After my divorce was finalized, I quit my job. I quit my book club. My monthly poker game. I canceled my gym membership and my weekly tennis lesson. I deleted my social-media accounts. I left every group text.
It’s easier this way.
Now I work from home—an apartment, actually. I’m a freelance copywriter. I microwave nearly all of my meals, and each evening after dinner, I scoop ice cream into a fussy teacup that I got at a consignment shop. I eat it while my TV plays something from one of the various streaming platforms. I watch until I hear the mockingbird’s call. From some unknown tree outside my window, he pleads for me to go to bed. I comply.
In my bedroom, I don’t read. I don’t dream. I wake without an alarm, in the dark, before the sun. I don’t even drink coffee anymore.
When I get lonely, I call my divorce lawyer. She always has answers to my questions.
“Hello, Min Epstein.”
“Hello to you, my friend.”
“We’re friends?”
“If we aren’t, this call will cost you approximately $300.”
We both laugh.
“I’m headed back from my mom’s party now,” Min Epstein says, and I wonder what that’s like. I haven’t talked to my parents since the divorce.
Instead, I ask her if she has any tattoos. She says, “Objection, relevance,” but she eventually says she doesn’t have any, which is what I expected.
I hang up a few minutes later, feeling, as always, less alone.
In the silence that follows our call, I practice slowing my breath. Any minute now, the mockingbird will trill at me to go to bed. Is it the same bird every night or different ones?
I read that they’re male birds luring mates with their fraudulent calls. Like all men.
I stand from my consignment couch, stretching, when a knock sounds at the door. I freeze, unsure what to do. No one aside from random delivery guys has ever knocked on my door, not even Min Epstein. I pay my rent via electronic check to a faceless management company, and I don’t have any of my old friends. It’s nearly 10 in the evening.
There’s a second knock.
“Hello?” I call out, tiptoeing toward the door.
“Hello,” someone—a woman—replies.
I open the door a crack, and in that sliver of space I see my upstairs neighbor, Katie or Karla or something. Occasionally, I hear her boyfriend through my ceiling: Katie/Karla, your tea is ready. Next to their front door hangs a heavy wind chime that goes ballistic during the Santa Anas. I can hear it above us now, already cranky.
I open the door wider. She stands there in sweats and an old T-shirt, flip-flops, her toes painted red as a lunar-new-year envelope. Even this outfit can’t camouflage her youth and beauty. How long before her average-looking boyfriend tires of her perfection and mangles her heart?
She says, “I told Pablo you’d be up!”
“I am,” I say.
“I’m Katie,” she says. “From Unit Four?”
“Simone. Do you need something?”
“Well, I—I had to tell you.” Suddenly, Katie is nervous. No one has had news for me since Frank—
“The strangest thing happened today,” she continues. “I saw your … do you have a twin?”
“A twin? Nope.”
“Oh, well, duh, she said she didn’t either.” Katie grins. “I found your long-lost twin! Hashtag doppelgänger!” She rolls her eyes at her own stupid joke. “I’m telling you, she had your exact hair and the same brown eyes. The same face! Like, she had your big nose.” She blushes. “Sorry—I didn’t mean it in a bad way! I love your nose.”
“Thanks. I know it’s big.”
“Suits your face.”
“Where did you see her?”
“That coffee bar on Fig. The one with the Spanish tiles.”
I pretend I know which one she means. “She works there?” I ask.
Katie explains that my twin was camped out at one of the tables, on her computer. Katie thought she was me, so they talked. The woman goes there a lot to work. She loves their cappuccinos. Katie didn’t get her name and didn’t know mine until now.
I absorb all of this information with a polite smile. As I close the door, Katie’s walking backwards and saying, “Go meet her! She says she’s there a lot. She didn’t believe me about you.”
The wind chime is loud now. Not as loud as the mockingbird though.
There he is.
Min Epstein shepherded me through my divorce five years prior. It was painless from a legal perspective: Frank and I don’t have children; he bought me out of the house with his dead mother’s money. Since then I’ve lived in relative comfort. Frank and I no longer speak. We have no reason to.
From a nonlegal perspective, however, it was, as Min Epstein says, thorny. At first, there was nothing but pain, bottomless pain, my life a shipwreck and I its ragged, nearly drowned sailor, full of shame and anger. In that state, I cut and burned everything and everyone around me until I decided to recede altogether. My life, which is really more of a half life, a laptop set to sleep mode, is simpler this way. Riskless. In this new life, only Min Epstein knows about my dead marriage.
Unlike everyone else, my lawyer was deft with my pain; she expected it. She was certainly unruffled by it. Because I stopped talking to my parents after what happened with Frank, I welcomed Min’s tender practicality, a mother and father rolled into one formidable divorce attorney.
