Double Identity

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  My father looked out at the crowd of journalists jostling to cover one of the biggest stories of their lifetime. In the TV footage, which I have seen now many times, he stands straight and proud, almost defiant. His eyes are hooded but guileless.

  “I already have everything I want,” he said, and turned around and shut the door of Myrlie’s house behind him. No TV camera captured what he did next: gathered Mom and me into a hug.

  It may sound strange, but Dalton Van Dyne was there at Myrlie’s house the day of my thirteenth birthday too. Joss had long talks with him at the kitchen table, and she came out and reported, “That’s the loneliest man I’ve ever met in my entire life. He thought a clone would be the only person who could possibly love him.”

  Joss still talks to Van Dyne a lot; last month she flew to Chicago to help him open a group home for troubled teenaged boys. The media had a field day with Van Dyne’s transformation: EX-CON EMBEZZLER TURNS LIFE AROUND, the headlines went. And, FORMER BILLIONAIRE DOWN TO ONE PAIR OF SHOES; GIVES ALL ELSE TO CHARITY. But he, too, refuses to comment on any cloning stories.

  That hasn’t kept the media away, of course. A Chicago Tribune reporter tracked down the other “fictitious” Digispur employees who worked with my dad, and some of them talked. One of those TV news magazines has filed a lawsuit trying to get access to tissue samples from Elizabeth and me, to prove or disprove my cloning “once and for all.” Six months ago, that would have seemed like one of my worst nightmares. But now, it’s amazing how distant that all seems, how easily I can get past it.

  I revealed myself, after all.

  And I know the whole truth now. I know there are no more surprises lurking out there. My parents told me everything I hadn’t already figured out.

  Because I’ve seen the videotape of my parents from more than twenty years ago, because I know about Elizabeth, I can picture my father approaching Dalton Van Dyne in the late 1990s. “You want a clone?” my father asked him. “I can do that.”

  It was a lie born of desperate hope and bravado. Elizabeth’s only remaining living cells had been frozen for years at that point. My father had worked in labs around the world, learning techniques and possibilities, but he’d never been the boss, he’d never had a chance to try to clone Elizabeth.

  Dalton Van Dyne put him in charge of his own lab.

  At first, my father had every intention of creating two clones, one of Dalton Van Dyne, one of Elizabeth. But then Van Dyne was arrested for “accounting irregularities” at Digispur, and it was clear that the secret lab was about to be closed down. Errol Schwartz, the man poised to replace Van Dyne as Digispur CEO, was virulently opposed to all biological research. Van Dyne wired my father huge sums of money with the message, “For raising my boy. Don’t tell anyone!” And my father stood in a deserted lab and made a choice. Van Dyne, he thought, would probably get another chance. Elizabeth’s frozen cells wouldn’t. Four cloned embryos went to four different surrogate mothers, and all the embryos contained nuclei from Elizabeth’s cells.

  The surrogate mothers went to four different places around the country, because Van Dyne’s trial was going on then, and my father was already growing paranoid. When it came time for the babies to be born, they all arrived at the same time. And then, one by one, during their first twenty-four hours of life, they all began to die.

  Except one.

  Me.

  “It’s because you were my baby,” my mom interrupted when my dad was telling me this story.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, confused. My mother by then wasn’t crying anymore, but she was loopy with medication, prone to forgetting who any of us were.

  “I gave birth to you,” my mother said. “I was one of the surrogate mothers. Your father said I was too old—but I wasn’t. I was the only one whose baby lived.”

  And then I understood that my actual birth had gone pretty much the way I’d always thought, long before I’d heard about cloning. And that made me feel better, to be that normal, at least.

  My father told everyone he’d worked with that all the cloned babies died, and then he changed his name and tried to erase his tracks. He kept all the birth certificates, and as a family we went through a lot of names those first few years.

  “But once you were old enough to know your last name, we didn’t want to confuse you,” he assured me earnestly.

  In the beginning, they had wanted an exact copy of Elizabeth. But they were so happy to have me that they kept trying to make my life easier than Elizabeth’s had been, more enjoyable. And they were so scared of losing me—so easily reminded that they’d lost Elizabeth—that they did everything they could to protect me.

  My father kept Van Dyne’s money because he didn’t know how to send it back until Van Dyne got out of prison. But sending it back didn’t make him feel any better. It only made him more paranoid, more worried that Van Dyne could track him down.

  That’s why he took me to Myrlie.

  “We always thought of Sanderfield as safe,” my father explained. “A haven we didn’t deserve anymore. But you were innocent. You could go back when we couldn’t. We never dreamed that Van Dyne would follow you instead of us.”

  This was before my father went into therapy, and the therapist could point out all the inconsistencies in my father’s logic, the dangers that lurked for me in Sanderfield. If my parents had been thinking rationally, Sanderfield is the last place they would have left me—Sanderfield, where anyone might recognize me, where practically every adult knew more about my family than I did. But my parents desperately wanted to avoid putting me through all their panic and fear, sleeping in a different hotel every night, driving endless loops across Kansas and Nebraska, Iowa and Missouri and Illinois—coming back to mail a letter, running away at every imagined hint of danger. Myrlie, in the end, was the only person they trusted to protect me.

  “And maybe subconsciously they were acknowledging that it was time for you to know the truth,” my therapist said. “Maybe they had motives in taking you to Sanderfield that even they couldn’t understand.”

  Maybe.

