The Sisters

I'm lying up here in agony, alone in this big four-poster bed Daddy bought back when Eisenhower was still in the White House, and there isn't a living soul in this house to look out for me. Not one. I would have to drop down on my knees and put my hands up to the ceiling and beg the good Lord Himself if I really wanted somebody to come over and check on me. You would think having a twin sister means having an inseparable partner in this old world. Somebody who would always be by your side when things got rough and the body started acting up the way bodies do when you push past seventy. You would think that. But thinking and knowing are two different beasts, and one of them has teeth.

I pick up the phone and I call Velita.

She lets it ring three times. Three. She always does this.

"'Bout time you picked up. I thought you were ignoring me."

I can hear her sigh on the other end. That long, slow sigh she does, like air going out of a tire in the driveway. "I wasn't ignoring you, Penny. You know I have a very busy day. Don't you remember? I told you all about it when I dropped off the soup yesterday."

The soup. Lord, the soup. I don't like her cooking, if you can even call it cooking. How can you call it cooking when you throw a bunch of stuff in a pot and wait? That's not cooking, that's praying. It's no wonder she's been single her whole life.

"When can you come over, sis? I get so dizzy when I stand up. I know you're getting tired of me calling all the time. I bet you wouldn't mind it if I fell down and really hurt myself, would you?"

She sighs again, and underneath the sigh there's something I almost don't catch. A little hitch. A held back something. Like she's bitten the inside of her cheek, I think, bitten down right where the gum meets the tooth, and now she's tasting blood.

"I can be there in thirty minutes."

She hangs up before I can answer.

I don't see what the big deal is. I'm not asking her to move into the spare bedroom. Just a few hours this morning before she runs all her last-minute errands. She's supposed to be getting married tomorrow, and how does she expect me to be there if I'm not feeling my best? It's a little bit funny too, her rushing to the altar now. She turned seventy last year. Seventy. The bride and groom together could've shopped at the Cracker Barrel and gotten the senior discount without even being asked.

About six months ago, the two of us took a trip to Europe and rode a river cruise on the Seine. What a dump it is over there. I don't know why Velita is in love with these really old places like Germany and France. You have to walk everywhere you want to go and there's not much to do anyway. Running out of nothing to do, I called it.

This was a cruise just for senior folks, and I was really looking forward to meeting a nice man. Somebody from the States. Somebody from Texas, ideally, or at least a man who wouldn't mind regularly coming down to meet me somewhere romantic, like Galveston. I haven't traveled much in my life, but why would you, when Texas has some of the nicest beaches in the world?

But would you be surprised if I told you the whole cruise was a snooze fest? There were all these wrinkly old men who wanted to talk about what medications they were taking and how far away their grandchildren lived. How is a man going to swoon me when all he wants to talk about is switching cholesterol pills, all the while slouching like a jumbo shrimp at the dinner table?

And then in walks Marcus.

Marcus stood tall like a giant redwood, and I remember catching sight of him across the dining room our very first night aboard. He couldn't walk straight through doorways on the cruise ship because his shoulders were so broad. I thought he must have been a retired football player or something. His teeth were white and straight (his own teeth too, I checked), and he still had a full, thick head of salt-and-pepper hair. He caught my attention right away. The attention of Velita, too.

I don't know why she was so interested in Marcus. Velita had never really been with a man in her whole life. She had a serious boyfriend in college, but she never got married or had kids or any of that normal stuff. So why start now? I had lost my husband, James, about ten years ago, so I knew what it was like to have a man around the house and what it feels like to have it all taken away.

That night for dinner, I wore my most dazzling dress and earrings, and spent a couple of hours getting my hair and face just right. Velita showed up to dinner, and the poor thing was wearing the most simple dress with hardly any makeup on at all, her hair just hanging straight down. I made sure to have an empty seat next to mine at the dinner table, so that Marcus would have to sit next to me.

As I devised, that handsome American man sat down at our table with me in between him and Velita. He would have no choice but to talk to me, and maybe even fall for me, too.

But he turned out to be quite rude. Marcus hardly paid any attention to me at all. He kept leaning across me to talk to Velita, his cologne washing over me every time he moved (some kind of pine smell, like an aftershave Daddy used to wear), and after about half an hour of this little soiree, I was getting so tired of it that I excused myself from the table. The two of them talked and talked all night. I don't think Velita got back to our cabin until midnight.

And that's the man she's going to marry tomorrow.

