I'll Be You(27)

Two women stepped through the gate, opening it just enough to squeeze through before quickly closing it shut behind them. I stumbled backward, disoriented, as an unexpected thought sprang into my head: Wait, twins?

The women who’d materialized from the other side were identical. They both had hair cropped short to the scalp—not quite shaved, but close—and skin that was tanned from too much direct sun. They both wore white linen sack dresses that hung loose around their torsos, with practical canvas tennis shoes that were brown with dust. Twins—except that they weren’t twins at all. As I recovered from my surprise, I realized that one was older, with crepey skin on her neck and stubble that was threaded with gray; and the other was young, and heavier set, her unplucked eyebrows as thick as caterpillars. The women didn’t look a bit alike, probably weren’t even related, which made the matching outfits that much more alarming.

They gave me only a glance as they passed by me, their eyes instead glued to the asphalt in front of them as they headed off down the road. They had canvas tote bags over their arms and I wondered if they were off to do some shopping in town. Or maybe they were going to the orchard down the road to forage for avocados? But in this heat, and without a car? The nearest store was at least a two-mile-walk away.

What kind of wellness retreat was this?

Or was it a wellness retreat at all?

Culty, I thought, as it sank in for real. My sister has joined a cult.

“Hey!” I called after them. “Hey, can I talk to you?”

They didn’t stop. If anything, they walked faster, the older woman hunching her shoulders, as Caterpillar Brows placed a reassuring hand between her shoulder blades. It was almost as if they were afraid of me. Or maybe they were afraid of being punished for speaking to me? Had they taken a vow of silence? Was GenFem some sort of monastic retreat?

I tried again, softening my voice until it was friendly and nonthreatening. “Please? I just want to know if you know my sister! Her name’s Elli. It’s possible that she’s going by Eleanor. She looks like…well, she’s my identical twin so she looks just like me. Is she in there?”

It was as if they hadn’t heard me at all.

“Look. You can just nod yes or no, you don’t need to even speak! Just let me know if she’s there, and if she’s OK.”

The younger woman stopped abruptly. She slowly turned to face me. A scowl had darkened her face, those impressive eyebrows drawing a sharp line across her brow.

“She’s not your sister anymore. You’re toxic.” The words were a low growl, a challenge. “She’s ours.”

I reared back with surprise. She bared her teeth at me and then jerked back around, grabbing the hand of the older woman and dragging her away from me, down the road.

So Elli was inside.

I thought of chasing them and demanding more information, but Charlotte was still in the car, and I couldn’t abandon her. Instead, I helplessly watched them turn the corner and disappear.

I turned to face the gate again, wondering why this fence needed to be so high, why the gate needed to be so heavily fortified. What, exactly, was behind it that I wasn’t supposed to see? I craned my neck up at the security camera, which was still pointed down at me, and saw my own reflection mirrored back at me. I wondered if that disembodied voice was still watching me. I wondered, too, if it was possible that my sister was also standing with that invisible woman, watching me on the monitor. Watching her own daughter, locked out on the other side of the gate. My God—could she be sitting there staring at the monitor, waiting for me to leave with her child? The Elli I’d known would never do that. It was unfathomable.

Who were these people, and what had they done to my sister? Was it possible that she had no intention of ever coming home at all?

I slowly raised my fists up above my head and then, with an exaggerated grimace, I extended both my middle fingers up in a silent Screw you.

I turned to see Charlotte still staring at me through the open window, her brow wrinkled with worry. I offered her a reassuring smile. “OK, Charlotte! Time to go home,” I chirped.

Then I got in my car and we drove away. My ears buzzed with the sound of cicadas, stirring up into a violent whirring swarm, blocking any clarity of my thoughts. This was not a good place, or a benign one, I could feel it in my nerves; but what was it? What exactly was GenFem, and how was I going to get my sister back?





10




RIBBONS OF CARS SNAKED up the coast to Santa Barbara, threading past the salt marshes and the polo club and the beaches where slick surfers bobbed in the water like seals. Last week, a surfer had been bitten by a shark. I had watched an interview on TV where he said the first thing he was going to do after he healed was get back in the water, because now the odds were in his favor. “No one ever gets bitten twice,” he said with a laugh from his hospital bed. And I’d thought to myself, You’d be surprised.

We sat in traffic for half an hour, the stop-and-go lulling Charlotte to sleep. Back at my parents’ house, I deposited Charlotte in her portable crib before going to look for my mother.

I found her sitting in the back garden on a meditation cushion, eyes closed, legs splayed out before her. Sage smoked on a brass plate by her knee, filling the air with a thick cloud of bitter smoke. She wore a Japanese kimono that she’d arranged around her like an altar cloth.