Whenever I call, she picks up.
I call her the next day.
“Min Epstein,” she says into the phone.
“Min Epstein, Minnie Mouse,” I begin. “I promise not to call you so much after this.”
I imagine Min Epstein in her black blazer, her black Gucci loafers with the gold horse bits shined to a buff, her black hair pulled into a neat chignon. She’s behind the wheel of her gleaming black Tesla, its console screen imparting essential information as she blasts her way down La Cienega like the sleekest astronaut. Does traffic even exist for someone like Min Epstein? She is my age, 42. She calls herself child-free, whereas I say my dreams of children were crushed when my marriage collapsed.
A matter of semantics, as Min Epstein says.
“Everything all right?” she asks.
“Guess where I’m going after I hang up?”
“You’re going somewhere?”
“Do I detect alarm in your voice?” I’m walking through my house looking for my purse. I haven’t used it since I don’t know when.
“No—I,” Min stutters. “It’s … unprecedented.”
I tell her about Katie and my twin. “She said we have the same big nose!”
I expect her to laugh, but Min Epstein is quiet for so long that I wonder if I’ve lost her to outer space. “You still there?” I ask.
I catch sight of my purse under my desk and grab it. I blow on it and a body of dust rises in a gray cloud. A second purse.
“Be careful,” Min Epstein says.
Walking toward the block of potential coffee shops, I feel like I’ve been zapped by electricity, as if dry winter static is sizzling through my body. This puny field trip shouldn’t be a big deal, but it is. I’m going to drink a cappuccino in public even though I gave up coffee years ago and I never go out. Not after Frank—and it’s all because of Frank. After what he did, I didn’t want to be awake anymore—didn’t want, didn’t need, to be in the world. It was all too much; so painful, it was dangerous. The pain would kill me.
Last night’s windstorm has left palm fronds scattered across the sidewalks, and as I step around the detritus, I tell myself I’ll be okay. It’s only a cappuccino, and if I see that woman, my supposed twin, so what? She probably doesn’t look that much like me, and even if she does, I’m not sure I’ll notice. If I barely look at myself in the mirror, will I recognize my face on another?
I tell myself that none of this—the cappuccino, this so-called twin—matters. But it does. I’m walking quickly. I’m humming. I smile at a woman who’s got her baby strapped to her chest and again at a gardener wielding his leaf blower.
I realize what I’m feeling. It’s hope.
I used to have this feeling all the time. Hard to believe, but it’s true. I met Frank and when we were together, the glass was half full—of nice champagne.
When Frank and I married at an overpriced event space, with its high ceilings and view of downtown L.A., with its crushed-velvet couches in shades of mustard and emerald, we laughed at how long we’d be paying for this single evening. It all cost so much, and we were happy to pay for it. We gladly paid for the letterpress invitations, for my handmade lace dress and his designer suit, for the brass band we’d hired for the cocktail hour, for the muddled mint and top-shelf gin in those cocktails, for the plates of ahi-tuna bites offered alongside them, for the team of professional photographers haunting us like ghosts. On one of those couches (a shade of dusty rose), Frank kissed me on the neck and my body tingled in reply. A photographer’s camera flashed, and I thought my whole life would feel like this. That it would feel good. My cup—my glass—runneth over.
Turns out, I’d pay for my marriage to Frank for a very long time, possibly forever, and not with money.
He was a public-school teacher. High-school English. He was beloved, the kind of teacher who jumped on a desk to act out a scene from Hamlet, who made everyone laugh, who cursed in class and had a desk drawer full of Starbursts that he tossed across the room to anyone who made a perspicacious insight. His high standards only made students work hard to surpass them: Their essays won awards, and his students got into UCLA, Berkeley, Yale. He supported the kids during walkouts, signed their petitions. Kids enrolled in the school to take him, and they cried to the guidance counselor when they couldn’t get into his class. He won Teacher of the Year six months before we married. He was 32.
I made the money, and he got home early enough to make dinner. He graded while the chili was on. He named his sourdough starter Joseph, as in Conrad. On weekends Frank would grade and lesson-plan, and I would exercise and clean the house and go to the farmers’ market, and then we’d go eat an expensive meal, sometimes with friends but usually only us, sucking up oysters in ecstasy, our country of two.
Frank and I decided we would have a baby after I got promoted at the ad agency. I was almost 35. I had my eggs checked, and the doctor assured me there were still plenty waiting to be conscripted.
We had a terrific sex life. I must say that. It’s what everyone wondered when the news came out. Sure, sometimes our sex was practical, a bodily need that had to be satisfied, but usually it was fun, sometimes romantic. Once in a while, it was transcendent, as if our bodies had left the earthly plane to rise together in heavenly lust. I know Frank experienced it along with me because I saw his face when he came.
