Still Lolo

by Lauren Scruggs

  As the days unfolded, I began to adore Shaun’s close concern for Lauren. It showed how he was assuming the same responsibilities I’d always assumed. He was becoming the older sibling just like me, looking out for Lauren just like I’ve always tried to do, even in the times I couldn’t be there for her.

  Not that Lauren always needed watching. As an adult she’s responsible and entrepreneurial, and growing up she was a highly capable child. Intelligent. Funny. Creative. It’s just that the pattern of me watching out for her was established early. Sure, the divorce factored into the equation, but even when Lo and I were babies, I took the lead. I hovered over Lauren like a little mother. She walked before I did. Even ran at nine months. But she didn’t start talking until she was good and ready, around two years of age. I didn’t walk until our first birthday, but I would babble up a storm long before I could walk. Lauren was always the cautious one, the shy one. I was confident and outgoing, eager to lead the way. If people asked us our names, I’d make the introductions. “I’m Brittany,” I’d say, and then add, “and her name is LoLo.”

  People said we were as cute as little princesses, and I guess we were. Mom cut our hair back then, and Lauren and I wore it the same way—thick bangs, hair to our shoulders. Lauren was a tiny beanpole. Almost frail looking. For the longest time, she couldn’t gain weight. I was fuller. Stronger.

  The fall after we turned five, we both started kindergarten at Daffron Elementary, a few blocks away from our mom’s house in Plano. For the first day of school, Mom had bought us dresses that matched in every way except the colors.

  For some reason when it came to kindergarten, school administrators thought it would be best if they split us up. Lauren went one way. I went another. I hated the thought of Lauren being alone. Who was going to watch out for her if I wasn’t there? On the first morning Mrs. Scarborough sat our class down on the rug in a semicircle in front of our desks to take roll call. She looked up midstream from her counting and said in a kind but firm voice, “Children, it looks like we have one extra student in class.”

  I raised my hand. “My sister is with me,” I said confidently. “We don’t ever want to be apart.” Lauren had snuck out of her classroom and was hiding behind my back.

  Mostly those were good years. Every summer we went to Dad’s lake house. We’d learned how to water-ski when we were four. Dad held us in the water while his friend drove the ski boat. Going to the lake house was always a fun adventure. We had bunk beds in our rooms where we created forts and caves with blankets and pillows and made up stories of princesses, knights, and dragons. We made drip castles on the beach and dug up orange-brown clay when the water was low, shaping the clay into bowls and drying them in the sun. Emma and Carson, the children of Dad’s friend, often stayed at the lake house with us. Emma was just a little older than us; Carson, a little younger. One of our favorite games was hiding from Carson, a sweet kid, but always full of brotherly annoyance. With Dad’s help, we hammered together a tree house high in the hollow of the oldest tree in the neighborhood, a beautiful two-hundred-year-old oak, and passed down a bucket on a rope to bring up our treasures. One year during a tornado, that old oak toppled over, which made us all cry. We couldn’t fathom why such strength would fail us, why something that beautiful would ever need to die.

  Mom took us to Sunday school regularly. A change was stirring within her, although we might not have been able to articulate it that way. She read her Bible all the time. She journaled and prayed and went to Bible studies at the church. In second grade I followed her new example of spiritual growth and decided to trust Jesus as my Lord and Savior. Trees topple over, I reasoned, and even parents let you down, but surely God is trustworthy. Lauren was thinking the same spiritual thoughts. She told me about them, but I’m not sure she would have initiated becoming a Christian unless I did it first. We both made the decision—individually, and yet together. It was real, a lifelong journey we’d begun, even though we were only seven.

  After that, Mom bought us each a Bible and a journal and taught us how to write out our prayers so our minds wouldn’t wander. In her house was a big, comfy tan couch. In the evenings, we would curl up together against the floral pattern and read, watch TV, or think big thoughts.

  “Mom,” I said one night out of the blue. “Do you think you and Dad will ever get back together?”

  She smiled. “It would take a miracle.” That was all she said.

