Her: A Memoir (11 page)

I followed the glowing white median and watched the mileposts pass. I was alone; Jedediah wasn’t with me. Cara had been raped; this was the new reality.

I arrived at the hospital before nine. I pushed through the carousel doors into the crowded emergency room and saw her right away; the curtain to her room had been left open. She was sitting in bed, still dressed, talking to the police. Kahlil stood to the side. Cara cried upon sight of me. I barely recognized her. Where was my face in her broken one? Her jaw was bumpy and distorted by purple and gold welts. Swelling had nearly shut both her eyes. Her front teeth were jagged, chipped; I didn’t know then how many were missing.

I thought about all of the years we’d been competing to be the prettier twin.

“She’s refusing to undress for the nurses,” Kahlil said. “She says she doesn’t want to take her clothes off.”

The hospital waiting room was crowded with patients. Cara had been there for hours and was yet to be seen by the attending physician. Nurses dressed the deepest wounds on her face with strips of gauze and gently tried to convince her to undergo an exam.

“You’ve got to cooperate with the doctors so we can get you home.” I put my hand on her shoulder and she flinched.

“I don’t want to go home.” Cara looked up accusingly at Kahlil. “What if that guy is there?”

I didn’t have an answer for this. She was right. I thought of climbing the three flights of stairs to her apartment door, wondering if the rapist would be waiting in the hall. Then it occurred to me: except for the bruises, he would certainly think I was Cara.

“We’ll escort you home,” one of the police said, his hat in his lap.

Cara agreed to undress for her doctors. She removed her tattered red pants, the black cardigan she’d taken from my closet, a pair of yellow ankle socks stitched with racing horses, and her bloodied, dirty, white rainbow-adorned panties and placed each into an evidence bag. She stepped into a blue hospital gown. She was administered a rape kit. Afterward, the detectives and a rape advocate were called back in.

*   *   *

When we arrived home Cara insisted I wash her clean. I closed the door on us to the clicking sound of the loose doorknob.

I brought my sister to the tub for a bath and helped her undress. I filled the tub with water hot enough to soothe, tepid enough not to scald. The nurses sent Cara home wearing scrubs and a white T-shirt. She turned her back to me and pulled off her shirt. I saw the mirrored marks: crescent-shaped gouges her assailant made with his teeth: more than a dozen deep bites. Cara turned to face me, asked me to undo the string on her pants. Her fingers and knuckles were bruised from fighting. Her pants fell around her ankles and she stepped out of them, into the tub. She settled in and reached for my hand, pulling me fully clothed into the tub with her.

I splashed water on my face and rested my wet forehead at the base of her neck. There were too many bites to clean. I poured peroxide, watched her wounds fizz white. I cleaned her with a soft cloth and lavender wash.

I bathed my sister, just as she’d asked.

“I floated outside of my body,” Cara told me in the tub.

I imagined my sister’s airborne soul, the back of the rapist’s round head, Cara pushing him away at the chest: 250 pounds thundering down against her, snapping back her wrists like flower stems. I see the hulk of him pinning Cara against the soggy autumn earth, turning her over, pushing her onto her knees, and taking what she’ll never have again: amazement at the sight of the world.

“I watched myself die,” Cara said. “I would have been happy to go, to leave—but then I saw our grandmother. She said I needed to stay put, to live.”

“You didn’t die,” I reminded her.

“That’s easy for you to say.”

“Did you think of me?”

“No,” she said into the water.

Fuck her, I thought. If I’d been dying in the woods, she’d have been the one I thought about.

Cara sat up, rigid in the bath, her knees bent. I tried to recline to avoid touching her. My legs rubbed against the sides of her thighs. She was cradled between my legs and stared past the faucet, beyond the tile, through the wall.

I cried every day when we were children. I used to try to count the days that I didn’t cry when I was a kid. I was seven and had a calendar full of failed days when I cried and shouldn’t have. Nothing and everything brought tears. I had every reason to weep as a child, yet I couldn’t as an adult, in this tragedy; I couldn’t find tears when I needed them.

I got out of the tub and wrapped myself in a towel. I went in search of a cotton nightgown in Cara’s bureau, picking up the softest, whitest one she had. I left her alone to dress.

