Prologue
Some people believe twins share a psychic connection.
We certainly did. I always knew when she needed me. Whether it was in the middle of third period, when she’d bolt out of English class to bawl over some guy, and I’d excuse myself from biology to hunt her down and hold her in my arms until she hiccuped and said what a loser he was anyway, or in the middle of the night when I’d wake in the silence of the house, with nothing to rouse me except a vague sense of desolation. I always knew it was hers.
And she always knew where to find me, too, when the unfairness and loneliness of it all overwhelmed me and I’d hide out in the farthest corner of whoever’s home we’d invaded that time. I’d listen to the voices of exasperated foster parents, their decision to call social services in the morning solidifying. She’d arrive quietly—the scuff of a shoe against shingles as she approached the intersection of the roof where the chimney rose, or a small thump as she bumped a forgotten piece of furniture in a dark attic, or a creak as she eased open the door to a shed and knelt down next to me beside the lawnmower and simply whispered, “Maisye.”
And my voice would find hers in the darkness, twisting around each other in a lonely dance—just the two of us against a cruel, broken world—“Tilda.”
It was a slow chip away at our surface, like a sculptor wielding a chisel. Shaping us into mangled hearts, malformed souls.
We were connected. Was it supernatural, or just heightened perceptiveness? I didn’t know, but even after we grew up, graduated, got—in my case, at least—married, found jobs across the country from each other and grew estranged, I still felt that awful, paralyzing nothing every now and then. I knew it was her. It had to be.
I always assumed that I’d know, somehow, if she wasn’t there anymore.
But the day Erica from the Boston P.D. called to tell me her body had been pulled out of the Mystic River, that little thread of Tilda in my consciousness didn’t vanish, like a candle snuffed out in a downpour. It strengthened, taking hold of me until I was the nothing, stepping into her place because she couldn’t be gone. I still felt her. I was her. All those boyfriends in high school became mine, the confidence with which she’d always carried herself became mine too, and so did the sadness she’d hidden underneath flirtatious smiles and low-cut tops and short skirts.
And so did whatever weight had crushed her until she felt the only solution was drowning, throwing herself off the bridge behind her Charlestown apartment.
I became Matilda.
When Mark came home, I was curled up on the floor, her favorite song—heavy metal, the polar opposite of my own tastes—blaring from the sound system as I murmured my name over and over again.
“Tilda. Tilda. My name is Matilda.”
I missed her funeral. I missed the next two years of my life. It was like a nightmare. The kind with only a few, subtle differences from reality, but they make it so oddly serene and perfect that you can’t help but stay on edge. And when I woke up, nothing was left.
Matilda was dead. After those years of being her, it took me weeks to accept, and even then I still felt her inside me, clawing to get out, to have her way. She was always the strong one, the willful one.
Never did she rise stronger than the day Mark came to visit, staring at me through my wall of glass, and slid a thick stack of papers through the tiny gap usually reserved for meals.
At the top, a word I’d never contemplated, not once in our five years of marriage: Divorce.
And Tilda knew I needed her. I could feel her searching for me, struggling to break free of the chains placed around her by layers of medication.
But I just smiled through the glass, swallowed her down, and accepted my fate. I watched Mark’s back as he wove through the cross-traffic of nurses and doctors, their focus anywhere but on me as they went about their jobs.
This wasn’t new. If I really thought about it, I’d spent my life inside a padded cell just like this one, alone as I looked out at the world through a thick sheet of glass that muffled everything. No one had ever been able to reach me completely, not even Mark. But he had been enough, and without Tilda, he was the only thing I had left.
And then he was gone.
Months of therapy weaned me off the pills, but wanderlust settled swiftly in their absence. I couldn’t stay in San Francisco, couldn’t look out at the Golden Gate Bridge every day and remember the blustery night when Mark and I had met at its center. I couldn’t bear to relive the uncharacteristic drizzle that had flattened my hair, turning it from golden to bronze in the moonlight, couldn’t stand to think of the words he’d used that night and wonder if he’d ever really meant them, or if he was just scared, too.
Because I understood. I knew exactly why Tilda had looked out at the Mystic and seen her last hope. I had done the same once.
Only I’d had someone to stop me.
But I didn’t anymore, and so I wandered, because with the bridge looming over everything, I had two choices: Look up at it and think about everything that had been and could have been and would never again be; or recreate the night it all began—the night it all started to end. And I knew that if I ever found myself on that footpath again, I wouldn’t get a second chance. God wouldn’t spare me another guardian angel.
So I packed everything I had left, folded down the backseat of my VW Golf, and shoved it all inside. Every last piece of me fit in that little car. I stepped back, admired my handiwork, and then sat down right in the driveway of the shoebox apartment I’d been renting ever since Mark and I had split. This was all I had left.
I cried. Sat for an hour while the sun warmed the pavement and the pavement warmed the backs of my thighs, until my calves ached and my feet fell asleep. And then I picked myself up off the asphalt, shook out my legs, slammed the hatchback shut, and took off.
I drove east. Reno. Twin Falls, where I couldn’t help but think about Tilda, the fallen twin. Salt Lake City. Colorado Springs, Wichita, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, New York City.
And then I stopped. I couldn’t bring myself to go further northeast. I drove just past the outskirts of the metropolitan chaos, stepped out of the car, and stared up the open road, knowing that only four hours stood between me and where she’d done it.
Those hours pooled around me like a ghost, flitting in and out of reach. One second, they seemed frighteningly small; the next, insurmountable. Safe. I stood in the gap between the half-open driver’s door and the side of the car, one arm leaning on the roof and the other on the trim above the window, and let her whisper to me from the depths of my soul.
She wasn’t dead. Not really. Not when all it took to find her again was to let myself sink to the bottom as she rose in my place.
I heard Mark’s voice in my head. What are you waiting for? He was always asking things like that. Things I didn’t know the answers to.
So I just stood and watched as the sky turned red, then orange, and finally crept toward a pale blue that reminded me of his eyes.
There, at a rest station on I-95, facing northeast as I squinted against the growing light, was where the FBI found me.
