Her: A Memoir (20 page)

The police noted that Cara had started to tidy the room after sitting on the toilet to shoot up and must have gotten dizzy. She simply sat down and closed her eyes and never got up. A bottle of Windex with the top screwed off sat on the floor beside her. She’d cleaned her needle with window cleaner and then tidied the room. It was clear that Cara intended to go on with her day. If she’d died instantly, she would have left a mess. If she’d planned on dying, she would have left a note. Writers leave notes.

The police and paramedics sent Mom downstairs, first to the kitchen, then to the living room. Mom was not to see them taking Cara out of the house.

A psychic once told Cara that she’d die young, and on the opposite side of the world from where she was born. She took her last breath in the town where she was born. She took her last breath at home.

Chapter 21

Cara’s boyfriends came to
her wake and her funeral. They vied to carry her casket. Joseph Mario was a painter. He accompanied me in the procession of cars from the funeral home to the church. He was nearly family because he had given her a ring. He was the last boyfriend to propose, the second to do so in Italy. He wasn’t her fiancé; he was her ex-fiancé, but he was the last of her fiancés. I invited him to ride with immediate kin at the head of the procession. He’d bought her diamond in Chinatown and had it fastened to a platinum band. We sat side by side in the convoy of mourners following directly behind the hearse. I didn’t rent a limousine. I selected a van that was ordinary but large enough for six. Cara wouldn’t have cared about the car. I splurged on lavender and tulips and zinnia. The boyfriends grabbed armfuls to take to her grave.

Charlie, Cara’s coresident at The Meadows, had also given her a ring. He’d twisted a black-eyed Susan around her finger and tied it, pulling the bloom through a knot, knocking off some of the petals. The band had loosened but she continued to wear it; she’d slip the ring off and re-loop the stem, securing it in place. Cara and Devon met at Bard College during the first week of freshman orientation. He was her truest love. Cara carved his effigy from wood and burned it after he left her. Devon delivered her eulogy. Eric, I didn’t know well; he stood at the rear of the church. Jude was an architect and never proposed. She’d met Danny on Match.com. He cued the music at the funeral home. Brian was an attorney; he proposed before any of the others. Cara said his diamond was a chip. She’d accepted it and then given it right back.

A few of her lovers weren’t in attendance, and there were some I didn’t know well enough to invite. Ethan told me over the telephone that he didn’t like death. Kevin’s car broke down on the interstate and he missed the services. Jared was a jazz drummer and didn’t show. Travis was her childhood boyfriend and mailed his condolences. Ishmael was a lover, not a boyfriend, and couldn’t be reached. Kahlil told me he wouldn’t be coming. He sent three calla lilies.

The diamond in Cara’s engagement ring from Kahlil weighed a fraction over half a carat and was set in a channel platinum setting. It had no visible inclusions. Mom had given the diamond itself to Cara as a graduation gift. She gave each of us a diamond: one diamond necklace for each girl, one diamond from each of her marriages. She had had the necklaces and the pendants modeled after the illusion style of her own mother’s engagement ring. The diamond pendants hung on strands of yellow gold, anchored in silvery squares so the diamonds looked larger. Cara had the diamond from her necklace extracted and put into a ring of Kahlil’s design.

*   *   *

I stood at Cara’s casket and received her mourners. Red roses arranged in the word
SISTER
were positioned on an easel behind me and stood as high as my head. Mom had bought them on my behalf. Clear glass vases filled with seasonal flowers stood tall on the floor. Notes that accompanied the flowers were propped and folded in front of them like labels on a buffet. A kneeling pew sat in front of the casket. Some people approached, ignoring Cara’s body, coming to me instead. Others walked directly to Cara and touched the edge of her coffin, kneeling in front of her. I thought of them as the bravest of the grievers.