Chapter 11

I
want my sweater
back. I want my black cashmere cardigan returned. It has flat black buttons and it’s fitted at the wrists. The sweater was neither too big nor too small. A good cardigan is hard to find. It was sexy over a wiggle dress, or homey with jeans and a belt. It was an every-dayer, a hip-accentuating waist-whittler. Cara and I both wanted my sweater. We stole it back and forth. The sweater traveled from city to city, closet to closet.

I bought the sweater on sale and wore it more often than I should have. The first time Cara spied the cardigan, I was wearing it to fight off an early autumn chill.

“I like that.” Cara looked at the sweater, not in appreciation, but in need. She flipped the tag up at the neck. “Cashmere?”

“It was on sale.”

“Fits perfectly.” Cara examined the sweater’s lapel. “I’ve looked forever but haven’t found a sweater I don’t feel like a square body in. We have thick waists.”

“Speak for yourself. I’m not thick-waisted. I’m short-waisted.” I curled my fingers around a belt loop in Cara’s jeans and tugged, teasing her. “And, don’t you dare talk about my twin that way.” I shook her back and forth, shimmying her hips, and kissed her cheek.

“Can I wear it tomorrow?” Cara asked.

“Nope. You think I trust you to give it back?” I took the sweater off that evening, folded it up, and hid it at the bottom of my suitcase, beneath boxes of film and a well-worn copy of Van Gogh’s letters. I unpacked the suitcase at home in Manhattan, no sweater to be found. Cara left a decoy in its place: a faded black cotton cardigan, frayed at the cuffs. A loose button dangled from the collar; fabric pilled beneath the neck; the right side stretched out at the shoulder; a side pocket was coming unstitched, flapping down where the thread had given way, and inside the pocket there was a smoked-down and stubbed-out cigarette. Her ribbed sweater, size medium, was my sweater’s sorry replacement. It wasn’t meant to fool, but left to teach a lesson: twins should have identical things. I was too selfish to share and had broken code—the sweater Cara left was punishment.

Cara was in the habit of taking my things, not just sweaters; lipstick, belts, dresses, and books were also ripe for lifting. The tradition kept up after the rape, right up until she died. Stealing didn’t only go one way. I felt free to help myself to anything that was hers as well. I took from her often. But Cara’s need for identical possessions went beyond sisterly borrowing. She deployed straight-out mimicry. She hoped that if we possessed the same things, we’d have exact lives. I wasn’t similarly motivated. Her life never looked good enough to me to try to make it for myself.

Jedediah and I were gifted a full set of dinnerware for eight for our wedding. We were given every kitchen item on our registry. We stacked the tiki green salad plates rimmed in earthy brown on top of the dinner plates. Deep soup bowls painted in matching hues and finished in shining glazes were pantry neighbors to the plates, and to a taupe sugar and creamer set embossed with flowers. The ceramic edges of the plates, mugs, and bowls chipped over the years, each half moon’s chalky exposure revealing the brittle insides of the dishware. As time went on and our marriage progressed, I was more and more careless: too many clumsy slips of the hand, and setting after setting crashed, enamel pecking off in the sink.

After Kahlil left, Cara came over and opened our cabinets, inspecting our dinnerware. She said she’d donated the plates they’d gotten as wedding gifts to Goodwill. Now she wanted to see for herself what a happy couple ate their meals on. She promptly bought an identical service for twelve for her new household of one. She purchased our same bath towels and television hutch, too, and the exact clothes hangers covered in silky pink satin that I used for dresses. She found our coffee table on clearance. She stole one of Jedediah’s books and wrote her name on the title page, shelving it on a hardwood bookcase identical to one of ours, in her house.

I inherited my house in duplicate when she died. I added her service for twelve to my service for eight. I had service for twenty, and a husband who was ready to walk out and take nothing. After our divorce, I kept all of the relics of our happy home and all of Cara’s hopeful duplicates.

*   *   *

My family kept watch over Cara after the attack: Mom cooked and nervously cleaned. Jedediah organized cabinets. Friends came and brought flowers, more food. Cara’s professors sent letters and called. I don’t remember how Kahlil helped, though I’m certain he did. I stocked Cara’s pantry with food she didn’t eat.

Her rapist was still on the loose as I browsed Cara’s neighborhood grocery. I tied a patterned blue scarf around my hair and wore huge white sunglasses. My heart beat in my throat as I stacked my shopping cart with boxes of Cheerios and pouches of Hi-C. He was still out there. He might see me in the grocery; we knew he shopped there. The police mentioned at the hospital that it was likely the man who’d raped Cara had bought his alcohol at the liquor counter inside that grocery store. It was the only shop for miles, and the rapist told Cara he didn’t have a car.