“I believe you,” Min Epstein told me when I described all of this to her, which was the greatest kindness because no one else did. No one believed my version of our marriage after it ended. My mother said, “You made too much money. I knew that would be a problem.” My father said, “Are you sure you can’t get over this?” One friend said, the last time we spoke, “I always thought it was too good to be true.”
When Frank got the call from Joanna, the principal, he didn’t tell me. Only after he’d discussed it with his union rep and then with Reggie, the history teacher across the hall, and after he was officially put on leave and litigation ground into gear, did he say a thing.
“I was miserable,” he explained, weakly, over my screams.
That a man who seemed to delight in my mind and my company, in my jokes, in my body, could have an affair with a 15-year-old student named Lulu, a girl with an eyebrow ring and a poetry zine, rearranged everything I understood about my life.
The glass of champagne? It tipped over. Shattered, really.
The coffee shop is the second one I peer into. Katie was correct: Blue and gray Spanish tiles line the floor of the long, rectangular space, and their beauty makes me want to throw money at the barista behind the mirrored counter. Which I do. My voice is husky as I order a cappuccino with whole milk. I feel unreal.
I carry my drink to one of the tables near the back. People congregate at the front windows, and aside from one group having what appears to be a production meeting, everyone else is solo, staring into their phones or laptops. Books have gone extinct apparently.
I sit and drink my coffee primly and look around. No one here resembles me, not remotely. I’m startled by my own disappointment and I feel like crying, which I haven’t done since the divorce. I remember why I stopped hoping.
The lawsuit alleged that, at first, Frank lent Lulu books in an attempt to groom her. It alleged that things turned romantic. It alleged that they met at a motel off National just west of the school. That he took her virginity. It alleged that the affair lasted nine months.
The allegations, Frank admitted, were true.
“Except the grooming part,” he whimpered. “I didn’t groom her! I was lending her things I thought she would like.”
Frank told me he was in love with Lulu. He was in love with her even after she and her mother sued the district, and him, and he was fired.
He loved the girl and she did not love him back.
I finish my coffee, and as the long-forgotten caffeine high takes over like a baby’s rattle shaking in my blood, I head to the back door. I’ve seen a few people exit that way with their drinks and pastries in hand. I want to see what’s out there.
It’s a patio that borders a public parking lot. The space is larger than I expect, with rows of charming picnic tables, a couple of dumpsters counterbalanced by a wall of bougainvillea, and people without laptops. They’re talking, laughing. Two friends clink their mugs like wine glasses. I feel the hope again, soaring, soaring. Maybe it’s the caffeine.
Lulu is now in college at USC.
What happened with Frank was a long time ago for her. A whole lifetime ago—at least for someone that young.
A redheaded man laughs uproariously, leaning back from his picnic bench, and I see her.
My twin.
She’s the only person sitting alone, writing in a notebook with her shoulders hunched. My shoulders. My thick curtain of brown hair. In profile I make out my own nose—beak-like.
My twin pauses in her writing and looks up. I inhale sharply, but she’s staring into the middle distance, squinting as I do, her eyebrows furrowing, her wrinkles deepening, as mine do. She hasn’t seen me yet and so I’m free to take her in. Her face is my face. In her hand is a Parker T-Ball Jotter. My pen. It’s my hand holding my pen. My hope turns into something like panic.
I happened to do genetic testing right before Frank’s news, so I know there aren’t any surprise siblings in the ether. But maybe she wasn’t in the system yet. But it can’t be. I’ve seen photos of my own birth. My father was there, my aunt. I’ve seen the birth certificate. No way I have a secret twin. This isn’t a soap opera.
I step behind one of the nearby dumpsters so that I won’t be seen and I watch her. My twin bends over her notebook, writing again. It’s how I used to work, when I had a big client and I wanted to brainstorm; I needed ink and the cramping hand for inspiration.
What is she writing?
Is she … me?
Hashtag doppelgänger, I think.
No, obviously not, that’s impossible. But she looks exactly like me.
My twin glances suddenly from her notebook and peers across the patio in my direction. It’s as if some string exists between us and I’ve given it a tug. But her eyes are glassy and unfocused, she’s deep in thought, and she doesn’t see me.
A great wind picks up and the sunshade stretched above the picnic tables lifts in a parabola. A pile of leaves whirls across the concrete. The wind gets stronger, with loud, rackety gusts, and the café patrons exclaim and cry out, squinting to keep the dust from flying into their eyes. The tiny brown napkins take off from the table, and the cups tremble in their saucers. The dumpster rattles in the wind and my twin is holding her notebook down with flat hands to keep the pages from flipping. In the chaos, she stands and shoves the notebook in a smallish purse that I’ve always coveted, from a boutique I used to frequent.
