Two
Tovah
I USED TO THINK BEING a twin meant I’d never be the center of attention. That I’d always share the spotlight with my sister or fight for control of it. For a long time, I didn’t mind sharing. I hid behind Adina while others praised her for her music, her poise, her looks.
Then my shyness mutated, and I started wanting to be seen too. We tried to share the spotlight until she got jealous. Until something shattered our entire family, and in the aftermath she ruined the precarious balance between us. Turned us into two girls who share some DNA and nothing else.
Tomorrow, when we turn eighteen, Adi and I will take a genetic test that tells us whether we’ve inherited our mother’s Huntington’s disease, the asteroid that knocked our family out of orbit four years ago. The black hole slowly swallowing her up.
Tomorrow I take the next step in knowing whether it’ll one day swallow me, too.
But tonight I skate.
Lindsay whizzes by, black hair streaming behind her. Four years on the track team have made me somewhat athletic, but I don’t have much grace. I never know what to do with my arms.
“Have you noticed,” I ask Lindsay when I catch up to her, “that we’re the oldest ones here?” There are two other birthday parties at the rink tonight. Mine is the only one that doesn’t require parental supervision.
“Considering I’m the same size as most of them, I was feeling like I finally found my people.” At four ten, Lindsay’s more than a half foot shorter than I am. She wears tiny T-shirts and matchstick jeans and carries a bucket of a purse the size of her torso. “Admit it. You’re having fun.”
It was Lindsay’s idea to have my birthday here, and I’m grateful for the distraction. Great Skate is a relic from the 1980s. Neon orange carpet in the dining area, strobe lights, outdated music collection. It smells like foot spray and fryer grease. Adi and I spent birthdays here as kids, eating oily pizza and hoping the guys we liked would ask us to skate with them. At that age, holding a guy’s clammy hand while Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” played from the rink’s scratchy speakers was the most romantic thing I could imagine.
“I’m . . . trying,” I say after grappling for the right word.
Though my sister and I ignore each other most days, Great Skate isn’t the same without her. If no one asked us to dance during couples skate—or more accurately, if Adi didn’t like the boys who inevitably asked her—we’d glide around the rink with our arms linked, pretending we didn’t care. And after a few laps, we didn’t. We were the independent Siegel sisters! We didn’t need boys.
We slow down as we approach Lindsay’s boyfriend, Troy, and his friend Zack, both wobbling on their skates near the rink entrance. Lindsay, Troy, and I are proud AP kids who’ve spent most of high school preparing for college. Advanced classes, student council, after-school sports, and as many other extracurriculars we can squeeze in. When Lindsay started dating Troy at the beginning of sophomore year, Zack, whose only AP class is Studio Art, joined our group.
Given what this birthday means, I hoped tonight would be just Lindsay and me, but I’m used to sharing my best friend with Troy. While there’s nothing wrong with him, sometimes I want to be selfish. I’m just not brave enough to tell her.
Lindsay drags her toe to stop and tugs on Troy’s Seahawks sweatshirt strings. “I can’t tell if you guys are pathetic or adorable.”
“Pathetic,” Troy grumbles. “That group of fourth graders has lapped us four times. I think I’ll stick to writing about others’ athletic achievements.” Troy’s the school newspaper’s sports reporter, and he can rattle off statistics about all of Seattle’s teams. None of them ever seem to be winning.
“I prefer adorable.” Zack wobbles and nearly loses his balance. His wavy russet hair falls in his face, and he has to grab the wall for support. “Nailed it.”
“Have you been finger painting?” I ask, gesturing to his hands. His knuckles are smudged blue and yellow.
Zack examines them. Grins like he’s just realized he’s a mess. “It’s mixed media, and I happen to be using my fingers.”
“Sounds like finger painting to me.”
“That’s because you’re not an ar-tiste like Zack is, Tov,” Lindsay puts in.
“Hardy-har. Got any big plans now that you’re eighteen?” Zack says. “You can pierce or tattoo anything. Vote. Go into an adult store.” His mouth quirks up when he mentions this last one, and when his thick-lashed hazel eyes catch mine, I feel my cheeks grow warm.
“I’ll be keeping it pretty tame,” I say. He doesn’t know what my actual, life-changing turning-eighteen plans are.
A group of five girls skate by with arms locked around one another. “Don’t break the chain!” one of them shouts, and the others giggle.
“Oh, to be nine,” Troy says in a mock-wistful tone. “Those halcyon days when we didn’t know what integrals or derivatives were . . .”
“Don’t remind me,” Lindsay says. “I have at least three hours of AP Calc waiting for me at home. And about a trillion college essays.”
This is what AP kids do when we’re not in school: talk about school.
“I bet Tovah’s already finished her college apps,” Zack says.
Even in AP land, I’m a shameless overachiever. I have no problem embracing it. I love when everyone begs to peek at my meticulous study guides or when I’m the first person in class to turn in a test.
