“Don’t give me excuses. Do it right, damn it! What do you think I’m paying you for?” Wynne slammed down the phone.
I stood in the doorway, still amazed at my sister’s authority, despite the fact that she had controlled situations for nearly forty years.
Even now, lying in the hospital, she continued to play the executive. But, after all, she was the first woman in the state to have become senior vice president of a major corporation. I wondered if it was Warren or some other harried assistant who had felt the sting of her tongue this time.
As she looked at me her expression changed from irritation to concern. “Lynne, why are you lurking in the doorway? You’re shaking. Come in and tell me what’s the matter.”
I walked in, a bit unsteadily, and sat on the plastic chair next to the bed. “It happened again.”
“What this time?”
I took a deep breath, holding my hands one on top of the other on my lap, trying to calm myself enough to be coherent.
The room was bare—hospital-green curtains pulled back against hospital-green walls. The flowers and plant arrangements had been sent to Wynne’s apartment when she had first taken sick leave months ago, but by the time I arrived in the city, they were long dead. Funny how I hesitated to change anything in her apartment, where I, for however long it might be, was only a guest.
Wynne sat propped up on the hospital bed, her hair black and shining, with not a hint of gray.
I looked at her face, at the deceptively fragile smile that had always been strong. Our features were so similar, almost exact, yet no one had ever mixed us up. And Wynne’s compact body had always looked forceful where mine had merely seemed small. She’d changed suddenly when she’d become ill. It was as if her underpinnings had been jerked loose, and she had sped past me on the way to old age.
“Lynne, I’m really worried about you,” she said with an anxiety in her voice I hadn’t heard in ages. “What happened?”
“Another shot. It just missed my head. If I hadn’t stumbled…” My hands were shaking.
Wynne leaned forward and reached out with her hands to my own, steadying mine with her own calm. “Have you notified the police?”
“They’re no help. They take a report and then—nothing. I don’t think they believe me. Another hysterical middle-aged woman.”
Wynne nodded. “Let’s just go through the thing again. I’m used to handling problems—gives me something to think about when I’m on the dialysis machine.”
It sounded cold, but that was the way she was now. We’d been apart since college, and emotionally longer than that. Really, I could hardly claim to know her anymore. Our twin-ness had never had that special affinity—secret baby language, intuitively shared joys and apprehensions. In us, the physical resemblance had merely served to point out our very different traits. I had wound up teaching in our home-town grammar school; she, more determined and ambitious, had made her way up in the world of business.
“So?” she said impatiently.
“Someone shot at me three times. If I weren’t always tripping and turning my ankle…”
“And you have no idea who it might be?”
“None. Who would want to kill me? Why? Really, what difference would it make if I died? Who would care?”
“It would matter to me.” She pressed my hands, then drew away. “You’re all I have. I wouldn’t have asked you to come if you weren’t vital to me.”
I bit my lip. “There are things…I want to say before…” But I couldn’t say “you die,” and Wynne, for all her lack of sentimentality, didn’t seem to be able to supply the words for me.
Instead I said, “Wynne, you shouldn’t cut yourself off like this.”
“I have you. I need someone away from the company.”
“But why? Why not let Warren come?”
“No.” She spat out the word. “I can’t let him see me like this.”
She looked all right to me. Better than I was likely to look if I didn’t find out who was shooting at me.
Wynne must have divined my thoughts, for she said irritably, “You don’t show someone who’s after your job how sick you are. I’ve never told any of them that I’m on the dialysis machine.” She shook her head as if to dismiss the unacceptable thought. “I told them it was just one kidney that failed, that I was having it removed.” Her face moved into a tenuous smile. “I know all the details from your own operation. So don’t say that you never did anything for me.”
I didn’t know how to answer. Could Wynne really hide the fact that she was dying? Warren had been her assistant for ten years. He had taken over her job as acting senior vice president. I had assumed they were friends, but I guess I didn’t understand the nature of friendship in business.
Brusquely, Wynne gestured for me to go on.
Swallowing my annoyance, I reminded myself that she was used to giving orders and now she had no one but me to boss around.
But before I could answer, a nurse came in and with an air of authority that dwarfed even Wynne’s, motioned me away as she drew the green curtain in a half oval around the bed.
I walked to the window and looked out, but I didn’t want to see the parking lot again. I didn’t want to search each bush, behind every car, looking for a sniper. Instead, I turned back toward the room—this small private room, so very impersonal. Even Wynne, with all her power, hadn’t the ability to stamp any image of herself onto it. It was merely a holding cell for the dying.
“Just another minute,” the nurse called out.
I nodded, realizing as I did so that she couldn’t see me behind the curtain.
I wondered if this room held the same horror for Wynne as it did for me. Or more? Or different? Would I ever see this mind-numbing green without thinking of the day I arrived in the city, unnerved by Wynne’s sudden insistence that I come, after years of increasingly perfunctory letters. That first day. I sat down and she said she was dying. No, wait, not dying. She had never used that word. It was her doctor who said “dying.”
It had been bright and clear that day, too. The sunlight had been cut by the Venetian blinds so that pale ribbons sliced across the green wall. And when he told me, the light merged with the green and that numbing green shone and the wall seemed to jump out at me and I couldn’t focus, couldn’t think about anything but the wall.