  Later that night, tucked under the covers, Lauren and I held a private sisters’ meeting. If it was going to take a miracle, then we’d pray for one. We vowed to pray every night for Mom and Dad to get married again. We’d pray for the rest of our lives if needed. But as soon as we made our vow, we had to laugh at the thought. Who were we kidding? We knew how far-fetched a prayer it was. It was going to take a God-size miracle to ever bring about something so ridiculous.

  In the meantime, we planned to cooperate with God any way he might want to work. Lo and I watched the movie The Parent Trap—not the modern remake, but the 1961 version where Hayley Mills plays identical twins (she plays both roles) who scheme to get their parents back together. Our mouths hung open at the brilliance of the idea. We put our heads together and figured out how we could do the same thing. We kept our big secret for days while we worked out all the kinks. That next Friday when Mom dropped us off at Dad’s house, we instructed our parents to hug us both at the same time and give us big kisses. As our parents moved in for the clinch, Lauren and I counted to three and ducked down, hoping they’d accidentally kiss each other.

  Drat! They were too smart for us.

  Lo and I realized other complications existed with our plan. Much bigger complications. Mom had a boyfriend, Todd, and he wasn’t going away. He didn’t live in the same city as we did, and we didn’t know much about him, but he came over to our house a few times. Mom never talked about him to us, but we knew he was in the picture somehow.

  Dad dated a few girlfriends too. One was blonde and fine-featured and looked eerily similar to our mom. I can’t remember her name, but she even came to the lake house with us once. “Why is she here?” Lauren hissed when the woman was out of hearing range. But there was no answer. This was the new normal, and we had to get used to it. And so the bittersweet years went by.

  Sure, we had fun. We played in the backyard and rode bikes and busied ourselves learning new activities like softball, soccer, gymnastics, and art. We both took piano lessons for years. Each year at recital time we played a duet together, but piano was never a deep love for Lauren, not like it was for me. When life got hard, I pounded on the ivories, pouring out my emotions on this wonderful melodic medium that reacted, note by note.

  While I channeled my feelings into music, Lo preferred painting classes. Her art teacher was this wide-smiled hippie named Dawn. She was very artsy, the kind of woman with clay under her fingernails from throwing pots on her own wheel. “Just be as free as you can,” she told Lauren, and the art teacher’s words surrounded Lo and worked their magic. Dawn released Lauren from shyness like no other person could. Hours went by in the classroom, and Lauren immersed herself in paintings, sketches, acrylics, pottery. I think it became rehabilitation for my sister. Whenever we came to the classroom to get her, she never wanted to leave. Each week she counted down the days until she could go again. Lauren’s favorite animal was a pig, which she felt funny about. Other little girls were enamored with horses, bunnies, or puppies. But Lauren saw something poignant about a pig. She liked the quirky pinkness of a pig. Dawn encouraged Lauren to paint all the pigs she could ever imagine. Wild pigs. Flying pigs. Pigs that danced and sparkled and laughed. And Lo did.

  Our nightly prayers seemed to hit a brick wall. No matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t accept the fact that our parents were completely, legally, irrevocably no longer together. No matter how much time passed, it never sat right in our hearts. Year after year after year, the wound was a raw scrape that refused to scab over. If we were at Dad’s house for the nigh
t, we missed Mom. If we were at Mom’s house, we missed Dad. Our parents tried as hard as they could. We sincerely thanked them for that. When it came to parenting, they maintained the best working relationship possible. For our sakes, they purposely lived only five minutes apart. They were always on the phone with each other, talking about someone’s missing library book or who needed the other half of an outfit. If Lauren or I were having a hard night and missed the other parent, Dad would call Mom and she’d come over and tuck us in, or the other way around.

  But it never got easier.

  We weren’t angry at our parents. That wasn’t the feeling. It was more a continual longing—that’s what echoed through our souls. As kids growing up in a divorced family, we were always living out of a suitcase. We didn’t have a home. We had two homes. You’d think that would make us feel lucky, but it didn’t. You don’t want two homes as a kid. You just want one.

