I couldn't believe that Julie-Ann was so generous. I missed her terribly, to be sure, and would often spend the afternoons in tears, calling to her, wanting to know her opinion on my new boyfriend Jared (although I can tell without hesitation she would not stand him) or the pantsuit I got at Wellston's (although I can tell you she would hate it). Gradually, over time, however, it wasn't so bad. I began, in my ways, to understand the appeal of oneness even as I mourned my twoness. Although I was still a big stickler for cooperation and teamwork in my outward life, I savored the ability to make the only and final decision on everything,
Julie-Ann became a memory as the years folded quietly into one another and, like pages in a scrapbook, my vivid photographs of her became tempered and faded the further along I got in the book. I began to wonder whether I had made her up, if in fact she weren't something I'd created entirely to overcome loneliness, or boredom, or mother's suffocation, or father's sexual advances. My fiancé Michael, who I had met in a psychology class at the university (where we were both studying child psychiatry), tended to agree. Only there was the sticky proposition that Mother or Father had abused me in some horrible, unspeakable way---mundane, normal old mother and father who read the paper and warmed up the sticky buns when Michael and I stopped by. Quite impossible, I'd have to think.
I began my practice in ripe anticipation of finding another child like myself. I ran across a few cases of multiple personality disorders, but the children were severely abused and, as a result, severely disassociated. In addition, their personalities never existed simultaneously--in fact, they didn't even know of each other. The imaginary friends of my cases similarly lived outside of their bodies, separate entities. Despite my research and my experience at the clinic, I never ran into a case of twoness.
"Let's face it, Jul, you're an extremely bright girl who probably had an extremely overactive imagination," Michael coaxed me as we sat in bed, massaging my shoulders as I flipped despondently through another medical journal. "And so will our kids, I suppose."
"I told you, Michael, I'm a little leery of us having any children. I don't want to pass any mental illness onto them."
"You're being silly, Jul." He put his hands across his chest. "You are the most sane person I know."
"It's just so odd that I cannot put my finger on it." I dropped the journal to the side of the bed alongside the others. "Julia-Ann was as real as you are to me. She had her own voice, her own talents---she was good at things at which I am absolutely not gifted and haven't been since she went away."
"It's all guilt." He patted my shoulder. "I've seen it hundreds of times in overachieving children. They feel guilty--they're too gifted. In your case, you attributed some of your ‘talents' to another person. The gifts are just repressed deep in you. I keep telling you, Jul, take a painting class or something. You'll see that you're just as talented as ‘Julia' as Julie-Ann ever was."
He did not know that I was afraid of such a proposition. In fact, I avoided all activities that might serve to awaken Julie-Ann. Perhaps I was being paranoid; Julie-Ann had been gone for more than fifteen years. However, whenever Michael suggested the theater, an art exhibition, concert, I pleaded disinterest and didn't accompany him. I began to worry that I bored him, that he would think I was rather stodgy, never wanting to have any fun.
But nothing seemed to bother him more than my fear of pregnancy. He ran battery after battery of tests on me, in his own fashion, over meals, in bed, on the commute, on vacations. All served to remind me that I was a perfectly normal woman in her early thirties, if a bit dull. I decided to chance it.
When the doctor informed us we were expecting I could not be happier. Although I worried that hormonal changes might affect my emotional state, Michael assured me that everything would be fine. And everything was, for the most part, until the sonograms showed what appeared to be twins.
Only one twin was inside the other.
"It's a fairly rare condition," the doctor explained, tracing his pen along a radiograph of my abdomen. "Fetus in fetu--child inside child."
"Well, what are we going to do?" I asked. "Surely the one child will kill the other, growing inside it like that."
"Usually the inner child is parasitic, yes, but not like a viable human entity," the doctor agreed. "The child is more like a tumor--a tumor with a spine, perhaps some malformed appendages--but in no way a fully living, conscious entity. Usually the mother is able to carry to term. And then we extract the teratoma from the healthy child."
"Are you certain that I will be able to carry this child full term?" I questioned, touching my stomach. Would the turmoil awaken her? What if she were the turmoil?
