Double Identity

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  Well I’m not….

  I slide out of bed and creep over to my door. I limp a little, because of my leg, but I manage to open the door and slip down the hall without making a sound. I peek around the corner, down the stairs to the living room.

  It’s not Myrlie and Joss down there talking. It’s just Joss, sitting in the dark with the TV on and the sound turned low.

  I dare to ease down a few steps because I think if I lean out from the railing and crane my neck a little, I’ll be able to see more than the ghostly glow of light in front of the TV. I’ll be able to see what Joss is watching. But the second step down creaks. Joss stares up at me and gasps.

  “E—” she starts to say, then chokes back the word. She swallows hard. “That stairs has always creaked,” she says, her voice suddenly too glib. “Elizabeth and I made a game out of avoiding it whenever we spent the night with Grandma. We’d sneak around and pretend the grown-ups couldn’t see us….” She breaks off, then mutters, “Sorry.”

  I’m not sure if she’s apologizing for talking about Elizabeth, or for not being able to cover up the fact that she started to call me the wrong name again.

  I stand frozen, halfway up and halfway down the stairs.

  “You couldn’t sleep either, huh?” Joss asks softly.

  “No,” I say, and somehow her question frees me to continue climbing down the stairs.

  I stop beside the couch, as soon as I can see the TV screen. It shows two girls, probably about eight years old, jumping on a trampoline. One is dark and one is blond—it’s Joss and Elizabeth, Elizabeth and Joss. They’re both screaming, “Look at this one! Look at me!” and then flinging themselves high into the air, spinning and whirling seemingly dozens of times before landing back on their feet.

  The colors are so bright on the TV screen—so much more vivid than anything else in this dark room.

  “I’ll turn it off,” Joss says quietly. She fumbles for the remote.

  “No,” I say, surprising myself. I’m steeling myself for something. Joss waits. “It was nice today, pretending Elizabeth didn’t exist,” I say, finally. “But I don’t think… I don’t think I can do that anymore.”

  “You’re probably right,” Joss says.

  I ease down onto the couch beside her, facing the TV headon. Together we watch the two little girls from another time defy gravity again and again and again. They hop off the trampoline and eat ice-cream cones, the ice cream melting and dripping and rolling down their chins. They giggle and lick ice cream from their fingers. The tape crackles and hisses and goes black momentarily. Then suddenly it’s winter: The girls are outside playing in the snow, making snowmen, throwing snowballs. Moments later, they’re opening Christmas presents, they’re hunting for Easter eggs, they’re back outside in the sunshine, jumping on the trampoline again.

  “Didn’t you ever do anything alone?” I ask Joss.

  “Not much,” Joss says huskily.

  The tape spools deeper into the night and I feel like I’m falling deeper into the past. It’s hypnotic, watching those girls, those happy, innocent, ignorant little girls. They grow up before my eyes, passing through stages of glasses, braces, short hair, long hair, oddball fashions. They don’t seem quite real. I realize that if I’m really an exact copy of Elizabeth—if that’s possible, if that’s true—then it’s the same two people sitting on the couch, watching, as the two little girls turning cartwheels on the screen. But Joss-in-real-life-right-now has a few gray hairs and the beginnings of wrinkles beside her eyes; I can’t believe that that dark-haired little girl on the screen could ever grow up. And the more I watch of Elizabeth, the more I feel that she is not me; I am not her. She mugs for the camera, she sings off-key without a hint of self-consciousness, she leans in close to the lens and whispers, confidentially, “You know, you’ll be able to sell this tape for a lot of money when I’m famous.”

  Joss has tears in her eyes.

  “It was so hard to believe that she was the one who died,” Joss says. “She was so vibrant, so alive.”

  I’m not vibrant, I think. For the umpteenth time, I hear my mother’s words echoing in my head: We’ll have an exact copy. But they didn’t get that. In the videos, everything about Elizabeth sparkles. She was spunky and confident and outgoing and talkative. I’m quiet and dreamy, hiding behind my glasses, hiding underwater. Were my parents disappointed? Is that why they left me behind at Myrlie’s?