The funeral home had faded pink carpets. The end tables were decorated with inspirational cards and tissues for weeping, boxes and boxes of them. The thermostat was kept low and the pinch-pleated drapes were drawn. The windows were closed and topped with stiff sage valances. Metal folding chairs with padded seats formed twelve rows, divided into two sections by an aisle that led to my sister. My mother asked the funeral director to display some childhood photographs of Cara. He had obliged, scattering the images around the funeral home on waist-high viewing tables topped with lace doilies and propped on stands beside plastic potted ferns and bowls of peppermints. Pictures were plentiful: Cara at three, feeding a goat with a baby bottle at a petting zoo, my mother beside her, holding Cara’s hand steady so that the goat could suckle; Cara at five jumping up and down on her bed after a bath, in our Barton Avenue apartment, her hair cut like a boy’s; Cara cradling a beloved doll; Cara in a grade-school headshot wearing a light blue shirt studded with rhinestones; Cara smiling for the camera as she got ready for prom. Cara beaming with pride after her turn as Mrs. Bedwin in our high school production of
Oliver!
, her arm around Fagan’s shoulder. The funeral home director displayed the grad thesis images I’d taken of me and Cara, exhibition style. These photographs—large, 32 x 40 inches each—were strung with wire, hanging from the ornate picture rails of the funeral home’s ceiling molding. Landscapes of blazing white snow looked stark against the paisley wallpaper.

Our father had missed all of the years displayed in the photographs. Cara and I had maintained some careful contact with him throughout our twenties, though not enough to invite him to either of our weddings or graduations. I’d told him that I loved him and he’d done the same. But my words felt false. I didn’t love him. I only thought that I should. He hadn’t earned my trust, let alone my love. When Cara died my budding relationship with our father went with her. I can only say in retrospect that I must not have wanted it enough to forgive him his abuse. The question of his attending the funeral was a difficult one. Part of me felt that even though he’d been a terrible father, he had the right to say good-bye to his daughter. The other part of me worried for my mother. I didn’t want him to come and make a scene. That had always been his way. Perhaps I was cowardly in my choice to exclude him from the services. I asked Jedediah to call him in Florida where he lives and tell him I didn’t want him there. And that command was both true and untrue. I
did
want my father to console me in my loss, our loss. But he had never been that type of father. That father might have kept Cara from her elegant casket.

Jedediah had made a CD of Cara’s favorite music for the funeral home staff to play over the loudspeakers: Jonathan Richman, the Magnetic Fields, Indigo Girls, and Otis Redding. I greeted Cara’s attendants to Jedediah’s sound track. Attendants took turns visiting me casket-side, bringing me glasses of water.

Few of Cara’s girlfriends attended her funeral. She hadn’t had many. After Kahlil left, she’d spent most of her time trying to win the affections of men. She didn’t want to be “a barren old maid,” she’d told me; she’d said I’d better learn from her “mistakes as an irresponsible wife” and hold on to my own husband. “Don’t do what I did and go out and cheat and lie and run around. You’ll be sorry if you do.”

Those of Cara’s girlfriends who did come to the service stood at the back of the room. One told me she “was there for my sister, not for me.” Cara had spent hours, I imagine, telling her how I’d kicked Cara out of my house and abandoned her in her time of need, and Cara’s friend had believed her. Her friend was right, I thought. I’d made the wrong choice, toeing the hard line. Now I was going to have to live or die with my tough love, once and for all, with no love left to give anyone. One of Cara’s friends from graduate school brought her baby boy. She passed the serene infant around a circle of guests: our high school teachers, my mother’s colleagues, relatives I’d only seen once or twice in my life. My distant second cousin kissed this woman’s baby. The little cherub brightened the room of death. I wondered how many friends Cara had exhausted and run through by the time she ended her life.

I greeted all of Cara’s guests, including one that was difficult to recognize.

Mike the Marine, our ex-stepfather, came to pay his respects. He knelt on the viewing pew beside Cara’s casket, making the sign of the cross, bowing his head in prayer. His mouth moved as he recited a Hail Mary in his head. Mike never once looked at the dead daughter he’d left in the haze of Jacksonville, North Carolina, when she was an impressionable twelve.

I’d not laid eyes on Mike since the day he’d pulled out of our driveway and never come back. It had been fifteen years.

I interrupted him in prayer, knelt beside him, moving close enough that I felt his breath at my ear.

“You’re a little late,” I whispered. “I think that means you should leave.”

Mike nodded, stood up from the pew, and paid his last respects with a blank stare at Cara’s sympathy flowers. Did he think the answers to his long absence could be found in a wreath of tightly bound pink carnations?