My twin is my height. She has my broad shoulders, my waist-to-hip ratio, my thighs, my butt, my feet.
My twin is busing her table. My twin is leaving.
I must follow her.
She heads into the nearby parking lot, and I know that my plan will soon be foiled because she drove here and I did not. I need to confront her, and now.
I am about to.
I’ll say, “Wow, my neighbor was right! Look at us!”
But then she pulls out her keys and hits a button.
The car that beeps in reply is a cherry-red Honda Civic.
The license plate reads KURTZ.
Frank’s car.
In the months following the reveal of the affair, I obsessed about Lulu. I wanted to understand why Frank fell for her. She was a child, for God’s sake, 15 years old, in his freshman honors class, a girl addicted to her phone and designing her future tattoo like any teenage girl these days. What was it about his own, middle-aged life, about his life with me, that made him seek her out? She offered him something I couldn’t.
I grilled anyone I could about Lulu. I asked Reggie, and our mutual friend Shelly, who taught journalism in the room next to Frank’s, to give me details. I pored over the court filings, trawled the news stories. It was never enough.
Lulu was short for Lupe, which was short for Guadalupe. Her parents were from El Salvador. Her dad died when she was little. Her brother was a heroin addict who regularly came to detox at their downtrodden apartment complex on Overland, only to start using again a few months later and steal anything he could to pay for his habit. Lulu didn’t like staying in the apartment with her mom and often crashed with one friend or another.
Lulu was by all accounts a talented writer and student, but she lacked confidence and didn’t have the family support that other teens her age had—that they need. She was just the kind of girl to take to a charming, sensitive English teacher, an older man who was funny and kind, and who believed in her, who took her seriously.
Frank wanted to believe that their affair was pure, that it existed beyond the power structures of older man and younger woman, teacher and student, white guy and brown girl. Predator and prey.
I forced him to show me a photo of her. He claimed he had only one: In it, she is laughing, open-mouthed, vulnerable as a baby bird.
Lulu is under five feet tall, with dark hair. I asked Frank again and again what her body was like, and when he told me, I threw my glass of bourbon at him. It burst against the wall into a thousand glittering pieces, and still I couldn’t get his words out of my head. He shouldn’t have answered me.
Lulu was a girl, whereas I was a woman. She had many more eggs shelved inside her uterus, and she was like a piece of Silly Putty, molded by Frank’s deft hands. Lulu hadn’t read the books Frank referenced, and until their affair, she’d never heard of the Pixies or a movie called Breathless. Until Frank, she had never let a man—
She was young and impressionable. He made an impression.
Until he didn’t. Lulu broke his heart, is what he told me.
And now he and I are divorced because of what happened between him and Lulu. An irrevocable severance.
Only now Lulu’s gone, just a name in court documents, and he’s with a woman who looks identical to me. And she’s driving his car. That would imply a close relationship, wouldn’t it?
I walk home, shuttling between fury and confusion. The caffeine has worn off, leaving a headache and that jittery, powerless feeling.
I push myself into my apartment and go straight for the phone.
“Min Epstein, you won’t believe what I saw.”
“Tell me.” Her tone sounds studied, careful.
I describe my twin on the patio, how she looks so much like me. I describe the wind.
“You must be kidding. I’d kill for a breeze,” she says. “It feels so … heavy and chalky out.”
I tell Min Epstein I followed my twin.
“You followed her?” she asks, and that same note of alarm that I noticed in our previous conversation resurfaces.
“I wanted to,” I say. And then I describe her car.
“It was Frank’s Honda,” I say.
She says nothing, but I hear someone else’s voice on her end.
“Court?” I ask.
“Mediation,” she says. “It resumes in a minute. But listen, Simone. I want you to stay put.”
“Where would I go?”
“You went to the café, didn’t you?”
“Well, I—”
“Doesn’t matter. What matters is that you remain in your apartment.”
“Why?”
“I’ll explain later.” She pauses, and the next words out of her mouth are soaked with fear. “Please. Stay there.” I hear some rustling. “I’ll call you back,” she says and hangs up.
I sit there on the couch, the phone in my hand as useless as a potato now that Min Epstein’s no longer on the other end.
Just then, the mockingbird begins its song. This early in the day?
The bird’s call, its shameful fraudulence, makes me think of my twin. How she has my face, my body. Or I have hers. She has my old life.
The phone starts in on its hang-me-up nag and I stand. Of course I’m not going to stay here.
