I'll Be You(95)

And it wouldn’t fix itself. I knew that. As I looked at Iona, who was staring back at me expectantly, I thought that she was right: I didn’t have the control and the strength necessary to live a lie. I didn’t want to spend life on the run. I couldn’t imagine raising Charlotte to believe that she was truly my child. Maybe Dr. Cindy believed that she was going to turn me into the kind of person that could be that selfishly cruel, but I knew better.

I was never going to make Level Ten, and frankly, I didn’t want to anymore.

The last of the sun disappeared from the mountains as I chewed over this dilemma. There was no way I could continue to pretend that Charlotte belonged to me, and yet I also didn’t feel strong enough to take her back and face the consequences. And as long as Charlotte was in my possession, GenFem would have an iron grip on my life. We were tied together, irrevocably: the child, the cult, and me.

I now understand that this is what cults do. They cut you off from the rest of the world, encourage you to sever all your ties to the people that you love so that you have no one left to rely on. They make themselves your entire family, the only ones who you think can see you as you really are. You are bonded together by the unconventional beliefs you’ve all chosen, too difficult to explain to the outside world, so you might as well not even try. We women of GenFem were bound together in a sticky web of our own making.

And yet, despite all that, I still felt a faint silvery connection to someone in the real world, a strand that couldn’t quite be severed no matter how hard GenFem had tried. A person to whom I would forever hold a bond, if only because we shared a common genetic code. A tougher, bolder, more fearless version of me—one that might be strong enough to do the things I was too scared to do myself.

My mirror. My twin. My Sam.

Iona was still watching me, growing suspicious of my long silence. “So, are you going to stay?” she asked.

And I suddenly thought I could glimpse a path out of this situation—an unlikely one, but better than none at all. I dusted the dead grass off my lap, smoothed the fabric of the dress across my bare knees. “Will I be allowed to send a text to my parents if I stay?”

Iona had the presence of mind to look mildly offended by this. “Of course,” she sniffed. “You’re not a prisoner.”





ONCE, WE WERE ONE. I was her and she was me.

Then, floating in our mother’s womb, we doubled ourselves: two new lives, identical in every way.

But then, at some point, we weren’t exact mirrors of each other anymore: We became her and me. Environment—or was it circumstance?—put its thumbprint on each of us, pressed us into a unique form. Handed us each a personality of our own. Gave us foibles, diseases, hang-ups. Thrust us apart.

I grew up wondering about how this had happened: How Elli became Elli and I became Sam. How far back would we have to rewind until we found the first moment of differentiation? Was it because of our relative positions in our mother’s womb, or the fact that I was born first and Elli came eleven minutes later, or was it something else—something utterly inconsequential, like a mosquito bite or a diaper that didn’t get changed—that first set us off on divergent paths? Was it possible to go back, fix the rift, and reconverge?

In my late twenties, a boyfriend gave me a book about an adoption program that had intentionally separated identical twins at birth, handing them off to different families, and then studied them. The twins never even knew they had an “other.” The researchers thought that, by monitoring these split-apart sets, they might solve the nature versus nurture debate once and for all. It sounded barbarous to me, but the doctor behind the study insisted that it was actually good for the children. “Identical twins must be raised separately if they are to truly become who they really are,” he argued.

I stopped reading after this quote, as a cold dread swept through me. Was I doomed to never be “who I really was” because I’d spent my life alongside my twin sister—being compared to her, vying for the same attention, never quite the center of focus? I’d always believed that Elli and I were stronger when we were together, but what if we weren’t?

Who might I have become had we been separated at birth? I wondered. What if that hypothetical Sam was a better me, more focused, less wild, in total control of her life? Would she have succeeded where I failed? It was too depressing to consider.

Maybe instead of a childhood practicing how to be each other, we should have spent those years practicing how to be ourselves instead. Maybe that’s where all of our problems began.

Maybe it wasn’t too late to try.





33




SO. I HAD A kid.

Of course, this wasn’t exactly news to me. I’d sold my eggs three times; the obvious conclusion would be the eggs that they scraped out of my ovaries had resulted in children. But I’d never really thought much more about it because what was the point? Those babies weren’t in any way mine, even if we did happen to share some genetic material and a passing resemblance. I had far bigger things to fixate on, like my lost potential.

I never expected to meet any of those children. I certainly never expected to end up taking care of one.

There was a lot to take away from my sister’s story. (She’d impersonated me in order to steal information from BioCal? I couldn’t wrap my head around that one.) But this was the fact that my mind kept tripping over as we sat there in the bathroom, talking in whispers: Charlotte was my child. And yet not mine at all, either. What was I supposed to do with this news?