The Best American Mystery Stories 2014 (20 page)

I called her phone but she didn’t answer, then I tried our parents to see if they’d heard from her. It started from there. The calling around. Probably for the first time ever, the town employed that emergency phone chain where each person is assigned five others to call, to see if anyone had seen Aida. Around here, you can’t get a haircut without it being blasted over the gossip wires, but nobody knew where she was. This is a town where nothing terrible ever happens. There are perverts and creeps like anywhere else but never an abduction or a murder. The worst violent crime this town ever saw beyond an occasional housewife wandering the supermarket with a broken nose or split lip was back in 1979, when one sophomore girl stabbed another with a pencil in the high school cafeteria.

The old man detective reminded us we had the good fortune of living in one of the safest towns on the East Coast. “This isn’t some third-world country,” he told our mother. “The likelihood that your daughter was kidnapped is extremely remote.” He told our parents it was common for teenagers to test boundaries. If he only had a dollar for every time a parent called looking for a kid who it turned out had just taken off to a rock concert at the Meadowlands or hopped in a car with some friends and headed down the shore. And it’d only been four hours, he emphasized. Aida couldn’t have gotten very far. Our mother argued that four hours could take her to Boston, to Washington, D.C., so far into Pennsylvania that she might as well be in another country. Four hours was enough to disappear into nearby New York City, her dark pretty face bleeding into millions of others. But the old detective insisted, “Four hours is nothing, ma’am. You’ll see. You’ll see.”

Our mother and father arrived late to parenthood. Our mother was a spoiled Colombian diplomat’s daughter who spent her childhood in Egypt, India, Japan, and Italy. She never went to university but was a dinner party scholar, a favorite guest, and indulged her international friendships for two decades of prolonged escapades in Buenos Aires, Los Angeles, London, Marrakesh, and Barcelona. She had many boyfriends, was engaged three or four times but never married. She was a painter for a while, then a photographer and an antique dealer. She sometimes worked in boutiques or found a man to support her, though she never wanted to be tied down. She was thirty-eight when she met our father in a Heathrow airport bar. He was a shy history professor from Marseille who’d written three books on the Marranos of the sixteenth century. She thought he was boring and lonely yet stable, tender, and adulating—everything she needed at that particular moment in her life. They married and tried to have a baby immediately, but our mother had several disappointments until she received the good news of twin girls at the age of forty-four. We were born during our father’s sabbatical year in Córdoba. Our mother said those prior broken seeds had been Aida and me but neither of us was ready for our debut.

“You were waiting for each other,” she told us. “You insisted on being born together.”

Our father never liked when she talked that way. He said she was going to make us think we had no identity outside our little pair. Our mother insisted this was the beautiful part of twinship. We were bound to each other. We were more than sisters. We could feel each other’s pain and longing, and this meant we’d never be alone in our suffering. When Aida was sick, I’d become sick soon after. Our father blamed it on practical things like the fact that Aida and I shared a bedroom, a bathroom, and ate every meal together. Of course we’d pass our germs around, be each other’s great infector. But our mother said it was because we were one body split in two. We’d once shared flesh and blood. Our hearts were once one meaty pulp. Our father would scold our mother for her mystical nonsense and our mother would shoot back that he was always dismissing her; just because she didn’t have fancy degrees like he did didn’t make her an idiot. She’d cry and it would turn into the song of the night, with our mother locking herself in the bathroom and our father calling through the door, “Pilar, don’t be like that. I just want them to know that if anything should ever happen, they can live without each other.”

He wanted us to be individuals while our mother fought for our bond. We knew we held a privileged intimacy as twins, but Aida and I were never exclusive. We had other friends and interests away from each other, yet it only made our attachment stronger, and we’d run into each other’s arms at the end of each day, reporting every detail of our hours apart.

Ours was a brown Tudor house on a slight hill of a quiet block lined with oaks. Aida and I lived in what used to be the attic. It was a full-floor room with slanted ceilings and strange pockets of walls so we each had niches for our beds, desks, bookshelves, and dressers, with a small beanbag area in the center. There was an empty guest room downstairs that either of us could have moved into, but we didn’t want to be separated, even as Aida’s heavy metal posters took over her half of the walls and she started to make fun of my babyish animal ones. We liked living up there even though it was hot in summer and cold in the winter. We couldn’t hear our parents’ late-night fights once we turned our stereo on. Every now and then we’d lower the volume just to check in, see how far into it they were so we could gauge how long before we’d have to go downstairs to help them make up.

Aida and I considered ourselves their marriage counselors. It was like each of our parents had an only child; I was my father’s daughter and Aida belonged to our mother. When the fights became so bad we weren’t sure they could make it back to each other on their own, Aida and I would assume our roles. I’d find our father alone in his study, hunched over his desk or slumped in the leather reading chair staring out the window at nothing. Aida would go to their room, where our mother was always on the bed lying fetal in her nightgown. Aida would tell me that our mother would often ask her who she loved best, and Aida would declare her devotion to our mother and say that if our parents ever split, Aida and our mother would run off together to Paris or Hong Kong. Aida would always tell me this part laughing, because we both knew she would never leave me and I would never leave our father. That was our trick. That’s how we kept our family together.

Fliers of Aida’s face went up on every telephone pole and shop window in town. Though the detectives briefly tried the idea that she’d run away, it was a missing persons case. The police searched the town. The detectives made rounds of the homes of all Aida’s friends. They focused on the boys, especially the ones with cars. But Aida wouldn’t have gotten into a car with someone she didn’t know. Our mother was mugged in Munich in the seventies and sexually assaulted behind a bar in Majorca in the eighties. She raised us on terror stories of vulnerable wandering women being jumped by aggressive, predatory men. We were each other’s bodyguards, but when alone, which was hardly ever, we were both cautious and sensible, even in this stale suburban oasis. If held at gunpoint, Aida would have run. She had long muscular legs, not at all knock-kneed like me, and the track coach was always trying to get her to join the team. Aida was a brave girl. Much braver than me. She would have screamed. She would have put up a fight. She would not have simply vanished.

A group of local volunteers quickly formed to comb the grass of Memorial Park, hunt for witnesses, go to every apartment and storefront with a view of the avenue and back alleys. The story made it to the evening news and morning papers, and a tip line was set up for people to phone in. Our parents didn’t leave the kitchen. Our mother waited, an eye on the front door, for Aida to show up in yesterday’s clothes. Several people called and said they’d seen her the night before just as the summer sky began to darken. She was in cut-off shorts, brown leather boots, and a white peasant blouse that had belonged to our mother. They’d seen her at the bottom of Elm and someone else had seen her further up, approaching the park. She was alone. But someone else saw her talking to two young guys. Someone saw her later on. A girl in cutoff shorts and brown boots walking along the far side of the park across from the Protestant church. But she was in a blue shirt, not a white one. That girl, however, was me.

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 cutoffs, 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—the 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 goodnight 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.