Double Identity

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  My father hands me my suitcase, like he knows what I want to do and that’s his way of stopping me.

  “You’ll be fine with your aunt Myrlie,” he says, the fake heartiness back in his voice. “And we won’t be gone long.”

  “Will you be back for my birthday?” I say forlornly. I don’t know why I ask that. My birthday is November 2, still more than a week away, and the question really does make me sound like a child. It’s just that birthdays are a big deal in my family, and I’m not sure I can bear it if my parents are away then.

  I fully expect my father to say, “Yes, dear. Of course we’ll be back long before your birthday. With lots of presents.” But I look up and my father is staring back at me in mute horror. He opens his mouth, but no sound comes out. He reaches out and brushes his fingers against my cheek, cradling my face in his hand. And then his hand slips away and he stumbles off the porch, down the walkway, back to the car. He moves like he’s drunk, though he couldn’t be. He’s barely even eaten today, let alone had anything to drink. And I’ve been with him for the past fifteen hours. I would know.

  Really, except for school, I’ve spent virtually every second of my life with my parents. How could I not know what’s wrong with them?

  How could they be leaving me now?

  TWO

  “Well,” the woman says.

  I’m still staring off after my parents’ taillights, staring at empty street. I’ve practically forgotten the woman is there. No—Myrlie, I remind myself. Aunt Myrlie. But I’ve never called anyone “aunt” before, so the name feels strange to me.

  I won’t call you that, I think defiantly. I won’t.

  Still, I tear my gaze away from the darkness where my parents used to be and glance at Myrlie. Up close, she doesn’t look so old, despite the white hair, despite the Mrs. Santa Claus robe. Her face has surprisingly few wrinkles, and her dark eyes are brimming with sympathy.

  “Are you hungry?” she asks. “Would you like something to eat? I don’t keep much food in the house, seeing as how it’s only me living here now, but I’m sure we could scare up something. Peanut butter and jelly sandwich, maybe? Chicken noodle soup? Or—?”

  “I’m not hungry,” I say. Then, because some of my defiance has leaked into those three words, I add, “No, thank you.”

  “Okay,” Myrlie says evenly. But she doesn’t seem to know what to say to me if she can’t talk about food. She can’t even look me straight in the eye. It’s as if I’m hideously ugly, painful to look at, and I don’t think I am. I’ve got long blond hair that I once described in a school essay as “cascading down my shoulders”—my teacher took off points for that because he said it was an overwrought cliché. And, truthfully, my hair doesn’t really cascade. It just kind of lies there.

  I also wear narrow, brown-rimmed glasses. My mother started bugging me a couple years ago to get contacts, but I like my glasses. My face would feel naked without them. Unprotected.

  Is that why my mother started crying? Because I fought with her about glasses? Is it all my fault?

  I can’t let myself think about that right now, or else I might start crying right here in front of Myrlie. I force myself back to evaluating my appearance. Before I grew seven inches in the past year, everyone always said I was tiny and cute. I don’t think I’m any less cute for suddenly growing tall, but people can probably tell by looking at me that I’m not used to being this height yet. I like to collect unusual words (hence, “cascading” and, well, “hence”), and the word I like to use about myself is coltish. So what if I’m a little wobbly on my legs right now—someday I’ll race the wind.

  Anyhow, “tall and coltish” sounds a lot better than “tall and gawky,” which is probably a more accurate description.

  Somehow I’ve survived two or three minutes of this strange woman staring at me without quite looking straight at me. But thinking about my appearance can last me only so long.

  “Um,” I say. “Maybe I can use your phone?”

  I feel brilliant suddenly—why didn’t I think of this sooner? I’ll call my dad’s cell phone and just tell him how ridiculous everything is. I don’t want to stay here, he and Mom didn’t want to leave me behind, Myrlie doesn’t seem to know what to do with me—so let’s just undo everything. And he’ll come back and pick me up and we can all go together to get help for Mom.

  This is virtually the same plan that got me out of attending the first three months of first grade, but I don’t care about seeming childish anymore. I’m picturing Mom and Dad and me riding off into the sunset together (or toward sunrise, anyway).

