by Zoe Aarsen
The walk was nearly two miles, but I hurried, eager to get home to my own familiar bed to catch a few hours’ worth of sleep. Thinking about Jennie exhausted me, and I wasn’t happy that her memory had been dredged up so close to the Fall Fling, when my life was rapidly changing in a brighter direction. There were entire stretches of days sometimes when I barely thought about her, and then, of course, when I did, I felt guilty. It wasn’t even accurate to say that I missed her; it had been so long since she’d passed away that I hardly remembered what it had been like when she’d been alive. By that autumn, I had lived on my own just as long as I’d lived with her, my life split in two distinct halves: With Jennie, and After Jennie. What had replaced the hollow longing that immediately followed her death was a distinct uneasiness, an undeniable but intangible sensation that somehow nature had messed up. Somehow, the wrong twin had been reclaimed.
“Nature doesn’t make mistakes,” Mom was fond of saying when talking about her profession, teaching future botanists and biologists about Phasmatodea, stick bugs that could blend seamlessly into their surroundings, and earthworms that aerated soil.
But what if . . . I could never prevent myself from wondering. What if it did, just once?
My mom liked to comfort herself by saying that when Jennie died, that was the beginning of the end of my parents’ marriage. My dad, in her opinion, just wasn’t man enough to help her through the tragic loss of a child. Truthfully, I think my dad would have packed his bags and headed down to Florida as soon as my mom started finding gray hairs, even if we hadn’t lost Jennie the previous year. What made his attention wane wasn’t the second empty bed, covered in its pink bedspread, untouched next to mine even after we moved into our new house, or the closet full of dresses and leotards that were several sizes too small for me but that my mom wouldn’t consider giving away. It was my mother’s refusal to move on, to accept, and the wrinkles that formed around her eyes during all the nights when she stayed up late, drinking tea on our porch, wanting to be sure, completely sure, that all the electrical appliances were turned off before she climbed into bed for the night. For all his advanced knowledge of the human psyche, my father couldn’t understand why he could forgive my mother for her paranoia, but couldn’t overcome his own revulsion toward her aging process.
He seemed to think having a younger woman in his life made him appear cooler to me, but his attempts to keep up with Rhonda’s interests were embarrassing. At sixteen, I already questioned his authority, his decisions, and his expertise far too frequently for his liking. Rhonda had turned twenty-seven that summer when I had been visiting in Florida. “Ha!” my mother had exclaimed at that. My mom had just turned forty-one.
Autumn was my favorite time of year, despite it also being a season of a lot of unhappy memories. Among them were the anniversary of Jennie’s death, and the anniversary of the following year, when Dad boxed up all his clothes and crammed them into the hatchback of his car for the three-day drive down to Florida. Colored leaves in the trees and dry crunching beneath my shoes made me nostalgic, but comforted me. Wisconsin is basically the autumn capital of the world, in my opinion. At no time of year was it prettier in Willow, and never did it feel more like home.
I reached our corner and passed the vacant lot where our old house used to stand. Mom had insisted that we use the money from our insurance company to buy the only house for sale on our block at the time our first house burned to the ground. Morbid? Yes. But at the time Mom was grieving; she couldn’t stand the thought of Jennie’s spirit being alone on our old street, with us hypothetically all the way across town carrying on with our lives. It was a little weird to walk past that empty corner every day, but the perimeter of our old house’s foundation had long since been obscured by dry, overgrown grass. In the eight years we’d been living in the house at the other end of the block next door to the Emorys’, Mom had never once considered moving away. The lot on the corner had become town property, and every once in a while someone on the town board had an asinine idea about putting a park there. The proposal would always be shot down by no fewer than twenty mothers who vowed they would never let their kids play on slides and swing sets on the site of such a horrific event.
“Hi, honey!” Mom called when she heard me enter the house through the side door in our kitchen. Our storm door had a way of banging twice due to its busted spring—clap, clap! She was in the living room, reading the newspaper as she liked to do on weekends, still wearing her glasses and drinking a mug of coffee I knew she had probably made hours earlier when she had gotten up to walk the dog. “How was the party?”
“Fine,” I said. “Olivia got a brand-new Prius.”
“Randy and Beth always have spoiled that girl. Start dropping hints with your dad,” Mom instructed me. “Brand-new cars are not really within my realm.”
“So,” I announced, setting my backpack down on the table behind our sofa and smiling at her, “guess who got asked to the dance next Saturday.”
“Get out of town!” my mom exclaimed. In her defense, she taught a bunch of college kids, so she was always eager to practice what she thought was cool slang. “Who? Wait! Were you guys hanging out with boys last night?”
“No, Mom,” I said. “We were in Olivia’s basement all night, just like I said we’d be. Her brother asked me.”
“Henry? Isn’t he a little old for you?”
One of the curses of living in a small town was that everyone’s parents knew every kid at school. All of our families picnicked together, coached in the same little league, carpooled to the ice-skating rink. “He’s only two years older than me. Not a big deal,” I insisted, even though in my own heart I thought it was kind of a huge deal.