It wasn't the first time Velita was engaged. It just took her fifty years to get back around to it.

The first time was with James. My James. My late husband. She met him in college, and they were together a semester or two before Velita worked up the nerve to introduce him to the family. I don't remember why it took her so long to do that, but he was overdue for getting my approval to date my sister.

James was hardly a man the first time I met him. He had long hair that went past his shoulders, the way the boys wore it back then, all the way to the small of his back if they let it grow, like they were trying to be girls. He majored in photography at the University of Texas. Like you need a degree to point a camera and push a button.

He was real boring at the dinner table, too. He put all of us to sleep, Momma and Daddy included, with his stories about studying abroad in Europe. Just the absurdity of it. Going all the way over there to take pictures of cobblestones and old ladies in headscarves for a few months. Clearly back then, he had no idea what an honest living really was. Nothing like our Daddy at all. Our father was the town pharmacist, ran his own business right there on Main Street, and everybody in three counties came to him for their medicine.

Despite his childish dreams of taking pictures and dragging my little sister to all his photo shoots, James was a very good-looking man. He had nice strong shoulders hiding under that greasy hair, and these muscular arms that looked like they could be boa constrictors. He was smart, too. It was just too bad he was dating my sister. Velita was so tame and quiet, she would never have been able to make a real man out of him. James needed somebody like me. Opinionated. Purposeful. Somebody who knew what was grown up and what was just a fit of immature "self discovery," or whatever nonsense it was he used to mumble about over his coffee in the mornings.

James could be molded. And I wanted him for myself.

I spent the entire summer trying to win him over. He didn't really respond to my flirting or my cute dresses. He was loyal to Velita, loved her dearly, and one evening after supper, sitting out on the porch swing with the cicadas screaming in the live oaks, he confessed to me that he'd bought an engagement ring. He was planning to ask Momma and Daddy for their blessing the following week.

I knew right then that if I wanted him, I would have to get us alone.

That time came around August, just a few weeks before the start of his senior year. The three of us made plans to take a day trip for a picnic. The night before, Velita came down with a bad case of the flu.

"I'm so sorry," James said, sitting on the edge of Velita's bed with a cold washcloth pressed to her forehead. "I'll stay behind to take care of her."

"Don't be silly," Velita said, smiling weakly up at him. "I'll be fine on my own. Why don't you two do the picnic together? No use ruining plans for all three of us."

"What a great idea," I said. "I'll get the car packed up in the morning, and we'll have a good time, just the two of us."

The next morning, James and I set out for the picnic spot. We made great conversation on the drive, and I made sure to laugh at all his jokes, the way men like. He was actually a very kind man and he asked me a lot of questions about myself. That is the kind of attention I really want to get from a man, the kind I deserve.

The spot James had picked out was inside a sylvan park, secluded and quiet, the kind of place where the live oaks make a tunnel over the road and the cicadas drown out everything else. I don't remember seeing other cars or visitors that day. Not a one. It was just us. A picnic for three would have been wasted on a place that romantic.

We were eating our sandwiches and slices of pound cake on a red-checkered blanket when a thunderstorm rolled in out of nowhere. The kind that comes up over the hill country in summer, dark on the underside and bruised purple at the edges. The sky opened up and poured down on us.

We giddily packed in a hurry and ran back to his car for cover. He and I were both out of breath, dripping wet, just looking at each other through the steamed-up windows. I leaned in and kissed him. He pushed me away. He gave the obligatory I can't do this, I'm getting married to your sister speech, but when I took his hand and moved it to my breast, we started kissing again, and before we both knew it, we were making love in the back seat of his Ford in the middle of a Texas thunderstorm, the rain hammering the roof so hard I couldn't hear myself think.

On the drive back, I promised James I would keep it a secret. Under no circumstances would I tell Velita. He agreed, and said it was best we didn't bring it up. Best we didn't see each other for the rest of the summer.

A couple of weeks later, I was late.

I told James I was pregnant. The child was definitely his, I said, since I hadn't been with another man in a long time.

Now if he was thinking I would keep this a secret and raise a child alone, he had a whole world of hurt coming his way. I told James he needed to break off his plans to propose to my sister and marry me instead. And I told him he had better drop that nonsense photography major. Our child would not be raised by some starving artist running off across half the globe to take pictures of pigeons.

James dropped photography and enrolled in pharmacy school. By the time he graduated, he was in line to take over Daddy's business.