  Holidays and vacations were often the hardest—like the Fourth of July when we were eight. Dad had custody of us for the long weekend. The plan was to head to the lake house to watch fireworks. But Lauren didn’t want to go. I mean, she did. But she didn’t. She pulled me aside and whispered, “Brittany, Mom’s going to be all alone this weekend.”

  “I know. But it’s Dad’s weekend with us. Don’t worry. We’ll have fun there.”

  “I can’t bear the thought of Mom being all by herself.”

  I sighed. “I know. Me too.”

  Late that Friday afternoon, before we left for the weekend, something burrowed its way into my little twin sister’s mind. She stepped out and made her own decision, maybe for the first time ever. She made a bold choice without me speaking on her behalf, and I knew there was no use trying to change her mind.

  “I’m going with Mom.” Lauren’s chin was firm with resolution. “You stay with Dad. He’ll understand.”

  Mom didn’t try to sway Lauren’s decision. Neither did Dad. There was never any open conflict in their relationship, not as far as we observed. Lauren went with Mom, and they watched a community fireworks display somewhere in downtown Dallas. I went with Dad, and we sat on the dock together at the lake house, watching the sky burst into colors all around the dark water.

  That holiday weekend was neither sad nor happy. It simply reflected the reality of our lives: we were a family divided. That night I awoke in the blackness in a sweat and fought my way out from under the covers. I switched on the bedside lamp and noticed how bare and alone it was above me in the bunk where Lauren usually slept. I bunched my pillow and doubled my prayers, the same prayers Lauren and I prayed every night. But I was hit anew with the fact we all needed to accept: my parents’ divorce was real, and it bore all the marks of forever. With the night at its darkest moment, I doubted if the dawn would ever arrive.

  CHAPTER 8

  Here Comes the Sun

  Lauren

  After the accident I lay in critical condition in the hospital for days, so I was told later. Mostly I was unconscious. Not in a coma. Just out of it. Heavily sedated. My body in shock.

  I don’t remember anything from that time in my life. No lights. No sounds. No visits to heaven or conversations with God. I didn’t know what an hour was, or a day, or how many of either had passed, or what it meant for time to continue forward. There was nothing in my mind’s eye. Not even darkness. My thoughts, my memories, my hopes, my ambitions were simply, completely, erased.

  As I fought to come to, it slowly felt like the electricity was being turned on in my brain. It wasn’t an immediate current. More like a string of old Christmas tree lights that sparked and fizzled. That eccentric haze was the most frightening part of it, if I could even consciously remember what fear was. I fought to remember what it means to be alive. To have an awareness of myself. As the sparks and fizzles grew stronger, I began to know who I was and know that I was living, but I couldn’t articulate in my mind what made me different from an inanimate object like a bedpost or a bowl of cereal.

  I began to see shadows. Shapes. Jittery at first, moving—then slow, blurry. Then dreams, I think. Then shadows again. The fog in my mind felt so thick. The blankness so . . . blank. While in this swirling semiconscious state, I feared that I would never again get back to where I needed to be. That I would never again be me. One of my earliest moments of consciousness in the hospital—if I could even call it consciousness yet—was an urge to tell somebody something. I needed to speak important words to somebody I knew. But I couldn’t imagine what a person was, or what a word was, or what communication was, if that makes any sense. All I could think to do—if I was thinking at all—was to keep fighting forward.

  I remember experiencing a similarly difficult-to-describe fear when I was a child. Not a war-zone type of fear where my parents screamed at each other. In this case it was more a silent-but-sinister type of fear. Some nights when the lights were off—I don’t exactly know how to articulate it—something lurked in my mom’s house. A genuine presence of evil. Once, around midnight, I sensed the presence as I lay in my pajamas. The fear paralyzed me. I prayed to God, then screamed out loud, which brought Mom running. “There’s someone in here!” I shouted. “You gotta check under the bed! All the closets! Everywhere!” Mom combed through the whole house and found nothing. The presence was gone then. But what I’d felt was something different than just a normal childhood fear of the boogeyman. A residual evil surrounded the house. Something was fighting to steal from us, kill us, or destroy us. I don’t know any other way to describe it than that.

