The Identicals(16)
Ainsley had ended up paging through the photo albums by herself, and she had to admit it was fascinating. There were clippings of Billy and Eleanor on the society pages of the Boston Globe—in every photo, Billy leaned in to kiss Eleanor’s cheek while she gave the camera a brilliant smile. They looked pretty much in love to Ainsley. There was another photo in the album that showed Eleanor, enormously pregnant—the size of a hippo, really—draped in a yellow dress that might also have been a pup tent. Billy wore square wire-framed glasses and white bell-bottoms and a white patent leather belt, and he held up two fingers over Eleanor’s shoulder. So… this was the day they found out they were having twins. The dates were stamped onto all the photos, and this one said: OCTOBER 10, 1977. Ainsley felt like she knew that Grammie didn’t discover she was having twins until very late in the pregnancy, and now she sees it was only six or eight weeks before the twins were born.
This is what baffles Ainsley about the olden days, before technology: people didn’t know anything. There were no ultrasounds to tell Grammie she was having two babies instead of one. There was no Internet. How did anyone know anything without the Internet? Really, Ainsley can’t figure that one out. And there were no cell phones. How did a person live without a cell phone? Ainsley was doing it right now, and it was very stressful. She might have logged on to her laptop and checked Facebook or Instagram to see if Emma had posted anything about going to the Jetties with Teddy, but Tabitha had changed the Wi-Fi password, just as she’d promised.
Most of the rest of the pictures were of her mother and Aunt Harper. They looked exactly alike: there was no possibility of telling them apart, and Ainsley wondered if when they were babies their identities had been switched, then switched again—maybe switched infinite times—until the day they were old enough to speak and say their names out loud. Then whoever they happened to be that day stuck. Eleanor always dressed them in matching outfits that she made herself, using her turquoise Singer sewing machine (which she still had and always claimed she was going to donate to the Smithsonian). There were green gingham jumpers with giraffes appliquéd on the front; there were pink party dresses with borders of purple sequins at the bottom; there were black velvet dresses at Christmas. Who put two-year-olds in black? Ainsley wondered.
Only Eleanor. It was well documented that Eleanor Roxie-Frost got her big break in fashion when Diana Vreeland happened across the twins wearing yellow linen shifts during a playground outing on Boston Common in 1980. Those dresses were miniature versions of what would become the Roxie. It had been in the era of women’s lib, and Eleanor Roxie-Frost became a textbook case. She went from being a stay-at-home mother of twins designing clothes for her daughters and herself to a fashion-design sensation featured in Vogue nearly every month. When the twins were in high school, Eleanor found retail space on Newbury Street and opened her flagship store there. The store had been a good thing and a bad thing, because Eleanor became so busy being a famous fashion designer that something in her life had to go. That something was Billy. Ainsley’s grandparents got divorced, a fact that Ainsley always found embarrassing. Around half of her friends’ parents were divorced, but grandparents were meant to stay together until they keeled over from being so old.
Even stranger and more unsettling was that, after the divorce, Aunt Harper had gone with Billy and Tabitha had stayed with Eleanor, a custody agreement that seemed to have been borrowed from The Parent Trap. The Frost family had split right down the middle, like one of these photographs torn in half—Billy holding one twin, Eleanor the other.
When Ainsley had gone to replace the photo album, she came across a tattered envelope wedged between two other books on the shelf. The envelope had an important, secret look, so Ainsley pulled it free. Inside was a plastic hospital bracelet bearing the inscription JULIAN WYATT CRUISE 5-28-03. It was her baby brother’s bracelet. Also in the envelope were three snapshots: one of a teensy-tiny Julian at the hospital enclosed in what looked like a plastic display case with tubes and wires running from his mouth, nose, chest, and feet. The second was a photograph of Tabitha holding Julian in two hands. Really, he was no bigger than a submarine sandwich; he had only weighed one pound and ten ounces when he was born, she knew. The third photo was of Tabitha, Wyatt, Ainsley, and Julian all together in a house Ainsley didn’t recognize, although they were sitting on the dark brown leather sofa that had predated the turquoise-tweed Gervin. Julian was free of wires, and he was a little bigger, maybe the size of a bag of flour. Ainsley was a pudgy-faced toddler with barely enough hair to make pigtails. But the real shocker was how young Ainsley’s parents looked. There were seniors at Nantucket High School who looked older than Tabitha and Wyatt did in that picture. Both of them were smiling—laughing, even—as though the photographer had just said something funny. Who took the picture? Ainsley wondered. Not Eleanor, certainly; she didn’t believe in joking around.
Ainsley scrutinized the photo for another moment. It was the only photograph of her nuclear family that she had ever seen. She knew why it was hidden away: Tabitha found the loss of Julian, and maybe the loss of Wyatt, too painful. Ainsley was grateful that Tabitha hadn’t kept Julian’s death certificate or anything morbid like that. The hospital bracelet was jarring enough. Ainsley returned everything back to the envelope, then the envelope back to its hiding spot between the two books on the shelf. She turned to check on her mother, who was still snoring softly on the sofa. She resisted the urge to kiss her mother’s forehead, although she did gently nudge Tabitha awake.