Chapter Forty-Two
As we waited for Addie to arrive, Eng’s condition worsened. His breathing grew more labored, his skin ashen. At last, nearly
an hour later, the front door banged open with a gust of wind. One of Addie’s boys, Albert, rushed into the room. “Mama’s
coming,” he called. “She’s bringing the others.”
Footsteps sounded in the hall. Hurried voices, the rustle of coats.
Addie swept in, tugging off her gloves with shaking hands. Her children crowded behind her, coats half buttoned, hair tousled,
cheeks flushed from the cold. The room filled with noise: questions, sobs, raw murmurs of fear.
Addie’s gaze found the bed. A crease formed between her brows. She looked at me. “Is Chang—”
“He is, Addie,” I said gently. “I’m sorry.”
She gasped, as if struck. Her face crumpled. “I told him not to leave yesterday. I told him he’d catch his death of cold.
He never listens.” Her voice broke, and she pressed a hand to her mouth.
Her children cried out, reaching for one another, their voices rising in sorrow and disbelief.
Addie turned to Eng, observing the uneven rise and fall of his chest, the shallowness of each breath. She clutched my arm,
her voice ragged. “What now?”
We waited, straining for the sound of a carriage.
And waited.
Eng lay there, a prisoner with a death sentence, clinging to the hope of a reprieve.
“I’m choking,” he rasped.
I cradled his head and tipped a cup of water to his lips. He swallowed with effort, his fingers clutching my arm.
“I’m afraid, Sallie.” His eyes searched mine, wide and urgent. “I’m not ready to go.”
I pressed his damp palm between mine. “I know.”
He exhaled a shaky laugh. “Sixty-two. They said we wouldn’t live to see forty.”
“Your life isn’t over, Eng.”
His fingers tightened. “You’ll stay with me.”
“Of course.”
At last, we heard hoofbeats pounding up the drive.
Isaac burst through the front door, flushed and breathless. “Hollingsworth wasn’t there,” he said. “He’s on a hunting trip
in the Blue Ridge.”
A terrible silence fell. Even the children stilled.
We all understood what that meant.
Eng’s breathing grew fainter, his skin cold and damp. I stared at the band of flesh that bound him to Chang, and for a moment,
I thought: Could I do it? Could I cut him free? I had no training, no tools, only a panicked instinct to save him. I pictured myself running for a carving knife, doing what
had to be done.
But what if I was wrong? What if I made it worse—left him to die in agony?
I stood rooted beside him, one hand on his chest, the other clenched in a fist. There was nothing left to do but bear witness.
Eng was watching me. He knew what I’d been thinking. His voice was barely a whisper. “May the Lord have mercy on my soul.”
In those final moments, Eng and I were tender with each other. We held hands, our fingers interlaced.
“I am glad you shared your life with me, Sallie,” he said, his voice low and hoarse.
“It has been quite a life,” I said. “I don’t regret it.”
“I never took you to Paris. I regret that.”
I shook my head. “There was plenty to occupy us here.”
“Ce n’est pas ma faute si je t’aime.” His fingers tightened around mine. “I did choose you, Sallie. You know that, don’t you?”
I squeezed back. “I do.”
His breathing grew more labored, the pauses between each breath stretching longer.
The children stood around the bed, wide-eyed and still.
“You are loved, Eng,” I said. “Vastly loved. Just look around you.”
His eyelids flickered. We touched his hands, his face, his arms, trying to hold on to him a moment longer, even as the light
faded from his eyes.
When he was gone, Addie and I held each other’s gaze. We didn’t need to speak. Understanding passed between us like air through
an open door.
For thirty years we had been more than sisters, less than friends. We would still be bound by our children, by memory, but
no longer by the pattern of our days.
After the brothers died, the vultures swooped in.
Newspapers around the world seized on the story, trading in lurid headlines and half-truths. Chang, they said, had died of
exposure. Eng had died of fright.
I thought of the creature in Mary Shelley’s novel, wandering across the Arctic ice—his unbearable solitude, his simple longing to be seen and understood.
Eng and Chang had homes and families; they’d secured a legacy.
They were successful by any measure. And yet to the world, they remained specimens, their humanity always second to their strangeness.
Even in death, their bodies drew attention. Addie and I could not bury them without fear that graverobbers would dig them
up and sell them. Doctors around the world clamored for the right to examine them one last time. Medical schools competed
with dime museums and carnival agents to buy them—the former to dissect, the latter to display them brined in formaldehyde.
“Name your price!” one promoter said.
We did not. But that didn’t stop publications like The New York Herald from ridiculing us. “It is, perhaps, a little unreasonable to expect any high grade of refinement on the part of two Lancashire
women, low-lived enough to be willing, for a consideration, to enter upon married life under such conditions as nature had
imposed upon these male Siamese,” the paper sneered, responding to false reports that we planned to sell our husbands’ bodies
to the highest bidder.
A week after their deaths, we held a small viewing for family and friends. The next day, the brothers were placed in a large
walnut coffin, sealed inside a custom-made tin box. That box was lowered into a wooden crate, packed with charcoal, and tightly
secured. A shallow grave was dug in the cellar beneath my house, where they would rest temporarily while we decided what to
do.
When a telegram arrived from a team of surgeons at Jefferson Medical College in Pennsylvania, requesting permission to conduct
a postmortem and write a scholarly paper, Dr. Hollingsworth traveled to Philadelphia to meet with them. He deemed their motives
respectable, and, after consulting with us, consented to allow three of them to come to North Carolina.
The doctors came. Our husbands’ bodies were exhumed, filled with embalming fluid, and transported north by train. In Philadelphia,
a group of surgeons assembled in an operating theater.
During the autopsy, they made a startling discovery.
What had long been assumed to be two separate livers were in fact one, joined not only by blood vessels, but by continuous tissue.
The final report read: “These disclosures show that any attempt during life to separate the twins would in all probability have proved fatal.”
We all remembered the old rumor that Chang might have left the bulk of his estate to Catherine Bunker, the woman he’d loved
before marrying Adelaide. But to Addie’s relief, Catherine was not mentioned in the most recent version of the will. Chang
left his land to Addie but required that his personal property be divided equally between his wife and children.
Eng’s will was more direct: I bequeath and devise to my wife Sallie Ann Bunker, on account of the love and tender affections I have for her, all my lands
to have, hold and enjoy during her natural life. It was a formal statement, but I felt the fondness in it. Even the use of Sallie, instead of Sarah, struck me. It wasn’t
typical language for a will, but it was true to him. It was Eng’s way.
Because of those final years on the road—the long train rides, the punishing schedules, the strain the brothers bore with
increasing weariness—Addie and I were left secure. We had never wanted that life for them. But their determination to provide
for us laid a foundation that would sustain us for the rest of our lives.
After the reading of the will, I walked alone to the edge of the property, to a ridge overlooking the fields. The sun was
low, casting long shadows across the land.
My land, now.
It felt as though the past was folding behind me, like wings, and the future was opening before me—this wide swath of grass, this cloudless sky.
My imagination stretched with it. In it were the stories of my childhood, the love I’d shared, the dreams I hoarded for myself.
I knew more than I ever thought I would about the brutality and wonder of the world.
I knew that the tender seeds of a relationship could take root in rocky soil and grow into a sturdy tree with many branches.
I had seen it happen. I had nurtured them myself.
Happiness, I’d learned, was like a dragonfly hovering over a field: long-winged, iridescent, quick to shift direction. You
had to keep your eyes open, to watch for it.
And here it was, right in front of me. Glimmering in the grass.