17
From the first questions he asked, I saw immediately that what interested Troy the most was how I arrived at agreeing to consider forgiving my sister. Troubling him for years was a similar question. Could he ever forgive his father? How do you get to that place? How do you overcome the anger and, yes, the fear in order to even give it a chance?
Hating is so much easier than loving, and hating someone you’re supposed to love or you have loved is often more painful for you than it is for them. Like me, whose memory was filled with happier times Haylee and I spent together, before his incident with his father, Troy also had his mind crowded with good memories of him. Little, seemingly insignificant things—like the time his father let him steer the car or when he gave him a tennis lesson or when he carried him on his shoulders on a beach or simply when Troy stood beside him and saw the respect his father commanded from other people—all made it harder to despise him. How he wished he had just walked by his sister’s room that day. But of course, there was his sister to be concerned about, and that was impossible to ignore.
When he picked me up, we went for a drive with no specific destination. We simply wanted to be off campus to talk. Even if we sat in a corner in one of the lounges or lobbies, we’d feel the eyes of the other students studying us, and if Marcy, Claudia, or some of the other girls saw us, they wouldn’t hesitate to barge in, hoping to fish out something they could pass on like breaking news reporters.
“It wasn’t as if Dr. Alexander cornered me into feeling guilty if I didn’t agree,” I began. “I believe she means it when she says she is looking forward to my opinion of Haylee. And she made me consider what good it will do now to continue hating my sister.”
Troy nodded. “I don’t know if she really came up with this,” he said. “But a quote attributed to Marilyn Monroe that I like is ‘If you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best.’ ”
“My sister should get a T-shirt with that on the front.”
“Maybe she doesn’t need it; maybe it’s there but invisible to most. Anyway, I’m not saying you did wrong by agreeing to celebrate Thanksgiving with her at home. Actually, I’m jealous that you have the strength to make that choice after all you’ve gone through.”
I sat back and wondered myself where I had found the strength. “You’ll find your way through it, too, Troy.”
“Will I? Maybe with you as my copilot.”
He sat forward when a turn was approaching.
“Hey, there’s a pretty good old-fashioned diner about half an hour ahead. Nothing fancy, just good food, and I like their music. It’s as if they’re stuck in the fifties and sixties. But I warn you, the youngest customers are in their fifties and sixties.”
“Sounds fine with me. For now,” I added.
“What do you mean, for now?” he asked, turning to me because he sensed something critical in my tone.
“You can’t keep running away from today, Troy. I love every place you’ve taken me and the people, too, but you have to find your way to face reality and fully experience what’s out there for today.”
“Oh. That. Rejoin society? Become a card-carrying member of the human race again?”
“Joke about it, but yes. That’s what I’m hoping to do. What I’ve been trying to do and what I want you to try to do, too,” I added, and reached for his hand.
He held mine for a few moments and drove quietly in deep thought for a while. Had I said too much? Was I pushing him too far? Did my session with Dr. Alexander make me arrogant, an overnight expert on psychological trauma? Who was I to take on someone else’s burdens while I still carried so many of my own?
“It’s not something I haven’t thought about,” he said, releasing my hand. “I’ve watched everyone else enjoying what I should be enjoying for too long. I’ll admit it, but it’s that first step that’s the hardest. Maybe I should be seeing a therapist, too, after all.”
“Maybe. What about your sister?”
“What about her?”
“Besides that day when you questioned her, have you ever spoken about it with her?”
“No.”
“How is she?”
He looked at me, clearly deciding whether he wanted to continue the conversation. “Wounded,” he said. “Like me.”
“Then maybe it’s time you had another talk with her. You have to look out for each other, and you can only do that by ending the see-no-evil, hear-no-evil syndrome.”
“Is that what you’re doing?” he asked, a stream of tormenting rage bubbling beneath his words, not directed at me as much as at himself, at the place in his life he wanted to escape.
“Maybe,” I said.
“Don’t take on too much, Kaylee, and don’t let any of the guilt shift to you. That’s the way my mother made me feel the day I told her about my father.”
“I won’t,” I said, but it did sound more like a hope than a commitment.
