by Ren Richards
It was more than an ‘I love you.’ It was better.
Lindsay entered the apartment like a shark in its own current. Focused, ready. She was holding three glasses by the rim in one hand and a pile of discarded laundry in the other arm when Nell came out of the bathroom.
‘Such a slob,’ Lindsay said.
For sisters, they didn’t look alike. Where Nell was short, plain and easy to lose in a crowd, Lindsay was petite with a commanding presence. She had sharp eyes and gold hair; today it was drawn into a bun, gleaming under a gallon of hairspray. Her lips were painted bright pink, her eyelids shimmering with hints of silver. It was a deliberate sort of beauty, meant to prove a point. Nell didn’t comment on it; when it came to Lindsay and Bonnie’s tense reunions, she preferred not to get between them.
Silver, the colour of knives. Lindsay was the sort of woman who made you wonder what she might have been like if she weren’t so clearly broken by the events of her life. Her heels made a hard slapping sound as she paced to the kitchen sink. ‘What are you going to do with your hair?’
Nell picked up a chunk of her damp brown hair and then let it fall to her shoulder again. Lindsay had been pestering her for months to get highlights. ‘I thought I’d leave it like this. It’s eccentric. They always expect me to be eccentric.’
‘Honestly,’ Lindsay said, tossing the dirty laundry into the hamper, ‘your life would fall apart without me. It would fall to utter shit.’
‘I will forever and hereafter do everything you say,’ Nell said, being mostly sincere. It had been Lindsay’s idea, after all, to interview the Widow Thompson and write her story, and the endeavour had paid handsomely.
But Lindsay was wary of today’s interview with Easter Hamblin. It was evident by her flawless makeup and new outfit – denim leggings and a white cowl neck whose buttons were the size of fists – that she was only coming along for the unseasonable visit with Bonnie. Lindsay’s love for their mother was all hostility and aggression, with only a perfume spritz of desperation.
It was no accident that Nell had dressed down for the occasion. She wore jeans and a grey sweatshirt. She did this so that her sister could feel secure in her role as the beautiful one. Today especially, Lindsay would need the power this implied.
Lindsay was out of breath as she stood upright, gave the blankets a final smoothing over. ‘Ready?’
They took Nell’s car, a decade-old Buick with scratched blue paint, parked sombrely behind Lindsay’s Red Obsession coupe. It had already been established that Lindsay’s tires would never touch the asphalt of the prison parking lot. Nell didn’t mind making the drive; fixating on the road took her mind off of the anxiety that was starting to mount now that she’d turned in the manuscript that had haunted her for two years. There was something terrifying about the months between the send button and the box of hardbacks that would arrive in the mail the week before publication.
‘Hey,’ Lindsay said, buckling her seatbelt. ‘Did you send it off?’
Nell put the car in drive. ‘Yep.’
‘So that’s it,’ Lindsay said. ‘You’re a millionaire?’
‘Two thirds of a millionaire, after Jasper’s fee and taxes.’
‘You smug little shit,’ Lindsay said. ‘Just let me be proud of you.’
Nell smirked at the road ahead. Lindsay’s pride meant even more to her than Sebastian’s love, but she wouldn’t let her have the satisfaction.
They turned onto the highway and Lindsay cranked the radio to a volume that was wholly inappropriate for such an early hour. If Nell had her way, she would be sleeping for at least another three hours, as per usual. But Lindsay was a relentless morning person, and she had no qualms being obnoxious about it.
Besides, if Nell was going to interview Easter Hamblin, now was the time. Royal King’s had a problem with overcrowding and new convicts were often transferred further upstate. Better a two-hour drive than a seven-hour trip one way.
This was Easter Hamblin’s story: She murdered her twin sister and assumed her identity for a year. The twins were born in Russia, conjoined at the hip and forearm. Unable to pay for their separation surgery, their parents eventually forfeited them to some charity organisation that flew them out to America. They were promptly adopted and a doctor was able to separate them, leaving each sister with mirrored scars and a body of her own. To go with their new identities, the twins chose American names for themselves.
