Page 9 of My Twin Sister

“You can stay with me at my place. The downstairs is set up with a spare bedroom.”

I nod. Smile. I’m glad she’s invited me. I would have stayed here if she hadn’t, but it wouldn’t feel right to finally have her back and then be separated again so soon. I think she feels the same way.

Geny chews her bottom lip, and I wait for her to say whatever it is she’s mulling over. She glances up, sees me looking at her, and sighs.

“Why didn’t you come back sooner? If you started to remember . . . if you remembered me. Why didn’t you come back then? How did you know about Dad’s service? Why wait until today?”

“The service was announced in the newspaper.”

She glares at me when I don’t continue. “That’s the only thing I get an answer to?”

“I don’t know, Genevieve. I don’t know what you want me to say. I didn’t have a full picture. I still don’t. It’s scary to walk into a situation when everyone knows and remembers your life, but you don’t.”

It feels like a staring contest, each of us daring the other to call out the lie. She looks away first. She links her fingers on top of her head the way I used to when I finished a race.

I want to go back to her house. I want to see what the life of my sister and my boyfriend looks like. I want to get a full picture of the life I almost had.

“All right,” she says. “Let’s go.”

* * *

The walk back to the church is awkward. There’s too much between us now. Too much time apart. Too much life lived without each other. I try to find that easy comfort we always had, but it’s gone. I should’ve expected as much, but it still surprises me.

I look for clues of the girl I used to know. “Do you still write?”

She turns her head to me, her face pinched in confusion. “Poetry? No. That was just a stupid phase in high school.”

It wasn’t stupid. And she was still writing after we graduated so it wasn’t exclusive to high school, but I let it go.

“Sorry,” she says.

“For what?”

“That came out rude. I didn’t mean it to. It’s just something I did when I was young. It seems silly now. Like the MASH games we used to play or something.” She laughs under her breath and I smile.

“I’m still holding out hope for eight kids with Channing Tatum in a mansion with a limousine.”

“I somehow always ended up with ten kids in a shack or something,” she says.

I snort. “Yeah, you didn’t have good luck with that game. But look at you now.” I spread my arms to gesture around me. “You showed MASH.”

She goes quiet, and I let the conversation die. She got the husband, the house, the kids, and family SUV. I got a life of anonymity, pretending to be dead. I take a breath and try to push away the resentment for my sister. It isn’t Geny’s fault, and I’m not completely empty-handed.

Ten: Geny

We walk back to the church to get Grace’s car, and I wonder what thirty-seven-year-old Grace Chandler drives. I wonder how Wyatt is going to feel with his ex-girlfriend sleeping in our home. His ex-girlfriend whom he never broke up with, but thought was dead. They’ll probably want to talk. Of course they will. I don’t know how I feel about that, but it’s going to happen regardless of my feelings.

My stomach clenches like I’m bracing for an impending car crash.

I don’t know how to act. I find myself second-guessing every single thing I say and do. The truth is, I’m not the person I was at nineteen. Who is? But it’s as if I forgot everything about who I am the second I saw Grace walk into the church.

We make it to the church parking lot in silence, and I pause to look at the place we grew up going to. The church was a second home for me as a teen. While Grace took to sports, I became more involved here, leading youth groups, helping in the nursery and anywhere else I could. Pastor Don was the uncle I never had. It was the only place I didn’t feel the heavy comparison to my sister. The place I buried myself in when she died.

Except she didn’t die.

There’s one lone car in the parking lot. A black Trans Am. It throws me when the lights flash and I hear the locks disengage. I pictured Grace with a stylish SUV. But that fit the life I thought she would have had. The life that would have been hers if she never got washed away in the current. My life.

I awkwardly climb into the passenger seat and scan the interior. There’s a Black Ice air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror. The smell is a gut punch. It’s the scent Wyatt used in his truck for the longest time, but it gave me headaches and I convinced him to switch to a less obnoxious scent. He was so reluctant at the time.