AN EXCERPT:

I lost my twin Lu during our last night swim together. I don’t mean that she died. 

My belly rose out of the black saltwater that night, a round white moon. It glowed in the August air. Lu stared at it. Our dark hair reached out like tentacles and intertwined on the surface of the water.

“Scared, Laura?” she said.

We held our freckled arms out to keep afloat. I looked at hers, the same as mine, and glanced away from her. Up on the bank our house was a small shadow. Mom and Dad were sleeping or whispering in their bedroom. 

“Scared?” Lu repeated. I could still see her watching the infant in my stomach. Lu always knew when I was scared or by asking convinced me that I should be. “Scared?” she had said when she moved to a special class in elementary, leaving me alone in ours. We were in third grade and she still couldn’t read. “Scared?” she said when I left on my first date with James. 

“Scared?” she said when we snuck away from our parents in church and climbed the narrow winding stairs of the high steeple, and found ourselves alone in the very top that shifted in the wind. “Scared?” she must have said when she left our mother’s womb without me. “Yes,” I had said. “Yes.”

“No. I’m not scared,” I said that August night.

Her brows furrowed and she kicked away from me. 

*   *   *

I got cold sooner than usual that August night. 

“I’m cold. I’m getting out,” I said shivering.

I swam to shore on my back and wrapped up in my old towel. The small rocks beneath me moved and took my shape as I sat with my knees up.

Lu was treading water. She would sink below over and over, and rise up again to float. She knew I would wait. I watched Lu’s body appear and disappear in the night water and thought of the small hidden body swimming in me.

When I told Mom and Dad I was pregnant Mom reached out to touch my stomach.  Dad looked both amused and embarrassed, the same look he had when he came down to the beach one day to call us in to dinner and Lu and I were fourteen and lying on the warm beach rocks with our shirts off. Usually Mom came to find us after that. 

I never had to tell Lu that I was pregnant. She knew. She knows who is in and who is out. She knows which chairs people sit in and how they sit. She knows I have a cold before I even notice my nose getting stuffy. She knows who smokes at school and who is missing from class. She knows middle names, even if she can’t read them, or spell them, or sound them out.

In April, a week before I told our parents, Lu and I were sitting in the grass of our yard hugging our knees, and looking down at the seabirds on the water. I wasn’t showing yet.

“Got a baby?” she asked.

I hardly stopped to wonder how she knew. She must have seen my hand linger over my belly, or maybe something crept into my voice when I spoke to James. It could have been that my breathing changed.

That was when I knew there was a baby beneath my skin, but I couldn’t imagine her outside of it. That was when I still believed that when my baby was finally born and cried, Lu would love her. Lu loves things that cry. Seagulls are her favorite animals, and she can watch women in movies break down for hours...

Drash: Northwest Mosaic

• 2008, Vol. 2