Here She Lies

we were about as smart and as pretty as each other — we were identical twins, after all. Our differences were cultivated. External trappings and divergent choices might have differentiated us, but they had never defined us and they never would. Julie’s eyes were my eyes and mine were hers. When I found her looking at me now, I knew what she was thinking.
    “If Mom and Dad were here tonight,” I said, “they’d be giving us milk and cookies and telling us everything would be all right. They would have liked Bobby, don’t you think? They would have known he had nothing to do with that woman’s murder.”
    Julie dropped her foot from her knee to the floor and shifted forward in her seat. “ I know he didn’t, A.”
    “That detective. He seems okay, basically. But I really think he’s wasting his time on Bobby. Don’t you?”
    “Totally.”
    “I mean, infidelity is one thing, Jules. But murder? No way.” I shuddered at the recollection of Zara’s opened neck. “How much do you know about her?”
    “Nothing, really. She was around our age, I think, maybe a little younger. All my neighbors who used her liked her. She worked hard. Everyone said she was honest. I’d never heard about the shady brother until tonight.”
    “Wouldn’t it be crazy if — no, that’s a ridiculous thought.”
    “If what?” she asked.
    My eyes landed on one of Julie’s empty boots, where at the ankle a brass ring united straps of leather.
    Then I looked at her: “I was going to say, if she was the woman Bobby was sleeping with.”
    “You’re right. That is ridiculous.”
    “I don’t know why I thought that.”
    “Because you’re upset,” she said. “It’s been a really bad day.”
    “I wonder how a brother and sister from Hungary ended up in Great Barrington.”
    “I guess they liked the country. Maybe they had a friend around here.”
    “The detective will find out, I suppose.”
    “The more I learn about people,” Julie said, “the more I think they’re incredibly unpredictable, you know?” Her forehead gathered, producing a slight crease. A sign of age. Were we getting older without having figured everything out? But maybe that was the trick: maybe you didn’t.
    “I know I left him, but Bobby was never unpredictable. He isn’t most people.”
    “Not Bobby,” Julie corrected me. “I meant Zara.”
    But for me, Zara Moklas was completely predictable. She would always exist in my mind the only way I had ever seen her: splayed on a dark country road in mottled hues of arcing lights and her own red blood. My only expectation for Zara, ever, could be death.
    “All the neighbors said she was such a nice person,” Julie said. “Maybe she was. But maybe she wasn’t. That’s all I’m saying.”
    “Because we don’t really know. I do get your point.”
    “Exactly. We don’t know. Maybe under her nice-nicefacade she was a drug dealer and she got it for a bad debt or something.”
    “I hope so,” I said, “because that would mean the killer was specifically after her. But honestly, why would she work as a secretary and clean houses if she was making money selling drugs?”
    Julie smiled wickedly. “Good point. Okay. Then maybe cleaning houses was a front and she was a madame and one of her girls went postal.”
    I pictured a cartoon-sleazy hooker with a knife on the bucolic road in front of Julie’s house. We laughed. And then suddenly I was crying.
    Julie crossed over to my chair and we held each other and soon she was crying, too. Her hands found my face and began to smear away tears.
    “It isn’t funny.” Julie.
    “It’s horrible.” Me.
    “We shouldn’t, should we?” She didn’t ask it as a question because it wasn’t a question. We were making light of something dark. Laughing at someone else’s catastrophe. Digging a moat around the us that had always offered protection. As children we had practiced this art of separation without remorse, but as adults we had learned better. Now, when we slipped into defensive isolation against the world at large, we felt guilty and stopped. At least we tried to stop. But we both knew that I had come to Julie to escape to her, into her, with her. It was a deep and irresistible impulse of our twinhood.
    “Can we bring up my suitcases now?” I asked.
    “Come on. We’ll get you settled and put you to bed.”
    “I think I’ll check on Bobby first.”
    I called the police station and was put on hold for five minutes, only to be told that the