Notes on an Execution, page 7
At work the next day, she wouldn’t even look at you. By the time you closed up, took the trash out to the dumpsters, and locked the Dairy Queen, you were bent entirely into yourself. The highway pulsed all the way home—you maneuvered your clattering VW Bug carelessly, swerving over the yellow lines, the wind whipping a beat into your ear, that screaming endless, unbearable.
She materialized in the headlights.
In the moonlight, that first Girl was just a shadow at the end of a long driveway. A ripple of hair. The Girl squinted in the bright of your headlights—her face was perfectly animal, vulnerable and confused.
You braked. You opened the door. You stepped onto the gravel.
* * *
Now, time melts. You hear the scrawl of the officer’s pen as he fills out the Watch Log. The thunk of his footsteps, lumbering uselessly away. You sink into the muck, the wild, furious dark, the cell widening and tightening until you are not a person, only a little ball. You press your forehead to the concrete, pleading with the baby. Please, stop crying.
If Jenny were here, she would know to gather your limbs. She would swaddle you tight, whisper consolations—It will pass, Jenny would hum, her skin like ripened fruit. It always does.
Jenny comes when you are weakest. When you most want to forget.
Her hair fanned out on the faded pillowcase.
Her footprints after a shower, dripping wet across the bathroom floor.
Hazel
1990
Hazel’s first memory of herself was also a memory of her sister.
It was the sort of memory that lingered and haunted, lurking in the very marrow of her bones. It arrived when Hazel’s pulse raced—every time she stepped onstage or drove too fast down the highway, she was transported. In the memory, Hazel was just a pumping mass of tissue, blurry and floating. Around her, a darkness that beat like a drum.
There was evidence of this time, in the ultrasound her mother kept balanced on the nightstand. Within the silver frame, Hazel and her sister were two little specks of molecule, growing together in this dark and primitive space. Her mother loved that photo, because you could see it even then, before either of them had ears or toenails. Two tiny webbed hands reaching out to each other, like deep-sea creatures in silent conversation.
In every important second of Hazel’s life, she could hear the phantom sound of her sister’s heartbeat layered over her own, as if they were still suspended together in the womb. It was a familiar syncopation. The most comforting thump. And no matter how far apart they were, how different or distant, Hazel’s hand would lift, always, to meet Jenny’s.
* * *
The morning Jenny came home from college, Hazel sat in the shower, letting the water beat scalding lashes onto the curve of her back. The seat her parents had installed in the corner of the tub was slippery beneath her bare thighs, and Hazel soaped her knee carefully, running the sponge over scar tissue. The place where the doctors had stitched up her skin was still a furious, blistering red—she could see the exact spot where her own ligament had been reconstructed, replaced with that of a stranger who had died right before surgery. Often, when Hazel looked at her knee, she thought of that nameless person, now just ash or bone.
She shampooed quickly, then turned off the water, listening as her hair dripped onto the shower floor. Downstairs, Hazel’s parents were frantic—her mother was banging idly around the kitchen, fussing with the marinade for the Christmas brisket. Her father’s shovel scraped against the driveway as he cleared the snow for Jenny’s car. They’d been in a blustery panic for days; her mother had wrapped the gifts weeks ago, and they’d been waiting stale beneath the tree ever since, dust gathering on glossy paper. Hazel’s father worked from home, and her mother had transformed his office into a guest room for the occasion, returning from the department store one frigid afternoon, arms filled with curtains, sheets, a generic framed photograph of a beach at sunset. The frenzy, when she realized she’d forgotten the pillowcases at the checkout counter. I don’t think he’ll care if you use the old ones, Hazel had said, from her perpetual spot on the sunken couch.
Hazel stood gingerly, her right foot raised to keep the weight off her knee—she bent over the edge of the slippery porcelain, leaning for the towel. Her arm cramped with the stretch, the muscles limp, unused for months. As she hopped to sit on the lid of the toilet seat, Hazel twisted the towel around her hair, wondering exactly where Jenny was now.
It was a game they’d played as children. A Summoning, they called it.
