Notes on an Execution(21)

Hazel stood gingerly, her right foot raised to keep the weight off her knee—she bent over the edge of the slippery porcelain, leaning for the towel. Her arm cramped with the stretch, the muscles limp, unused for months. As she hopped to sit on the lid of the toilet seat, Hazel twisted the towel around her hair, wondering exactly where Jenny was now.

It was a game they’d played as children. A Summoning, they called it.

I can tell when you’re sick, Jenny had said, arriving in the elementary school nurse’s office before their mother had even been called. And I can tell when you’re sad. Jenny would shake Hazel awake in the dead of night, pulling her from the worst of her nightmares. I can read your mind, Jenny would say—and when Hazel startled with the fact of the intrusion, Jenny only looked confused. What? she would ask. Can’t you read mine, too? Hazel would burrow deep into herself, trying to conjure the interior of Jenny’s body the way she conjured her own. She never could read Jenny’s mind, but this didn’t stop her from trying, or from claiming that she had the same telepathic power. You’re lying, she’d guess, when Jenny faked a stomachache. You like that boy, she’d tease, when Jenny crossed her arms over her chest at the middle-school locker. Hazel wouldn’t call this a Summoning—not the kind of thing Jenny could do. It was just intuition, many years of noticing. Hazel knew her sister’s face.

Jenny would be driving now. The route from Northern Vermont University to their suburb outside Burlington was just over an hour. A Nirvana song would be playing, humming crackly from the radio, Jenny’s hands fluttering on the steering wheel. Jenny’s new boyfriend would be sitting in the passenger’s seat—here, the image faded, blurred.

Hazel gathered her crutches, wiped the steam from the mirror. In the dim winter light, she looked pale, grim, lifeless. She did not look like Jenny. She did not even look like herself.

*

Hazel’s real self was not this bathroom ghost. Her real self had cheeks blushing pink beneath scorching bulb lights, hair sprayed back into a slick, glossy bun. She wore long black lashes, glued sticky to her eyelids. Her collarbone jutted out beneath the straps of a corset that tapered down into a custom-designed tutu, glitter dabbed subtly along the ridge of her chest, engineered to reflect the stage lights with a turn or a leap.

For a precious moment, Hazel was no longer leaning against the damp sink. Instead, she was following the sound of the orchestra into the velvet wings, as the instruments hummed the opening notes of Swan Lake. The smell, like elastic and rosin. She was rolling onto her pointe shoes, reveling in the ethereal stretch of her hamstring. The audience hushed, alert, awaiting her arrival. She was caught in that long, agonizing moment, before she stepped into the gold.

Hazel was her real self when she danced—but she was more than that. She was feather, she was breath. She was an illusion, a mirage that answered only to music and memory. She flew.

*

Downstairs, the front door slammed. Gertie the basset hound erupted in a fit of barking as Hazel’s mother cooed. Hazel’s hair was still dripping cold—she climbed onto Jenny’s twin bed to peer out the window. Jenny’s old station wagon puffed in the driveway.

Jenny had come home twice since college started. Both times for dinner. She had refused to stay the night, packing herself back into her car after the leftovers had been scooped into plastic containers for the mini fridge in her dorm room. Hazel tried to picture the house through Jenny’s new, worldly eyes: nearly identical to the homes that fanned around it, clustered at the edges of a sheltered little town. Burlington had never felt so quaint and silly as it did when Jenny came to visit, all ice cream shops and mountaineering stores. Both those dinners had been before Hazel’s knee, and she had not been able to pinpoint exactly how Jenny had changed.

From the distance of Hazel’s bedroom window, still framed by Jenny’s John Hughes posters, the differences were obvious. She and Jenny had always looked as close to identical as you could get while still technically being fraternal, but Hazel could see, with an uncomfortable jolt, how age would separate them further.

She’d heard the story of their birth so many times, it felt like fable. Jenny had come out first, slick and easy, her exit dislodging Hazel’s entire body from the birth canal—a nurse had massaged their mother’s swollen belly until Hazel came out kicking, her face blue, the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. We thought we’d lost you, Hazel’s mother always said, and only recently did Hazel realize that her parents had lived entire minutes believing Jenny would be their only child. Hazel could imagine it, looking now at her sister. Jenny was growing even prettier, the dimple in her cheek more pronounced. Jenny had a heart-shaped face, supple and inviting, while Hazel’s had always been gaunt and witchy. And, of course, there was the freckle. As their mother pulled Jenny into a hug, Hazel reached up instinctively to touch it.

The Twins. This was how they had learned to know themselves. At slumber parties and school events, field trips and family holidays, she and Jenny were a single unit. One name. One bedroom shellacked in pink wallpaper. As children, Hazel and Jenny took pleasure in switching clothes between class periods to confuse their teachers. They used to wear matching versions of the same outfit, Jenny in purple, Hazel in blue. Does it ever bother you? Hazel said to Jenny once, when one of the boys in middle school joked about asking the Twins to the spring dance. You know, being the Twins? Jenny had looked at her with a gaze so narrowed and cold, Hazel knew she wore it to veil her hurt. Hazel still remembered how her own tongue had flitted across her canine teeth, which were pointier than her sister’s, more overlapped, how she’d bit down until she tasted a warm prick of blood. Why would it bother me? Jenny had asked, her voice like a woodland creature. Hazel still burned with the shame of this question. Only in the last four months—since Jenny had been at school—did Hazel respond to her own name alone. For the entirety of her life, Jenny’s name would echo across a room, and Hazel would turn, ready to answer.