The Disappearing Twin by Kathy J. Karlson
Mother
"What happened?"
When Meredith Frone got home, the city police car sat in her
driveway whirling its lights and Tina was sitting on her stone
wall, watching, her legs dangling like a girl's.
"I dunno," Tina said.
Cab Drivers
Both of Meredith Frone's planes had been cancelled because of
thunderstorms. She had gone to Washington National, stood in line
for more than two hours, found that her flight had been cancelled
just about the time she got in line but they weren't telling
anyone, had been sent to Dulles in a taxi with a comforting, slow
driving man from India who told her he was going home after he
dropped her because the weather was too bad, had her Dulles
flight cancelled, then paid for another cab to take her back to
Washington National to pick up her car.
The second cab driver said, "First off, you got your buzzheads
who just jump lanes with their flippers and then clip you when
they paddle by. Then you got your little fuckers pissing in the
pool, taking off their diapers, know what I mean? and letting
them float."
She hadn't been listening so she was very confused, thought he
was talking about other drivers, sort of got somewhere else.
"Sorry," she said, "I don't know what you're talking about. My
head's somewhere else."
"Okay," he said, and dropped her off at the expensive lot where
she paid for a full day's parking. And then she came home to cop
lights in the fading twilight. And under the oaks her son James
spread-eagled on the lawn. Her son.
The Police
She turned from Tina to the policeman who stood there in her
driveway, "What happened?" she asked.
"Ma'am. We're trying to ascertain."
Ascertain. Standing in line at the first airport, she had
listened to an excruciatingly loud and boring recitation from a
meaty man with a carrying voice who was enumerating the highs and
lows of Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, Boston ("the world's crappiest
city, bar none"), and on and on, and she had wanted to turn
around and explain some principles of public space and rudeness
and how stupid, how really stupid and self-important, how "Do you
have beans for brains," how repulsively intrusive, how grossly
banal, but instead she practiced serenity or alternatively
accused herself of being a coward or of not bringing ear plugs.
She remembered what Jimmy, her husband, had said to her a couple
of years ago, when she accused him of being insensitive, "It's
like you are saying to me, 'Why can't you be more compassionate,
you fucking asshole.'"
Then a Chinese man behind her in the line had begun to talk to
her and he had been very nice and had wanted to talk about Edmund
Burke and Chinese pictographs and materialism. She had felt a
little ashamed about her attitude to the other passengers who
were headed somewhere, just as she was. To death, finally.
Mother and the Police
She was half-calm and half-agitated when she talked to the
policeman. What had James done? What adventure he had concocted
in the short time she was supposed to have been away on business?
And Jimmy, her husband. Missed him most now, right now.
Thunderstorms had brought her back. What if she had flown
away?
"Ma'am, we found your son out at the crash site."
"Crash site?"
"Yeah. That huge pile-up on the highway. You didn't know about
it?"
"No."
"Yeah. Some people died, but the night was clear, thank God, so
finally it stopped. It could have been worse."
She looked down at her spread-eagled son and said to the
policeman, "And what does this have to do with James?"
The policeman's face flashed on and off in the light. "He was out
in the road, Ma'am."
"Why is he lying on the grass?" she asked the policeman.
"I was afraid he'd hurt himself-I wanted him to be where I could
see him."
She knew that if James wanted to be gone, he'd just lift off and
sprint away across the back yards. She said, "Did you ask him
what he was doing there?"
"No, Ma'am. But he told me he was looking for diamond rings. You
know from the victims' fingers."
Well. James would never touch a dead person or rob the dead,
certainly. Probably he had gone, she thought, to seek the moments
of the other world that he had mentioned to her, maybe he that he
thought he'd find at the site of such an accident. Maybe he was
looking for his father.
"May I speak to him?" she asked.
"Well, sure."
Son
When she went over to her son, she knelt by his head. "Hey,
baby boy," she said to him, even though he was seventeen years
old.
"Mom," he said, his face still hidden in his arms as he lay on
his belly.