I can tell when you’re sick, Jenny had said, arriving in the elementary school nurse’s office before their mother had even been called. And I can tell when you’re sad. Jenny would shake Hazel awake in the dead of night, pulling her from the worst of her nightmares. I can read your mind, Jenny would say—and when Hazel startled with the fact of the intrusion, Jenny only looked confused. What? she would ask. Can’t you read mine, too? Hazel would burrow deep into herself, trying to conjure the interior of Jenny’s body the way she conjured her own. She never could read Jenny’s mind, but this didn’t stop her from trying, or from claiming that she had the same telepathic power. You’re lying, she’d guess, when Jenny faked a stomachache. You like that boy, she’d tease, when Jenny crossed her arms over her chest at the middle-school locker. Hazel wouldn’t call this a Summoning—not the kind of thing Jenny could do. It was just intuition, many years of noticing. Hazel knew her sister’s face.
Jenny would be driving now. The route from Northern Vermont University to their suburb outside Burlington was just over an hour. A Nirvana song would be playing, humming crackly from the radio, Jenny’s hands fluttering on the steering wheel. Jenny’s new boyfriend would be sitting in the passenger’s seat—here, the image faded, blurred.
Hazel gathered her crutches, wiped the steam from the mirror. In the dim winter light, she looked pale, grim, lifeless. She did not look like Jenny. She did not even look like herself.
* * *
Hazel’s real self was not this bathroom ghost. Her real self had cheeks blushing pink beneath scorching bulb lights, hair sprayed back into a slick, glossy bun. She wore long black lashes, glued sticky to her eyelids. Her collarbone jutted out beneath the straps of a corset that tapered down into a custom-designed tutu, glitter dabbed subtly along the ridge of her chest, engineered to reflect the stage lights with a turn or a leap.
For a precious moment, Hazel was no longer leaning against the damp sink. Instead, she was following the sound of the orchestra into the velvet wings, as the instruments hummed the opening notes of Swan Lake. The smell, like elastic and rosin. She was rolling onto her pointe shoes, reveling in the ethereal stretch of her hamstring. The audience hushed, alert, awaiting her arrival. She was caught in that long, agonizing moment, before she stepped into the gold.
Hazel was her real self when she danced—but she was more than that. She was feather, she was breath. She was an illusion, a mirage that answered only to music and memory. She flew.
* * *
Downstairs, the front door slammed. Gertie the basset hound erupted in a fit of barking as Hazel’s mother cooed. Hazel’s hair was still dripping cold—she climbed onto Jenny’s twin bed to peer out the window. Jenny’s old station wagon puffed in the driveway.
Jenny had come home twice since college started. Both times for dinner. She had refused to stay the night, packing herself back into her car after the leftovers had been scooped into plastic containers for the mini fridge in her dorm room. Hazel tried to picture the house through Jenny’s new, worldly eyes: nearly identical to the homes that fanned around it, clustered at the edges of a sheltered little town. Burlington had never felt so quaint and silly as it did when Jenny came to visit, all ice cream shops and mountaineering stores. Both those dinners had been before Hazel’s knee, and she had not been able to pinpoint exactly how Jenny had changed.
From the distance of Hazel’s bedroom window, still framed by Jenny’s John Hughes posters, the differences were obvious. She and Jenny had always looked as close to identical as you could get while still technically being fraternal, but Hazel could see, with an uncomfortable jolt, how age would separate them further.
She’d heard the story of their birth so many times, it felt like fable. Jenny had come out first, slick and easy, her exit dislodging Hazel’s entire body from the birth canal—a nurse had massaged their mother’s swollen belly until Hazel came out kicking, her face blue, the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. We thought we’d lost you, Hazel’s mother always said, and only recently did Hazel realize that her parents had lived entire minutes believing Jenny would be their only child. Hazel could imagine it, looking now at her sister. Jenny was growing even prettier, the dimple in her cheek more pronounced. Jenny had a heart-shaped face, supple and inviting, while Hazel’s had always been gaunt and witchy. And, of course, there was the freckle. As their mother pulled Jenny into a hug, Hazel reached up instinctively to touch it.
