291 Days
Sarah and Tarah Darby were born five minutes apart.
Tarah claimed to remember the event. She was pulled from her mother’s womb and waited five long minutes for her twin to follow.
Finally, Sarah emerged blue-faced and malnourished; Tarah was the stronger twin.
This dynamic continued for the rest of their lives.
Growing up in Buckle Beach, Tarah was the better athlete, the better student, the “better twin,” according to their mother, who drunkenly confessed the truth one Christmas Eve when they were ten years old.
Tarah went to the University of South Florida. She became an entertainment lawyer. She moved to Los Angeles. Consciously, because it was close to the industry in which she chose to work. Subconsciously, because it was as far away from Florida as she could get.
Sarah dropped out of high school. She got pregnant at seventeen.
She stayed in Buckle Beach. Consciously, because she loved the ocean and being close to her mother.
Subconsciously, because she wanted to struggle and fail so her mother would realize what a neglectful and cruel childhood she had endured.
When she got the call that Sarah had passed away, Tarah was not surprised. She claimed she’d felt it happen. Earlier that day, she’d sobbed in the bathroom, overcome with the same emotion that had overwhelmed her when she first entered the world: My twin is dying.
Tarah agreed to take in Sarah’s daughter.
Consciously, because it was the right thing to do.
Subconsciously, so she could punish the girl whose birth turned her twin into a teen mom and high school dropout, thus cementing her demise.
She would clothe, feed, and house her twin’s mistake, but she would never love her.
A few days after she moved in with Aunt Tarah, Rhea developed an anxiety disorder. It manifested in various tics and twitches. Aunt Tarah did not notice, but her assistant did and made an appointment for Rhea to go to a psychiatrist.
Rhea had never been to one before, but she had seen them on TV and was surprised to find that, unlike most things in life, her psychiatrist’s office looked exactly like the ones on TV.
Rhea sat in an oversized leather chair; her feet did not touch the ground.
She wondered what her mother would do if she could see her daughter in that chair.
Sarah used to say, “Therapy is for weak-minded people. No one’s gonna understand the way my mind works better than me. ”
On the table next to Rhea, a clock audibly ticked next to a heavily used box of Kleenex.
The nearby wastebasket nearly overflowed with balled-up tissues.
Rhea took in the evidence of all the weak-minded souls who had recently wept in her chair and decided she would not cry.
She did not want to be some cliché patient who weeps to their therapist.
“So, hello, Rhea, I was told you just moved here from Florida, is that right?” the sturdy Germanic woman sitting across from her asked, and Rhea burst into tears.
She wept uncontrollably as her story fell out of her mouth.
Three weeks ago, she went to Buckle High School, a tenth grader, a cheerleader for the Buckle High Mosquitos.
She had friends, a boyfriend, a life. Her mother was manic but manageable.
Everything was manageable until she came home from school and found her mother unresponsive on the couch.
Sarah Darby was a waitress and went to a doctor for pain in her wrist. For as long as Rhea could remember, Sarah was always complaining about pain.
The doctor prescribed her medication, something strong, which worked too well, and Sarah kept going back for more.
She loved the pills until they stopped working.
She wore a patch on her back that supplied her with a steady stream of morphine.
She loved the patch until it stopped working.
The pain and her tolerance to what killed it grew stronger until Rhea came home from school and found her mother, face down, finally free from pain forever.
The psychiatrist explained that Rhea was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, which was creating the tics, twitches, insomnia, abdominal discomfort, and general feeling of doom.
And when Rhea was done describing all the ways medication had ruined her life, her psychiatrist offered her some medication.
Rhea declined.
Her tics and twitches continued. Since she refused to medicate them, Aunt Tarah’s assistant sought out alternative therapies.
Rhea’s weekly schedule involved acupuncture, Reiki, a life coach, hypnotherapy, and hot yoga.
Aunt Tarah paid for all of it, mostly out of spite.
She figured, If Rhea is too stubborn to listen to a real doctor and wants to waste her time with these quacks, fine by me.
She looked forward to the day when Rhea would admit nothing was working and ask if she could go back to the psychiatrist.
