Here She Lies

splayed my toes to feel the cool air on my skin. Reaching into the open table, I picked up a blue elastic and put my hair into a high ponytail; then I took off my zircons and impulsively placed them in Julie’s earring dish. She seemed to stiffen a little when I did that.
    “What?” I said. “They’re exactly the same, like the cats.”
    “I had an infection in one of my ears recently. Didn’t I tell you?”
    “No.”
    “I never got around to sterilizing my earrings.”
    “Well, then, I’ll sterilize them all tomorrow. How’s that?” I smiled, coaxing her agreement.
    “Fine.” She leaned back and sighed. “But next time, ask first.”
    I let her have that last word. Why not? We weren’t little girls anymore; we were grown-ups and she had a point: boundaries mattered. Which made me regret mixing the glass cats, having earmarked mine for Lexy.
    “Do you remember our old game?” I asked her. “ I wish on you flood —”
    “Witch’s Wishes. I haven’t thought of that in years.”
    It was a game we’d invented during our mother’s losing fight against cancer. “I wish on you fire!” “I wish on you starvation!” “I wish on you plague!” We wished every horrible possible thing on each other, andthe more we played it, the stronger and braver we grew. “I wish on you destruction!” “I wish on you decay!” But never death; death was what we were steeling ourselves against. Even at ten, watching our mother waste away, we knew death was our mortal enemy. When she finally died, we began to wish death on each other, too, to strengthen ourselves against it.
    “It never worked, Jules, did it? To ward off anything.”
    “No, but it got us through some tough days.”
    She was right; it had provided a kind of shield, even if imaginary. I was so glad to be here with Julie. She was the only person with whom I could discuss our past in shorthand without our parents’ deaths throwing a vast, tragic shadow over everything. Their deaths were tragic, but before that we had been a family with somewhat regular problems; and before the divorce, long before, if I remembered correctly, we may have even been happy. Our parents had certainly loved us, even doted on us. They read to us every night, greeted us with cocoa after building snow forts in our Connecticut yard, applauded at all our school plays, took us to museums and restaurants in New York. When we were little our mother had dressed us identically, but later, around the age of nine, we began to assert some individuality and in our final year with her she not only let us be ourselves but encouraged it, allowing separate traits and even insisting on them. Julie was calm, I was easily agitated. Julie was steady, I was impulsive. Julie dressed practically, I wore costumes (or what our mother perceived as costumes; to me they were gorgeousoutfits someone ought to have photographed). Julie was the smart one, I was the pretty one.
    That was the distinction that affected us most — smart/pretty — before we matured enough to understand that as identical twins we were more or less exactly the same. Our mother was offering us the possibility of individuality. I understood that now, but since she died before she had a chance to explain herself we spent a good amount of our growing-up energy trying to negate our presumed deficiencies. Before Julie went to graduate school in marketing, she spent a year living (with me) in the New York apartment we had inherited from our father, wearing flowing skirts and writing bad poetry, trying hard to be pretty inside and out. Broke and bored, she finally packed it in, got her advanced degree with honors, bought some nice suits and began her quick professional ascent.
    And me? I had aspired to be a photographer. But instead of following my heart and photographing people on the street wearing their own concocted fashions, which was what really intrigued me, I turned to buildings, proving that I was serious and smart, and slowly and painfully failed over six lean years to establish myself as a freelance architectural photographer before enrolling in graduate school to become a physical therapist. I had realized I needed to work with people in a way that had some impact; as a PT, I could literally touch them and see the effect of my work. The job at the prison had been my entry-level launch pad to a new career.
    Once Julie and I grew up, the idea of a smart/pretty discrepancy lost its poignancy. We both came to realizethat