The Twins. This was how they had learned to know themselves. At slumber parties and school events, field trips and family holidays, she and Jenny were a single unit. One name. One bedroom shellacked in pink wallpaper. As children, Hazel and Jenny took pleasure in switching clothes between class periods to confuse their teachers. They used to wear matching versions of the same outfit, Jenny in purple, Hazel in blue. Does it ever bother you? Hazel said to Jenny once, when one of the boys in middle school joked about asking the Twins to the spring dance. You know, being the Twins? Jenny had looked at her with a gaze so narrowed and cold, Hazel knew she wore it to veil her hurt. Hazel still remembered how her own tongue had flitted across her canine teeth, which were pointier than her sister’s, more overlapped, how she’d bit down until she tasted a warm prick of blood. Why would it bother me? Jenny had asked, her voice like a woodland creature. Hazel still burned with the shame of this question. Only in the last four months—since Jenny had been at school—did Hazel respond to her own name alone. For the entirety of her life, Jenny’s name would echo across a room, and Hazel would turn, ready to answer.
Now, the mole beneath Hazel’s left eye felt the same as it always had, a raised and fleshy bump shaped vaguely like a teardrop. People loved to point it out. Hazel, they would say, tapping their own cheeks, distinguishing her, like Hazel needed a reminder of her own imperfection.
* * *
There Jenny was, at the bottom of the stairs. When Hazel looked up from the complicated math of her crutches, Jenny was grinning, soft and expectant, those same sister eyes, that same sister mouth, Jenny’s whole sister self, waiting. She wore a pair of oversized combat boots, an army parka Hazel had never seen before, and a big studded belt like Courtney Love. As Jenny engulfed Hazel in a hug, the hall filled with her smell, hidden beneath something foreign. A new brand of soap, or maybe shampoo, fruity and sugared. Hazel itched for a sneeze.
“It’s so good to be home,” Jenny marveled, as she bent to soothe the dog, Gertie’s fat little paws tugging at her jeans.
She turned to the boy behind her.
Jenny’s new boyfriend was not what Hazel had expected. Hazel had known her sister to drift toward bulky shoulders and taut corded necks, boys who looked like tree trunks. By the end of high school, Jenny and Hazel had split the world evenly: Hazel had ballet, a rotating series of pointe shoes and wrap skirts and intricate rehearsal schedules to be negotiated with the car they shared. In turn, Jenny claimed school. Jenny had the test scores, the report cards, the Honor Society. Hazel could usually find her sister laughing near the trophy cases, Jenny’s body propped naturally against the chest of a hockey player, a linebacker, the statewide shot-put champion. Hazel knew these boys only from the stories Jenny told as she drove Hazel to the studio—she listened intently, both enthralled and repulsed.
The boy standing in the foyer was definitely not an athlete. He was lean and rigid, a pair of oversized glasses resting loose on the bridge of his nose. His pants were slightly too short at the ankle, a few wiry leg hairs curled beneath the cuffs.
“You must be Hazel,” he said. “I’m Ansel.”
When Ansel smiled, the grin spread across his face, like a runny egg cracked open. Of course, Hazel thought—of course Jenny would choose a person like this. A human magnet. Hazel blushed with the attention, conscious of her context in the frame of this moment. Her existence, simplified. She was Jenny’s body double.
“Ansel,” Hazel said. “I’ve heard so much about you.”
This was not true, and Hazel regretted saying it. When Ansel stretched out his hand confidently, Hazel gathered the muscles in her abdomen—the entire body revolves around the core. She lifted one sweaty arm from the metal of her crutch and shook.
* * *
Jenny had not called after that night onstage.
After the three-hour surgery, after the cards and flowers had flooded Hazel’s bedside, after her arms had bulked from pushing the wheelchair down the hospital halls—no word from Jenny. Even after Hazel had been deposited onto her parents’ couch, where she sat for the next six weeks, only dragging herself occasionally upstairs for a shower—nothing. Hazel tried the dorm phone twice, left messages with the perky RA. Jenny did not call her back.
