I'll Be You(4)

3




MY PARENTS’ HOUSE WAS starting to smell like old people, which alarmed me: like furniture that had been collecting dust mites for too many decades, ancient cooking smells trapped in the brocade curtains. My niece was asleep in one of the two guest bedrooms—the bedroom that had once been my own—so I headed to the other to drop my bag.

There, I flopped down on rose-print sheets that I remembered from my childhood, now soft from decades of washing. I hadn’t slept in this house in at least five years, during a failed attempt at a self-detox. I wondered if my mother had forgiven me yet for ruining her favorite quilt during that stay.

“Mama?”

I sat up and there was a child in the doorway, staring at me. Dark curls tangled around her ears, and she blinked at me with sober brown eyes set into a soft, puffy face. I found myself looking for my sister in her, before reminding myself that, of course, she was adopted. She was wearing a Pull-Up diaper and a T-shirt with a cartoon giraffe on the front, and her skin was still pink with sleep.

“I’m not…” I began, but the little girl had already run into the room and toward the bed, her arms flung out at me as if expecting me to pick her up. I stared at her, unsure what to do; and then, hearing the lopsided gait of my mother coming down the hall, grabbed her and lifted her up.

She was hot in my arms, steaming and sticky, and heavier than I expected. She pressed her face into the skin of my neck, leaving something troublesomely damp there. I wrapped my arms around her and then sat motionless on the edge of the bed, terrified of dropping her.

Suddenly she pulled back, as if startled, and looked up at me with a strange expression: studying me, hard. She must have understood, somehow, that I was not my sister. Maybe the way my shampoo smelled, or the texture of my skin. What was my sister’s hair like these days? Last time I’d seen her it had been long and shiny and gold, usually pulled back in a ponytail. My own blond hair was shoulder-length, grown out from a pixie crop I’d ended up with a few years back after I sold my hair for cash. Your crowning glory, my mother had sobbed when she saw me, as if I were Jo from Little Women. I think she was more upset about that than anything else I’d done to myself.

Anyway, Charlotte was still clutching me, staring up at me with wide unblinking eyes, when my mother appeared at the door. I met her gaze over the little girl’s curls.

“Did you tell her I was coming?” I asked.

“No.” My mother cringed in the doorway. “We didn’t want to until you got here. Just in case…”

In case you didn’t show up at all was what she was thinking. I frowned. “Does she even know that her mom has a twin sister who looks exactly like her but isn’t her?”

My mother looked panicky. “Well, not exactly? She’s seen family photos around our house, but I’m not exactly sure what your sister told her. Maybe nothing? She’s only two, after all. These things are hard to explain.” We were whispering, as if the child sitting right there between us couldn’t understand a thing, but when I looked down at the little girl she was squinting at me as if she knew exactly what was being discussed.

“I am your aunt, not your mother,” I said loudly, enunciating every syllable. “I am your mother’s sister. We are identical twins. Do you know what that means?” Charlotte nodded, but there was a dark squint in her eyes as she dug very hard for the answer and came up empty. “It means we look exactly the same. So I know I look like your mama, but I am not your mama.”

The little girl in my arms took this in for a minute, and then burst into tears. “Waaannn maaamaaaa,” she wailed. She flung herself sideways, so that I had to clutch her tight in order to keep her from falling off the bed, which of course just made her cry harder.

My mother backed slowly out of the doorway. “Why don’t I go make her a sippy cup of warm milk?” She fled down the hall.

“Hey, shhh, shhh. It’s OK.” She was rigid in my arms, still trying to throw herself to the ground, inconsolable. What are you supposed to do with a crying two-year-old? Wasn’t this when you put the pacifier in their mouth to quiet them? I looked around the guest bedroom but of course there was no pacifier, not even any toys, just some ornamental ceramic orbs in a big wicker bowl on the dresser. I dug in my jeans pockets for something, anything, that might distract the child from her grief. A metal hair pin—perhaps not advisable. A set of keys. She slapped them away when I jingled them in her face. Maybe that kind of thing was for babies, not toddlers.

I jiggled the girl in my lap, bouncing her on my knee until her teeth were rattling in her mouth. The wailing grew louder. My mother had vanished into the kitchen at the far end of the house and I was fairly sure she had no plans to return with warm milk.

Desperate, I dug deeper into my pocket and turned up the sobriety coin I’d been given at my year anniversary, two weeks back. A bright bronze thing, embossed with words Charlotte would not yet understand: UNITY—SERVICE—RECOVERY. It was just the right size to clutch in your hand instead of reaching for that drink. It glinted in the light from the window. Charlotte paused from crying to stare at it.

“Tweasure?” she asked, her eyes pink and wet.

She was smarter than I thought.

“Treasure,” I agreed. “I stole it from a pirate in the faraway land of Los Angeles, sailed all the way here to give it to you. Should we go bury it in the garden and make a treasure map, so that the pirates don’t come and steal it back?”