  Both my parents worked hard at providing a secure environment for Brittany and me—as best they could, anyway, while living apart. When we were little, we kids slept in Mom’s bed most nights when we were over at her house. When we were at Dad’s, we cajoled him into moving Brittany’s bed into my bedroom. We explained to Dad how we wanted to turn the other bedroom into our playroom, and that was true, to an extent. But mostly it was because Brittany and I didn’t want to go to sleep with no one else around.

  To this day, if I hear the sound of a blow-dryer, it puts me to sleep in two minutes. Mornings when we were at Mom’s house, I’d wake up early while Mom would be getting dressed. I’d amble over to her bathroom and flop down on the carpeted floor next to where she stood in front of the sink. “Just relax for a few more minutes, Lo,” she’d say and nuzzle my back with her toes. I’d fall fast asleep again, right where I lay. Sometimes she’d turn her dryer on medium-warm and blow the balmy air all over me in my nightgown. It was the most relaxing, comforting feeling in the world.

  Dad was the master craftsman at putting us to bed. One evening when we were teeny-tiny, we asked him to sing us a good-night song. He mumbled a few lines of a 1970s rock ballad, something from his college days. Then he must have realized where he was, because he changed directions and broke into the only children’s song that came to his mind: “Edelweiss” from The Sound of Music. Dad must not have remembered all the words, so he made some up as he went along. The last line stuck with us though, because he had so obviously changed it. Bless Brittany and Lauren forever. The song, sung in Dad’s special way, became a nightly routine—until we hit junior high. At that point, we decided we were too old for Dad to be singing to us before bed anymore.

  Mom and Dad established routines that made Britt and me feel secure in their love for us; yet I still craved the normalcy I saw between my friends and their married parents. While both my parents might come to a school open house, I knew one of them would be going home alone afterward. If a friend invited me to a sleepover later in the month, I had to do some calculations to figure out which parent I’d be staying with then—so I’d know who to ask for permission.

  Britt and I never gave up hope, though. We kept praying every night. Praying, praying, praying. Always praying for the same thing. Every once in a while we saw glimmers of hope. Sometimes Mom and Dad shared a meal together at the same house. It’s hard to budget and cook for just one person, they said. If one was dropping us off at the other parent
’s house, it just made good economic sense to all eat from the same pot. At other times, whichever parent stayed for dinner would linger for an hour or two afterward, and that made sense too. Brittany and I silently compared notes and both vowed, without speaking, to always ask the other parent to put us to bed if we could get away with it. Other times our maneuverings were bolder. We’d call up a parent and directly invite him or her over to dinner at the other parent’s house. “C’mon Dad,” we’d sing out gleefully. “We’re eating your favorite tonight—it’s ravioli!” Sometimes we went to baseball games or to the movies as a family—it made sense to all buy tickets together. We celebrated Christmas once with all of us over at Dad’s place. That way Mom and Dad didn’t need to cart all the presents to two houses, they explained. One time Dad took us on a trip to Colorado, and Mom came along. We were puzzled at first because no explanation was given. Then we were excited, but soon everything turned weird. Dad was in a bad mood most of the trip. I’m not sure if he actually wanted Mom there or not.

  We sure wished they could bury the hatchet. Or whatever they needed to do to work out their problems. Living out of a suitcase became more frustrating for me, not less, as the years went on. One evening when we were eleven, Brittany and I were staying at Dad’s house. Our good friend Erika was there, and we girls were all playing dress-up. (Actually, we called it “makeover.”) I really wanted a certain shirt to match the pair of pants I was wearing. But my shirt was at Mom’s house, and my pants were at Dad’s house. In my eleven-year-old reasoning, nothing else in the closets would do. Not even Brittany could coax me back from the ledge. In my mind, the whole mess was an indication of how wearisome our living situation was. The things we held most important were never where we needed them to be. I started crying and wouldn’t stop. Dad came in to see what was wrong. “Honey, I’m sure you can wear another shirt,” he said.