Della

Early morning sunlight streamed through the huge, double pane window that backed Della Johnson’s queen-sized bed. It bathed the brass frame in twinkling, stunning beauty. The little glass prism perched on the antique washstand that served as a night table threw a rainbow over the right corner of the white bedsheets.

This is what days off are for. Staying in bed. Watching the sun. Della produced her arms from the cave of blankets, reached into the air, and stretched the kinks of the night out. Her motion produced a thousand small tiny dust mites which glittered and shimmered, far prettier than they deserved to be, in the sunshine’s rays.

After a long work week, Saturdays were almost sacred. Do nothing all morning. Yoga in the afternoon, if she felt like it. If she couldn’t get motivated to head to a class, at least she could tune into a podcast on her phone, do ten minutes of it and call it a day.

Sundays were for errands. They were for grocery shopping and laundry, cleaning, cooking and worrying about the upcoming week. Not Saturday. No, Saturdays were a break from the grinding machine Della put herself through all week.

The abrupt slam of her apartment’s front door shattered all illusions of a peaceful morning. What the hell. It could be only one of two people busting into the apartment so early in the morning. Early, meant ten, wasn’t early at all, but people knew to stay the hell out on her days off.

Della weighed the odds, trying to guess by the rustle coming from down the hall, who the intruder was. Not her father. He always knocked first. That left her mother or her twin sister.

She pulled open the top drawer of the highboy, antique dresser, and chose a pair of grey leggings. Ripping off her pajama pants, Della slipped them on and followed up with a black tunic.

Since the noise hadn’t escalated into someone tidying the kitchen, it was a pretty good tell that it wasn’t her mother breaking and entering. That left Eve. Her identical twin sister.

Sure enough, a minute later, the bedroom door cracked open and Eve stuck her head in. “Oh good. You’re awake.”

“I am now,” Della responded, tone only half as grouchy as she intended.

“You know, normal people get up at like seven or eight. Even on the weekend.”

Della shrugged. “Guess I’m not normal then. Anyway, normal people knock and wait for the door to be answered.”

Normally Eve would have grinned. It shocked Della to see tears well up in her sister’s light blue eyes. Her lips, a natural hue of pale pink without any addition of gloss or lipstick, trembled.

“Evie?” Della moved across the room to wrap her sister in a tight hug. If anyone chanced to look in the window, it might have given them a start, seeing two of the exact same person wrapping their arms around one another.

“I just can’t do it anymore.” Evie pulled out of the hug. She stumbled across the room and sat down heavily on the edge of the bed. Huge tears flooded Evie’s eyes and spilled down her porcelain cheeks. They dripped off her dainty jawbone and landed on her pink blazer.

Della didn’t stop to wonder who the hell wore a blazer on a Saturday morning when they had nowhere to go but their sister’s apartment. She joined Evie on the bed, sitting as close as possible. She turned and took Evie’s hand in her own. It was unnaturally cold and limp, as though the life had gone out of her sister.

“Can’t do what anymore?” Della prodded gently. Her heart sunk into her stomach. She already knew what Evie was going to say.

“I can’t stay with him anymore. He’s… impossible. Since coming home last month, he’s… a total stranger. I thought maybe once he got out of the hospital that he’d be different. You know- be thankful that he’s alive, but it’s the same thing every single day. He won’t leave the house. He’s so bitter, it’s impossible to get through to him. I just… can’t.”

Della raised a hand and gently caressed her sister’s fine, flaxen blonde hair. “I know sweetheart. None of us thought it was going to be an easy road. You just have to hang in there. You’re stronger than you know. You’ve been the one to see him through all of this. You’ve been basically living at the hospital for months. No one would ever blame you for being angry or emotional. You just have to-”

“No!” Evie pulled away. Her normally pale blue eyes darkened with the intensity of her anger. “This isn’t just me going through a rough patch or having some doubts. I’m done. Done. I was done before the accident. I was going to tell him and then it happened. I couldn’t just leave him. Everyone would have judged me. They would have said I was jumping ship instead of standing by the man I was supposed to love. They would have judged me and ridiculed me and said the worst things imaginable.”

“I…” Della was frozen in shock. She finally realized she was sitting there, mouth hanging open, staring. She snapped her mouth shut and glanced away. Her throat felt bone dry. It was hard to even swallow let alone form words. Finally, she glanced back at her sister. The tears had stopped. Evie sat, back ramrod straight. She stared forward, seeing absolutely nothing at all. “Are you sure?” Della finally whispered.

“Yes.” Evie didn’t look at her. “Yes, I’m sure. I- it’s just that… if I leave him now, I’m scared of what will happen. He’s so- fragile. Like one wrong move would send him over the edge. Into… I don’t even know. I don’t want to think about it. Sometimes I’m afraid he’s going to do something to harm himself.”

“No! He wouldn’t! Not after nearly a year of lying in a hospital bed, healing from all those skin grafts. He wouldn’t have gone through all that pain just to… uh- well…”

“I don’t know. He had people watching him in the hospital. He didn’t have a choice there. Although, maybe you’re right. Maybe he wouldn’t actively do something to harm himself. Maybe that was the wrong thing to say. He’s just- lost. We all are. I’m afraid that if I leave, that if I’m no longer there to support him then he wouldn’t have a life at all. He already doesn’t leave the house. He doesn’t see other people. He’s walled himself away because he can. He has the insurance money and he doesn’t ever need to leave. I do everything for him. Grocery shopping, driving him when he does have to go to the hospital, whatever it takes, Evie’s there to do it. Anyway, I think without me there, he would just give up.”

“You said though- that you were considering leaving before the accident?” Della’s throat closed up even tighter. She struggled to choke the words out. Her stomach churned violently. The only thing harder than seeing her sister with Thomas every single day was imagining a time when Evie and Thomas weren’t together.

Then I wouldn’t see him at all.

Evie hung her head. “Yes. We were fighting all the time. About everything. I didn’t want to go through with the wedding. I was going to tell him and then…”

“Then the accident happened.”

“Yes. And like I said, I couldn’t walk away. People would have called me a coward. I couldn’t live it down. I made a promise to myself that I would see him through this, see him well and happy and then I would leave. It might be excusable then. He’s changed. I’ve changed. Nothing is the same.”

“It would still be shocking.”

“I can see you’re shocked.”

Della blinked. “Of course I’m shocked. I never thought you were unhappy! I’m your sister and you never told me once!” The sting of those words cut deep. It was true. She and Evie had shared everything right from the time they were in the same womb. They played all those stupid identical twin tricks on everyone growing up, even on their own parents. Even now it was impossible for people to tell them apart if they didn’t want them to.

If we don’t want them to. Of course!

“Oh no. You’re thinking of something awful. I can just tell. You get this look on your face when you have these ideas. Like the time you thought me filling in for you at your lifeguard shift would be perfectly acceptable.”

“Hey, that was fine. Nothing happened.”

“Someone could have drowned.”

“No one ever drowns.”

“No one ever rolls their car over and burns alive and survives.”

The moment of levity faded at Evie’s words. Thomas Porter had been through hell. Literally. The flames from that vehicle seared up his right side, over his leg, his chest, his neck and swirled over his cheek. Mercifully, most of his face had been spared.

“I have an idea,” Della whispered. This time there was no humor in her tone. “It’s not a good one, but it might be a solution, at least for the next few months.”

“What’s that?” Evie leaned forward, obviously interested despite herself.

“We switch lives.”