The Best American Mystery Stories 2014 (21 page)

“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 that 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 in 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 with 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 goodnight. 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 back seat.

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 on to each other.

I didn’t go back to school right away and never went back to my job at the coffee shop. Our friends came by less and less, and I understood it was because there was no news. Our father went to work but I spent the days in the house with our mother. I followed the home school program and did my assignments with more attention than I’d ever given my studies before. Aida was always the better student. It took some of the pressure off. When I wasn’t studying, our mother and I orbited each other with few interactions. Sometimes I’d suggest we do something together. Go to a midday movie or watch a program on TV. Sometimes I’d bring up a book I knew she’d read just to give her the chance to talk about anything other than Aida, but she never took me up on any of it. She spent most afternoons in a haze, drifting from bed to kitchen to sofa to bed, taking long baths in the evenings when I thought she might drown herself accidentally or on purpose. The people in town were still holding candlelight vigils at the Memorial Park every Friday night in Aida’s honor, but our mother never went. I went twice with our father, but we agreed that turning Aida into a saint wasn’t going to bring her home any faster.

The vigils continued, though, and the volunteers kept searching the wooded areas around town, the shrubbery along the highway, the vacant buildings and abandoned lots next to the railroad tracks. The reporters kept the story in the news, and when they found her shirt the TV stations wanted a statement from our parents, but they were too broken down to talk, so our next-door neighbor, whose dog once tried to eat Andromeda, spoke on their behalf. The police wouldn’t let me do it because they didn’t want whoever had Aida to see me and know there were two of us out there.

Sometimes people brought us food. Casseroles, lasagnas, hero sandwiches. The church ladies dropped mass cards for Aida in our mailbox. The department store where she worked set up a fund in Aida’s name to help send some kid to art school, and there was a community initiative to raise money to contribute to the reward my parents had already publicly offered for Aida’s safe return or information about her disappearance. Our father said we should be grateful to live in such a supportive and generous town, but our mother resented it. She hated that she was the one, the mother who’d lost the daughter. She hated that her life, which she’d curated so meticulously, had become something else. Her Aida was no longer her Aida but a story that belonged to all of them now. But our father didn’t want us to come off as unappreciative, so he took me aside and told me I was in charge of writing thank-you notes, and on every note I was to sign our mother’s name.

Aida and I had a plan. After high school, we’d go to college in Manhattan. I’d go to one of the universities and study history and she’d go to one of the art schools. We’d share an apartment and get jobs near each other so we could see each other for lunch or meet after work like we did here in town. We’d make extra money by signing up for twin research studies like we always wanted to do, though our father never let us. We’d never live apart. We’d have to meet and marry men who could get along like brothers and tolerate our bond with good humor. If not, we’d be happy to live as a twosome forever. We’d move back in with our parents and look after them in their old age. It wouldn’t be so bad.

Our mother liked to think she raised us to live in a bigger world, but Aida and I only wanted a world together. Our father tried to undo this attachment early on by sending us to separate summer camps, but Aida and I protested until they finally let us go to one in New Hampshire together. It didn’t become a trend, though. Aida and I quickly figured out that our absence had led our parents to the brink of divorce. When we returned, our father was sleeping in the guest room. I urged him to offer endless bargain apologies—for what, I had no idea—and Aida encouraged our mother to forgive, and after she was done forgiving to forgive some more.

I often wondered how our parents survived six years alone together before our birth when they had so little in common. “It’s just love,” Aida would say, as if that explained everything. She always had more answers than I did about why things were the way they were, so one day I asked her if she would love me this much if I wasn’t her twin, and she didn’t hesitate before telling me, “It’s
only
because you’re my twin that I love you this way.”

The night our mother caught her on our beanbag with Marlon, Aida told me that being kissed for the first time was like being shot in the chest. I said,
That doesn’t sound very nice
, but she assured me it was—the feeling of being ripped apart followed by a beautiful hot internal gush. In the early days of her disappearance, our mother’s suspicions had gone straight to Marlon. His father and stepmother lived a few towns over and he hadn’t yet gone back to school. The police looked into it. Marlon admitted that after their encounter he and Aida had called each other a few times, which I never knew, but he insisted they’d never seen each other again. He had a solid alibi for the night Aida disappeared in his stepmother, who said he’d been home watching television with her. As the months passed, our mother became obsessed with him, regularly phoning his stepmother to call her a liar and Marlon a monster, until the lady filed a complaint and the police told our mother she had to stop harassing them or else.

Every now and then we’d get word of another sighting. Someone saw Aida in Texas the same day she was also seen in Seattle. There was a spotting in the next town over, down the shore, up in the Ramapo Mountains, and down by the reservoir. The police followed these leads but they all led to nothing. Even as the reward money increased, there was no solid theory for what might have happened to her. The locals started worrying maybe there was a serial killer on the loose, but that would suggest Aida was murdered and there was no body. The reporters liked to say that for the missing girl’s family the worst part was not knowing, but our mother always said that not knowing preserved hope that Aida would soon come home, and hope is never the worst thing. Our mother warned the police and detectives not to use words like
homicide
in our house. Aida was alive. She might be half dead, broken apart, mutilated, and of course she would never be the same, but Aida was alive, and unless the police could present her cadaver as proof, we were not allowed to think otherwise.