I wouldn’t mind a break from Sean. I could use a time-out beside the lake. Wasn’t the whole point to step back from our overcommitted lives and disconnect and figure out what was important? Lots of people have that idea. But not everyone acts on it. Civilization would collapse if they did.
I was right to be uneasy about being separated from Nicky and—as it turned out—to be concerned about Sean’s sticking to our plan. I certainly never expected Sean to fuck the fish. I didn’t think that Stephanie would stalk me all the way to my mother’s.
Life is full of surprises.
I’d brought books. The complete works of Charles Dickens, James M. Cain’s Serenade. A Highsmith novel I couldn’t remember reading, or maybe I’d forgotten. I bought enough food to last for a while—and a new CD player. I could play the music I liked without having to listen to Sean’s awful screaming British bands from his youth.
I made an effort to cover my tracks, stopping at convenience stores where I thought they might not have state-of-the-art surveillance cameras. Still, when they started looking for me, it should have been easier to find me. I assumed they weren’t looking that hard, whatever they might have been pretending and telling Sean.
I didn’t know that till later. The lake house had no internet and no TV.
*
I never imagined that our plan would involve my twin. Now, thinking back, I realize I needed my sister for it to work. I needed her, just as I’d always needed her, even when I tried to escape or deny or ignore it. I must have known all along that Evelyn would be part of it. But I didn’t want things to happen the way they did.
I must have known. My sister and I had always known things about the other without being able to explain or understand how we knew.
On the way to Michigan, I had a lot of time to think. Sometimes I thought like the decent human being I wanted to be. Sometimes I thought like the scheming maniac I really am. I spent the night in a motel in Sandusky. A Motel 6 where I could pay cash.
I reached the lake house the next day. Mother’s 1988 Buick was parked in the driveway. I wished it was just a car, any old car, but it was the car in which Mother had nearly killed us countless times during our childhood. After she’d had her license suspended for DWI, the car had remained in the garage. Bernice took it out every so often, to keep it running, but its forced retirement had preserved it with Mother’s nicks and dents. I told myself that the car was Evelyn’s now, but that only made me feel worse. Because I realized that pretty soon—too soon—the car might be mine. But what would I do with it? My sister would be dead, and I would be in another country, a multimillionaire with no use for Mother’s beat-up Buick.
The cabin door was locked. I knocked. No answer. No one had fixed the torn screen on the porch, and I climbed through it. The house smelled like something had died in the walls. When that happened when Evelyn and I were kids, we’d scare each other by saying that a dead person was walled up in the cabin. Edgar Allan Poe was our favorite writer.
Usually it was a dead bat in the walls. All the bats were dying now. Dennis Nylon gave a benefit for a bat-disease research foundation to launch our Batgirl look. That was my idea. And, it occurred to me now, that was what I’d worked for: saving the lives of dead bats.
God, I hated being alone in the cabin. Had Evelyn changed her mind? She’d better be here. Don’t let her be dead.
On the kitchen counter, I saw the bottles of orange energy drink and the packages of the marshmallow cookies and potato chips that Evelyn ate when she was high, when she ate at all.
“Evelyn?”
“In here.”
I ran to the room where she slept when it got too cold to sleep on the porch. For years we’d shared the same room because it was so much fun to talk and tell stories and scare each other. Then for years we’d argued over which room was ours. Finally we settled on who would sleep where—the first of our separations.
I opened the door.
It’s always a shock, seeing your double. Like looking in the mirror but much, much more bizarre. The strangest thing now was that we looked so similar and so different. Evelyn’s hair was ratted as if a small animal was nesting inside. Her face was unevenly puffy, and her skin was a bluish skim milk pale. When she smiled at me, I saw that she was missing a front tooth. She wore several sweaters, one on top of the other. She’d crawled under the blankets, and still she was shivering.
She looked awful. I loved her. I always had and always would.
The strength of that love erased everything. The years of fights and worry. The crazed middle-of-the-night phone calls, the not knowing where she was, the dragging her into rehab, the disappointments and scares. All the resentments, frustrations, and fears were burned away by the happiness of being in the same room. Of her being alive. How could I have forgotten the most important person in my life? I had never loved anyone as I loved my twin. Anyone but Nicky. It was almost unbearably painful that my sister didn’t know him. That he didn’t know her. And maybe he never would.
I ran over and hugged Evelyn. I said, “You need a bath.”
“Bossy, bossy,” Evelyn said. She dragged herself up in bed. “What I need is a shot of bourbon, a beer, and two Vicodins.”
I sat on the edge of the bed. “You’re high.”
“You know me so well,” Evelyn said flatly.
Then she said, “I want to die.”
“You don’t,” I said. “You can’t.” I was crazy to have thought that it would help Sean and me if she died. I had forgotten how much I loved her, how much I wanted her to live. I’d think of something else. I’d bring her home with me, I’d tell Sean and Nicky the truth—
She said, “This is not going to be like that play where the girl spends the whole play telling her mom she’s going to kill herself. And then she does. Or doesn’t. I can’t remember. This is not going to be like that.”
“Tell me you’re not serious,” I said.
“This serious.” She pointed at the dresser behind my head where a dozen pill bottles were lined up like clear cylindrical bombs awaiting detonation. “I am not going about this like some amateur. This will not be messy, I promise.”
“I need you to stick around,” I said.
She said, “We’ve fallen out of touch, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“That can change. Starting now.”
“Everything can change. For example, I’ve gotten quite neat. I plan to clean up the kitchen. Make the bed. I won’t kill myself in the house, where you’d have to deal with my body. I plan to do it outside and let Mother Nature do the heavy lifting.”
I said, “You still think this is about whose turn it is to clean up the cabin?”
“Wait,” said Evelyn. “Here’s an idea: Join me. One last swim in the lake. Two dead twins gone back to the element we came from. We won’t have to worry about each other. Or think about each other. Or dread getting old and dying. No more terrors in the middle of the night. Do you know how sweet that would be? No more worry, no anger, no boredom, no wanting, no sadness, no more—”
“That sounds tempting,” I said. And for a moment, it did. Dying with Evelyn would be the final big adventure, the ultimate “fuck you” to tedium and boredom. Deal with that, Sean and Stephanie and Dennis! But Nicky would need to deal with it too.
“Thanks, but I can’t. I’ve got Nicky.”
I was sorry as soon as I said it.
“And I don’t,” she said. “I don’t have the cute little person who needs me. The nephew you never let me meet.”
“I couldn’t . . . you were so . . . I never knew . . .”
“Don’t worry about it, Em. It’s a little late. So without the cute little person, all I have is the big ugly death wish.”
She put her wrist beside mine. The two barbed-wire bracelet tattoos made a squashed figure eight. My sister was always fond of theatrical gestures.
“No more fights,” she said.
“No more fights,” I said.
“Listen,” I said. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
“You don’t love Sean anymore,” she said. “Big surprise.”
“It’s not about him. Or maybe it is. A little. Listen. I’ve disappeared. I’m faking my death to collect insurance money.”