Meant For Me (12 page)

And I woke up the next day in bed with not one total stranger, but two.

My mouth was thick, my head was pounding, and I despised myself in that moment of initial awareness. So, what, Chloe rejected me and I did this? Was I that fucking weak? That determined to punish myself and anyone who might attempt to get close to me?

Reaching over a bare back for my phone, I saw I had a text from Chloe.

God. She had answered and while she was answering I was having a threesome I didn’t remember. I rubbed my hand over my face. This was why Chloe deserved better than me. Even though I had wanted her in every inch of my body, I was glad I hadn’t had sex with her.

I’m sending you my thoughts.

I frowned.

What do you mean?

She answered right away. It was ten in the morning, and the original text had been sent at midnight.

Here. Doc share.

I clicked on it. It was a document, several pages long. Maybe it was like a diary. Quickly, I closed it again. I didn’t want to see it. I didn’t want to read Chloe’s thoughts when there were two naked girls bookending me. That was just wrong.

Thanks, Chloe. I am looking forward to reading.

The only way out of the bed without waking up either of them was to crawl down the middle to the bottom, under the sheet. As I slid down feet first, I got an interesting vista on the way down. It was like I’d fallen into a prosthetics factory. Legs everywhere. Fucking ridiculous. I about broke my back bending my way off the bed and onto the floor but finally I was out, breathing hard, head pounding.

I found my jeans on the floor and I pulled them on. With phone and wallet still tucked into my pocket, I left. I hadn’t seen my t-shirt and I didn’t care. I just wanted out of there. The light searing into my eyes in an all too familiar way, I left the apartment building and got my bearings. I was about six blocks from my place. Shirtless, shoeless, and unshaven, I looked like I’d wandered outside in the middle of a heroin high. Keeping it classy. That was me.

In the blissful darkness of my apartment, I brewed coffee for myself, and flopped onto the couch. Despite my headache I wanted desperately to hear Chloe’s thoughts. What was her voice like, when she had the freedom of many words instead of so very few?

I opened the document.

My name is not Chloe.

Before she ran off and left us, my mother (adopted mother, not birth mother) liked to tell the story of how one day she found me staring in the mirror. I was about four, and I had pushed a chair over to stand on so I could see in the mirror above the fireplace. She asked me who I was looking at, amused at how intently I was staring. I told her I was looking at Ekaterina. Since that was my birth name, the name I’d had before they brought me to America and the agency told my mother a new name was a fresh start, it freaked her out. She called a shrink and told him to fix it. To fix me. Because she was sure I was becoming some sort of split personality or something.

It eventually became something she’d laugh about, tell friends at holiday parties, her hand petting my hair absently as I leaned against her. I leaned on her everywhere, all day, every chance I could get.

I don’t remember that mirror incident. I don’t remember seeing a shrink. Not then anyway.

But I do remember Ekaterina.

And this is her story.

I stood up abruptly, and went for the coffee. Holy shit. Chloe hadn’t been born with her name. I hadn’t thought about that but it made sense. She would have been given a Russian name, and apparently Paul and his wife had changed it. Probably to allow her to fit in better in her new home.

But damn. She hadn’t been six months old. What did that do to a kid?

Not good things. I pictured little Chloe, big eyes and a solemn stare talking to herself in the mirror. It got under my skin, I had to admit.

When Ekaterina was still Ekaterina, she didn’t need a mirror to see her own features. She merely had to look to her side and into the eyes of her twin to see what she looked like. That twin’s name was Anya, and together they moved as one in the orphanage on the hill. The window looked down on the town, a bleak industrial city of squat gray houses and an equally gray sky. They never left the orphanage. They went into the yard, to play on the hard-packed dirt or in the winter the frozen ground and the slippery patches of ice that older kids broke up with their heels and crunched between their teeth or threw at each other or pretended to stab themselves in dramatic dying scenes.

