First Born(45)

I don’t reply. I just glance at Dad.

A cardboard box gets blown down the street and a police car drives past us with its lights flashing and its sirens wailing.

We reach the crematorium.

‘This is it,’ says the driver. ‘Fifty-one dollars.’

Mum pays the driver and we all step out of the cab and run to the entrance of the crematorium. It looks like a cross between a chapel and a government building.

The manager ushers us inside.

The floor is made of stone and the air inside is chill and it is hushed.

There are small alcoves and nooks in the walls. Urns occupy the spaces. I can hear music in the distance, from another room.

Text from DeLuca. The insurance policy was taken out last week.

I turn off my phone. My sister deserves my full attention.

‘A service is just ending,’ says the manager, a man with thin grey hair. ‘You’ll be able to go through in about ten minutes.’

Dad shuffles on the spot.

Mum holds my hand tight.

Everything about this feels wrong.

We walk through and there’s a long cardboard box, raised on a wheeled platform. On top of the box are two flowers. A red rose and a white lily.

Mum swallows a gentle sob.

We approach the box.

We cannot see her, but we know she is there. At peace.

Beyond the box is a brass door. Mum and Dad opted to see the box enter the oven itself. To say their last farewells.

‘You can say goodbye now,’ says the manager.

Mum approaches the box and then falls to the ground, her hand up in the air, her palm flat against the cardboard. Her weeping is silent but I can see, from her back, that she is sobbing.

The final words from mother to child.

Dad kneels next to Mum and bows his head and says something to my sister that I cannot hear. Mum rests her head on his shoulder.

A chill runs down my neck.

They look back, both with tears in their eyes, and they beckon me to the cardboard box. They step away and hug each other and Mum sniffs and she cries.

I approach the box. A rose and a lily.

A flame flickers in the background, beyond the doors, some kind of pilot light.

I place my palm on the box.

‘Half of me,’ I whisper. ‘Half. I will never be the same without you. I love you.’

The manager coughs and I step back to Mum and Dad. We hold each other’s hands. Dad’s is cool and loose. Mum’s is hot and tight. Her wedding ring pushes into my knuckle. The doors open and the box moves. Music in the background I didn’t notice before. The box is pushed in and the doors lock shut.

And then the fire.

Mum wails.

I feel so desperately sorry for her. And sorry for my twin sister, for living here, for making this tragic life decision, for relocating to New York. And I feel sorry for holding the pillow over her face until she stopped struggling.





Chapter 23


It takes an hour and ten minutes for the cremation to complete and for the ashes to cool.

The wind is whistling under the door, creating an eerie howl around the crematorium. Mum and Dad have stopped crying.

A man steps through a door carrying a plastic box with a rose and a lily on top. He hands it to my parents and then walks away.

I place my hand on the box.

It’s not warm.

We leave the building and the cab’s already outside waiting. There’s an advert for The Late Show on its roof. The wind gusts and Dad shields the box with his body while Mum and I pull the cab door open. The driver doesn’t help. We get in and speed away.

There’s a team of four guys boarding up the windows to an industrial building, screwing pieces of plywood to the frames. Further on, closer to the East River, there’s a woman with a stall, sitting there in a yellow poncho selling sandbags, twenty for a hundred dollars. Her sign says there’s a discount for bulk orders. It says the sandbags are military grade.

We don’t speak on the way back to the hostel.

Dad’s probably thinking about KT, but also about flight logistics, how much time we’ll need to check in and clear security, if carrying a box of human remains might hold things up even though they’ve been assured it won’t, whether the storm will delay the flight, and how they’ll get from Heathrow back to Nottingham. Mum’s likely thinking about KT. About how she lived a full life. They both seem calm. People say relatives need closure and they’re right.

I got closure almost a week ago.

Something shifted when her body went limp, when she stopped struggling. I’ve been calm ever since, but in some ways the cremation was cathartic for me. It marked the start of me coming to terms with the rest of my life as a solo twin.

Statisticians tell us that identical twins tend to die within two years of each other. That gives me less than twenty-four months of life left.

Imagine having an exact copy of yourself, behaving entirely differently in the world, experiencing it differently. There is a well-documented medical condition called twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome. It’s where blood from your mother passes through one twin on its way to the other. The donor twin receives the good blood briefly before donating it to the twin, who then receives all the nutrients. This is what I believe happened to us in the womb, only with spirit. I was four when I realised she was the special one and I was the back-up. Same size and shape, but flat. Hollow. I was constantly reminded of my own shortcomings. The mirror-image version was always more important and seeing her, being with her, weighed me down.