There was a picture of the tree house again. In this one Ian was standing in the tree, holding onto a can with a string. I was on the ground, at the other end of the string, an identical can in my hand. I remembered that day. We’d seen a commercial with the can telephone on it, and Mom had explained that sound ran up the string. Mom had laughed when I asked why people didn’t just use their cell phones. Mom had the best laugh—loud and goofy. She would throw her head back and squint her eyes tight; her whole body laughed when she did. I missed it.
Mom explained that, before cell phones and Walkie-Talkies and everything else, kids played with these. Ian had wanted to try it out. I’d thought it was stupid—we had cell phones—but I went along with what Ian wanted. He was my brother—I couldn’t tell him no.
Ian wanted to climb up and test it out. I’d stood on the ground with the can to my ear and waited. When he spoke, I wasn’t sure if I heard him through the can or just in my head. I had told him it was pointless. We’d always been able to hear one another.
We were older in the second album. I flipped faster, wanting to get done—like ripping off a Band-Aid. Ian and I weren’t together in all of these. Hidden behind a picture of Ian in his football uniform, I found one of Ian smiling with his girlfriend, Mandy. God, it hurt to look at that one. I’d killed her, too. There were a few with me—us standing in front of the fireplace with our homecoming dates. Ian was smiling. I was scowling. Typical.
The pictures stopped suddenly. We hadn’t taken a single one since the accident. None of the moments since then were worth preserving.
Headlights flashed across the living room. I shut the album and took a deep breath. I pulled Jenna into the kitchen. My fear was reflected in her face.
I heard Mom’s key in the door. I listened to her footsteps as she crossed to the hall table and tossed her keys down. She sighed—I imagined her stretching out her back. It would have been a long day. Mom was on her feet all day, fixing people. She must have felt helpless when she couldn’t fix her own son.
Mom’s shadow grew taller and taller until it bent around the wall and across the ceiling. I reached over and grabbed Jenna’s hand. She gave it a squeeze just as Mom stepped into the kitchen. Mom froze, her surprise quickly turning to anger.
“What are you doing here?” she snapped at Jenna. “Don’t you think you’ve done enough?”
Jenna flushed. “Stop,” I told Mom. “I want her here.”
Mom stepped closer to me. “We came here to start over. We came here for you to get better. She’s making it worse.”
“Luke,” Jenna began, “I should probably—”
Mom was livid. “I told you, Luke is dead!”
It hurt to hear, even though I’d been trying to convince everyone of just that. “I’m not dead.” I took a deep breath. This wasn’t going to work if I was mad.
“Ian,” Mom began, stepping toward me.
My head was coming apart, like one of those bridges that opened in the middle. It felt like I might fall into the gap. “I’m Luke,” I said, trying to convince myself, too. “You always assume I’m Ian. I’m Luke.”
Mom turned her back to Jenna, her hand settling on my shoulder as she lowered her voice. “Okay. I’m sorry.” Her hand was shaking. “Of course you are. You know I sometimes get you two mixed up. You look so much alike.” She forced a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “Where’s Ian?”
“Sit down,” I told Mom. She did. Jenna stood off to the side, her arms folded across her chest. I leaned across the table and looked Mom straight in the eye. “Mom, Ian is dead.” I’d never believed I could say those words. There was no taking them back now.
Mom paled, but she didn’t move. “That’s not funny. You’re tired. We’ll make an appointment with Dr. Benson in the morning.”
“Mom, I need you to listen. Just listen.”
I told the story for the second time that night—the kiss, the anger, the alcohol and accusations. I admitted that I’d wanted Ian’s unblemished life and I’d lied. At some point Mom started crying and shaking, but I could tell she didn’t really believe me.
“I’m sorry,” I finished. For killing Ian. For lying. For being me.
“I’m losing my mind,” she whispered to herself, staring at her hands. Tears dropped into her palms.
“Mrs. McAlister, please. Luke is telling you the truth.”
Mom turned on Jenna. “What do you know about any of it? You weren’t there.” Her sobs were screams. “You didn’t have to watch them lower your child into the dirt. You didn’t see grief take the one who remained. You don’t know what it’s like to see a ghost every single day.”
Jenna didn’t answer.