The twins never spoke about their lives in Russia. Not a single mention of their biological parents, despite having lived with them for the first ten years of their lives. In the months leading up to the trial, several child psychologists had come out to give interviews to the press, speculating that the twins had been abused. Attachment disorders. Post-traumatic stress. Things that would slip through the cracks in the adoption system that brought the twins stateside.
But a physical separation could not undo the effect of their years spent sharing an identity. Autumn flourished while Easter shrank into herself and became increasingly reclusive. At twelve, she was accused of setting a litter of pit bull puppies on fire. She denied this and the murder of many other small things found in the twins’ wake.
By their twenties, the sisters lived in a shared apartment, having never been apart. Because Easter had been famously agoraphobic, their neighbours thought nothing of only seeing one twin at a time.
It was a year before Easter was found out. She’d taken great lengths to hide her identity, always wearing long sleeves to conceal her scar, which was on the opposite arm to Autumn’s.
Even after Autumn’s skeleton had been found, picked clean by woodland creatures, Easter tried to maintain her sister’s identity.
Two years ago, it was the most talked about case in the country.
Nell had followed the case with the sort of romantic obsession of a girl in love. She held her breath when television shows were interrupted with newsbreaks; when she retrieved the morning paper, her heart was in her mouth.
But she hadn’t written about it. She hadn’t planned to. She was waist-high in mothers who had drowned their children and spurned lovers who poured arsenic into their partner’s tea.
‘Bonnie’s block doesn’t have visitation until three,’ Lindsay said. ‘So I’m coming with you.’
Lindsay pitched this as a coincidence, but Nell knew better. Lindsay considered herself to be Nell’s unofficial manager, not just of her career, but of her life. When things started getting serious with Sebastian, Lindsay happened to be in the city rather often. She had to stop by Nell’s apartment to pee, or to borrow a coat.
So Nell had been expecting her sister to be present for the potential dawning of her next big thing.
‘I haven’t decided if I’m going to take her on yet,’ Nell said. ‘She reached out to me with an outlandish story that her murdered sister is secretly still alive. It was oddly lucid – not the rambling delusion you’d expect from a story like that.’
‘She sounds nuts,’ Lindsay said. ‘Imagine if I murdered you and just walked around living your life for a year until someone figured it out.’
‘It would mean you have to write the book,’ Nell said. ‘Sounds like I’d get the better deal.’
The parking lot of Royal King’s State Penitentiary was predictably crowded. The prison itself was sanctioned as a city by the state of New York, with its own zip code and grid of streets that all led to the same destination: the sprawling granite building surrounded by guard towers that resembled grim castle spires, and barbed wire fencing.
The streets beyond the parking lot were jammed with parked cars – spouses and heartsick mothers coming from out of state to visit their loved ones. Nell and Lindsay used to be among those sleeping in their cars overnight before they’d moved to New York. It was murder on the spine, but worse was being turned away when they found out Bonnie had violated a rule and been denied visitation. That meant another night in the car, hoping they could get in the following day.
For Nell, g
rowing up with a parent in prison was like having a piece of herself always in a cage. The smell of the place soured her for days after, and she thought about all those women who were trapped, making little animal sculptures out of toilet paper and water, fashioning eyeliner from the grease under the windows so they could look like they had when they were free.
Nell and Lindsay were shuttled from one foster home to the next throughout their childhood, and every time Nell stuffed her clothes into her backpack and climbed into the social worker’s car, she wondered if she’d be sent to prison too. It seemed inevitable, like there were only a finite number of homes in the world and eventually she’d burn through them.
That sick feeling of dread was with her even now as she pulled into a parking space.
If Lindsay felt any discomfort, she didn’t let on. She pulled down the visor and pursed her lips at her reflection, making sure her lipstick was even.
