Three Months after the Accident
JUNE 1983
Somehow, although I’d been thinking about it and mentioning it to Jude for months, the trip to our hometown, Harmony, becomes Sab’s idea. What better way to spend my twenty-third birthday, the first birthday for my new self, the first one I’ll remember? We’ll walk the tiny town square, find the farm where I grew up, maybe run into people who knew me way back when. He’ll arrange everything, his treat.
Over a dinner of overboiled spaghetti, the strands coalescing in shellacked clumps on our plates, I mention the trip, keeping my voice light and casual. I feared the plan might infuriate her—Jude would resent him for hijacking our hometown visit—but instead she drops her fork and says, sincerely, “What a nice thing for him to do.”
“Really?” I ask. “You’re okay with it?”
“As long as I’m coming, since it’s my birthday, too.” She takes a long sip of beer. “It’s mandatory that your two favorite people in the world get to know each other a bit.”
I laugh at the stern finality of her tone, the way she leaves no room for rejection.
“You win,” I say, holding up my hands in surrender. “I accept the invitation you’ve given yourself. I could never say no to you.”
“No, you never could.” She lowers the meatball back to her plate. For a moment we’re quiet, the scraping of our forks the only sound in the room, and then she says: “I’m so psyched to take you back to Harmony, but I must admit I’m just as psyched to meet Sab. There’s something mysterious about him.”
I pause my own fork midair. “Mysterious how?”
“I mean, I’ve never met someone so capable of forgiveness. Like Mount Everest heights of forgiveness. You beat the guy bloody and he still wants to be with you?” She gives an exaggerated shake of her head at the wonder of it all.
“Jude,” I say, and put my fork down. “Please don’t bring it up with him. This trip is important to me and I don’t want things to be weird.”
“I would never,” she says, “but don’t you think about it?”
She knows I can predict her next words, which is why she doesn’t bother to ask them. I play stupid, anyway: “Think about what?”
“About how far you could go and still have him forgive you?”
Her voice is neutral, all the teasing gone out of it, and I wonder if there’s something in our past that provoked the question.
Sab is waiting outside of his twin home, gym bag slung over his shoulder. He’s wearing jeans and a polo shirt and his gold chain with the horn charm. His hair is still wet and I can smell his cologne, something like black tea and cinnamon, and I want to dab the fresh razor nick on his chin. He bends down to Jude’s open window.
“Wow, you look familiar,” he tells her. “And yet, you also look nothing alike.”
I know what he means; for this outing, my sister has abandoned the elaborate primping routine she does for work in favor of a bare face, jean shorts, uncombed hair, and a Tootsie Pop T-shirt that reads: “How Many Licks?”
She shakes his extended hand. “I’m the evil one, in case you haven’t already figured that out.”
He scoots into the back seat and squeezes my shoulder. “I don’t know about that,” he says. “Look at all you’ve done for Kat.”
Jude sets off, turning up the feeble air-conditioning and twisting the radio dial. “I did it for myself as much as for her,” she says. “If Kat’s in a bad way, I’m in a bad way. If Kat’s happy, I’m happy. If Kat likes you, I like you until you give me a reason not to. And if you hurt my sister, I will unscrew your balls with my bare hands and use them as a garnish.” She looks into the rearview mirror, her eyes finding Sab’s, and stretches her mouth into an exaggerated clown smile.
Sab holds up his hands in mock surrender. “Whoa, easy,” he says. “If your right hook is anything like your sister’s, I want nothing to do with it.”
Jude laughs—her real laugh (our real laugh), which fits me fine but seems deeply incongruous coming from her: a light, skittering sort of sound, like the pop of bubbles or a finger dragging the highest notes of a piano. “Okay, Sab, you’re off the hook,” she says. “Let’s pick on someone else.”
“You can’t possibly mean me,” I say, and reach back to touch Sab’s knee.
“Oh, I think we do,” Jude says. “Sab, tell me one funny thing about Kat that you’ve noticed. Could be anything.”
“Tread carefully, both of you,” I say, but secretly I’m pleased. I like their easy banter, their tentative familiarity. They are willing to make space for each other, just for me.
“Hmmm,” Sab says. “Why do I feel like this is a trap? Like whatever I say will apply to you both, and then you’ll gang up on me, and I will truly be a dead man, my balls on your dinner plates?”
