All about Skin (4 page)

Aida and I hadn't dressed alike since we were little girls and our mother got her fix buying identical dresses to solicit the compliments of strangers. But the day she disappeared we'd both put on our cut-offs, though every time we wore them our mother warned we'd grown so much they were pushing obscene. We'd also both put on our brown gaucho boots, sent to us from one of our mother's friends from her bohemian days in Argentina. We were both running late for work that day and that's why neither of us decided to go back upstairs to change.

One of the volunteers found Aida's purse by the Vietnam veterans' monument in the middle of the park. Her wallet was inside, though emptied, along with her phone, the battery removed. Our mother wanted to take the bag home but the police needed it for their investigation. The only other things they found were her lip gloss and a pack of cigarettes, which was strange because Aida didn't smoke. Chesterfields, our father's brand, probably swiped from the carton he kept on top of the fridge. The box was almost empty. I would have known if she'd been smoking, and our parents wouldn't have particularly minded. They were liberal about those sorts of things: a benefit of having older parents. They served us wine at dinner and spoke to us like colleagues most of the time, asking our opinions on books or art or world events. They'd trained us to be bored by kids our own age and to prefer their company over that of anyone else. We had no idea how sheltered we really were.

In the days that followed, there were more sightings of Aida. Somebody saw her cashing a check at the bank. Somebody saw her cutting through the woods along the train tracks. Somebody saw her by the river behind the soccer field. Her long, dark hair. Her tan bare legs in those same frayed shorts, though this time she was wearing sandals. And each time our parents would have to tell them it wasn't Aida they'd seen. It was her twin.

Three different people called to say they'd seen her, the girl whose photo they recognized from TV and the papers, hitchhiking on a service road off the turnpike near the New York State border. Someone else had seen her at a rest stop a few miles down. A woman had even said she'd talked to Aida at a gas station in Ringwood and only realized it was her after she caught the news later that night. She'd asked Aida where she was headed and Aida had said north, to Buffalo.

Aida didn't know anybody in Buffalo and she'd never take off. Not like that. She worried about everybody else too much. When we were little she would say good night to every stuffed animal in our room before falling asleep, without skipping a single one so she wouldn't hurt anyone's feelings. She wouldn't leave the house without letting everyone know where she was going. I'd joke that she had separation anxiety and she'd say, “No, that's just love, you moron.” Even so, after I heard the bit about Buffalo I went up to our room and knelt on the closet floor until I found our old shoebox under the dusty pile of plush animals. It was empty but I knew she couldn't have taken our money with her. Two years earlier we'd used the savings to buy our parents an anniversary gift of a sterling silver frame for their wedding picture. We'd depleted the funds but started adding money to the box again. Not much. Just dollars whenever we had some to spare. We didn't think of it as our Runaway Fund anymore but as our Petty Cash. Maybe she'd used it for something and had forgotten to replenish it.

In Aida's absence, Andromeda howled around the house the way she had before she got spayed. She slept in Aida's bed next to her pillow as if Aida were still there, nestled under the covers. She purred against my knee and I ran my hand over her back but she stiffened and looked up at me, hissing and showing her teeth before running off, and I knew she, too, had mistaken me for my sister.

Aida and I turned sixteen a month before she disappeared. The other girls in town had lavish Sweet Sixteen parties in hotel ballrooms or in rented backyard tents. Aida and I didn't like those sorts of parties. We went when invited and sometimes danced, though Aida always got asked more than me. We were identical, with our father's bony nose and our mother's black eyes and wavy hair—tall, dark, and Sephardic all over, as our parents called us—but people rarely confused us. Aida was the prettier one. Maybe it had to do with her easy way. Her trusting smile. I've always been the skeptical one. Aida said this made me come off as guarded, aloof. It made boys afraid to get near.

