Her

by Christa Parravani

  Those of Cara’s girlfriends who did come to the service stood at the back of the room. One told me she “was there for my sister, not for me.” Cara had spent hours, I imagine, telling her how I’d kicked Cara out of my house and abandoned her in her time of need, and Cara’s friend had believed her. Her friend was right, I thought. I’d made the wrong choice, toeing the hard line. Now I was going to have to live or die with my tough love, once and for all, with no love left to give anyone. One of Cara’s friends from graduate school brought her baby boy. She passed the serene infant around a circle of guests: our high school teachers, my mother’s colleagues, relatives I’d only seen once or twice in my life. My distant second cousin kissed this woman’s baby. The little cherub brightened the room of death. I wondered how many friends Cara had exhausted and run through by the time she ended her life.

  I greeted all of Cara’s guests, including one that was difficult to recognize.

  Mike the Marine, our ex-stepfather, came to pay his respects. He knelt on the viewing pew beside Cara’s casket, making the sign of the cross, bowing his head in prayer. His mouth moved as he recited a Hail Mary in his head. Mike never once looked at the dead daughter he’d left in the haze of Jacksonville, North Carolina, when she was an impressionable twelve.

  I’d not laid eyes on Mike since the day he’d pulled out of our driveway and never come back. It had been fifteen years.

  I interrupted him in prayer, knelt beside him, moving close enough that I felt his breath at my ear.

  “You’re a little late,” I whispered. “I think that means you should leave.”

  Mike nodded, stood up from the pew, and paid his last respects with a blank stare at Cara’s sympathy flowers. Did he think the answers to his long absence could be found in a wreath of tightly bound pink carnations?

  * * *

  This is how it is: We were always who we were, only together. We were girls who made a language about time and memory. We feared being ourselves because it meant being alone. We are bound in our own bodies and share one mortality. One day there will be one of us left with just the memory of the other. We prepare and we age.

  If you are a twin, you watch yourself live two lives—yours and hers. It’s constant comparison. I am never as good as the bad I wanted her to be. I was the only soldier I needed. We couldn’t have known what splitting would mean. Time speeds past fast, scattering like shrapnel, and is quiet as cobwebs. We wait for the ambush. Sister will find out first; she’ll be my living memory. She will be the body left standing.

  I fragmented into the loved and the pitied and the loathed; it took me five years. I became a deafening danger bomb, a tick you couldn’t find if you hadn’t buried it in yourself. I refer to myself as “her,” “that girl.” Nobody wants to look me directly in the eye. Sister still sees me.

  * * *

  At Cara’s funeral, people saw in us the same person: one dead, one half-living. Through me, Cara’s ghost came to life. I was her specter. If she hadn’t already died, I’d have killed her for doing that to me. I pulled a stray thread from the hem of my dress. I pulled the limp orchids from my hair and crushed them.

  I told each of the boyfriends at her funeral the same thing; I told each of them something different.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Cara loved you more than she loved any man.” The boyfriends nodded in thanks.

  “I wish you’d seen how she’d light up over you,” I mentioned to some.

  “She told me she wanted to marry you,” I said to one of the boyfriends who hadn’t proposed. Cara had said that about all of them, hopeful that one would eventually make her a wife again. “You were the one,” I said.

  “She would have made a great mother,” I lied to one of her more attractive boyfriends. “She wanted nothing more in the world than to be a mother. Your children would have been beautiful.” She’d wanted a child. I stood and gazed down at my sister. She’d never hold her own baby.

  “We’ll both be mothers if one of us has children,” Cara used to say to me.

  “Our babies will be half-siblings, actually,” I’d counter. Identical twins are born with exact genetics, which makes their children related in the same way they would be if they shared a parent.

  A few of Cara’s boyfriends asked me to hold their hands. I gripped their palms and squeezed. I gave the boyfriends my ghost hand, Cara’s gift from the afterlife. Holding my hand was like holding hers. We used to hold each other’s hands. We’d done it since we were girls. We wanted to know what men felt when they touched us, so we held on to each other. Our rings are size 4, and our fingers are short; women’s bodies, children’s hands.