I had fantasies as I shopped that he’d see me, and I’d recognize him from Cara’s police sketch. I’d call 911 and a SWAT team would take him down. They’d shoot him dead. I was naive, horror struck, only twenty-four; I couldn’t have known him from a drawing, but he certainly would have recognized me. He wouldn’t know he’d done what aging or a haircut or a disguise couldn’t do to twins. He’d un-samed us. When he defiled my Cara, he separated us.

I secretly hoped he’d take me, too, not really, of course; but deep down, I’d lost Cara. I wished he’d discover me in a grocery isle and drag me to the path where he’d raped her. I felt her pulling far from me in the days following her rape. Attacked, I’d be the same as Cara again—we’d both be as dirty as she said she felt. It was the only way I’d be able to know what she meant when she told me we couldn’t be twins anymore: I was “still clean.” It could happen to me, too, I reasoned, on my dangerous shopping trip.

It was dangerous; I was right. He shopped while I shopped. This time the police were watching. They caught him on camera in the liquor isle. I was told later, after they’d arrested him, he’d been observed on surveillance tapes the afternoon I was there. All men looked the same to me as I shopped: menacing, ready to strike out and steal me into the woods.

I wheeled my cart over to the autumn vegetables and picked out the roundest, brightest orange pumpkin I could find and put it with the rest of my bounty. Mid-October is the time for jack-o’-lanterns, hayrides, reaping. The leaves had just peaked. The grocery aisles were filled with cider doughnuts, gourds, and sugary candies for trick-or-treating. The bakery counter was lined with stalks of Indian corn. White plastic tarps with holes cut for eyes hung from displays for soon-to-be ghosts. Ghoul masks were stacked on shelves, one on top of the other, beside bins of plastic fangs and tubes of fake blood. The masks rattled as I pushed my cart by.

I turned the corner in the canned goods aisle and plucked green beans from the shelf. Canned green beans had become a comfort, a reminder of our days in North Carolina, when they were served on our school lunch trays. I imagined that I saw Cara’s rapist turn the corner and head up the cereal aisle. I ran with my cart past shelves of ketchup and mayonnaise and followed the invisible man into aisle 6. I didn’t find him among the Cheerios and went looking for him at the butcher’s block.

There was only one male customer there. He ordered pork chops and ground chuck, tossing both into his cart where his infant sat mouthing a teething ring.

I bought a steak and a pack of chicken legs, placing them at the front of my cart, next to a bag of organic premixed salad and a box of raspberry pastry, and headed to the checkout. It was time to go home. I hadn’t found my man.

All of the food I bought spoiled. Cara liked these things, thanked me, but she wasn’t eating. Her life had been cataclysmically altered. Why would she eat? One of her eyes was blackened; she’d lost hearing in one ear—the rapist had smashed the side of her head again and again with his blows. Cara said first she heard a sharp ringing as his fist fell down against her, then a hiss. Eventually she couldn’t hear a sound. She refused to change from her nightgown. It was stained with antibiotic ointment that had escaped the bandages that covered the rapist’s bites on her back.

Cara woke crying in the middle of the night; I heard her from the living room where I slept. I jerked awake, startled. There was a moment, before I recognized her weeping, when I felt at peace. I slept in a darkened room on a portable mattress, surrounded by Cara’s belongings: a cracked pope snow globe from Rome; all its water had run out. When she tipped it, the sand inside fell dryly on Saint John Paul’s head; a leather-bound diary from Venice; a feather duster; a jar of coins; a bunch of plastic grapes. I rested in her soft peach sheets, and
then
I heard her sobbing. I’d been dreaming of the two of us floating together on a raft of twigs, like the one the children craft in
The Night of the Hunter
. Cara steered with a reed in the back and I drank water from the side of our boat. I woke thirsty and cold, my blanket on the floor beside a spilled glass of water. I got up and rummaged through Cara’s medicine cabinet, through painkillers prescribed by her physician at the emergency room. I shook one more than Cara’s prescribed dose into my hand and poured her a glass of water—I knew what it would take; one wasn’t enough. I brought the pills to her. She swallowed the medicine and fell back to sleep. My sister had been stolen and my sweater was missing.