Stranger With My Face (6 page)

“It’s the Brighton Inn,” I said. “Natalie’s dad owns it. You’ve got to see the inside. The ocean water runs right through
like a creek, and they’ve got a little bridge built over. That building across the street is the gallery. The painting in
the window is one of Mom’s.”

By the time I had finished giving Helen a guided tour of the village it was really late, and we headed back to Cliff House,
pedaling as fast as we could to beat the descending darkness. We put the bikes away and entered the house through the kitchen.
Dad was seated at the table, getting ready to pour wine, and Mom was burning a chicken under the broiler. Both of them were
in good spirits—their work had gone well—and Mom had a painting of Neal’s to show us. It was a strange, fantasy thing of rocks
that were shaped like dragons.

“It’s good, isn’t it?” she said with satisfaction.

“He’s our kid, all right,” Dad acknowledged, “half artist, half SF nut.”

“S, F?” Helen asked, mystified.

“That’s short for science fiction,” Mom told her. “The other term is ‘sci-fi,’ but don’t use that around here unless you want
a fight on your hands. It’s an insult unless it’s used by another writer, apparently.”

Dad came back at her with some reference to artists, and the kids heard us laughing and came rushing down the stairs to see
what they were missing. Mom flipped the chicken to blacken it on the other side, and everything settled into an evening a
regular family might have.

My parents liked Helen. I could tell by the way they joked around with her.

“So you’re from Arizona, are you?” Dad said. “The state of tumbleweeds and dust storms. We took a trip out that way once and
dried out and wrinkled up like a couple of prunes.”

“Speak for yourself, Jim,” Mom said. “I really liked it. We almost moved there, remember? If we had, I’d be painting mesas
and mountains instead of the ocean.”

“You almost moved to Arizona?” I asked in surprise. “You never told me that.”

“It wasn’t Arizona,” Mom said. “It was New Mexico. It was back before you came along, in Dad’s and my starvation days. We
got this idea that we might build a hogan or something and live there on beans and chiles while we were waiting for the world
to appreciate us.”

“You had starvation days?” Helen asked incredulously. I guess she thought Cliff House had always been ours.

“All creative people do their share of starving,” Dad said. “When Shelly and I were first married we lived in a studio walk-up
in Greenwich Village and survived on peanut butter. That’s how we came to be the cooks we are today. By the time my wife hit
the big time and we could afford to eat something better, it was too late for us to learn how to manage an oven.”

“When I hit the big time!” Mom exclaimed, tossing a chicken bone across the table at him in mock anger. “It was when your
book
Walk to the Stars
got developed into a TV show that things started changing for us. They got Brittany Mahrer for the lead role—”

“Just about the same time your work was getting recognized.” Dad grinned, frankly delighted for both of them. “It all seemed
to come at once, Helen, like ketchup out of a bottle. You shake and shake, and it seems like nothing’s ever going to happen,
and then—blurp!—it’s all there. Money started coming in, and we knew right away what we wanted to do with it. We had a dream:
To live on an island. To be together, away from disturbances—to work—to raise our kids.”

“‘Kid’ then,” Mom reminded him.

“Right. Laurie then, and we thought there’d never be another. And then, out of the blue, blown in from Saturn—”

“Oh, Dad, cool it,” Neal said, blushing. He never liked to be the subject of a conversation.

Dad reached over and ruffled his fine blond hair.

“It was a good wind that blew us you and Megan,” he told him fondly.

After dinner we sat in the living room and played poker, which was one of my mother’s favorite card games. I was never able
to understand why, because she played so badly. Helen proved to be even worse, her animated face giving away every draw, so
all you had to do was look at her to know exactly what was in her hand. The children found this so hilarious they were overcome
by giggles, and Neal finally ended up falling out of his chair with his pile of poker chips flying in all directions.

“It’s not always this wild around here,” I told Helen as we were preparing for bed.

“I enjoyed it,” she assured me. “I’m an only child, and things can be pretty boring around our house. You’re lucky to have
a brother and sister.” She paused and then added thoughtfully, “They don’t resemble you at all, do they? They’re both so fair.”

“Like Dad and Mom,” I said. “Heredity’s a funny thing, isn’t it?”

Dad had set up the air mattress with a pile of blankets and pillows. Even so, it didn’t look too comfortable, so I decided
to take it myself and give Helen the bed. She argued a little but gave in without too much pressure; we were both so tired
after our long bike ride that we were ready to settle anywhere.

Once in bed with the light off, we exchanged a few mumbled sentences. Helen commented about the roar of the surf—“It sounds
like it’s coming right in through the front door”—and I laughed and told her, “I’m so used to it, I never hear it.” Once I’d
said that, though, I did begin to hear it—the rush and the crash and the soft sucking sound as the waves moved in and out
against the rocks.