  I took care with the boyfriends at her funeral. I knew they’d shown her the love I couldn’t in the last years of her life. It was no small thing to enter into the fold of our twinship as a lover. Lovers had to pass the tests we administered. She’d ask them to dinner and call to invite me. I’d ask endless questions and dip my fork into their entrées. At the end of her life, they’d tolerated Cara when I needed to retreat from her. The boyfriends provided her with companionship; she slept beside their warm bodies.

  * * *

  We ate ziti and meatballs at the after-wake gathering. I couldn’t eat; I chewed my ziti into tiny bits and spit it into a napkin. I sat wordless in a corner, my plate on my lap. Mom looked at the plate and then at the wadded-up napkin on the floor. She left the room crying.

  I’d stopped eating so I wouldn’t look like my sister. I cried and heard her sobs. I looked at myself in the mirror after she died and pulled at the tiny roll of her fat on my stomach. I ran my palm down the curve of her hip. I was more Cara than myself, so I starved her away. The smaller I made myself, the farther I traveled from her. The more the bones on my back showed, the less it was hers. I needed to rid myself of her likeness to travel back to my own self. I was the original egg; the doctor had said so.

  It was simple: When an egg splits in two, the division is never equal. The splitting egg pulls essential nutrients as it goes and makes itself into a second functioning body of cells. The original egg remains, fighting to survive; it’s been stripped of more than half of itself. The egg that splits becomes dominant; it drains more of the shared placenta, requires more space in the womb. One twin grows larger and stronger at the expense of the other. This twin is always bigger at birth. The twin who makes herself out of her sister must do so by nearly killing off that sister. Cara outweighed me by a pound; she’d begun her hungry taking, her killing of me, from the very start.

  * * *

  The Unitarians were on a national retreat in the Midwest the week my sister died. It was nearly impossible to find someone to conduct a funeral service. I paged through the phone book and called each of the ministers to try to secure their services. I left messages on the congregations’ answering machines, but not a single message was returned. After several days, I was desperate and settled on our cousin Larry, a born-again minister at a church in Altamont. Larry agreed to hold a service but voiced his reservation. My sister was “unsaved and a junkie,” and “God wouldn’t look kindly on such a life.” My mother invited Larry to dinner. I dished some chicken out of a foil roasting pan onto a plate for him; three legs, a thigh, and potatoes. Larry ate hungrily. I poured him a glass of milk and gave him the program I’d written for Cara’s service.

  “These are not God’s prayers,” he said and handed it back to me, grease spotting its top right corner. I’d included some Sufi scripture and readings from Shakespeare and Milton and Toni Morrison.

  “What about our selection of music?” I served him seconds.

  “I’m not familiar with it,” he said.

  “It’s just a few things she liked.”

  “Your sister died outside of God’s plan. Your service will be standard. A conservative eulogy should be given, mentioning your sister’s better qualities.” He drank his milk in one gulp. “You can feel free to ask some people to read some of the scripture I assign.”

  * * *r />
  Cara’s funeral procession gathered at DeMarco-Stone Funeral Home early in the morning. Devon was a pallbearer, along with two uncles, a family friend, and two first cousins. We sat in the rowed chairs at DeMarco-Stone and waited. Mourners filed down the aisle from the back of the viewing room and stopped at my sister’s body. Some of them walked past quickly, giving her a short nod, and then headed to their cars to line up for the procession. Others stopped and gazed down at her. They bowed their heads in prayer and looked as if they were trying to force themselves to remember how she looked, just as she was, in her coffin. The pallbearers stood at the back, hands crossed in front of them. Mom and I were the last of the mourners left in the room. I watched Mom hobble to Cara. Stooped and exhausted, Mom jutted her shoulders forward. Her long black hair fell in her face. Strands of hair caught in her mouth as she sobbed. She got to the pew and faltered, oblivious to others. She held a hanky.

