pulse instead. “Mary Lee is dead, Maddy. It’s a terrible tragedy. Mom and Dad are on their way. I spoke to them last night.”

How blurry and strange this was. The twins had never called Mother “Mom” and never called Father “Dad.” The family never called Madrigal Maddy, either.

“Did you tell my parents that Mary Lee died?” said Mary Lee, even more heartsick. This was terrible. She could at least have called Mother and Father herself. What a weakling she was. Poor Mother and Father were sitting on some plane even now, picturing the wrong daughter dead on a slab.

Madrigal, or what was left of her, probably lay somewhere in this very hospital. They would have taken off the ugly turquoise ski suit and put her into — no. She would be wearing nothing. It would not matter at all that her bare flesh was against cold steel. Madrigal would never know anything again.

This was so horrible, Mary Lee could not stand being in the building. “I need to go back to the school,” she said, weeping without brushing her cheeks.

“Good for you,” said the doctor. “That’s what we want, Maddy. Courage to face this. Identical twins! My, my. It’s a double whammy for you. Now, your sister’s roommates are coming to pick you up. Bianca and Mindy will be here in a minute and they’ll stay with you all day. You don’t need to worry about being alone, Maddy, until Mom and Dad get here.”

“I’m Mary Lee,” she said tiredly. “You see — ”

The doctor hushed her. “Mom and Dad already talked to me about the problem,” she said. “You two were over-identifying. It happens. Parents make mistakes, and Mom and Dad made their share. Identical twins aren’t easy to bring up, and separating you two was very wise. It’s just a terrible shame the equipment snapped. Let’s not blame Mom and Dad.”

Mary Lee thought that, next time it snapped, maybe the equipment should be holding this doctor.

Bianca and Mindy crept into the room like great big fashionable mice. “Maddy?” they whispered.

It was too much to fight off. Why argue with Mindy and Bianca? Why argue with anybody? In a few hours Mother and Father would arrive, and they would know the instant they were in the room with her that she was —

—
the daughter they had not wanted to keep at home
.

The daughter who had died was the one they had cherished more.

Could she bear to see the shock in Mother’s eyes — that it was Madrigal who had died? Could she bear to see the jolt in Father’s face — that they were left with Mary Lee?

A dread even more cold and horrid than her twin’s death enveloped her. What if Mother and Father wished that she, Mary Lee,
had
been the one on the gondola? What if, when they realized Mary Lee was alive and well … what if they were sorry?

She walked numbly between Bianca and Mindy. They had not thought to bring her a change of clothing, and she had to wear the ski suit that was Madrigal’s. When they finally reached the dorm — interrupted by a hundred people crying, “We’re so sorry; Oh, this is awful; Oh, what a tragedy; Oh, poor Maddy, you lost your sister, we’re so sorry about Mary Lee, Maddy” — she wanted only to shut the door and be alone.

But boarding schools are not arranged for alone-ness.

She stripped off Madrigal’s ski suit and thought that when she got home she would burn it, for it did not deserve to live, when Madrigal could not. She opened her closet to find something plain and dark to wear. Perhaps her black T-shirt with the pleated pocket and her black jeans.

“Maddy!” said Bianca. “That’s sick. You can’t start by dressing in your sister’s clothes.” Bianca flipped open the suitcase that Madrigal had brought. “Here. Wear this cute little skirt.”

“I’ll wear the jeans,” said Mary Lee wearily. “Bianca, I appreciate your concern, but I’d rather be alone.”

“We can’t let you be alone,” said Mindy. “We promised the doctor.”

“Promised her why?”

“Because she doesn’t want you to think of following your sister. She says identical twins can get a little screwy.”

Following my sister
, thought Mary Lee.
If
o
nly you could do that! I would follow her and bring her back
.
I would
—

They meant suicide. They had been told to stay with her to prevent her from killing herself.

“I’m not the type,” said Mary Lee, “and neither was my sister. She loved life.”

“Actually, she wasn’t very happy,” said Bianca.

“And she sure didn’t love life here,” added Mindy.

MreeLee
,
you be Madrigal
.

And she was. Clothing was all it took.

Mindy and Bianca talked on and on, sure that it was Madrigal to whom they offered comfort.

Mary Lee wanted her parents desperately. She stood by the window, waiting and watching. They would come in an airport taxi. It would be orange. She would see it against the snow. She would run to her mother and be hugged; turn to her father and be held.

Nothing could bring Madrigal back home.

But surely, surely, there would be enough love left to bring Mary Lee back home!

F
ROM THE DORM WINDOW
, she watched the orange taxi pull up in front of the administration building. Her mother and father got out. The Dean of Students walked swiftly down his wide stone steps, hand extended to shake theirs, as if congratulating them on the death of a twin. Everybody nodded heads up and down and then shook heads back and forth: a strange head-dance upon the mysteries of death.