 |
 |
 |
|
HALLOWEEN SPECIAL VOL. 7, No. 35 |
|
of TheColumnists.com
On the Saturday after Randa's funeral, I drove up to the lake where we owned a weekend retreat, parked at the little boathouse, climbed into our kayak and paddled out to her favorite spot at the north end where Mount Baker, still capped with snow, loomed over me and I could see nothing but unspoiled forest in every other direction. It's the most peaceful place I know--and I needed that.
"Goodbye, darling," I said out loud. "I'll never forget you."
I began to sob as I scattered her ashes over the lake that she loved. It was her last request to me as she lay dying at the hospital in Bellingham, withered and wan from terminal cancer. She wanted me to go alone to scatter her ashes and to stay the weekend at the lake house, thinking of her and the good times we'd always had there.
"I'll be with you then--and always," she told me. "Just close your eyes and let me come to you as I used to be--not like this."
Randa was only 41. She had just made up her mind to finally start a family. She looked and felt fine and knew it was common these days for women to have children safely at her age. But she came home from her first visit to her obstetrician with a stricken look on her face. I was watering the lawn, but she walked right past me without saying a word. I shut off the water and followed her into the house. I found her sitting in the living room, staring at the TV, which wasn't even turned on.
"What's the matter?" I asked, gently.
"They found something in my routine physical," she said. "I have cancer. It's in my uterus and my ovaries and it's already spreading." She looked up at me, tears in her eyes. "Charlie, I think I've had it."
It seemed preposterous. She seemed so healthy. But the cancer was there, big as life. We tried everything, wound up going to a bunch of specialists in Seattle. She had two surgeries and chemotherapy. They finally sent her home to wait for the crisis. It was hopeless, but I never stopped hoping something would come along that would save her. I loved her so much. As she suffered and started to wither away, I could feel my life draining out of me. She was my life. And she was going.
I'm not a religious man and she never put much stock in it either, but she began to talk about us being together again after she was gone. It was frightening to see her grasping at straws like that. I didn't want to argue with her. I never asked how she thought we were going to be together again--or where. I just went along with her, letting her believe whatever gave her inner peace.
At one point I began to worry that she was thinking I should take my own life so we could be reunited in the afterlife, but she knew I didn't believe in Heaven or an afterlife or anything of the sort. And she was an unselfish woman--that was always one of the rare and special things about her. It wasn't like her to want me to cut my life short because cancer was ending hers. Still, I must say the idea of ending my own life had a certain appeal once I knew I was losing her. I didn't believe in an afterlife, but I thought the idea of it was beautiful. What if I were wrong and we could be together again some way after death? Anyway, I really didn't want to go on without her.
In her final week, when she was back in the hospital, she finally agreed to let them sedate her for the pain, Randa began to smile so strangely in her lucid moments. Late one night when we were alone in her hospital room and the place was almost eerily quiet, she beckoned for me to come close. Her voice wasn't very strong anymore, so I leaned down to hear her better.
"Surprises are coming for you," she whispered. "You'll be frightened at first, maybe think you're losing your mind or something. But you're strong--and intelligent--and I know you'll be all right. I love you. Always remember that. And I want you to be happy and remember me the way I used to be."
I was bewildered, but I was too emotionally fragile then to risk asking her what she meant about "surprises." I didn't want to engage her delusions about the spirit world or whatever place her mind was going. I just wanted to hold onto her and not let her go. I have this tendency to freeze up, become terribly inarticulate, when I'm with seriously ill people who are nearing the end. I was that way when my mother died. She went in much the same manner as Randa. After several weeks of rapid deterioration, both Mom and Randa had a last few days of almost blissful contentment, as if they were entering some kind of dream state in which they could see into a new dimension that the rest of us couldn't see.
I remember asking Mom why she seemed so happy one night, knowing that she had only a few days to live. Like Randa, she asked me to come closer and she whispered in my ear, "Reggie stood at the foot of my bed last night and told me everybody was waiting for me," she said. "He looked so good. I don't feel sad about leaving now because I know I'll see him and everybody else again."
Well, Reggie certainly hadn't stood at the foot of her bed anytime recently. Reggie wa her older brother, a mentally retarded man, who had died in a nursing home a decade earlier. She was getting lots of morphine and she was fantasizing. It relaxed her, made it easier for her to accept the fact that she was slipping into the deep sleep of death.
