“She called earlier, you know? After you visited. You have no idea what that meant to her.” He leans over slightly so that we bump shoulders. “What it means for us to have you home.” He puts his arm around me and gives me a squeeze. “Three years is too long between hugs.”
“I noticed your crepe myrtle has tripled in size. Well done.”
Dad pats my arm and releases the hug. I have this tic, changing the subject when a moment feels too emotional. When we were first dating, Joel teased me about beingplayfully aloof. He thought it was cute. By the end, he just called mecold. When I told Sheryl in a session, she asked me,What are you afraid will happen if you sit too long in the emotion?It annoyed me. I was paying her to agree that Joel was an asshole.
“Want me to put your suitcase upstairs?” Dad asks.
“No,” I say, and I’m quick to grab it off the counter before he can even reach for it. “You go work on the air filters.” I head off, and he seems to have gotten the hint, because he doesn’t follow me.
Whenever I come to visit, I stay in the downstairs guest room, but we don’t want Mom going up and down the stairs after her surgery. I wonder if this temporary situation—Mom staying in the downstairs bedroom—will become permanent for both of them. I guess this is how it happens. Your parents get old so slowly, you don’t notice, and then it seems to happen all at once.
I stand for a moment at the bottom. It’s been so long since I’ve gone up these stairs. I lift the suitcase and take the first step.
The wall along the staircase is a timeline in reverse. My weddingphotos. High school graduation. And then it’s Izzy and Iggy all the way up. The two of us as teenagers, sitting in front of the cave of The Hollow, our legs dangling down into the well. By then, we were trying to separate ourselves. Izzy always wore her long hair down, pulled back with the same blue scarf she used as a headband, face barely kissed with makeup, while I wore a sleek high ponytail and a swipe of red lipstick.
But in earlier pictures, it’s hard for even me to tell who is who. An eighth-grade dance with matching dresses. A trip to the zoo, us drinking from a metal rhinoceros’s mouth.
At the top is a portrait of us as newborns, two babies swaddled in the same blanket, faces pressed together, still mostly one entity, still accustomed to being together inside one body. Mom told us that she used to paint our toenails to tell us apart. Yellow for me. Green for Izzy.
Maybe you’re the real Isabelle, Izzy had whispered one quiet night when we were eight. We had separate beds, pushed up against opposite walls, but often Izzy climbed into mine, buried her freezing-cold feet into the bends of my knees.
I had thought about it then. If Mom had made the decision at some point to use nail polish to tell who was who, that meant there was a very real possibility that we had been switched at some point. It would be so easy, wouldn’t it?It doesn’t matter, I said, my voice heavy with sleep. Because it didn’t matter. Not really. It only meant that our names were switched. Izzy had curled up tighter against my back, nuzzled the sharp point of her chin into my shoulder blade.Good night, Izzy, she teased.
I stand outside the door to our old bedroom. There are still two construction paper butterflies taped to the wood, our names spelled out in curly, glittering script.
I open it. The two twin beds. The vanity, makeup still scattered on the surface. Izzy’s snow globe collection on a set of shelves. My posters. Sashes and crowns from back when we participated in pageants.
Unlike the town, unlike the pecan tree out front or Dad’s creaking knees, the room is entirely unchanged.
It’s too much to look at. I close my eyes and picture silt at the bottom of a lake. The water clear and calm and blue as the sky, if you stay near the surface. But if you go deep, if you kick your feet, you might stir up the dirt, it might swirl and churn, and then your whole world goes dark.
One of Izzy’s snow globes plays a few slow, tinny notes, like an old carousel winding down, like the ghost of something that was once sweet. I don’t know if I’m hearing it now or hearing it then. I open my eyes, and I see her, standing just across the room, her long, dark hair parted down the middle, tucked behind her ears and falling in front of her shoulders.
I walk slowly toward her, and as my feet cross the moaning wooden floor, the snow globe lets out one last metallic note.
I reach her, lift my fingers to her face. Her skin is cold as glass.
When she first disappeared, I used to catch glimpses of her all the time, in windows and mirrors and reflective pools of water. Once, in Denver, I saw her on the light rail in a train car opposite. I was so sure it was her, I left my bags behind as I hurried off the train. My heart raced as I pushed my way through the platform, past startled pedestrians. I just barely made it before the doors closed. But when I looked around at all the faces, she wasn’t there. She was gone, and I was going the wrong direction.
I study that reflection now. Normally, when someone dies or goes missing, they become frozen in time. They never age beyond the day they were lost. Not Isabelle. I get to watch what she should have become, to see the fine lines develop around her mouth and the corners of her eyes. It’s like she’s still here, trapped behind the glass of the mirror.
“Knock, knock,” Dad says as he steps through the open doorway to stand behind me.
“I drove by Sherman Ranch,” I say. “Saw them digging it up.”
“Yeah.” He puts a hand to my shoulder.
“They’re going to find her, aren’t they?”
I turn to Dad, and he wraps his arms around me, both arms this time, a real hug.
I think sometimes of when Izzy was heady in love, climbing through our bedroom window in the dead of night, smelling of campfire and giggling to me about Ben.He’s totally obsessed with me, she said.
At the time, I was jealous. Envious that he loved her that much.
I break the hug. I turn away from Dad.
What are you afraid will happen if you sit too long in the emotion?Sheryl asked.