Mira’s breath quickens. Her face is a hardened mask.
“All live a short, brutal existence, knowing only duty and loss,” Rayla continues. “Half a person. Half-alive.”
Slowly, I grab Mira’s slack hand.
“How do you know all this?” I manage to ask.
“Because I was forced to choose.”
I stagger, blown away by the revelation. I tighten my fingers around Mira’s hand.
“Our mother . . .” My words falter.
“Was the firstborn.”
“Did she know?” Mira asks.
“Yes. I told Lynn her truth in the end,” our grandmother says. “To make her stay.” But it was the reason she left me, her unspoken words linger audibly in the air.
Mira frees her hand from my grasp. She stares down at the dead grass, drifting away from me. Untethered from my sister, I watch Rayla inhale heavily and throw her umbrella back over her head.
“The task at hand,” she repeats decisively and recommences our march through the grassland.
Concealed within a dried-up wheat field, Rayla and I cautiously survey a quaint, sturdy farmhouse situated fifty yards ahead. While Mira continues to study the ground, lost within her own mind, I note the small sustainable garden that hugs a shed with a yellow door, and an electric vehicle charging on a gravel driveway nearby. Did we come for the car?
The lace curtain in the front window stirs.
“I won’t be long,” Rayla says. “Stay in the field.”
With a final look over her shoulder, she advances into the open lawn, leaving us under the protection of the dead wheat stalks. Body taut with unease, I watch Rayla approach the house without her weapon drawn. The screen door opens, and a middle-aged man emerges. Powerfully built and wary, he holds a sleek black baton in his hand.
My fingers curl around my new knife—Rayla told me the curved rosewood handle belonged to my mother—and I take an involuntary step forward. We should make our presence known. Let this man realize that the woman standing on his doorstep is not alone.
I draw back when Rayla removes her hat and displays her face to the man.
“You don’t recognize an old friend?” she inquires warmly.
He moves closer, hand shielded over his eyes against the sun, but conveys no sign of recognition.
“It’s been a long time, Xavier.”
“Rayla?” he says, astonished, his body relaxing at once.
My grandmother nods, and suddenly she’s in Xavier’s arms, lifted off her feet in an affectionate embrace.
“I was hoping you would come,” he says, the corners of his eyes crinkling with his brilliant smile.
I let out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding and turn to see what Mira thinks about Rayla’s “old friend.”
But she isn’t there.
Wandering through the hardened stalks, I track the top of Mira’s head as it bobs through the sea of wheat. She makes a series of quick turns and disappears from my view again.
I find her squatting over the cracked dirt.
“We shouldn’t separate,” I tell her. “It’s safer when we’re together.”
“I’m peeing . . . or did I need to get your permission first?”
I swallow my retort. It tastes hot and bitter and doesn’t go down easy, but I refuse to let this develop into a fight. We need each other too much to be divided.
Remaining a short distance away, I pick at a tall blade of grass, and turn toward the quiet farmhouse.
“Do you want to talk about what Rayla said?” I ask.
“Nope.”
But I do. My mind races. Our grandmother was caught with twins . . . Our own mother was a twin . . . The chances of two generations in a row having identical twins are so small, so incredibly rare.
“What can Rayla possibly be doing in there for so long?” Mira suddenly asks. She pulls up her pants in one quick motion and rises.
“We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t important—”
“She’s hiding information from us, like everyone always does,” she answers, cutting me off. She shoulders past me.
“Mira, no! Rayla told us to wait—”
But she just charges forward.
“We want answers, so let’s go and get them.”
MIRA
I prowl the two-story farmhouse. I pass three sides of its cedar exterior, testing every door and window. Bolted levers and opaque glass seal its insides from me—taunting me, goading my obsession to see.
What secrets are you keeping locked within these walls? What truths are you obscuring?
Tiptoeing, jogging, possessed with the need to know, I round the final corner of the safeguarded building, past more tinted windows and unyielding cedar walls.
“Mira, there’s no way in!” Ava whispers behind me.
But there, above the dark-red branches of a dogwood shrub, I spy my opening. I plunge into the leaves and press myself against a clear glass pane, searching for Rayla, the man with the baton, and my answers.
“Mira, get back here!” Ava orders, keeping her voice low. “You’ll be seen!”
At first I see only the three reflections of my knife through the triple-glazed windows. Then my eyes adapt, and I realize I’m staring into an unoccupied bedroom. I spot a telescope. An unmade bed. An open door.
Ava sneaks into the foliage and stands to my right, her breathing quick and forceful like a seething wild boar that has been outrun. And overruled. Silenced, she leans her forehead against the glass and holds her hands over her brows, blocking out the glare.
“Find anything?” she finally mutters.
Through the bedroom door I make out the profiles of three figures huddled inside the living room: Rayla, the man named Xavier, and a teenager who must be his son. The glow of a hologram flickers between their heads. I piece together from the slivers of images—the steel chair legs, two ankles bound in fetters, one-way glass walls—that this footage is surveillance from a prison. An interrogation room.
Shut up, shut up! my mind tells my shaking hands. My sinking heart. My burning blood. It’s not him. It can’t be.
Rayla shifts her weight and rakes her fingers through her tousled hair, exposing the high-angled image of a frail man slumped over a table in the center of the barren room. His hands are lacerated and cuffed, his head bruised and shaved. His chin stoops over his chest so I can’t see his face.
Look up. Look up. Look up. I have to see. I have to know.
Xavier barks out an order that I can’t hear through the thick layers of glass, but I see his son raise a steady hand and use his fingers to zoom into a close-up of the prisoner. I see Rayla mouth two words over and over: “Look up. Look up. Look up.”
“Look up, dammit!” Ava cries out.
The man lifts his head as if he hears her call.
His skin is pasty and sweaty. Chin patchy with a rough beard and dried vomit. Cheeks hollowed. Lips chapped and busted.
But it’s my father’s eyes that tell me of his torture. The way they stare blankly before him, focusing on nothing. Empty, like no one is behind them.
Father, Father. Oh God.
Bile rises up my throat, and I swallow it. Swallow the truth and what I’ve done.
Suddenly his sunken, bloodshot eyes snap to the surveillance camera. They begin to blink a code. The rapid fluttering of his lids lasts for six more seconds before two Texas State Guards charge into the room, stuff a bag over his thrashing head, and the footage cuts to black.
“Don’t touch him!” I scream.
I smash my fist against the window over and over, trying to break the glass, oblivious to the noise I make. I will break everything to get to him.
The smart glass instantly darkens, shutting me out. Leaving me to stare only at the vague outline of my reflection next to Ava’s.
“They saw us,” Ava says.
Neither of us moves. We stand crippled by the reality we’ve tried so hard to censor.
“Mira,” Ava says beside me.
I can’t look at her. I can’t look at me. I need to unknow. I need to unsee.
The smart window switches to clear again, and Xavier gapes down at us, his breath fogging the glass. His head swings like a pendulum as he looks from Ava to me. Ava to me. Ava to me. His son, golden eyes fixed on mine, walks slowly toward the window, as if approaching mythical animals. Unicorns. Bigfoot. Twins.
“Impossible,” he mouths.