Velita was devastated when she found out. I didn't get myself pregnant. I wasn't the one who cheated on my sister. So I made James break the news to her. I don't know what was said behind that closed door of her bedroom. I do remember the way she looked when she came out. Like somebody had reached down into her chest and pulled something important out of it. Like a doll with the stuffing pulled.

But sometimes God has something else in store for us, and the way I saw it, if she was angry at the way things happened, she was really just angry at God's will. And besides, this wasn't the tragedy she was making it out to be. James was turning out to become a real man.

Sometimes, late at night, I do wonder if James would have proposed to Velita that day if I'd been the one to come down with the flu.

In the end, I was never pregnant. A few weeks after our shotgun wedding, I went in for a check up, and the doctor told me with that careful, soft voice they use when they have bad news for you that not only was I not with child, but it was unlikely I could ever become a mother.

For over forty years, it was just me and James. Childless and rattling around together in Momma and Daddy's old two-story house.

A few years into our marriage, Daddy retired and James took over the family pharmacy. Things were really looking up for us. Not so much for Velita.

She never met another man. She kept to herself. Unlike my James, who turned himself around by getting a real job, Velita worked at a photo lab in the next town over, developing pictures of people's birthday parties and family vacations in a dark, musty old room all by herself. Like she'd locked herself in a cave while everybody else around her kept living.

I was worried about her. She only lived a town over, but she stopped calling. Stopped visiting. Understandably, she was still heartbroken about James and did not come to our wedding. It was embarrassing having to find another Maid of Honor at the last minute and come up with an excuse as to why my own twin sister couldn't make it.

When Momma and Daddy passed, a couple of years apart and both of them too young, Velita arrived at the funerals in all black, a veil covering her frail-looking face. She stayed in the back so nobody would notice her. When it was her turn to pay her respects, she stepped up to the casket and slipped something inside. An old, worn photograph. Her, James, and Daddy standing together in front of the pharmacy. Daddy's arm around James's shoulders.

It was the most selfish and tasteless thing I ever saw at a funeral. I made James take it out and throw it away.

I could tell the picture made him upset, too. He just kept looking at it. Kept turning it over in his big hands like it was something fragile he didn't know how to put down. He sighed a lot, the way a man does when he's having an asthma attack but doesn't want anybody to notice.

"Earth to James," I said. "Your family is waiting on you. Go on and throw away that thing."

And I don't know why Velita was so sad anyway. Daddy left me and James the house. She got everything else.

She finally came around one year and started poking her head out of her shell. I really missed the big Christmas dinners Momma and Daddy used to throw at the big house, so one year, James and I pulled out all the stops.

I had James come home early from the pharmacy every day for a week, hanging up lights and setting up the Christmas tree. We got a big old ham with all the sides and desserts and pies, and we must have invited half the town over. The house smelled like cloves and warm sugar and the fresh-cut pine of the tree in the corner.

To my surprise, Velita accepted our invitation. She even came over early to help set up. It sure was a lot of work for James to do all on his own, and he was so slow. Couldn't even follow the simplest instructions from me. It's a wonder how he ever ran a pharmacy when he couldn't even listen to his own wife.

Velita came over with a wrapped box in her hand. She looked a lot healthier than she had at Daddy's funeral. No doubt her inheritance had something to do with it. She was dressed nicely for once, and she had even taken the time to stand in front of a mirror before stepping out of her house.

I went upstairs to fetch something from the linen closet, and while I was still up there, I heard James and Velita quietly talking to each other downstairs. In low voices. Hushed.

I crept down the first couple of steps, hiding behind the bannister, and listened.

Velita gave him his Christmas present. An old Kodak camera. The kind with the leather strap and the heavy metal body, the kind James used to carry around all the time, back when he was a different man, back before he became mine.

For a moment, they just stood still and looked at each other. They were not even talking at that point, but tears were streaming down both their faces, dripping onto the carpet at their feet. Then Velita leaned in to hug James, and when he accepted her into his arms, they both just melted into each other and started kissing.

I never came down those stairs faster in my entire life.

They let go of each other, completely caught off guard. I ripped the box out of James's hands and threw it against the wall. The muffled sound of shattered glass came from inside it, like a small set of teeth breaking.

Now sometimes when a rage runs through me, I forget where I am. What I'm doing. What I'm saying. This was one of those moments. When I finally came to, both Velita and James were crying, really crying, the kind of crying that comes from someplace deeper than the eyes.

