One Year after the Accident
MARCH 1984
These are the things Jude Bird, formerly Jude Sheridan, knows to be true: One year ago, on a wet winter night, her mirror twin lost everything she ever knew about herself. She saved Kat, and Kat saved her in turn.
On March 13, the anniversary of the day Kat lost what she knew, Jude suggests they celebrate everything she’s gained. She blindfolds her sister and walks her through the neighborhood, past a Catholic church, a playground, a rehab center, a check-cashing place, a McDonald’s, a theater showing Against All Odds, Corropolese Tomato Pie. She opens the door of a tattoo shop and leads her sister inside and lays her down on a long leather table. Hours later they step outside, just in time to witness the last of the sun’s brazen light, and examine each other’s wrists: the old, identical scars have been transformed into identical arrows, pointed resolutely forward, beckoning what’s to come.
The Plan is dead now, in both the external world and in her mind, rejected and released for good. She does not think of Violet until the day she comes home from work and finds an envelope bearing her name. Out falls Jude’s nameplate necklace, perfectly polished, and a note in Violet’s familiar script:
J,
I think you might have dropped this …
And the scorpion has lost its sting.
V.
She does not think about King Bash or the RonDon or the Island or kill-saving, the horrible weight of the monkey mask atop her head. She does not think of Verona except for one single Sunday evening in early spring. Kat says she has a surprise for her and leads her to their car, ordering Jude into the passenger seat. She drives with a concentration Jude hasn’t seen since the murders—radio off, eyes unwavering, not a word of explanation, weaving in and out of traffic with an intense and deadly calm. After an hour they arrive at the old house, their childhood home, the place where they’d seen their father for the very last time, the place where they’d first met King Bash and the RonDon, the place where Jude had fled from Verona’s dog, the place that still terrified her when she faced it straight on.
All this time Kat has not spoken one word. Now she turns to Jude and says, “You can do this.”
Jude can’t look at her, can’t look at anything. She shuts her eyes and shakes her head and says no no no no no, feeling like a child on the verge of a tantrum, being dragged along when all she wants to do is sit down and stay put, safe in her stillness.
“Yes yes yes yes yes,” Kat says. She exits her side of the car and opens Jude’s door. She wrestles Jude’s hand from her lap and traps it in her own. “You are doing it. We are doing it.”
Kat pushes ahead as she has always done, oblivious to threats or consequences, pulling Jude along with her, down the curved brick driveway, all the way to the ancient front door. She raises and lowers the knocker, banging it again and again, until it swings open and reveals Verona, dressed in a gauzy robe, a cigarette glowing at her fingers. Her mouth drops open and her eyes flit left to right, taking them both in.
“Girls!” she says. “Katherine! Judith! What a—”
“Shut up,” Kat says. “You just shut the fuck up.” Her tone scares even Jude. She remembers her private description of Kat, one she’d never shared: a machine gun tucked inside of a tulip. Now the petals have fully opened, the barrel taking aim.
To Jude’s surprise, Verona goes silent. The ashes drop from her cigarette.
Kat squeezes Jude’s hand and says, “Go.”
Jude knows she has no choice. “Ouy rea rou therom,” she says. Her words sound disconnected from her own mouth, a voice being piped in from some distant locale.
“You are our mother,” Kat translates. She squeezes Jude’s hand again, so tight her fingers turn numb.
“Ouy rewe pupsosed ot cettpro su,” Jude says. Her voice is louder this time, and closer.
“You were supposed to protect us,” Kat says.
Verona is silent, her face unmoving. Another cluster of ashes drops.
Jude speaks one last line, her voice now fully her own: “Ouy rea thinong.” She squeezes Kat’s hand and they translate it together: “You are nothing.”
They wait for a beat, hands intertwined, breath in sync. Again Verona’s eyes dart back and forth, from Kat to Jude and back, until she lifts them to glance at something in the distance, a benign and empty place to land her gaze.
“Good gracious,” she says to no one at all. “Good gracious indeed.”
And with that, Very Sherry shuffles backward to step off the stage. Kat looks at Jude and Jude looks at Kat and together they thrust their hands against the door, slamming it shut, making her disappear.
Instead of thinking about all those things, now lodged deep into her past, Jude amplifies the minutia in her present, turning the small into big, the gray into color, the silence into sonic booms.
She thinks about the pleasure of the first bite of hoagie; of a table well dusted and a floor scrubbed clean; of Kat driving her own new car and getting lost on purpose; of their weekend trips with Wen to the topiary maze; of their poker nights with Sab in the dim, smoky snug room; of their growing collection of travel books about the places she said they’d been; of finding a new love, a real love, one that would corner and seize her heart; of spinning her very best lies into truth. Mostly she thinks about the long, wild challenge of learning who they are now, After Kat and After Jude—iterations that Jude believes will be their best ones yet.
And what she thinks, is.