Time softens things, but that moment remained hard and bright and brittle.
“Lynne, you keep staring off in the distance. Are you sure you’re all right?” The nurse was gone. Wynne was looking at me, her lips turned up in the hint of a smile, but her eyes serious. “Are you still seeing the doctor?”
“Doctor? You mean the psychiatrist at home?”
“Yes.”
“Wynne, I wasn’t seeing him because I was crazy. It was just therapy. I needed some perspective.”
“On?”
“Us,” I answered. She looked truly surprised, and I couldn’t help but feel stung to realize once more that she, who had influenced every part of my life, was so unaffected by me.
“You were saying, before the nurse came for my spit and polish, who might want to kill you? It’s so hard to believe.”
I shifted my mind gratefully. Still, where to begin? I was too ordinary—a middle-aged first-grade teacher—to make enemies. If it had been Wynne…
“Well,” she said, tightening her lips, “we’ll have to examine the possibilities.”
I shook my head. “I don’t have any money, no insurance other than the teachers’ association policy.”
“And that goes to Michael?”
“Yes, but Michael’s not going to come all the way from Los Angeles to shoot his mother so he can inherit two thousand dollars and a clapboard house.”
“I didn’t mean that.” She looked momentarily confused, and hurt. “I was just listing the possibilities. You have to do that. You can’t let sentiment stand in the way of your goal. I had to learn that long ago. There are plenty of people who have wanted me out of the way.”
“But they weren’t trying to murder you!”
She shrugged. And she watched me.
“Wynne, I’m the one they’re trying to kill. No one would kill you now. What would be the point? I mean…”
Her face turned white.
“Wynne, we don’t have much time! Either of us. Maybe we can’t find out who’s shooting at me, but at least we can feel like sisters.” I paused, then went on. “When you asked me to come here, after all these years, I thought you wanted to close the gap between us.” I smiled, heard my voice breaking. “Frankly, I was surprised it mattered to you. It was a shock to realize how much it mattered to me. I…”
Her eyes were moist. She looked away. But when she turned back there was no sign of the emotion that had passed.
Startled, I began awkwardly brushing at my hair with my hand, rather than reaching toward my sister, as I’d instinctively wanted to do. I forced my attention back to the question under consideration. Suppose no one did know Wynne was dying. Warren at least had been kept in the dark, or so Wynne thought. I was beginning to wonder if she had accepted it herself.
“You’re not working,” I said. “You don’t have any connection with the company now. How could you be a threat to anyone?”
The lines in her face hardened. “I know things. When I get out of here, I’m going back. I’ll see who’s been out to get me. I’ll take care of them! I’m too valuable for the company to just forget.”
“You what!” I stared at the green wall. Wynne had shoved the death threat to me aside, finding it of less importance than interoffice grudges. I looked at her, wondering what we really meant to each other. In many ways we were so alike. I felt so helpless in the face of her bitterness.
“Who particularly,” I asked, “would want to kill you!”
“Me?”
“I mean who might mistake me for you? An old lover?”
She half smiled, surprised. “What do you know about me?”
“Only what you’ve wanted me to know, like always. The lover was just a guess. After all, you’re forty years old and single. There must have been men, maybe married…
“You make it all rather melodramatic.” She continued to look amused.
“Shooting is melodramatic!”
She didn’t reply.
“What about Warren?” I persisted. “Would he kill to keep your job? Would he mistake me for you?”
She looked at me in amazement, as if the possibility were too fantastic to believe. “Lynne, anyone—Warren in particular—who would take the trouble and risk involved in murder, would be a bit more careful than that.”
“Maybe they don’t know you have an identical twin?”
She sighed, her jaw settling back in a tired frown. “They know. When you’ve held as important a position as I have, believe me, they know.” She paused, then added, “But if you really think that someone is mistaking you for me, maybe you should move out of my apartment. Take a hotel room. I’ll pay for it, of course.”
I shook my head
Fingering the phone, she said, “Lynne, you haven’t made much of a case for this death threat. I don’t want to sound unsympathetic, but the truth is that you’ve always leaned on me. Are you sure that this death thing isn’t just a reaction to my own condition? It does happen in twins.”
“I think not,” I snapped, finally exasperated. “I’ve been through years of therapy. Our bodies may be identical, but my mind is all my own.”
She sat silent.
The awkwardness grew. “Listen Wynne, I know you’ve got business to take care of. I interrupted your phone call when I came in. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
She nodded, a tiredness showing in her eyes. But I wasn’t out of the room before she picked up the phone.
As I walked down the hall, I thought again about what an amazing person she was. Dying from kidney failure, and she was still barking at subordinates. I wondered about Warren—did he allow her to run things from her hospital room? Did he believe Wynne’s story about her condition? Could he think I was she, coming in for treatment? Not likely. If Warren were anything like Wynne, by now he would have a solid grip on the vice presidency. He would have removed any trace of Wynne, and she’d have to fight him for the job.
Still, I stopped by the door, afraid to go out.
If Wynne wasn’t giving orders to Warren or some other subordinate, whom was she yelling at? “What do you think I’m paying you for?” she had demanded.
She wasn’t paying anyone at the company. She wasn’t paying any expenses—I was handling those. There was nothing she needed.
Or was there?
My hand went around back to my remaining kidney.