A huge enough deal that I was still a little apprehensive about how Candace, Olivia, and Mischa were going to react. Olivia was relatively easygoing and nice to most girls at school, at least nicer than the stereotype of the blonde, rich, popular high school girl. Candace, on the other hand, could be vicious. Mischa had a tendency to respond in social settings in a manner directed by either Candace or Amanda.
My mom wanted to know all about the party—which movies we’d watched, what kind of cake Olivia’s mom had served—but I was eager to file away my memories of the party and not think about them again. I announced that we hadn’t slept much and that I wanted to take a nap, and headed down the hall to my room.
I drifted off to sleep on my own bed, my muscles aching with sleepiness from not having been properly rested the night before. As I recalled the strange feeling that had come over me when Violet had told her stories, the hair on my arms stood straight up in my warm room.
Of course it wasn’t evil spirits that were levitating the bodies, I assured myself. That was just crazy thinking. I didn’t even believe in ghosts or spirits or poltergeists, evil or well-intentioned. I had spent a large part of my childhood wishing for a message from the spirit of my twin to no avail. If Jennie hadn’t been able to figure out how to cross the divide of energy separating the living from the dead to communicate with me, then why would a random spirit—who didn’t have any particular reason to be interfering with the sixteenth birthday party of a girl in a boring part of Wisconsin—bother to contact us?
But still, it was weird, I thought.
I slept soundly despite the daylight hour. Dreams began and ended without reason, as they often did whenever I fell asleep at an odd time of day, or slept too late in the morning.
I dreamed briefly of a birthday party, one of our own. I couldn’t be sure which birthday it was, perhaps when we turned five, but in my dream it played back in my memory like a fuzzy Super 8 home movie, muted. Jennie and I wore matching paper party hats, pink cones held onto our heads with slim strings of cheap white elastic. We were dressed as we often were around that age, with Jennie in blue and me in red, my mother’s primitive technique for keeping track of which twin was which. Jennie and I beamed and leaned forward in unison to blow out our candles. Olivia was there, very small fo
r her age, and solemn-faced. Cheryl was there too, smiling and in pigtails. My father moved around the table in our old dining room with his video camera; my mother cut our cake and placed neat slices on paper plates with the Barbie logo printed on them. In a lucid moment after this memory closed out of my dream, I promised myself that I’d ask my mom when I woke up about which year we’d had a Barbie party.
What might have been minutes later just as easily as it might have been hours later, my dream shifted into one that was significantly darker. I was suddenly out on our old lawn in the dead of night, freezing in my paper-thin nightgown, feeling the blazing heat of the fire engulfing our house singe my bare arms and face. Neighbors were lifting me, carrying me farther away from the house, and sirens interrupted the quiet of the night, delivering firemen to our house far too late to make any difference in our future, with their hoses and yellow suits. I could never remember in my dreams or waking life how I’d ended up out on the lawn. What had awakened me so late at night and inspired me to leave the house?
In my dreams, as clearly as in my memories, I could see my parents’ writhing silhouettes, black against the raging flames behind them, emerge through the front door of the house. My father’s striped pajamas had caught fire. A fireman threw a heavy safety blanket on him and wrestled him to the ground out on the lawn to stifle the flames as my mother, her face caked with black soot, wildly searched the crowd that had gathered to watch the midnight spectacle. She looked so deranged, so unrecognizable with her hair mussed and her face smeared, that all I saw was the white of her nightgown and her frantic dark irises darting against the whites of her eyes. When she saw me in the arms of a neighbor near the fire truck, she ran toward us on bare feet across the crunchy, frozen grass.
“Where is she?” she had asked me in a strangled voice, shaking me by the shoulders. “Where is your sister?” In the eight years that had passed since the fire, I couldn’t remember anymore if I had actually seen Jennie wave at me from the front window as flames devoured the curtains, or if I had imagined it. But whenever my daydreams or nightmares brought me back to the moment when my mother asked me where Jennie was, I saw her there in silhouette, the details of her face lost in shadows. She was aware, as the fire swallowed her, that I had made it out alive. If she had actually made her way to the window as I believed she had, she must have realized that she was going to die alone, without me, which was probably more terrifying than reaching the end of her life. I’d never had the courage to ask my mother if Jennie’s body had been found in what had been our bedroom, or somewhere else.
In the years since the fire, I had come to realize after running those terrible moments through the processor in my mind hundreds of thousands of times that my mother had no idea when she first saw me which twin I was. All she had assessed in the frenzy of the emergency was that only one twin had made it out of the house. In my dream I felt nothing, neither fear, nor horror. Perhaps I had been in shock that night, suppressing all my memories of sensation.
For the first half of my life, my entire identity was shared with Jennie. Everyone who saw us assumed that we were two halves of a whole, nonexistent without our other half.
“My, they’re so cute,” people would comment. We weren’t. We were average-looking, and chubby with chipmunk cheeks. The year that Jennie died in the fire, we were both missing our front teeth. It was our identicalness that was cute and memorable, not our features. Had I not been born a twin, people might have said behind my mother’s back that I was a homely child.
