Pieces of My Sister's Life

As the winter solstice approaches, the Beast of the Atlantic Nor’ Easter awakens, like the Vampire rising from dormancy, to menace our Island. It revives itself, siphoning the last dregs of heat energy from the ocean surface and alchemizing it with the briny spray, to make prodigious sheets of rain and winds of frightful power. Aye, it is physically manifest; like a monstrous Steam Engine, But this Devil’s spawn also has an immanent cunning, its capacity to addle the great ocean, the exercise of its winds to set the Sea churning upon herself. The Beast’s foul breath goads her skin into dips and swirls, eddies and vortices, which agitate the reposeful depths, and they rise up in protest. Unaccustomed to the surface, and buffeted by the Beast’s winds, the depths rapidly lose their equilibrium. As back falls upon forth, to lashes at fro, the roiling becomes a full-scale riot; and the Sea loses all providence of her own natural ebb and flow.

With the Sea in its claw, the Beast unleashes the Tides onto our humbled shores. Screaming gales pour through our very souls, as the Beast prepares to devour the Island wholly, like Jonah was swallowed by the Great Fish. Aye, but the Beast is an evil and diabolical one. At the brink of our Armageddon, the Beast relents suddenly, as if relishing the promise of another violation of its wretched victim.

Whence the Beast continues towards the Mainland, it does not yet glance aback at the destruction it hath wrought. But the Sea, our life’s blood and earthly salvation, she will return to us as she has for perpetuity, and we shall forgive her with no conditions.

Thomas Rathburn
Southeast Lighthouse Log
Block Island
December 1798

Prologue

T
HERE’S A PHOTOGRAPH
I keep in my bottom drawer, buried beneath the strips of wrapping paper that haven’t yet found a gift that fits them. In the picture two girls stand arm in arm on the Rhode Island shore, dressed in new pink bathing suits. They face away from the water so their dark hair blows against their sunburned cheeks. They’re laughing because they think they know each other.

In those years we weren’t speaking I’d pull the picture from my drawer at least once a week. I’d study it like it was a microscopic specimen, a DNA spiral or an amoeba. I’d look into those little girls’ eyes, searching for a soul. But no matter how closely I scrutinized, still I couldn’t tell which was me.

I don’t take out that picture anymore. The only pictures I let myself see were taken over the past year, pictures in which we look so different even I can’t recognize our likeness. Much more disturbing in their own way, but for me less painful than those two girls who believed all of life would be an arm-in-arm, pink-bathing-suited affair. I don’t want to remember how alike we were. Seven years old and we had one face, one body and one future. Only a decade later and I wanted Eve dead.

We lived in our own world, Eve and I. I can imagine us floating together in our mother’s womb, not caring if anyone else existed. And that’s pretty much how it was for the first years of our life, the comfort of us watching them.

Our world had its own language, which we spoke before we learned the words outsiders could understand. Daddy said he used to stop by our door and listen, two babies barely old enough to walk, jabbering away like foreigners. It wasn’t a language with grammar or syntax so much as an understanding arising from shared experience, maybe also a twinnish telepathy inherent in our shared genes. I wish I could remember what it was like and what we were saying, but the language is like those two girls at the beach, a piece of another life.

I try to pinpoint a defining moment when things changed. Maybe it’s that a world can only stretch so far before it finally breaks, that a two-person world strains under the weight of three.

The third was Justin, and I met him at the age before girls stop playing with boys. It was soon after our mother left, the day after we’d moved to Block Island, a two-hour ferry ride from New London with the few belongings our mother hadn’t taken with her. And that day, dizzy from the loss of everything we’d known, I found him.

He was at the end of our shared drive, straddling the branch of an apple tree that seemed to be made for climbing, carrying a cardboard sword and wearing a football helmet. I liked him at once.

I walked up to the tree without speaking, wondering if he’d mind if I climbed up there beside him. He peered down at me and lifted his sword. “You’re on my property,” he said. “Who are you?”

I stepped back, opened my mouth and closed it again, smiled.

“You can’t remember?”

I shook my head, finally managed to speak. “I’m Kerry.”

He jumped down with a roar and lunged forward with his sword. I grabbed onto my stomach, choked, teetered and finally fell. From then on we were friends.

Justin was three years older at an age when three years may as well be three decades. But he played with us, maybe drawn in by the allure of leadership and protection, maybe because Eve and I were the only other kids on a street lined with old couples and divorcées. We idolized him. He was our hero, gave us the guidance our father didn’t have the time or the sense to provide. And if in the beginning I sometimes felt a vague sense of loss without knowing why, soon I learned to ignore it, forgot the language Eve and I once shared, lived in a bigger and only slightly colder space.

We taught Justin how to skip rope and fold origami swans, how to press fall leaves in cellophane to make their color last forever. He taught us how to dig quahogs from the sand with our bare toes, how to cut an earthworm quick and clean so both halves could squirm away. We ran six-legged races, my right laces tied to Justin’s left, Eve’s left tied to his right, and we showed off to his mom and felt like things would never change.

But the times I remember most are those rich rainy afternoons on our covered front porch, when Justin told his stories. I have no idea how a child just starting in life could be filled with a lifetime of imaginings. But already at the age of nine Justin had conjured the first hints of the magic that would later make him famous. Already he’d been to Canardia, a world with butterflies as big as birds, oceans that reflected rainbow colors, and waves that washed up on the shore with the sound of an angel choir. There were fairies and bandits and child heroes just our age who at the last minute always managed to prevail.

This magic world took over where our old world had left off. I’d hold Eve’s hand and close my eyes, fight bandits and fly with the fairies. I’d come time and again to the edge of death, huddle close and feel the damp chill of Eve’s skin against my arm. I would laugh when I was afraid. I’d feel part of something bigger.

I remember one night Eve and I in bed lying head to toe, feet pushed up into the legs of each other’s pajama bottoms. Eve, tracing her finger along the stitching in our quilt, said, “I’m gonna marry Justin Caine someday.”

And I wanted to fight back, wanted to tell her how it was. To tell her that he was mine and she was mine, so to take him would break me in two. But I couldn’t think of the right way to say it. I smiled and shrugged and pulled my feet out from her pajama legs. I let her think that we could both live in this straining world of two that became three. Although even back then we both, in a way, knew the truth.

I was questioned thoroughly after Eve’s death, four hours of interrogation by a man with eyes too kind to be questioning a murderer. The police had analyzed her blood and found the morphine, and then they’d turned to me. The police had asked questions before, in the middle of that horrific year we turned seventeen. And this round of questioning might’ve turned out different if the man had known what to ask, given any hint of knowing what had happened long before Eve’s death. But his questions had no real meaning, so I answered calmly and rationally, with the right degree of indignation. Maybe that means my conscience is finally clear. Maybe the grip of the past has loosed its hold.

This is part of what I’ve learned, that we weren’t wrong for going after what we wanted. It was the events that were evil, but us, we were kids. We were stupid; we didn’t understand the power of our own choices. I learned so damned much those last few months of her life. So much she gave to me, so much her dying taught me. That’s what it is to be a twin; you become wiser than you could ever be on your own, wiser even than two people together. Seeing life from two sides, two souls, you learn the true meaning and measure of everything that comes your way. It’s the only way that I know to see the world through God’s eyes.

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