  Then I see the turmoil my question has unleashed on Myrlie’s face.

  “I don’t think …,” she begins, stops, starts again. “Look, I know this is probably all very strange for you. It’s strange for me, too. I feel like if I forbid you to use the phone, it’ll seem like you’re trapped here. Like I’ve kidnapped you, or something. When actually …” She lifts her hands helplessly, as if explaining exactly why I’d been dropped at her doorstep is far beyond her verbal abilities. “Walter said it was very important that you shouldn’t try to contact anyone.”

  “I just want to call him,” I say, and it’s all I can do not to make my words a whimper: I want my daddy …

  “Well…” Myrlie wrinkles her brow, deliberates. Somehow in that moment I decide I like her. She’s taking me seriously. “I don’t see how that could be a problem.”

  I follow her down a hall and into a kitchen, but I don’t pay much attention to any of it. Why should I, if I’m just going to leave again in a few minutes?

  The phone is on the kitchen counter, and it’s an old-fashioned landline, actually connected to the wall with a cord. I punch in the familiar number and put the phone to my ear. I hear one ring and a click and then a computerized voice: “We are sorry. This number is out of service.”

  “What?” I say out loud. I’ve known my father’s phone number since I was four, but I must have misdialed. I hang up, then pick up the phone again and push the numbers with exaggerated care. This time I check the number on the phone’s digital screen: 484-555-9889. Yes.

  I lift the phone to my ear again—ring, click, computerized voice: “We are sorry. This number is out of service.”

  I’m starting to panic. I try my father’s number again; I dial my mother’s number, even my own, though my phone broke yesterday, and that’s why I don’t have it with me now. (And why did my phone break right before this bizarre trip? Was it just a coincidence? Or … not?)

  Out of service.

  Out of service.

  Out of service.

  I call the nationwide directory and ask for any listing for a Walter, Hillary, or Bethany Cole, hometown, Greenleaf, Pennsylvania.

  “Checking, checking,” the computerized voice says. Then, “We are sorry. We have no listing for any of those names.”

  It’s as if my family ceased to exist. As if we never existed. I collapse against the kitchen counter, let the phone drop from my hand. There’s not even any real live human I can argue with, protest to.

  I feel a gentle hand on my back. I’ve forgotten about Myrlie again. She’s been standing here the whole time, listening to every word.

  I turn to face her.

  “Isn’t there any emergency number my father left with you?” I choke out. “Some way to reach him if I break my arm or, or …?” My throat closes over my next words. I can’t say them. Or if I just need him?

  Myrlie’s eyes are filled with fear now. Fear and confusion and something I can’t quite read.

  But slowly, slowly, she shakes her head no.

  THREE

  Myrlie tucks me in to bed. I go along with her, as compliant as a rag doll. She carries my suitcase to an upstairs bedroom, helps me pull out my pajamas, helps me slip them on. And I don’t care that this stranger sees me halfnaked, don’t care that she’s treating me like a five-year-old. My brain doesn’t start functioning again until she’s pulled the down comforter up to my chin
and turned out the light and murmured, “Things will look better in the morning. They always do.” Then, when I’m lying there, wide awake in the darkness, some tiny, tiny part of my mind comes alert again to goad me: You’re overreacting.

  Except, I’m not. It’d be one thing if my parents were like the adults I’ve seen dropping their kids off late for school or smacking their toddlers in the grocery store or growling at their teenagers at the mall, “Stop bugging me!” If I belonged to any of those parents, I wouldn’t be all that surprised to be foisted off on a stranger in the middle of nowhere, with no way to reach my mom and dad.

  Okay, maybe I’d be surprised, even then. It’s just a million times worse because my parents are the most careful, overprotective, parentish people I’ve ever seen.

