“I’m like the funhouse mirror reflection of my sister.”
Anna Collins
I felt like a thief every time I entered Colette’s apartment through her bedroom window. But it was hardly sporting to walk in the front door when she only lived on the second floor, and climbing up the fire escapes kept my ninja skills sharp.
She was still sleeping when I flopped on her bed the next morning, and I grinned at her shriek of surprise.
“One-zero, Anna,” I said cheerfully.
“I was up until three a.m. giving you an alibi, so two-one, Colette,” my sister said, peering at me through sleepy eyes.
“Except I got Mom’s painting, so we’re two-two at least.”
Colette sat up and rubbed her eyes. “Show me,” she said, instantly alert.
I pulled the harness off my shoulders and opened the telescope tube. As kids, my sister and I had always opened presents together, so I’d held off looking at the painting until I was with her.
The canvas was thick, and I realized as I unrolled it that the backing was stuck to it. Colette shifted over, and I spread the painting of Mom and Aunt Alexandra out flat on the bed. The half-inch of canvas that I’d cut away from the edges to get it out of the frame hadn’t affected the integrity of the image, as the room the young women were standing in faded to black around them.
Colette gasped quietly and touched the faces of our mother and her older sister with a delicate fingertip. “They were so beautiful.”
“Mom still is, and the photos I’ve found of Aunt Alex show that she aged well too,” I said solemnly.
Colette sounded wistful. “I wish I looked more like Mom.”
“You and Mom have the same eyes – she just always looks like she’s about to burst into song and start dancing around the room with teapots and kitchen implements.”
Colette snickered, and I added a mental point to my score. I loved to make my sister laugh.
“Meanwhile, Aunt Alex looks like she knows where all the bodies are buried,” I continued.
“Are you kidding? She’s probably the one who buried them. Mom said Aunt Alex always treated rules more like guidelines, and sometimes she just flat out ignored them.”
“So, like me,” I said, as I studied the two young women in the painting.
She smiled at the comparison but didn’t confirm or deny as she stroked the cut edge of the canvas. “You couldn’t take the frame?”
I shook my head. “Wired to the wall.” I studied my sister’s face. Her lips looked a little swollen, and her jaw was slightly red. “Was everything … okay? I mean, for you, last night.” I stumbled over the words because it felt so hard to say them out loud. “He didn’t hurt you or anything?”
“What? No.” Colette flushed. “No.”
And that, oddly, was all she had to say about that.
“Is that a flush, like I don’t want to talk about it, or a blush, like I can’t tell you?”
“I’m not talking about this with you right now, Sister.”
We’d called each other Sister since we were little, just to confuse whoever couldn’t tell us apart. At this point, I couldn’t see anything but our differences, but I’d learned that most people were not very observant and saw whatever they expected to see. I was counting on it, in fact.
“You’re okay though? Truly?” I studied my sister’s face, and she met my eyes with the tiniest of smiles.
“Yeah, I’m good.”
“You’re good.”
The smile on her face bloomed into something pretty and real. “I’m good.”
She got off the bed and stripped off her tiny little camisole nightgown as she walked to the bathroom. My sister was the least self-conscious person I knew, and it was probably with good reason. Objectively speaking, she had a great body. Perfectly tanned all over in the way that only Saint Tropez or tanning beds can do, and curvy in a totally feminine way. “I’m going to shower. Make us some coffee, will you?”
“My hearts always turn out like penises though.”
She turned to stare at me for exactly one second before she finally rolled her eyes. “Don’t draw in the coffee foam, Sis. Coffee dicks are off-putting.”
I grinned. “Not to mention unsanitary.”
She laughed all the way to the bathroom. I could still hear laughter when the water went on.
“Four-two, Anna,” I murmured happily.
I studied my mother and her sister for a long moment. Alex had died just over a year ago, but Colette and I had never met her. My mother and her sister had had a huge falling out when they were in their early twenties, and Alex had left Boston right after their fight. She’d moved to Chicago, our mother had moved to Rockport, Massachusetts, and the twin girls born to Sophia a few years later had never known their mother’s older sister.
Aunt Alexandra had never had children of her own, and after she died it was a giant shock to all of us to learn that Colette and I were the main beneficiaries of her will.
That will was why we were in Chicago.
Alexandra Kiriakis had left her apartment to her firstborn niece, and Colette immediately moved into the badass brownstone in a part of the city neither of us could ever afford on our own. Colette had wanted me to live with her – the apartment had three bedrooms and it was huge – but Aunt Alex had left her art studio to her second-born niece, which was me. As a twin it was hard enough to find privacy, so I happily moved into the funky little downtown studio. It was much better for Colette and me that we didn’t live together, and having my own studio to go home to was one of the keys to our sisterly harmony.
About a month after I moved into the studio, I found the letter from Alex.
Dear Anna, it began. If you’re as much like me as I think you are, you’ll have found this letter pretty quickly. It had been taped behind a painting, and my only excuse was that I’d been so in awe of the painting that I hadn’t immediately looked behind it. Because really, who does? I need you to do me a favor if you can. If you can’t – or won’t – I understand, but I think you’re probably up to the challenge.
Challenge accepted. I’d never met a dare I didn’t take, or a bet I didn’t win, and somehow, my Aunt Alex had known that about me. Her letter went on to tell me about a painting that had been stolen from her, and how important it was that my mother get that painting back. It was a painting of Alex and Sophia that she called The Sisters. It was the last art piece they’d worked on together and it had been stolen years before. A man named Markham Gray had it and refused to return it, so the only thing Alex could think of was that it had to be stolen back from him.
I’ve tried to get it back from Markham for thirty years, and it’s just one more way that I’ve failed my sister. Please, if you can, take it from him and give it to Sophia. Perhaps then she’ll understand why I did what I did.
“I’m thinking about how to frame the sisters. How much canvas did you have to cut when you took it?” Colette asked as she walked out of the bathroom. She pulled the hair tie out of her hair and shook it down in a curtain of blonde curls around her shoulders.
“Not much. Probably half an inch all the way around.”
“I’ll have to make a custom frame before we give it to Mom,” she said as she slipped a dress over matching pink lace bra and panties.
I shook my head at her lingerie finery. “I’m lucky if I can even find a bra, much less one that matches my underwear.”
She shook her head at me with a sigh. “You’re so weird. Do you think we should go with gilded wood or plain?”
“It was in a heavy gilt frame in Gray’s panic room, and they looked like princesses locked in a tower. They should celebrate being let free with all the finery we can dress them in.”
Colette nodded absently as she studied the painting. Then she looked me in the eyes. “You did good, Sister.”
“Thanks. You too.”
I watched her choose a nail polish color to match her bra, which matched her panties, which would only be visible without the dress. I couldn’t imagine who would even notice that they matched. “I’m not good at being you, Sister. I kind of suck at it, actually,” I said.
“Well, considering that I can’t rock climb, ride a motorcycle, scuba dive, or jump out of planes, I figure we’re pretty even,” she said as she dropped the nail polish in the pocket of her dress, then tucked the heavy canvas of Alexandra and Sophia into a large portfolio and slipped it under her bed.
I thought of the boob-tastrophies in her pink dress and shuddered in horror. “Nah, you win. Ten-six, Colette.”