I'll Be You(63)

“Let’s go step-by-step,” I said slowly. “Is this place a cult?”

“A cult?” She looked stunned, as if the thought had never occurred to her. “Of course it’s not. It’s a women’s movement. They’ve been trying to help me with my issues.”

“Help you with what issues? The fact that you are in possession of a missing child?”

She shook her head. “It’s too complicated to get into now.” Her eyes met mine, trepidatious, and then darted away. I could tell there was something she was thinking that she wasn’t going to tell me.

“Well, are you allowed to leave?”

She struggled against the question. “That would be a bad idea.”

“Bad, as in inadvisable? Or bad as in forbidden?” She shook her head. She was staring at something over my shoulder and I turned to see her looking at herself in the mirror with a look of vague horror. She lifted a hand to her face and gently probed the dark hollows above her cheekbones, before sliding her eyes over to study my face, instinctively comparing the two. I couldn’t see the parallels between us today; I could only see the differences. The lines around my eyes from too many years of hard drinking; the thin spots in her eyebrows from overplucking. Her eyes wide and open and desperate where mine were hooded and suspicious. Her dimples gone sharp from weight loss.

“We don’t match anymore,” I said sadly.

“We haven’t matched in a long time.” She closed her eyes and turned away from the mirror. “I should go to dinner, and you should go home. There’s nothing for you to do here.” She reached out and unlocked the latch of the door, but I reached out and stopped her hand.

“Are you serious? You really want to stay in this place? You’re just going to…ditch me?” There was a wobble in my voice, a stinging behind my eyes.

She flinched. “It’s always about you, isn’t it?” she said softly.

“This has nothing to do with me,” I retorted.

Her eyes met mine. “This has everything to do with you,” she said, her voice cracking.

My hand on her wrist grew tighter. She winced, and I released it, giving up. What a waste this had been. My sister has become a stranger; she’s not my other half anymore, I thought. And then it occurred to me that this must have been what Elli thought when I showed up at her door, high and incoherent, time and time again; when I threw myself at her husband, in the name of “helping” her; when I took her money and betrayed her trust. All the way back to high school, when I guilt-tripped her into coming back to Los Angeles with me to perform a job she hated. She was right: We hadn’t matched in a long time, and that was more my fault than hers.

She was here to work out her issues. Well, hadn’t I been her issue since the day we were born? So maybe all this was my fault. I’d broken her—maybe as early as that day on Splash Mountain—and she’d never healed correctly.

I watched helplessly as she opened the door and peered down the steps, preparing to dash to the lodge. “So what am I supposed to do now?” I said to her back. “Just leave you here and go back to Santa Barbara to keep taking care of Charlotte for you? You want me to be her mother? Am I supposed to keep pretending that I don’t know who Charlotte really is?”

She stopped then, and turned to me, surprise on her face. “So you do know, then? You figured it out?”

“Figured out that you stole her? Yes. I already said that.”

“No,” she said, frowning. “I mean, who she really is.”

“Yes.” I was growing frustrated by her willful cluelessness. “Her name is Emma Gonzalez.”

“No,” she said again. “That’s not what I meant.”

“Oh for God’s sake, stop being so cryptic, Elli. Just spill it.”

She looked out the door then, down the steps to the lodge, as if measuring the distance between us and them. Faint voices carried up in the distance, the high soprano hum of women singing in unison. Night had fallen and the oaks rustled overhead, sending a shower of brittle leaves clattering to the stairs. Slowly, my sister closed the door, turning to face me.

“She’s yours,” Elli said. “Charlotte is your daughter.”





WHEN WE WERE CHILDREN, we treated it like a game: You be me, and I’ll be you. In the bathroom, when we were brushing our teeth; in school, when our teacher was droning on too long; on set, when we were picking up our lunch paninis, one of us would give the signal, and we would switch. Settling faces, rearranging limbs, changing inflections. By the time we got to high school it had become an art form. We studied each other’s mannerisms like a textbook—the way we each held our toothbrushes or doodled in our notebooks or chewed our sandwiches. We even came up with a secret hand signal, a twist of a flattened hand, that meant Let’s switch.

How proud we were that we knew each other so well. How secretly pleased to have two personae to play with, when most kids only had one. We didn’t realize how dangerous it was.

I remember eating dinner with my parents one night, our freshman year, and my father looking up just a few moments after my sister had flashed me the signal. He caught me slumping over my plate, idly smashing my spaghetti with a fork, while across the table Sam was neatly cutting her meatball into quarters. My father glanced at me, then at Sam, gave a small frown, then turned back to me: “Sam, pass the salt, please.”