I live 15 minutes from the old neighborhood and yet it’s a world away, with its traffic and its multimillion-dollar homes, its sparkling reservoir. Years ago, the gays and the artists began the area’s gentrification, and by the time we arrived, it was just barely affordable. Today, scores of rich bachelors and affluent families have hoovered up the remaining real estate, so that it is and isn’t the neighborhood that made it so sought-after in the first place. It seems like the only businesses that can afford the rents along the main shopping artery are high-end chains, and the newer restaurants are a developer’s idea of a cool restaurant, an uncanny valley of a restaurant. I know not to be smug: My current neighborhood will look like this within a decade.
I’m driving Katie’s car because I no longer possess one. I knocked on her door and said it was an emergency. She tossed me her keys without question.
I’m going to cruise by the old house. See if the Honda’s in the driveway, see if there are other clues to Frank’s new life with this new woman. It’s the sensible plan.
I turn onto our street, my heart squawking like a bird in my chest. Katie’s car is a vintage Benz, a diesel, and its engine chugs loudly. I want to turn around and wait for Min Epstein.
I planned to drive by slowly, but the car is so loud and the street is so quiet that I’m afraid the engine will tell on me. But, also, something in me feels fierce and fanged. I pull over in front of a duplex and get out, looking around to see if anyone I know is outside.
That’s when I hear someone calling my name.
I look up.
Frank is standing a few houses down—in front of our house. His house. He’s got his gardening Crocs on and the head of a succulent hangs in his hands, its roots like pink threads.
“Frank,” I say softly.
I’m walking toward him.
When he is only a few feet away, I stop to take in all the ways he’s changed. He’s maybe a few pounds heavier, a little more suntanned than usual. His hair is the same, but he has new glasses, light-blue frames instead of the staid tortoiseshell ones he used to favor. They suit him, and I know my twin picked them out.
I wait for him to ask me what the hell I’m doing here.
“Weren’t you wearing the black jeans before?” he asks.
“What?”
“Why didn’t you park in the driveway?” he asks. He peers behind me, as if looking for something.
“Did you have a good session? At the café? I hope going that far east was worth it. Where’s your purse?”
“I—”
“And your hair!” He laughs. When he reaches out to touch a strand, my breath catches. I feel like a candle wick, drowning in hot wax.
“You look insane,” he says and laughs again. “Like you put your finger in an electrical socket!”
“The wind,” I say.
“What are you talking about? It’s still as shit out here.” He squints at me. “You okay, Mo?”
Mo.
No one’s called me that since—since Frank.
“Where’s your girlfriend?” I ask.
I’ve startled him. It’s like he’s been hit by an invisible fist, knocked in the mouth with it, his face crumpling like a used napkin before immediately recovering, smoothing out.
And then he grins.
“Oh, she went to buy me a french dip from Philippe’s,” he says.
I say nothing.
Frank crosses his eyes in that goofy way I always hated, and I realize he’s joking. That this is our old joke, the one about our imaginary lovers who were perfect, who did everything we ever wanted them to. It was funny—until it wasn’t.
I’m about to say Lulu’s name to see what might happen.
“Let’s go inside,” he says, and with a great shiver I wonder if it was all a dream. Can I go inside? Pretend nothing bad happened to us? To me?
I’m not sure how to respond, so I don’t move. I’m as placid as a pane of glass when a blip of red startles at the corner of my vision.
It’s Frank’s car, turning onto the street. Headed slowly toward the house. My twin.
“You go on in,” I say. “I’ll be right there.”
I hold my breath and grab Frank by the shoulders to spin him toward the house. He feels like—like Frank.
“Hurry,” I say, my voice squeaky.
I’m running back to the Benz.
I return to my own street within half an hour, the sun refusing to set. I want it to be nighttime, for darkness to envelop me. I want the mockingbird’s beseeching to muffle my mind.
I don’t understand. To Frank, it was as if I’d never left. To Frank, it was as if our life together rumbled along. Then who was the woman who looked exactly like me?
Were we like cells dividing? Were there many of us, scattered across the world?
As soon as I get back to the apartment, I stop at Katie’s with her car keys.
“Everything okay?” she asks at the door. She wears an elaborately tied kimono and nothing else. Wire-rimmed glasses perch on the end of her nose. Pince-nez, a long-forgotten word, floats to the top of my consciousness.
“You look like James Joyce,” I say, almost against my will.
“Who?”
“Never mind. Thanks for your help!”
I’m inside my apartment for just a minute before there’s a knock on my door. How quickly a solitary life ends, I think. It can only be Katie again, here to pry about my so-called emergency.
I open the door and Min Epstein stands before me.
