All about Skin (5 page)

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 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 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.

At dinner, our mother pushed her food around her plate. We didn't bother nagging her to eat anymore. Her hunger strike was for Aida, who she was sure was being starved in some psychopath's home dungeon. Sometimes she had visions. She saw Aida chained to a radiator crying out for help. She saw her bound and gagged in the back of a van, being driven down some interstate far from us. She saw Aida drugged, captive in a dingy den, man after man forcing himself onto her.

Our mother never left home, in case Aida returned after escaping her captor, running to our house, where she'd find the door unlocked, our mother waiting with arms open. Even at night, our mother insisted on keeping the door ajar. Our father told her it was dangerous but she said she feared nothing now. Everything she loved had already been taken from her.

A few days into December we got the call that a hiker up in Greenwood Lake found Aida's boots. They were ruined from months of rain and snow but the police took them for analysis. Just like with her purse, there were no discernable fingerprints, but Aida's blood was found in trace amounts. It could have been from before. A cut. A picked-over bug bite that left a smudge of blood on the leather. After all, our mother offered, Aida had that terrible habit of scratching an itch until it became an open sore. Or, the blood could have come after. I slept with my identical pair of boots for weeks after that. I held them into my chest and closed my eyes waiting for images to burn across my mind, but they never came. I spent hours in bed staring at Aida's half of the room, still afraid to cry because I told myself you only cry for the dead.

That Christmas passed like any other day. The year before, Aida and I had helped our mother with the cooking while our father fumbled with the fireplace and played old French records, but this year there was no music and the three of us ate reheated food delivered by the townspeople. Our parents floated around the house avoiding each other while I divided my time between them, then alone upstairs in our room with Andromeda. Days earlier, a documentary-style crime show called asking if they could do a one-hour special on Aida's disappearance with family interviews and all. They assured us it wouldn't be tacky or macabre, and said that in a few cases, their shows had helped witnesses to come forward with information about the disappeared. Our father had agreed but when he told our mother I could hear all the way in the attic as she cried out, “What do they want from me? There's nothing left for them to take.”

Our father thought publicity would be good for Aida's case. The campaign to bring her home, like some POW, was down to its final embers, and the detectives had recently come by to warn our parents with weak, well-meaning smiles that there was a good chance we might never know what happened to her. They encouraged us to join a support group and gave us a list of all sorts of networks for families of missing people. But our mother insisted that because Aida was alive, that kind of publicity would force whoever had her to cause her more harm or finish her off out of fear of being caught. She didn't trust the media, believing their stories on Aida were meant to sell papers rather than find her. She regularly accused the detectives of incompetence, calling them small-town sleuths who never investigated more than a stolen bicycle and who secretly wanted to abandon Aida's case because it tarnished the town's “safe” image. She considered all the neighbors suspects. Every man who'd ever met Aida was a potential kidnapper or rapist, and every woman, a jealous sadist. It was a community conspiracy. It was because we were outsiders. It was because Aida was so perfect that people wanted to hurt her. It was because we never belonged here that they wanted to hurt us. Our father didn't disagree with her anymore. I wondered if it was because he'd given up trying to reason or if it was because he was starting to believe her.

I celebrated our seventeenth birthday twice. Our mother was finally willing to leave the house for hours at a time so she took me to dinner at an Indian restaurant in town. For dessert, the waiter brought me a mango mousse with a candle jammed into its gooey surface. I smiled at our mother. I knew she was making an effort. She held my hand as I blew out the candle. It was strange to see her thin finger free of her wedding band.

When we walked back to the car a group of kids driving fast down Elm shouted, “Hi, Aida!” They did this sometimes when they saw me around, whether it was a sincere error in recognition or just to torment us, I never knew. Our mother pretended not to hear them. She was getting stronger about these things.

That weekend I celebrated again with our father. He took me to Mostly Mozart again and this time, he offered me a cigarette by the fountain. He'd moved out two months earlier. He swore to our mother it wasn't for another woman but because he just needed to be on his own, to discover who he really was. Our mother turned to him with a stare that was somehow vacant while containing the sum of her life.

“If you don't know who you are by now, my love, not even God can help you.”

He rented a small, dark studio near the university. It had an interior view, a Murphy bed, and a kitchen with no stove. It was all he could afford as long as he was still paying the mortgage on our house in the suburbs, and there was no way, as long as Aida remained unfound, that our mother would let him sell it.

He admitted to me that he'd been planning to leave our home since long before we lost Aida. He loved us, he said, but he always felt wrong among us, out of place, as if he'd made a wrong turn somewhere. He said there was a time when he thought he and our mother would grow closer from the pain of Aida being gone but he was tired of trying and tired of hoping.

“You understand, baby,” he said, and I was embarrassed to tell him I didn't.

“You're all grown up now. Only another year and you'll be off to college. There will be new beginnings for all of us.”

We still didn't know how to talk about Aida. I asked him, because I knew he would tell me the truth, if he thought we'd ever find her, or at least know what happened to her.

“No. I don't.”

Just like our mother couldn't go on without Aida, I knew the only way our father could hold on to her was by letting go.

Later that summer, some teenagers getting high up on Bear Mountain came across what they thought was a deer carcass, and started poking around until they spotted a human skull. When the forensics results came back conclusive the newspapers decided, as if they were the judges of such things, that our family could get closure now, find some peace in knowing the search was over, and Aida's broken, abandoned body could finally be laid to rest. The community held a big public memorial at the same spot in the park where they'd held all their vigils but our mother insisted Aida's funeral service be kept private. And so we sat on a single pew before the altar watching a priest who never knew her bless my sister's pine casket, the four of us together in an otherwise empty church for the first time since our tandem baptism, though our family was far from religious and, if anything, Aida and I were raised to believe in only what is seen.

A few days before Aida's remains were found, I walked slowly through the park on my way home from school the way I often did in a sort of meditation, whispering her name with each footstep, wondering what would become of us, what would become of me, all those empty years spread out ahead in which we were supposed to go on living without her. Across the brick path, I saw a pair of kids chasing pigeons and I thought of my sister, the way she would have walked over to them and explained with her boundless patience that it was wrong to scare helpless animals, that they belonged to nature just as much as two-legged wingless folk did and had the right to live without fear of unreasonable human violence. And then I heard her call my name, loud, with laughter just beneath it, the way she would call to me when we'd meet each other halfway after work, her airy voice rushing through the mosaic of dried leaves on the wilting grass, shaking the naked branches overhead, then departing just as quickly as it came, leaving the park and every breath of life within it entombed in stillness. Anybody else would have called it the wind, but me, I knew it was something else.