We dropped the subject, and when we arrived at the diner, which was everything he had described, we talked about everything but family. On the way back to Littlefield, however, he revealed that his mother knew he had brought me to the house.
“Was she mad?”
“No. She surprised me, actually. She told me to bring you around for dinner before the Christmas holiday break. She wants to check your fingernails to see if there’s any dirt under them.”
“You idiot,” I said, punching him playfully. “Now I’m nervous about it.”
“Good. Then you’ll be just like me,” he said.
He turned up the radio, and we sang along with an early holiday tune that we both remembered growing up. Even as I sang, I wondered, was it too dangerous to be happy and to hope? Disappointment for us both, especially for me right now, would be like a nuclear disaster.
What should I recite before I go to sleep tonight? Fools rush in where angels fear to tread? Or To err is human, to forgive divine? Tread on in, Kaylee Blossom Fitzgerald, tread on in. I didn’t have much longer to wait to find out which quote fit better.
It was a long and hopeful kiss good night at my dorm. Troy would have as hard a time falling asleep as I would. The sun in the morning would struggle with us to light up our smiles.
However, the excitement at Littlefield before a holiday break wasn’t much different from the excitement Haylee and I used to experience at our public school. The air was electric with it. There was more laughter, louder conversations in the cafeteria, and more genuine grins of anticipation on everyone’s face, especially our teachers’.
Both Troy and I worked hard at controlling the nervousness that bubbled just beneath the surface of our own smiles and laughter, hiding it as best we could even from ourselves, until that Wednesday morning when classes broke at ten and parents began arriving to pick up their children. Seniors with cars drove off, beating on their horns as they exited the parking lots, as if we were celebrating the end of a war or something. Troy lingered, waiting with me for my father. They had yet to meet, of course.
Marcy was all right about going home. She was going to have two Thanksgiving dinners, one with her mother on Thursday and then one with her father on Friday. We talked about it Tuesday night. She said she was also looking forward to reconnecting with some old friends she knew when she was attending public school.
“What about you?” she asked me. “Reconnecting with anyone?” she sang, her eyes widening. I knew she meant an old boyfriend.
“Not really,” I said. “I’ll be going to a dinner with my father and his girlfriend Friday night, though.”
“Your father’s girlfriend. How that sounds when I say it, too. Sisters of divorce,” she said. “That’s who we are.”
We turned to Claudia, who had fallen into a funk that was more pronounced than when she had first arrived.
“What’s wrong with you?” Marcy asked her.
“Thanksgiving.”
“C’mon. It won’t be that bad,” Marcy told her.
Claudia smirked. “My mother is a lousy cook,” she said, which made us laugh. “My father won’t take Friday off. It’ll be just another weekend at the Lukases’ except for cranberry sauce from a can.” Then she surprised us with a smile. “But Ben might show up on Saturday.”
“You creeps!” Marcy cried. “When did you plan that? Rob never even suggested it.”
That cheered Claudia. She loved being special. Then they both turned to me.
“You’re the one with the boyfriend who could easily drive over to see you,” Marcy said.
“He might.” It was actually an idea neither of us had considered.
But now, as we sat in the lobby waiting for my father to arrive, I toyed with the idea of suggesting it.
“How do you think you will spend the long weekend?” I asked him.
“We’ll go out to dinner rather than have one at home on Thursday like most families. We’ll probably go out Friday, too. My father will work on Friday in his home office.” He hesitated for a moment and then added, “I think I’ll have that conversation with Jo. I don’t know how it will go or what we’ll do after that.”
“My sister will be gone on Friday. I have no plans for Saturday.”
“Oh,” he said. “Why don’t I come by and spend Saturday with you? I’ll take you to dinner, too.”
“I’ll call you,” I said. “That might be very good.” I saw my father arrive.
Troy carried my small suitcase out to the parking lot. My father stepped out of his car and watched us approach.
“This is Troy Matzner,” I said. I nearly laughed at the way they looked each other over. They reminded me of gunfighters in an old western, only the two of them waiting to see who would reach for his handshake first. Troy, more nervous than I had ever seen him with anyone, offered his hand quickly.
“Happy to meet you, Mr. Fitzgerald.”