“They’re so well behaved,” people would compliment my mother. But we weren’t that, either. We fought and bickered constantly. We were always jealous of the attention the other twin received from our parents. Whatever toy was being played with by our twin was the only toy in the house we wanted. We had duplicates of every toy in the toy chest, but even that wasn’t the solution to the problem. More than anything else in our toy chest, we fought tooth and nail over our Lite-Brite sets, so violently that eventually Mom claimed she had donated them to homeless children (even though after Jennie died I found both boxes hidden away in the garage).
Tricking our parents and teachers was a never-ending source of entertainment for us; we would swap clothes, swap name tags, and insist on being called by the other twin’s name. My mother cautioned my father on a daily basis that she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, being home with us all day long while he was off teaching lectures on campus. Naturally, throughout my whole life people have suggested that I read books and studies about identical twins sharing telepathic powers, secret languages and codes, inexplicably having the same habits. I had no recollection of us sharing any such special connection before Jennie’s death. I remembered only her presence and a sense of comfort in having her near. Being a twin made me acutely self-aware; I didn’t need a mirror to know how ugly my scowl was when I was angry. I could still remember crying to my mother, Tell her to stop making that face! whenever Jennie glanced at me with her brow-furrowed frown, because I thought it was hideous and I knew I was capable of looking exactly the same way.
After the flames had been extinguished, the chief of the fire department approached my mom and dad and they exchanged words quietly, too far away for me to overhear. My mother collapsed into my father’s arms, and we were all driven in a police car to the hospital in the next town over, where we were assigned separate rooms and monitored for smoke inhalation. I was told by a doctor that my mother had been sedated and that I would be able to see her in the morning. Nurses brought me tomato soup and allowed me to stay awake, watching cartoons, until the sun peeked over the horizon. I was eight–—too young to understand death. Too young to understand that Jennie was gone—gone—and I’d never see her again. For at least a year, I kind of expected that one day I’d wake up for school and suddenly she’d be back, unharmed and fully restored, her old self as she’d been before the fire. Special twin connections aside, somehow that night in the hospital I’d already known factually that Jennie was dead. I didn’t remember any of the concerned nurses informing me, but I knew.
The next afternoon, my mother sat next to me on the edge of my bed, her eyes swollen from so many hours of heavy, drugged sleep. My father stood stoically behind her, his hands on her shoulders.
“Jennie, we have something to tell you that’s going to be hard to understand,” my mother began.
I opened my mouth to correct her, but I hesitated. I had an opportunity to switch, I realized. I could have let them go on believing that I was Jennie, and that McKenna had perished in the fire. But as an innocent, naïve eight-year-old, I didn’t see any value in that. My instinct to correct the incorrect was too great. “I’m McKenna, Mom,” I corrected her.
I was too young to know that parents really do have favorites; they can’t help it.
Even the medical chart that dangled on a clipboard at the foot of my hospital bed had my name listed as Jennifer Laura Brady. Had it been wishful thinking on my parents’ part when my intake form had been completed, or just an innocent mistake? I had never dared to ask.
When I woke up, the sun was low in the sky, suggesting as I yawned and stretched that it was almost dinnertime. My dream about the fire ended where it often did, at the hospital. For a few more minutes I lay still in my bedroom remembering how for almost a year after the fire, my mother would sit alone on our front porch every night, her eyes fixed on the empty, singed lot on the corner as spring heated into summer. I drifted out there one night and sat down beside her on our porch swing. “I could be Jennie if you’d like that,” I offered earnestly. Her bereavement was that severe. I was willing to do anything, even sacrifice my own identity, to make my mom right again.
* * *
“I don’t feel like cooking. What do you think about going to Bobby’s?” Mom mused as I opened the fridge and lingered there, reviewing options. Showing my face at Bobby’s with my mom on a Saturday night would have been mortifying when I was still the old McKenna. But now, after a momentary hesit
ation, I agreed. Sleeping through the day had rendered me starving, and there was nothing in our fridge that could compare to a giant chef salad at the diner.
As we stepped outside our house, Trey was pulling into the driveway next door in his sputtering gray Toyota. I had a split-second flashback of its interior: the squishy front seat and the faint smell of pine from the air freshener that dangled from his rearview mirror. My first instinct was to look away and pretend as if I hadn’t heard his engine shut down a mere ten feet away from me. But then my mom had to be a huge geek and wave, making a friendly exchange unavoidable.
“Hi there, Trey!” my mother called out as Trey climbed out of his parked car.
“Hi, Mrs. Brady,” Trey replied. My mother still went by Mrs. even though everyone in town knew my dad had taken off seven years before. Without saying a word to acknowledge me, he nodded at me with a dismissive expression that told me everything I needed to know: He thought my ascent into popularity was deplorable, he was disappointed in me, and the social rift between us had deepened.
“He’s a handsome guy, that Trey,” my mother said once we settled into our own car and were putting on seat belts. “I never would have thought he’d turn out so cute; he was a goofy-looking kid. What’s his story at school? Girlfriend?”