Her: A Memoir

by Christa Parravani

  Wrinkles came early for Cara. By twenty-eight, she’d lived hard years. Crow’s-feet and frown lines had begun to etch her skin, though not deeply enough for anyone other than her twin to notice. Her chain smoking, heroin slamming, X dropping, and poor diet aged her beyond me. The age lines starting on Cara’s neck in the photographs began deepening on me in the mirror after she’d died. Her hair, which swirled on her shoulders in brassy Revlon-toned auburn waves, was now my own. I’d dye mine to match hers; when I grew tired of Cara’s hair, I colored mine black again. Round and round went the cycle of bleach and darken. My hair dried to the texture of hay: chemical burned, brittle, broken. My stylist gave me a trim and demanded I stop.

  * * *

  I was the smaller of the identicals. One twin always has a rounder face. I was the one with the narrow face. We were called the girls. Mom called us her “ladies.” Cara called me her. One twin goes and the other must follow. The big temptation after my sister died was to overdose or shoot myself. I got ready to die. I starved. I lied, and I swallowed pills. I wet my marital bed. I cut my arms with a knife. I divorced. I refused sleep out of fear of dreaming of Cara. I allowed any man who wanted me to fuck my body of bones so I wouldn’t have to be by myself. I lived alone in a house I filled with my sister’s furniture. I crashed cars, and I quit my job. I checked myself into mental hospitals. I scared our mother. I turned myself into Cara. I wanted to chase my sister into the afterlife. I saved myself at the brink of our two worlds. I cheated my own death. What one twin gets, the other must have. I declined my piece of our whole. I became a woman who owns half a story: I lived.

  I spent years in the shroud of her white tattered scarf from Nepal; I wore her wedding rings and her favorite dresses. I slept in them until they tore. So be it. I love her, like I love no one else. I am in love with Cara. If I couldn’t die with her, I could write my sister back to life. I learned another language: posthumous twin talk. I began to communicate with my sister by writing. When I write, I feel my sister come as close as I’ll allow.

  Cara had begun her own memoir. No one can finish it. I can take pieces, like she took pieces of me. I searched the files on her computer and found poems, recollections of our youth, and the short prose pieces she wrote to accompany my photographs. With my findings, I’ve patched together our tale.

  * * *

  Once upon a time we were one snake, with one head, one body and two sharp teeth. Once you cut a snake in half it grows another head. Once it grows another head, it heals, becomes two snakes. Once upon a time there was only one of us. When your body is a mirror, there is no word for individual. Is there one word for two snakes? Twin. Snakes shed their skin. Once I was tough. I had all of our sharp teeth and all of the scales.

  I am Cara. What I am makes me us. Us makes me her. Christa is me. Us, me, her, we. I am, without her, half of her.

  I am breathing another girl’s breath. It’s the reality of never being alone, even in death, I imagine, that will never end. I will always be her body, breath, blood, legs, voice. Christa will walk for me. I will speak for her.

  We wore the same outfits as little girls but in different colors. My dresses were blue, with ballooned shoulders and bows. Sister wore pink and was smaller than I. Women, we are the same size. Still, if I were to draw a picture of us, I would be great big, and holding her like a baby.

  Her face is prettier than mine. We look exactly alike.

  “I have always wanted a twin.” People say that. People want someone just like them, who thinks like they think and who will understand them even when they don’t understand themselves. People think having a twin means never being lonely.

  Nothing is lonelier than being separated.

  “We are lucky,” we answer back. But we are not. We are worried. “Cut yourself in half,” we tell people. “See how that feels and you will stop wanting a twin.”

  People ask questions. “Do you know what the other is thinking? Do you have ESP? Do you dream the same dreams when you sleep?” I answer yes. I say, “I think what she thinks.” It’s easier than telling the truth. Now we are conflicting languages, snake-spit Babel. Sister explains me with her camera. I tell on her with my words, and I also tell on myself.

  Once upon a time there was a story with no present, no past, no future. The story was written in our same blood.