Velita said she was sorry. She ran out of the house and didn't come back, not that night, not for the Christmas party, not for a long time after. Before the guests arrived, I made James promise me he would never be alone with Velita again. He made that promise to me. And he kept it until the day he died.

The camera was mostly fine. A small dent in the body. The broken glass we'd all heard had just been a couple of lens filters that shattered on impact with the wall. James said everything else about it worked, although he hardly ever used it.

"No matter what I do with this thing," he said, holding it up to the light in the kitchen one Sunday afternoon, turning it slowly in his hands, "I can't get the pictures to look the way they used to."

Such a silly gift to give a man, anyway. Velita had forgotten that I'd whipped him into shape, made him forget about those silly pictures he used to take. I don't know why she wanted to stir up those old memories of him with his long hair in Europe. So the camera just stayed in our closet, except for once in a blue moon when he would take it out for some special occasion, hold it for a while without taking any pictures, then put it back on the shelf.

Part of the reason I called Velita over this morning is that I want to give her the camera back.

As usual, after our little fights, one of us eventually reaches out, and we just carry on like nothing happened. That's what sisters do. Especially twins, I tell myself. Especially twins.

When James passed a few years ago, Velita brought up that Christmas night in the living room. She kept apologizing for having kissed him while I was upstairs, and she kept asking about the camera. Asking if she could keep it, to help her remember him.

I told her I wanted to hold on to it. It was James's camera, after all. Why would she want it? She would nod her head feebly, and bring it up again from time to time, the way a person comes back to a sore tooth with their tongue.

But today I feel like it is time to let go of it. I am ready to let Velita keep the camera. It will be a nice wedding gift, and I know it will bring her so much joy. It's not my place to understand. Lord knows if He even wants me to. But it doesn't make sense for me to hold on to the thing any longer. I don't even know how to use it.

I also called Velita over because I want to talk about Marcus. The handsome American she met last year on that river cruise.

It never made sense to me why such a refined, classy man would be interested in my sister. Velita is a hot mess, bless her heart. Never married. Lives alone in a small house. Spends her time developing pictures, even though she hasn't had to work in years.

My curiosity got the best of me about a month ago, and I started sleuthing around on the Internet. James got a desktop computer a few years ago. I could never figure the thing out, or understand why anyone would want to sit in front of a screen all day, until Velita came over one afternoon and showed me how to use it. Wouldn't you know it, my photo-lab sister, the one who hides from the world, was the one who taught me how to find people on it.

It's quite fascinating what you can do. You can look up just about anybody.

There are all sorts of bad people in this world. People who want to take away everything I worked so hard for in my life. When James passed, he left me the house and quite the nest egg he'd built over the years after taking over Daddy's business. He even made Velita the beneficiary of part of his estate. Something he must have done behind my back, in the final hour, when the morphine had him so far under that he couldn't have signed his own name straight if his life depended on it. Which I suppose by then it didn't.

With all this money and easy living, I might as well have a big old target on my back that says ROB ME to every low-life crawling out of the woodwork. So I got myself a subscription to a professional database. The same one the police use when they're looking up folks. If I have your name, you're in my sights. And if I have your date of birth, too, honey, you are toast. I can learn about all the secrets a person is hiding. Debts. Warrants. Prior arrests. Any mistake you ever made is going to show up in that database, with your name and a little mug shot picture right beside it like a smiling school photo from the worst day of your life.

And there he was.

The mug shot of Marcus Gifford, age sixty-seven, of Hot Springs, Arkansas, was unmistakable. Same broad shoulders. Same salt-and-pepper hair, though a little flattened from however they make you stand against that wall. Same straight teeth, although in the picture he wasn't smiling. Same Marcus my dear sister Velita is going to marry tomorrow.

It seems Marcus has been very, very busy these past few years. He told us the truth at dinner that night on the river cruise when he said his wife had passed. He just left out the part where she was his fourth.

I was able to find the local paper for Hot Springs, The Sentinel Record. The fourth Mrs. Gifford had died under mysterious circumstances, and he had been wanted for questioning by the Garland County Sheriff's Office for the past two years. The article did not officially report him as a suspect, but it did mention, in that careful way newspapers have, that Mrs. Halz (her maiden name) was the sole heir of the Halz Industries empire. A multi-million dollar construction firm headquartered in Little Rock.

And that is why I called Velita over.

It's true I haven't been feeling myself, and I was hoping for a little help getting up and around. But the real reason is Marcus. I just don't know how to handle this. I've been holding on to this news for a couple of weeks now, trying to find the right time to bring it up.

