Epilogue
Surry County, North Carolina
I still live on the old homestead in Surry County. All my children are grown and gone. Some time ago, Grace and her youngest
son, Isaac—the one who most resembles his father—moved into the house with me. Aunt Joan, now in her seventies, joined us
after a fire took her cabin and she had nowhere else to go.
We are our own unlikely foursome. We laugh about it sometimes.
It works well enough with the four of us here. Our lives are simple. We don’t use much, and we don’t need much. We keep two
horses, three mules, four pigs, eight cattle, ten sheep, and a dozen chickens. The vegetable garden gives us yellow squash,
zucchini, fat heirloom tomatoes, sturdy cucumbers, and peppers. The orchard yields peaches, apples, and pears.
When the last of my children left home, I moved to a bedroom in the back of the house, overlooking the flower garden. Grace
chose one at the front, above the azaleas and the long drive to the road. Joan’s room looks out toward the barn. Isaac sleeps
in the twins’ old room, in their custom-made bed. There’s more than enough space for him to stretch out.
We each carry our own kerosene lamps to bed.
Isaac manages the farm now. He handles the accounts, hires help when it’s needed, keeps things running. Grace and I do most
of the cooking and gardening. We milk the cows, gather eggs, and fill the pig trough with scraps from the day before. We churn
butter, put up jars of jam, fry ham in the big iron skillet.
Joan chops wood and fixes what breaks.
We only clean the house when we absolutely must.
I am still a passionate gardener. These days, I take requests. Grace favors hardy azaleas, with their exuberant colors and
trumpet-shaped blossoms, the way they thrive in nearly any soil. Joan likes hydrangeas, their color determined by the earth
in which they’re planted. Isaac prefers anything yellow—buttercups, mustard, daisies, marigolds.
I’m partial to roses. People think they’re fragile, but they’re not. They bloom with thorns, demanding space. Years ago, I
planted a row of bushes along the fence, pressing each root into the soil with my hands. I take great satisfaction in how
they return, year after year, no matter what they’ve weathered.
One of the first things Joan did when she came to live with us was plant a myrtle tree in the backyard.
When our chores are done, we have time to talk and read and sew and think. In the evenings, we like to sit on the porch—two
of us in rocking chairs, two sharing the old double-wide—and gaze out at the blue-gray mountains. Sometimes we soak up the
quiet, listening to the blackbirds’ chatter, the whippoorwills’ wild wail. Sometimes we gossip. Grace and I play chess, and
Joan plays the winner. Isaac is teaching himself to play the flute.
Grace and I are voracious readers—newspapers, the almanac, the encyclopedia. The Bible, for her. Philosophy, for me. We’re
making our way through the books in the study. I started with Emerson, then moved on to the small volumes by Locke and John
Stuart Mill that Eng and Chang brought home from their travels. Now I’m reading Herbert Spencer’s The Principles of Psychology, which argues that the mind is not fixed so much as shaped by habit and circumstance.
I read slowly, to be sure I understand. I keep a dictionary close so I can look up the words.
I once thought our beliefs were set like stone, but perhaps they’re more like cloth, taking the color of what they’re steeped in.
Some dyes hold. Others lift. Recently I reread Mansfield Park—a book I first pulled from Eng and Chang’s shelves years ago.
Back then, I read it in snatches, by lamplight, in rare tranquil
moments. As a young wife, I thought it was the story of a modest girl who endured hardship and was, in the end, seen and chosen.
It struck me as a happy ending, or as much of one as a girl like Fanny, or a girl like me, might hope for.
Now I see it differently.
Fanny Price was brought into a house that would never truly be hers. She lived within its walls and followed its rules, subject
to the will of the Bertrams, who had taken her in. They fed her, clothed her, and claimed to care for her, but she had no
power except what they chose to give. Her future wasn’t hers to shape. It was something she had to wait for—until the moment
she refused to yield.
No one was going to hand her the life she wanted. She had to claim it for herself.
