Then Sunday—five days ago, now—there was a text from my mother to my sister: What time are you picking her up today? Dad and I were thinking about going out to dinner if you can get here before six.
There was a long gap of time after my mother’s message, with no response. I could imagine my mother’s blood pressure rising by the hour, as the phone remained adamantly silent. It wasn’t until seven o’clock that night that my sister finally responded. Can you handle Charlotte for a few more days? I’m not ready to come home yet.
My mother replied immediately. How many days are we talking? Are you OK?
I’m doing fine. Finding the answers I’ve been looking for.
By this point, my mother had seemingly lost interest in her daughter’s journey to self-discovery. Mostly, she seemed peeved.
You know I love Charlotte but this is a lot. My osteoarthritis is flaring up.
There was a two-minute pause after this. I imagined my sister staring at the blank text message field, thinking her options through. My mother’s furious blinking while she waited for my sister’s inevitable apology, her promise to return so very soon. It wasn’t like Elli to ask for favors.
But there was no apology, just a terse final text, more command than atonement: Get Sam to help you. She’ll know what to do. She’ll get it.
And then: nothing.
I looked at Charlotte, scampering back toward us now, her palms black with dirt and bejeweled rings drooping from every finger. What, exactly, was I supposed to “get”? The child? How to help my mom take care of her? My sister’s cryptic journey to make sense of things?
Or was it the impulse to bail out of your life that my sister knew I’d understand?
THEN
5
A TALENT AGENT NAMED Harriet Sunday discovered Elli and me on the beach in Santa Barbara when we were nine years old. Towheaded little girls, freckled and sandy, sun-faded bikinis, identical down to the dimples in our left cheeks. We had wide-set blue eyes, which lent us a hypnotic baby-doll quality, both alien and appealing. When we walked down the street in perfect syncopation, blond waves swinging about our shoulders, people would stop in their tracks and stare.
Harriet must have known right away that she’d hit the jackpot.
I remember Harriet’s arrival in my life as a shadow falling over us, while we sat there at the high-water line, digging in the sand. She wore a vintage YSL smoking jacket, cropped black hair tucked under a Dodgers baseball cap, and cat-eye sunglasses. “Are you building a sandcastle?” she asked, her voice smoked and husky.
Elli was frozen, our mother’s admonishments written across her face—never talk to strangers—but I, since birth, had never followed the rules. “A jail,” I said. “A jail for crabs.”
Harriet liked this. She crouched down and studied us, hard, in a way that most adults didn’t bother to do: not as circus freaks, a double novelty act, but as if she was looking for something of particular value that existed underneath the dimples and blond hair.
“Do you girls like the movies?” she asked. Even though her tone was casual I could hear the intensity behind her words, as if my entire life hinged on the answer to this question. Which, looking back, it did.
Something about this emboldened me. “Duh,” I said. “That’s a stupid question.”
“Samantha.” Elli hit me in the shoulder, horrified. But Harriet just laughed, deep and long. Ten years later she’d be dead of lung cancer but that laugh—a raspy rumble that seemed to start somewhere deep in her stomach—made me trust her, because only a good person could have a laugh that sounded that honest.
Sometimes I wonder what would have become of me if Harriet hadn’t come to the beach that day. (Not a beach person, Harriet. She was coerced to attend a beloved goddaughter’s birthday party.) Had we not been discovered by Harriet, would I have found my way to Hollywood on my own? Was acting in my genes or was it inserted there only through Harriet’s suggestion?
And—if Harriet hadn’t died a horrible early death when I was nineteen and still only half-formed, would things have gone so sideways for me later?
There are moments in life when you collide with something that sends you careening down a path from which you can never return. We are ping-pong balls, paddled about by fate and coincidence, doing our best to wrestle back some agency from the forces that move our lives. On our deathbeds, our last thoughts a faint echo: what if, what if, what if.
My mother materialized then, having looked up from her book long enough to register the presence of the curious stranger crouching by her little girls. Towel wrapped tightly around cellulite thighs, zinc oxide on her nose, her fists already clenched at the ready: “Can I help you?”
Harriet stood, her voice going solicitous. A business card was suddenly in her hand and she thrust it at my mother. “I’m an agent,” she said. “TV and film. I’m interested in your girls.”
“Well, we’re not interested,” my mother responded. She put a protective hand on each of our shoulders.
“I am!” I objected, shaking my mother’s hand off.
Harriet’s gaze flickered across my mother’s drugstore sunglasses, the threadbare towel with sunscreen stains across the logo. “There’s a significant amount of money to be made. No pressure, though. I totally understand your concerns.”
My mother’s face twitched. She tightened her grip on Elli’s shoulder with one hand, while the other slowly reached for the business card, almost as if being pulled by marionette strings.
I could have sworn that Harriet winked at me then. “Give me a call and I’ll turn your girls into stars,” she said before walking off down the shore.
Stars.
The wind picked up, blowing sand across the beach and into our faces. Elli cried out, rubbing her fists in her eyes—tears falling that my mother hurried to wipe away. As for me, I didn’t feel anything. I was already blinded, already lost.
* * *
—
I was not a complete stranger to acting. Our suburban elementary school had a serviceable performing arts program and I’d participated in productions of Mary Poppins and Peter Pan. I loved it: the cardboard props used so many times that they were soft along the edges, the way backstage smelled of dirty socks and spilled soda, the shocking heat of the stage lights against your skin. But most of all, I loved having an audience. Onstage, I could be simultaneously the center of attention and totally invisible. Here I am, look at me. Here I am, you can’t see me at all.
Maybe this was a result of being a twin, of feeling like I was always only a part of a whole, never a main character in my own right. People look at you a lot when you’re a twin, but they never really see you. Their eyes are always flicking away and over your shoulder, scanning for the presence of your other half. As matching children, you are objects of fascination, but almost never complete human beings.
Often, no one can tell exactly who you are anyway.
Onstage, I could be whole. I could be whole and I could be anyone I chose to be: a fairy, a witch, a pauper, any flight of fancy I could temporarily inhabit and bring to life. I lived for that moment of stepping into someone else’s skin, the excitement of putting it on and feeling what it was like to be them for a while.
All these years of group therapy later, I’ve come to understand how my twindom drove me toward a career of pretending to be someone else entirely. With my sister, I may only have been half of a whole; but without her, who was Samantha at all?
* * *
—