We were both virgins but she was ahead of me by her first kiss. She'd had it right there in our house during a party our parents hosted when our mother's jewelry collection got picked up by a fancy department store in the city. She could call herself a real designer now, not just a suburban hobbyist, selling her chokers and cuffs at craft bazaars. One of her friends brought her stepson, who'd just failed out of his first semester of college. Our father was trying to talk some wisdom into the kid, whose name was Marlon, and inspire him to go back. Later, Aida arrived at Marlon's side with a tray of crudités. For a virgin, I'd teased her, she had her moves. She brought him up to our attic cave and he'd gotten past her lips to her bra before our mother noticed she was gone from the party and found the two of them unzipped on our beanbags. A minor scandal ensued. Our mother called him a degenerate pedophile in front of the whole party and his stepmother said Aida was too loose for her own good. After all the guests had left, our mother sat us down at the kitchen table and warned Aida and me that the world was full of losers like Marlon who'd come along and steal our potential if we weren't careful, while our father just looked on from the doorway, eyes watery for reasons I will never know.

Neither of us was ever interested in the boys at school though. Sometimes we'd have innocuous crushes, like Aida's on the gas station attendant up on Hawthorne Avenue or mine on the head lifeguard at the town pool, boys who were just out of reach. But our parents had always told us we were better than the local boys, suburban slugs who would peak in their varsity years and come back to this town to be coaches or commuters. We, on the other hand, were sophisticated gypsies, elegant immigrants, international transplants who spoke many languages. We had our mother's inherited Spanish, Italian, and quasi-British private school inflections, and our father's French and even a bit of his father's Turkish. The fact that we'd settled here was incidental, temporary, even though Aida and I had been here all our lives.

“You're not like them,” our mother would say every time we were tempted to compare ourselves to the local crowd.

For our sixteenth birthday our parents took us to the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center. It was a warm July night. During the intermission we went out to the fountain so our father could smoke a cigarette and Aida and our mother drifted up toward the Opera to look at the hanging Chagalls. I stayed with our father. I asked him to let me have a smoke too, like I always did, because it gave him a laugh, though he never gave in. But that night, even though we were supposed to be celebrating, he was somber.

“I don't want you to pick up any of my bad habits, Salma.”

Sometimes our father put things out there, like he wanted me to push him to say more, but I wasn't in the mood.

I'd always been his confidant, like Aida was our mother's. For a while now, he and our mother had been doing well, hardly any fights. Aida said the Angry Years were behind us. The crying, the oversensitivity, the accusations, the hysteria. Aida said our mother was too romantic for our father. He didn't appreciate her capricious moods and found them unnecessary. Aida said it had nothing to do with our father's affair, but something deeper between them and that our mother was too progressive to get hung up on infidelity. She'd found out the usual way when the girl, one of our father's students, called our house and told her she was in love with her husband and that he wanted to leave her.

I'd had my suspicions since the day our father was promoted to chair of his department and our mother decided this was our father's way of undermining her intelligence yet again. She'd locked herself into their bedroom but instead of pleading to her through the door, our father went out to the backyard to smoke, and when I arrived at his side he looked at me and said, “Can I tell you something, baby?”

He only called
me
baby. Never Aida, whom he called darling. “I don't love your mother anymore.”

“Yes, you do.”

He shook his head. “No, I don't.”

I never told Aida. She thought she had our parents all figured out. When we later discovered love notes in his briefcase from his college girl, Aida said it was probably just a crush gone wrong. It would pass, she said; our parents were too old to leave each other and start new lives. They'd eventually accept that this marriage was the best they could do. I let her have her theory. But I knew my father truly loved that college girl, even if just for a moment, and even if it had nothing to do with who she was, but who she wasn't.

It was the end of the summer. Another week until I started eleventh grade and our father was due to go back to the university for the fall semester. Our mother said I didn't have to go to school anymore. I could be homeschooled, work with tutors, and spend my days in the house with her. Watching. Waiting. She hardly ate. She drank sometimes. Just a bit to wash down her Valium, which she hadn't taken in over a decade, but one of her Manhattan friends showed up with a vintage vial for the rough nights. Our father didn't try to stop her. He was drinking and smoking more than usual, too, as if with Aida gone we'd become short-circuited versions of ourselves.

