by Jenna Blum
Karena spins and walks back.
“Fuck you, Charles,” she says. She pushes his shoulder, hard. “I want you out of here, you hear me? I want you OUT OF MY HOUSE!”
She screams this last in his face, then runs into the kitchen. Through the dining and living rooms, out the front door. But she can hear Kevin’s engine starting up when she is halfway through, and by the time she gets to the curb, calling his name, he is, as she has known he would be, already gone.
48
Because Karena is right behind Kevin and because she drives like a maniac across the river, she catches him as he is going up the front walk to his house. Karena springs from her car and runs after him. “Wait,” she says. “Kevin! Please!”
But when Kevin turns from his stoop he gives her a look that stops Karena right where she is. His face is just as she feared it would be: flat, closed. His mouth and eyes narrow lines. It might as well be a plate that someone painted features on.
“What,” he says.
Karena bends over, trying to catch her breath. She is panting as if she has sprinted across the city instead of driving.
“I’m sorry,” she gasps. “I’m sorry, Kevin. I’m so sorry—”
“Great,” says Kevin, “see ya,” and puts his key in the lock.
“No!” Karena says. “Just one minute, just give me one minute to explain—”
Kevin crosses his arms like a hostile bouncer. He looks at his watch. “One minute,” he says. “Go.”
“Okay,” Karena says. “Thank you, Kevin,” and then she wastes precious seconds stammering.
“First of all,” she says, “I am so sorry—”
“You already said that,” says Kevin. “Forty seconds.”
“But I am,” Karena says. She steps forward to touch his arm. “You’ll never know—”
Kevin looks down at her hand as if it were a slug. “Do NOT do that,” he says, and Karena snatches it back. Kevin checks his watch.
“Fifteen seconds,” he says.
“Oh!” Karena cries. “Kevin, Charles is crazy. You know that! You know how he gets when he’s manic, he’s evil, vindictive, he’s cookin’ with gas—”
“Time,” says Kevin. “Good night.”
“Please,” Karena says. “Please just one more minute—”
“Why?” says Kevin. “Why, Karena? What difference does it make? We could stand here all night and I doubt you’d be able to explain this incredibly fucked-up situation. Let me ask you one thing. Is it true? About the Motorcycle Guy?”
Karena looks away, at the streetlight, concentrating on its cold glare to keep from crying. Even so, she feels her chin trembling and eyes swelling, her face blotching up. She knows her hair is in witchy disarray from rushing over here. She is ugly, so ugly she can’t stand to have Kevin look at her, too ugly to belong to the human race.
“That’s about all the answer I need,” Kevin says. “Thanks.”
He pushes open his front door, and Karena is galvanized.
“It was an accident,” she yells. “It was just a stupid, awful accident! We were kids, Kevin. Eighteen. It was our eighteenth birthday, how’s that for irony. Charles was totally manic, he was out of his mind, he was being physically abusive to our mom. I went chasing with him to try and stop him, and he drove us into that storm, and we thought . . . we thought it might be a deer . . . Oh, shit,” she says, sniffling, “what a fucking soap opera.”
“That’s a very interesting and terrible story, Karena,” Kevin says from his top step, and when Karena glances up she sees he is looking down at her as if she were a new species of bug. “I just wish you had told it to me before.”
“I tried,” Karena says. “I mean, honestly, no, I didn’t, but I wanted to, Kevin! Oh my God, if you only knew how much I wanted to! I felt so bad about keeping it from you—”
“Did you?” says Kevin. “Boo hoo, poor you. Meanwhile, from the very beginning, what’s the one thing I insisted on, Karena? That you tell me—the fucking—TRUTH!”
“I already said I wanted to!” Karena yells back. “But how could I? Put yourself in my position. It’s not the kind of thing you can go around saying every day, like when I was eighteen my brother and I ran into somebody—”
A shadow moves in the downstairs front window, behind the branches of the fir, and the slats of the blinds are twitched apart. Mrs. Axlerod. Karena can see the woman’s pin-headed silhouette.
“Kevin,” she says in a much lower voice, “this isn’t a conversation I can have on the street, all right? Can’t we please go inside?”