“Mom, I know it’s hard to believe.” My head was nothing but pain now.
“You’re sick. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You’d rather Luke was dead than Ian?” I asked.
She clutched her throat and blinked hard. Tears rolled down her cheeks.
“It was easier to believe that Luke was dead. Better.” I stood up. I was shaking now. Mom stood up and crossed to me, but I stepped away. “If you’d looked hard enough, you would have seen that it was me. You didn’t want to. You wanted Luke to be dead.”
She slapped me. Hard. She looked even more surprised than I felt. I pulled my shirt up. “Look,” I said. “Look at this scar. Remember? Look hard. It looks nothing like Ian’s scar. Nothing.”
Mom was shaking her head back and forth, staring past me.
“Or these cabinets!” I threw my arm out. “You know Ian couldn’t have done this—he was failing woodshop until I built that damn birdhouse for him!”
Mom stopped looking past me and through me and around me. Her eyes jerked side to side as she examined my face.
“Or the time I came home drunk and drove over the mailbox. Remember that? Ian was out with Mandy and Dad was in the field. You promised you wouldn’t tell if I promised I wouldn’t do it again. Only one of us held up our end of that bargain.” My throat was tight, the words hard to say. “You made me get up early the next morning and put up an identical mailbox so Dad wouldn’t know. You made me go with you to the hospital.”
Mom nodded, denial and truth battling in her expression.
“You made me volunteer every Saturday for two months. I hated it. You showed me every drunk driving patient. You made me deliver their flowers and go with you when they needed pain meds. I was standing in the hall when they told Reed he wouldn’t walk again.” Reed was a high school kid who’d been brought in late one night. Reed hadn’t even been drinking. He’d been driving home after a basketball game and someone else had hit him and stolen his future. He’d been picked up by Chapel Hill the week before. The drunk driver had died on the operating table. “But I didn’t learn my lesson, did I?” My head felt like someone had split it with an ax. “Do you remember what you told me that day? ‘I can fix drunk. I can handle arrested, suspended, even expelled. But I can’t fix dead.’” That had been six months before the accident. “You were right, Mom. I couldn’t fix dead.”
“Oh my God, Luke.” Mom threw her arms around me and cried into my neck. She whispered my name over and over again, her words trying to convince her of what her arms were still unsure of. It had been so long since she’d hugged me. I wrapped my arms even tighter around her.
“Oh God,” her voice cracked as her arms dropped to her sides. I didn’t let go. “Ian.” Her face twisted in agony as she pushed away from me. It felt like he’d died all over again. For her, he had. I was empty and caved in, and I wanted to take everything back. I just wanted him back.
Mom swayed, and Jenna rushed forward and put her arms around her. Mom sobbed Ian’s name. He heard. Pain shot through my head, and I fell to my knees. Darkness.
Mrs. McAlister ordered me out of the house right after Luke blacked out. I wanted to stay and make sure he was okay, but I couldn’t argue with her. She looked deranged—not that I blamed her. I wasn’t sure if she understood, or even believed, what Luke had been trying to tell her. It was too much—to suddenly be reunited with the son you thought was dead while being faced with the death of the one you thought had survived. I kept waiting for her to snap or go into shock or something. Not that it changed the fact that there was only one, and he thought he was both. I wanted to stay to make sure she was going to be okay too, but she ordered me out, and I was too exhausted to argue.
I drove home slowly, my head heavy and dark. My brain grappled with the puzzle—I had most of the pieces together, but I couldn’t make sense of the picture. Ian’s death hurt, but then I had to remind myself that I’d never known him. The Ian I knew had been nothing but Luke’s guilt, glued together by memories and regret. But it didn’t really feel that way.
I was going to have to face the fact that the boy I’d fallen in love with was seriously unstable. Luke was only present in flashes, in stops and starts, in glimpses. The rest of the time he was hidden away somewhere. I imagined him trying to escape his pain, finding some dark place to hole up in while Ian was awake. But I still couldn’t imagine them as one person. Every time I tried, I saw twin brothers, two separate people. Ian stood up straight while Luke had a tendency to slouch. Their laughs were different. And Ian had never kissed me like Luke had.
I loved the most flawed boy I could’ve found, and my loving him wasn’t healthy, for either of us. I just wanted to crawl into my bed and forget.
