Chapter Three

The Way Things Were

Here, another story for you:

Once upon a time there were two sisters, twins, who came into the world looking just the same. Some said it was luck, some said it was fate, but Iris knew the truth: they were caused by a hiccup in development, something that happens three times out of every thousand births. One egg splits into two. Two babies with identical DNA.

Presto.

Another hiccup: two babies are hard for one womb to hold, and though they still weren’t due for ten weeks, the baby girls decided they’d be better off on the outside than in. Anyway, they had a whole world to discover.

So after they were born, three-pound Lark and three-and-a-half-pound Iris shared a room in the neonatal intensive-care unit, all tubes and tape and tissue-paper skin, while Lark learned to breathe on her own. This was a skill Iris already had—somehow she had learned something important and not taught it to her sister. It was a mistake she’d never make again.

When their parents told them the story of their early births, they said the girls had been placed side by side in the NICU; the doctors had said it was better for them, that twins in the NICU had better outcomes when they were together.

Iris had always taken this literally—yes, of course they were together in one strange little plastic box, she somehow already a little stronger and a little more able to be in the world than her sister. Yes, of course she kept her tiny preemie fingers curled around Lark’s tinier ones, letting her sister feel the rise and fall of her chest. You can do it, just like that: breathe, breathe.

But no. When their dad put together that photo album and they saw the pictures for the first time, they discovered their parents had been characteristically imprecise in their language. They were in two plastic boxes, side by side. There were no tiny preemie hands reaching for each other, no breathing lessons, no assurances. “We meant you two were in the same private berth,” their mother explained. “Right next to each other, side by side. You can’t put preemies together in the same crib!”

Iris was skeptical. The doctors had said it: they had better outcomes when they were together.

Perhaps that was why it took Lark so long to learn to breathe, why Iris was ready to go home a month before Lark was. Apparently Iris spent that month pronouncing her displeasure to the world; her parents thought she was colicky, but as soon as her sister came home—six pounds, with working lungs—she was happy again.

“You were a whole different baby all of a sudden,” their mom said with a smile.

“Thank goodness,” their dad said, with a different kind of smile.

After that, the girls stayed together.

Their parents said they were talking before they could talk, chatting away in some strange babble that no one else could parse but that each of them seemed to understand perfectly. “I was afraid you’d never speak Other People words,” their mom always told them every time she told the story. “You didn’t seem to need to. You could understand each other; that was all that mattered.”

Lark picked up Other People words first; Iris was slower to adapt and seemed suspicious of the entire concept.

“It didn’t matter,” their mother told them, every time. “Even when you spoke Other People words, you were still really only speaking to each other. Always in your own little world.”

As they grew up, other children revolved in and out of their lives. There was a little girl next door with a sandbox in the shape of a frog and a mother who overflowed with laughter and grape juice; there were two girls in preschool who liked to pretend they were twins too—they were most certainly not, but Iris and Lark let them pretend, to be kind. There was Maria in kindergarten, who always wanted to do dance recitals, and Gracie in second grade, who bragged to everyone that she was closer to Lark than to Iris.

In the end it was not worth it. After the grape-juice girl, everyone else seemed to want something from them, whether it was to exploit their obvious appeal as backup dancers (a matching set), or to borrow their status as semi-celebrities (for everyone knew about the identical twins), or to be the one who finally broke them apart (for some people were just that way). As if that could happen.

Who is the grape-juice girl, and who is the one with the chisel behind her back? You cannot always tell. So Iris and Lark responded by floating away, orbiting around each other, a binary star.

None of that saved them from the adults, who stared at them like everything was suddenly a little off, as if they might be dreaming, as if the ground had just tilted three degrees—and they made everything inside Iris tilt too. When that happens to you enough, you start walking around feeling like you are perpetually three degrees off from everyone else.

People asked them the strangest questions: Which one of you is the good one? Which one of you is the smart one? Who is faster, stronger, sweeter, who gets good grades, who is a good little girl? Who is (ha-ha-ha) prettier?

Which one of you is the girl and which is the copy?

In the end, the adults were just like the chisel girls—so fascinated by what made them different from each other, slicing off little bits of each girl and comparing them. As if dividing them was what made them interesting, what gave them meaning.

It wasn’t.

The story always went one way, and the moral of the story was clear:

They had better outcomes when they were together.