I just don't know if I can.

Would she accuse me of trying to sabotage her wedding? After all these years, would this finally be the thing? The last straw? The thing that makes her cut me out of her life for good?

The doorbell rings.

Velita is here.

I walk downstairs and let her in. The dizziness I told her about over the phone seems to have lifted, somehow, the moment I got to my feet, the way these things sometimes do.

"I was expecting I'd have to let myself in through the back door," she says, stepping inside. "But here you are. Feeling better, Penny?"

"Velita. It's so good to see you. Are you excited for tomorrow?"

She looks at me. "You must be feeling much better, Penny. Do you even need me right now? You know I'm going to be very busy today."

We take a seat in the living room. The same living room where the three of us had that awful fight that one Christmas. The carpet has been changed since then. Twice. But sometimes when the afternoon light comes in just right through the front windows, I swear I can see where the tears dripped down off their two faces and onto the floor between them. Two little dark spots, side by side, like a pair of pupils looking back up at me.

"Well, I haven't been feeling myself lately," I begin. "But the truth is, I wanted to give you something before your big day tomorrow. An early wedding gift."

I cannot bring myself to tell her about Marcus, after all. It is not my place to intervene and get involved in other people's business.

"I wanted to give you James's camera. The one you gave him. I know you really liked it, and I think James wanted you to have it anyway."

Velita looks up at me, her eyes wet, her mouth working a little bit at the corners.

I hand her the box. The camera is packed inside, wrapped carefully in the newspaper article about her soon-to-be husband and his last wife in Arkansas.

Velita has always been sensitive to the world. Always been able to notice the oddest things that most good people wouldn't even bother to look for. When she opens the box and unwraps the camera, Marcus's mug shot will be the very first thing she sees. Those dark eyes, printed in dot matrix, looking right back at her out of the worst day of his life, as if to say, You're next.

"Oh, Penny." Her voice catches. "This is the sweetest surprise you have ever given me. And what a lovely wedding gift it will make."

She holds the box close to her chest and breathes in deeply.

"It's like having him right next to me. Like all those years ago."

"Don't you get hung up on him now. Not on the day before you marry Marcus."

Velita laughs. She relaxes in front of me. We talk for a bit more, and for the first time since we were girls in matching Easter dresses, we are actually enjoying each other's company. She leans in to hug me, and we hold each other tight. I can smell her shampoo, the same drugstore brand Momma used to buy us when we were small.

She looks at me and says, "You know, after the cruise last year, I was so afraid of staying in touch with Marcus. I thought you might find a way to take him from me. The way you took James."

I freeze.

She has never said that out loud before. Not in fifty years. The words just sit there in the air between us, the way smoke sits in a closed-up room.

But then she smiles. A small smile. A tired smile.

I hold her hands in mine.

"Girly," I tell her, "I've had my time with a husband. Marcus is all yours. I'm starting to feel better now, so why don't you run off. You've got a wedding to get ready for tomorrow."

We hug one last time. She walks to the door, the wrapped box held against her chest like a baby.

I call out her name.

She turns around.

"And Velita," I say, "I hope you enjoy your wedding present."

She smiles at me again. That same small, tired smile.

Then she walks out into the bright Texas morning, the box pressed close to her heart, and the door swings shut behind her with a soft, final click.

I stand there in the foyer for a long moment.

Upstairs, the house creaks the way it always does when nobody is moving in it. The way it has creaked every day for forty years, ever since James and I came home from our shotgun honeymoon, and Momma stood at the kitchen window watching us pull into the drive, her face a question she never asked out loud.

I climb the stairs slowly. The dizziness is back, or maybe it never left. I make my way to the bed.

Outside the window, somewhere down the block, a dog is barking at nothing.

I lie down.

I close my eyes.

I picture Velita, somewhere on the road between her house and mine, pulling over at a stoplight because something has caught her eye. The way the newspaper feels through the wrapping paper. A name showing through, maybe. A face.

I picture her pulling onto the shoulder. Putting the car in park. Lifting the lid off the box.

I picture her looking down.

And I picture, on the other side of all those years, Marcus standing in his fine wedding suit tomorrow morning. Waiting at the altar. Checking his wristwatch. Checking the door.

Waiting on a bride who never comes.

The dog outside stops barking.

The house goes still.

And for the first time in a long, long while, I find that I am smiling, too.