Her

by Christa Parravani

  After Kahlil left, Cara came over and opened our cabinets, inspecting our dinnerware. She said she’d donated the plates they’d gotten as wedding gifts to Goodwill. Now she wanted to see for herself what a happy couple ate their meals on. She promptly bought an identical service for twelve for her new household of one. She purchased our same bath towels and television hutch, too, and the exact clothes hangers covered in silky pink satin that I used for dresses. She found our coffee table on clearance. She stole one of Jedediah’s books and wrote her name on the title page, shelving it on a hardwood bookcase identical to one of ours, in her house.

  I inherited my house in duplicate when she died. I added her service for twelve to my service for eight. I had service for twenty, and a husband who was ready to walk out and take nothing. After our divorce, I kept all of the relics of our happy home and all of Cara’s hopeful duplicates.

  * * *

  My family kept watch over Cara after the attack: Mom cooked and nervously cleaned. Jedediah organized cabinets. Friends came and brought flowers, more food. Cara’s professors sent letters and called. I don’t remember how Kahlil helped, though I’m certain he did. I stocked Cara’s pantry with food she didn’t eat.

  Her rapist was still on the loose as I browsed Cara’s neighborhood grocery. I tied a patterned blue scarf around my hair and wore huge white sunglasses. My heart beat in my throat as I stacked my shopping cart with boxes of Cheerios and pouches of Hi-C. He was still out there. He might see me in the grocery; we knew he shopped there. The police mentioned at the hospital that it was likely the man who’d raped Cara had bought his alcohol at the liquor counter inside that grocery store. It was the only shop for miles, and the rapist told Cara he didn’t have a car.

  I had fantasies as I shopped that he’d see me, and I’d recognize him from Cara’s police sketch. I’d call 911 and a SWAT team would take him down. They’d shoot him dead. I was naive, horror struck, only twenty-four; I couldn’t have known him from a drawing, but he certainly would have recognized me. He wouldn’t know he’d done what aging or a haircut or a disguise couldn’t do to twins. He’d un-samed us. When he defiled my Cara, he separated us.

  I secretly hoped he’d take me, too, not really, of course; but deep down, I’d lost Cara. I wished he’d discover me in a grocery isle and drag me to the path where he’d raped her. I felt her pulling far from me in the days following her rape. Attacked, I’d be the same as Cara again—we’d both be as dirty as she said she felt. It was the only way I’d be able to know what she meant when she told me we couldn’t be twins anymore: I was “still clean.” It could happen to me, too, I reasoned, on my dangerous shopping trip.

  It was dangerous; I was right. He shopped while I shopped. This time the police were watching. They caught him on camera in the liquor isle. I was told later, after they’d arrested him, he’d been observed on surveillance tapes the afternoon I was there. All men looked the same to me as I shopped: menacing, ready to strike out and steal me into the woods.

  I wheeled my cart over to the autumn vegetables and picked out the roundest, brightest orange pumpkin I could find and put it with the rest of my bounty. Mid-October is the time for jack-o’-lanterns, hayrides, reaping. The leaves had just peaked. The grocery aisles were filled with cider doughnuts, gourds, and sugary candies for trick-or-treating. The bakery counter was lined with stalks of Indian corn. White plastic tarps with holes cut for eyes hung from displays for soon-to-be ghosts. Ghoul masks were stacked on shelves, one on top of the other, beside bins of plastic fangs and tubes of fake blood. The masks rattled as I pushed my cart by.

  I turned the corner in the canned goods aisle and plucked green beans from the shelf. Canned green beans had become a comfort, a reminder of our days in North Carolina, when they were served on our school lunch trays. I imagined that I saw Cara’s rapist turn the corner and head up the cereal aisle. I ran with my cart past shelves of ketchup and mayonnaise and followed the invisible man into aisle 6. I didn’t find him among the Cheerios and went looking for him at the butcher’s block.

  There was only one male customer there. He ordered pork chops and ground chuck, tossing both into his cart where his infant sat mouthing a teething ring.

