Mother’s mental breakdown had begun when I first disappeared. After my rescue and before she returned home from the hospital, Dr. Jaffe, her psychiatrist, had assured my father and me that she finally had come to accept all that had happened and fully understood what Haylee had done to cause my abduction. She realized and acknowledged that Haylee had been lying and had been deceitful, from that first night in front of the movie theater from which I had disappeared through every minute, every hour, every day, and every week that had followed. Now she knew that lies, not dreams, had been swimming around her, and she had nearly drowned in them. Every ugly fact she faced was another jellyfish sting. I had no doubt that when she first heard them, she winced with real pain.
Although acknowledging the whole truth helped lift her out of the dark pool of mental illness that had made it impossible for her to have any sort of sensible daily life at the time, it did not return her to the person she had been. There were too many scars, too many deeply felt wounds in her heart. Reluctantly, she had swallowed the ugly facts like bitter medicine or sour milk. In one sense, she had recuperated. She no longer denied what Haylee had done, but the side effects left her crippled in so many other ways. For the time being, we were alike in that sense.
Sometimes when I saw her step out of the shadows now, she looked like she had absorbed them. Her eyes were gloomy, her eyelids half-open. She seemed to drift, to slide along the walls, seeking the darkest places, periodically glancing back to be sure the light or the sunshine wasn’t following her and, along with it, the ugly truth: one of her precious daughters had nearly destroyed the other. Frantically, her gaze darted around the room she was about to enter. She looked like a frightened mouse quickly seeking a safe haven, a place to hide, a place that would serve as a sanctuary. But how did you flee from reality forever?
When Mother wasn’t reminiscing through photographs or videos, she would spend hours at a time simply sitting and staring out a window, turning her extended fingers clockwise and counterclockwise, as if she were winding an old watch, perhaps hoping she could turn back time and would see us both returning from school. She slept a great deal, and when she was up and was somewhat energetic, she would talk about us constantly, eager to describe what we had been to her—but not how we now were. Usually, I slipped away.
Irene was her audience most of the time. For a woman nearly six feet tall, with manly shoulders and large hands, with long, thin fingers that reminded me of spider legs, Irene was surprisingly gentle, even graceful. Her patience and compassion were something to behold. I thought it was more than simply her good training. She sincerely liked Mother and appreciated the pain she had suffered and continued to endure. Early on, I suspected there was something dark in Irene’s own past that enabled her to empathize, but she didn’t like to talk about herself. “Let’s concentrate on your mother,” she would say, if our conversation drifted too far into her past. Everyone has secrets, I thought.
In any case, she was better at sympathizing than I was, because despite the truth she had accepted, Mother still searched for ways to excuse Haylee for what she had done to me—and to her. The blame was as easy to spread as warm butter. To her, my father was obviously the one who bore the most guilt. After all, he had chosen to desert us, to divorce her. How could she have been expected to carry the burden of bringing up two young girls with such extraordinary needs on her own? No wonder something unfortunate had happened.
Unfortunate? I would think. That sounds too much like something accidental. There was nothing accidental about this.
Nevertheless, this sort of logic of blaming my father settled in her mind and comforted her, even though she knew that from day one of our lives, she had instructed him about how he should behave toward us, and she had presented herself as an expert on girls who shared the design of every cell in their bodies. So the truth was that he couldn’t contradict her; sometimes he couldn’t even ask questions. Whether she wanted to face it or not, she was, in fact, bringing us up on her own and always had been. It was a major part of what eventually drove my father out of the house and into his new life.
And then there was the blame that stained me. Somehow, in Mother’s mind, I had failed my sister by not directly addressing her growing jealousies. Mother had repeatedly told me that I should have revealed what Haylee had been doing on the Internet with the man who had abducted me. Keeping it a secret from Mother was to her as good as causing what had happened. There was, after all, such a thing as a conspiracy of silence.
Didn’t I understand? Haylee had needed our help. Because of my silence, the sickness of sibling rivalry was permitted to grow and get stronger. Identical twins were far more susceptible to it than ordinary siblings. It was the bogeyman Mother had feared the most. He was always there in the shadows, waiting for his opportunity to pounce on us, and by not seeking Mother’s help early, I had helped give him that opportunity. To Mother’s way of thinking, Haylee was just as much a victim as I was. Mother once said, “She really didn’t want to do that to you. She couldn’t help herself. Just like you wouldn’t have been able to help yourself if the roles were reversed.”
But the roles weren’t reversed and never could be! I wanted to shout back at her. I would never put my sister into a spider’s web.
However, Irene, my father, and Dr. Jaffe advised me never to argue with Mother and warned me especially against giving her any nitty-gritty details of my abduction. She was still too fragile. One more nightmare would crack her like a fresh egg.
Yet I always wondered how she was able to cope with my having to have therapy, too. Why didn’t she want to know why I needed it so long after I had been rescued and still needed it from time to time? Why didn’t she ask more questions about my abduction? How could she not worry about how it had all changed me, damaged me? She never even asked me if I had been raped. Shouldn’t that have been her first concern? She didn’t ask about my hair, why I was nearly bald, or why I was so thin. When I think back about it all, I can’t recall a moment when she had shed a tear over what had happened to me. Where was the mother I needed when I needed a mother the most? When was it her turn to be sympathetic? Wasn’t that a big part of who she was supposed to be?