I wasn't sleeping so much as entering a semiconscious space where I'd talk to my sister. Our mother believed someone was keeping Aida prisoner. In a shed. A garage. A basement. In a wooden box under a bed. I tried to picture her in her darkness. I knew wherever she was she'd be able to hear me speak to her in my mind. Our mother used to buy us books on telepathy. She said it was one of our special twin gifts. We'd play Read My Thoughts games in our bedroom every night. We learned to speak to each other silently from across a room and know what the other was thinking. In seventh grade, when Aida fell off her bike, I knew it before the neighbor from across the street spotted her hitting the curb. I'd felt her fainting, her fall, the impact of the sidewalk hitting her cheek, the sting of broken skin and warm fresh blood.

I waited for the pain. Something to tell me what was happening to Aida. I tried to feel her. I wanted to make our bodies one again. Remember that her veins were once my veins and her heart was my heart and her brain was my brain and her pain was mine. I waited for the sensations. I wanted them to hit me and within them I'd be able to know the story of her disappearance. I'd know who stole her. What they were doing to her. How they were punishing her.

I knew she was alive. Otherwise something in me would have signaled her death. If she'd been hurt or tortured or even killed, my body would have turned on itself. One of my limbs would have blackened. My fingers and toes would have contorted or my skin would have bubbled up in boils and cysts. I didn't dare consider the possibility that I could be like the starfish, a self-healing amputee capable of regeneration.

I heard the phone ring downstairs. Aida and I had our own line in our room but it hardly ever rang. The family line never quit until night, when the calls cooled and our house fell into a cemetery silence. I heard footsteps and knew it was our father. Our mother hadn't been up to our room since the day Aida went missing, when she searched her drawers for a diary, photographs, or letters. I think our mother was hoping Aida wasn't as good as we all thought she was. She searched for evidence, anything that would give her a suspicion, a place to look. I watched her rummage through Aida's drawers and even accuse me of hiding things, but I told her, just like I'd told the detective, Aida didn't have a secret life beyond the one we had together under those lopsided attic walls.

Our father pushed the door open. I never bothered closing it all the way. His eyes avoided Aida's half of the room, and he settled onto the edge of my bed. I was lying above the covers with my day clothes on even though it was close to midnight. I thought he was just coming in to check on me since I hadn't bothered saying good night. He wouldn't look at me, his chin trembling.

“They found her shirt.” He folded over and cried into his hands.

I sat up and put my arms around his shoulders as he choked on his breath.

Later I'd learn that her shirt was ripped almost in half and was found stuffed into a bush behind the high school parking lot. I, however, took this as a good sign. A sign that Aida was real again, not the lost girl in danger of becoming a legend, the girl people were starting to get tired of hearing about because it made them scared and nobody likes to feel scared. A ripped shirt meant she'd resisted. But it also meant she was up against someone brutal. The high school parking lot meant she'd been close to us that first night. So close we might have even passed by her when I went out with our father in his car to retrace her steps and mine to every familiar place. The school grounds were empty that night. I'd stood out by the bleachers and called her name. I'd felt a lurch inside my chest, but around me there was only silence, wet grass, a low moon. On the ride home our father had driven extra slow while I stuck my head out the open window hoping to see her walking on the sidewalk or under the streetlights, making her way home.

“We moved out here because we thought it would be safer for you girls,” our father had said as if to both of us, as if Aida were curled up in the backseat.

We took a long time to get out of the car after we pulled into the driveway. Our father turned off the headlights and kept his fingers tight around the wheel. I wanted to tell my father it would be okay. We'd walk into the house and find Aida sprawled across the sofa just like last night when we sat around together watching dumb sitcoms. I wanted to tell him Aida had probably gone off with other friends. I didn't mind that she'd forgotten about me. My feelings weren't hurt. I wanted to tell him we shouldn't be mad at her for making us all worry like this. I wanted to tell him nothing had changed, everything was just as it had been the day before, Aida, guiding our family like the skipper of a ship through choppy waters, reminding us all to hold onto each other.