Untwine Read online

  I am in the PICU. I can see the words PEDIATRIC INTENSIVE CARE UNIT printed in bold black letters on the glass panel window that takes up half the wall. I’m reading backwards. Or is it upside down? Or am I reading at all?

  I think I’m being watched through that glass window. Or on a monitor. Sometimes it’s easy to feel when people are watching you. Maybe somewhere a nurse or a doctor is sitting behind a desk, watching a bunch of people like me. That same person could be watching over Isabelle, too.

  I can barely keep track of all the random and not so random thoughts drifting in and out of my head. Maybe that’s a good sign. Then I remember our cat, Dessalines, who I imagine pacing between our front door and the litter box, scratching the wooden floors, wondering where we are. I wonder how long it will take someone to find Dessalines, if none of us goes home. He might have to wait a while before Josiane, our cleaning lady, stops by, as she does once a week.

  Dessalines will have to live up to his namesake now. He’ll have to prove himself worthy of the Haitian revolutionary hero Dad named him after. Like us, he’ll have to fight for his survival.

  It was Dad’s idea to name our copper-eyed black Burmese Dessalines. Dad takes every opportunity he can to teach us lessons about Haitian history, even making a hero into a cat, a cat into a hero. It’s a good way to teach someone a lesson, though. You have to learn about the real Dessalines if you’re walking down the street and looking for your cat—as Isabelle and I often find ourselves doing—and your confused friends ask why your cat’s name is not something like Kitty.

  Mom’s older sister, Aunt Leslie, lives in Orlando, but she will definitely come down as soon as she hears what happened. She’s a pediatrician, not a veterinarian, but she would save Dessalines. Or maybe Dad’s younger brother, Uncle Patrick, will come down from New York to save Dessalines.

  Aunt Leslie arrives late for Thanksgiving dinner every year. There is always one last patient to see. Her patients, she often says, are the children she’ll never have.

  “You twins.” She always refers to us together as you twins. “You twins are getting older by the minute. My patients are getting born by the minute. They keep coming and coming.”

  And now we might be going and going, slipping away. And her own sister might be slipping away, too, somewhere. And what if we all slipped away, how would she answer now when she was asked if she had children?

  “No,” she might say, “but I used to have twin nieces who were just like my own children.”

  And how would our parents answer—if they’re alive—when people asked if they had children? Would they say, “Two,” the way they have in the past, then add, “twin girls. I mean, young ladies.”

  We were the first twins on both sides of our families. We were always les filles, “the girls,” or les jumelles, to our grand­parents. Mom said that she and Dad chose the names they did for us so that they could rhyme a little bit with jumelle, the word for “female twin” in French. Our middle names are the first names of each of our grandmothers, so I am Giselle Sandrine Boyer, for my grandma on Mom’s side, and my sister is Isabelle Régine Boyer, for Dad’s mom.

  In Haitian Creole, the word for “twin” is marasa. If we had a sibling follow us, a brother or a sister, that child would have been our dosa, the “untwinned” one. When we were little, Isabelle and I promised our parents that if we had a brother or sister, we would never make him or her feel left out. We would teach the dosa our twin speak, we told our parents, what Isabelle called “the language of the palms,” because sometimes when we had something urgent to say to each other, we would just grab each other’s hands, or gesture.

  Aunt Leslie is our godmother. When we get mad at our mother, we call Aunt Leslie our “good” mother, because if our parents refused to get something for us, we’d call her up and she would send it. Dolls. Clothes. And later, money. We’d send her links to things online, and she’d buy them and have them mailed to us directly. I wish I could call her now to tell her to go save Dessalines.

  “Go save Dessalines?” She’d try to make a joke out of it. “Well, he’s been dead for over two hundred years,” she’d say. And she would force me to say it even though she knew exactly what I meant. “Dessalines the cat, Aunt Leslie, not the revolutionary. We need you to save Dessalines the cat.”

  Surely the hospital would call Aunt Leslie and Uncle Patrick, or even Grandma Régine and Grandpa Marcus in Haiti, and they would go by the house and find Dessalines.