But the twins were left alone to play together because they spoke the secret language of those who shared space before they were born. And they were happy in the way of children who are fed and have a roof over their heads and don’t know any better. They weren’t loved by anyone but each other, but neither were they mistreated. They simply… were.

Losing a twin has been described as losing a limb, but it’s different than that. If a leg is cut off, you miss what it did for you, to learn to adjust your balance, you mourn the extension of yourself that is missing. But having a twin is like having the inside of you, your heart, your brain, interwoven with someone else’s. You cannot open someone’s chest, and slice out pieces of their heart and expect them to live. You can’t take a saw to their skull, and unravel their brain matter like a knit sweater, leaving only frayed yarn bits in a lumpy ball behind. When you yank a portion of the sweater out, you destroy the weaving entirely.

So when Ekaterina was put on a bus, to an airport, and onto a plane that sounded and felt terrifying, and then into a taxi, in a land where no one spoke a language she could understand, the twins were unraveled. Everything was different. Everything smelled and tasted and sounded different and all the mirrors were gone. Ekaterina turned and there was no Anya. No comfort. No shared brain to process thoughts and feelings and to make decisions.

Ekaterina became Chloe who was sent to live on an island with strangers who wanted her to speak their language.

But I could only speak the secret language of my twin, and Russian if you coaxed me. I learned English in that I could understand and could think it, and when I learned to speak it, I told my parents about my twin and they told me to hush. That I had no twin. The orphanage had never mentioned a twin. Why would they split up twins? They thought it was the mirror again, that I was looking for the other side of me, the Russian side, that my twin was in essence an imaginary friend I had made up to comfort me in my new strange world.

That she wasn’t real.

That I didn’t know what I was talking about.

In my head, I screamed for Anya, for the other piece of me that was gone, missing, removed with no thought to the damage it would create. I screamed out loud too and cried and begged and no one listened. So I took my thoughts inward, and I stole my words away from everyone. If they wouldn’t listen to them, then I wouldn’t speak, and they couldn’t hear.

Eventually, I forgot how to speak.

No one hears my innermost thoughts, no one but Anya. I still speak to her, and that hole will never be healed without her. And if I see her again, will my voice return? I don’t know. But I want to try. I need to try.

And I need you to help me, Ethan.

Help me find my sister. My mirror. My voice.

My hand was shaking, and it wasn’t from the hangover. I had asked to hear Chloe’s voice and I’d gotten it. I could
hear
her. She was sharing something with me probably very few people knew- that she had a twin. And why she’d stopped speaking.

I believed her. Because while probably a lot of people would question Chloe and her memories, I didn’t. Her sister wasn’t an imaginary friend. You didn’t create a sibling to survive an orphanage. Or did you? Maybe there really was no sister but she had convinced herself at three that there was. I didn’t know. What mattered was Chloe believed it to be the truth and the undeniable reality that her adoption had yanked her out of a very narrow and scheduled world into one that was confusing and frightening.

It was clear Paul loved his adopted daughter. But how do you make it okay to a three year that they’re surrounded by a language they don’t understand? A smile is comforting but an explanation more so. It was why I hadn’t been able to have sex with Chloe. I’d had no explanation. We all needed words.

The one word she’d known- her name- had been taken away from her.

I pictured Chloe as Ekaterina and it fit. She was so delicate and so was her birth name. I tried to imagine someone randomly changing my name and I couldn’t wrap my head around it. Sure, people changed their name, took on nicknames or pen names or stage names. They gained and dropped last names with marriage. But that was a conscious choice. What had happened to her was totally without her understanding or her knowledge.

Totally unsure of what to say to Chloe, I stared at the text box on my phone and thought before typing.

Ekaterina is a beautiful name. As beautiful as you.

Then I added a second text.

Of course I’ll help you. Tell me what you need
.

If finding her sister brought her voice back, I’d do anything to see that happen. She deserved peace. Closure. If Aubrey had suddenly just disappeared when I was four it would have messed me up big time.

Do you believe me?