Somewhere once I had read a description of eternity—

If there were a mile-high mountain of granite, and once every ten thousand years a bird flew past and brushed it with a feather,
by the time that mountain was worn away, a fraction of a second would have passed in the context of Eternity
.

That had stuck in my mind, and it came back to me now as I listened drowsily to the waves dragging upon the great black rocks
at the base of Cliff House. How many eons would pass before those rocks were gone? Cliff House itself, along with the people
who had lived there, would by then be long forgotten. The whole of Brighton Island would probably have been swept away by
winds and tides. Would there still be a mainland with people on it—and, if so, what sort of people? Humans like us, or a whole
new civilization straight out of the pages of one of Dad’s novels? “A fraction of a second . . . in the context of Eternity
. . .”

My mind rocked slowly back and forth at the edge of sleep, and I was just beginning to slip over and sink beneath the waves
when Helen spoke my name.

“Laurie,” she said, “what are you doing?”

My eyes flew open and I blinked hard into the darkness.

“What?”

“Please, get back! Don’t look at me that way! What is it?”

“Helen,” I said, “wake up! You’re having a dream.”

I reached over and groped for the bedside lamp and then realized that I was on the far side of the room, so I got up and went
to the door and flicked on the overhead. Helen was sitting bolt upright in bed. She raised her arm automatically to shield
her eyes from the influx of light, and then lowered it again as she focused on me.

“You’re over there,” she said.

“I had to get up to reach the light switch.”

“You were on the air mattress?”

“Of course. Where did you think I was?” I crossed over to the bed and sat down on the side of it and reached for her hand.
It was trembling. “You were having a nightmare.”

“No, I wasn’t,” Helen said. “I was wide awake. I had dozed off, and then I felt something brush against my cheek. I opened
my eyes, and you were here, standing next to the bed. You were looking down at me, and you had the strangest expression—not
like yourself at all.”

“I never moved from the floor,” I said. “Not until you called my name.”

“But I saw you!”

“How could you?” I asked, trying to be reasonable. I fought to keep my voice steady. “There’s no moon tonight. It was totally
dark.”

“But there was a light—some sort—there had to have been. It was like—like it was coming from inside—but that’s impossible,
isn’t it?” Helen’s hand gripped mine tightly. “It wasn’t you, Laurie. There was a girl here, and she looked like you. On the
surface she did. She had your features, your hair—but her eyes—” She broke off the sentence and started to shake her head
frantically from side to side. Her red hair flew back and forth. “It wasn’t you—it was somebody else.”

“A nightmare,” I said again, tentatively, but we both knew that was not true. The mirror girl had been there, and Helen had
seen her, not as a shadow, a formless voice in the darkness, but in my shape and form.

“Her eyes?” I whispered. “What about her eyes?”

“That’s what scared me,” Helen said in a choking voice. “I wouldn’t have been scared to wake up in your house and find you
by the bed. That would have been normal enough. People get up in the night, stumble around, try to find the bathroom, come
back half-asleep to the bed they’re used to. What scared me were the eyes. They were evil eyes, Laurie, just plain evil! When
she stood looking down at me, all I could think was—this person is going to kill me!”

We talked about it during the weeks that
followed, first in that shaky, self-conscious way people do when they are afraid of a subject, and later, when we had some
distance, more objectively. Who could the girl have been? How could she have gotten into the room and left it so quickly?
What did it all mean?

Of course, by then I had told Helen the entire story, not just the part about Gordon and Natalie.

“I’ve been scared I might be going crazy,” I said, admitting that to myself for the first time. “The dreams—and that’s what
I kept telling myself they were—were taking over my life.”

“You’re not crazy,” Helen said firmly. “And that girl you call Lia isn’t any dream. Have you ever actually seen her?”

“No, not really. As a shadow, maybe. As a reflection. Not as a real person.”

“I saw her clearly,” Helen said. “Either I’m more attuned to things like that than you are, or else she’s getting stronger.
If that’s the case, she’ll be able to appear anywhere soon, even in broad daylight.”

“What do you mean?” I asked nervously. “You can’t be talking about—about that ‘astral projection’ thing. I told you. I can’t
do that.”

“But Lia can,” Helen said. “There
is
a Lia, Laurie. She’s not just somebody your mind has invented. If she were, I wouldn’t have seen her too. Somewhere in the
world she exists, this girl who looks so exactly like you, and she has learned how to project herself.”

“There can’t be somebody who looks that much like me,” I objected.

“An identical twin would.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “I don’t have a twin.”

Helen regarded me thoughtfully. “Are you sure?”

“That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard,” I said vehemently. “Of course I’m sure.”

“Do you have a better idea?”

“No, but any other explanation would make more sense than that.”

I would have given anything to have been able to discuss the subject with Gordon, but the one time I tried to broach it, he
shut me down quickly.