She looks as I remember her, short and slight, but not in the least bit fragile or vulnerable. Her dark hair is brushed behind her tiny ears, which are studded with pearls, and her nails are painted pale pink. She wears a gold wedding band. Her black silk shirt, unbuttoned at the collar, is tucked into black cigarette pants, and she wears black pumps. Even in heels she is shorter than I am. She could fit a body in her giant leather bag, which I’m sure required an invitation and a black AmEx card to purchase.
“Min Epstein in the flesh,” I say.
She is stunningly beautiful, but the expression in her eyes tells me her beauty is the least of her powers. When was the last time I saw her in real life? Not for years.
“Here you are,” she murmurs, almost to herself, and I realize she’s holding the straps of her bag so tightly that the skin across her knuckles strains. She’s frightened and using every bit of energy to tamp it down.
“You better come in,” I say.
She peers at me from the front step as if shocked by my very presence. With a gulp of air, she nods and steps inside.
She’s still holding on to her giant bag as she looks around my apartment like a pigeon hunting for crumbs. Then she stops as if embarrassed. Again she looks at me—the only word is ogle.
“Take a picture, it’ll last longer.”
She apologizes. When I ask her what’s wrong, she tells me we should sit down.
“I went to see Frank,” I say as soon as we are facing each other on the couch.
“Oh my God,” Min says.
“It was like … like I never left,” I say softly.
“Did you see your double there? With Frank?”
“My double,” I repeat.
“I can’t believe this is actually real.”
She’s looking right at me, but I can tell she’s talking to herself. It’s as if I’m in a documentary that she’s watching at home, like I’m just some person on a screen.
“The rumors are true,” she says.
“Please explain what’s going on,” I say.
“Where do I begin?” She sets her bag on my floor with a big thump. Maybe there is a body inside.
“I always thought it was an urban legend,” she says.
“What was an urban legend?”
“It’s lore, among lawyers. We whisper about it in law school, and if you’re at a big firm, like I was at first, there’s always gossip. Jokes. Stories. No one really believes it, but still, we talk. How can we not? It’s irresistible. Certainly there’s no one who’s ever had firsthand experience. It’s always someone who knows someone who knows someone, that sort of thing. It happens most often in divorce cases. Any situation where the clients are ripping apart something that really matters.”
“My marriage.”
“Your life,” she says.
“So, all this time, you’ve known about my … double?”
I’m not sure she hears me. Again, she’s talking more to herself than to me. “I always took it for bullshit. I don’t believe in the supernatural.”
She looks at me for a long time, as if taking inventory of my presence.
“After we’d been talking for a few months,” she says, “I had an inkling. Did you?”
I still don’t quite grasp what we’re talking about, so I shake my head.
“And then, when Frank was remarrying so soon after the divorce was finalized, I knew for sure. By then, I liked chatting with you, even if it was a little eerie.” She stands abruptly and paces around my apartment. “I didn’t realize you were, in fact, actually real. Here. In this apartment. This couch. I thought you were, I don’t know, some … voice. Your calls were a reminder of the gravity of my work. So many tragedies. I needed to acknowledge it, never forget it.”
“Of course I’m real.” And then I ask, trying to sound neutral: “Frank’s remarried?”
“Yes.”
“To my double.”
“To you.”
“No, I’m here. Alone.”
Min Epstein stops pacing and folds her arms in front of her chest. “I don’t know how else to say this, Simone, but a part of you—nearly all of you, really—forgave Frank. You two got back together. You married, for a second time.”
“What about me?”
“You’re the other part. The lost part.”
The wind shrieks and keens all night, and so does the mockingbird, precluding sleep. Not that I would be able to, even in silence. Min Epstein’s words careen around my head, as does the vision of Frank the day before. My hand on his shoulder. And then I can’t stop seeing my twin: with her notebook, driving toward me.
Who am I? Apparently, I’m not myself. I’m a ghost, and until today, I had no idea. So I’m a clueless dolt of a ghost. I’m a mockingbird. I’m a severed hand, still snapping its fingers to some macabre music that stopped playing years ago.
You’re the lost part, Min Epstein said.
How can I be found?
The next morning, the world feels scrubbed clean by all the wind. The cloudless blue sky rings through my front windows.
Before she left last night, Min Epstein told me she doesn’t know what will happen to me.
“Until today, I didn’t even know you were more than a voice,” she said.
But I’ve decided there’s got to be a way out of this.
It’s Sunday morning. I know exactly where to find Simone.
I knock on Katie’s door.
“I swear this is the last time,” I say.
The farmers’ market on Sunday is enormous, not to mention a pain in the ass, and when I left Frank, I was happy to unshackle myself from its weekly ritual. I never eat fresh vegetables anymore.
Which makes sense for a photocopy of an actual human being.