“Glad to meet you, too,” my father said, shaking his hand. He glanced at me. “Heard a little about you.”
“A little is enough,” Troy quipped.
My father smiled. “When are you heading home?”
“About ten minutes after you leave,” Troy said. “We’re nearby, so I don’t have to rush.”
“I heard. I know your dad’s company well.” He glanced at me and then picked up my suitcase. “Have a great holiday,” he told Troy, and busied himself with putting my suitcase in the trunk so Troy and I could say a quick good-bye, with a quick kiss, too.
“Should be good weather the whole weekend from what I hear,” my father said, gazing around.
“Good,” Troy said. “Maybe I’ll take a ride.”
My father nodded. “Ready, Kaylee?”
“Yes. I’ll call you, and we can plan your visit,” I told Troy, and got into the car.
He stood there watching us back out and drive off.
“My imagination, or was that boy really sad to see you leave?” my father asked.
“Maybe a little of both.”
He laughed. “When would he visit?” he asked, more concerned about that. We both knew why.
“Not until Saturday, maybe. Let’s wait and see,” I said.
“Very good idea. Wait and see,” he repeated. “In the meantime, Irene tells me your mother has been working hard on the Thanksgiving dinner. She went out with her to buy all the food and has the dining room looking beautiful. She even put up some old decorations.”
“She wants to forget everything as quickly as she can,” I said. My father nodded.
“How does that make you feel?” he asked.
“Playing therapist?” I regretted how quickly I had come back at him. I saw the sting in his eyes. “I don’t blame you,” I said. “I know you’re worried.”
“I just want what’s best for you right now, Kaylee. That’s my priority.” He turned to me with that intense gaze he could draw up instantly. “I mean it.”
“I know, Daddy. Thanks,” I said.
The little ball of tension and anxiety that had begun rolling around inside me the moment we left Littlefield grew bigger and bigger as we drew closer to my home, and by the time we arrived, it felt like a bowling ball.
“Your mother gave me a dress, shoes, and a jacket for Haylee to wear out of the institution,” my father said before we got out of the car. “I brought it there yesterday, but I didn’t see her. I made a point of telling your mother not to expect you to be wearing the same outfit and not to lay it out for you. I warned her that I would bring Haylee right back to the institution if she pulled any of that stuff.”
“What did she say?”
“She said the two of you should make those decisions yourselves now.”
“I hope she meant it.”
“I’ll be a phone call away. Dana and I are having a small dinner at her place Thursday night. Her brother, who lives in Philadelphia, is coming with his wife. They have a ten-year-old boy and an eight-year-old girl.”
“Don’t you feel funny being with another family? Doesn’t it make you unhappy remembering our Thanksgivings?” I asked. Maybe it was really rubbing off on me, Dr. Alexander’s direct and incisive questioning. Maybe I was asking him because it still made me angry that he had left us. Maybe I wanted to see how sorry he was about us, too.
“I just want everyone around me happy. I’ll think about myself tomorrow.” He smiled. “Just call me Scarlett O’Hara.”
“You and Troy with your old movie quotes,” I said.
“Oh, yeah? Sounds like a boy I would like.”
We got out of the car. My father got my suitcase, and we walked to the front door. He still had the key.
Mother was waiting eagerly for me in our small foyer. I could see how different she was from the woman I had left the day my father took me to Littlefield. She looked more like the mother I remembered before all this had happened. For one thing, she was back to wearing bright colors and had on an orange Calvin Klein fit-and-flare cable-knit dress I recalled. She looked like she had put weight back on, too. She had always had a figure her girlfriends envied. I saw she’d had her hair recently styled in her familiar textured bob, a little longer than usual and with longer bangs. She was wearing light makeup, and her complexion looked as rosy as it had been.
I had anticipated Irene greeting us at the door, but she was nowhere in sight. My father carried in my suitcase and paused to smile at my mother.
“You look very nice, Keri,” he said.
“Thank you,” she quipped, like someone dismissing a pest. “Kaylee, you look like you’ve grown another inch or something. Maybe I just forgot how tall you are. Come in, come in,” she urged. “I’ve made some changes in the house I want you to see, and then we’ll have some lunch, and you can tell me all about your school. I sent Irene out to get us fresh bagels and that cheese you and Haylee love.”