*   *   *

This is how it is: We were always who we were, only together. We were girls who made a language about time and memory. We feared being ourselves because it meant being alone. We are bound in our own bodies and share one mortality. One day there will be one of us left with just the memory of the other. We prepare and we age.

If you are a twin, you watch yourself live two lives—yours and hers. It’s constant comparison. I am never as good as the bad I wanted her to be. I was the only soldier I needed. We couldn’t have known what splitting would mean. Time speeds past fast, scattering like shrapnel, and is quiet as cobwebs. We wait for the ambush. Sister will find out first; she’ll be my living memory. She will be the body left standing.

I fragmented into the loved and the pitied and the loathed; it took me five years. I became a deafening danger bomb, a tick you couldn’t find if you hadn’t buried it in yourself. I refer to myself as “her,” “that girl.” Nobody wants to look me directly in the eye. Sister still sees me.

*   *   *

At Cara’s funeral, people saw in us the same person: one dead, one half-living. Through me, Cara’s ghost came to life. I was her specter. If she hadn’t already died, I’d have killed her for doing that to me. I pulled a stray thread from the hem of my dress. I pulled the limp orchids from my hair and crushed them.

I told each of the boyfriends at her funeral the same thing; I told each of them something different.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Cara loved you more than she loved any man.” The boyfriends nodded in thanks.

“I wish you’d seen how she’d light up over you,” I mentioned to some.

“She told me she wanted to marry you,” I said to one of the boyfriends who hadn’t proposed. Cara had said that about all of them, hopeful that one would eventually make her a wife again. “You were the one,” I said.

“She would have made a great mother,” I lied to one of her more attractive boyfriends. “She wanted nothing more in the world than to be a mother. Your children would have been beautiful.” She’d wanted a child. I stood and gazed down at my sister. She’d never hold her own baby.

“We’ll both be mothers if one of us has children,” Cara used to say to me.

“Our babies will be half-siblings, actually,” I’d counter. Identical twins are born with exact genetics, which makes their children related in the same way they would be if they shared a parent.

A few of Cara’s boyfriends asked me to hold their hands. I gripped their palms and squeezed. I gave the boyfriends my ghost hand, Cara’s gift from the afterlife. Holding my hand was like holding hers. We used to hold each other’s hands. We’d done it since we were girls. We wanted to know what men felt when they touched us, so we held on to each other. Our rings are size 4, and our fingers are short; women’s bodies, children’s hands.

I took care with the boyfriends at her funeral. I knew they’d shown her the love I couldn’t in the last years of her life. It was no small thing to enter into the fold of our twinship as a lover. Lovers had to pass the tests we administered. She’d ask them to dinner and call to invite me. I’d ask endless questions and dip my fork into their entrées. At the end of her life, they’d tolerated Cara when I needed to retreat from her. The boyfriends provided her with companionship; she slept beside their warm bodies.

*   *   *

We ate ziti and meatballs at the after-wake gathering. I couldn’t eat; I chewed my ziti into tiny bits and spit it into a napkin. I sat wordless in a corner, my plate on my lap. Mom looked at the plate and then at the wadded-up napkin on the floor. She left the room crying.

I’d stopped eating so I wouldn’t look like my sister. I cried and heard her sobs. I looked at myself in the mirror after she died and pulled at the tiny roll of her fat on my stomach. I ran my palm down the curve of her hip. I was more Cara than myself, so I starved her away. The smaller I made myself, the farther I traveled from her. The more the bones on my back showed, the less it was hers. I needed to rid myself of her likeness to travel back to my own self. I was the original egg; the doctor had said so.

It was simple: When an egg splits in two, the division is never equal. The splitting egg pulls essential nutrients as it goes and makes itself into a second functioning body of cells. The original egg remains, fighting to survive; it’s been stripped of more than half of itself. The egg that splits becomes dominant; it drains more of the shared placenta, requires more space in the womb. One twin grows larger and stronger at the expense of the other. This twin is always bigger at birth. The twin who makes herself out of her sister must do so by nearly killing off that sister. Cara outweighed me by a pound; she’d begun her hungry taking, her killing of me, from the very start.