They were an hour early, but it would take that long to get to the front of the line anyway. In addition to being the most crowded prison in the state of New York, Royal King’s also housed some of the most famous prisoners in the tri-state area. They seldom stayed permanently; they were usually shuttled elsewhere. But there were always visitors for famous felons: journalists, writers, beautiful women whose fathers hadn’t loved them. And in the women’s section of the prison, thousands upon thousands of love-struck men who were lured in by the siren song of these dangerous women. Women who looked like their mothers, or a girl they used to lust after in middle school. Women who looked lonely and small, or powerful and dominating.
Nell had seen every type. She had interviewed dozens of convicts searching for her next story. Sebastian was the one who had set up a PO box for her after the letters started coming in. Attorneys looking for writers to humanise their clients before an appeals case, parents swearing their child was wrongfully accused, inmates themselves looking for commissary money. Most lost interest in being interviewed when Nell told them they wouldn’t be paid.
Easter, being a convicted felon, would be entitled to no percentage of the advance if the manuscript sold. That was some cold irony, Nell thought. Her punishment for her crime was that she could never profit from her story, but without her crime she would have no story to tell. Nobody was going to buy a book about a well-mannered twin who lived a quiet little life arranging flowers.
Lindsay draped her arm around Nell’s shoulder, hanging on her like a sleepy toddler, her hyper morning verve suddenly gone. She hadn’t made Nell stop anywhere for coffee, and it was starting to show. She stayed like that until they were called.
Visiting a convict is a dehumanising experience. Pat-downs, metal detectors, the deadpan CO drawling out the same rules about not bringing gifts or engaging in physical contact. The physical contact rule wasn’t relevant anyway. Easter was a high-profile case being housed in solitary for her own protection. This meant all her visits were partitioned off by a sheet of bulletproof glass and a phone.
Nell waited on the ruptured vinyl bench whose stuffing was billowing out like a polluted cloud. Lindsay made room for herself on the edge of it. The sisters never needed much space for themselves; that came from a lifetime of sharing bunk beds and dining chairs, being crammed together in minivans packed with foster siblings like clowns in a VW.
Easter Hamblin was brought to her side of the glass, shuffling with the hobbled gait of an inmate in chains. She was forty years old, and her features couldn’t seem to agree on how her face was supposed to look. Her skin was leathery, aged, and her lips were pale and thin. But her eyes were large, bright green, with long lashes that would have made sense on a younger and prettier face. Her hair was limp and brown, dulled by the neon lights, but it still held the hint of curls.
She’s a set of twins in one body, Nell thought.
Easter sat and considered Nell and Lindsay. They looked nothing like twins, surely, but Nell realised now that she and her sister were sitting the way that Easter and Autumn had when they were conjoined. She shifted, but there was little room for her to change this.
Easter picked up the phone, and Nell held her receiver between herself and Lindsay so they could both hear.
‘That your manager?’ Easter asked. She had a thick Russian accent, not at all smoothed over by her decades in America.
‘Sister,’ Nell said. ‘She’s just here to observe.’
Easter laughed. It was the humourless, exaggerated bark Nell had heard from Bonnie. Maybe there was something about this place that changed the sound of laughter.
‘Observe,’ Easter echoed, taunting. ‘Like a watchdog looking for a thief to bite, she observes.’ Easter bared her teeth, animating her imagery.
Lindsay said nothing. If Easter meant to unnerve her, it would take more than that. Besides, it was true. Nell’s presence made Lindsay fierce. A social worker had tried once – only once – to separate the sisters when the group home got too crowded. Lindsay, who was eight, went rabid. She lunged into the driver’s seat and bit his neck. His cries were drowned out by her screaming. A merciless, shrill sound that Nell wouldn’t hear again for another decade.
‘Me and Autumn came to America when we were ten,’ Easter said, not missing a beat. Like most of Nell’s interviewees, she had a mind for details. ‘My brother Oleg visited sometimes. Kept in touch.’ She waved her hand as though swatting at a mosquito. ‘Our American mother had the email then Facebook.’
Nell wove the pen between her fingers but didn’t take notes. She rarely did. She had a strong memory for details, but the ideas needed to be written down immediately. Those disappeared forever if they weren’t captured.
