Twins (8 page)

Van broke through the crowd, ferociously, as if the student body formed a locked door and he had to clobber people to get through. He approached as if he’d be willing to break wrists to break in.

Jon Pear and Madrigal are an Event, the way Madrigal and I were an Event. I want to be an Event. I do not want to be half, or forgotten, or lost, like boarding school. Jon Pear will make me an Event.

Van left the circle like a warrior with the courage to leave his troops. Alone, he walked toward Jon Pear and Madrigal, as if getting this close was also an Event.

When he looked at Mary Lee, Van sucked in his breath and held it for so long, she had to smile. She forgot Jon Pear, though he still held her hair and her arm. How lovely Scarlett and Van were; how beautiful the friendship of sister and brother. It would be good to have real friends. Mary Lee had drawn a new life, but that didn’t mean she had to use every molecule of Madrigal’s. She could choose some of her own.

She remembered with a start of surprise that Madrigal had despised Scarlett.

But I’ll be friends with her, thought Mary Lee joyfully. Real girlfriends, like other girls. “Scarlett,” she said eagerly, “this afternoon would you like to go to the mall with me?”

“No,” said Van sharply. “She would not. She has other plans, Madrigal. She always will.”

From the gathered, tightening circle of students came another hiss, another murmur,
She always will
.

“How brotherly,” said Jon Pear. “Of course, after that unfortunate little episode, Scarlett, I can see how you would need a brother around rather often.”

Scarlet paled, pressed her lips together, and lowered her head.

Van stepped between his sister and Jon Pear, and moved her back, as if he were herding her, as if he were her guard dog, and she were a vulnerable lamb. They withdrew into the circle of students, and there they vanished, and Mary Lee could no longer tell one face from another, but instead the students boiled, like water, bubbling and increasing and raising steam.

What little incident? Why did they hold Madrigal responsible?

“There’s no need to discuss Mary Lee again,” said Jon Pear. He seemed to be addressing the entire school, for his voice soared as if he carried a microphone. “She may not be buried beneath the soil, but Madrigal and I have buried her. Refrain from mentioning Mary Lee again.”

People faded and blurred.

Walls left and returned.

Mary Lee found that she was walking beside Jon Pear again, deeply exhausted, as if they had hiked miles together over rugged terrain in difficult weather. “Why did you fall in love with me?” she whispered.

“For your name. Madrigal. Song of the murmuring waters.”

She tried to remember what Van looked like but found that she could not. Van, she thought, first syllable of vanish. Perhaps that’s all he is, a thing that goes away.

She did not know why she was putting so much value on a mere hour anyway, a mere hour months ago where nothing really had been shared except a snack.

I could be Jon Pear’s song of the murmuring waters, she thought.

“And,” said Jon Pear, “because you are the twin I have always needed.”

She could not snuff out her twinship like a candle. “I’m not your twin, Jon Pear.”

Jon Pear’s laughter went in and out like tides slapping underground caverns. It passed from good to evil and back.

“Ah, but you are, Madrigal. You and I are twins of the soul.”

She was drawn to him like a child to sticky candy, and could not tear herself away.

Jon Pear walked her to her car.

The school day had been so short! Where had it gone, that collection of classes, acquaintances, and curiosity?

She was filled with thoughts of Jon Pear. They seemed to have multiplied in her, so that there was room for nothing else: his strangeness, his beauty, his familiarity, his ugliness … his evil.

She could take neither her mind nor her thoughts off Jon Pear.

Who are you?
she thought, for she knew he was nobody ordinary. She wanted knowledge about him. She wanted detail and background. All girls who have crushes on boys want more: they want to see his house, and see his clothes; they want to talk to his friends and see him in sports; they want to read his papers and touch his books and know his life.

She wanted to know which car was his, what he drove, where he was going, but he simply stood waiting for her to drive away.

“Tell me everything,” she said to him.

He laughed. It was an ordinary laugh. “You know everything, Madrigal. I didn’t leave anything out.”

“I want to hear it all again. I love it. I want you to tell me everything over and over, like bedtime stories.”

