Page 2 of My Twin Sister

I could feel sadness I knew wasn’t mine. Excitement. Guilt.

I walk past the rows of people and up the steps, right past the stuttering pastor, and stand over my father. I mumble a prayer under my breath. The Lord’s Prayer. The one he taught us to say every night before bed.

The bruise around his neck is still visible from beneath the makeup. I trace the line of it gently with my fingertips before pulling my hand back and dropping it by my side. I close my eyes and lean over, kissing him on his cold, waxy forehead. A series of memories fly through my mind like some kind of movie montage.

Him making us pancakes every Saturday morning, even when we turned into bratty teenagers. Eating cereal and watching cartoons together before school when we were little. The time I fractured my ankle at a track meet, and the way he carried me as I sobbed for my lost season. All the years we lost. A tear rolls down my cheek.

I stand up straight and wipe my face.

This is it. Here goes nothing.

When I turn around, my gaze locks with Geny’s. She is standing up, but frozen in shock. Tears roll down her face. I walk down the steps, and she snaps out of her trance. She lunges toward me and pulls me into her arms.

“How? You’re alive. You’re alive. You’re alive.” Her voice is strained, words trying to squeeze through a too-small hole.

I push my emotions back to keep myself composed and pull back from her tight grip.

“We’ll talk after, okay?” I slip my hand into hers like I did when we were kids.

She looks at me like I’ve lost my mind and I understand I’ve just exploded her entire life, but there’s still a funeral to be had, and we both owe our dad that much.

I tug her gently to the seats. Wyatt’s eyes follow me, and I can practically hear his heart pounding in rhythm with my own. Because if there’s anyone I know like my own soul, beside my sister, it’s Wyatt Gibbs.

Four: Geny

My whole body trembles and my mind fights with itself about what is real. Don and everyone in the pews seem to be having an equally hard time gathering themselves. The pastor stands behind the podium at a loss for words, and I resist every urge to pull my sister outside and find out how this is happening.

Don starts speaking again, but I want him to stop. I need this to be over. It’s too much. Losing my father and gaining my dead sister. My brain is short circuiting trying to make sense of it and I just need real answers and not the ones my head is conjuring up.

I have no idea what else Pastor Don says about my father, who he was, or what he would have wanted. I can only count the seconds that pass with my sister’s hand in mine. Warm and alive. When the speech is finally finished, the service ends, and I pull my sister out the front doors of the church, barely able to contain my hysteria and leaving my family behind. How is this happening? Is this real? It has to be real. By the look on everyone else’s faces, it’s definitely real.

Her fingers interlaced with mine are real.

Outside, I spin to face her. I can barely see her through my tears and the late afternoon sun, brighter in the fall than in the dead of summer. I wipe at my eyes. I try to breathe, but I think I’ve forgotten how.

I get my first good look at her, and it’s incredible. Of course, I could have guessed how she would look because we share a face. But I never thought to imagine it. To me, her face has been frozen at nineteen years old.

I reach my hand out without having the thought to do so. The tips of my fingers touch her cheek, and I can’t help but suck in a breath when my fingers meet her skin. My hand falls to my side like I’m a child having sneaked a touch of a priceless glass artifact at the antique stores our mother used to take us to.

“How are you here? I don’t—” I choke out. “I don’t understand.” I can hardly whisper the words through my constricting throat.

“I’ve missed you so much,” she says. Her eyes shine, and we collide into each other, arms pulling each other in tighter.

She smells like the sea salt spray we’d spray in our hair during the summers of our youth, and I think maybe she is a ghost.

Shock still has me in a chokehold, and I don’t know what to do or what to say or what happens next.

And then icy-cold dread spiders through my limbs. She’s going to find out I married Wyatt. That we have children together. The guilt was almost too much to live with back when it first happened. The looks and comments from the people in town made it hard to go out in public. But eventually, the scandal of it all faded into normalcy. It always does.

I’ve never had to face my sister though. If I had, everything would have been different. A mix of emotions pinches in the center of my chest. I won’t go there. Not right now.

I’m first to pull away from our embrace and I instantly regret it. I reach forward and grab her hand because I need to restore the touch. Then I realize she never answered my question earlier, so I ask again, my voice only slightly steadier than before.

Her chest inflates with a big breath, and she lets it go with a sigh. “Can we talk about this in private? I’ll tell you everything you want to know. Just . . . somewhere else.”

She glances around, and it’s the first time I notice them. The crowd of people standing around us, staring, chattering, some even crying.

Our breaking eye contact has burst the protective bubble around us. People take it as permission to flood toward us. Old neighbors reach out and touch Grace’s arms, back, hair.