  I bought a steak and a pack of chicken legs, placing them at the front of my cart, next to a bag of organic premixed salad and a box of raspberry pastry, and headed to the checkout. It was time to go home. I hadn’t found my man.

  All of the food I bought spoiled. Cara liked these things, thanked me, but she wasn’t eating. Her life had been cataclysmically altered. Why would she eat? One of her eyes was blackened; she’d lost hearing in one ear—the rapist had smashed the side of her head again and again with his blows. Cara said first she heard a sharp ringing as his fist fell down against her, then a hiss. Eventually she couldn’t hear a sound. She refused to change from her nightgown. It was stained with antibiotic ointment that had escaped the bandages that covered the rapist’s bites on her back.

  Cara woke crying in the middle of the night; I heard her from the living room where I slept. I jerked awake, startled. There was a moment, before I recognized her weeping, when I felt at peace. I slept in a darkened room on a portable mattress, surrounded by Cara’s belongings: a cracked pope snow globe from Rome; all its water had run out. When she tipped it, the sand inside fell dryly on Saint John Paul’s head; a leather-bound diary from Venice; a feather duster; a jar of coins; a bunch of plastic grapes. I rested in her soft peach sheets, and then I heard her sobbing. I’d been dreaming of the two of us floating together on a raft of twigs, like the one the children craft in The Night of the Hunter. Cara steered with a reed in the back and I drank water from the side of our boat. I woke thirsty and cold, my blanket on the floor beside a spilled glass of water. I got up and rummaged through Cara’s medicine cabinet, through painkillers prescribed by her physician at the emergency room. I shook one more than Cara’s prescribed dose into my hand and poured her a glass of water—I knew what it would take; one wasn’t enough. I brought the pills to her. She swallowed the medicine and fell back to sleep. My sister had been stolen and my sweater was missing.

  * * *

  The police, a male and female pair of detectives, came the Monday after the rape. They called that morning to say they’d gotten a lead and arrested a suspect—Edgardo Hernandez. They needed Cara to identify some of his belongings. If she made a proper identification, she’d go to the station downtown and pick the suspect out of a lineup. Cara would also need to identify her own belongings collected at the scene and sign off officially on the items they’d taken into custody at the hospital. Her clothes: pants, panties, socks, my sweater.

  Mom let the detectives in. She offered them coffee, brownies, a sandwich. They carried my sweater in a clear, ziplock plastic bag. It was covered in bits of leaves and torn at the shoulders.

  Cara looked at the evidence bags. “Sorry about your sweater.”

  “I’ll find another,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

  I’ve yet to find that sweater’s replacement. Nothing I’ve tried on or bought fits as well, or succeeds in replacing my memory of what happened to Cara.

  We waited for Cara to identify Edgardo’s things. The detectives had gone inside his apartment and had found the clothes she’d described: a turtleneck sweater, dark jeans, a pair of plaid patterned boxer shorts. He’d been arrested and detained.

  She’d given an excellent account. Hernandez was discovered because of my sister’s recollection of his garments. She’d told them he smelled of whiskey and wore a tan sweater. He’d pulled the collar up over his chin, to conceal his face. She’d gotten a good look at him, remembered the color and fit of his sloppy clothes. A twin is a perceptive observer. A twin learns how a person is made through watching, and then makes herself into a copy. Twins size people up. Observing keenly is a path to love and acceptance; for this, the twin keeps a sharp eye.

  The female detective, Jennifer, wasn’t what I’d expected. I’d expected someone less styli
sh and groomed. She looked tough in her smart black pants. She was petite with round, sorry blue eyes that peered out from under the long wave of hair that covered one. I could tell by the way she stood and from her tone that she probably cursed without apology and held her own among her male colleagues during drinks at the bar. Jennifer quickly became my hero. She was not a drunkard; she was kind, empathetic, soothing, motherly, and assuring. Jennifer was calculating. Her senses were amped like a hound’s. She seemed to hear for miles and, like a hunting dog scenting prey, she already smelled her man. There was no question she’d get him.

  I saw this clearly: Jennifer would kill the animal who’d done this to Cara. She’d do it with her own hands if she had to; she’d do it with her pistol, without remorse or hesitation, not only for justice but for a paycheck. I wondered who it was that had hurt her; it was written on her face that someone had.