  Even when I was little, they never hired a baby-sitter for me. When I was four or five—probably five, after I’d watched Gretchen Dunlap across the street go off to kindergarten while I was being home-schooled—I somehow got wind of the fact that other kids sometimes had babysitters who let them jump on the couch cushions and eat all the cookies they wanted and even go to bed without brushing their teeth. I wanted that too, so I asked my parents for a babysitter of my own. I remember my parents looking sad—disappointed, maybe, even hurt—and then my mother bent down on her knees in front of me and said, “Oh, honey, why would we want to spend even a second away from our baby? You don’t need a sitter. You’ve got us. All the time. Always. Forever.” She even agreed to let me jump on the couch and eat too many cookies and skip brushing my teeth every once in a while. But somehow I knew it wasn’t the same.

  And when my parents take me to the mall, they don’t go to the boring stores and make me sit and wait while they pick out vacuum cleaners or refrigerators or ties or anything for themselves. They sing out, “This shopping trip is all about you!” And even when we’re loaded down with bags of jeans for me and sweaters for me, and new DVDs for me, they still beg, “Isn’t there anything else you want us to buy?”

  The last time we went on one of those shopping trips, I spent the whole time whining, “You’re embarrassing me,” and, “Stop being so loud,” and, “Nobody else I know has to stick with her parents the whole time at the mall.”

  Guilt surges through me as I’m lying there in the bed in Myrlie’s house. It feels like the ceiling has opened up and a huge bolt of guilt-lightning has zapped me.

  Oh, no. What if my parents know how ungrateful I am and this is their way of teaching me a lesson?

  I close my eyes and I can hear voices echoing in my head: Gretchen Dunlap from across the street telling me, “My mom says you’re the most spoiled kid she’s ever seen. So there!” when we were five or six. And my snarling at my mom, “You’re driving me crazy! Just leave me alone!” after she’d offered to braid my hair when I was nervous about a swim meet.

  That was before she started crying, I tell myself. I wasn’t mean to her after she started crying. Why would they drop me off in this strange place and then vanish now?

  And then I feel almost disappointed, because my parents doing this to teach me a lesson would be strange, but sort of understandable. Without that explanation, I’ve got nothing.

  Maybe none of this has anything to do with me, I think, and that’s a big leap for me. My parents have spent my entire life telling me how important I am, how much they love me, how everything in their lives revolves around me. Maybe things changed, I think. Maybe now I’m just… in the way.

  I swallow a lump in my throat, but I can’t believe this explanation either. Even a long, long time ago, before she became a permanent fountain of tears, I can remember my mother looking at me and starting to cry, just out of the blue. And the past several months, my father has seemed much more worried about me than about my mother—it’s my seat belt he double-checks every morning when they drive me to school, it’s me he follows in the car when I’m out rollerblading around the neighborhood. (Which is why I pretty much stopped rollerblading around the neighborhood.) Then there’s the way Myrlie reacted when she saw me. She was so happy at first—and then it seemed like it broke her heart just to look at me.

  Why? I think. Why, why, why, why, why?

  It’s that word that carries me off to sleep, a lullaby of curiosity and loneliness and fear.

  FOUR

  In the morning I wake up disoriented. I can’t quite believe I made it through the night, all by myself, so far from home. Sunlight is streaming in the windows past white, dotted swiss curtains, and in spite of myself I’m a little pleased that I can put a name to the thin, old-fashioned material.

  It’s a shame it’s not dimity, I think, just because I like that word better. I’m not actually sure what dimity looks like.

  I am the only kid I know who’s even heard of dimity, who likes old-fashioned words, who’s ever bothered to read the dusty, falling-apart books at the back of the school library, behind the brand-new computers. I think it’s because my parents gave me so many antique toys when I was little, along with the Bratz dolls and the toy computers. I’m the only kid I know who had a Cabbage Patch doll; I was the only one who had a collection of My Little Pony videos and my own VCR, instead of just DVDs and a DVD player.

  Thinking about my old toys makes me sad, and I get an ache in my throat that makes me want to be a little kid again just so I can get away with throwing myself on the floor and pounding my fists and hollering, “I want my mommy! I want my daddy! I want to go home!”

  Instead, I make myself sit up and put on my glasses so I can look around.

