“Josie,” Aunt A barked. “Now.”
“Call them!” Lanie taunted. “Do it! Call them, for God’s sake! What are you, some sort of fucking chicken?”
I snapped.
I fell on my sister, screaming insults and scratching at her face, grabbing fistfuls of her ink-black hair. Aunt A separated us quickly, grabbing my shoulders and roughly pulling me off her. Brushing herself off, Lanie sat up on her knees.
Aunt A hurried to the bed, readying herself for Lanie’s next move. But Lanie drew a rattling breath and looked from Aunt A to me to Mom. “This is your fault,” she spit, then stood and walked away.
Breathing a sigh of relief, Aunt A went to her sister’s side. She had already fallen back asleep, her face relaxed and serene. Aunt A tenderly brushed a stray hair off her cheek and kissed her on the forehead.
Outside, an engine started, and then we heard the crunch of gravel as Lanie pulled our shared car out of the driveway.
Aunt A glanced up at me. “Should she be driving?”
“No,” I said. “But I don’t know how to stop her.”
By the time Lanie returned home the next morning, freshly stoned but blessedly calm, our mother was gone.
Arriving for the burial was hard, but leaving the cemetery was nearly impossible. There was nothing to do once the urn containing my mother’s ashes had been lowered into the ground—nothing could undo the years of estrangement, the times that I had cursed her name because she had abandoned us—but just the thought of walking away and leaving her there in the ground made me shake with guilt.
“We’re going to Mom’s house, hon,” Ellen said softly, squeezing my shoulder. “Did you want to come with us?”
“I—” I started, but couldn’t finish, unable to articulate that I couldn’t leave, not just yet.
“I’ll stay with her,” Caleb said to Ellen. He sat beside me and took my hand. “Take as much time as you need.”
And so I sat in a chair, watching as the others dispersed. When Lanie walked away, she didn’t look back once, and I had to wonder what she was feeling. Lanie had always been our mother’s favorite—something I had rationalized away as a child, thinking that our father liked me best. Lanie was the one who volunteered to help our mother in the garden, the one who read Wuthering Heights with her; I was the one who listened to our father’s mini-lectures on American presidents and spent weekends with him scouring yard sales for discarded reference books. On the family trivia nights my father regularly instigated, I teamed with him, combining his knowledge of history with my self-studied geography, and we battled Mom and Lanie, who together dominated the arts. Now it was just the two of us left, me and Lanie, virtual strangers where we had once formed the two halves of one magnificent whole.
From Twitter, posted September 25, 2015
chapter 13
Caleb and I returned to find Aunt A’s house full of her friends, who had arrived with store-bought appetizers and bottles of wine. I couldn’t tell which friends I recognized and which ones I had never met, so I kept my conversations light and impersonal. At one point, I was certain I saw Poppy Parnell, but when I charged over to order her to leave, I realized it was just one of Aunt A’s colleagues, and so I thanked her for coming and refilled her wineglass.
In the kitchen, I found Ellen arranging carrots on plastic crudités trays and opening containers of dip.
“There you are,” she said, shoving a tub of something purporting to be French vegetable dip into my hands. “I need help. Open this.”
Grateful for the distraction of minor manual labor, I began wrestling with the pull tab as I wondered aloud, “What about this dip is French?”
“Name alone. I guarantee that the French don’t eat this crap. This is wholly American.”
“Ze Americans have ze lard ass,” I said, putting on my most comical French accent. “Although, I have to tell you, I have met some French people who were really into eating processed junk.”
“Well, of course you did, darling. You were socializing exclusively with dirty backpackers.”
“Hey, I was a dirty backpacker,” I protested, setting the now-open dip down onto the table.
“And yet I love you anyway. Speaking of dirty backpackers and assorted foreign characters, do you want to tell me what’s going on with Caleb?”
“No,” I said, plucking a carrot from the tray and shoving it in my mouth.
“Tell me anyway,” she said, spreading crackers out into a fan shape on a plate. “He’s here. Did you call him after I left the bar yesterday?”
“No, that would have shown some maturity.” I crunched through another carrot and admitted, “Caleb surprised me.”
Ellen set down the cracker box and gaped at me. “You didn’t know he was coming? I can’t believe I let Peter talk me into staying at a hotel last night! I miss all the good stuff.”
I nodded grimly. “It was quite the surprise. For both of us. First he met your mother, who I’d said was dead. And then he met my sister, who I’d never mentioned.”
“I can see how that would be a surprise.”
“Yeah. Oh, and Lanie pretended to be me.”
“As she does.”
A vision of my sister at that long-ago party flashed through my mind, her wearing my pink sweater, her hair rumpled and cheeks flushed. A spark of fury ignited beneath my breastbone, and I snapped, “Well, she must be out of practice because she didn’t fool Caleb.”
“Of course she didn’t,” Ellen scoffed.
“It’s not that crazy,” I said, put off by Ellen’s dismissive tone. “We’re identical twins. And it’s not like she’s never fooled anyone before.”
Even as the words left my lips, though, I remembered the puzzled expression on Caleb’s face, the disbelief evident in his voice even as he said “Jo?” It was clear he hadn’t believed she was me. Caleb could tell the difference between us and he didn’t even know there was a difference to tell. How was that possible? Unless . . .
“Oh,” I said suddenly, the realization a swift kick in the gut. “Adam knew.”
I looked to Ellen for confirmation, but it was no longer a question in my mind. Adam had known that it was my sister he took by the hand at Benny’s party, my sister who he locked himself inside an upstairs bedroom with, my sister who he had sex with that night. He had always known.
“Oh, honey,” Ellen said, laying a sympathetic hand on my arm. “Yes. I thought you knew that.”
In the aftermath, Adam had sent a deluge of emails, proclaiming over and over again and in all-caps, I THOUGHT SHE WAS YOU. Had I ever truly believed that? I had certainly wanted to believe it. It was easier to believe Adam thought she was me; it was easier to find only one villain in the situation instead of two. Lanie had been disappointing me for years, whereas Adam had been my lifeline, my rock. Knowing both of them had deliberately betrayed me would have completely destroyed me. Believing he had been fooled by my untrustworthy sister had been an act of self-preservation.