  In the middle of all this imagining of Dessalines’s rescue, all of a sudden, I open my eyes and see Aunt Leslie sitting there in the only chair at my bedside. She is holding my hand the way Isabelle was holding my hand in the car.

  For once Aunt Leslie is the first one to arrive, and she is never the first one to arrive. Aunt Leslie is even wearing her white doctor’s coat over her black blouse and slacks, as though she hasn’t had a second to pull the coat off. Or maybe it’s because just as she’s always told us, they treat you better in hospitals when you have a doctor in the family. Maybe she’s purposely kept it on. Or maybe they have given her privileges. This was part of her vocabulary. She’d told us all about “privileges,” permission to use a hospital’s facilities as a doctor. But they certainly wouldn’t have given her privileges to work on us. She must have simply forgotten to take off her coat before ­getting in her car, or on the plane.

  I remember Aunt Leslie telling Isabelle and me at our weekend-long twelfth birthday party—hosted by Aunt Leslie and attended by our family and Tina’s family at Disney World—that in some places people thought twins were bad omens. When they were born, their parents left them out in the forest to die. In other places twins were revered and even worshipped. In some parts of Haiti, for example, twins were thought to have special powers, and if you didn’t give them what they wanted, they could put spells on you. Maybe that’s what Isabelle and I had done to her. Maybe our love had put a spell on her. We loved her so much that we made her love us even more. Maybe that’s what brought her to my bedside so quickly.

  At the Disney World birthday party weekend, after scaring us with her twin stories, Aunt Leslie gave each of us an identical gold chain with a hand-shaped pendant with what seemed like vines carved inside. They were good luck charms, she’d said, from the Maghreb region of Northwest Africa. She had bought them for us while attending a medical conference in Cairo. They were called the Hand of Fatima and were meant to protect us from the evil eye.

  “Why do we need protection from the evil eye if we have special powers?” I asked her.

  “Just put it on,” my sister had shouted.

  Where’s my necklace now, I wonder. Neither Isabelle nor I had taken them off since Aunt Leslie had given them to us. How come I am only thinking of it now?

  At times it feels like my ears are filled with water. Sometimes they feel crystal clear, almost too clear, so that the machines in my room and other rooms and their stop-and-go beeping feel like missile attacks directed at my brain. Sometimes it feels much too bright in the room, even though the lights are dimmed. Sometimes it feels too dark, like I am going blind.

  Standing behind Aunt Leslie’s chair is a policewoman dressed all in black. She has a shiny star on her chest and a pad and pencil in her hands. The light coming off her star is blinding.

  The policewoman looks tall, even to someone as tall as me. So tall that she seems like a giant standing next to Aunt Leslie.

  “I want to see if I can question her,” the policewoman says. “Even with hand signals.”

  “It’s only been a few hours,” Aunt Leslie says, “and she has a very bad concussion.”

  “According to the ER doctor, she might be floating in and out of consciousness,” the policewoman says. “The sooner we get a statement from her, the better.”

  “She’s in no condition. As you can see,” Aunt Leslie says, reminding me of the tube that I want to reach over and grab out of my mouth, except that my hands are tied down, as if I am a prisoner and not a patient. Th
ere are spaces between my teeth. I’ve possibly lost teeth, whole teeth, pieces of teeth. With the tube pressing my tongue down, there’s not enough room for my tongue to find out exactly how many, but I have more stubs than teeth, fragments, pieces, shards of teeth.

  “She’s in no condition,” Aunt Leslie repeats to herself.

  Tears are streaming down her face. I have never seen Aunt Leslie cry before, not even at her own mother, Grandma Sandrine’s, funeral. Now she’s sobbing so much that the officer has to reach down and squeeze her shaking shoulder. I wonder if Aunt Leslie knows where Mom and Dad are. I wonder if she knows where Isabelle is.

  Aunt Leslie puts both her hands on top of mine. Aunt Leslie’s hands feel soft, and even though they’re sweaty and shaky, they feel like being home with Mom, Dad, Isabelle, and Dessalines. They feel like love.