“The one that matters, yes. I sent it in last week.” Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore has been my goal since seventh grade, when I went to a summer program there for girls interested in science and medicine. My favorite professor was a surgeon who let us watch an open-heart surgery, and while some of the kids shut their eyes, I was riveted. I’d always loved science class the most, but this—I was watching her physically fix someone. It felt powerful. Important.
Since then I’ve shadowed as many local doctors as I can, and I volunteer at a Seattle hospital. Because I applied early decision, I’ll hear back in December. Biology program at Johns Hopkins, and then, if all goes well, med school there too. The next five to ten years of my life perfectly planned out.
“I bow down to you.” Zack attempts to do so and almost topples over again.
The sight of this nearly six-foot-tall guy stumbling on skates tugs at my heart. Makes it race faster that its usual sixty bpm. My mind, in all its infinite logic, reminds me this crush can’t become anything more than that. My future is too much of a question mark to drag someone else into my life.
Textbooks and exams don’t have emotions. They’re much safer.
The music stops midsong, and the DJ booms over the speakers: “Helloooooo, and thanks for coming out to Great Skate tonight! Everyone having a grrrrrreat time?”
All the kids yell back that yes, they are.
“I can’t hear you,” the DJ taunts in that way all announcers love to do, and we all bellow back, though Zack rolls his eyes at me. “We have a few birthdays here tonight. Can Sienna, Nathan, and . . . Tovah come up here?”
He hesitates before saying my name, the way most people do when faced with an unfamiliar word. It’s not hard to pronounce, but I don’t like how he utters it: like he’s questioning it.
I glare at Lindsay. “You didn’t.”
She tries to make her pale-green eyes innocent. Fails. “Get over there, birthday girl,” she says, laughing as she gives me a push.
“I despise you,” I tell her before skating to the middle of the rink along with the two kids, who blink up at me like I’m, well, an adult at a skating rink full of children. I grind my teeth—my worst habit—and cross my arms, wishing I could shrink to the size of a third grader. My sister, who prefers the company of string instruments to people, would hate it even more.
“How old is everyone turning?” the DJ asks.
Lindsay’s filming a video on her phone. A playful smile bends Zack’s lips, which I’ve imagined kissing only when I feel like torturing myself.
“I’m ten!” yells Nathan, and Sienna one-ups him with, “Eleven!”
“I’m, uh, eighteen,” I mutter, which gets a few laughs and gasps from the kids.
Eighteen. It’s supposed to be a lucky number. Hebrew letters have numerical value, and the word “chai,” meaning “life,” is spelled with two letters that add up to eighteen. It’s a word we toast with—“l’chaim!”—and carry around on necklaces. Since my mother’s diagnosis, eighteen has meant something different. It doesn’t mean luck or life. It means the opposite. The worst thing that could possibly happen, multiplied by eighteen, raised to the eighteenth power.
I don’t know the Hebrew word for that.
The DJ leads everyone in “Happy Birthday,” and I suffer through thirty more seconds of humiliation. As I skate back to my friends, the DJ says, “Now it’s time for you to find that special someone for our couples skate.”
The lights turn red. Seal’s “Kiss from a Rose” starts playing, though none of us are old enough to remember when it was actually popular. If it ever was. My taste is more nineties grunge, thanks to my father’s lifelong Nirvana obsession. No one else in our family can stand Kurt Cobain’s growl or distorted guitar.
Tonight the couples skate fills me with more dread than it did when I was twelve. Lindsay and Troy are already slowly circling the rink. The kids pair off, their nervous laughter mixing with Seal’s velvety vocals. I envy their naive confidence.
Zack’s gaze meets mine. His eyebrows lift. My heart plummets.
“I’m going to take a break,” I say quickly. He can’t ask me to skate with him—because I can’t say yes. Before he can reply, I clomp off the rink.
Before entering my house, I kiss my fingertips and touch them to the mezuzah on the doorpost.
My parents are watching an Israeli movie in the living room, subtitles on for my dad’s benefit. Adina and I speak Hebrew with our mother, who was born in Tel Aviv and lived there until right after her mandatory military service. We call her Ima and our father Aba. He’s American and not quite fluent in Hebrew, though he’s been taking classes for years.
“Yom huledet sameach.” Ima wishes me a happy birthday as Aba pauses the movie. Her head jerks upward. Twice. Three times.
It doesn’t look too unusual unless it happens thirty or forty times a day.
Huntington’s makes her body do things she can’t control, makes her temper unpredictable, makes her forget names and conversations. I never know if something I say will make her furious, or if she’ll remember tomorrow where I went tonight. Or if one day she’ll forget my birthday altogether.
“Todah,” I thank her.
“Eich ha’yah?” Aba asks in stilted Hebrew.
“About as fun as skating with a few dozen small children can be.”
He smiles, and then an alarm on his phone beeps. “Time for kinuach,” he says.