"We'll closely monitor your progress," he assured. "We don't catch most cases of this particular oddity until after childbirth usually, so we're ahead of the curve here."
The first few months came and went without incident. Gradually, however, I began to feel stirrings.
It was hard to describe the stirrings. It was too early for the baby to be moving, and yet I felt a specific stirring, someone turning over in bed, shaking off sleep. Yet I began to feel more aware of things, like the color of the sky behind the swaying trees, the sounds of the breeze through their leaves, the smell of sycamore and pine, of wet grass. I began to doodle at work, to hum along with the songs on the radio. It was so much like her, these things, but she was not here, not that I could tell. And yet I didn't feel quite myself. It seemed that there were hours of the day that I couldn't account for--the time between university and home, arriving at our doorstep hours after dinnertime, Michael opening the door with a flourish, his sleeves rolled up and his hair falling in long wisps across his creased forehead.
"Where're you been, Julia? I've been worried sick."
"I felt a little nauseous, so I took a nap in the office. It came on so suddenly…I couldn't get to the phone to call."
"Perhaps we should see the doctor, then." He led me to the kitchen, where an overcooked, rubbery casserole awaited. I was not hungry; I could taste the burn of wasabi on my tongue. Had I eaten sushi? He sat across the table and stared at me intently with those calculating blue eyes of his. I smiled slightly and let a rubbery glob of cheese and noodle slide down our--my--throat.
Other times I would wake up fully dressed in the kitchen in the middle of the night, leaving or coming back I could not tell, wearing jeans and a shirt that formerly were regulated to garden duty or the market. What a strange time in one's life to discover sleepwalking, I would muse, and thereafter I began to tie a cord from my wrist to the bedpost.
I dreamt long, vivid dreams about untying the rope, getting dressed in the same awful old clothes, and walking about the town at night, looking in shop windows, familiarizing myself with roads and walkways, engaging in discussion with the most horrible and dangerous of men--men who rode motorcycles and had necks as roped and thick as bridge girders, whose teeth were stained with tobacco. I dreamt I took our car at high speeds through the countryside, pulling over at a patch of moonlight wildflowers and dancing in their adoring throngs. I dreamt I sat in the coffee shops listening to the clove-smoking university students talk about Keats and Sartre and the Motherwell retrospective while they drank coffee out of cups the size of soup bowls and I knew what these dreams meant, and I knew it was all right to feel something was missing in my life, amidst the stodgy, safe conservatism of it all, but after all, I had a good career and a loving husband and a child on the way and perhaps after the baby was born Michael and I could do something more risqué.
But when I went to ask him one morning, as we got ready to leave for work, he came back in the house smiling.
"The wildflowers you left in the car, Julia, left dirt all over the seat." He wiped the back of his pants before giving me a quick kiss. "I mean, they're a sweet touch, but goodness, now I've got to change!"
I began to remember Julia Ann's laugh--a somewhat sharp, barking squeal, a sound I thought I had forgotten years ago. Out of curiosity I began trying to imitate it when around colleagues, while out at dinner with Michael, a premeditated bit of spontaneous joy that fell flat, insincere, when it passed through my lips. It was certainly not mine, Julia's laugh, and yet we had shared the same vocal chords, the same muscle of tongue, the same air expelled through our shared lips. I could not understand it, just as I could not believe she was gone. Was she really gone, or was she just biding her time, her moment to emerge, to wrest control of our body from my grasp? Was she slowly consuming my children--or me?
I am foolish to think such things.
At some point the stirrings became unbearable.
"You can't be going into labor already," Michael shook his head as I described the feeling of opening, of water breaking, of something pushing, wanting out, wanting to part with me, believing it was time. Or perhaps needing, gasping, wanting more oxygen, more room, more…life. "You have to cancel your appointments at the clinic. We're going to the doctor this morning."
"It is consuming the other one." The doctor held up the ultrasound. "We're going to have to abort."
"What do you mean?" I questioned. "You said the other child was usually harmless."
"The in fetu pregnancy is such a rare case that it's hard to predict what will happen." He shook the film slightly in his hand. "In this case, the vital child appears to be a malignancy--or have a malignancy--that is consuming it. I'm very sorry."
"Are you sure it's not…"
"It's not what, my dear?"
