When I was lonely as a child I would sometimes go to the small bathroom right off the kitchen. My two sisters were into dolls and sports and my brother loved movies and baseball and I loved books and quiet and there was never anyone it felt right to play with. That would get worse, later, when I was angry and the others either weren’t or couldn’t show it, while I was always, helplessly, loud as a spouting fountain with my feelings. But the bathroom was always peaceful. It was the size of a closet. The ceiling was wallpapered in a midnight sky with white stars and the walls in white with pastel stars, so that standing in the bathroom with the door closed was like being inside an impossible mash-up of the dark of night and the light of day while the infinite stars swirled around you.
I stood in front of the cabinet mirror and studied my brown curly hair. I studied my green eyes. I looked at myself, looking for her. Her eyes I knew, from the medical chart I’d found once in the white filing cabinet, were blue. But maybe they’d have darkened with age. And her hair was brown like mine. Andy and I weren’t identical, obviously—though strangers, befuddlingly, sometimes asked, even if we were standing right in front of them—but wasn’t it possible that she and I were? That somehow I had been robbed of a true twin? In my mind, I grew her up. I made her my age; I gave her my curls. I made her shy. I made her love books.
It never quite worked. I could never get hold of the idea of her. She was gone, unimaginably gone. I was alone in my family. I couldn’t imagine myself being otherwise.
But in Ricky’s story, I started to see her everywhere. In Cole’s growing up in Jeremy’s absence. In the trunk Bessie kept in her closet. In the photograph of Oscar that Ricky carried, making the boy into his imaginary friend.
Oscar wasn’t imaginary. He has a grave.
The fact of a body. But where? I decided I had to ask. I’d gone to visit my parents on Nantucket, where they were staying for a month, as they did every year. I waited until the end of the weekend, until the house we were all staying in—my parents and my siblings and I—came to feel like a too-tight shirt over sunburned skin, scratchy and congested. The island had changed over the years, the backpackers playing guitar and the dogs roaming free on the beaches now replaced by men with sweaters knotted over their shoulders and women in Lilly Pulitzer dresses whose hair stayed perfectly blow-dried even in the humidity. The old five-and-dime was now an antiques shop. It was too much to hear all our voices piled on top of one another, all crammed into the same spaces we’d occupied as children. For how many more years could we gather this way? For how many more years would we be able to find a house that held us all? Would we never talk about everything that had happened? I waited until just before I had to leave or I would miss my ferry. Then I went through the house to find my mother. She was dressing in the bedroom, her hair curled onto hot rollers. She’d dabbed a strong floral perfume on her wrists, and though she hadn’t brought pantyhose to the summer island there was the same half-closed bathrobe. The perfume filled my throat. Time buckled.
“Where was Jacqueline buried?” I said.
My mother froze, her mouth a little round O. She’d moved on to applying lipstick and now the top half of the O was a raisin brown, the bottom her bare lips. Her hand suddenly trembling, she finished painting her lips. Then she straightened her back, carefully screwed shut the tube, placed it down on the vanity, and walked out.
The next morning, when I was back in Boston, my cell phone rang. I saw it was my father. My father has called me perhaps twice in my life. This time when I answered he did not say hello. “I hear you’ve been asking your mother some questions.”
I grabbed a pad off my desk, and a pen. I knew I wouldn’t get another chance.
“Jacqueline’s buried in a mass grave,” my father said. “I don’t know where. Somewhere by the hospital, probably. The Catholic Charities took care of it.” When the three of us were five months old, and Andy and I were home and Jacqueline was still in the hospital, my father had taken my exhausted mother to Puerto Rico for a much-needed vacation. They’d landed at the airport, he said, and he’d heard his name over the public address system. Jacqueline had died. Standing with the emergency phone in his hand—I imagine the porters all around him, the vacationing families overburdened with colorful luggage, the honeymooners holding each other’s hands and leaning into each other to steal kisses—he made an instant decision. “Could you bury her?” he asked.
They couldn’t, they said. Only the Catholic Charities did that.
My parents are atheists. He told them to baptize her.
“It was simplest,” he told me on the phone, his voice gruff against tears. My parents never asked where Jacqueline was buried. Later my aunt would tell me they asked never to be told. “It was the right thing. She only lived in the hospital. She belonged there.” He sounded as though he was pleading. Not with me. With the past. We hung up, and never spoke about it again.
*
The caretaker has stopped walking and is watching me, waiting for me to answer his question. The grave to my left has a coffee cup cemented to its slab, the flowers in the cup crumbling and long dead. The cement at the bottom of the cup is unevenly applied, clearly a job done by a mourner rather than a professional. The mug says DADDY. I choose my words carefully. “I heard about the Langley family and I suppose their story just stayed with me. I had a sister, a triplet sister. She died when we were babies.”
“But how did you hear about them?”
It’s brutally hot in the clearing, the air stilled by the wall of the trees. The caretaker’s wife is waiting at the gate. But the caretaker just looks at me. In the long silence I feel keenly just how strange it is that I know so much about this family. How strange it is that I’ve come here at all. I want to tell him something that will make it all make sense for him, but how can I explain that I am trying to chase down the origin of this story because I can’t find the origin in my own life? That I need to understand how Bessie buried her children—because in her is Lorilei, and in her is my mother? That I need to understand the way that love warped what Bessie could see—because in her son is my grandfather, in Bessie is my grandmother, and in all of this is the click that Lorilei’s heels make as she walks up the courtroom aisle to argue for Ricky’s life and the strong grip of my father’s hand as he hoists my grandfather into the car, to bring him over the bridge to us? We are standing in a graveyard. But the past isn’t in the ground for me. The past is in my body. “I was doing some legal work and came across the story,” I finally muster.
We walk a few steps farther in silence, the sun strong. Then I almost cry out, because I see what we’ve come to. LANGLEY.