I head to Hollywood without any plan but to find my twin, my double. I’m certain that when we see each other our likeness will be enough of a shock to get her to speak to me, and plainly.
This is another place I haven’t returned to since the divorce. I walk slowly past mountains of produce sold by beautiful farmers who weigh and bag their wares coolly. I pass that one weird woman selling her nontoxic play dough and weave among couples strolling hand in hand. Toddlers stagger from curb to curb as if drunk. The brutality of it all guts me. I hated this and I went every weekend so that Frank and I would have delicious ingredients for the feasts he made. It was part of my life until it wasn’t. This part, I didn’t miss.
Simone will be here. What will I say?
I imagine her holding a peach, thinking of that poem Frank always quotes.
Do I dare to eat a peach? … Do I dare / Disturb the universe?
It’s February; the only peaches available would have to be shipped from the Southern Hemisphere. But yes, I am about to disturb the universe like the divorcée ghost I am.
She’s exactly where I expect her to be at 9:15 a.m.: talking to Marco, the fish guy. She will be trying to get sand dabs. Frank’s favorite. And hers. And mine—ours.
She’s got her hair in an unfussy ponytail. She wears head-to-toe chambray, and besides that leather purse I love, there’s a straw bag over her shoulder as big as Min’s leather one, and out of the top peeks chicory and a baguette. She looks chic, happy. She is handing Marco some cash, saying “Thank you,” and then she is placing whatever fish he pulled from his cooler into the straw tote. She turns to leave.
“Simone,” I call out, just like Frank did the day before.
Our eyes meet and right then, the wind starts. It blows from the west, as if somewhere off the ocean it gathered strength, rising, until it eventually got up the nerve to come here, to us. The universe, disturbed. A baby bawls. The pop-up tents shading the tables of produce tremble and ruffle in the breeze, and then they flap and groan. Onions tumble. Down the line, one of the tents snaps and flies into the air.
Simone looks at me, aghast, but she’s also delighted. I used to have quite the ego.
Her hair whips across her face as she says, “When Frank said he talked to my twin, I thought he was playing a prank.”
“He wasn’t. Can we go somewhere quiet to talk?”
I’m shouting on account of the wind. People look around, alarmed or thrilled, as farmers try to take down their tents, or hold on to them. On the street behind us hulks a parking garage. I nod at it and she understands immediately.
She takes my hand and the wind howls louder. We run.
We are out of breath when we get into the garage. It feels strangely quiet after a windstorm like that. Smell of exhaust. Of urine. Of metal. It’s darker inside here, as parking garages always are.
In the shadows, by a brushed-metal elevator door, Simone steals another look at me.
“What’s your name?” she asks.
“Simone,” I say.
She gasps.
I tell her everything I know.
She needs to sit down, of course. My twin sinks to one of those concrete curbs that keep the cars from bashing the wall as they nose forward. A useful, if ugly, invention.
“Now what?” she asks.
“It’s why I came to find you,” I say. “I can’t go on.”
“You’re in purgatory,” she said.
“Lulu,” I say.
She winces as if the girl were a toothache.
“How could you go back to him?” I ask. “After he did that? She was 15!”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“It didn’t happen overnight,” she says. “Frank and I didn’t speak for months—the darkest era of my life, if you can imagine.”
“I believe I can,” I say dryly.
“And then, I don’t know, one day he called me and I decided to pick up. We went to dinner. We talked. We talked and talked until the restaurant closed.”
“How romantic.”
“Not at all. It was hard. It was intense. He was over Lulu; he finally saw how insane it all was. He wanted to try again, with me. He didn’t think I would want to but he had to see. He realizes now how awful it was for me, how foolish he was. He was blinded by … I don’t know … lust.”
“What about Lulu?”
“What about her?” Anger is in her voice. “She’s agreed to settle out of court. She’ll be fine. We’ll probably move somewhere cheaper, to cushion the fallout. Anyway, he already spent so much on legal fees. Thank God for Hannah’s money.”
We smirk at each other. Hannah was our rich mother-in-law, conveniently dead before Lulu could shake her image of her son.
“This is so bizarre,” Simone says, looking at me again. “You’re just … living in Highland Park? As another version of me?” She shivers.
“Living is a strong word,” I say.
She gets up, vibrating with intention; I recognize this feeling she’s having, the way I get when I’m moved to action. “How can we solve this? Because we have to solve this. Right? We have to! We need to, I don’t know, like, synthesize us.”
I knew she’d understand. “I’m pretty sure I know how,” I say.
She looks at me, expectant, excited.
“If you leave Frank,” I say, “I think it’ll end this.”
Her laugh is a dog’s yip. Incredulous.