As I paddled the kayak back to the boathouse, I kept flashing back to that last moment with Randa and her words, "I'll always be with you." I thought it was probably going to be true. I could close my eyes and see her as she used to be. It helped me ease the pain of my grief to do that. But was that a healthy thing to do after the healing process supposedly had begun?
Certainly it felt good to me now. I thought her plan for me to spend the week up here was a sound one. I didn't want to sit there in our home in Bellingham, nodding at friends and relatives who came to pay their respects, wishing I could crawl in a hole. Alone, I could indulge my grief openly. I'd be surrounded by the places and things that only brought back warm, lovely memories. It would be therapeutic. When I went back to town and my work, maybe I wouldn't feel so emotionally unsettled.
I put the kayak back on its perch in the boathouse and drove the car the 500 yards up to the house, which we'd built behind a stand of trees, invisible from the long ribbon of road that led up to the lake. Suddenly I hit the brakes. There was a strange car parked next to the house--a small, blue convertible with a tan top. There was smoke coming from the fireplace. This wasn't possible. We had given out no keys to the place and never took any of our friends out to stay here. The gate to our road had been locked when I got there and there were no other houses on the lake. We owned the lake, for Christ's sake, along with all the property surrounding it. Someone had broken into the house. There could be no other explanation.
As angry and upset as I was, I took a moment to calm down. I needed my wits about me to deal with the situation. My cellphone didn't work out here, so I couldn't call the sheriff's office. I'd have to either turn around and drive back to town for help or go in, confront the intruders and then use the house telephone if I needed to call for help.
I parked next to the convertible, but couldn't see any registration through the window. They had to have heard me drive up to the house, so I just walked up the steps to the porch and crossed it to the door. I didn't bother getting my key out. I just opened the door and walked in. There was nobody in the foyer, but I could see a woman seated on the sofa, facing the fireplace. A shiver ran through me as I took in the long blonde hair and the slim figure of the woman, who rose from the sofa, turned and smiled at me.
"Hello, Charlie," she said in that familiar, melodic voice of hers. "Don't look so surprised, dear. It's just me. Randa."
Surprised? The word doesn't come close to describing how I felt looking at her in the dim light of the living room of our tree-shrouded house by the lake. It was Randa, all right--and just as she'd said she'd be--healthy, beautiful and so very much alive. I was struck dumb.
"I'm not a ghost, darling," she finally said, her smile beckoning. "Come and see for yourself."
She held her arms open and I rushed to her and hugged her to me. She was warm and real and she was my Randa, not a phantom. I inhaled the fresh scent of her--she was wearing that slightly cinnamon-tinged perfume I loved so much--and kissed her lovely neck. We kissed passionately and finally, when we came up for air, I held her at arm's length and looked at her. She looked as if she might have been crying, but otherwise she was my perfect Randa, as if she'd been reconstituted in some miraculous way as she must have looked on her most beautiful day on Earth.
"H-How can this be?" I asked. "Don't let this be a dream...a fantasy. Let it be you, my darling."
"It is me," she said, so matter-of-factly. "I'm Randa."
"But I saw you waste away so terribly," I said. "I was there as the life seeped out of you. I saw you slide away into the fire. I held your ashes in my hands and scattered them on the water. How can this be? Who was that I saw die?"
"That was Randa, too," she said, her smile fading. She stifled a sob. "There are things you'll have to know."
Randa turned away from me and walked to the window that had the best view of the lake.
"I saw you out there, saw you doing exactly what she wanted," she said. Her voice wasn't so melodic now and when she turned toward me, I saw her eyes glistening with tears. "Now it's my turn to do my part for her."
"I don't..." I began, but she motioned me to the sofa and joined me there. We both stared at the bright red glow of the burning logs. I started to speak again, but she put her finger across my lips. "Hush," she said. "I have a story to tell you."
It was now late afternoon and the winter sky was darkening. It would soon be very cold, so the cozy heat of the fireplace was very welcome. I didn't know a cold feeling was coming that no fire could touch.
"You never suspected, did you, Charles?" she began. "Never imagined that there were two Randas in your life."
"Two Randas?" I blurted. "What the devil do you mean?"
"I mean twins," she said. "Identical twins. So identical, in fact, that we could fool our own mother and father. It became the great game of our lives--the fooling people. And we were so, so good at it!"
