Carly’s Voice (3 page)

I took Carly by the hand. She did not resist or melt down into one of her usual tantrums.
Perhaps there was hope that she was aware that what she did was wrong? I can always
hope. “We’ll come back to the park tomorrow, Carly,” I said as we walked toward home.
I repeated over and over that she must only leave the house with an adult. Please,
let her learn this lesson.

Back home I sighed, “I found her.” Tammy was home by then. Taryn was in the bath,
and I sent Carly upstairs with our nanny to join her. I explained everything to my
wife, who closed her eyes and dropped her head. We didn’t need to discuss this any
further. It was just one more reminder of the challenges we faced.

The next day, my wife called a home-security company and had a chiming alarm installed
so we would know when the door had been opened.

Upstairs, I heard the bath running again. The
bleep bleep bleep bleep
s told me that Matthew was back to defeating the warlords. The air conditioning hummed.
Everything was back to the way it should be. Our house was filled with all the normal
evening sounds heard in all the other normal houses on our normal block.

But this was not a normal house.

This was Carly’s house.

Chaos Is Born

There is no education like adversity.

—Benjamin Disraeli

A news reporter once asked me to describe our a-ha moment with Carly. He wanted to
understand that blinding flash of insight we had had about our daughter. I thought
for a moment before replying, “There never has been a moment like that. Carly has
always just been Carly.”

From the moment our daughters were born on a gray morning in January 1995, both my
wife and I knew which twin—Twin A or Twin B—was going to grow up to live the life
of Carly, and which would become Taryn. Call it intuition or cosmic intervention,
but one baby just
was
a Carly.

After the unsettled time around the birth of our son four and a half years earlier,
we were elated to close the book on trauma and start a new life with our enlarged
family. Matthew had been born during the grieving period for Tammy’s mother, who had
died suddenly just months before his birth.

Having the twins had not come easily. Creating life was not an issue for Tammy; sustaining
it had been. After three miscarriages in the years after Matthew was born, we were
about to break the curse. We looked forward to a fresh start. Quid pro quo; we were
owed
that much.

“How many bedrooms do you have?” Tammy’s obstetrician-gynecologist had asked her cryptically
five months earlier, during the summer of 1994.

“Three,” Tammy replied.

“You might want to consider four,” Dr. Amonkwa said.

It seemed that the Clomid, progesterone, and aspirin that he had prescribed had broken
the cycle of lost babies and parental despair. Rather than one child, Tammy was pregnant
with twins. Other doctors had told us that perhaps more children were not meant to
be. But we, and in particular Tammy, seldom took “perhaps not” at face value.

After careful monitoring for the rest of the nine months, Tammy gave birth to our
daughters. We considered naming them after the drugs that made their successful birth
possible, but Clomid and Progesterone Fleischmann would have been cruel.

Our older twin and middle child arrived at 7:38 a.m., and her little sister, Taryn,
fourteen minutes later. Carly had been the feisty one in utero, clamoring to get here.
But once she arrived, she seemed to take a look around and say, “Oh, wrong place.”
This world would never be in step with our little girl. Within weeks of her birth,
Carly took on a startled and cranky look, one that matched her demeanor.

Taryn was peaceful and elegant with a cap of dark hair and a quizzical expression.
But Carly arrived blotchy and patchy and looking surprised. From the prenatal medical
records, there was little to suggest that the fraternal twins would have such different
fates. Tammy’s medical chart indicated that the delivery of the girls was “spontaneous,
vaginal, and uncomplicated,” much like the act of
their creation had been. After a week in the hospital, we bundled our tiny new-potato-like
parcels into furry winter baby buntings and brought them home to our modest Toronto
house.

The next six months were a bleary, sleep-deprived period of normalcy. As normal as
a household can be with three children under five, two of whom eat every three hours,
twenty-four hours a day. Tammy and I would plod up the steep, narrow staircase to
our bedroom around 9:00 p.m., lugging two babies and six mini-bottles of formula.
Frighteningly, all six portions would be consumed before 5:00 a.m. the next morning,
each feeding followed by the requisite diaper change.

Tired as I felt, I couldn’t fail to smile at the two little swaddled lumps. Carly
and Taryn slept in a large woven basket that we placed atop a low dresser that Tammy
had been lugging through life since college. It was stained a puzzling shade of green
and had more sentimental than aesthetic value. Now tucked into an alcove in our bedroom,
it served as a pedestal on which our daughters started their lives.

The two girls had spent nine months pressed together in Tammy’s womb and felt completely
natural being tucked in tightly, snuggled closely. We made a conscious effort from
the start to give them unique identities, refraining from dressing them the same or
referring to them as “the twins,” but rather as Carly and Taryn. Yet, they were two
halves of the same whole and would lie together, reaching out and touching each other,
practically hugging. How were we to know that one day they would grow to be like the
front and back cover of a book—matching opposites—with so much separating them?