He smiled, and the smile was like Van’s: warm and easy.

He slid the key in the ignition for her, and turned it, and the radio came on with the engine. A fifties rock station. Mary Lee loved that stuff. So soft and easy. But when she danced her shoulders to it, she remembered her dead sister, who would never dance again.

She needed to be alone after all. Scream into the wind and sky, cry out for the sister she had lost. She waited for the tears to come; the tears she wanted, for they would make her feel both better and worse. The only way I will ever feel about Madrigal now, she thought.

No tears came.

Her eyes were dry. Her thoughts were still mainly of Jon Pear, and the dead twin had hardly a sliver, hardly a splinter, of her emotions. And not a single tear. “I can’t even cry for her,” she said desperately.

“I have your tear,” Jon Pear reminded her. His smile increased, blocking roads and mirrors and thought.

She stared at the tiny glass tube on the thick gold chain. “What will you do with it?” she whispered.

His smile grew even larger, like a mushroom cloud. An explosion. “I like this game, Madrigal,” he said. “I’m glad you thought of a new one. We’ve played the old ones enough.”

When she got home, the house seemed more isolated than Mary Lee remembered, the neighborhood more remote, the road less used. Even the house itself looked smaller, its windows blank and dead.

How silent, how sinister, her own driveway felt.

The sky had grown dark early. Shadows were vapor, wafting up from the frozen earth, caressing her legs.

The key trembled in her hand.

She missed boarding school — the chaos and shrieking of hundreds of girls. The lights always on, the radios always playing, the laughter and the arguments always from one room or another.

She tried to picture Madrigal and Jon Pear laughing and arguing, kissing and exchanging gifts.

It was Madrigal’s key, of course, because Mary Lee had had to give up everything of her own, and adopt Madrigal’s possessions. The key did not go into the lock easily, and when it did go in, would not open the lock.

She stood on the front step, pushing and turning and clicking and still the door did not open. The shadows behind her crawled up and touched the backs of her legs.

And were they shadows? Or the ghost of Madrigal, trying to come back?

Who was that twin? And who was Jon Pear? What would happen if Jon Pear could read her soul, and imitate her movements, and know her choices the way an identical twin did? Did she want to know Jon Pear the way she once knew Madrigal?

Eventually the key moved and the lock opened. But it was only the key to a piece of architecture, and not the key to any question in her heart.

She could think of nothing and no one but Jon Pear. When she did her nails, when she emptied the dishwasher, when she listened to her parents’ chatter, when she watched television … hardly a fraction of her participated. The rest was with Jon Pear.

And it was, as he had decreed, like twinship again.

The ordinary world had relatives: parents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins. But only twins shared molecules and thoughts. Only twins knew each other’s interior.

Now she felt not quite separate from Jon Pear, either.

And completely, hideously, separated from Madrigal.

The evening was heart-quiet.

Mary Lee went silently away from her parents, who had been silently with her. To the bare wood stairs she went — stairs she and an identical person had spent a lifetime running up and down. She went into Madrigal’s room.

My room, she thought. I’m Madrigal.

But she was not Madrigal, and she walked in a trespasser. She stood carefully in front of the mirror. Once they had not needed mirrors. She pretended the reflection was her twin. Oh Madrigal, tell me Jon Pear lied! Tell me you had enough love to go around! Tell me you could love this Jon Pear and your love for me was not diminished by it.

But it was difficult to think of Madrigal, for she was entwined with thoughts of Jon Pear.

She took the room apart, inch by inch, studying everything, looking perhaps for an inscription in a book —
love and kisses
,
Jon Pear
. But there was none.

A treasured greeting card. Scribbled-on, ripped-off notebook paper.

There was none.

Mary Lee was not surprised to find the same three paperback novels she, too, had purchased, two thousand miles and silence away.

The extraordinary linkage of Madrigal and Mary Lee had often extended to shopping.

Vividly, Mary Lee remembered a morning of rage. Not hers. Madrigal’s. In her separate bedroom a year ago, before her own mirror, Mary Lee had stared at herself that morning, bored with the way she did her hair. I’ll part it on the side instead, she had decided. The left side. I’ll hold it back with my new green barrette.