She was grinning, but her grin faded as she saw the dark look I was giving her. I felt like I'd just been slapped across the face with a wet towel. Twins? That's ridiculous! Why would Randa keep from me the fact she had a twin sister? It made no sense. Suddenly I was angry. I reached for Randa and she laughed as I tore at her blouse, trying to see her breasts. Still laughing, she reached behind and unhooked her bra, so that I could see all of her beautiful breasts.
"You're looking for the tiny white mark where the mole used to be," she said. "Her birthmark. Well, Charles, my little white mark is on my right breast. See, right here, in esactly the same place as hers was on her left breast."
I looked closely and she was right. She was the mirror image of Randa--except that her scar was on the other breast. She wasn't my Randa. All of a sudden I felt dizzy. None of this made any kind of sense. I thought I knew my wife. How could she have been part of a deception so cruel?
"All right, so it's true then," I said. "You're her twin. Why have you been hiding all these years? And what's your real name?"
"My real name is Randa," she said, covering herself up again. "I'm Randa Darby. Mrs. Charles Darby, if you like. The same name as hers. For all practical purposes, Charles, I'm your wife, too. Only now I'm your legal wife because I'm the one who's still alive."
She said all this very calmly, as if it happened to people all the time. I was dazed by what she was telling me. I was beginning to wish I'd suddenly wake up and realize I'd been having a nightmare. But there she was before me--either Randa come back to life or her exact duplicate, trying to take her place.
"I'm so sorry, Charles," she said, putting her arms around me and kissing me again. "We're both getting over a horrible, horrible tragedy, but learning all this is almost too much for you, isn't it?"
I couldn't help it. The tears just came and then we were holding each other again and I was grateful I had Randa in my arms, even this clone of the real one. After a few minutes, we came out of it. She had made coffee for us when she saw me go out on the lake and some sandwiches. We both were famished, so we ate and drank until the plates were clean. She caressed my face and asked if she could tell me the rest of what she called "our story."
It's funny how much of the story I already knew. Randa had told me she'd been delivered by a midwife on a farm in North Dakota, far from any hospital or doctor's office. Her mother had died giving birth to her. She just had left out the part about having a twin sister follow right after her. They were both healthy girls with no defects. And they were not just identical twins. They were astoundingly identical twins.
"We couldn't have been more alike if we'd been joined at the hip like Siamese twins," she told me. "We felt the same pains. If Randa cried, I could be a mile away and I'd start crying, too. When we were old enough to visit the dentist, he told our parents we had almost identical teeth--and our cavities showed up on the same teeth at the same time."
Their father made a decision after living with his new girls for just one week. He would call them both Randa after his stillborn sister, who had died along with his own mother during a difficult childbirth. The name went back generations in his family.
"He always told us he'd never be able to tell us apart, so he'd call us both Randa," the living Randa explained.
"Like George Foreman, the boxer, who named all his sons George," I said.
"I guess," said Randa. "But he had this crazy idea that we were supposed to be one girl and not two, that God had made a mistake in letting us be born apart. We didn't know it then, but our mother's death had unhinged him. He never seemed like a normal person again, we were told later. We didn't know at the time, though, because we didn't know what normal was supposed to be like."
Keeping their shared identity became an obsession with their father. He hired Kate Mulberry, the farm woman who'd delivered them, to serve as their nurse in their infancy. Later, he married Kate and demanded she keep the secret, too.
"She thought it was strange, but she went along with it," Randa said. "Kate was a good mother. She worried that we'd be jealous of each other, that we'd long for our own separate lives, but Father was adamant about keeping the secret, so Kate came up with her own solution: She treated the whole thing as a wonderful special game the four of us would play. Randa and I earned special rewards if we tricked people really well and I suppose we grew up thinking we were very special girls with a very special secret."
They were home-schooled by Kate and took turns riding the bus to church with Kate and their father every Sunday. If one Randa made a new friend at Sunday school, she'd come home after church and brief the other Randa on her. They constantly filled each other in on the "missing days" of their lives.
"Once I got whooping cough and nearly died," Randa said. "My sister got to be Randa all by herself for more than a month and when I got well, she wanted to keep on being the only Randa. Father gave her the tarring of her life. Still, I had to stay home until I looked completely normal and healthy again."