"I just feel so…drained." I put my hand to my head. My thoughts, actions had been so muddled as of late. The reality of my doctor before me was tenuous, grainy, and quite removed, as if I were looking at him through the inside of my head, far away, so far away. I just wanted to sleep. "I'm very weak, you see."
The surgery was scheduled for the next morning. Michael and I waited in the hospital room, the shell of antiseptic that would protect me from greater harm, as I looked at the cracks in the ceiling and Michael dug into a snack bag of potato chips from the vending machine.
"We should never have done this." I shook my head. "Not while she is still here."
"Oh, for Christ's sake, Julia, you have to stop it with that." He crunched the shiny cellophane into his fist. "There is no one else. We've discussed this over and over. You've shown no signs of multiple personality or other dissociative illness. As for the twins--it could have happened to anyone. Certainly there's a genetic propensity for having twins, but this---this is a complete anomaly."
"There is no anomaly." I pushed the tray away. "I am passing down my genetic defect."
"You aren't a twin, Julia. You never were. You're being unbearably neurotic about the whole thing."
He stood up and looked out the window. His dismissiveness shocked me even as it was predictable in some way. He hadn't believed me up until this point; why would he believe me now?
"I'm going to die, Michael." I grabbed the edge of my sheets, a sweat breaking over me. "The opportunity has presented itself. It's Julie-Ann's time now."
"Look." Michael was at my side, patting my hand. "I know how incredibly traumatizing this is for you, Jul, but you are going to be fine. They're going to do surgery tomorrow and I'll take care of you and you'll recover and it'll be fine."
"Bollocks, Michael--you think you know everything."
"What?" He stepped back, slightly hunched as if digesting some indiscernible horror. I suddenly wanted to laugh at him, loud and boisterous, and wipe that fucking smirk off his boring old fucking face.
"You're right, Michael." I shook my head. I couldn't spend my last night with him fighting. It could not be how I was remembered. I took his hand and held it to my face, washing his fingertips with my tears. "I'm just so tired and cranky."
When I woke up from the surgery I felt lighter, emptier, awash in a haze of partially numbed pain.
"Hi honey." I saw her husband standing over me, a soft look on his face. He reached to touch my shoulder. I was too groggy to pull away. "You did so well. You're going to be okay."
"The children?" I managed. Although I hadn't wanted them, I know that she had, and to be honest, I would have raised them for her, no questions asked. With him? Certainly not. I couldn't stand that smug, elitist bastard, and I never did understand what she saw in him.
"We can try again, Jul--or we can always adopt." His hand touched my forehead. "Just rest, sweetheart. We'll talk more when you're feeling better."
Yes, I needed my strength.
The fourth night I persuaded Mike to go home. He needed a shower; he needed to get back to work, and I needed to get away. I slipped on the frumpy clothes in which I had arrived to the hospital, rummaged through her purse to make sure that I had coins for the tube, and walked out of the hospital into that good night.
You think that I am callous; that I don't care that she's not here anymore. That's not true at all. I miss her terribly. I will be mourning her the rest of my life. And maybe she's not gone. Maybe she's somewhere deep in there. And maybe when she's strong enough or brave enough she will re-emerge, a phoenix among the ashes, and stuff me back into the peanut can like the coiled paper snake that I am.
But it's my time now. And I have to make the best of it. Life is short---we know that old adage. For me, life is even shorter.
I do not know where I am going quite yet. Perhaps London--it is easy enough to disappear in such a large city. Except many of her colleagues teach at universities there--I doubt we'd run in the same circles, but maybe we'd pass on the tube, at the Indian market, at the park, and they'd squint and say Julia, where have you been? Michael's a complete wreck, and I'd chuckle a bit and say Funny, you know I get that quite a lot, but I'm not her, the girl you always say I am. I'm Julie Ann. Sorry. And that's where our story ends, I suppose. And mine begins.
Jen Michalski lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Her fiction has appeared in Split Shot, Ink Pot, The Swamp, Fiction Warehouse, Scrivener's Ink, Thieves Jargon, Gold Dust Magazine, and Baltimore Reads. She is the editor of the online quarterly JMWW.