“I make no guarantees,” Jude says. “But I’ll go easy on you and start.”
“Nothing too bad, I beg you,” I say to her. I clasp my hands together, miming fervent prayer, but I’m serious. It strikes me, once again, how unsettling it is for someone else to be the keeper of all my secrets, even if that someone is my twin—and might, in some cases, have just as much to lose.
“All right, then,” Jude says, her eyes fixed on the road. “I’ll go easy on you, too. We have the usual twin stories about playing with identity. Like I’d be talking to someone and then walk away, and five seconds later Kat would come running over from the other direction. Or I walked into a room on one side just after Kat exited on the other, causing mass confusion.”
“Ah, the old twin teleportation trick,” Sab says. “Classic.”
“We excelled at the mindfuck,” Jude says. “Sometimes with each other. Sometimes we couldn’t remember who did what; I would take credit for something, good or bad, and she would do the same.”
“Example?” I ask.
She pauses, thinking. From the subtle twist of her mouth I can tell she’s sifting through anecdotes, discarding any that are too personal, or considering how she might disguise them.
“Like once we had a dog that got rabies,” she says, finally. “One of us had to shoot it, and to this day I take the blame for it. If you could remember it, you would insist you’d done it, and accept the blame for it yourself.”
Her tone, in telling this anecdote, went flat, stripped of all emotion, and I sense she isn’t talking about a rabid dog at all. She intuits my mood and quickly pivots: “Hey, it wasn’t as bad as it sounds,” she says. “He had been sick for a very long time. We tried so hard to make him better but it never happened. We tried really, really hard and nothing could be done.”
I still don’t believe she is talking about a dog.
“And to this day, we’re not sure which one of us killed him?” I ask.
“We’ll never be sure. I’m convinced I did it and you are convinced you did it.”
I don’t know what else to say. The silence settles and stretches, until Sab finally cracks it: “Did you guys also have a secret language? I’ve heard that’s a thing with twins.”
“We did and do,” I say.
“Ew idd dan od,” Jude says.
“Ew idd dan od?” Sab asks. “What’s that?”
“That’s it,” I tell him. “That’s the language.”
“Will you teach it to me?” he asks. His pushes his head between our seats, turning to look at me first, and then Jude.
“If we teach you,” Jude says, “then we won’t be able to talk shit about you.”
He laughs. “Something tells me you’d have no problem doing that in plain English.” A pause, and then he adds: “También puedo decir mierda. I can talk shit, too.”
“But does it count as a secret language if neither of us can understand?” she asks. This time they both laugh, and she directs her next words just to me: “I kile mih.”
I like him.
Four hours later, we check in at the Pleasant Valley Bed & Breakfast (Sab and I in one room, and Jude in her own), drop off our bags, and reconvene in the lobby. Sab pulls a pamphlet from his back pocket. “It says that Harmony only has a population of 732 people, and is only two miles long in either direction. We could start off at the museum and then go to Murdering Town, which is this old site where George Washington and his guide were shot and—”
“That sounds great,” Jude says. “Let’s go.”
She takes one step toward the exit and I reach out to yank her shirt, stopping her. “Wait a minute,” I say. “I’m not here to learn American history, I’m here to learn my history. Our history. You know, where we liked to play and the house where we grew up, all of that.” I turn to Sab. “I really appreciate the research you did, but I hope you understand.”
“Whatever you guys want,” he says. “I’m just along for the ride.”
I look at Jude just in time to catch her expression, although I don’t know if “expression” is the right word; her face is entirely blank, as though her features have reset themselves to neutral, waiting for her to signal how she feels. In the next few seconds I can read her thought process as clearly and simply as flipping through the pages of a book, an ease made possible only because we share an identical face: a flash of panic to a flash of fear to a flash of resignation to, finally, a tense surrender. She will go along with my plan, but she has some private qualms about it, and I tell myself to have some reverse empathy: being here is upsetting for me because I don’t remember, and upsetting for her because she does.
“You’re right,” she says. “Let’s do the Bird Twins History Tour.”
A bracelet of bright brick buildings encircles the main square, many adorned with striped awnings and flickering gas lamps. The streets are ghost-town quiet until a horse clops into the horizon, pulling a buggy draped in blue velvet, the driver in a top hat and tails. Sab reaches into my purse for his Polaroid camera and takes a snap, waving the picture in the air, watching the fuzzy image sharpen itself into a recognizable scene.