In their teens, the girls finally decided they liked sharing Randa. Their father died and, after that, Kate sent them to regular school. That opened up lots of opportunities for diabolical fun. Each always had a perfect alibi for anything bad they wanted to do. If one Randa wanted to steal some candy from the Woolworth's store, she did it while the other Randa was in class with dozens of witnesses. But fooling the boys was the most fun of all.
"Randa liked this boy named Kirby Rawlins that I thought was a complete drip," she told me. "She let him kiss her one night and put his hand under her dress. The next date was my turn, so I bit his lip and slapped his face when he tried to go under my skirt. You should have seen the look on his face."
"You mean you actually dated the same boys on a regular basis?" I asked.
"Sure we did," she said. "Most of the time we had the same taste in boys, so we shared them like we shared everything else."
I didn't like the direction this was going. Was it possible...
"What about me?" I asked, unable to wait any longer to know the truth.
Randa came to me and curled up in my arms. I think she was afraid to answer my question, but finally she hugged me close and whispered, "We loved you, Charlie. You were always the one for both of us."
I tried to get my mind around that one. How could I have fallen in love with twin sisters, each playing the same "character" every time I was with them, and not known what was going on?
"Randa was a virgin on our wedding night," I blurted. "You're not going to tell me that was you, are you?"
Randa stifled a giggle. "It was both of us, Charlie," she said. "Do you remember how she went in the bathroom afterward and didn't come out for awhile? Well, when she came out, she was me. I came in the bathroom window and she went out. You deflowered two virgins that night, dear boy!"
"Jesus!" I said. "This is insane!"
All of a sudden my grief was forgotten. I was outraged and so I sulked. Randa or Randa II or whatever the hell I was supposed to call her obviously knew this was a hard pill for me to get down and so she kept her distance from me. I busied myself building the fire back up in the fireplace, then sat down on the sofa and just stared at the flames. After another hour or so, she sat down next to me and put her arms around me.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I was too flip about it. Of course you'd be upset. That's the only time we ever doubled up on you like that, believe me. It wasn't supposed to be what I guess it sounded like--a stunt or something. We did it because we both loved you and we wanted to start our married life with you on the same night, in the same way."
I was confused and still angry, but the tenderness she was now showing me was so much like my own Randa that it brought back the terrible hurt I'd forgotten about for the last couple of hours.
"How often did you....share me?" I finally asked.
"Most of the time we alternated weekly," she said, softly now. "I'd stay up here when you were in town and go away when you were up here. We wore the same clothing, so we had several outfits up here, but I had my own car and my own cellphone. We shared everything else."
We didn't sleep together that night. I had trouble sleeping and, as I lay awake, I figured out what we should do. If I'd really been the husband of both Randas for the past 18 years and never knew it, I might as well stay with this one. She didn't just resemble my wife, she actually was my wife--at least she had been half the time I was married. I had never wanted another woman, so why not stay with Randa II? Of course, we'd have to move elsewhere or people would wonder how she came back from the dead. Once I'd settled this in my mind, I drifted off to a deep sleep.
When I woke Sunday morning, I called Randa to tell her what I'd decided. She didn't answer. I went to the guest room, where she'd made up a bed for herself, and found it made up already. There were signs in the kitchen that she'd made herself breakfast. I finally found her down by the lake shore. She had a dark, troubled look on her face.
"What's wrong?" I asked.
"It's Randa," she said. "She misses me. I can feel it. And I miss her, too. We've never been separated, not even for a day, in our entire lives."
I didn't know what I could say about that. Randa I was dead.
"You sound as if you--you're still communicating in some way with her," I said--and she just looked at me, incredulous.
"She's my sister," said Randa II. "No, she's much, much more than that. She's...she's me! I've been trying to make you see that, haven't I?"
The way she looked then, as if something had come loose inside her, frightened me. I had never seen this open darkness in my Randa. I walked back to the house and left her their beside the lake.
Maybe she spent the whole day down by the lake. I don't know. She came in at dusk. I'd made pasta for us and was about to serve it. She seemed oblivious to everything. She came right up to me, her eyes wild.
"We should go to her, you know," she said. "She wants us both with her, Charlie. She's afraid by herself. She's never been totally by herself like this."
"Don't talk like that, Randa," I told her. "You haven't eaten anything all day. You're not yourself. Sit down with me now and we'll talk about it."
