Act of God (7 page)

“You telling me penthouse owner say, yeah, sure thing, just take my mat?”

“No one lives there. It’s the model apartment.”

She’d never before heard the term “model apartment,” and it evoked a thrilling perfection, the apartment to which all other apartments aspire.

“It has an awesome view,” he stammered, shuffling his heavy feet in place. “Want to see it?”

The penthouse’s living room was as big as the shoe factory her parents slaved in. The ceiling was as tall as a telephone pole. Three out of four walls were glass. From the vantage point of the thirtieth floor, the tempest’s production became grander. Behind the skyline, banks and banks of clouds waited to come onstage.

She turned her attention to the furniture. The dining room table was set for six as if in preparation for a dinner party. The beds were made. The office desk had an open laptop, lit with icons. She touched the keys. They didn’t give. The computer was only a hollow plastic shell painted to look like a laptop. Did Americans decorate their homes with plastic electronics like her mother tried to beautify their hovel with plastic fruit? She wished her mother could see her eldest daughter now, but even if her mother had miraculously
appeared, she wouldn’t have been impressed. To be impressed, you needed to want, and her mother appeared to want nothing. On wintery Sunday afternoons, after the family, except Anushka, returned from church, her mother would settle half asleep in the dark living room, her mind as empty as her pockets. And if Ashley had blinked and her father had miraculously appeared, he would probably have groveled to the doorman just because he was in uniform. Her father had spent ten years in a gulag. He was used to living in holes. He’d look around and then cower at being so exposed to the elements, like a mouse in an open field.

“I’m not supposed to let anyone up here. We should probably leave,” said the doorman as Ashley started to make herself comfortable on the sofa.

She patted the cushion beside her. “Come. Sit by me.”

“I could get fired if one of the real estate agents comes by for a showing.”

She’d sized him up correctly yesterday—a gelded draft horse that thinks he’s a stallion.

Back in the actor’s apartment, she hunted for food. She hadn’t eaten since yesterday morning. It must be lunchtime, though the black clouds made it look like midnight. She opened the refrigerator. Unlike Vida’s shelves, which held only a small ration of wilted vegetables and queen-sized chocolate bars, this actor’s fridge was stocked for a siege. She began to inspect the jars, bottles, boxes, and fruits only an oligarch could afford in Russia. She wanted to taste everything—pineapple (better than rock candy), Finocchiona salami (a fatty hard old sausage), Dean & Deluca Single Origin Truffles (tastier than Vida’s chocolates), Bella Viva dried fruit (she could buy the same kind in the Omsk marketplace), Dean & Deluca Mesquite and Stout Ale Mustard (she ate a spoonful), East Shore Dipping Pretzels (not
salty enough), Lambrusco Wine Jelly (too much like medicine), hickory-smoked almonds (she finished the jar), butter caramels, olive oil, Grissini Breadsticks, and a carton of Yunnan organic green tea ice cream (it didn’t taste like tea at all).

She felt sick but didn’t stop. She gorged as the storm raged outside.

Kat didn’t get back to the hotel until well past midnight. Lenny, the hairy-wristed gentleman from the bar, had paid for her drinks. At some point during the afternoon, they’d staggered back to Lenny’s place, a walk-up in Hell’s Kitchen. He was almost a head shorter than Kat, but Kat believed that horizontally everyone was the same height. His hairy wrists were just the beginning of his pelt. For someone steeped in an afternoon of alcohol, Lenny was an attentive, hopeful lover, and Kat couldn’t help but think, what better way to spend a rainy day than two strangers comforting each other? She might have fooled the world with her hearty sexuality, but she never could fool herself. She was lonely.

She quietly shut the hotel door so as not to wake Edith. She didn’t want a lecture on how irresponsible she was not phoning to let Edith know she was alive. Thank god she’d remembered to stop by the twenty-four-hour pharmacy to pick up Edith’s heart pills. She placed the vial on Edith’s side of their shared nightstand so her pills would be the first thing Edith saw when she woke up, in case Kat had to sleep in to ward off a hangover. She already tasted the chalky dehydration that promised a headache. In the dark, she shed her wet clothes, slipped under the sheets, and then pulled up the blanket. It was surprisingly chilly, though whether from air-conditioning or the storm, Kat wasn’t sure. Her
pupils drank in what little ambient streetlight there was. She watched Edith materialize out of the gloom. Edith had fallen asleep on top of her blanket, in her bra and underwear. She didn’t want Edith to freeze, but unearthing the blanket from under her would only wake her. Kat stripped off her own blanket and covered Edith, then got back under the cold sheets.