Kevin shakes his head.
“I don’t think so,” he says, and at the thought that she may never see the man cave again, the black leather couch and the geodes and The Weather Wizard’s Cloud Book on the toilet tank and the cloud mobile twirling gently over the bed, Karena starts to hyperventilate. She doubles over again and puts her head between her knees.
“Oh, fuck,” she hears Kevin say.
After a minute, he comes down the steps. His Samba soccer shoes stop in the sidewalk square a foot from Karena’s head. She focuses on them until she can breathe again, then straightens cautiously, blinking gnats of light from her peripheral vision.
She smiles tentatively, but Kevin’s flat expression doesn’t change.
“You know,” he says, when it’s apparent that Karena’s not going to pass out on his lawn, “I have to say, it’s not exactly ideal to have a girl-friend who’s guilty of vehicular homicide. In fact it’s pretty fucking far down on my wish list. But if you’d told me about it, Karena, we might have been able to figure something out. We could have put our heads together and decided on a way to deal with it.”
Karena starts to tell him again why she couldn’t, but Kevin holds up a finger. “Please do not interrupt,” he says, “I am not finished speaking. What I was going to say is, boy, am I a jerk. I must be a real tool, right, Karena? Because the silly thing is, I was just starting to trust you. And I was starting to believe you trusted me. Oh, I always knew you were slippery. I knew you were always hiding something, that you’d been damaged in some way. Look how long it took for you to tell me the real reason you were on the tour. But once I put two and two together and found out you were Chuck’s sister, I thought, Jesus, man, pay her out some rope. No wonder she’s skittish. And meanwhile it’s not like I find a woman every day who’s beautiful and smart and funny and astrotravels in bed, so I figured, okay, if it’s just Chuck, I can deal with it. He’s a known quantity, and everybody’s got something.”
“Oh!” says Karena. She has been nodding throughout to show she’s listening, but she can’t help the exclamation when Kevin repeats what she was thinking on the road that day in Cherry County. “Yes,” she says, “exactly, everybody’s got something, and maybe now that we know what my something is we can cope with it—”
“BUT,” says Kevin, “and again, I have to ask you not to interrupt, BUT, it doesn’t work that way, Karena. This isn’t exactly your garden-variety baggage. This isn’t like oooh, you have a mean ex-husband or four kids or even intimacy issues. You and your brother killed a man. Let’s not forget that, all right? Because I think it’s kinda important. But what really kills me, Karena, what really fucking slays me is that after all this time, ignoring all evidence to the contrary, you still trust Chuck more than me. Your craaaaaaazy brother,” and Kevin wiggles his fingers by his face. “You. Trust him. More than me. Do you have any idea how that makes me feel?”
Karena is still nodding, nodding, like a bobble head on a stick, maintaining eye contact in the way she’s read you should in a hostage situation, to humanize yourself to your captor. Now she senses some other response is necessary, so she whispers, “No.”
“Huh,” says Kevin, “no, I didn’t think so. Well, let me tell you. It makes me feel sick. It makes me feel contaminated, having watched the two of you. Having been your dupe. You know, Karena, I wasn’t going to say this, but I always thought there was something grotesque about you and Chuck.
Something not right. And at first I thought it might be a twin thing, you know? That I was just having a weird allergic reaction to it the way people sometimes do.”
Karena nods yet again, this time because she knows what Kevin is talking about. Most people have been fascinated with her and Charles’s twinship all their lives, approaching them with interest and curiosity. But there have been the handful of superstitious too, the ignorant and mistrustful. Their grandmother Hallingdahl, for instance, sometimes muttered about the bad luck of the double yolk. One client of Frank’s wouldn’t let them on his dairy farm because he said everyone knew twins curdled milk. In the pioneer days, identicals were sometimes carted around the countryside as a carnival sideshow. Karena thinks for a second of the two-headed calf in the display case at the Great Platte River Road Archway Monument. It’s not the first time she has been called a freak.