She sat down, but she was like a zombie, in a trance. She ate, chewing slowly, but she didn't seem to hear anything I was saying. She seemed to be listening, listening to another voice that I couldn't hear. She was creeping me out.
I put her in my bed that night. She let me undress her and touch her, but she wasn't responding. She was still plugged into that other place. I hugged her to me, but her body was actually chilly. I chafed at her arms and tried to get her circulation going. I was actually uncomfortably warm from the fire I'd built up in the bedroom fireplace, but she was cold. I kept thinking of Randa I, her ashes scattered on the icy water of the lake, and wondering if that wasn't where Randa II had put herself.
Finally, I dozed off, my mind swirling with terrible visions. Tomorrow was Monday and I'd need to go back to town. What would I do with her then? Suddenly, something made me sit up in bed. Randa was gone, the bedclothes pulled away from me and piled up on the floor beside the bed. I blinked my eyes and saw a shadow flit across the dim light in the hallway. Then I heard the unmistakable sound of my shotgun broken open and two shells sliding into place. I jumped out of bed just in time. Randa came from the hallway, stark naked, the shotgun levelled at the bed where I'd been sleeping just moments ago.
"She needs us now!" she cried and jerked the trigger.
In the deafenimg roar of the shotgun, I must have hollered at the top of my voice. I saw her swing toward me. She'd blown the mattress to hell and the second shell would blow me to hell. I tackled her and knocked her down, the gun going off again, blasting big chunks out of the wall over the bed. She scrambled to her feet and ran back up the hallway. I grabbed the gun and followed her. On a lamp table in the hall, I found my box of shotgun shells. I don't know what made me stop then, but I did and I had time to re-load one shell before I was startled by a high, keening screech and saw Randa racing toward me with a hatchet. I lifted the gun barrel just in time. She ran into it just as I pulled the trigger and the blast lifted her into the air and flung her back up the hallway. She landed in a sodden mess of her own blood and entrails.
My last nightmare vision of her was her bloody lips trying to form a single word. A bubble of blood appeared with her dying breath, then popped. I can't say for sure, but I think she was trying to say "Randa."
Naturally, I wanted to get away from the lake and that house as fast as I could. But I couldn't just leave it like that. I had to repair the wall, get rid of the blasted mattress and clean up the blood, which was literally everywhere in that hallway. I cleaned up Randa's broken body, too, but I didn't know what to do with it. Should I take her into town and leave her at a hospital, the coroner's office, or where? Should I call the sheriff's office and go through all that? Should I try and find the girls' stepmother in North Dakota? I didn't know if she was even still alive? Randa II hadn't gotten around to that part of her story.
In the end, I decided to wrap her body in the bedclothes I had to get rid of anyway. I found several lengths of sturdy chain in the boathouse--and a rusty anchor I'd never used. I weighted her down with that and paddled out to the middle of the lake, the body lying over the prow of the kayak, then tipped her over and watched her sink out of sight. If Randa still wanted her company, Randa II was on the way.
It probably makes me sound like some kind of monster, but I left it at that. The Randas had always had the opportunity to end the game their father had started them playing in childhood. They could have become independent women and led separate lives. But they wanted the game to go on--and it did. And they dragged me along as a fellow player without even giving me the option of knowing we were playing.
As far as the rest of the world knew, the beautiful 41-year-old woman who died that weekend never existed. Her name was written nowhere and, if she ever had any documents of identity, they were for a another beautiful 41-year-old who died of cancer a week earlier. I had killed her in self-defense, but it didn't really matter. I had killed a woman whose existence was never recorded.
Many years later, after I'd sold the lake property, remarried and started a family, my wife, Lillian, and I were packing up some of the lake house furnishings that we'd had in storage for years. Our little girl, Tania, came to me with a framed photograph of Randa.
"Who's this pretty lady, Daddy?" she asked.
Lillian knelt beside her and looked at the picture, too.
"That's a picture of Randa, your first wife, isn't it, Charlie?" she asked.
"I think so," I said.
"You think so? You mean you don't know for sure?"
"Well, it's a long story, Lil," I said. "But I know her name is Randa."
©2006 by Ron Miller. The illustration is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. This column first posted Oct. 30, 2006.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine.
You can comment on this column online. Please address your message to either "The Editors" or . To send an email, click here and don't forget to mention name: talkback@thecolumnists.com
|
|
|
Archives |
|
|