  Jennifer’s buttery blond hair grazed the handle of the gun she wore on her hip. Jennifer, tough and tender, looked down at the bags of Cara’s clothing. Jennifer, Venus De Milo standing in her clamshell, understood nakedness, saw the shame and fear in the room. We were relieved to know she was on the case. She told us she’d make her visit short and to the point. There was no need to linger.

  She didn’t want a sandwich.

  She laid the bagged items out on the coffee table and waited for her partner to reveal them one by one. I asked if I could have my sweater back.

  “You’ll never see that sweater after today. Evidence stays in a vault at the station.” She looked at the sweater more closely. “This sweater looks expensive.” She set the bag down.

  I thought of a college friend who had a job in an evidence room at a London police precinct. He’d told me all about the things they stored there. I remembered a few of the odder items: a bloody guitar someone had used to bash in the head of a lover, an empty box of matches used for arson, a murderer’s diary. There was a wheelchair they’d had for over a decade. An elderly man had used it to wheel himself off a cliff, a suicide who was depressed over Alzheimer’s. The wheelchair had somehow survived the fall. It wasn’t damaged in the least. The boys who worked in the evidence room liked to take it for rides around the building when the higher-ups weren’t watching. My sweater would soon be a casualty of an evidence room. I imagined strangers touching it, even trying it on.

  We sat on the sofa: Mom, Kahlil, Cara, Jennifer, me, and the male detective. I can’t remember his name; he looked worried and hung his head, sad at himself for being a man in a world where men did these things. Cara sat in the middle and I sat on one side of her. Kahlil was on the other. The sofa was a green sectional and fit all of us easily. It was brand-new, but the fabric was ripped away at the corners, stuffing falling out. The cats had gotten to it, clawed it up. They’d torn into the sofa like they did every stick of furniture Cara ever owned.

  Cara and Kahlil had purchased the sofa with money from their wedding. Cara had never owned one before. In college there had been a futon, and an ice-blue velour recliner she’d rescued from the street—but never a sofa, a real sofa. A sofa wasn’t just a place to lounge; the purchase of a sofa meant she was finally an adult.

  Mom was smoking and Cara was chain-smoking. The living room was thick with smoke that wafted up to the ceiling and twirled in the air. Jennifer coughed and cleared her throat. The male detective’s eyes watered.

  “This is embarrassing,” Mom said. “Cara doesn’t usually live like this.” Mom patted Cara on the shoulder and Cara pulled away. “Right, honey?”

  “It’s fine,” I said, suspecting they’d seen and smelled much worse.

  “This is nothing.” Jennifer handed my mother the tea saucer my sister had been using as an ashtray. She didn’t miss a beat.

  I opened a window to clear the room. Air relieved the room of the burden of smoke, like fresh water from a mountain diluting a toxic stream. I pulled the bronchial inhaler I used for asthma attacks from my pocket and took a puff.

  The male detective opened the first bag and pulled out the jeans. They were faded from years of wear, caked with mud at the knees. One of the back pockets had been ripped clean off the pants. Specks of dried brown blood flecked the legs. He must have been standing over her as he punched her pretty face.

  Cara flinched at the sight of the pants, leaned into Kahlil’s arms and whimpered. She nodded, yes.

  The detective pulled the turtleneck out next and held it up by the shoulders. The sweater hung limp and was large enough that it obscured his face. It was enormous, split at the seams. Edgardo must have worn it for years. It was filthy; the fabric had been exhausted by the task of containing him. The detective turned it around and stood up, holding the sweater to his side.

  Cara moved to the edge of her sofa cushion and got a good look at the garment. She’d not yet changed from her pajamas. It had been four days and there was no convincing her to freshen up. She pulled a purple chenille throw blanket off the sofa arm and covered herself. She stood up and touched the body of the sweater. “Yes, that’s the one. The neck of the sweater kept getting caught in my mouth. I remember the texture.”

