My eyes are adjusting to the dark and I can just make her out, sitting at the dining room table. She’s in her usual chair, facing the window. Which means her question is mostly rhetorical.
“I guess I was being bad, Mom.”
There’s a sharp intake of breath that must come from somewhere behind her forehead because it pulls her eyebrows inward. “What’s gotten into you, Sasha?”
I almost say Isaac Harver’s dick, but then cut it off with a laugh at the literal answer my sister would want me to toss out. At the fact that I’m getting in trouble for something that’s not my fault.
“You said yourself that I seemed happy,” I tell her.
“But why are you?”
It’s a good question. How can I be happy when the clasp on my clarinet case actually creaks from lack of use? How can I be happy when I flubbed a basic scale this week in band, my fingers correcting automatically, but not before Charity’s eyes made a quick dash in my direction, noting the mistake? How can I be happy when my boyfriend and my lover are two different people?
“Because I’m two different people,” I say, answering myself aloud, feeling the jigsaw of my new life click together. I’m a puzzle, definitely. But not the kind that lies flat on the table waiting for someone to piece it together. My broken bits have flurried through the air of their own volition, creating in three dimensions.
And I don’t need finishing.
“Sasha, are you drunk?” Mom asks in disbelief. She gets up, crossing over to me in the dark, her own breath laced with wine from dinner—I take a deeper whiff—and perhaps some after too. I’m not drunk. I just did a lot of intimate things with someone who was, and now we both smell like each other, entangled, inseparable. Like me and my twin.
“What is my sister’s name?” I ask her.
She stops, sagging against the wall for support, her hip pressing into the plaster where my anger used to go until it found the path to my mouth. “What?”
“Her name.” I advance on Mom, my words tight and precise in a way that won’t allow for denial or explanation. All I’m after right now is a fact.
“Shanna,” Mom says, her hand going to her throat as she does, as if the name needs the extra help to be pushed out into the air between us. “Her name was Shanna.”
“Shanna,” I say, and my heart explodes into a stuttering beat at the name, black eruptions fill my already dark vision. I sink to the floor beside Mom, a miasma of smoke and sex rising up from my clothes.
“She’s here, Mom,” I say, my hand going to my chest. “She’s here and there are things that she wants.”
“Don’t say things like that,” Mom says, but she’s two people right now as well. The woman who only finds hope in the pages of romance novels, and the one who is staring at me through tears lit from behind by joy. The woman who keeps one hand to her own throat as if to deflect a death blow, and the other reaching toward me, clasping her fingers with mine as the pulse beats through us all.
“You need to explain,” she says.
twelve
There is a fight.
For once I’m not participating. I sit in my chair, staring at the empty one across from me where my sister was always supposed to be, Mom and Dad throwing words at each other so quickly, they’re like a physical bond between them. The only one left standing.
Dad clearly thought I’d finally ratted him out about his affair when he got home from golfing to find no dinner, his wife and daughter stern-mouthed and stiff-spined at the table. I think that conversation might have actually gone better than what Mom served up, a calm repetition of what I’d told her the night before.
“Jesus Christ. Just . . . Jesus Christ,” Dad is saying. I almost don’t recognize him without his earplugs in, his forehead touching the table where his dinner usually is.
“Honey, I just think we should listen and consider. Sasha says—”
“That our dead daughter is living inside our other daughter,” Dad finishes for her, finally lifting his head. “That’s what she says.”
Mom looks at the table, the high polish that she gives it every week providing her own twin. “Is it entirely unbelievable?”
“Yes,” Dad says, raising his arms like he’s the band director about to take us into forty-six measures of whole rests. Nothing there. Should be obvious.
I get up, my chair smacking the wall behind me. I can hear bits of plaster filtering down behind the wallpaper, see small grains of it slip out from under the baseboard.
“You’re going to tear this house apart,” Dad yells at me, and I’d almost award him some points for a great metaphor if I thought he did it on purpose.
“Back off,” Mom snaps at him, and he does, jaw coming together with an audible click. I don’t think she’s told him to do anything in the last ten years or so, but he must have been well trained once because the skills are still there.
“Honey, do you need anything? What’s wrong? Can I get you something to eat?” Mom’s hands are on my shoulders, running down my arms. Her skin trying to give heat to a baby who died inside her and her words trying to feed a child who hasn’t eaten in eighteen years.
I am suddenly very important.
“Sure,” I say. “Leftovers are fine.”
I sit down in the perpetually empty chair as Mom leaves the room, unspoken words trailing behind her and promising a fight upon her return. The house looks different from here, like I’ve found a new world in our own dining room. Dad watches me as I settle into the cushion, which is stiff and like new.
“Sasha, I don’t know what’s going on,” he says. “But it’s not what you think it is.”
I nod to let him know I’m listening, but I definitely don’t agree. From the kitchen I hear the clink of plates, the patient hum of the microwave that was a wedding present they haven’t given up on yet.
“If you need some help, any kind of help . . .” He trails off, obviously hoping I’ll finish his sentence with the words he doesn’t want to say.
I don’t know when Dad and I stopped communicating. The awkwardness between us is a slow growth, one no one noticed until it was too late, metastasized. He’s trying, I know, and I should be meeting him halfway. But it’s been so long since there was anything more between us than lame jokes he throws at me to tease; the only interaction we’re familiar with when it comes to each other is irritation. But there’s nothing funny about his daughter possibly being insane, no tidy column for the deceased twin to be crammed into.
“I don’t need help,” I tell him. “There’s nothing wrong with me.”
Mom puts a plate in front of me, her lips twisting a little when she sees where I’m sitting. Steam rises up from my plate, heat escaping with little pops from a pork chop that I ignored at dinner last night.
“Sasha,” Mom says quietly. “Maybe it will be easier for us to understand if you can tell us more about why you think that Shanna—”