  * * *

  Cara’s dying meant there was a strong chance I would soon join her. I researched our situation and read somewhere that 50 percent of twins follow their identical twin into death within two years. That statistic did not discriminate among cancer, suicide, or accident. The second twin goes by illness or the intolerable pain of loneliness. Flip a coin: those were my chances of survival.

  Certainly we’d talked about what we’d do if one of us died before the other. The answer was always suicide and our plans were the plots of girls who never suspected they’d really lose the other. We’d schemed since grade school about how we’d seal our pact: in the case of illness we’d hold a bedside vigil and ingest a dose of cyanide. In the case of an accident, the injured twin was not allowed to die until she stumbled to a pay phone and called the other. The unharmed twin would take her life by whatever means she possessed: Drano, phone cord, knife, swan dive from a cliff.

  Chapter 2

  I have a story, a tale I’ve never told. It was 2005 and Cara was looking for a new apartment again; her life still unraveling after the rape. She and her husband, Kahlil, had divorced. The weekend of the daylight saving time change, Cara and I had a slumber party at Jedediah’s and my place and reset the clocks together. We turned the hands back and retired to bed, pleased at gaining our temporary hour, the sorely needed extra time for sleep and coffee and lingering over the Sunday real estate classifieds. I didn’t mind the change in season—there’d be early sunsets, holiday feasts, and tree trimming. Snow would soon float quietly down from the sky until it stuck, frozen on the brown grass, building a fortress of white over the naked forsythia at the edge of the driveway.

  New England winters are bitter—by 4:30 p.m. the light is nearly gone. Almost as soon as the sun comes up, it seems to blink down again. I had a secret plan to fight off the winter blahs that year, bottles and bottles filled with little yellow round friends, painkillers and downers prescribed to ease my aching back. I had primed myself for the coming blizzards. I had pain relief and I had my twin. We had a winter full of plans. Soon we’d trudge into the snow to take pictures. Soon we’d hold our post-Thanksgiving night family complaint session and our ritual Christmas gift exchange.

  I’d been in trouble for a while with crippling pain. The doctor had said too many hours a day in the darkroom, standing on a concrete floor, hunched over developing trays had put my back out. I was going to need to start taking better care. Practical shoes and more calcium were in order. I’d needed to see a chiropractor, go to physical therapy, and, for God’s sake, stand up straight. To get me through the worst of the pain he gave me a prescription for Soma, a non-narcotic muscle relaxant, and a script for Valium, a benzodiazepine that also helped soothe the muscles but should only be taken at bedtime, and never mixed with Soma.

  Cara was staying the weekend while Jedediah was away on business. I never liked to be alone for very long, a consequence of being a twin, and I was glad to have Cara nearby. She didn’t like to be alone, either. We spent that weekend watching stand-up comedy on television and drinking margaritas from salt-rimmed glasses until we were tipsy. We switched to giant cups of water with ice when we got too drunk—pulpy wedges of lime bobbing up against our lips as we sipped. We ate steaks grilled the right way: charred fast and hot so the outside was seared. The insides stayed cool and red and the centers bled when the knife cut. Twin weekends, the rare weekends we spent alone, were occasion for food and drink.

  The music we listened to in college—Tracy Chapman, Indigo Girls, Violent Femmes—played festively throughout those weekends. We were like kids without parents, but we were wives without husbands. Cara liked to ho
ld one of my cats, a slick gray Siamese, and dance through the house with him, bouncing him on her hip to the music, like a baby. The cat stuck his little pink tongue through his teeth in delirious joy, his head tipping back as he whirled with her.

  Sunday rolled in faster than we would have liked during our daylight saving time fest—the extra hour wasn’t enough. The woods around the house had gone dark and still. Jedediah was due home the next morning.

  Cara and I sat together on the sofa. I hunched over my laptop, writing out lesson plans for the Monday morning photography seminar I taught at a local college. Cara was grading student essays for the Introduction to Writing course she TAed at UMass. Papers heaped on her lap, ink on her face, she tossed the essays one by one onto the floor as she finished. They lay in a mixed-up pile at her feet. The pages were marked with checks and commas, and long lines of notes ran down the margins.