  Our uncle sprinted down the aisle with smelling salts. It seemed absurd to me that he’d brought them. Throughout the wake he’d passed me at my post and slid them out of his pocket, nudging me with his elbow. The salts were tied in a cheesecloth bundle. He showed Jedediah how to use them. “This might get ugly,” he’d said. “These women are likely to work themselves up into hysteria.” Jedediah intercepted my uncle on his dash with his salts. My husband was the barrier of sanity that separated my mother and me from our crazy family.

  Mom looked at my sister and straightened the shawl Cara wore. “We’re never going to have more moments? Are we?” Mom looked up and opened her mouth to cry out; no sound came. She rested her forehead on the closed bottom of the casket lid and went back to her vigil. I knelt beside my mother, offered my shoulder to her; she held on to me.

  I was the last to see Cara before we closed the lid of her coffin. I knelt down beside her. I clasped my hands. I wept. My tears fell on her face and made lines in her makeup. I saw my sister for what she was. My muse was a corpse. I felt her alive in myself, with all of her troubles.

  I left her alone to be carried. I watched from the doorway. A drape that covered her casket was removed to expose a gurney. The funeral director unlocked the gurney’s wheels with his foot and pushed my sister’s casket down the aisle, toward the door where I was standing. The gurney creaked and moaned. They wheeled my sister to the door. The pallbearers knelt to shoulder the burden of her coffin. Some of her boyfriends stood alongside the hearse. In the back of the hearse, standing sprays, wreaths, and bouquets were assembled neatly around the casket. The undertaker plucked roses from an arrangement and handed them to mourners. A line of cars curved through the parking lot; Mazdas, Toyotas, Fords, and BMWs, all with orange funeral flags tied to their radio antennae.

  We all made our way to the church. Larry gave Cara the eulogy he’d promised.

  “I want to leave you with this thought,” Larry said at the end of his service. He stood at the front of the church, the mouth of the nave. “If Cara could speak to you now,” he said to the room of mourners he’d held captive with his sermon, “the one thing she’d want to tell you was that you must take Jesus Christ as your Lord and savior.”

  The room gasped. I felt their eyes on me, both in pity and in plea. Jedediah squeezed my hand and I nodded to him, whispered that I was going to fix Larry’s wrong.

  I stood up and walked to Larry’s lectern, asked if I could take the floor. He graciously gave it to me, allowed me my words.

  “If Cara were here today,” I managed, though my voice was shaky, “she’d want to tell you that she hoped you could live each day of your life with joy.”

  The room breathed a great sigh of relief.

  “Cara wouldn’t want you to be sad that she’s dead,” I heard one boyfriend say to another outside of the church, after the service. They’d made friends in their shared pew. “She’d want you to be dancing.”

  “She did that to you, too?” the other boyfriend answered. “She always had to be dancing. I hated that.”

  “Did you take her out dancing, or what, man?” the first one asked, slightly competitive.

  “You know I did.” The boyfriends slapped five.

  They were wrong, of course: Cara would have wanted mourners to bang on the lid of her casket with their fists, a gospel choir singing in a minor key. Dancing was for weddings.

  “What do you think she’d make of all of this?” one of the boyfriends asked and held a prayer card out in front of him. He’d taken it from a table at the entrance of the funeral home, after signing the guest book. He read the card and folded it into quarters, tucking it into his back pocket. I’d selected the Sufi prayer that she’d asked the entire congregation to recite, in unison, at her wedding. The front of the card was an image of a bright blue sky and rolling white clouds:

  I offer you peace.

  I offer you joy.

  I offer you friendship.

  I hear your needs.

  I see your beauty.

  Our wisdom comes from a higher source.

  Our wisdom comes from a deeper source.

  I honor that source in you.

  Part II

  Chapter 22

  One night in late November, five months after Cara had died, I got out of bed and went into the kitchen because I couldn’t sleep. Our cottage was dark except for glowing embers in the woodstove. The fire there, at the far end of the kitchen, needed stoking; it barely warmed the house. To the side of the stove, a drafty window whistled wind. I could see my neighbor’s darkened home. Everyone else in the world was sleeping. I knelt down and pressed my forehead against the floor, my face so close to the ground that I breathed in my exhalations. I listened to the sound of my breath over the hum of the refrigerator.