She closed her eyes, anticipating the comforting wholeness that twins share when they sleep near each other. She had once attended an identical-twins conference, without Edith, and had met others who experienced what she had. Twins have been known to send each other messages in dreams, even when they’re sleeping in different hemispheres, though Edith didn’t believe any of that. Whether she believed or not, she was always waiting for Kat in sleep’s antechamber, though Edith took different spirit and animal forms. No matter where in the world Kat was, when she closed her eyes for the night, Edith’s presence came to her, like a scent, and Kat believed that she visited Edith nightly in exactly the same way. Tonight, however, all she could smell was Lenny on her.

Maybe Edith was only pretending to be asleep?

“Edie, are you awake?” she whispered.

She listened for a response, but heard nothing. Sleepers’ exhalations were always discernable: silence was the lie. “Edie, don’t be mad at me. I got your pills. They’re on the nightstand.”

Again, nothing. Was she so angry that she wouldn’t speak to Kat?

“What do you want from me, Edie? I can’t live like a nun. I’m not like you. I can’t suffer loneliness with your stoicism. Is that such a horrible, unforgivable need that you feel you have to shun me?”

Kat switched on the light. Edith’s eyes were open, but she wasn’t looking at her. Kat rose. “Edie?” She stared straight into those pale blue irises. The forest-green coronas looked moist and alive, but the pupils were opaque. Nobody was looking back at Kat. She lowered her ear against Edith’s chest to listen for life but flinched when the skin felt cold. Kat’s heart banged so loudly she couldn’t distinguish any pulse but her own. She thought she’d heard a faint echo from deep within Edith.

She dialed 911. “My sister isn’t breathing. I can’t find her pulse. Help us. Please, help us.”

After dispatching the paramedics, the operator asked, “Could she be choking on anything?”

Kat knew that Edith wasn’t choking, but the operator’s commands filled her with purpose.

“Make sure her airway is clear. Are there any signs of trauma?”

Should she close her sister’s lids? Edith was such a private woman. She wouldn’t want strangers to see her soulless eyes. Closing Edith’s eyelids was the most heartrending sensation that Kat had ever experienced. The once blinking, widening, animated lids obediently shut.

The pandemonium of paramedics stilled only after it became evident that Edith wouldn’t be shocked back to life. The two men, older than Kat imagined medics to be, must have seen their share of weeping wives, howling husbands, and sobbing parents—but not twins. They were momentarily taken aback when they saw that the corpse and the bereft were identical.

“Can I ride with her to the hospital?” Kat asked as they were fitting Edith into a body bag.

The two men exchanged alarmed glances. “We’re not taking her to the hospital.”

That was when it finally sank in. Edith was going to the morgue.

“Do you want a moment to say good-bye?” asked the taller man before closing the bag.

“We’ve already said good-bye.”

Edith was then zipped up, strapped on the gurney, and trundled away. Kat accompanied her as far as the elevator.

“Is there someone you can call to be with you tonight?” asked the shorter man.

The elevator door closed before Kat could answer him.

She returned to their hotel room, though that was the last place she wanted to go and lie down. A horror she’d never before known began to occupy the empty bed beside her. She thought she smelled death on the sheets. How long had Edith been dead? Oh god, let death have come quick; let her not have suffered long and alone. The odor—almost sweet—was still there. Kat stripped Edith’s bed, and left the sheets balled in the corridor for the maid. That’s when the messy, gulping sobs began, liquid grief. When she finally came up for air, she called the front desk.

“My sister just died. Is the bar closed?”

The Indian-accented young man stammered an enigmatic “I’m sorry, ma’am.”

“Sorry the bar is closed or sorry my sister is dead?”

“Both,” he said.

A few minutes later, he knocked on the door with an open bottle of Scotch.

“A guest left this behind,” he explained.

“Would you like to stay for a drink?” asked Kat. She couldn’t bear to be alone.

“Nobody’s watching the front desk.”

“Please. Just one.”

“I could lose my job.”