  I’m in one of two twin beds angled on one side of a spacious room, opposite a wailful of windows. Both of the beds are covered with lacy yellow comforters, and the furniture is all white, even the desk that’s under the windows. It’s clearly been a little girl’s room, and that makes me wonder about Myrlie. “It’s only me living here now,” she said last night. Did she used to have a husband? Kids? Myrlie is a mystery to me—the only thing I know about her is that my father said she was my aunt. Does that make her my father’s sister or my mother’s?

  It bothers me that I don’t know this, but my parents never talked much about their own childhoods. For all they’ve told me about their pasts, you would think their lives began the same day as mine.

  I slip out of bed and cross the room to one of the windows. It looks out on a generous backyard studded with huge, brightly colored trees. Two at the back particularly stand out: one bigger, one smaller, both brilliant red. The autumn leaves surprise me, because when we were driving yesterday, right up until nightfall, all we passed were bare, bleak landscapes with trees holding empty branches up to a gray sky.

  You’ve come south, I tell myself, and I’m proud of my powers of deduction. Trees lose their leaves later the farther south you go—ergo, Myrlie’s house is a good deed south, as well as west, of Greenleaf, Pennsylvania.

  But this reminds me that I don’t even know what state I’m in, and I don’t feel much like gloating over my brilliance.

  I wander around the room aimlessly, fingering a miniature glass tea set on the dresser, a china doll on the desk. Since I’ve never stayed the night before at anyone else’s house, I’m not sure what the rules are. Am I supposed to wait in the room until Myrlie comes to get me? Or am I supposed to go downstairs so she knows I’m awake?

  Trying to decide, I open the door and peek out into the hall. I catch a glimpse of a sink and a toilet behind a nearby door, and I decide that no one could fault me for going to the bathroom. The bathroom is an old-fashioned one, with claw feet on the bathtub and a black-and-white tile floor and separate knobby handles on the hot and cold faucets. If I concentrate really hard, I can distract myself from the weirdness of my situation by thinking about how this bathroom could fit in the early-1900s movie I was imagining the night before. But bathrooms don’t usually figure very prominently in those kinds of movies, so I’m still feeling strange and awkward and uncomfortable when I open the door.

  Myrlie is climbing the stairs
, right outside the bathroom.

  “Good morning!” she says, with some of the fake heartiness my father employed last night. “I thought I heard you stirring about up here. I didn’t know if you were an early riser or someone who could sleep the whole morning away like …”—she freezes, looks a little panicked, then hastily continues—“like a lot of kids. Anyhow, since you got to bed so late last night, I thought I’d just let you sleep until you woke up. Although, with the time change, you’re probably totally messed up. I took the day off work so I’d be sure to be here when you got up. Would you like some breakfast?”

  She’s doing that thing where you talk too much when you don’t know what to say. I tend to go in the other direction—not talking enough—so I stand there for a few seconds in silence. Am I in a different time zone now? I want to ask, and, Who is it that can sleep the entire morning away—besides me? But all I say is, “Breakfast would be nice.”

  I follow her down the stairs and she offers me bacon and eggs and toast—“Or pancakes? How about pancakes?” I choose Raisin Bran, the only cereal in the house. It’s the kind of breakfast I wouldn’t touch back home—Froot Loops are more my style—but somehow it seems like I’d be even more beholden to Myrlie if she went to the trouble of scrambling eggs or mixing pancake batter, just for me. I feel strange enough ladling the cereal up to my mouth and chewing and swallowing while Myrlie sits across the table watching me.

  Suddenly I’m disgusted with my own wimpiness, my willingness to sit there as meekly as a lab specimen under a microscope when I’ve got so many questions swarming through my mind.

  I swallow hard and the Raisin Bran scrapes down my throat.

  “Where do you work?” I ask, because it seems like a nice, neutral opening shot.

  Myrlie jumps a little, like she’s forgotten I have a voice. Or like she thinks that’s something I should already knew.

  “Oh!” she says. “At the school. I teach kindergarten.”