  “How the hell do you manage to keep all of those straight?” I bent down to tidy the papers, to give the pile some order.

  “I don’t. It’s a song and a prayer at this point. They don’t pay me enough to be organized.”

  “They never do, do they?”

  “Nope. You think it’s cold in here?”

  “It’s getting there.” The woodstove had burned down to embers and I noticed the dog sleeping, my pampered Chihuahua, a fleck of cinnamon in a pile of white, burrowed up to her nose in a basket of warm linens I’d fetched from the dryer. “I’m going out for firewood,” I told her.

  “Want help?”

  “No, no thanks.”

  “You sure? I know your back has been sore.” Cara rubbed her hands together to warm them and tried to lay them on my shoulders. “I could rub your flip-flop muscle,” she teased. This was her name for the tense, tight area between our big and second toes.

  “I don’t want your help,” I said, surprised by my tone. We’d had a nice weekend, and I was sorry to spoil it. I tried to be kind, to turn the other cheek, but no matter how I tried to mask it, resentment returned.

  Accepting help from Cara was a deal with the devil. She used my weakness as leverage against me. Her arsenal was well stocked—I’d recently confided in her that I was restless in my young marriage, feared it was unraveling, and had doubts I should remain. When she felt afraid that I might abandon her because of her drug use, she’d remind me that she knew my secret. She was willing to tell Jedediah and explode my marriage if I left her. My fall would be her pleasure, not because she didn’t love me, but because she did—she wanted me for herself, down in the same muck she’d been flailing in. Nobody wants to be alone in misery. Cara experienced no shame in admitting that need. Not only did she not want to suffer alone, she demanded co-suffering from all who dared love her.

  I knew she was back on drugs. It had taken years, but I’d learned the signs—no-shows for dinner, broken relationships, a lengthy paper trail she thought she’d hidden.

  I’d been reading her e-mail for months, looking for receipts from Canadian and Mexican pharmacies. I was tipped off to look for them when I opened her glove box and stacks of half-empty unmarked foil-packaged pills tumbled out. A handwritten invoice for “Medicines,” signed with a smiley face and wedged beneath an unpaid parking ticket, sat just below her stockpile. I did what I had to do. I logged in to her e-mail and guessed her password; it wasn’t difficult. Hers was the exact same as mine: our beloved first pet’s name, a cat.

  I tried to intercept deliveries before she was able to get them. The pills were colorless and had a tooth to them—they weren’t smooth but rough, and as round and large as pennies. Each delivery consisted of 120 pills packaged in punch sheets wrapped in thick brown paper. Some weeks she bought Vicodin and others Valium. No matter the drug, they looked the same, like rat poison molded into horse pills. She’d been spending hundreds of dollars weekly on them and, even though I seized half of what she ordered, she didn’t allow the missing packages to deter her from ordering more.

  Pills made her slower, sluggish. It sounds strange but her hair fell flat when she used; her hair had been limp for months. I knew I’d probably not even scratched the surface of what Cara was able to procure, but I continued looking. I convinced myself that there was no hiding her problem from me. That was true, but soon enough I’d learn that my discovery would never be enough to save Cara. Her life was in her own small hands.

  I could see she was high as soon as she walked into a room. I looked for her flaws at first glance, just as she looked for mine. I relished them. Twins love, but they bicker and fight and judge. Twins are wicked and harsh, as hard on their twins as they are on themselves. Harder. All of the things a twin hates about herself are obvious in her twin. For twins, self-loathing means it’s sibling hunting season.

  Twins: it’s always tit for tat.

  We were constantly keeping score and upholding double standards.

  That daylight saving weekend, our last alone, I wasn’t giving Cara the satisfaction of accepting her help.

  I walked to the medicine cabinet and took a dose of Soma, two pills, and walked out into the cold to get some logs and kindling.

  I attempted to carry an armful of wood from a neatly stacked pile of seasoned oak. Cara watched from a window like she was rubbernecking a car wreck. She looked on as I dropped piece after piece of wood. I picked up each one, only to watch it tumble to the ground again. I struggled foulmouthed, a stubborn Quasimodo in a dress—I was furious at my sister for being such a lout. I did need her help. I thought of what I’d said, I don’t want your help, and shouldered the weight of the wood.