She’s thinking of you, Hazel’s mother said, unconvincing, as she delivered another bowl of soup.
While she wasted away on the couch, Gertie’s jowls slobbering into her lap, Hazel tried to conjure her sister. In the hydrocodone haze, she imagined that Jenny would be at a Friday night party, wearing the denim skirt they’d picked up at the thrift store that summer. On a Wednesday morning, Jenny would be in the dining hall picking the cantaloupe out of a wilting fruit salad or playing Pearl Jam on her Walkman as she ambled to class. Hazel couldn’t picture Jenny’s classes—she’d never been on a real college campus, her schedule already packed with rehearsals when Jenny and their dad drove out for the tour. She imagined tweed jackets, button-up shirts, her sister’s fingers scrunched around a pencil. Those images felt manufactured to Hazel, less like a Summoning and instead a fantasy that likely had nothing to do with Jenny’s reality. The effort only made her angry. Where are you? Hazel would beg, pathetic, her knee pounding like a gavel beneath her skin.
* * *
Hazel’s father hefted the suitcases up the porch, frigid December air blowing into the house from the frosted cul-de-sac. For a long, tense instant, Hazel faced her sister, who looked undefinably different. As Jenny’s eyes flicked down to Hazel’s knee brace, then back up again, she said nothing—but Hazel saw the glint. There was something satisfied in Jenny’s gaze. Shining and wise. Like Jenny knew what it meant, to be the sister standing.
* * *
While everyone prepared for dinner, Hazel sat at the table. Usually, she and Jenny would have set the place mats together, bickering over which napkins to use. But Hazel’s crutches leaned against the sliding glass door, exempting her.
Their mother served the chicken as Jenny gestured with an open bottle of wine. Hazel shook her head no. She had never liked the taste of alcohol or the way it made her head swim, and besides, she still had a few painkillers left. Her mother had been counting them out every morning, as she insisted Hazel wean slowly off. You have to be careful, her mother had said. Addiction runs in your blood. Just look at your grandfather. Hazel chewed her chicken tepidly, the half capsule flooding her system, dulling the throb in her knee. Everyone’s teeth had purpled with wine—her mother patted her hair anxiously as she asked Ansel questions about school, which he answered dutifully. He was a philosophy major, he said, aiming for graduate school. I want to be an academic writer. Thought is the purest thing you can leave behind. His voice was soft, lilting, seeping inky into Hazel’s core. His skin was milky pale, the interior of his forearm like a blank sheet of paper. He really was handsome—the kind of handsome that solidified the longer you looked.
A startle, when he said her name.
“Hazel,” Ansel said, a spotlight swiveling. “Jenny tells me you’re a ballet dancer. How is your knee feeling?”
“She’s almost healed,” Hazel’s mother jumped in. “Just a few more weeks on those crutches, then physical therapy. She’ll be dancing again in no time.”
Hazel nodded politely. Ansel idled on her, genuine, curious—no one had looked at her this way in months. Without pity or discomfort. She recognized a flicker of awe in the moon of his smile, a sliver of the reverence she pulled out of the audience after a perfect series of fouettés.
“I have an announcement,” Jenny said, tearing Ansel’s attention away. Jenny’s lips were flecked purple with sediment—a flare of hatred burst through Hazel, uncontrollable.
“I’ve been thinking about our birth story,” Jenny said. “About the nurse who saved us. We never even learned her name, but she’s the whole reason we’re alive. Or at least the reason Hazel is, right? Anyway, I’ve decided on my major. I want to study nursing. Specifically, labor and delivery.”
Hazel’s parents beamed across the table, the pride spreading involuntary. Exaggerated, nearly obscene. The room felt cold, everyone drunker and sloppier than they had been only minutes before. The whole display, so abruptly pointless. As her father raised his whiskey for a toast, as Jenny lifted her smudgy wineglass, Hazel clutched her water and stared into the kitchen light until the bulb had sufficiently blinded her.