One mild afternoon in early spring, when the four of us were in the parlor, I finished the embroidery of Leah at the well.
The windows were open to catch the breeze. Grace sat with her book—Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter by William Wells Brown. Aunt Joan was tuning her fiddle. Isaac knelt beneath the window, installing a shelf.
“There,” I said, cutting the final thread with my silver scissors. I hadn’t realized I’d spoken aloud until I looked up and
saw the others watching me.
“Don’t tell me you’re finally done with that,” Grace said, setting her book aside.
“I think I am.”
“Let’s see it, then,” Isaac said.
I turned the frame and held it out.
The simple biblical scene had grown wild in my hands.
Leah and Rachel were nearly swallowed by a lush garden.
The well at the center fed a winding stream that ran through rows of vegetables: orange carrots, red peppers, lettuces in shades of green.
Lavender spilled across the border. Vines and herbs twisted and twined.
Flowers grew side by side that had never shared a season. Stars spread across a daytime sky.
It was unlike anything I’d ever made—untamed and tempestuous, full of movement and light.
Joan set down her fiddle and leaned closer. “That’s not Leah and Rachel,” she said. “That’s you and Adelaide.”
Isaac grinned. “In the Garden of Eden.”
“Who would’ve imagined,” Grace said.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the ways people make sense of the world. The lies we tell ourselves, the truths we ignore.
The pockets of tolerance we develop and the gaps in our empathy.
Addie and I don’t see each other often, but we have settled into something steady, something we never had when we were younger.
We are not kindred spirits. We do not see the world the same way, nor do we pretend to. But every few weeks, we meet for tea
in the afternoons, a habit we began after our husbands died.
When she comes to my house, she brings pound cake or chess tarts, and we sit on the porch if the weather allows. Grace and
Joan make themselves scarce—a courtesy that goes unremarked but not unnoticed. When I visit her, I bring apple cake, her favorite.
She sets out Mama’s rose-patterned porcelain teacups and saucers, each piece placed just so, a nod to the old order she still
believes in.
Sometimes, watching her pour tea with the same graceful certainty she brings to the rest of her life, I think how strange it is to love someone so unlike yourself.
Addie still sweeps into a room as if she owns it.
Even now, with silver threading her dark hair, she carries herself like the beauty she was at nineteen, when every head turned to watch her pass.
She remains quick to judge, swift to decide, unshaken in her opinions.
For years, I lived in the refracted glow of that certainty. Even when I resisted her, even when I told myself I saw through
her, I was never fully free of her sway. But time wears down even the most ingrained patterns. Our marriages, our children,
our losses, the long weight of the years have mellowed us both.
Addie still speaks of the war as a great tragedy rather than a necessary reckoning. But she voices those beliefs more quietly
now, and I have learned when to hold my tongue. We both know the steps of this dance, the careful measures that allow us to
remain in each other’s lives.
Now and then, I catch her looking at me with something like surprise—perhaps at finding that her once-yielding sister no longer
bends so easily. Or maybe she is remembering, as I do, the girls we once were and the future we imagined, so far from the
one we came to inhabit.
We lived a life no one else could fully comprehend. That binds us still, even as our sensibilities, our beliefs, our hearts
pull us in different directions.
I used to think love was something I had to earn. That it came with conditions.
When I became a mother, I ached to give what I’d never received. I wasn’t always good at it. Sometimes I was distracted or
worn thin, and sometimes I focused on the wrong things. But I held my babies close and sang to them when they couldn’t sleep.
I let them climb into my lap and bury their faces in my neck. I told them, again and again, the words I had never heard myself:
I love you just as you are.
My children, bless them, are scattered all around these mountains and far beyond. Some live in different states, as far away as California. They come to visit for a few days or a week. Now and then, if they need to, they stay longer.
A few of them—those who moved far enough away—keep their lineage a secret.
There may never come a time, I suppose, when the private lives of joined twins don’t stir curiosity, controversy, or worse.
“You had a choice, Ma,” my son Robert tells me when I say there’s nothing to be ashamed of. “We don’t. We were born into it.
