I could write a whole blog about closure. Or I could tell you a story about closure around the tragic accidental death of my best friend.
It’s a complicated story, but here are the basics: I visited Emily’s mother at Emily’s childhood home in a suburb of Detroit. I met her thoughtful and lovely caretaker, Bernice. I sat on the old-fashioned pink-and-white-striped silk sofa, and Emily’s mother showed me a photo album full of pictures of Emily when she was a little girl.
It’s hard to explain. But as we looked at the childhood photos together, I felt that I was being given a moment of understanding, a clear window into my friend’s childhood. As Emily’s mother and I remembered and celebrated Emily’s life, I felt I understood everything. And I realized that Emily’s story was twice as interesting as I could possibly have imagined.
And I could finally let my beloved friend Emily go.
Moms, please feel free to post about your own most moving and satisfying moments of closure.
Love,
Stephanie
33
Emily
I always knew that something bad would happen in the cabin. Maybe that was why I was so afraid of being there alone. I often dreamed of some evil . . . presence waiting for me on the screened-in sleeping porch where my sister and I spent so many childhood nights whispering in the dark, telling stories, inventing the fantasy kingdom (population: two) where we could live together forever without any grown-ups to ruin our fun or tell us what to do.
Our favorite song was “Octopus’s Garden.” We sang it over and over, faster and faster until our throats hurt and we couldn’t stop laughing. It makes me cry now. What if one of us met the octopus first?
The night before I disappeared, the phone rang. Sean and I were asleep.
“Who is it?” Sean mumbled.
“Dennis,” I said. It was not uncommon for Dennis Nylon to call at odd hours. It meant he was on another binge, spiraling toward another stint in rehab. He dialed through all the names on his work-contacts list till someone answered. I always answered because I knew that if no one else picked up, he’d move on to his next list: press and media people. I was the one who would have to deal with the ensuing shit storm. It was easier to talk Dennis down, to let him ramble until I heard him snoring on the other end of the phone. Then I could go back to sleep.
“I’ll take it in the hall,” I told Sean.
I practically sprinted down the stairs. I knew it wasn’t Dennis.
“Will you accept a collect call from Eve?”
I always did.
Eve and Em were the not-so-secret names that my sister and I had for each other. No one else—no one—was allowed to call us that. Once, early in our relationship, Sean called me Em, and I told him I would kill him if he ever called me that again. I think he believed I meant it. And maybe I did.
I had to leave the room to accept a phone call from my sister. Sean didn’t know I had a sister. No one did. No one but Mother, if she still remembered, and Bernice and people who’d known us in high school. But who cared about them? I’d had to get rid of a lot of old snapshots. At that point, I was still talking to Mother, so I sent them back to her with the excuse that I was moving a lot and I didn’t want to lose them.
“Hi, Eve,” I said.
“Hi, Em,” she said. And we both began to cry.
I don’t remember exactly when I stopped telling people that I had a sister. More or less around the time I moved to New York. I was sick of saying that I was a twin and having strangers pry or think they knew something about me. Didn’t they see how it bored me when everyone asked the same questions? Fraternal or identical? Did you dress alike? Are you close? Did you have a secret language? Was it weird, being a twin?
It was weird, and it’s still weird. But not in any way I could—or wanted to—explain. Sometimes, after I’d started pretending that I didn’t have a sister, I could almost forget I had one. Out of sight, out of mind. It was easier. Less pain, less guilt, less grief, less worry.
No one at work knew I had a twin. The first time Sean and I played our “Who had the unhappier childhood?” game, he told me that he was an only child, and I said, “Oh, poor you! Me, too!” After that, it became too complicated to explain how I could have forgotten I have a sister. It was easier, in every way, to keep Evelyn’s existence a secret. If she showed up at my house, I would have some serious explaining to do. That never happened. By then, my job had made me an expert at explaining the inexplicable—controlling information.
Every so often, I tested myself, my luck, and the people around me, daring them to guess the truth. Was Sean curious about why I spent a fortune on that Diane Arbus photo of the twins? Why I loved it so much? Of course not. It was a work of art. A good investment, he probably thought. The truth would have made him wonder what kind of person he married. That is, he would have wondered more than he did.
The first time Stephanie came to visit, I made a point of showing her the photo and saying that I cared about it more than anything in my house. But she just thought it proved that I had very good—very expensive—taste. Millions of people admire that picture, normal people who don’t look at the image and wonder which of the twins they are.
I was the dominant twin. I pushed my way out first. I walked and talked first. I grabbed Evelyn’s toys. I made her cry. I protected her. I put her at risk. I was the one who showed her where to find Mother’s gin bottles and replace the gin with water. I lit her first joint and invited her to smoke weed with me and my friends. I was the one who split our first tab of acid, who gave Evelyn her first Ecstasy pill, who took her to her first rave in Detroit.
How was I supposed to know that she would like getting high even more than I did? Or that she would find it harder to stay sober? Or that the terror of boredom that I felt would also torment her but in a different and more harmful way? She was the weaker twin.
I took the phone into the kitchen and turned on the light. It was cold, but I was afraid to put the phone down long enough to put on a sweater. I was afraid she’d hang up or disappear. Again.
“Where are you?” I said.
“I don’t know. Somewhere in Michigan. Guess what? I stole Mother’s car.”
“Nice,” I said. “We can all rest easy knowing the world is a safer place.”
She laughed. “I guess Mother hasn’t been driving it all that much.”
“Thank God for that,” I said. “Remember that time she backed off our driveway and fell into a ditch, and we had to call a tow truck with chains to pull her out?”
“I don’t remember much,” said Evelyn, “but I do remember that.” I was thinking, and my sister was too, that we were the only people who remembered that. I looked at my hand, holding the phone, and focused on the tattoo I hardly see anymore. Now I could see Evelyn, her wrist, her tattoo.
We got the tattoos after our worst fight ever. I’d found her kit in her bureau drawer—a hypodermic, cotton wool, a spoon, rubber tubing. Oh, and a packet of white powder.
We were seventeen.
I’d been suspicious for a while. She’d started wearing long sleeves, and she’d always had beautiful arms, nicer than mine; I get freckles in the sun. I’d known what I was going to find before I found it. But I was shocked when I did. This was real. My sister wasn’t joking.
I began to shout at her, yelling that she couldn’t do this to herself. To me. She said it was none of my business. We weren’t the same.
By then we were yelling so loud I was afraid that Mother might hear. But Mother was floating on a warm, cottony substance cloud of her own.
I slapped my sister. She slapped me back. We stepped away from each other, horrified. We hadn’t hit one another since we were little girls.