One of the people her aunt’s assistant sent Rhea to was an inner-child specialist. A gentle man whose soft voice did not match his six-foot-seven frame. After Rhea told him about her mother’s passing, he suggested Rhea write her a letter.
“And do what with it?” Rhea asked.
“Throw it away? Save it? Bring it here? Whatever you want…it might help you process some of the confusing emotions you’re feeling.”
It took Rhea a very long time to write the letter.
Every time she wrote Dear Mom, she sobbed until her vision was too blurry to continue.
When she finally completed the task, she brought it to her inner-child specialist. Handing him the piece of paper felt oddly similar to turning in an essay for a letter grade.
Dear Mom,
I miss you so much. I think about you all the time and wish you hadn’t died. Do you think about me? What is it like after you die? Are you with Snickers and Rusty? I miss them too. Well, I hope you aren’t annoyed with this letter. See you soon!
Her therapist silently read the letter and asked how she felt after writing it.
“Um, fine, I guess,” Rhea said.
She wished she didn’t want him to compliment her writing skills and tell her she’d earned an A+ on the assignment.
He gently asked, “Why did you think your mom would be annoyed with the letter?”
“…Oh, I don’t know, she just didn’t really like sappy stuff….”
He read the letter silently again, then asked if See you soon! meant Rhea was contemplating taking her own life.
To which Rhea responded, “No, I was just trying to end the letter with something happy.”
But the therapist’s question scared her so much, she did not write another letter to her mother for five years.
After several months of these alternative therapies, Rhea’s tics and twitches lessened.
Aunt Tarah wondered if all the spastic motions had been fake; maybe her niece was doing it all for attention and finally grew bored with the charade.
Rhea, however, knew she was not faking. The symptoms had been very real and were miraculously easing up.
Because of this, she continued frequenting her various healers and, by adulthood, had managed to cure all signs of the anxiety disorder, except two.
Every time she got in her Prius, she had to shift the car in and out of drive six times; over and over again, she would slide the little gear stick soothingly in and out of the D position. She could not drive until she had completed this ritual.
The second twitch she could not quite shed was blinking.
Whenever life became overwhelming, she would press her upper eyelids into her lower eyelids, and the more she pressed, the easier it was to breathe.
One week after her date with Danny Beckett, she sat in her Prius for over an hour, staring out the window, blinking.
Eventually, she shifted in and out of drive six times before backing down her vertical driveway and blinking her way across town.
She stopped at a CVS and bought all the remaining Peeps in the store.
“Wow, you’ve got some lucky kiddos,” the elderly cashier said, referring to the large stack of bright yellow marshmallow chicks she was bagging.
“Uh-huh,” Rhea said.
“Happy Easter,” the cashier said as Rhea blinked out the door and blinked back to her car.
Rhea pulled up to Zoe’s modern box house and carried her bag of Peeps down the paver-stoned driveway to the fogged-glass front door.
Zoe’s house was all sharp corners and hard edges cohabitating with a contradictory fragility, a black iron entryway table holding a delicate vase.
Rhea wondered if the house was perhaps a metaphor for Zoe herself, although Rhea had been looking for the delicate fragility part for decades and had yet to find it.
Rhea followed the sounds of laughing children through the house. She slid open a glass door and stepped into an Easter egg hunt. A few dozen kids raced around the grass, hunting for plastic eggs, screaming with delight when their hunt was fruitful.
When Zoe’s daughter was one year old, Zoe decided to throw an Easter party, and to keep the children motivated, she filled the plastic eggs with dollar bills.
These budding capitalists hunted with a fervor their parents had never seen before, and Zoe’s Easter parties became an annual event.
Rhea and Tiny had always been the only childless adults in attendance, but that was about to change.
“No, do not climb the tree, Payton,” Zoe’s husband yelled. “I said there are no eggs in the trees.”
“Ree Kee!” Ada said as Rhea entered the patio. Ada was breastfeeding Ekele, who looked up to glare at Rhea, then resumed siphoning the life out of his mother.
Rhea could not help but feel strange whenever Ada breastfed this young man who could speak in complete sentences. Hearing Ekele say in crystal-clear English, “Mommy, can I please have num-nums?” made Rhea feel squirmy.
“I’m barely making any milk, he just does it for comfort,” Ada would say.