I'll Be You(72)

And so, before I’d even gotten my driver’s permit, I made a conscious decision to become my sister’s first enabler, thinking that I was helping her; although of course I wasn’t. Not at all.

“Don’t cancel it,” I told my mom. “We’ll tell them Sam got food poisoning. And I’ll do the rest of the interviews myself.”



* * *



—

So why didn’t I ever share this story with Dr. Cindy? Because I already knew what I should have done that day, and I didn’t need a slap or a Sufferance to remind me. If I hadn’t hidden the evidence of my sister’s nascent substance abuse, if I’d made my mother confront the truth instead of letting her pretend everything was fine, if I’d only stood up for what I’d known was right—how different Sam’s life might have been.

GenFem wanted me to believe that we could rewind the timeline of our lives, try to find the moments that defined us, imagine who we might have become instead, and then go become that person. All those months, all that money, spent rewriting my history, in hopes of total reinvention: When I look back now I realize that it was only ever so much speculation. There is only the here, the now, the what it is.

The only thing that we can hope to change is the path forward.





23




FEBRUARY MARKED MY SEVEN-MONTH anniversary with GenFem. I’d achieved Level Five at a record pace, marking it with a ceremony and an orange scarf just before the holidays, but since then I’d plateaued. I couldn’t seem to get any further ahead in the levels no matter how many one-on-ones I paid for or workshops I attended. Chuck had been sleeping in the guest bedroom for months and still showed no interest whatsoever in meeting with adoption agencies; in fact, we’d barely spoken since Christmas. My GenFem family was starting to question my commitment to the Method: I hadn’t kicked Chuck out yet, hadn’t forced the issue, hadn’t taken what I deserved.

That was a sign of my weakness, Dr. Cindy told me. “You are manifesting your own victimhood.”

That month, she organized a day trip to a shooting range in the foothills near Santa Ynez, where a half dozen of us shot at targets in a sandy pit overlooking Lake Cachuma. A “bonding exercise,” Dr. Cindy called it, “that can reveal hidden strength of character.” I didn’t want to go, but felt like I should, to prove my commitment. When I got to the range, though, I found that I enjoyed the weight of the warm steel in my hand, the explosive fury of the handgun’s kickback. It made my heart race; it made me feel alive.

I was a good shot, to my surprise—the only one of our group who consistently hit the center of the target. So when Dr. Cindy whispered in my ear that I should really buy a handgun—“a symbol of the power you contain within yourself, a reminder that you do not have to be the victim”—I found myself handing over $575 for a Smith & Wesson.

I didn’t know what to do with it—was I supposed to use it against Chuck? I wondered. But, of course, she’d never suggested that. Instead, I hid it in the closet in our office, and sometimes, when I couldn’t sleep, I would think of it, gleaming in the dark. A little frightened by what it represented, the secret violence inside me.



* * *



—

One winter afternoon, Iona and I were in one of the velvet cubbies in the GenFem center, working on a Reenactment of my most recent Trigger Moment—the night when I found Chuck with Sam, dressed as me, in the den. After three weeks and four Sufferances, I still couldn’t get my response right no matter how many times Iona and I ran through it. Was I too forgiving of Sam’s behavior, too slow to see her duplicity? Should I have kicked Chuck out when I found him with her? But every time Iona pretended to be my drunk sister—her voice nothing like Sam’s as she slurred, “I was just trying to help you. I just want to be your surrogate”—I burst into tears. An insistent voice in the back of my mind kept questioning what actually happened that night. Yes, what Sam did was horrifying, but was I the one who screwed up? Should I have let Sam be our surrogate after all? Would that have been so bad?

Had I been, perhaps, too hard on her?

“Of course not,” Iona said sharply, when I asked her these questions. “Remember what we talked about yesterday? About Sam keeping you subservient to her? She’s toxic. Do you really think that would have changed if you let her get pregnant with Chuck’s kid? It would only have made things worse.”

“But…” The words choked out of me. “But we’re identical twins. We share the same genes. It was a chance to make a baby that was basically half me, right? And now, even if we adopt, I’ll never know what a baby of my own would have looked like. And I could have. I know that’s unimportant in the grand scheme of things, but I can’t stop thinking about it.” I thought of the blond child in my dreams, the one who always vanished into a blur as soon as I woke up.

Iona leaned in, a dark flash in her eyes. “What about your sister’s babies? They might as well be yours, right?”

I felt a sharp prick, like a thorn, in my chest. “My sister’s babies?”

“Like you said, same genes. Same DNA. Yes? So those eggs she gave away—sorry, sold—are equally you. And the babies they produced are half yours. You really want to know what your babies would have looked like? Well, you can.”