And when my father had decided, along with my therapist, that my attending a private prep school rather than returning to my high school for the new school year was a good idea, why didn’t she question the reason? After all, I was being sent away. I’d be out of the house again. Why didn’t she wonder why I was so eager to do it? Why didn’t she fight for me to stay with her?
In my heart, I concluded that she understood but simply would rather avoid facing up to it. That much self-denial she couldn’t keep hidden. Otherwise, she would only end up back in the hospital, not that she was making much of an attempt to return to the world.
She didn’t want friends to visit or call. She had no interest in going anywhere, doing any shopping, having her hair and nails done, or taking me to do any of those things. She didn’t even appreciate her own mother, my grandmother Clara Beth, making the trip from Arizona to Pennsylvania to see her. She frustrated Nana by refusing to talk about anything but the needlework she was doing or a chicken recipe she had discovered. She behaved as if nothing terrible had happened to this family, and whenever she made a reference to me, she cloaked it in words and images that made it sound like she was referring to Haylee as well. Clara Beth finally threw her hands up in frustration and fled from our house as if she were breaking free of any guilt herself. She didn’t even say good-bye to me.
I supposed, in some ways, I couldn’t blame her. In a real way, our house was on fire. Despite Mother having been released from continuous psychiatric care, she was as good as in a hospital in our own home, which was another reason I was happy to go off to a private prep school and avoid every opportunity but Christmas and spring break to go home.
I would much rather have spent my holidays with my father, but by now, he had found someone new to love again and was trying to make a
new life. In a real sense, he was fleeing from the past as much as I was. I couldn’t blame him for it. How else could he go on? How else could I?
Once, before all this had happened, when I criticized Haylee for being so selfish, she smiled at me the way an adult might smile at a child for being so innocent.
“Sometimes,” she said, “you have to be selfish in order to survive, Kaylee. You’ll figure that out on your own, I’m sure.” Her voice dripped with condescension.
I didn’t believe her at the time, probably because I didn’t want to believe her.
But she was right. She was right about many things.
And when I permitted myself to think about my captivity and the brutality inflicted on me in that basement apartment, I realized I had survived because of what I had learned from my twin sister, the sister who had maneuvered to put me there and whom I couldn’t imagine ever forgiving, even after I had seen her in her dreadful catatonic state.
But I knew in my heart that eventually, somehow, that was precisely what I had to do to help her survive, and what I had to do to help myself survive—forgive.
Mother knew nothing about my visiting Haylee and what had happened. My father had told Mother’s therapist, who had advised us to keep it from her. Her doctor said that the news could send her reeling backward and return her to the psychiatric ward. Keeping it from her was no problem. I had no trouble not talking about my visit. I wanted to forget it for as long as I could. It was another reason I was willing to leave and try to start anew.
Several weeks after Mother had been brought home, my father was there to help me bring down my luggage. It was the start of a new semester at Littlefield. Mother knew I was leaving and was in the living room with Irene. All the arrangements had been made. The pamphlets about Littlefield had been received, and I had deliberately left them on the coffee table in the living room for days after they had arrived. I could see, however, that no one had picked them up, not even Irene. This morning, Mother didn’t—as I had expected, actually hoped—offer her opinion on what I should pack for my stay at Littlefield.
“Does she fully understand what’s happening, Daddy?” I asked, pausing at the foot of the stairway and nodding toward the living room.
“Oh, she understands. I went over it with her in great detail last week and again yesterday. You probably forgot how your mother could pout sometimes. There were days when she wouldn’t say a word to me, answer a question, anything, until I said I was sorry for whatever innocent thing I had done or uttered.”
I nodded. Of course, I remembered days like that. None of us could stand the silent treatment. Haylee was probably the least concerned of the three of us about upsetting Mother, but she was bothered by silence and hated it. When she wasn’t with me or Mother, she was constantly wearing earphones or on the telephone. I had no doubt she would have had more trouble than I had surviving in Anthony Cabot’s basement apartment with no one but a cat to talk to most of the time.
I walked to the living room and stood in the doorway. Mother and Irene stopped talking and turned to look at me. Mother was in a housecoat and her pink and green slippers. She had yet to get to the stage where she would dress nicely, with concern about her hair and makeup, even if she wasn’t leaving the house. The one exception was the half dozen or so dinners we’d had with my father since her return. Never once during any of those dinners did Haylee’s name come up. Periodically, Mother would gaze at the chair Haylee would have occupied, but then she would look away quickly or down.
There were long moments of silence at these dinners, followed by my father talking about the house or his work. Irene showed interest and asked questions, but whenever my father mentioned the prep school looming on the horizon for me, Mother stared blankly at him and just ate. My father and I exchanged looks, but neither of us forced her to comment. It was like tiptoeing over thin ice. Neither of us wanted to be blamed for causing her to have a relapse.