“No, definitely not.” She looks at me with sadness. “I’m sorry, but … things with Frank? They’re the best they’ve ever been. The affair strengthened our bond.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“I am.”
My twin looks past me, at the world beyond the parking lot. From the top floor, there must be a gorgeous view of Hollywood; here, on the ground floor, it’s only sunlight and parking meters.
“You don’t understand,” she says. “I let the affair go.”
“You let it go?”
“I had to,” she says. “For love.”
“You realize I’m the ‘it’ you let go, right? And now I’m doomed to live this half life until—until when?”
My twin finally returns her gaze to me. Her eyes aren’t without empathy, but there’s something else there too: pity and frustration and frustration’s more demeaning cousin, annoyance. She is annoyed to be inconvenienced by me, by the fact of me.
She thought she’d let it go.
My twin glances at her watch and says, “Shit, I gotta run. Can I have your number? We can keep the conversation going. We’ll figure it out.”
I know she’s lying, because she is me and I can see it in her eyes and in the hurried way she grabs at her bag. She won’t tell Frank about any of this. If I call, there’s no way she’ll pick up.
“I know where you live,” I say.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she says. “Are you threatening me?”
Am I?
Five years ago, I directed so much of my fury at Lulu. She took from me, so I would take from her. I imagined taking her young face in my hands and with one swift gesture twisting her neck until it broke. And then I’d gouge her eyes out.
I should’ve done it to Frank.
I step closer to my twin and the wind replies like an answer to a question, rushing into the parking lot. An empty soda bottle scuttles by and the wind yelps with rage and grief and then a car alarm goes off. Or is it a mockingbird pretending to be a car alarm? It’s not fair that a car can crush a bird under its tires. A woman too.
Whatever the sound is, it’s so loud that it distracts my twin. I grab her ponytail.
The wind moans.
I’m supposed to be the amputated limb, the severed lizard tail, the corner of mold on a block of cheese. I refuse. I am the body that will go on.
The wind and the car alarm cover the sound of my twin’s screams as I drag her by the hair to the ground and bash her skull against the concrete.
It was easier than I expected.
My twin lies dead at my feet, her hair matted with blood, brains. I wait for something to click on inside of me. Regret, perhaps. Horror.
Or maybe I long for its opposite: some inner glow coursing through me, a feast of energy as I am resurrected, the blood of my victim running through my vampiric veins like an espresso shot.
Instead, I feel nothing.
Maybe, I tell myself, it’ll take some time for the computer to reboot, for me to come back online, back to myself. What will happen now? I’ll have to return Katie’s car and empty my apartment before people begin to ask questions.
But even if they did, what then? One can’t investigate the murder of a ghost.
Because my twin’s the ghost now.
Calm as those farmers at their stands, I yank off my twin’s chambray shirt and then my own. I put on her shirt. Same with her pants, her socks and shoes, even her underwear. I stuff my own clothes and old purse inside her straw bag next to the chicory and the baguette and the fish. Out of her lovely purse, I pull out her keys. I know exactly where she parked the car, one of those secret spots off Selma.
The moment I stand up, the straw bag weighing on my shoulder, something changes. I lift my chin just a little, a defiant pose.
I glance down at the body. Is it beginning to fade? My vision falls blurry, like the world seen through a dirty windshield. There is no wind, no car alarm, only silence.
I blink.
The body is gone. Nothing.
As if it turned to dust and was carried away like freeway particulate. Let go.
It seems I drove Frank’s Honda again; maybe my car’s in the shop. Why he never joined me at the farmers’ market, I don’t know. From now on, I will insist we come together.
The inside of the car smells like Frank’s deodorant, and I hold on to the steering wheel to steady myself. On the dashboard is a yellow Post-it that says I LOVE YOU MO MO.
The world is as still as a photograph as I turn onto the old street. No breeze. My second visit in two days, which would have been unfathomable before all of this unfolded. I pull the car into the driveway, and carefully lift the bag of farmers’-market goods across the console so as not to harm the bread. Katie’s car keys are in there, along with the purse and clothes.
Frank’s standing at the door, as if waiting for me.
“Hey, you,” I say sweetly.
“Hey, you,” he repeats. “Get my note?”
“Did I?”
“In the car.”
“I did.”
He takes the bag from me and peers inside. I wonder if he can smell the blood on the shirt, see it sprayed across the collar like raindrops on a window.
“Did you get the persimmons? The good ones I like?” is all he asks.
“Something like that,” I say.
He looks up from the bag, the edge of the baguette sharp as a knife and nearly grazing his cheek. Does he already know, somehow? Does he recognize me?
His neck, it’s so pale. His eyes glisten with feeling.
I could peck them out as a bird might.