  “I’m sorry,” the officer says. “But we think what happened was not exactly an accident. We’re just trying to figure things out.”

  What happened was not exactly an accident.

  I hear those words, then sink under.

  Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end! “I wonder how many miles I’ve fallen … I wonder if I shall fall right through the earth!”

  Under is now a dark empty space that I slip into when my mind wants to rest. When things become too difficult to process, I sink under. And while I am under, I remember some things and not others. Under can be a blank space, like an empty sketch pad or canvas, or an empty room. Or a classroom.

  This year in the art history class that Isabelle refused to take, we learned about rock engravings and cave paintings. I doubt that with my unmoving hands I could even carve a single letter on a cave wall now.

  I have become prehistoric, I want to tell both Aunt Leslie and the policewoman. If I were left out in the forest the way I am now, I would become prey for the hunt. Wild bison would devour me. And I don’t even have my amulets to protect me. I don’t have Mom and Dad. I don’t have the Hand of Fatima. I don’t have Isabelle.

  Isabelle was Baby A when we were womb-mates. That means she was the stronger one, the one with the greater chance of survival. After the doctor pried our fingers apart, it took him ninety seconds to pull out the rest of me. Isabelle was ninety seconds older and weighed four more ounces than I did at birth. Our weight difference has stayed pretty much the same since. Even if one of us spends a week in bed while the other one spends a week swimming, there’s never more than half a pound difference between us. Still, it has always seemed like Isabelle is stronger than me.

  Isabelle would have been very popular in the ancient world. Some great artist would have made a statue of her. In ancient Egypt, she would have been Nefertiti’s friend. In ancient Greece, she would have been a Muse, a goddess of music.

  I don’t know how I even remember all this. I spend most of my time in art history class half listening and half sketching, drawing my classmates paying undivided attention.

  In class, during slide shows, the dark, split only by a narrow beam of light, somehow lets people think they are alone. I sketch my friends scratching their armpits, fixing wedgies, and picking their noses, all in the presence of great art.

  Even though he coaches our boys’ basketball team, my art history teacher, Mr. Rhys, is barely five feet tall. He will jot down a few facts on the board, turn off the lights, then talk us through the slides, even though he could have easily used the classroom Smart Board. Peeking over his thick glasses, he often clears his throat between sentences, as if the dust the projector light catches on its way to the screen bothers him.

  Every face in the class blurs now into the tiny tear bubbles that are welling into my eyes. And I know that I am not remembering, but somehow seeing something that is happening somewhere else, without me. Maybe this is like that levitating thing people talk about, that moving towards the light. Except I am moving back towards my old life.

  My chair in the classroom is empty now.

  Today Jean Michel Brun, my computer whiz, art history class crush, the boy with the big Afro, the boy with the radio announcer’s voice, the boy I sometimes dream of moving to New York and going to art school with, and sharing a dirty paint-stained loft with, will be sitting in his usual seat, halfway between me and my best friend, Tina. Sometimes I spend the entire class watching him tug at the small gold loop earring in his right ear. It amazes me that he’s not split his earlobe in two. It amazes me, too, that Tina and I don’t burn holes through his head with our stares.

  I am a “smile if you get caught staring” kind of starer. I make eye contact. If I’m feeling bold, I might even wave. I also take my time looking away. And when I do, I look at the floor, then look back up and start staring again.

  Tina is more a stealth admirer. She treats the whole thing like some kind of covert operation. She turns away immediately if she gets caught, then she starts tugging at her bra strap or patting down her straightened hair. Tina has an advantage over me. She and Jean Michel are also taking a computer science lab elective together.

  Mr. Rhys’s slide show now moves on to illuminated manuscripts, brightly painted books with gold lettering. I remember Isabelle telling me, “I’ll take this class when they finally teach African art,” and I momentarily lose interest in everything Mr. Rhys has to say. Now Italian frescoes mean nothing to me. But my sweet Leonardo and his Mona Lisa I still love, even while imagining my sister writing protest letters to Principal Volcy saying that, although our school was named after Toni Morrison, a great writer, we were not living up to her reputation or her legacy.