“Just don’t aim that thing at Jude,” I whisper. “Apparently we don’t like to have our picture taken, except under very strict circumstances.”
“Both of you,” he whispers back, “or just Jude?”
I stretch my arm across his chest to slow down his pace, letting Jude stride out of earshot.
“Her issues are my issues. I know that might sound weird to you, but it’s just the way it is.”
“Hurry up!” Jude shouts, waving us forward. “We have a lot of ground to cover.”
I loop my arm around him and rush us along, catching up to Jude. I just want a normal, happy birthday with my two favorite people in the world, my past and my present in seamless accord. And for a while, I have exactly this. We visit the small park where we played in our homemade costumes, our mother pushing the swings and spinning the rides; and the creek where Jude and I used to fish with our father before he disappeared; and the campground where we’d held a private memorial service and spread our mom’s ashes; and, finally, Miss Sally’s Extraordinary Confections on Main Street, where we stopped for ice cream in the summer.
I swing the door open. A tinkering bell announces my entrance, and a woman springs up from behind the counter. Her face is plump and perfectly round and topped with a thick brown donut of a bun. A platter heavy with pastel confections balances on her forearms.
“Good afternoon,” she says. “What is your pleasure today?”
“Are you Miss Sally?” I ask.
“I am,” she says. She sets her tray down and picks up a scooper, hovering it above a trough of ice cream.
I pull Jude toward me and tilt my head against hers.
“Do you recognize us?” I ask. “Kat and Jude Bird. It’s been a few years, but we’ve been coming here since we were kids.”
Miss Sally’s watery gray eyes dart back and forth, studying our faces. “You do look familiar,” she says, and turns to Jude. “Weren’t you here a few months ago?”
“Nah,” Jude says. “I just have one of those faces.” She points to me. “Obviously, so does she.”
“Twins,” Miss Sally says. “Twins are delightful.” She leans closer, studying Jude’s face, pointing the scooper like a gun. “I suppose so. I just remember the paper clips in the hair. Paper clips instead of barrettes or ribbons.”
“They’re in style now,” Jude says. “At least where we live.”
I replay my long walks around the neighborhood, review my detailed observations from our window, and can’t remember seeing even one paper clip employed as a fashion accessory. But Jude’s voice is so smooth and certain, shut tight against any doubt, a voice that believes its own words.
“Well, now I know!” Miss Sally says, lowering the scooper. “And it’s delightful to see you both again.”
Jude steps closer to the counter, leaning her chest against the glass. “I knew you’d remember us, and it’s good to see you again, too.” She orders three cones to go and balks when Sab offers to pay; this is her treat. When Sab brings out his camera she even takes it from his hands, scootching me and Miss Sally in closer, telling us to smile our biggest smiles and say, “Cookies and cream!” as we pose. Out of deference to Jude and our history with disorienting photographs, I rearrange my hair so that it falls into my sister’s part.
We stand outside beneath the awning, licking our ice cream in silence. The air is cooler here than it is in the city, with no tall buildings and stretches of black asphalt to trap and hold the heat, and the sun’s languid descent beams gold through the trees. The hair on my arms and neck rises up and a chill rushes across my skin, a chill I attribute not to the ice cream or the deepening twilight but to a thought I had just as the Polaroid of me and Miss Sally fell from the camera’s slot: What if she really didn’t recognize us? And if she did recognize Jude, why did my sister come out here alone? I am tempted to ask, but Jude had seemed so pleased to have been remembered and so adamant in her denial, and I don’t want to ruin this day or turn my new, good memories into bad ones.
We have dinner at our parents’ favorite restaurant inside the Harmony Inn, the oldest building in town, rumored to be haunted. Our mother, Jude says, used to come here and look for evidence of the supernatural—a ghostly young girl in a white dress who skipped along the hallways; furniture rearranging itself without the help of human hands; spots in certain rooms where the temperature plummeted or rose. She’d be terrified if she felt so much as a breeze from a window—
“Mom?” I asked. “Or us?”
“I meant us,” she said. “With mom. She would bring us here and tell us stories. We liked to be scared, all three of us.”
“Where did your mom grow up?” Sab asks. “And your dad, for that matter.”
The question surprises me, mostly because I’d never thought to ask it myself.
Jude chews and chews her steak and washes it down with her beer. Thirty seconds pass, a minute.