She let the poor man leave, but still poured two glasses, one for herself, and one for Edith. The loneliness felt both cavernous and suffocating. Edith had been alone and without her pills. Why hadn’t Kat gone straight to the pharmacy? Why did she have to go home with Lenny? Why did she have to get drunk with Ashley? She was such a fuckup and now her sister was dead.

Daylight brought no comfort, though Kat had spent every waking hour of the night yearning for dawn. When she managed to doze off and forget that Edith was dead, the naked mattress was there to remind her when she opened her eyes. Why had she stripped the bed? She went into the hall to find the sheets, but the bundle was gone.

The Scotch bottle was nearly empty. She picked up Edith’s vial of heart pills. The label warned of sleepiness. She took three with the last swig. Between the booze and the beta-blockers, she finally sank into slumber, where she found herself dining with Edith in an Egyptian restaurant she didn’t recognize. Edith was relishing her food, a cut of rare lamb that she ate off the bone.

Kat waited until Edith finished before telling her the awful news. “Edie,” she said hoarsely. “Oh, Edie, I’m so sorry to tell you this, but you have to know. You’re dead.”

“I just finished eating my dinner. I’m no more dead than you.”

Two mustachioed waiters came over. One grabbed Edith’s wrists, the other her ankles, and swing-tossed her off the balcony, a ten-story fall to her death.

Kat finished her dinner, so grateful that the kind waiters had taken things into their own hands and spared Edith any more suffering. But when her plate was empty, she began to fret that Edith might not have died instantly, that she might have hit the pavement, crushed and in agony. Kat ran down
endless flights of stairs. When she reached the street, Edith was sitting on the curb, stunned and shaken by the ten-story fall, but unharmed.

Kat burst into tears of elation. “I thought I’d never see you alive again!”

She woke momentarily euphoric, but then the naked mattress stripped her of that illusion.

She waited until a decent hour, nine sharp, before tolling the death bell. She called Edith’s old friends from work. She found their numbers in the BlackBerry.

“Hello, Janice.”

“You sound awful, Edie.”

“It’s Kat. Edith is dead.”

“Oh, no. No, no, no. How? When?”

“Last night. I found her. I don’t even know where they took the body. I forgot to ask.”

“Call Stanley. He’s Edie’s executor. I can’t believe she’s gone.”

“Neither can I,” said Kat.

She wasn’t ready to call Edith’s executor. The word sounded too final. She took another beta-blocker to buffet her thumping anxiety. What if Edith had taken her medicine that morning? What if Kat weren’t such a fuckup? Would Edith be alive? Did she call anyone for help at the last minute?

Kat reached for the BlackBerry. It contained so much of Edith’s life it seemed like a sacred memory totem. Edith’s last call was to Vida, probably the last person Edith spoke to. It was placed at eleven a.m. sharp and lasted two minutes and nineteen seconds. What had they talked about? Did Vida say something that gave her a heart attack? The call before that was to Stanley. Did he say something that killed her? Who was the last person she emailed? Edith’s AOL account asked
for a password. I’m her twin, Kat thought, we shared every cell in our bodies for sixty-four years, surely I can guess her password. The account locked after ten failed attempts, and then Kat wept anew because she hadn’t known her sister at all. She found Edith’s last web search.
Act of God.

Had Edith found God? Their mother was a secular Jew. Their father’s only religion was jazz, or so their mother told them. He died when they were three of a cerebral aneurism while soloing on his trumpet. Edith had always been adamant about her lack of faith, while Kat secretly hoped for miracles.

Over the next couple of days, Kat used the money from Edith’s purse to buy one bottle of vodka after another. She didn’t care what brand.

The BlackBerry rang sometime on the third day while Kat was reading Edith’s datebook, weepy because Edith had so many friends. When the sacred BlackBerry rang, Kat almost believed that Edith was calling her from the other world.

“Katherine, it’s Stanley Flom. I’m so sorry for your loss. Everyone here was so fond of Edith. You have our deepest condolences.”

“Thank you,” Kat said.

“I know this is a difficult time for you, but the medical examiner’s office phoned me this morning. A decision has to be made. Edith wanted her body donated to science, but now that the preliminary autopsy is in, the ME doesn’t think she’ll be eligible.”

“What did she die of? Was it her heart?”