“When Helen slept over at my place—” I began.

“I don’t want to talk about Helen,” Gordon interrupted. “You’re so wrapped up in that weirdo, people are starting to talk
about it. Mary Beth says you don’t even eat at the table with the islanders anymore. You go off and sit with Helen in a corner.”

“Why does that matter to you?” I asked him.

“I just told you why—because people are saying stuff. You’ve got nice friends, and you act like you don’t want to hang out
with them. It’s insulting.”

“They’re
your
friends,” I said.

“If they’re mine, they’re yours. At least, they’ve tried to be.” He regarded me worriedly. “What’s going on with you, Laurie?
When we’re together I don’t feel like you’re really with me. It’s like your mind’s off somewhere else.”

“I’m with you now,” I said, and kissed him to prove it.

That always worked with Gordon. His mouth came down so hard on mine that I could feel my teeth cutting into my upper lip.
I guess it was what you would call a passionate kiss, but in the middle of it I realized that he was right—my mind was detaching
itself—moving away from the two of us as though it had business elsewhere. Somehow I seemed to be standing back, looking at
this boy and girl kissing, thinking what a good-looking couple they made, like something out of a movie, perfectly cast, with
the boy’s fair hair so nicely contrasting with the girl’s dark mane.

This is how Lia must feel,
I found myself thinking. She stands apart and watches.

The thought was so terrifying that I shivered convulsively, and Gordon broke off the kiss to draw back and stare at me.

“I must really turn you on! That’s good for the ego, you know.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “You know it wasn’t that.”

“Then what the hell was it? That’s what I mean—your mind’s never here anymore. I don’t know what your problem is, Laurie,
but if you can’t get it together, we’re going to have to break up. Things can’t go on the way they are.”

“No,” I agreed, “they can’t.”

It wasn’t just our relationship that I was referring to. As important as it once was to me, it was overshadowed now by other
issues. Helen’s suggestion had been absurd, but I would have to confront it in order to discard it. As she herself had said,
I had no alternatives to offer. My parents might laugh at me, or be hurt and angry, or get worried and haul me over to the
mainland to see a psychiatrist, but any of that would be better than worrying over the strange little lump of doubt that had
been planted at the corner of my mind. If there was really a Lia, and if she was really my sister, I had to know.

The next afternoon when I got home from school, I went up the stairs to Mom’s studio.

I entered without knocking, which is what she prefers (“Banging on the door is the last thing you want to do when somebody
has a brushful of paint in her hand,” she always said). The room was filled with the slanted, golden afternoon light which
is so much mellower than the blue-white light of morning. Mom was seated at her easel with her back to me. On the canvas before
her there was the first rough outline of beach and ocean and the figure of a child. I could tell by the lines of the sturdy
body that it was Megan, bent forward, hands on knees, gazing intently at something that had been washed up by the tide. The
sky was gray and foreboding, as though a storm were rising in the distance. Mom always painted her skies first and then worked
her way into the foreground of her pictures.

I drew a long breath and let her have the question.

“Do I have a twin sister?”

For a long moment Mom gave no sign of having heard me. She continued to sit motionless, the hand that was holding the brush
frozen in midair a scant half-inch from the surface of the canvas. Then, slowly, she turned to face me.

“Why would you ask such a thing?”

“Because I need to know.”

“You don’t come up with a question like that out of the blue. Something or somebody had to inspire you to ask it.”

“Does that really matter?” The fact that she had not given an immediate denial was answer enough. I stared at her, incredulous.
“What happened to her? Where is she? How could you never have told me?”

“There didn’t seem to be any reason why you should know,” Mom said. Her face was very pale, and her eyes had the wide, startled
look that Neal’s get when he’s confronted with something he doesn’t know how to handle. “The whole thing is so long behind
us, and we had no choice. We couldn’t take both of you. We couldn’t even afford one baby, really, but we wanted you so desperately—”

“You couldn’t take us!” I repeated. “Take us where?” A second possibility occurred to me, and I heard my voice rising in an
unnatural squeak that sounded like someone in a soap opera. “Am I adopted?”

“Oh, Lord, I’ve really messed things up now, haven’t I?” Mom shook her head miserably. “When you came in here asking about
a twin, I thought that, if you’d discovered that much, then you already knew the circumstances. I never wanted to tell you
like this. Let’s go get Dad. We’ll sit down together and talk it through, and he’ll explain—”

“I am adopted, aren’t I? Tell me!”

“Yes.” Mom started to get to her feet, her arms reaching out for me, but I motioned her back.

“You’ve lied to me! For seventeen years, you’ve lied!”