A while ago Ima insisted we call her pill regimen “dessert” so she wouldn’t sound as sick. There’s no cure for Huntington’s, but the meds reduce her symptoms. Mood stabilizers and antidepressants, plus antinausea pills to combat the side effects.
I was fourteen when Ima was diagnosed. She’d been acting strangely for a while, dropping cups and plates, forgetting conversations we’d had. Yelling at us when she’d only ever been gentle. Huntington’s is a genetic disease that slowly kills the brain’s neurons. There’s no way to tell when symptoms will appear or how fast the disease will progress, though usually people start showing signs in their forties or fifties. Sometimes before then. People gradually lose the ability to walk and talk and swallow food. In the final stages of the disease, they’re confined to beds in assisted living facilities. Time between onset and death is ten to thirty years, and there’s no cure.
Though her symptoms aren’t grave now, the reality that this disease is fatal has only started to sink in over the past few years.
I leave my parents to their movie and head upstairs to my room. When I flick on the lights, I jump: my sister’s standing in the middle of the room like she’s haunting the place.
“You scared me,” I accuse, and she rolls her shoulders in a shrug that suggests she’s not actually sorry. I swipe an orange plastic case off my desk and shove in the night guard my dentist makes me wear for bruxism: grinding my teeth too much, especially while sleeping. It’s caused by stress, but my hectic schedule will have been worth it when I’m accepted to Johns Hopkins.
“I wanted to talk to you.”
She hasn’t been in my room in a while. With the light on, she scrutinizes the walls, the photo collages of me and Lindsay and a few other friends. My shelves overflow with medical books and Jewish texts. A printout of next week’s Torah portion, Ha’azinu, on my desk so I can study it before services. Then there are the academic achievement awards and middle school Science Olympiad medals. Framed above my desk is my most prized possession: a ticket from a Nirvana show my dad went to when he was my age.
I’m not sure what’s on Adina’s walls. I haven’t been in her room in a while either.
“Fine. Talk.”
Adi regards my bed as though she doesn’t know if she should sit or not. Pushing some of her hair off her shoulder, she settles for standing, crossing one ankle behind the other. We’re fraternal twins, “te’omot” in Hebrew. It’s similar to the Hebrew word for coordination, which when it comes to us is wildly inaccurate. We share some features: same long thin nose, same curves. Adina’s always been more comfortable in dresses that accentuate the lines of her body, while I prefer loose clothes that disguise mine. We have the same thick almost-black hair, though mine is coarse and hers is like silk. I chopped it into a pixie when I started high school, but Adina keeps hers long, curls twisting halfway down her back. Even if I wanted to look like her, I never will.
Her dark eyes are hard on mine. She has Ima’s eyes, while mine are light blue like Aba’s. After a couple agonizing minutes of silence, she says, “I don’t want to take the test tomorrow.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” The night guard goops up my words. Makes them less sharp than I want them to be.
Not knowing has to be worse than a positive result. We can prepare for the worst. We can’t prepare for an unknown. Not taking the test means even more years spent wondering, wondering, wondering if we’re going to end up like Ima. If we take it, there’s a chance for relief. To know that we’ve been spared.
As little as we talk these days, I’m too scared to do it alone. This fate binds us as sisters, as twins, though the rest of our lives have spun in opposite directions. It’s something we have to do together—or not at all.
“I keep thinking about how much happier I’d be if I didn’t know.” Her arms hug her chest. Adina’s prone to big, dramatic emotions. If she thinks she’s played poorly in a show, she whines and slams doors, sometimes even cries. I’m thirty-six minutes older than she is, but the gap between us could span an entire geologic era. “I’m not ready.”
I pull a pair of pajama pants from a dresser drawer. Slam it shut. “Adina.” I snarl her name as I whirl around to face her. “We’ve had four years.”
“I want to keep focusing on viola. If I don’t take it, I won’t have to worry as much about the future, and—”
“You know why you have to take it with me,” I interrupt her. “You owe me.”
The heaviness of her debt sags between us as we stare each other down. She knows what she did. Knows the balance between us is permanently skewed. And that means I get what I want now.
Adina’s jaw quivers. “I was hoping for a little empathy. But clearly I went to the wrong place.”
“So you’re done in here?” I ask as I start unbuttoning my jeans. Her puppy eyes won’t win her any pity.
“I’m done,” she says crisply. I shut the door behind her. There’s nothing left to talk about. There’s only tomorrow.
Adina glances away as a nurse jabs needles into our veins, but I watch the glass vials fill with red. I’ve never been squeamish. It’ll make me an excellent surgeon.
I cling to the statistics. There’s a fifty percent chance each of us will test positive. A positive result means someone will develop Huntington’s. Fifty percent isn’t the worst probability, I try to convince myself. A fifty percent chance of rain in Seattle doesn’t always mean a downpour; sometimes it means gloom and gray skies. I pray for gloom and gray skies.
In three weeks, we’ll know if neither or both or one of us is going to die the same way our mother will.