by Laura Mei-Yook Jue
She finally sees me as she’s browsing the shiny, waxy apples in the frigid produce section. Her mouth forms an O, and then a straight line as her eyes get dark and she quickly wheels her cart away.
I stay half hidden behind the circle display rack of identical cans of black beans and puffed bags of tortilla chips. My fingers—her fingers—hover lightly over the tubs of guacamole; my feet—her feet—stand planted in business casual black flats on the beige tiles; my pale face, with the high cheekbones, gently rounded chin, and light dusting of freckles—her face—stare over neat pyramids of tomatoes and onions as the wheels squeak toward the checkout line and she disappears between the racks of tabloid magazines. I am her, identical in every way, down to the heart that now thunders in her chest as she runs away from me.
I’m glad she didn’t pretend not to know me. That would have been dishonest, disrespectful to both of us.
#
I walk. It’s midday and the sun lights the sidewalk up white. Squinting against the glare, I listen to the cars buzz by like mosquitos. Sometimes I catch a snippet of a radio DJ or song blasting through open windows, little bursts of nonsense, removed from any meaning, and then snatched away on the wind.
She must sense I’m coming, a faint tingle in the back of her skull or an itch in her nose.
Normally, I would have followed her to the grocery store parking lot, slipped like a shadow into the trunk beside the paper bags before she closed the door, but there was something in the way she looked at me. It used to be her eyes would glide right over me, seeing but not perceiving. Today she stared right at me. There’s a knot in my stomach, just like when she gets nervous or anxious or confused.
The sun is so bright and suddenly heavy. I rest for a moment in the shelter of a bus stop.
A man sitting on the bus bench looks up. “You lost?”
“No.” I know exactly where she is, as if I were right next to her. I always know; I’ve been with her our whole life and know her better than anyone. I could never be lost.
He looks at me funny, a pinching at the sides of his mouth, then shrugs and turns away.
I leave the shade of the shelter immediately, no matter the blinding sun.
#
When I catch up to her, she’s sitting in her car in the parking lot of a strip mall. A paper coffee cup shakes in one hand as her other hand clutches her phone. She doesn’t see me where I stand outside the hole-in-the-wall café, nestled between the Ross and the Albertson’s. I settle into the earthy aroma floating from the open door and the top 40s playlist leaking from the outdoor speakers. From my angle across the sun-bleached parking lot, I see the bulging shape of a booster seat in the back of her Toyota. Stickers of cartoon animals dot the rear window like birthmarks.
Despite the glistening streaks on her face, she’s calmer now. She spent the last ten minutes on the phone with her husband, who reassured her it was a trick of the light. Someone who had similar features and fashion sense, under the deceptive fluorescent lights. Anyone would think they saw something they didn’t.
She hangs up and sips her coffee, brushing her hair from her face. Her hair looks nice today. She thought it was too frizzy this morning, and lay too flat on her scalp, so she put it up in a ponytail.
She’s telling herself she believed him, but I know she can feel me watching. She always has. I feel her eyes looking for me, that lone observer.
We’re close like that. Like sisters. When we were children and she lay on her bed flipping through magazines of skinny girls with blonde highlights and shiny lips, picking the products from a catalog that would make her as skinny and shiny as them, I curled in the darkness of her closet, or between the wafting curtains, or prone among the discarded stuffed animals under her bed. Alone in her room, she sucked in her stomach and crossed her legs the way she saw the other girls do, and I appreciated how she was doing it just for me. She never had to change herself for me, but knowing she cared about what I thought made me happy. I treasure those moments we’ve shared.
“Did you order already?”
I look down at the old woman. “Yes.”
“Then you should go stand over there, dear.” The old woman points one gnarled finger at the other side of the outdoor ordering window, beneath a sign that says pick up here.
I glance at the finger, then back at the old woman, and four seconds go by before I realize she’s talking about me. I had thought her question strange; my self—the other one, sitting in her car—clearly already received her order. She holds it in both hands, which are shaking less now, at least twenty feet from where my body stands separating the old woman from the next person in line.
The old woman smiles. Wrinkles frame her mouth and the corners of her eyes. Her hair is dyed a copper red, the same color as her cakey lipstick, though a strip of gray shows at the roots.
I’ve never talked to another person before, more than a word or two. I never cared to; I am singleminded in my purpose.
But something is slipping, that thing that binds me to her so closely it’s like I’m not even there. The closeness that makes me a shadow, so that every morning when she wakes up and goes yawning to the bathroom to brush her teeth, she doesn’t notice me behind the fogged shower curtain. So that when she puts on the coffee and pours the child its cereal, she overlooks my face pressed to the window.