“Then I told myself not to be ridiculous,” Kevin continues, “that I was just jealous. I knew it’d be a challenge going in. I know the twin bond supersedes everything. And to top it off your twin just happens to be Chuck. Still, I kept telling myself it was a natural phenomenon—you guys are just eggs, right? Two eggs that got fertilized at the same time, totally organic process. I could not figure out why seeing you together made me so squeamish, and I doubted my own instincts, but now I know I was right all along. The murder, the guy you killed, that’s bad enough. But then there’s the grotesque way you and Chuck are. Laughing at everyone else. Thinking you’re smarter. You think I don’t know the two of you made fun of me behind my back, Karena? You think I don’t know you probably have some stupid twin-code nickname for me?”
Karena flushes. “I—” she begins, but Kevin shakes his head.
“I don’t want to know,” he says. “I just wanted to tell you that tonight? When Chuck decided it’d be so funny to do the big reveal? I felt like I was watching a peepshow. And that’s how I’ve felt all along, Karena. Like there’s you and your brother doing your nasty little twin dance and I’m the necessary audience. Your idiot audience of one. Well, I’m done.”
Karena waits, watching him. Kevin scrubs a hand over his hair.
“No, I mean, I’m done,” he says. “I’m really done.”
“Okay,” says Karena. She takes a deep breath. “First of all, Kevin, it wasn’t like that at all. It—”
“Did you not hear me?” says Kevin. “I’m done. With you. We’re done. There’s nothing left to see here.”
Karena shakes her head.
“You can’t mean that,” she says. “Kevin, come on. After everything we’ve been through together—”
“Yeah,” says Kevin, “well, I’m kind of done with that too.”
He turns and starts back up the walk.
“Kevin, please,” Karena says. “Turn around. Look at me! Isn’t there anything I can do?”
“You can leave me alone,” says Kevin. “Go home to your brother, Karena,” and he closes his door.
49
So Karena does. She goes home to her brother, because what other choice does she have? Except as she speeds back across the Mississippi and through the neon pulse and throb that is Uptown on a summer night, and swings around the lakes and toward her house in Edina, Karena has but one goal in mind: to get Charles out of her house. If he hasn’t gone already.
Nope. When she drives past, his yellow Volvo is still at the curb. Karena scowls at it and parks around back. She charges through the patio, the destruction of dinner—chairs shoved askew, shattered glass, candle burning fatly in its meltdown wax. The kitchen is a disaster area, all spattered tomato seeds and vegetable peelings. The Rorschachs of Charles’s food preparation.
“Charles!”
No answer. Karena pounds up the stairs to the master suite, pokes her head up over the railing. No Charles here, just the oscillating fan turning its wire face back and forth. Karena runs back down.
“Charles!”
She looks in her den. Dining room. Living room. Out on the front porch, onto the walk. Back inside.
“Charles! Where are you? I know you’re here! Answer me!”
Down into the basement. Laundry room. Boiler room. Upstairs again, out into the night. The garage? Karena stands with her hands on her hips, staring around the yard.
“Charles!”
In response she seems to hear the neighbor kids yell, Marco! Polo! although they have long since gone inside. There are only crickets and the faint laugh track of somebody’s TV. Karena shakes her head. She is losing her mind.
Then she remembers Charles’s other lair, in New Heidelburg. And its adjacent bathroom. Where Charles was the night he tried to . . .
Karena runs back upstairs to the master suite as fast as she can. The bathroom light is off, but when she flips it on she sees the blood. It is everywhere, bright red on the tiles and the walls. The closet door, once a mirrored slider, is now stalactites of reflective glass. More litters the floor, curving shards bigger than her arm, as thick as the icicles that hang from the eaves in winter. Charles is wedged against the far wall, between the tub and toilet.
“Charles!”
At the sound of her voice, Charles cinches up tighter, like a millipede that’s been poked with a stick. His weeping ratchets up into that raw, rich, gut-shot sobbing Karena remembers from that day on the road. She crunches over the glass toward him, pinches a wicked sword of it out of the way, and kneels next to him.
“Let me see, Charles. Let me see your wrists.”
But his veins are intact. Karena pats his face, his head, his arms, his torso, his legs.