“I can’t remember with Dad,” Jude says. “We were so young. And with Mom, she always just waved her hand and said, ‘A small town out in the middle of yonder, just a speck of a speck of the earth.’ Or something like that, in so many words. For whatever reason, she didn’t like to talk about her childhood.”
“And we never pressed her on it?’” I ask. “Demanded specifics?”
“We did a few times. But that was always her answer, and we learned to stop asking.”
“Some things are meant to stay secret,” Sab says. “Ain’t nothing wrong with that.” He raises his glass, and for a minute it feels like we’re all in the snug room, about to play a round of cards, toasting to good luck. Good culk, I think, but say aloud: “Yerv rute.” Very true.
“Yerv rute,” Jude says, raising her glass. “Dan ot omm.” And to Mom.
“Verv rute,” Sab repeats, “Dan ot omm. Whatever that means.”
Back at our hotel, we say good night and close our doors and get into bed, and when his hands begin their slow walk down the curve of my body, I deny him for the very first time, telling him I am tired and drained, unable to summon the energy even to talk. He turns and falls into a steady sleep, and although the walls are thick I can hear my sister through them; those crisp, distinct bubble-pop noises drift faintly to my ears. It occurs to me, then, that I can’t tell if she is laughing or crying, that the sound of our mirth is indistinguishable from the sound of our sorrow.
In the morning, we make one final pilgrimage, navigating a series of intersecting dirt roads a few miles from Harmony’s main square, each dustier and more remote than the last. We pass one farmhouse, so old and weathered it seems ready to collapse, and I feel a surge of hope: “That one?”
“No,” Jude says. “Mom would never have let our house deteriorate in that way.”
Sab is quiet in the back seat, his hand dipping out of the open window.
In another quarter mile she makes a turn. A battered street sign reads TOUCHSTONE ROAD. A magnificent sunrise reddens the sky. We hear the moo of cows, the cluck of chickens, the impatient barking of dogs, and above the din Jude says, “There.”
It is exactly as I’d hoped: all wraparound porches and strips of stained glass and pairs of arched windows that look like winking eyes. Behind the main house I spot a pristine picket fence keeping all of the animals safe. I’m so overwhelmed I barely hear Jude’s narration: “See that window? That was our bedroom, and there’s Mom and Dad’s bedroom, and on the ground floor to the right is the parlor, and beyond that the kitchen…”
As soon as Jude turns off the engine I spring from the car and run with ferocious speed, my eyes wide, the hot air drying them out. Behind me I hear Jude call, “Kat! Kat! Wait for me!” and she catches up, her hands on my shoulders, panting in my ear. Together we skulk around the perimeter of the porch and peer into windows, pointing out mundane household items that, for us, hold deep significance. There’s the spot where Dad liked to read, Jude says, and the oven where Mom made us cakes, and the closet where I always hid for hide and seek, and the wallpaper that looked like climbing vines, and the old mahogany stairs that we descended on our butts, bumping the whole way. We circle back to the front door and Jude, to my surprise, yanks on the old-fashioned bell.
“What are we going to say if someone answers?” I ask.
“That we used to live here, and would they be so kind as to give us a tour.”
She takes my hand, gripping hard.
I take my turn and yank, but no one ever comes.
“It’s time to go,” she says. “I want to be home before dark.” She grabs my arm and pulls. I am her dog, chafing at my leash, scratching to go back. I want to stand and gaze at this diorama of another life, preserved beneath glass, with no way for me to break in.
“We can come back again some time,” she says. “I promise.”
I let her lead me but near the end of the long, rocky driveway, I shake off her arm.
“Give me just a minute,” I say.
She retreats to the car and Sab slides up to me, his camera in hand. He begins taking pictures of everything: the immaculate fence, the glittering windows, the mailbox designed to look like a miniature version of the house itself. “You’ll want these later,” he says, and flaps his arms, circling around me until the pictures slowly reveal themselves. On the walk back to the car I notice something I hadn’t seen before: the body of a dead rabbit—a baby bunny, really—deflating atop the gravel, sinking into itself, its soft brown fur still pristine and absent of blood, its tiny, powerful legs folded into its belly, its black eyes open in eternal horror. I do not know why it makes such an impression on me; even after Sab gives me an album full of pictures from this trip, it is the image that lingers most powerfully, igniting some long-lost corner of my mind.