I got home just before dawn. Thankfully, Mom was sound asleep. I didn’t want to explain to her where I’d been—not that it was any of her business. And it wasn’t like she’d made the best decisions in life. She was not the person to lecture me about restraint.
I put my keys back in their hiding place and dragged myself upstairs. My mind was having trouble holding on to thoughts. My eyes were gritty, and it felt like a thick fog had rolled through my brain. I wasn’t going to have any trouble sleeping, no matter how worried I was. My body just couldn’t take anymore. I didn’t even take off my shoes. I fell face-first on the bed and was asleep almost instantly.
I woke up in my room, but I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten there, nor did I have any idea how long I’d been out. It was dark, but I wasn’t sure if that meant I’d been asleep a couple of hours or if a whole day had passed. Or more. I’d never been that disoriented. I rolled over and stared at the strip of light seeping in from underneath my door.
Footsteps in the hall. They stopped right in front of my room—two feet made two dark spots in the light. There wasn’t a knock or any real acknowledgement that I was in here. But I knew it was Ian.
My dark room was comforting. No one else could get in. It was more like a cell than a bedroom. No window. Nothing hanging on the walls. The only decoration was the picture of Ian and me looking down from the tree house, taken before Dad started sharpening us on each other and trying to make us prove we were the better twin. I got sick of that game fast—it was one I couldn’t win. And I didn’t want to compete with Ian all the time. Dad had never understood the twin thing. It was more than being brothers.
I didn’t know Ian had left until I heard him coming back. The shadows reappeared, just two gray spots underneath the door. Why didn’t he knock?
But he didn’t. He didn’t even try to talk to me. He just started hammering.
I got up and walked over to the door. “What are you doing?” My door rattled each time the hammer struck, and for a second his hammer was in sync with my pulse.
Ian didn’t answer. He hammered louder, paused, and then placed something against the door before starting up again.
“Ian?” I tried to turn the doorknob, but it was stuck. “What the hell is going on?”
Silence. Then, “You’re trying to get rid of me.”
“Ian, what are you talking about?”
I jumped as the hammer struck the door—loud and violent. I was surprised the wood hadn’t splintered.
“You can’t fix this,” Ian said. “Jenna picks you and all of a sudden you think you have everything under control. That you can make everything okay. But you lost that right when you killed Mandy. I have a chance at a normal life—as long as you aren’t in it.”
I grappled with the knob, but it wouldn’t turn and my hands were sweaty and kept slipping. “Ian,” I warned.
More hammering. “Mom said she told Jenna everything. I just have to change Jenna’s mind. I’m sure it won’t be that hard.”
I broke out in a cold sweat. I beat on the door with my fists and hollered his name. He waited until I stopped yelling before continuing, as if I hadn’t said a word.
“I warned you. I told you to stay away from her. Things were getting better.
I
was getting better. She made me whole and then you took her away.” His voice was conversational and pleasant, like we were discussing the possibility of rain or what we wanted for dinner. “You don’t listen. You never think of anyone but yourself. But I do. And I’m going to make sure you can’t tear this family any farther apart. You owe it to me, and to Mom and Dad. You broke us. I’ll fix everything.”
I twisted and tugged at the handle. I focused on turning it. I pictured the latch pulling away from the door. I concentrated so hard that my head ached. It turned, but it didn’t open. It was then I noticed that the door opened out into the hall. I tried to push it but it struck something and stopped. I rammed my shoulder against the door but it wouldn’t budge. I peeked through the small crack and realized what Ian had been doing. There were boards nailed across the door. I couldn’t get out.
“Let me out, Ian. We need to talk.”
“I’m through talking to you.”
I watched his feet recede. I hollered his name until my throat was sore, but he was gone and I was locked in the room I’d created. It shouldn’t have been possible. It also didn’t appear possible to escape, but I was going to have to figure that out. Before it was too late.
The sun was low when I woke up, and my muscles resisted as I stretched, as if it had been years since I’d moved. Shards of last night pierced my skull; I tried to pretend it had all been a dream, but I couldn’t because my chest was nothing but a hollow space with a heart so heavy I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to carry it. I rolled over and pulled the covers over my head, thinking they could hide me from reality. They didn’t.