It was weird now hearing references to the two of us. No one at school but Troy knew yet that I had a twin sister.
My father gave me the look that asked if I was going to be all right.
“I’ll take my suitcase, Daddy. Thank you.”
“If either of you need me for anything, I’m a phone call away,” he said, handing it to me.
My mother’s all-too-familiar look of disdain invaded her revived look of happiness. “Right. A phone call away,” she said dryly. “How lucky we are.”
I hugged my father and watched him leave. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was out on a ledge a thousand feet above the ground and had nothing to grasp but myself. The moment the front door closed behind my father, however, my mother seized my hand.
“Come on,” she said excitedly. “I have so much to show you before Haylee comes.”
I followed behind her, glancing at the dining-room table and seeing how beautifully it was set for tomorrow night. She paused when she saw where my gaze had gone.
“I found all those Thanksgiving decorations we had stored in the pantry,” she said. “Remember how you and Haylee helped me put them up, both of you making sure everything was pinned just right? What a team we three were back then.”
If we were going to remember good times, I thought, were we going to remember the bad ones? Should I even suggest why Haylee wasn’t here?
“Wait until you see what I’ve done to Haylee’s room,” she said. She started up the stairs.
Why, I wondered, if she was going to change a room or improve it, would she choose to do Haylee’s and not mine? Wasn’t that like rewarding Haylee?
Not a thing had been changed in my room. Every single thing was exactly where I had left it. I put my suitcase down. She was waiting impatiently in the doorway. Stay calm, I told myself. Don’t be too quick to judge. I followed her to Haylee’s room.
Daddy hadn’t mentioned how much brighter Mother had made it. With pink polka-dot curtains, pink floral bedding, and a light pink rug, all new, it smelled like a room in a newly constructed home. Three of our rag dolls looked like they had been washed, or maybe they were even new, duplicated. All three were dressed in multicolored outfits. She had them on the oversize pillows, looking at us. There was a vase with a rainbow of artificial flowers on Haylee’s desk, too. I stared at it. It was on the computer desk where Haylee had arranged for my abduction. At least there was no computer there, new or otherwise.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” Mother asked. “I had a decorator, you know.”
“Yes,” I said, but I really had doubts that Haylee was going to like this. It seemed to explode with color. If a room could be exaggerated, this was it. Mother was trying too hard to wash away the past. It was a room for a much younger girl.
My subdued reaction annoyed her. She stepped forward to straighten one of the framed rock-star posters hanging on the right wall. I hadn’t noticed it.
“I think this singer was one of your favorites, right?”
“More Haylee’s,” I said. If I had said that a year ago, she would have ripped it off the wall.
“Well, it will be more of a homecoming for her, then, won’t it?”
“I wouldn’t think of this as a homecoming. She hasn’t exactly been in school or something like that, Mother.”
“It’s a school,” she said. “Just a different kind.”
“No, it’s a punishment, or it was supposed to be. You never went there, did you?”
My question made her face ripple with tension. Her smile, which I thought was so forced that it resembled a mask, dissolved into her more familiar motherly expression of concern.
“No. I was told it wouldn’t do either of us any good, and besides, I hope that’s all coming to an end. It will do us no good to talk about it, Kaylee,” she added, with that definitiveness we had heard many times when we were told we couldn’t do something.
I used to think my mother would make a good undertaker. She could slam our dreams and aspirations shut in a coffin and bury them forever whenever she refused a request Haylee or I made that violated her main principle: Nothing different for either of you, ever.
Her smile flickered back on like a neon light. “Besides, I want you to come down to lunch now in the kitchenette and tell me all about your new school. I want to know everything, your teachers, your subjects, how you’re doing, the dorm you’re in, friends you’ve made, all of it. It will take us all night to catch up, I’m sure. Come, come.” She beckoned and started away.
I glanced back at Haylee’s new room. Actually, I was looking forward to seeing the expression on her face when she first confronted it. Then I hurried after my mother. As we descended, we heard Irene coming in with the groceries.