During her one and only mall expedition with Scarlett, they’d stumbled on a basket piled with gaudy barrettes, marked down from outrageous boutique pricing to affordable leftovers. Mary Lee and Scarlett sorted through every one. Scarlett chose a silver-and-gold braid, while Mary Lee settled on an emerald-green tortoiseshell.

Mary Lee ran downstairs that day to catch up to Madrigal, who was already having breakfast, only to find that Madrigal, too, had suddenly decided to part her hair on the left, and Madrigal, too, at a different store in a different mall with a different shopping partner, had nevertheless found the exact same emerald-green barrette to hold back her hair.

Mary Lee was entranced. Out of an entire nation of goods! That two sisters in different malls would choose the identical tiny object!

But Madrigal had flung back her head, and
screamed
, a scream of pure wrath, and flung her barrette into the trash. She’d stomped up and down, taking a decade off her age, acting like a toddler in a tantrum. “Why did you have twins?” she screamed at Mother and Father. “I hate sharing my decisions with her! I want to be
one
person! Make her go away!”

How quickly Mary Lee had torn the barrette out of her hair. How swiftly she, too, stomped down, going even further than her twin, crushing the offending barrette beneath the hard sole of the brown loafers — shoes she rarely wore, preferring sneakers. Shoes that Madrigal also rarely wore and, dressing separately that morning, had also chosen.

But later Mary Lee fished Madrigal’s barrette out of the trash, washed it off, and kept it. Very soon after that morning, Mother and Father had decided on the boarding school. But even at boarding school, Mary Lee could not bring herself to wear the green barrette. Madrigal would feel it. Two thousand miles away, would get a headache right on the spot where Mary Lee held her hair down with it.

She had meant, over Christmas, and later over the long weekend of Madrigal’s visit, to talk about the barrette incident, to see if Madrigal felt better about that stuff now that it had come to an end. But the time had never come to discuss barrettes.
I could wear it now
, she thought, and knew that she never would, for even the ash and wind of Madrigal would hate her for it.

She left Madrigal’s room, with its secrets, and went into her own former bedroom. The bed had a comforter, but no sheets and blankets beneath it. The floor had only a carpet. The closet only musty air. The dresser drawers were empty. For her own possessions had not, after all, been shipped back.

Too painful, Mother had said.

We can’t bear it, Father had said.

The school agreed to dispose of Mary Lee’s things.

Dispose.

It was a garbage word. A trash word.

The possessions of Mary Lee had been disposed of.

She wanted to run down the stairs and fling herself on her parents, let out her pain and anguish.
I made a mistake! Everybody made a mistake! We switched clothes
,
that’s all! And it’s me
,
it’s Mary Lee
,
I’m still here
,
please be glad
,
please be glad that I’m the one who lived
.

Yes, she thought, I will do that. I cannot just adopt my sister’s life.

Bravely, she left the empty room and headed for her mother and father to tell the truth.

At the top of the stairs she paused, hearing soft conversation between Mother and Father. “I don’t miss her,” said Father.

“I don’t either. But it still hurts so much.”

“Of course it hurts,” said Father. “But if we must lose a daughter, better it should be that one.”

“What kind of parents are we?” said Mother. “And what are we doing now? I’m sure it’s another terrible mistake.”

“Having twins was the mistake,” said Father.

Mary Lee was stabbed through the heart.

She crept back into the room that was not hers, and stood in front of the mirror, trying to grasp the reality that it was only a reflection and never never never again a twin.

Oh, Madrigal! They don’t miss me! They think it was a mistake ever to have had me. They wanted only you!

The mirror spoke to her.

Mary Lee shuddered convulsively. Ridiculous. The mirror —

The mirror spoke again.

For a moment she thought it was her sister, living between the silver and the glass. She even heard her sister’s voice, whispering out of the long ago as if, in another life, the twins had lived in a fairy tale. Madrigal had once stood before this very different mirror, murmuring, “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Who Is the Fairest of Them All?”