“I’m going now, Mother,” I said now. “To my new school,” I added with emphasis. I was really leaving. There was no point in pretending otherwise.
Normally, whenever Haylee and I left for somewhere, even just to go to school in the morning, we always kissed Mother good-bye, me kissing her on her right cheek and Haylee kissing her on her left. Since she had returned from the hospital, whenever I kissed her, she always brought her hand to the other cheek to confirm that Haylee hadn’t kissed her, and then she would grimace. It was disturbing, giving me the feeling that my kiss was insufficient or that it stung. It was eerie for me, because I imagined Haylee there, giving me her confident smile to say, See! Mother likes my kiss better.
However, my father told me that before Mother had gone to therapy, when I had been abducted, she would act as if I had kissed her, too, that I was there. Now that he thought about it more, he said it really bothered Haylee, who would go into a pout.
“I should have realized something from that,” he said. “I should have realized what she had done. There are none so blind as those who refuse to see.”
I never dreamed that something as simple as a kiss good-bye would become such a deeply traumatic thing, but it was. When we were younger, Haylee was especially embarrassed about Mother’s special kisses and her demands that we kiss her so much, even in front of our classmates. Haylee complained to my father, but he told us that kisses were important to Mother because she had so few when she was a little girl. Neither her mother nor her father was a very affectionate person.
“People who have suffered great thirsts of any kind are more obsessive about satisfying themselves when they finally can,” he said. “That can often be overwhelming. Try to be understanding.”
I thought that made sense, but Haylee grimaced and continued to complain whenever Mother wasn’t around. “Why do we have to suffer for what our grandparents did to her? That’s unfair!”
Now, as I stood in the doorway, holding my luggage, I knew Irene was waiting, along with me, for my mother to say something, to wish me luck, a good trip, anything. She simply stared at me blankly, the way she had at dinner when the private school was mentioned. Finally, Irene said, “Have a nice trip. We’ll be anxious to hear how the school is and how you are doing.”
Mother looked at her, not simply surprised but a little annoyed that she had put words in her mouth by including her.
She pulled herself back on the sofa and, sitting stiffly, added, “I’ll be here. I’m not going anywhere.”
I could practically hear her thinking, I’m waiting for your sister to come home.
I was afraid to approach her and kiss her. Her face would feel like cold marble.
“ ’Bye,” I said, and hurried to the front door, where my father was waiting. He saw the disappointed look on my face. I told him what Mother had said. “I’m surprised they let her come home,” I added, not hiding my anger.
“Oh, there’s a difference between being mentally disturbed and behaving like a spoiled child because you’re not getting things your own way or, more important, deciding them. She’ll get over it,” he said confidently.
He loaded my suitcases into the car’s trunk, and we got in.
“Kaylee, I know I sound like a car stuck in low gear or something, but try to put all this behind you for a while so you can give yourself a chance for a fresh start. It’s going to be great. You’ll see,” he said, reaching over to squeeze my hand gently.
Before we turned out of the driveway, I looked back and saw Mother standing at the living-room window, looking out at us. I felt more of a sting than an ache in my heart. She looked forlorn, abandoned, and much smaller to me than she ever was. It wasn’t all that long ago when she had both Haylee and me in her life, in our home. Now, I thought, with my father gone, of course, she would have no one but her caretaker, Irene. She hadn’t reconnected with any of her girlfriends. The echoes and the memories hanging in every corner like woven spiderwebs might easily drive her back to the hospital.
I knew that it was selfish of me to deser
t her, but there was no way I could return to my school or any school near us. Our story was too infamous here. I was afraid even to go to the local supermarket, maybe especially the local supermarket, or any place where people who knew one another gathered. They would see me and begin their chatter. There she is. She doesn’t look normal. How could she be?
If I stayed, I wouldn’t leave the house very much. I’d become as much of a prisoner as Haylee was, and how would that do Mother any good?
“This is like going to college,” my father said, now eager to fill every moment of silence. “You’re on your own more, and you meet new people. It’s exciting. Don’t you think so?”
“I guess,” I said.
“Oh, it will be. Makes me wish I was eighteen again.”
“You wouldn’t be going somewhere specifically to get away from people who knew you,” I said bitterly.
“You gotta stop thinking of it like that, Kaylee. Look at the positive side. The school will have better teachers. It’s more beautiful. You’ll make lots of new discoveries along with new friends. And when it does come time for you to go to college, it won’t be as traumatic as it is for most high school kids. You’ll grow up faster.”
“Is that good? I think I’ve had to grow up too fast as it is.”
He looked at me.
“You know what I mean?”
I felt guilty now about how I was treating him. He was right, and he was only trying to help me. I had to pull myself up and out of this pool of depression and self-pity.
“You never have to mention what happened to you,” he said. “You don’t have to react to any nasty questions. You’ll see. You’ll feel differently when you get there.”
“I know. I hope,” I added. “I’m sorry, Daddy. And I do feel sorry for Mother, too. I realize she is struggling for a way to forget and start anew, just like I am.”