It had been ten years since I last saw my twin sister. There had been a time, early on in our separation, when she was all I could think about—I saw her everywhere: pouring drinks in a rowdy pub in central London, contemplating Winged Victory in the Louvre, lighting a cigarette on a darkened Roman street. And every time I closed my eyes there she was, hollow-cheeked and borderline feral. She stalked my subconscious and materialized whenever my mind wandered for even a fraction of a second.
But as time and distance wore on, my memory of her faded. Occasionally, I woke up in the middle of the night sweating, convinced that something was wrong with her, and I would spend the rest of the night sitting by the phone, waiting to hear that something had happened, but then morning would come and life would return to normal.
Since that strange three a.m. phone call and the subsequent discovery of the podcast, the shadowy figure of my sister had once more been lurking on the periphery of my thoughts. I had largely avoided succumbing, but with my sister’s usual impeccably cruel timing, thoughts of her were impossible to shake the night Caleb returned home. With his familiar lanky form finally slumbering beside me once again, I tried to sleep, but images of my sister at her worst (smudged eyeliner, vacant eyes, bloody nose) flickered rapidly across the inside of my eyelids.
Sleep was out of the question, no matter how desperately I wanted it. I rose quietly, then microwaved a cup of tea, grabbed an afghan, and curled up on the couch, planning to watch episodes of The X-Files on Netflix. Programming about aliens and human-sized worms prowling the sewer system was the ultimate in escapism and rarely failed to calm me when I was anxious. Despite this, I froze at least once every twenty minutes, certain I heard my phone ringing. My connection to my sister had been dulled over the years—first by drugs, then by distance—but my body insisted Lanie was calling out for me. I hadn’t decided if I would answer.
By the time the sun broke over the tops of the downtown Brooklyn high-rises, there had been no call that Lanie was dead, maimed, or otherwise, and I decided I had been mistaken. It seemed Lanie and I weren’t connected after all; maybe we never had been.
“Morning, love,” Caleb mumbled, padding out of the bedroom and rubbing a hand over his sleepy face and through his loose brown curls. “How long have you been up?”
“A while,” I admitted, handing him the slice of buttered toast I had prepared for myself and dropping another into the toaster.
He made short work of it and grinned. “I’ve missed your cooking, babe.”
“Stop it,” I said, hitting him playfully in the stomach. “Like I’m supposed to believe you were dining on gourmet fare in the DRC. I know how you aid workers do it. It’s all gruel, beer, and snack cakes.”
Caleb caught my hand and tugged me toward him. I licked my lips and stepped closer, tucking my fingers into the waistband of his pajama pants, looser than they had been when he left. When my fingertips hit his mildly feverish skin, something inside me softened. Everything was going to be okay. The podcast no longer mattered; the past and the lies I had constructed on top of it no longer mattered. All that mattered existed within the circuit of our hearts and flesh.
Caleb lowered his face to mine, our lips connecting. I barely noticed his teeth had not been brushed in more than twenty-four hours. Caleb was home, and everything was safe and warm again.
My cell phone sounded shrilly from the bedroom, crumbling the cocoon that had been forming around us. My stomach dropped. Lanie.
“Leave it,” Caleb murmured, grabbing at me as I pulled away.
But the mounting dread was too strong to ignore, and I nearly choked on my racing heart as I hurried to answer the call.
“Josie, sweetheart, I’m sorry,” Ellen said, the unnatural softness in her demeanor sending prickles down my spine.
“What?” I asked, more an impotent puff of air than a word.
“There’s no easy way to tell you this. She’s dead. I’m so sorry.”
I touched my breastbone, my fingertips pushing into my skin. I could still feel my sister pulsing beneath my chest; she didn’t feel dead. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah, honey, I’m sure. I haven’t seen . . . her, if that’s what you’re asking. But Mom got a call from someone with the Life Force Collective this morning.”
I paused, Ellen’s words permeating my consciousness slowly. The call had come from the Life Force Collective. Lanie wasn’t dead.
My mother was.
“Oh. All right.”
The flatness of my own words surprised me. I had imagined this moment more times than I could count, and I had always expected that I would cry, that I would scream, that I would be inconsolable, flattened by the lost chances. I expected a sense of emptiness, of despair, but as it turned out, I felt nothing.
Ellen inhaled sharply. “Well. Yes.”
I nodded, a gesture Ellen could not see. Pulling the bedroom door shut, I asked, “How did it happen?”
“She . . . Oh, hon, she hung herself.”
A shiver ran through my bones as I pictured my mother’s thin body swinging in the air, her neck at an unnatural angle. A sob threatened to escape my throat, and I was strangely pleased that I had to choke it back. Perhaps I wasn’t so cold after all.
“Where should I send the flowers? To the funeral home or to your mom’s house?”
“Skip the flowers and just hand-deliver yourself to Mom’s house.”
“Ellen, I’m not going home.”
“Josie, you have to come home. You’re her daughter.”
“The daughter she abandoned more than a decade ago! I don’t have to do anything.”
“She was still your mother.”
“She’s dead. It doesn’t matter if I’m there or not. She’s going to be just as dead if I’m there as she is if I’m here.”
“I’m going to pretend you didn’t just say that. You know very well funerals are not for the dead. They’re for the living the dead have left behind. We need you here. My mother needs you here. If you think things have been bad with that podcast—not that you ever once bothered to call Mom to see how she was handling things—they’re about to get a whole lot worse. That bitch Parnell is going to be beating down my mother’s door, and you will be there to help deflect her.”
“Ellen, you know I told Caleb both my parents were dead,” I said, dropping my voice and glancing toward the bedroom door.
“And you honestly think that’s a secret you can keep? Even now? Especially now?” She paused for my response, but I had none. She sniffed. “Fine. Tell him that my mother died. Problem solved. Just come home.”
“I can’t. I’m sorry.”
“Goddammit, Josie—”
“I’m sorry,” I repeated, disconnecting the call.
My cousin generally insisted on having the last word, so my finger was poised to decline the call that immediately followed. The phone rang again, and once more I hit the red button to ignore it. After the third attempt, I powered the phone down completely. Ellen could call all she wanted, but I wasn’t going back to Elm Park.
Caleb, holding the half-eaten remains of my second piece of toast, pushed open the door and peered inside. “Jo? Is everything okay?”
I opened my mouth to say Yes but a strangled sob slipped out instead. Caleb took me in his arms, rubbing my back in gentle circles and asking me what happened.