Since dinner parties were out of the question (not that they happened often before
the girls’ arrival), we covered our dining room table with a large pad and plastic
tablecloth for changing the babies when downstairs. Tammy’s friend Sue would come
over on Sunday
afternoons and help us with laundry. While Tammy simultaneously fed the two babies,
Sue and I would cook as much food as we could squeeze into our freezer for the week
ahead. The first months were a blur of laundry, poo, spit-up, quiche, and lasagna.
But Tammy was happy to have a family after the false starts and dying hopes. I have
scores of photographs of the early days, each of us taking turns holding both babies.
We both seem to have a tired but amazed expression, as if to say, “How’d this happen?”

Life took on a chaotic rhythm that was made manageable by the arrival of our nanny,
Mari. Mari had recently moved from St. Lucia to join her sisters and cousins; one
sister worked as a nanny for a friend of ours. She took to our daughters immediately,
a broad, open smile spreading across her usually serious face whenever she saw the
two girls. Although a very quiet person, Mari exuded confidence in running our household—a
thankless task we were more than happy to relinquish. For the next twelve years she
would buttress our family and steadfastly help care for all three of our children
and home. Tammy and Mari divided the never-ending tasks of Matthew’s school and after-school
activities and the seemingly endless work required to keep Carly and Taryn fed and
clean. Tammy and I took a divide-and-conquer approach from the start, something that
would stand us in good stead in the years to come.

My career had me at the office by 8:00 a.m. and seldom home before 7:00 p.m. Nevertheless,
after work I did my best to focus on Matthew—to be sure he wasn’t left out. We had
been warned that boys in particular could get regressive when new babies come into
the house. I recall my brother more as a tormentor when he was nine or ten. He once
tried to feed me cat food and put pepper in my sister’s chocolate pudding. On other
occasions, he would hide under my bed or in the closet at night until the lights were
out, then jump out and scream. Ghouls really do exist, at least until they become
teenagers. Eventually, even little boys outgrow their wickedness.

Not knowing what to expect, I assumed Matthew might continue in the family tradition
since he had his rambunctious tendencies. A year or two before the girls were born,
we had bought a book titled
Raising Your Spirited Child
to help us understand why even the smallest thing, like an itchy tag at the neck
of his shirt, could set off a full-blown tantrum. He was a rigid kid who vacillated
between playful sweetness and the terrible twos that had overstayed their welcome.

While Mari and Tammy bathed the girls, I would eat dinner with Matthew. Then, in the
warming spring evenings, I would take him to the park. As we walked, I often reflected
on how Matthew’s infancy was also anything but ordinary.

Always a snorty eater, in the fall of 1990 when Matthew was eight months old, we had
to rush him to the emergency room, barely able to breathe. After several days in the
hospital while the doctors ran tests, we were told Matthew had been born with a double
aortic arch. The vessels carrying blood to and from his heart were wrapped around
his trachea and windpipe, literally strangling him like jungle vines choking a tree.

But Matthew was a trooper and rebounded from surgery quickly. Five years later, Matthew
loved to hear how he had been a brave patient, how he was giggling and laughing within
days of his operation. He wore his scar as a badge of honor. “You have no trouble
eating now,” I joked with him. “Remember the time when you were two and Mom and I
caught you taking an ear of corn out of the garbage after dinner?” Tammy and I had
been washing dishes, and, upon hearing Matthew making noises of gastronomical bliss,
found him smiling up at us as he finished an ear of corn that had been scraped from
a plate into the garbage.

By late spring, the girls were sleeping through the night; Matthew was on a schedule;
and Tammy and I even got an hour or two of quiet time before bed. We felt like we
had gotten off the dirt
road and onto the open highway. We traded a sedan for a minivan and ventured out on
day trips and visits to friends, always lugging the girls, an oversized twin stroller,
a huge diaper bag, and our rambunctious five-year-old son who ran circles around us
making sounds like the Indy 500.

Before their first birthday, however, we began to see Carly and Taryn heading in different
directions. Our first challenges with Carly were innocuous enough. Tubes in her ears
to relieve the heavy fluid buildup one month. A few tests with audiologists to be
sure the infections hadn’t compromised her hearing the next. Tammy and I could handle
this level of intervention. Lots of kids had tubes put in their ears. It was as common
as diaper rash. Just by looking at her, however, we knew that Carly had deeper issues
than goopy ear canals.

While Taryn’s skin had smoothed into creamy baby softness, Carly’s often had a ruddy,
chapped look. Taryn’s eyes seemed to giggle almost from birth, while Carly often wore
a dozy gaze. And while Taryn was making headway at crawling, pulling herself up, and
achieving all the other milestones of a toddler, Carly languished on her back. The
biggest difference between the girls, however, was their personality. Taryn was happy
and peaceful; Carly cried incessantly, earning her the nickname Cryly.