“Perfect timing!” Mother cried. “Look at Kaylee. Doesn’t she look like she’s grown?”
“She looks older, yes,” Irene said. “Hello, Kaylee.”
“You’ll have lunch with us and hear all about her new school,” Mother commanded.
“I look forward to that. Let me get everything together for you. Go on and relax,” she fired back at Mother with just as much authority.
“Right, right,” Mother said, surprisingly obedient. “Let’s go into the living room, Kaylee.”
I looked at Irene, who raised her eyebrows and smiled. She was obviously pleased with the progress Mother had made.
Mother sat on the settee and smiled up at me. I sat across from her. Haylee and I always sat across from her on the matching settee.
“Don’t sit so far apart from each other,” she might tell us. Or “Kaylee’s not crossing her legs like that. Why are you?”
All our lives, we were made conscious of what the other was doing. As little girls, we knew that if one of us folded her hands in her lap, the other should, too. We were keen on pleasing Mother. She took such delight in our seemingly unconscious mimicking of each other. It wasn’t much of a stretch for anyone now to imagine which one of us was the first to work at being different.
“Your father tells me you have a roommate. What is she like?”
“She’s very bright, especially in math. We get along very well. I think she’s enjoying this school.”
Mother’s eyes didn’t blink. There was a colder glint in them. “What did you tell her about our family?”
“Daddy and my therapist, Dr. Sacks, both believed it would be best for me to say that I was an only child. That way, I wouldn’t have to explain anything nasty.”
She didn’t respond. She held her cold gaze.
“It was easier for me to do what they suggested. I had to try to recuperate, Mother.”
“Exactly,” she said, smiling. It surprised me. I was anticipating her anger, even her ranting against my father and my doctor.
“You understand?”
“Of course I do, Kaylee. As should you.”
“Understand what, Mother?”
“When I tell you that your sister is coming home from her school tomorrow.” She held her smile. “I’m trying to recuperate, too,” she said.
As Mother and I went into the kitchenette for the lunch Irene prepared, I considered what she had said. In my mother’s mind, there was no such thing as forgiveness; there was only forgetting or pretending that the bad thing had not happened. She was telling me how she would survive all this.
Was she telling me to do the same?
Although Irene asked a lot of questions about Littlefield, Mother asked many, too. She was so much like her former self that I decided not to challenge her way of dealing with the horrible thing Haylee had done, not only to me but to all of us.
Afterward, Irene pulled me aside to tell me my mother had made enough of an improvement for her to consider cutting back to only a weekly visit.
“Her doctor agrees,” she said. She didn’t mean to suggest it, but I realized all the pressure was on me now not to spoil the recovery. If I expressed any anger in front of Mother when Haylee was here or if I was in any way mean to her, this fragile reconstruction of Mother’s life might crumble.
Irene had Mother take a rest before dinner, and I went to my room. I had some homework to do over the holiday, and I thought it would provide the best way to avoid thinking about the challenge that lay ahead.
My father called to see how things were going. “I see her feisty self has returned,” he began.
I told him a little about the way she was behaving and how she was coping.
“Well, that might be for the best, but don’t you permit anyone there to make you uncomfortable, Kaylee,” he warned. “I won’t stand for you enduring an unpleasant second. Understand? You call me, and this whole thing is called to a halt. Your sister is going to hear the same from me.”
“I know, Daddy. Thank you. I’ll be fine.”
Just before I went down to dinner, Troy called. He told me his sister had just arrived, but his father was not home yet. I told him how it was going for me.
“Do you think I should speak to my sister before Thanksgiving dinner or after?” he asked.
“I’d do it after, just so you don’t make her uncomfortable for the evening.”
“That was my thinking, too. It’s great to have someone bright enough to bounce ideas off of,” he said.
“I wish that was all I was.”
“I’ll call you Friday,” he said. “Right now, I’m going to the indoor pool to relive a memory.”
“Glad you can’t see through the phone,” I said, and he laughed.
“Kaylee,” he said, then paused.
“I know,” I said. “Me, too.”
I had this eerie feeling after I hung up. Anticipating words, feeling similar about things, was, after all, what had made Haylee and me the Mirror Sisters.