"I know, I know, you're not my baby boy. Not a baby. Not a
boy."
"I'm sorry about this," he said, looking out through his
bear-like straight brown hair.
"Why'd you tell the guy you were stealing rings?"
"I thought it'd get me home faster than a story about
investigating the transmigration of the soul."
She loved her son. She didn't even think of what she'd have to
tell Tina. She didn't want to tell Tina about anything.
Mother and Son
When she was three months pregnant with James, the doctor saw
the shadow of another fetus on the sonogram. She had told her son
about this shadow just last year because she had gone to the
hospital for a miscarriage, a prayed for baby, but perhaps prayed
for too late in her life. The bad year and Jimmy died, too. James
had been so sad for his mother, so solicitous. She told him about
his disappearing twin. Maybe that was stupid.
"James," she said, "there you were, little tiny man, and then
this shadow. Two weeks later, the shadow was gone. The doctor
said that sometimes the second fetus disappears, sometimes the
twin will be there and then be gone. He said it was called the
disappearing twin--two babies could be there, and then one would
just be gone."
James had been completely upended . . . he demanded how the twin
could have just disappeared. His mother, flat on her back, with
the linens up around her neck said, "Of course, we were satisfied
with you so we never wondered." So, after his father died, James
came up with the idea that his mother bore both of the twins and
that the doctor had stolen his brother.
James told his mother he was going to find this other twin. She
just said, "Oh, James."
He searched for his twin, what he thought of as his other self,
in all the faces he saw. He looked for the same light brown hair
and even features, for the Norwegian look that is handsome but
not very glamorous, for the short nose, for the sturdy and big
body, those features he inherited from his dead father. He looked
and looked.
He stopped attending his life, went instead on the underground
rivers of dreams of the twin, see him in an eyebrow or cheekbone
on a face.
The Police
After the highway incident and the arrest, the police decided that James needed a psychiatrist and then James was court-ordered to go back to Dr. Miller. Meredith Frone drove her son to the psychiatrist for six months until James got his driver's license back.
The Psychiatrist
Finally, Dr. Miller introduced him to grief.
"It's not too late," she said. "You can feel that you have lost
something you never had."
"But I did have him. My twin. Just for a few months."
Dr. Miller shifted in her chair. "You would like a copy of
yourself? Someone just like you, someone you could love and who
would love you and someone you would know and who would know you
and see you just for yourself alone."
"I think," she said, "that you are taking parts of yourself and
putting them outside and loving them there. Let's see if we can
find these things in you."
"Oh, God," James said. "What bull. Maybe the twin disappeared
into me! In the womb I sucked him in or something or I was too
much and took too much of the food." He began to cry because that
thought of killing or usurping the thing he most wanted, that
thought seemed to cave him in. Dr. Miller didn't say anything for
a while. She sat with her hands folded in her lap. Every once in
a while, James opened his eyes and looked over at the ficus tree
by the psychiatrist's window. And cried again. He hated crying
and almost left before she began to speak.
"I do not think that you destroyed your twin or that he
disappeared into you. What I meant was that it seems you are
taking the perfect lover twin and putting him outside yourself
and always seeking him. That seeking may be what is making you
feel empty."
"Instead of accepting?"
"Instead of grieving."
"But I have been." James began to get mad. "I have been
grieving..."
"No. You have been looking." He did not like the "no" of Dr.
Miller. Then he remembered that she always had a face for him
that was soft and kind. She was very beautiful.
So now he is working on grieving. Maybe he is too full now
instead of too empty.
Mother
His mother asks him how the session went. "Oh, I don't know." And she says, "Maybe when you are ninety or something, maybe you'll meet your twin in Heaven. With your dad."
Son
Then he thought, "Yes, once I've disappeared, too." And then
he looked over at his mother and realized that he the two of them
had the same last name and this struck him as news.
Then she said, "What? You have that look on your face."
"Yup," he said.
Mother
She thought he had the sweetest smile in the world.