  My presentation was going to be about my sister-approved art: Algerian rock paintings and ibeji statuettes, effigies of Yoruba twins from Nigeria. I was also going to throw in some pictures of sequined vodou flags from Haiti, each thread, sequin, and bead shining like a tiny sun, Haiti’s own illuminated manuscripts.

  Isabelle was supposed to skip lunch and come listen to me do my presentation. She’d helped me prepare for it, printed articles, checked books out of the school media center.

  But I am not there.

  She is not there.

  In the classroom where I’m longing to be, Mr. Rhys plows right through several centuries of art. He also goes on and on about depth perception, shadow and light, and movement and rest.

  In the projector-illuminated dark, Jean Michel Brun waits until Tina’s not looking, then he reaches over to hand me a note.

  DO YOU WANT TO MEET LATER?

  I peer down to read the note.

  His words are all in capital letters, implying urgency.

  Could he have figured out a way to pass a note to my ghost, sitting invisibly there in that classroom?

  In the sunken-under dark, I imagine sitting next to Jean Michel in art history and life drawing classes in New York, at the New School, or NYU. We are no longer teenagers, but a young man and woman starting our lives together. Our adventure sounds like the description of an indie movie. Two young artists, in love, leave Florida to make it in New York’s crazy, incestuous art world.

  But back to the policewoman. What did she mean? What happened was not exactly an accident.

  The policewoman’s star keeps shining even behind my shut eyelids. It grows brighter and brighter until I can no longer see anything else.

  I remember Mr. Rhys once saying, before lowering the shades and turning off the lights in his classroom, that there is more darkness in the world than light, more abysses than mountains, more invisible places than visible ones. Maybe he’d meant this in some artistic or philosophical way, but it might also be true in the real world.

  Until the policewoman appeared with her star, I didn’t realize that I was surrounded by both too much darkness and too much light. I was used to living two lives at once, sometimes carrying around in my head both Isabelle’s memories and mine, both her dreams and mine. Sometimes I said “I” even when talking about the two of us, and I said “we” when I meant just me. I sometimes tasted what she was eating, especially when it was
something with strawberries, which I don’t like. The same thing happened to her, too. She hated onions, which I sometimes ate just to annoy her. But I don’t remember ever seeing such a blinding star with her before.

  I lie there wishing I could see rainbows and glories instead. But the policewoman’s massive star is starting to block out every other possible thing. Her star looks like it’s about to explode.

  “She seems very agitated,” I hear someone say.

  It sounds like Aunt Leslie. It might also be the policewoman.

  Then the star explodes.

  A streak of red and orange bursts in a Russian doll series of fires before my eyes. I hear an alarm and a long beep, and all of a sudden the room feels crowded with not only more bodies but more voices. Something heavy and loud pounds into my chest, and every time it lands, I feel like I am being struck by lightning. The beep continues as the exploding star fades into darkness.

  The tube in my throat is abruptly yanked out. I clench both my fists, then gasp. Coughing seems to offer the only relief. I cough up what seems like rivers, fishes, sea glass. I feel like I have been underwater for hours and am only allowed a few seconds on the surface. I need to take in as much air as I can before I sink under again. People are tugging at my arms, my legs. And someone unclenches one of my fists.

  If I could, to stay on top, I would hold on to the side of the hospital bed, like an anchor, like a boat. But I can’t. I am allowed only a few short breaths. I tighten my fist even harder. But this time there’s something in my hand. I didn’t feel the hand that put it there. But the thing itself is sharp and cold against my palm. It is flat and attached to a string, a gold chain. It is my good luck charm, my Hand of Fatima from Aunt Leslie.

  I ONCE WROTE a story about a girl who could feel no pain, no hot or cold, no bruises, no pressure, absolutely no pain at all. Isabelle and I were in the ninth grade and I was researching unusual illnesses for a science project when I came across congenital insensitivity to pain.