Out of Oneness, Two
by Elizabeth Rosen
Just as I’d known she would be, when I opened the door, my twin sister Erin was standing there, mild sunburn across the bridge of her nose and wet canopy of hair trailing down her back. Her sunglasses were pushed up into the tangles on top of her head and her bathing suit was still damp with salt water. She was weeping.
I wasn’t surprised to see her. As twins, we’d often dreamed about one another. In middle school, she’d dreamed of the boy pushing me into a locker in the school hallway and the resulting cut above my eye that left a scar bisecting my eyebrow, that flaw one of the only things that allow people to tell us apart. I’d dreamed of the terrible haircut she got at a cosmetology school where the trainee made her look as if she’d slept on one side of her head for six years. So we were both alert to the possibility that our dreams might foretell an event that would come to pass, and now here she was, as she’d been in my dream the night before, tears streaming down her wide cheeks, shoulders shaking.
If I did not rush her into my arms upon immediately seeing the state she was in, it was only because I knew she had drowned three weeks prior. Still, she was my twin, whether here or in the hereafter, and I opened the door wide to beckon her in. She cried harder and shook her head, pointing one extended finger over her shoulder toward the beach, two blocks to the east where we had played in the waves as children while our grandparents—whose beach cottage we had inherited—had slathered us in sunblock and doted on twice the granddaughter than they’d thought to wish for. Later, as adults, the beach became our sacred spot, a place we walked and bared our souls to one another.
It was also the beach where she’d drowned, riptide pulling her out faster than the lifeguards could fish her from the waves to carry her to shore and try to unsuccessfully revive her. How much it must have taken her to leave the place of her death and come to me inland. Yet here she was, my dead twin, come to invite me for a last walk together along the beach. I pulled the door shut behind me, the click of the lock engaging with a finality I had also dreamed. I pocketed my key.
As we walked toward the beach, we passed stucco walls flush with bougainvillea vines whose magenta blossoms exploded in color against the muted beach colors of the architecture. We didn’t speak. I was content to wonder whether someone looking out their window would see a single melancholy woman walking past, or do a double-take at the duplicate women passing by, so alike that for years we had been able to fool our teachers, our boyfriends, sometimes even our relatives if the light was right.
The beach came into sight at the end of the cul-de-sac and with it the crash and suck of the waves’ assault and noisy retreat from the shore. Violent though it was, the sound was a comfort to me, the rhythm of living oceanside. We left the asphalt for the the sand, hot and rough under our bare feet. We turned to follow the wet line on the sand that marked where the waves ended their encroachment. The sun shone blindingly on the ocean. I narrowed my eyes against the glare.
“I know you want me to apologize.” I didn’t bother to say it out loud, being more or less certain that our twin ability to know the other’s thoughts would be uninterrupted by death. “I’ve always hated being one of two.”
Sorrow was written across her brow.
“It wasn’t enough, the scar,” I told her. “I was always one of ‘those Klossen girls’ who no one could tell apart. I needed more. I need to be one, alone.”
Erin dipped her head in acknowledgment and reached for my hand. Surely, she knew that I had seen her floundering from the beach as the riptide took her, that I had felt her panic in my chest when she realized she was too tired to swim out of it. She must have known I would feel that panic as twins feel things, one for the other.
As she turned to face me, the winkling glare from the water glanced over her. I saw that what I’d thought were tears was ocean water sluicing down her face, that what I thought were sunglasses tangled in her hair were clumps of seaweed. Her hand in mine was sticky with salt water, and I realized her body had not been wracked by sobs as she stood in my door but uncontrollable shivering from her long immersion in the cold, deep ocean.
Of course, she knew I knew: when you are a twin, you are always aware of where the other one is, like a satellite to its paired planet. You always know.
“I’m not sorry,” I said. “For three weeks now I’ve been the only Klossen girl. It’s been the most miraculous time of my life.”
She nodded, cracks of compassion from her long immersion opening across those wide, full cheeks I knew so well, her waterlogged flesh splitting apart like overcooked fish. I let her lead me to the sea and in, back to the twoness, back to the dark.
The Molotov Cocktail 