  “Whenever Elizabeth and I talked about going to the Olympics,” Joss says, “we always planned for her to win all the gold medals, and I would get all the silver. And I never questioned that, never thought that maybe I would deserve any gold myself. Never thought I could be number one, as long as Elizabeth was around. Isn’t that strange?”

  She’s not asking me. She’s asking the little girl dancing on the screen in front of us.

  “Why didn’t my parents make me do gymnastics?” I ask. “I mean, if Elizabeth was good enough for the Olympics, if I’m supposed to be her …” I can’t quite bring myself to say the word. Clone.

  Joss gives me a measuring look.

  “I think I know why,” she says.

  She leans over and digs through a box on the floor—the entire box of all the old videotapes. She pulls out one and exchanges it for the tape in the VCR. She fast-forwards through snow scenes and an ice storm and what look to be the first tulips of spring. And then we seem to be in some sort of gymnasium, and dozens of girls in leotards parade by. I pick out Elizabeth—she’s the tallest one. It’s some sort of competition; in the background I can hear an announcer calling out names on a loudspeaker with the same sense of hushed anticipation as at a swim meet.

  The camera pauses for a second, then focuses in on Elizabeth mounting a balance beam. Elizabeth rolls, twirls—and falls. Even in the shaky videotape, I can see the astonishment, the humiliation on Elizabeth’s face. My face. Elizabeth climbs back on and bursts into a series of spins above the beam, her hands not even touching. And then she finishes the spins and reaches down, every muscle in her body seeming confident that that beam will be right beneath her, right where she always knew it would be. Her fingers connect and she twists her body around, ready to land on her feet. But her feet slip. She falls again, plunging to the mat below. The screen goes black.

  “She grew so fast, her center of balance was off,” Joss says quietly. “That was her last gymnastics meet. She’d done that routine a hundred times before that, perfectly. But… that was the competition.”

  I can see my parents wanting to spare me the pain of falling like that, after soaring. My parents still don’t even think that I should use sharp knives, for fear that I might cut myself. I look down at my hands—my long-fingered, broad hands that used to be so tiny and delicate. Somehow I’d always expected to be tall someday. Even when I was the shortest kid in my class, year after year, I always knew that I’d eventually outgrow the others. I can even remember telling a bully in fourth grade, “You just wait till I get my growth. Then you’ll be scared of me.”

  A sickening realization creeps over me.

  Of course I knew I’d grow tall. My parents told me. And they knew because of Elizabeth. I think about how much uncanny knowledge my parents had always seemed to have. When I was in second grade, my mother had simply announced one afternoon, “Time to get glasses.” And she’d taken me to the eye doctor and, yes, it was true, I was beginning to slip into myopia.

  “Were you referred by the school nurse after a screening?” the eye doctor asked.

  “No, I just had a feeling,” Mom said.

  Of course she did. Of course. She’d also known when I’d lose my first tooth, when I’d need my first bra. Because of Elizabeth.

  I’m sinking so far into the horror of this revelation, that I’ve lost track of what’s showing on the TV. Then Joss gasps.

  “I didn’t remember them taping this,” she moans.

  I look up and the TV shows the two girls, not so little anymore, standing in full sunlight in front
of an array of summer flowers.

  “Are you going to have fun today?” someone—Joss’s dad?—asks from behind the camera.

  “Oh, yes,” Elizabeth says, tossing her head so that her hair streams out behind her in the breeze. The sunlight catches the golden glints in her ponytail. “We’re going to ride every roller coaster ten times.”

  “Make sure you check back in with us every two hours.” This is my mother’s voice, the familiar note of anxiety buried deep within. “Be careful.”

  “I can’t watch this,” Joss says. She clicks off the remote and the TV goes dark. So does the entire room. “That was Sinclair Mountain. The amusement park. That last day. Before …”

  The accident, I think.