  As you can tell, I have a therapist now too. So does my mom. We’re just your ordinary, typical American family, who could keep the entire psychiatric industry in business all by ourselves.

  My father did show the psychiatrists the proof of my cloning.

  “Just so you know we’re not delusional,” he said.

  But that’s as far as the proof has gone. My parents’ attorneys are confident that we can hold off the onslaught of the news media. And they’re confident that my father will never be charged for his connection to the Digispur embezzling scandals. The FBI has been investigating him; but, strangely, all they seem to care about is the money.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” I complained to the therapist last week. “The lawyers say my dad’s biggest mistake was sending the money back to Dalton Van Dyne, because that could look like money laundering, or something. Still, they think they can get him off because he didn’t have any—what do they call it?—criminal intent. But sending the money back was my dad’s way of trying to make things right. And Van Dyne gave it all back to Digispur. Why isn’t anyone concerned about my dad lying to Van Dyne? And what about the cloning?”

  “Cloning wasn’t illegal fourteen years ago,” the therapist said mildly. “And in this context, lying isn’t a federal crime.” She raised one of her overly plucked eyebrows. “Bethany … are you angry with your parents?”

  Of course I am. Of course I’m not. Why can’t she understand?

  I much prefer the talks Joss and I have. I kind of see now what she means when she says that life always wins in the end. Elizabeth died, and because of that Joss became a minister and Ryan Bridgeman became a police officer trying to help other people. My parents cheated Van Dyne, but now Van Dyne is helping troubled kids.

  “Was my dad right or wrong to clone Elizabeth?” I asked Joss once.

  “Why is that a question you have to answer?” Joss asked me.r />
  And then I remembered the conclusion she finally reached after the accident: 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?”

  No matter how I got here, I’m alive. Now what do I do?

  I am not trying anymore to pull my old self back together. I am not trying to be like Elizabeth, or not like Elizabeth. I am not trying to understand why I lived when the other clones died. I am just me. A new me.

  We had to stay in Sanderfleld, because my parents needed Myrlie to take care of them. It was so hard those first few weeks, getting on the school bus like any ordinary kid when I was anything but ordinary. The clumps of TV cameras outside the school didn’t help. And even away from the cameras, I felt eyes following me all day long. The teachers were worse than the kids, because so many of them remembered Elizabeth.

  But then a kid said to me in the lunch line one day, “My parents say I was a test-tube baby. I don’t think anything could be weirder than that.”

  And Mrs. Wade, the English teacher who’s evidently been teaching in Sanderfield since the beginning of time, asked me to stay after class the same afternoon.

  “I find that it’s always a little disconcerting when I have identical twins in my classes,” she said. “Do you understand the word, ‘disconcerting’?”

  “It means strange,” I said. “Unsettling.”

  “Precisely,” Mrs. Wade said. “I see you have a gift for language, just as your sister did. But I always tell identical twins that I, for one, understand that they are each individuals, that no two humans are ever exactly alike, and that I will judge each of them on his or her own merits. And I will do the same for you. Thank you. That is all.”

  As I walked out of school that day, I felt like I’d been given a gift. When Mrs. Wade and some of the others in Sanderfled look at me, they don’t just see Elizabeth’s clone or a scientific monster or an incredible news story or a chance for gossip. They see a human being.

  They see me.

  I am thirteen years old now—nearly thirteen and a half. And with each second that passes, I move further into territory Elizabeth never entered. Nobody knows what Elizabeth would have been like at fourteen, at fifteen, at sixteen. She is a ghost that will haunt me less and less, the older I get.

  I am not glad that Elizabeth died. But I am glad that I’m alive.

  It is spring now, and Joss has come up from St. Louis for the weekend.

  “So … can we expect Bridgie to show up later this evening?” Myrlie teases.

  “Come on, Mom,” Joss says. “You know Bridgie was always Elizabeth’s boyfriend, not mine.”

  “Speaking as Elizabeth’s clone, I can assure you, Elizabeth would have lost interest in him by the time she was thirteen and a half,” I say. “So you’re welcome to him.”

  Joss rolls her eyes. But it’s good to be able to joke about what used to horrify me. And I wouldn’t mind going to a wedding in a year or so. Myrlie would be delighted to have a chance at grandchildren.

  “Ta-da,” my father says, walking around the corner of the house to join Myrlie, Joss, Mom, and me in the back yard. He’s pushing a wheelbarrow. We all rush over to him to help steady what’s inside the wheelbarrow: a new tree, its roots balled up in burlap.

  It takes all five of us to place the tree in the ground, to pack dirt around its roots. My dad bought the biggest tree he could find.

  “No sense getting a baby tree for some girl who’s already half-grown,” he said when we were planning this.

  “What, am I going to end up being ten feet ten?” I joked.

  “Who knows?” my dad answered, with a soft smile of his own.

  Now I bend down to place a little wooden sign at the base of the tree. It reads, “Bethany Elaine Cole, Born November 2.” There’s no year, because I think of myself as having two November birthdays, almost exactly thirteen years apart. One was when I came into the world. And one was when I finally faced up to the whole truth about who I am.

  “The tree is beautiful,” my mother sighs happily. “Just like Bethany.”

  My tree right now is basically a collection of sticks with a few leaves budding out. Only a mother could call it beautiful. But come fall it will be as striking as Elizabeth’s red maple—just in a different way. For my tree, I chose a ginkgo: a tree that’s unique, with an unusual history. A tree that’s survived against the odds.

  Just like me.

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