I paused, standing up to dig out some aspirin for my jacked up head. Was this a con? Was Chloe some sort of pathological liar? No. That didn’t make sense. A liar wouldn’t stop talking. Liars loved an audience. All they did was talk. Besides, Chloe had a sincerity in her eyes, her expression that I wasn’t sure anyone would fake.

Yes. I believe you
.

Maybe I wanted to believe her. Maybe I needed to believe in someone. Something. Maybe I needed to feel like I could help. Like somewhere under the selfish hedonist who was wasting his life, I still had vestiges of the guy who’d wanted to do the right thing. Who could be someone’s hero.

She sent me a smiley.

No one ever has ever believed me but I knew I could trust you
.

That meant more to me than she could ever possibly understand. I hadn’t given her any reason to trust me or to find me worthy of her deepest, darkest secret. It felt like something tenuous but genuine was being established between us, maybe sprouting from my confessions about Caitlyn. I had exposed my thoughts to her and in return, she felt capable of doing the same.

You can trust me. Btw, you should know that I really, really wanted you last night. But I didn’t want to do the wrong thing.

You don’t have to explain.

I found aspirin in the kitchen and tore the lid off. I popped three into my mouth and then bent over the sink, turning the water on, and catching a stream into my open mouth. After swallowing and wiping my mouth, I answered Chloe.

I don’t have to do anything. But I wanted to explain. You’re not just any girl.

She wasn’t. She was much more than that.

I didn’t want to give her a chance to respond to that so I quickly typed again.

What have you done to find your sister?

Just looked online. I couldn’t find anything. I don’t know what I’m doing.

Hell, I didn’t either, but I figured public records had to bring us some information.

Tell me everything you know about Anya.

Then I asked what was probably a weird ass question. But I asked it anyway.

Do you want me to call you Chloe or Ekaterina?

The pause was so long I wondered if I had ticked her off somehow. Or if she was unnerved by the question. Setting my phone down I dug in my fridge. There was basically nothing edible in it. I was craving a burger the size of Rhode Island.

My phone buzzed on the counter.

I don’t know yet.

For some reason, I liked her answer.

So the question was how did I find a girl that might not have the same name anymore? I had to assume adoption records were sealed since it was a foreign adoption. Chloe had given me almost nothing to go on. Just the name of the orphanage in Russia and the last name she and Anya had been born with- Volkov.

After taking a shower and washing the stench of vodka and guilt off of me, I picked up my phone to call my friend Kyle who I thought could help me. He was the kind of guy who could find anything online in one tenth the time it took anyone else. I had a text from one of the girls from the night before. At least, I had to assume that’s who it was. She sent me a pouting emoji followed by a pic of the two of them naked in bed, one kissing the others neck.

It said, “Lonely without you.”

Delete.

You’d think I would remember something like that, but nope. Nothing. Which was fucking disturbing. The alcohol was really a bad choice. I’d maintained a whole three days of sobriety before blowing it but this time I was serious. No alcohol.

I called Kyle.

“Hey, asshole, where have you been?” was his greeting.

“Vinalhaven, visiting my sister, dickhead. What have you been up to besides jacking off?”

“Really, after jacking off, I don’t have much time for anything else.”

I snorted. “Hey, listen, how do I go about finding someone who was adopted from Russia seventeen years ago? I only have her birth name and birthday.”

“That’s seriously one of the most random things you’ve ever asked me.”

“I like to keep our friendship spicy and interesting.” It had been awhile since I’d talked to Kyle and I realized that I had missed having real friends. I’d been hanging out with acquaintances because I’d reached the point where all my college friends and fraternity brothers had been starting to give me a critical eye and concerned speeches. So I’d stopped talking to the majority of them, or at least had stopped hanging around with them.

“That is so creepy. Anyway, give me what you got and I’ll see what I can do. Can I ask why?”

“I, uh, am involved with this girl, and this is her sister. They were both adopted from Russia and Chloe wants to find her sister. No big mystery.”

“Russian twins? I’m in. Can I have the twin if I find her?”