  We sit in silence. I think of glib things to say: Well, you know, that was twenty-some years ago. You should be over it by now. Or, You know she died. Watching the tape’s not going to change anything. But I don’t speak. Slowly my eyes adjust to the darkness. There’s a little bit of moonlight coming in the window. I can see Joss in silhouette, shaking her head.

  “That day was special,” she says, her voice almost a whisper. “Mom and Dad and Uncle Walter and Aunt Hillary let us roam around by ourselves some. We felt so grown-up. We had boys flirting with us—well, with Elizabeth, anyway. Elizabeth just glowed. I can’t describe … It was like that was my first glimpse into this new world of being a teenager—a world that Elizabeth was entering first. We walked around checking out the cute boys and making fun of our parents for being too chicken to ride the roller coasters and we felt … invincible. I remember thinking I was really going to like being a teenager, being in that new world.”

  “Did you?” I ask. I have not thought much about what it will be like to be a teenager. For the last six months, the sound of my mother’s crying seemed to have drowned out every other thought in my head.

  Joss shakes her head more violently now.

  “I was still in the hospital when I turned thirteen,” she says. “I was in pain. I couldn’t stop thinking about how I’d spent the last day of my father’s life avoiding him, how I’d acted like I was being really generous, letting Elizabeth choose which seat she wanted in the minivan, driving home. And then that choice killed her…. I’d think things like, Maybe God goofed, and maybe I was the one who was supposed to die. Or, if it wasn’t a mistake, why did God want Elizabeth and Daddy dead? I was a pretty death-obsessed teenager. All the boys were scared of me. Everyone was. I never got that charmed-teenager life.”

  I won’t either, I think. In the dark, I practice tossing my head the way Elizabeth had in the video. But there’s no sunlight streaming down on me, and the movement makes the back of my head hurt. I must have banged it against the kitchen cabinet when I was scooting away from Myrlie and Joss, horrified at the notion that I might be Elizabeth’s clone.

  “Why did God want Elizabeth and your father to die?” I ask, because I’m working on something like a geometry proof in my head. If God wanted Elizabeth dead twenty years ago, and if I’m just like Elizabeth, then is there something wrong with my being alive now? Were my parents defying God—did they think they were God?

  “Questions like that are hopeless,” Joss says. “You can drive yourself crazy trying to fathom God’s will so simplistically, putting everything into neat little boxes and categories. I don’t think He wanted anyone to die. But He let it happen because of free will, because we’re not God’s little robots, preprogrammed to live out our lives without getting to make any choices of our own.”

  “Is that what they taught you to say in theology school?” I ask.

  “Yes, but it’s also what I believe,” Joss says.

  “What did they teach you about cloning people? Did they say anything about parents creating little robots, preprogrammed to be exact copies of someone else? Did they?” My voice arcs up. I am being surly and nasty with Joss, and maybe it’s all because I can’t toss my hair over my shoulder as well as Elizabeth did.

  “There was a class that was something like ‘The Theology of Newer Reproductive Techniques,’ but I never took it,” Joss says, shrugging apologetically.

  “But most people think cloning is wrong,” I say, my voice still harsh and rude. “Not just ministers. That’s why there are laws against it. That’s why there’s something wrong with me.”

  Joss twists around and turns on the light behind her. I blink in the sudden brightness.

  “Bethany,” she says. “I don’t know what Uncle Walter and Aunt Hillary did to get you. I don’t know how you were, uh, conceived. But none of it would be your fault.”

  I look away, but there’s nothing safe to look at.

  “Let me tell you a story,” Joss says. “Years after the accident, I was at a science museum. They had this bizarre exhibit about speed and momentum, using the example of four teenagers in an out-of-control car running into a tree. Someone had figured out that teenagers one and two would die if the car hit the tree at X speed. Five miles faster, it would be teenagers one and three. Ten miles faster and a last-minute turn of the steering wheel only teenager four died, the others lived. In scientific terms, it all seemed so random, and I stood there at that exhibit just sobbing, and I wanted to yell at Einstein for that little quote of his about how God doesn’t play dice.”

  “Einstein said that?” I ask.

