“Yes, we both do, but we didn’t take cell phones tonight.” I shrugged. “I guess I should have made sure we did. I was just so nervous about it all that I forgot.”
“I’ve got a teenage sister,” Officer Monday said. “Like all her friends, she won’t even go to the bathroom without her cell phone.”
“We were too involved in my sister’s plan. We didn’t think,” I said more emphatically, and threw in a few well-placed sobs.
I knew now that it was over, that it was happening. I should have felt more remorse, but a little voice inside me asked, If your twin sister is gone, are you still a twin? Won’t people stop mixing you up? Won’t you become your own person finally?
I had to be careful not to let the policemen see my smile. They wouldn’t understand.
No one who didn’t know us and how we were raised would understand.
1
Haylee
Even with all the warnings and the bad stories out there, whose mother wouldn’t have a hard time believing her daughter would do something like this? Everybody thinks they’re raising angels. I saw that from the way my friends’ parents talked about them. How could their daughter be doing something as terrible as carrying on a romance over the Internet with an older man? And right under their noses? This was all especially true for our mother.
Simon Adams was right. Examples of this were constantly on the news. But our mother was always very confident that we wouldn’t do anything that was so forbidden or so stupid. In her eyes, we were such goody-goodies. I hated it when she bragged about us and people looked at us as if we were right out of a fairy tale about two identical princesses, Cinderella clones without so much as a blemish on our behavior or complexions.
When we were little, both of us used to believe that we hadn’t been born. We had descended from a cloud of angels and just floated into the delivery room. The stork really did bring us.
Mother had no idea how many things we had done recently that she wouldn’t approve of, mainly things I had done and that my dear abused sister would have to go along with or at least keep secret. Kaylee would have been suspected less. After all, no matter what Mother told other people or even what she told us, I knew in my heart that she favored Kaylee, despite her effort not to show any bias.
However, I had no doubt that her favoring Kaylee gave her nightmares. What if I could tell—or anyone else could tell, for that matter—that she really did favor one of us over th
e other? How horrible for her. All our lives, she had made an effort to treat us equally and to think of us as halves of the same perfect image of a daughter she had created. The smallest thing that could make one of us different from the other was vigorously avoided. She was adamant about not loving one of us more than the other.
No one suffered more under this rule than Daddy, who sometimes accidentally and sometimes deliberately tried to treat us as individuals. I pretended to be as upset about that as Mother wanted us to be, but in my secret chest of feelings and thoughts, shut away from Mother’s eyes, I was pleased, even when he did something for Kaylee that I might envy. At least, in his thinking, there was a difference, and we weren’t simply duplicates or clones, as some of Mother’s friends occasionally referred to us. It always annoyed me that she didn’t mind when people said that. I did. Who wanted to be a clone?
I was tired of hearing how we were monozygotic twins developed from a single egg-and-sperm combination that split a few days after conception, that our DNA originated from the same source. I didn’t even have my own DNA like most everyone else. I had to share everything with Kaylee from the moment I was conceived. Mother often told people that we even took up equal space in her womb and that everything that had come from her to nourish us was consumed in “perfectly equal amounts.” I never knew how she could know that, but she would say, “How else could they be so identical at birth?”
According to Mother’s logic and beliefs, how could I ever even exist without Kaylee? Our hearts beat with the same rhythm. We took the same number of breaths each day. If one of us sneezed, the other soon would, and that was true for every yawn, every ache, and every shiver. We were the mirror sisters; we lived in each other’s reflected image.
Well, maybe not now; maybe finally not now. I could walk away, and Kaylee would be stuck in the glass looking out. Come back, come help me! she would cry. Help yourself, I would say. I did. That’s why you’re trapped in the mirror.
Another patrol car arrived on the scene, and before we went home, we all drove around, Mother in one car and me in the other, searching for any signs of Kaylee. Sometimes the officers would stop to ask a pedestrian if they had seen a girl who looked like me, and I would have to make myself more visible. On one stop, I actually stepped out of the vehicle.
“She’s wearing the same clothes,” they told potential witnesses. They all shook their heads and apologized for not having seen Kaylee. One elderly man looked as if he might have something to tell them. He was studying me so closely my heart stopped in anticipation, but after another moment, he shook his head and told us his eyesight wasn’t what it used to be.
It seemed like we drove for hours. At one point, we passed the closed-down coffee shop, and I held my breath again. Was Kaylee still there, maybe lying on the side of the road? How would I react to that? It was deserted. There was no one on the sidewalks, no one in the street, and no one sitting in any vehicle. Even the shadows looked lonely.
Simon was left behind to wait at the movie theater in case Kaylee showed up there. When we returned and saw him alone looking confused and helpless, Mother grew more frantic. She wanted more police, more cars, and insisted that they knock on every door within a mile of the theater.
“He wanted Kaylee to meet him nearby,” she said. “He has to live somewhere in this neighborhood.”
They tried to reason with her, but she spun around on Officer Donald, the first policeman who had arrived at the theater, and screamed, “Do something! Don’t you understand? My daughter’s been kidnapped, or she would have been back by now. She’s being held somewhere against her will or taken so far away we’ll never find her. Every minute that passes is terrible!”
“You’ve got to stay calm, Mrs. Fitzgerald,” he told her, and looked to me to do something to help her, but I just lowered my head and looked as powerless as they felt.
A policewoman arrived, probably called in by one of the other cops to help handle Mother. To be truthful, even I was shocked at how she was behaving. Kaylee and I had seen her upset many times, of course. She used to pound on herself so hard when she screamed that she would have black-and-blue marks, but she was lashing out now and throwing her arms about so wildly that I thought they would fly off her body. She began screaming at me again for keeping Kaylee’s secret.
“Don’t you understand that you’ve been kidnapped, too?” she cried.
Everyone looked at her oddly then. I had to explain what she meant, how she believed that nothing ever happened to either of us without it happening to the other. Of course, it still made no sense to the police. It was then that I told Officer Donald about Daddy and how Mother’s insisting on both of us being treated exactly the same had led to their divorce.
“It became too much for my father,” I said.
They looked sympathetic. They didn’t have to say it. I could see it in their faces. It would have been too much for them, too, maybe for anyone.