“That’s not true,” Mom said. “We never lied, we simply didn’t tell you. Why does it matter? You’re our child just as much
as your brother and sister are. We couldn’t love you more if I’d carried you in my body. There never seemed to be any reason
to make you wonder and worry over things that should have no bearing on your life.” She paused and then added pleadingly,
“Let’s go downstairs now, Laurie. Your father can explain it all better than I can.”

“You mean the man I’ve always
thought
of as my ‘father,’” I said cruelly, wanting to hurt her, to repay her for the terrible hurt she had just inflicted upon me.
“He’s Neal’s and Megan’s father, not mine.”

“He’s your father in every way that counts,” Mom said.

And so we went down, and she got Dad out of his office, and we sat at the kitchen table, which is where talks in our family
are always held, and he told me the story. He did not seem as shaken up as Mom. It was as though he had been anticipating
this moment for a long time.

“I always figured someday we’d have to go through this,” he said. “Someday something would come up—a need for a medical history,
maybe—and you couldn’t keep thinking your genes were coming straight down the line from the Strattons and the Comptons. A
lot of people are open about adoption. Still, that idea has always upset your mother.”

“We have such a good life together, the five of us,” Mom said defensively. “I couldn’t bear to think of spoiling it. Whether
everyone else is doing it or not, it can’t be a good thing to split a family into segments. You hear about all these young
people discovering that they’re adopted and going off to find their ‘real parents,’ as though their adoptive parents were
nothing more than babysitters.”

“I want to know,” I said flatly. “I want to know everything.”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” Dad said, “but first I want some wine.”

He got up and got glasses for himself and Mom, and would have given me one, but I waved it away. Then he sat back down and
poured for the two of them and raised his glass and took a swallow.

“It’s simple,” he said. “We wanted a child, and we couldn’t have one. We tried for years. Doctors told us your mother’s ovaries
weren’t functioning properly. They couldn’t pinpoint the reason, they just weren’t. We tried to adopt in New York State and
got turned down, which wasn’t surprising; an aspiring writer married to an aspiring artist, with no money coming in, aren’t
promising parent material.

“But we wanted a kid; we were that selfish, I guess, and had that much faith in ourselves and in each other. We were sure
the lean years were going to give way and one or both of us would eventually make it. What we were afraid of was that by the
time that happened we’d be beyond the age to qualify. We heard that there were babies with mixed racial backgrounds available
in the Southwest, so we went there. That was the trip we were talking about that night Helen was here.”

“Mixed racial backgrounds,” I repeated numbly. “What exactly am I?”

“Your biological father was white,” Dad said. “Your biological mother was full-blooded Navajo.”

“I’m half Native American?” I whispered, stunned. “That’s why I look so different from you and the kids! My hair—my features—”

“Your alien eyes.” Dad was trying to make a joke of it, but he couldn’t pull it off. He took a deep swig of wine and refilled
his glass. “Come on, Laurie—lots of family members look different from each other, or have varying backgrounds. The roots
of humanity are so meshed, we’re all blends and combinations.”

“That’s not funny.”

“It’s not supposed to be. Honey—” He reached for my hand and looked hurt as I jerked it away. “Laurie, it’s not that big a
deal. You’re the same person you always were. You’re our beloved daughter. You’re one of us, a Stratton. So what if the same
wind that blew your brother and sister into our lives didn’t carry you? You got here. That’s what’s important.”

“If you really felt that way you wouldn’t have hidden the truth from me,” I said coldly. “Now, I want to know about my twin.”

“What’s there to know except that you had one?” Dad said. “Your father evidently walked out on your biological mother at some
point during her pregnancy. She gave birth to two babies and knew she wouldn’t be able to raise them alone. It was a measure
of her love for you that she wanted you to have a better life than she could give you.”

“Did you see her?” I asked. “The other baby?”

“Of course. You were there together in the same crib at the agency.”

“Did she look exactly like me?”

“You were identical.”

“Then, why—” The question rose to my lips without my even realizing that I was going to ask it. “Why did you take me instead
of her?”

“We couldn’t raise both of you,” Dad said. “We were going out on a limb to take on even one dependent at that point in our
lives.”

“That’s not what I asked,” I said. “What I want to know is, why did you choose me over my sister?”

There was a moment’s silence as my parents exchanged glances.

Then Dad said slowly, “Your mother—your mother, well, she thought—”

“I didn’t want her,” Mom said. Her normally gentle voice was strangely sharp. “I just didn’t want her. I wanted you.”

“But if we looked exactly the same—”

“You weren’t the same,” Mom said. “You looked just alike—both of you so beautiful with big, solemn eyes and all that thick,
dark hair. The people at the agency wanted us to take you both, and despite what Dad says, I really think we might have done
it. It seemed wrong to separate twin sisters. I picked you up and cuddled you, and I knew I never wanted to let you go. It
was as though you were meant to be ours. Then I handed you to Dad to hold and picked up the other baby, and—and—”