At least we can decide whether to share that part of our lives.”
“But you have the right to tell your story,” I say.
“The right, maybe. But not the desire. I don’t seek fame in that way. Or infamy.”
“It’s about living honestly, Robert. It can’t feel good to live in hiding.”
“It’s not hiding,” he says. “I’m just choosing what I want to reveal about myself. I’ll do things my way. Just like you did.”
People speak of getting over grief as if it were an illness, something time and patience might cure. But that is not how it
works. Grief does not end. It shifts, settling into the crevices of your days.
I carry mine still: for my children gone before me, the graves I have tended, the silences they left behind. For my husband,
whose death left a knot of emotions I’ve never fully unraveled: relief and regret, anger and forgiveness.
I’ve learned to hold my joys as tightly as my sorrows, knowing that life is fragile and nothing is promised.
Sometimes I take a blanket to the graveyard where my girls are buried. Rosalyn, who fell into the fire. Julia Ann, who never
recovered from that winter fever. Kate, who died of consumption, despite that long journey to Europe to see the best doctors
in the world.
Dinah is buried there too. Grace says she’ll be content, one day, to rest beside her mother.
Joan agrees it’s as good a place as any, though she wishes she could lie beside Myrtle, the only person who truly knew her
heart. Not that she believes in an afterlife. Myrtle is part of the earth now, Joan says, and soon enough, she will be too.
Isaac says he’s too young to worry about where he’ll be buried. He still has a long life to look forward to.
There’s a moment in Frankenstein when the creature watches a family through a crack in their wall. For months, he observes their gentle ways, their love for
each other. He leaves firewood at their door, tends their garden by night. When he finally reveals himself, certain they’ll
see past his appearance to his good heart, they drive him away.
I thought of that often as I watched Eng and Chang navigate their lives. They longed to be seen as ordinary men. Each time
they met someone new, they had to brace themselves, to assert their claim to humanity in a world that never fully let them.
I saw how they leaned on each other—how their bond became a kind of fortress, both shelter and prison. How, sometimes, it
shut out even those who loved them.
There were parts of Eng that even today I struggle to understand. Acts that revealed a darkness I cannot reconcile with the
man I believed I knew. These were not small lapses, but profound failings that haunt me still. And yet. I also choose to remember
his strengths: his steadiness, his dry humor, the small kindnesses he offered me, the tenderness he showed our children. The
grace he extended, in the end, to his querulous brother.
I think of Addie, my counterpart in this strange arrangement, and of Chang—mercurial, quick to anger, yet fiercely loyal to those he claimed as his own.
The two of them shared a boldness, a drive to seize what they wanted with an unapologetic certainty.
I sometimes envied that certainty, even as I questioned its cost.
Marrying Eng allowed me to step outside my circumscribed existence, to evade its unyielding rules. Within our foursome, I
came to see the world differently. I am grateful to the three of them for giving me the chance to be part of something improbable.
Something extraordinary.
Here I am, a woman long past girlhood, with few duties left but to take pleasure in the ordinary wonders all around me. And
yes—they are everywhere. The tinkle of cowbells. A blanket of daisies like fallen snow. Wind rippling through the wheat, turning
it liquid gold. Bumblebees threading the grass.
On hot summer afternoons I reach for my straw hat, and Grace and Joan fetch theirs, and we make our way through clover and
bluegrass down to the pond, where we strip to our chemises and wade in. Lying on my back in the cool water, my hair floating
like weeds around my face, I close my eyes and feel the sun on my lids. When I open them, the sky is watercolor blue.
On the walk home we are drowsy and sun-dazed, our bare feet treading the familiar path.
Later, in the kitchen, Grace dusts biscuit dough with flour while I scoop butter from the churn. Joan dunks silky lettuce
into a pail of water. Isaac slices tomatoes into neat rounds and arranges them on a plate. A stew simmers on the range.
What more could I ask of this life?
If days like this aren’t miraculous, I don’t know what is.