  I managed to hulk an arm full of it up the stairs and dropped each log in the big empty copper bucket beside the hearth. “This should warm your bones,” I teased, trying to lighten the mood, a passive apology for snapping at her. The pills were starting to kick in a little bit. The pain wasn’t lifting but my mood was.

  I brushed off the bark and dirt from my dress and went into the bathroom, opening a bottle of Soma, swallowing two more. A half hour passed and still there was pain. I took two more. I worked away at my computer, and another half hour passed. The spasm in my back crashed down on my tailbone. I opened the medicine chest and retrieved two more pills, chasing them down with two tablets of Valium. An hour passed and I repeated the same dose.

  I sat down at the kitchen table to resume my course work and lost consciousness.

  * * *

  I came to in my sister’s embrace, and was surprised to see Jedediah standing in the kitchen off to the side. He’d come home early from his trip to find his wife strung out, cradled in her sister’s arms. “It’s not as bad as it looks,” I slurred. We were like two kids caught snooping through a porn stash. It was exactly how it looked.

  “What did you give my wife?” Jedediah walked over and pulled me from Cara’s grip.

  “Nothing, I swear.” Cara picked up my purse, flipping through my wallet for an insurance card. “We need to get her to the ER, don’t you think?,” she said. She was defiant and deferential, taking claim of me but also allowing for the possibility that this scene didn’t bode well for more weekend parties, just the two of us. She stood with her hands on her hips, bent down, and tilted her head to the side, baby-talking me. “Tell him. Tell him I didn’t give you anything.”

  I didn’t have the strength to answer her.

  Jedediah is tall and thin; he stands six feet and weighs no more than 155 pounds. My husband was skinny and some might even say frail. He managed strength to pick me up, though, and carried me to our car, sitting me upright in the front passenger’s seat. Cara chased close behind and got into the backseat.

  “Don’t you dare die on me,” she begged.

  “Just stop it. Would you?” Jedediah pushed the gas down hard, skidding out of the gravel driveway, rocks popping and then shooting out beneath the tires. “I can’t stand your moroseness.” We rolled in place for a few seconds, having lost traction on dirt and pebble, so Jedediah gunned it and the wheels screeched out loud as he hit blackto
p.

  Cara ignored him and leaned in over the headrest, whispering in my ear, “I’ll kill you if you die, and then your husband will kill me.” She reached around from behind my seat and straightened out the twisted shoulder strap and lap belt that Jedediah had hurriedly snapped into place. “What use are we if we’re both dead?”

  Cara wiped the sweat from my forehead. Jedediah rolled down the windows, and I craned my neck out, vomiting. “Do you want me to call anyone, let them know there has been an emergency?” Cara asked, slipping her hand beneath the collar of my shirt, stroking the bare skin of my back. “You might not be out for a long time.”

  My head hung limp from my neck and swayed as the car moved. She’d caught me off guard. There was only one person I’d wanted to talk to for the last several months and I’d been doing it in secret. “Call D,” I blurted. The pills had impaired my judgment and I immediately regretted mentioning D. We’d met over the summer and even though he was twenty years older, in my husband’s mind he posed a threat to our marriage, to my fidelity. Jedediah shifted gears hard.

  Cara said, “No problem, love. I’ll let him know that you’ve gotten yourself into a bind.”

  The hospital was only a mile from the house. Jedediah had figured I’d be in the ER sooner, having my stomach pumped, if he took me himself. An ambulance would have taken too long.

  Cara phoned the hospital from the car and told them to wait for us at the door with a wheelchair—she said there had been an emergency, an overdose, a suicide attempt. She told the nurse on call that I’d need a psychiatrist to approve an overnight stay, and then a transfer to a behavioral facility. My twin was a pro, she’d done this before, only, before, she had always been the one barfing out the window while I frantically drove, or stood by as doctors worked to bring her back to life.