  Jedediah refused to share our bed. In the summer and early autumn months after Cara died, I’d been unfaithful more than once, the first time with a man who said he loved me, the words I needed to hear. Although I didn’t reciprocate his sentiments, I gave him my body. The sensation of his hands on me was more of a sting than pleasure. It was the hurting I needed, the punishment for having allowed Cara to slip through my fingers.

  As I crouched on the kitchen floor in the night, I heard a low tapping, the familiar sound of our house’s eaves settling in the cold. I looked up. Following the flicker of light from the woodstove along the length of the kitchen, I saw something. It was no further than six feet away, lodged firmly in a crack between the floorboards. I crawled toward it and pried it out: a pill. Covered in dirt, scratched where the writing with the identification code should have been. It was one of Cara’s. She must have left it behind.

  I rolled it in the palm of my hand, put it on my tongue, and swallowed.

  * * *

  For Christmas break, my mother, Jedediah, and I took a trip to Hawaii. Cara had always wanted to go to Hawaii. It represented the “big vacation” for her—drink umbrellas and tide pools, flowers and rum, escape and rest. For me, Hawaii with its bright emerald sea would be like living in a giant antidepressant. On crystal shores, locked in on all sides by glittering ocean, silky sand, and frozen rum daiquiris, I’d be forced into a state of good feeling.

  The Poipu coast of Kauai, I’d read, had the most swimmable waters of all the islands and the fewest sharks. The cost of the trip seemed reasonable, though an empty bank account worried me less than the prospect of spending the brutal gray winter weeks between semesters weeping in a psychiatrist’s chair.

  Still, I packed bottles and bottles of pills.

  I also packed a Ouija board, an antique designed by Elijah Bond in 1890 with block-lettered type of the alphabet and numbers and a creepy sun and stern-faced moon hovering over the simple answers: yes and no. The Ouija board’s paper was worn and peeling up from the slab of cedar on which it had been dry mounted. I laid the Ouija board flat on the bottom of my suitcase. Its planchette, carved from wood and embedded with a small magnifying glass that singled out the letters on the Ouija, had to be in perfect condition to glide across the board. I wrapped the t
riangular planchette in Cara’s favorite white flowing scarf: a scarf of fragile silk and muslin; a scarf that still smelled, distantly, faintly, like my sister; a scarf as dramatically long and easy to bow and drape as Isadora Duncan’s famed noose.

  I’d been wearing that scarf everywhere and even slept with it on. I’d managed to fashion it into an accessory that went with all of my outfits. It tickled the flesh of my bare knees in summer and was dirtied with soot and ash from sitting on the floor in front of the fireplace in winter. It was filthy and ridiculous. It was as excessive and unnecessary as my three-week Pacific Island vacation. But it also worked well as a protective cover for the Ouija’s planchette, my earpiece to Cara, wrapping my direct and only line to her in her “energy.” Cara had insisted that belongings, especially clothing and jewelry, were the truest and fastest way to the dead. She’d said the dead missed their things and wished for them back; keeping the objects and making them yours would bring out the fight in a spirit. Cara said the dead would come sailing back into life to claim their possessions.

  In Hawaii, my fingertips barely touched the planchette. According to the directions printed on the inside of the top of the game box, fingers should only brush the planchette and allow the spirit to whisk it across the board. This is how spirits talk. Also, two living people are needed for a séance, but I attempted to channel Cara by myself in Hawaii. I broke the rules of Ouija. I thought Cara might overlook my oversight and gift me with her grace. In Hawaii, I worked the board alone, in a back bedroom of the three-bedroom cabin we’d rented, while Jedediah and Mom made dinner. I lit candles and sat on the floor. If I heard someone coming, I’d blow out the flames and slide the board under the bed and appear to have been napping or reading a book. I asked Cara:

  How do you feel about Jedediah?

  He’s a coward.

  How will I survive without you?