“Where are you bleeding, Charles? Where are you hurt?”
It’s his right ankle, the blood oozing from a gash there. Of course. He kicked the mirrored closet door in. The cut looks clean, though, no glass in it. And the flow is sluggish. Karena grabs a towel from the rack and applies it to the wound. Charles thrashes in protest and wails, but Karena says, “Stop!” and slaps him on the calf to make him calm down. Once he has, she presses hard on the towel.
“Owwwww,” Charles sobs.
“Did you take anything, Charles?” Karena asks. “Drugs, lithium, anything?”
Charles moans something. Karena bends closer. “What?”
“Noooooooo,” he says. “I’m sorry. Ah, God, I’m sorrrrrryyyyy . . .”
Karena keeps her weight on the towel and considers whether he’s telling the truth. Since Charles is Mr. Holistic now, he probably doesn’t have anything stronger than herbs, and Karena herself keeps nothing heavier in the house than aspirin—
“What about over-the-counter stuff?” she asks, leaning in. Her hair, swinging, grazes Charles’s face, and she flips it back with an impatient sound. “Did you take Tylenol, cold medicine?”
Charles shakes his head. His face is red, contorted, tears leaking out from beneath his tight lids.
“You hate me,” he insists. “You hate me . . .”
Karena sighs. “No, I don’t, Charles.”
Charles whips his head from side to side.
“You dooooooo,” he moans. “Ah, God. Please, just let me die . . .”
“Don’t say that, Charles,” Karena says, without her usual energy or conviction. She lifts the towel and peeks under the edge: The bleeding has slowed. Still, she keeps the terry cloth against the wound with one hand and smoothes her brother’s hair back with the other. Some instinct tells her this is the right thing to do. At her touch Charles grips panicky fistfuls of her shorts and mashes his face against Karena’s leg, and she stares down at his head, the fine honey-blond hair at his temples shading into coarser waves, and feels nothing. Not love nor pity, not even exhaustion. She knows the emotions must be there, but she can’t access them. Kevin was right, Karena thinks, there is grotesquerie here, but it’s not Karena and Charles. It’s Charles’s disorder, the way it reduces a grown man to sobbing panic on the floor. The way it renders Karena unable to feel. The way it takes you by the hand, nodding and smiling slyly, and leads you back to the same old pla
ce every time, so just when you think everything might be all right after all, you come home and open a door to a room full of blood.
Charles is lowing now, moaning, and as Karena strokes his hair she looks around the bathroom, her gaze and mind wandering. The ceiling has a crack in it, the light fixture holds dead flies. How much will it cost to replace the mirrored door, the rug? The tiles will have to be bleached too, the blood has seeped into the grout. And the walls.
Charles is saying something, words mixed in with the groans. Karena leans over. “What’s that?” she says.
“I’m sorry,” he gasps. His eyes are still pinched tightly closed, as if he can’t bear the overhead light or maybe Karena looking at him. “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean to ruin your life. I’m sorry, I’m just so sorry.”
“That’s okay, Charles.”
“Please,” he says. “Please help me, K. Please.”
Suddenly it’s as though Karena’s ears pop after a long flight, only it’s her feelings. They come rushing back to fill her, her love for him and the pity.
“I will,” she says. “I will, Charles.”
“Please,” Charles says again. He brings his hands up to cover his face. The Lakota ring looks sternly at Karena. “Please, K. Please don’t hate me. I never meant to do those things—it’s like there’s a stranger in my head. Some guy I can’t control—”
“Yes,” Karena says. “I know that guy, Charles.”
She pulls Charles’s hand aside so she can speak directly into his ear.
“Listen,” she says, voice low. “I will help you. I will help you, Charles, but you have to help me too, okay? The Stranger—he’s terribly strong. But you’re stronger. I know you are. You have to try. You have to help me beat him. You have to go back to the doctors with me, try different medications until you find ones that fit. It’ll be tough, but I’ll be with you. We’ll do it together. You hear me?”
Charles nods vehemently. “Yes,” he says. “Yes, yes, anything, K, I’ll do anything you want. Just please don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me alone here in the black.”