“You have?”
“This is where Dr. Hildreth—Gran—took me before she brought me home. I sat right in this chair, and she told me all about you. She said I had a family waiting to meet me. A brother and sister who’d been hoping for a new sister of their own. Someone to come and make their family whole. A family who would make me whole again. Make me well.”
Vi nodded. A lump formed in her throat.
She shouldn’t have brought Iris here. It was all too much. She remembered what Gran had said about regression. Wondered if this would trigger it, make everything worse.
She walked over to the file cabinet. “The entire bottom drawer is full of files on Patient S. I only took the first one. There’s so much more. We can’t take it all—we’ll just have to pick the stuff that looks most important.”
She pulled open the heavy gray drawer. Iris crouched beside Vi, their hips touching.
We’re conjoined twins, Vi thought.
We share the same heart, the same memories.
I don’t know where I end and she begins.
Iris pulled out a file and started reading some of the notes out loud: “?‘Sodium amytal…’?”
“I looked that one up,” Vi said. “It’s like a truth serum. When the military needs to get the truth out of a prisoner, they’ll dose them up with that.”
“Why would she give me that?”
“To get inside your head. To empty things out. To control you.”
Iris went back to reading. “?‘Metrazol.’?”
“Gran gives it to her rats. It gives them seizures. Sometimes it kills them.”
“But why would she give it to me?”
“I think it kind of scrambles your brain.”
“The rest of this is notes on ECT?” Iris said, looking down at the paper.
Vi nodded. “Electroconvulsive therapy. Shock treatments. They put these paddles on your head, and—”
“And a rubber thing in your mouth,” Iris said. “I remember. I remember the taste of the rubber, biting down on it, knowing what was coming.” She looked at the paper. “?‘Subject underwent daily sessions this week.’?”
“Every day?” Vi said, looking down, reading the notes. “I think they normally do, like, two or three a month? That’s what Gran’s told me, anyway. That many… it’s a miracle you’ve got a brain left.”
Iris flipped through the pages. “But why? Why do all of this to me? Hypnosis. Sleep deprivation. The drugs. The shocks. Leaving me in that dark room, in that cold water for hours. Why?”
To wipe everything clean, Vi thought. To take a human being that Gran thought was inferior in some way and remake her. Tear her apart, erase everything so that she could build her back. “Well,” she said. “?‘Start with a blank canvas’—that’s what she wrote in her notes on the Mayflower Project.”
“So who am I?” Iris said, looking up from the notes. “If she’s taken everything away—all my memories? Everything I was when I first came here?”
“You’re you,” Vi said, her voice breaking a little when she thought, You’re her monster. “She can’t have taken everything away. And there have to be clues in these files about where you came from, who you were before you got here. The papers I took earlier said your parents were members of the family that Dr. Hicks and Gran studied. And Julia has been researching the family. She’s had contact with remaining family members. She can help us figure it out. We can look through the files for more clues.”
“But my parents are dead!” Iris said. “That’s what the notes said. I killed them! Them and my sister. I started the fire.”
Vi shook her head. “Only because she made you. You were brainwashed. Programmed.”
Iris was quiet for a second. “What else have I done? What else might I be capable of?”
Vi put her hand on Iris’s, resting on top of the open file. “I know you. And I’m with you all the damn time. There’s no way you’re doing anything bad.”
“Promise?”
“I promise,” Vi said. “Now, come on, let’s quickly look through these and see what we can find. We’ll grab what we can and get out of here.”
Iris reached all the way into the back, took out the last folder.
“Bring it over here,” Vi said, standing up and going over to the desk. “You go through that one. I’ll get the folder before it. Pull out anything that seems important. Anything that might help us. Look for stuff with names. History. Where you might have come from. We need lots of documentation.”
Iris nodded as she started reading.
“Vi,” she said a minute later, her voice higher than usual. “Vi, come here.”
Vi set down her own folder and walked back to the desk, looked down at the paragraph of scribbled notes that Iris was pointing at.
The experiment has exceeded all expectations. Patient S fully believes that her parents were killed in a car accident that she and her brother survived. She does not question that this boy she lives with is her brother. Patient S believes in this fictional version of herself so strongly that she is able to tell me about early memories she has of her parents, of the accident itself.
Vi’s mouth went dry. The room began to shift and spin.
No. No. No.
She was shaking her head.
Can’t be. Can’t be. Can’t be.
She was back in the car at the bottom of the river. The water was so cold, and she couldn’t move.
10, 9, 8…
This wasn’t Iris they were reading about.
This was…
… 7, 6, 5…
Iris flipped the pages to the back of the file folder. A photo was attached to the back with a description below, penned in Gran’s messy handwriting:
Patient S, 11th birthday.
And there was Vi, smiling as she leaned in to blow out the candles of her favorite cake, the one Gran made just for her every year: angel food with strawberry-and-peach whipped cream filling.
“Vi,” Iris said softly. She sounded strangely far away.
“It’s me,” Vi said. “It’s been me all along.”
Her voice was high and airy, a balloon at the end of a string, floating up, up, up.
… 4, 3, 2, 1.
And then the world went black around her.
THE BOOK OF MONSTERS
By Violet Hildreth and Iris Whose Last Name We Don’t Know Illustrations by Eric Hildreth 1978
Dearest Iris, Do you remember when we thought you were the monster?
You, my secret sister.
My truest love.
My twin.
I used to picture us that way sometimes. Not just sisters, but twins, curled around each other in the darkness of the womb, then later, in the darkness of my room. Entangled, both of us unsure whose limbs were whose.
Shadow sisters.
Doppelg?ngers.
I loved you so much I thought my heart might explode.
Do you remember when I gave you lessons in being human?
Walk upright. Brush your hair. Wear your clothes right side out. This is how we tie our shoes. This is how we smile and say please and thank you.
As if I were an expert.
Learn to blend in, I told you.
I can help you.
I can save you.
And you did need saving. But not from yourself.
All along, you needed saving from me.
Lizzy
August 21, 2019
SKINK PUT ON a pot of coffee while I sat at the desk in the campground office reading The Book of Monsters. The pages sucked me in, sent me tumbling back through time.
Back to a time when I was a girl named Iris.
A stitched-together girl whom a strange old doctor (“Call me Gran, dear”) brought home and introduced to her grandchildren.
“Children, this is Iris. She’s going to be staying with us. Iris, these are my grandchildren, Violet and Eric.”
They were standing over a wounded rabbit, and I was terrified, but mostly at the way my heart ached with hope.
We are your family now, Gran told me. We’ve been waiting for you.
And the children taught me things.
All the normal things I’d forgotten how to do: how to dress and brush my hair and tie my shoes.
They taught me about Scooby-Doo and Captain Kangaroo. About Count Chocula cereal and candy that sizzled and exploded on my tongue. How to make lemonade and Kool-Aid by mixing powder with water. How to do Spirographs and box with plastic robots.