  “Yeah, pretty weird, huh?” Joss says. “The thing is, when I got done crying, I walked away from that exhibit with this strange sense of peace, and I didn’t have to ask anymore why Elizabeth died, why Daddy died, why I didn’t. The new question I was obsessed with was, ’Okay, I lived—now what am I supposed to do with my life?’”

  “So you became a minister,” I say sulkily.

  “Well, not immediately,” Joss says. “But later, yes. I’d spent a lot of time asking questions, but that was the first time I started listening for answers.”

  She’s looking at me like I’m supposed to jump up and down and say, Oh, thank you for helping me understand! That solves everything! But my parents are still missing, I’ve still got my mother’s voice echoing in my head, telling me I’m an exact copy of a dead girl. And I’m still worried about how the man in the black car knew my name.

  “What am I supposed to do?” I ask.

  “Hold on,” Joss says. “Have faith. Don’t think that there’s something wrong with you because of this.”

  That’s easy for you to say, I want to snarl at Joss. Your parents didn’t clone you. But Joss is sitting there talking to me at four in the morning. She didn’t go back to St. Louis. She chased after me when I ran away.

  “I want to look at the package from my father again,” I say.

  “Okay,” Joss says.

  She climbs the stairs, avoiding the creaky step, and comes back a few minutes later with the packet that she and Myrlie and I were so startled by. I pull the sheets of paper out of the envelope, one after the other. They are all so cold and official, the bureaucratic language, the computerized printouts of all the different birth certificates. Each certificate has me being born at the exact same time, on the exact same date. This makes me feel more like a copy than ever. Only my parents’ signatures are different, the loop of my father’s “l” reaching higher on one form than another, the line of my mother’s “r” S sloping differently. I put the certificates in a row. A handwriting analyst would probably be able to figure out which form was signed first—which one is real. I can only stare at the familiar cursive, my eyes blurring with tears. I pull out the paper that was wrapped around the bundles of money because it holds even more words in my father’s writing: “In case Bethany needs anything.” The paper slips from my shaking hand to land upside down on the carpet. I bend down to retrieve it and gasp.

  “Did you see the back of this?” I ask Joss, because I don’t think I can trust my own eyes.

  “No—I was too shocked by all the money. What is it?” Joss leans over too, and picks up the opposite corner of the page. Together we lift it toward the light. “Oh, m
y gosh,” Josh says. “It’s an entire letter. Uncle Walter gave us an explanation after all.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  Joss and I smooth out the paper on the coffee table. She turns on another light. We both bend our heads low over the page. I don’t know about Joss, but I’m almost giddy with excitement, so eager finally to have a lucid, rational explanation—an explanation from my father, not my mother.

  Then I read the first paragraph.

  He is chasing me. He is hunting me down. Thought he would stay in prison. I lied to him. Lots of lies.

  There’s a gap, then in bigger writing it says, “NO REGRETS!!!” The “No” is underlined six times.

  Lies were the only way to get Bethany. Bethany, Bethany, Bethany …

  The way he’s written my name, again and again, it’s almost like a caress. Or a lullaby. I can’t stand to look at my own name in his writing—I have to skip ahead.

  Naming her Elizabeth would have been too much like tempting fate. Surely you understand why we chose Bethany from the Bible.

  “What’s my name got to do with the Bible?” I ask Joss.

  “Um …” Joss tears her gaze away from the page. “Bethany is a place mentioned in the New Testament. Jesus had friends there. Mary and Martha and… Lazarus.”

  She’s looking at me like this is supposed to mean something.

  “Who are they?” I say. “My parents never took me to church. I don’t know what they believed.”

  Joss sighs.

  “Lazarus died and Jesus brought him back to life,” she says. “In Bethany.”

  “Oh,” I say. I look back down at the letter, but my eyes have blurred and I can’t seem to make the loops and lines of ink into words. It doesn’t matter. “So, did you know right away, as soon as you heard my name, that I was supposed to be Elizabeth reincarnated or resurrected or … or recycled?” I ask. “Am I so stupid that I’ve been walking around all my life telling people I was a clone—just by saying my name?”