Seven Months after the Accident
OCTOBER 1983
The door to apartment 4E is open, as if Jude has been expecting me, and she is pacing across the living room, back and forth. I think I see her lips move, and I realize she is having a conversation with me, playing both our parts. I know what she’s saying, and what I’m saying back, and yet when my sister stops and turns, forcing me to look at my mirrored self, all of our words fail to come. “I don’t know what to say,” we both say. She steps right as I step left; I step right as she steps left; finally we do it correctly, moving in opposite directions. She locks the door behind me in a way that feels permanent, sealing us both inside.
She opens her mouth, closes it. She waves her hands. She shrugs, closes her eyes, and tries again, this time using the words only I will understand: “Ouy ownk.” You know.
I nod, unable to speak.
The look on her face makes my heart clench; she is present but not here. She has stopped existing in the same way I’d stopped when I found the pictures: I can see the mechanics of my sister, her fulcrums and bolts and nuts and screws, the wheels and levers that activate and spin her brilliant brain, all come to an unnatural, jerky halt that drops her to her knees, without any instinct to break the fall. Her torso collapses next, sending her face directly to the floor with such blunt force that I hear the crack of her nose, and her blood spreads like a pillow beneath her. I kneel in her blood and rest her head on my knees.
“Jude,” I whisper. “You don’t have to say anything. You don’t have to say anything you don’t want to say ever again. And you don’t have to lie.”
For a long, long time, we sit this way. I grip a fistful of her hair like reins. I rock her back and forth. She looks at me without seeing, a different kind of blind from Richard, the blindness that comes from having seen too much.
“I do have to say something,” she says. Her voice sounds clogged, rusty, as though she’s forgotten how to use it. “You know about the murders.”
I force myself to stay calm. I hold my broken, raggedy sister in my arms, her blood warm against my skin, and speak in an absurd, singsongy voice, the cadence of a nursery rhyme.
“I do know. And I know about a murder that didn’t happen,” I say, sweet, so sweet. “Deep breath, okay? I’m here now. I believe you. I’m sorry I ever doubted you.”
My tone is working. She seems mollified, and responds in a shy, tentative whisper, like she’s asking for permission.
“You saw there were two, Ronald Lester and Donald Lawson. We used to call them the RonDon. And then Sebastian Vance. We called him King Bash.”
My hands squeeze her face. I try to picture the kind, self-deprecating Richard I know calling himself the king of anything.
“I know you know King Bash,” she says. “You call him Richard and you are friends with him. I went to the market to try to talk to you and I saw him. He wasn’t supposed to be there. He wasn’t supposed to be alive.”
“I know we did what we had to do,” I tell her. “But it’s okay now. It’s in our past.”
Jude shakes her head, breaking free of my grip. I can hear her think, You don’t understand before she says the words. “No, it isn’t. He has to die.”
She can’t mean this, I think. This situation has no business in our future. If Richard suspects us, he has kept his thoughts to himself. “What do you mean, Jude?” I say. A light tone, a curious tone. “Why would he have to die?”
“If he doesn’t die, Violet will go to the police. She knows what we failed to do and she wants it done.” She looks past my shoulder and addresses the wall, too embarrassed to face me straight on. “She has proof. My necklace ripped off in King Bash’s house and she has it. And she had a tape recorder running during one of our meetings and I couldn’t grab it in time and I am stupid and I’ve failed us. We have to do it.”
I am not that person anymore, I want to tell her. I am not her, and I no longer want to be her. Instead I say: “Don’t worry. You’ve worried long enough for both of us.”
My sister becomes a person again, and the pain of her own presence hits her acutely. I let her cry, her nose blowing bubbles of her blood, and I promise, for the first time in our lives, to be the twin who concocts all of the explanations and tidies any mistakes. I will become Before Kat one last time, just for her.