  Our mother got up and went into the kitchen. She turned on the tap and water rushed loudly against the sink’s basin. I could hear her sharp, short sobs beneath the drumming tenor of the water’s tide. She opened the microwave and warmed her cooled cup of coffee, put away the untouched turkey sandwiches she’d made for the detectives. The fridge door banged shut. The microwave chimed. My mother walked slowly back to the living room, careful not to spill.

  The detective placed the sweater back into the paper bag. “Thanks,” he said. “We have just one more item, and we’ll be able wrap things up.” He pulled out a pair of boxer shorts patterned with electric blue and black checks. The elastic waist of the shorts was coming undone; the inside band poked out through holes in the fabric.

  Cara cried out at the sight of the shorts. They were a stand-in for the man, as close as she would come to sharing a room with him before the trial, two years later. Her voice warbled at its highest pitch. The sound moved up and then down in register, over and over, until she lost her breath and quickly caught it again. She beat her hands on Kahlil’s chest and screamed her throat raw. This time there were people to hear her.

  Chapter 12

  Albert ate too much

  Barbara hit the booze

  Carolina free-based crack

  Duncan was depressed

  Enid had an eating disorder

  Floyd followed a Florida cult

  Georgia gulped Geronimo

  Harold slammed heroin

  Inez bought Internet porn

  Jared jacked a jeep

  Kenny took Klonopin

  Laura left her little ones

  Mark snorted methamphetamine

  Nancy nailed her neighbors

  Otis smoked opium

  Portia popped pills

  Quincy needed Quaaludes

  Rebecca repressed a rape

  Stan sniffed glue

  Trevor tripped on acid

  Una underwent cosmetic surgery thirty times

  Vera vacuumed on Vicodin

  William wore nothing to work

  Xavier took X

  Yardley yearned for yellow jackets

  Zach smoked Zambi

  Getting to Cara was mostly a straight run out of New York City. Once the lights and smog and noise and the guilt of my weekday life, a life free of my sister and her rape, were behind me, I’d hit Interstate 91 and shoot through Connecticut, then Springfield and Holyoke to Northampton. Before long I was on her doorstep. It had been a year and a handful of months since October 18. I’d been making the trip back and forth for all of that time and had miraculously carved out a routine with Jedediah and work. I’d settled back into the city, my marriage, and graduate school. I worked every night in the darkroom printing color photographs of us until dawn. Cara limped along. She, too, was in a graduate program. I wasn’t certain how she completed her course work. I ha
d the feeling that her passing was an act of mercy on the part of her professors.

  And her workshop peers’ whisperings about her only increased her stress.

  “I don’t understand why they don’t like me,” she complained to me over the phone. “I try so hard.”

  “Maybe they think you’re teacher’s pet?” I consoled. She was her professor’s favorite. Cara had been given the largest scholarship the university had.

  “I’ve heard some people think I’m having sex with her, my teacher,” Cara said proudly. “It’s better to have people gossiping about me than ignoring me, I guess. That means I’m on their minds.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Well, at least I know how to dress myself,” Cara said. “So what if I get a little drunk.”

  She told me how the grad students showed up to her dinner parties empty-handed, wearing jeans and beat-up shoes. Cara answered the door in floor-length cocktail dresses and flowers from the supermarket pinned into her hair. Kahlil manned the kitchen while she hosted out front. Everyone ate happily and heartily and waited for Cara to drink enough so that she couldn’t stand.

  Cara had no inclination to spare those around her.

  Her first appearance at school after the rape was at a reading for first-year fiction-writing students. Cara stood at the podium fat-lipped, arm in a sling, both eyes still blackened. She pulled out her pages and cleared her throat. “I’m Cara, for those of you I’ve not met,” she said. “I’m glad to be alive.” The crowd shuffled nervously in their seats. A few people glared at Kahlil, who sat rapt, watching his wife. Cara read a short story about an unhappy marriage and took a bow. Word was that Kahlil had roughed her up.

  She and Kahlil had moved to Northampton immediately after the rape. They’d settled into a new apartment in a quiet suburban neighborhood, a pretty two-story white Victorian with a front porch and yard, a duplex. The street was named for a tree: cherry, oak, or maple, a tree that sounded solid and safe.