‘What did Autumn think of Oleg?’ Nell said. ‘Did she get along with him?’
She had only met the brother once, a brief chat over coffee in preparation for visiting Easter. He had given her a stack of childhood photographs, carefully presented in a crisp white envelope. They had looked through them together, laying them out on the sticky table. Infants turned in slightly different directions. Toddlers, one looking sullenly to the left while the other stared transfixed by something to her right. Sepia memories of little girls in dresses whose arms were pinned together.
‘Sometimes I think they are the real twins,’ Easter said. ‘Joined at the hip.’ She flashed her teeth in a taunting smile. ‘She hates most people. That’s something you don’t see in papers. Beautiful smile. She would always talk to the neighbours. “How are you? How is work? How’s that cute little poodle? Is your mother good after her surgery? Maybe I bake her some muffins.”’ Easter’s face changed as she adopted her sister’s persona. Her eyes made sense as the rest of her features brightened. She pouted her lips so they looked fuller. Then the illusion deflated and she looked weathered and old again. ‘But she didn’t mean it. That’s what you call an act, like in a play.’
‘Why?’ Nell asked.
‘What do you do when you have a secret?’ Easter countered. ‘You bury it in the dirt, hope no one will dig it up, or you dye it a pretty colour and wrap it around your shoulders like a shawl, so nobody will see how ugly it is.’
‘Psychotic,’ Lindsay said. ‘The word for what you’re describing is psychotic.’
Nell cut her sister a vicious glare. Lindsay pretended not to see it.
Easter laughed, not at what Lindsay had said but Nell’s reaction to it. She pointed a finger from one sister to the other. ‘The blonde one is older. I can tell, even though she’s smaller. She thinks she’s the boss, but it’s you.’ She was looking at Nell, but then her eyes moved to Lindsay. ‘Ask my neighbours and they say I was psychotic. Didn’t dress nice or say hello. But what is the first thing anyone says about a psychotic person when they learn what they’ve done? “I never would have expected.” Autumn is like this.’
‘I notice you keep referring to Autumn in the present,’ Nell said, diverting the attention away from herself, as she always did when her interviewees started to pry. She shared as little of herself as possible. This was why she n
ever invited Lindsay to tag along; Lindsay had her own ideas about what rules should apply to her, and she had never been especially good at keeping her thoughts to herself.
‘Past tense is for the dead,’ Easter replied. ‘Autumn is alive.’
Autumn was very much not alive. Nell had seen the crime scene photos and the dental records that confirmed the pile of bones lying by a woodland river was Autumn Hamblin. The twins’ brother saw fit to share this alongside their childhood photos. He was willing to help Easter convince Nell to take her on. But he had no illusions about her.
Nell didn’t challenge Easter, however. She sat in patient silence, waiting for her to go on. When she didn’t, Lindsay said, ‘You’re saying Autumn was the evil twin.’
Easter laughed. ‘If you like to word it this way, yes.’
Below the range of the window, where Autumn couldn’t see, Nell was clutching Lindsay’s knee, her nails boring into the denim. Mouth shut, she was saying.
Easter took on Autumn’s expression again. It was eerie how she could do that, become someone else entirely. She curled her fingertip around the rigid cord of the phone. ‘Do you talk about your little girl like she’s alive, or dead?’
The room went silent.
Easter leaned back, as though lounging in a recliner rather than the empty space behind her stool. ‘You don’t talk about her, do you?’ she said. ‘You’re the type to bury secrets in dirt. But bodies always come back up.’ She said those last three words slowly, and they popped from her mouth like she had been sucking on a lollipop. Like the words had a taste she could savour.
Lindsay snatched the phone from Nell’s hand and slammed it back on the receiver. ‘We’re done.’ She grabbed Nell’s wrist, but Nell didn’t move. She was staring at Easter, who was still holding the phone, her eyebrows raised expectantly.
The receiver clattered against the hook when Nell reached for it; her hand was shaking.