“Are you all right?” The old woman’s voice scrapes like gravel and her breath reeks of gingery lozenges.
“Am I…”
The old woman frowns. I think I said something wrong, even though I didn’t say much of anything at all. Her question confused me. I’m not used to being anything, not on my own at least. As I move away, toward the pick up here sign where the old woman told me to go, I step off the sidewalk.
She looks up from her coffee, through the windshield. Our eyes meet.
She nearly drops the cup jamming it into the cup holder, and drives away, much too fast for this crowded parking lot, as if she’s running from something. Just like at the grocery store, when she left before I had the chance to get in the trunk.
Is it me? Why would she run from me? Seeing someone with her own face should be a comfort, among all these strangers. Isn’t the known much more assuring than the unknown? What could be more known than your own self?
#
Standing in the shade of a tree, across the street from the school, I watch the line of cars inch forward. The bell rings, and the children emerge in neat lines behind teachers. She stands among the others, her car double parked and lights blinking. Her face is strange, and I recognize it as terror.
Is she afraid of me?
She doesn’t see me yet, but I don’t try to hide myself. I watch her beckon the child, and it runs across the yard.
The child looks remarkably like her, with the same straight dark hair and wide-set eyes. Like she was in the dryer too long and came out small. It raises its arms, yells “mommy!”, and she scoops it up. Gripping the child, she hurries to her car, ignoring the teacher and other parents.
She’s saying something while she buckles it into the booster seat. Asking how its day was, what it did in school, did it make any new friends, not listening when it answers. When the buckle is secure, she closes the door and walks around the front of the car. She stops when she sees me.
And she stands there. An invitation.
I go to her. I’ve spent our life going to her, following her to the grocery store, the gas station, the post office. Our shared skin is a flexible but unbreakable tether between us, and now she reels me in.
When I’m hardly an arm’s length away, she says, “Why do you look like that?”
I don’t say anything.
“Answer me.” Her voice trembles. Her face is white. “Why do you have my face?”
It’s a strange question. But it’s been a strange day. I frown. “How do you know it’s not mine?”
Horror paints her features. “What are you?”
A twinge of anger twists in my belly that she would pretend not to know me. It’s foreign and unwelcome.
She shakes her head, but I can see the fear still in her eyes. She grabs the handle of the door, then stops.
“Stop following me.”
How could she request that of me? We might as well be sisters; no, we’re closer than sisters. I’ve been with her through the lowest points of our life, even though she was ashamed I saw her. She never saw me, but she would seem to look my way, wondering if I approved. And of course I did. She was me, and I her. Even when we made mistakes—pining after the wrong boy her freshman year of college, getting too drunk and throwing up in the bushes at her best friend’s wedding, chasing a career that made her tired and miserable—I was there. Did she think I was judging her? Did she think I cared?
Are things so different now that she has seen me? I glance into the car, through the stickered window, at the child that looks so very much like her. It was only in the last few months or so that she began noticing how the child’s nose slopes like hers. It’s developing the same scattering of freckles. At its fifth birthday party, the July before it started kindergarten, when it looked up at her from its rainbow sprinkle birthday cake, she thought she was looking in a mirror. Then, she gazed at her reflection with love.
Now, she looks at me with revulsion.
Anger, white hot. I’ve never been angry at her before; she is me, my self, my body. But is she? I’ve always thought that what she felt, I felt too. She was my heart, my mind, my skin. But now in the face of her terror, I feel anger. This anger is mine alone.
And now, pity, regret, hope. All mine.
I soften.
“I’ll stop, if you want,” I say.
She stares at me. She could touch me if she reached out her hand. If she did, would I disappear? Would we meld into one?
But she doesn’t. She is motionless, but I can see in the way her mouth purses and her eyes get glassy that she shrinks away from me.
“Leave me alone.” She gets into the car and pulls out of the parking lot.
I watch her drive away until she turns the corner. She has rejected me. For the first time in our life, she has sent me away. Of course, there were many times throughout the years she wished I wasn’t there, when she wished to be alone and unperceived, but I think they were not as frequent as the moments of comfort that I was with her.
I’m alone. The breeze through the leaves is nice. It’s a beautiful spring day, with the clouds meandering across the sky. Can I live on my own? If I don’t have her, do I even exist?
I slip off my black flats to feel the grass under my bare feet.
