“Okay.”
“Why don’t you sit in our car?” he said, stepping to the side so I could do that.
When I started for it, Mother began to follow, but Officer Monday asked her to wait. I knew why. They thought I wouldn’t say things in front of my mother. Simon took her hand. When I looked back at them, their roles appeared reversed. She suddenly looked like his charity date. How ironic, I thought. He was the one using psychology on her. It brought a smile to my face that I wiped away instantly as I got into the patrol car. The two officers got in and turned to me.
“So,” Officer Donald began, “tell us how this all started and everything you know about the man. We understand your sister told you his name?”
“She told me a name, but as I told my mother, I don’t know if that’s his real name. It was Bob Brukowski.”
“Did he send her a picture of himself over the Internet?” Officer Monday asked.
“I guess he did, but I never saw anything on her computer. I know only what she told me about him. Maybe she thought if she showed me his picture, I’d tell her he was too old for her or something.”
“So tonight you just know she was meeting this Bob Brukowski somewhere in this neighborhood, and the man was definitely older, and he was going to take her to his house?”
“Yes. She made a big deal about him being an older man and not a high school student. She was bragging about how much a mature man was attracted to her. I kept warning her, but she wouldn’t listen.”
“So what happened tonight?” Officer Monday asked. “How was this all set up?
“She had a plan,” I began, and started to describe it. As I spoke, the belief that Kaylee really would never be back grew stronger and stronger. I half wished that I had been there hiding in the shadows and watching, like the director of a movie, when Kaylee had met him.
“Does your sister have a cell phone?” Officer Donald asked.
“Yes, we both do, but we didn’t take our cell phones tonight.” I shrugged. “I guess I should have made sure we did. I was just so nervous about it all that I forgot.”
“I’ve got a teenage sister,” Officer Monday said. “Like all her friends, she won’t even go to the bathroom without her cell phone.”
“We were too involved in my sister’s plan. We didn’t think,” I said more emphatically, and threw in a few well-placed sobs.
I knew now that it was over, that it was happening. I should have felt more remorse, but a little voice inside me asked, If your twin sister is gone, are you still a twin? Won’t people stop mixing you up? Won’t you become your own person finally?
I had to be careful not to let the policemen see my smile. They wouldn’t understand.
No one who didn’t know us and how our mother had brought us up would understand.
• • •
Even with all the warnings and the bad stories out there, whose mother wouldn’t have a hard time believing her daughter would do something like this? Everybody thinks they’re raising angels. I saw that from the way my friends’ parents talked about them. How could their daughter be doing something as terrible as carrying on a romance over the Internet with an older man? And right under their noses? This was all especially true for our mother.
Simon Adams was right. Examples of this were constantly on the news. But our mother was always very confident that we wouldn’t do anything that was so forbidden or stupid. In her eyes, we were such goody-goodies. I hated it when she bragged about us and people looked at us as if we were right out of a fairy tale about two identical princesses, Cinderella clones without so much as a blemish on ou
r behavior or complexions.
When we were little, both of us used to believe that we hadn’t been born. We had descended from a cloud of angels and just floated into the delivery room. The stork really did bring us.
Mother had no idea how many things we had done recently that she wouldn’t approve of, mainly things I had done and that my dear abused sister would have to go along with or at least keep secret. Kaylee would have been suspected less. After all, no matter what Mother told other people or even what she told us, I knew in my heart that she favored Kaylee, despite her effort not to show any bias.
However, I had no doubt that her favoring Kaylee gave her nightmares. What if I could tell that she did favor one of us over the other? How horrible for her. All our lives, she had made an effort to treat us equally and to think of us as halves of the same perfect image of a daughter she had created. The smallest thing that could make one of us different from the other was vigorously avoided. She was adamant about not loving one of us more than the other.
No one suffered more under this rule than Daddy, who sometimes accidentally and sometimes deliberately tried to treat us as individuals. I pretended to be as upset about that as Mother wanted us to be, but in my secret chest of feelings and thoughts, shut away from Mother’s eyes, I was pleased, even when he did something for Kaylee that I might envy. At least, in his thinking, there was a difference, and we weren’t simply duplicates or clones, as some of Mother’s friends occasionally referred to us. It always annoyed me that she didn’t mind when people said that. I did. Who wanted to be a clone?
I was tired of hearing how we were monozygotic twins developed from a single egg-and-sperm combination that splits a few days after conception, that our DNA originated from the same source. I didn’t even have my own DNA like most everyone else. I’d had to share everything with Kaylee from the moment I was conceived. Mother often told people that we even took up and used equal space in her womb and that everything that had come from her to nourish us was consumed in “perfectly equal amounts.” I never knew how she could know that, but she would say, “How else would they be so identical at birth?”
According to Mother’s logic and beliefs, how could I ever even exist without Kaylee? Our hearts beat with the same rhythm. We took the same number of breaths each day. If one of us sneezed, the other soon would, and that was true for every yawn, every ache, and every shiver. We were the mirror sisters; we lived in each other’s reflected image.
Well, maybe not now; maybe finally not now. I could walk away, and Kaylee would be stuck in the glass looking out. “Come back, come help me!” she would cry.
“Help yourself,” I would say. “I did. That’s why you’re trapped in the mirror.”