The Identicals(26)

Tabitha goes to stand by the window and gaze at the water, which is probably a mistake because the feelings of intense self-reflection return. Billy is dead. Everyone assumes that Harper is the only one who feels this loss, but Tabitha is grieving as well. He was her father, too. She wasn’t present for his illness; she wasn’t at his bedside the way Harper was, but still Tabitha aches. One more person who was related to Julian is dead. During his annual visits to Nantucket, Billy accompanied Tabitha to the cemetery to place flowers on Julian’s grave every August 15, the anniversary of the day Julian died. They would bow their heads, and Billy would say a simple prayer and squeeze Tabitha’s hand until she thought it would break. “He’s with my mother in heaven,” Billy would say. “She’s taking care of him. You can count on that.” Tabitha had never been particularly religious, but the ritual of going to the cemetery with Billy had comforted her as nothing else had.

Have you ever lost anyone? Tabitha has now lost her father.

And Harper, Tabitha admits to herself. Seeing her sister today was a trial. Years of anger and hatred had blanketed the truth, which lay underneath like a sediment, nearly disguised but not quite. Tabitha lost her best friend, her sister, her twin.

Did Tabitha remember the way Harper used to ride on her back when she was a pony? Of course. Tabitha remembers a lot more than that. She remembers their switching classes at Winsor—Tabitha would double up on art, Harper on English. She remembers them both candy-striping at the Brigham, intentionally confusing senile Mrs. Lawton—Tabitha would walk out one door at the same time Harper walked in another—and giving themselves side stitches from laughing so hard. She remembers summer camp at Wyonegonic and how the other girls thought Tabitha and Harper would hate each other, as the twins in The Parent Trap did, but they had been best friends, inseparable. They waited together in their bathing caps at the end of the dock before diving into freezing-cold Moose Pond in perfect tandem. They paddled together in the canoe, Tabitha in the stern, Harper in the bow. Tabitha would steer; Harper added power. They lined up side by side in archery, their bows poised exactly the same way.

She remembers rock, paper, scissors and Harper rolling away with Billy, leaving Tabitha behind to suffer through a future of living up to Eleanor’s impossibly high standards. Tabitha had waved good-bye, standing on the brick sidewalk in front of the house on Pinckney Street, but Harper hadn’t bothered waving back; she had been too busy fiddling with the radio.

Tabitha remembers Harper showing up on Nantucket to help Tabitha take care of Julian.

Tabitha stops herself there.



When they get home, there’s a brown box sitting on the front porch of the carriage house. It’s Ainsley’s new phone, which cost Tabitha seven hundred dollars, making it more punishing to Tabitha than to Ainsley.

“My phone!” Ainsley shrieks, and she jumps out of the FJ40—which still smells like cigarettes—while it’s moving.

Tabitha slams on the brakes. She tries to remind Ainsley that she is grounded from her phone until Friday. But there will be no taking it away from her now. Or, rather, Tabitha can take it away, but it will no doubt involve a physical fight in which Tabitha may well get struck for the second time. She isn’t up for it.

You’re right, Ramsay, she thinks. I’m a piss-poor parent. I crumble like a day-old cookie every time.

She watches Ainsley disappear into the carriage house with the box. Tabitha continues down the long white-shell driveway to her mother’s house, Seamless—a 4,500-square-foot edifice with three floors, six bedrooms, six and a half baths, and a glassed-in porch that perches on the edge of a cliff, offering uninterrupted views of Nantucket Sound. Tabitha has always assumed that someday this house will be hers—as well as the town house on Pinckney Street—although lately Eleanor has been dodgy about money. The ERF boutique on Newbury Street folded the year before, and Eleanor must have sustained a hit to her finances and her ego, although she was predictably stoic about both. Tabitha has always assumed that Eleanor is sitting on a comfortable cushion of cash, but obviously it wasn’t enough to save the flagship store. The Nantucket store will be the next to sink—short of a miracle—despite Tabitha’s efforts to diversify the inventory. The Palm Beach store is just fine because… well, because the clientele in Palm Beach is old. Older.

“Do you need help getting inside, Mother?” Tabitha asks.

Eleanor inhales dramatically. “You have no idea how today taxed me.”

“It taxed all of us,” Tabitha says. I got slapped! she thinks. And doused! Her dress looks pretty good considering—another selling point for the Roxie. It can absorb a full glass of champagne without showing a stain or a wrinkle. “He was my father.”

“He was my husband,” Eleanor says.

“Ex-husband,” Tabitha says. “You were divorced from Billy longer than you were ever married to him.”

“I don’t expect you to understand,” Eleanor says.

“I don’t understand,” Tabitha says. “I find this sudden mourning and this heartbreak a little manufactured and more than a little self-serving. Billy lived eleven miles away. Did you ever go to see him? When he was here, on Nantucket, did you ever offer to take him to lunch? Or to invite him inside this house? No! When his name came up, you insulted him. You outgrew Billy long ago. You divorced him, then you forgot about him, Mother. I can’t believe you’re now telling my daughter that you loved him with all your heart.”