The Invisible Twin: Epilogue

 

 

            When Amy entered the house, no one was home. She looked around and noticed everything was as tidy as a museum; this wasn’t at all like the cozy home it had been when she and her younger twin brothers were growing up.

            The only thing besides the worn, folded blanket on the back of the sofa that spoke of a lived-in home was the book on the side able. She looked at the title, and recognized the book Kit had forgotten from his visit. Since she’d be in Cardiff at the end of the week, he’d asked her to stop by for it. She had deliberately chosen a time when her mother would be out and her father was still at work.

            While she loved visiting her parents, today she had quite a bit to do, and simply didn’t want to be delayed.

            As she picked up the book, what looked like a letter fell out of it. She stooped to pick it up and saw, “To Brynn Michael Evans from Christopher Morgan Evans, Bangor, Wales.” scrolled across the empty back page . The handwriting wasn’t the scrawl of his childhood, but his adult penmanship.

            She wondered when Kit would have even needed to write to Brynn. She couldn’t think of them ever being apart for more than the length of a class in school or one of Bryn’s football matches. Once Kit left for University in 1983, Brynn was gone.

            Curiosity got the better of her, and she opened the pages and read.

                                                                       

 

                                                                                                            17 April, 1990

Dear Brynn,

            To anyone reading this, I must surely seem mad. I was told by wiser heads that in order to move on, I need to confront my demons.

            Strange as it is for me to even think this, much less write it, you have been my demon for the last seven years. It’s only now that I can tell you what has disturbed me since the accident.

            Of course, regaining consciousness after my injuries to find you had not survived was the most exquisitely unbearable pain. For several days, despite my hopes and dreams for the future, I had no desire to remain on this earth since you were not on it.

Your hopes and dreams had been crushed by a vehicle driven by one who had no business behind the wheel. There was no satisfaction in knowing that driver had also perished; he had led a long and distinguished life.

My lack of desire for life was no match for the medical prowess of the doctors. Their refusal to allow me to give up kept me alive.

But before the hospital, before the crash, the two of us were happy knowing our own secrets, suspecting each other’s. I hoped a certain girl I’d met at the party where you lost your virginity – I knew that before you admitted it – would be at the one we were going to that night. Having read some of your journals since, I know you had similar expectations of seeing someone that night. Whether or not our expectations would have been met, I’ll never know.

            As the headlamps hurtled toward your door, I screamed, not from pain – yet – but horror at your being mangled. What I never told anyone, no matter how they pushed or why, was that you screamed, too. Your head was turned toward the car bearing down on ours. The doctors said that was why your spinal cord was severed. An internal decapitation, they called it. But in the seconds before impact you screamed, “Duw, dwi ddim eisiau marw! Kit, helpa fi!”

            I didn’t understand why you said, “God, don’t let me die! Kit, help me,” in Welsh. You seldom spoke Welsh, even to me.

            And in the interminable instant just before impact, we both reverted to our secret twin speak, the language everyone insisted we’d left behind before we started nursery. But we both know better. Simple phrases, the odd word, remain with us, even today. Someevie – our expression for “I love you,” came out of both of our mouths – or perhaps we only thought it to each other. I can hear, even now, your 17-year-old voice saying it. Someevie, Kit. Someevie, Brynn. Ekee nom: Be awesome.

            But as toddlers, we didn’t know the word awesome. Ekee nom was “be the whole world.” Only when we were older did ekee nom mean “be awesome.” You told me that every time before I went onstage. I still hear you say it every opening night, or before the first table read for a film or telly show.

            And as I was slammed against the side of the car, and you were crushed by the attacking car, I knew the instant your soul left your body, even though I told everyone I didn’t remember what happened. There was a horrid attempt for you to take a breath that couldn’t come because the nerves that allowed it had been severed, the moment you knew you were dying. A broken rib punctured one of my lungs, and as I tried to take a breath, I had a similar experience, although not from the same cause.

            And in that instant, my head was flooded with more twin speak words than I thought I knew, yet I understood it all. Someevie, Kit. Ekee nom alegat. Be awesome for us both.

            There was much more, far more than anyone outside the two of us would have accepted as possible in that instant. Yet, it was like someone was trying to fill a pitcher with the tap opened full, trying to fill it before the water was cut off. I know the things you said, and they were not things I would have thought to say. It’s still too painful to recall it all at once, much less translate it from twin speak.

            Your insistence at my being awesome likely had a good deal to do with my failure to die in the first few weeks.

            Surviving without you, trying to figure out a way forward, was sometimes more painful than my physical injuries. Mr. Mac, the psychologist I went to, was a great help. Yet, despite his having also been a twin who lost his other, sometimes he simply didn’t know what he was talking about. Actually, I was surprised Mam and Da even allowed me to seek psychological help.

            I started to read your journals to try to learn what I didn’t know about you as well as to find meaning in everything you poured into the instant before you died. If only I’d read certain entries early on, I could have avoided some emotional pain from others.

            I made the mistake of being taken in by Tegan Davies, your twin groupie nemesis. Had I only known about her from your experiences, I could have avoided her. Still, she burrowed in when I was most vulnerable, so any kindness, no matter how evilly intended, I drank in without a second thought.

            Even when I seemed to be moving forward, my desperation to protect you made me make the most egregious mistakes socially. But then, we both know I was the one without social skills.

            It took a few years of walking into emotional walls before I realized I was angry. Mr. Mac knew it – he’d gone through the same loss under different circumstances – and tried to get me to examine who I was angry with.

            I thought it was Mam – you were her boy as I was Da’s – and she was never comfortable with the things I did to heal. I frequently made her cry, although I didn’t mean to. 

            Sometimes I thought it was everyone. Perhaps Tegan. Perhaps a girl at Uni who did something similar to what Tegan did. But the girl at Uni was reacting to my cavalier behavior. In hindsight, I’m not proud of the way I treated her.

            But the anger stayed long after I’d healed from those experiences. Mr. Mac proved to be right in that instance. I was angry with you.

            I was angry with you for dying. I was angry because I felt I didn’t know you as well as I should, especially when several people – including Mam – said things about you that I didn’t think were true. And I began to doubt my understanding of you at all.

            I couldn’t tell any of those people the twin speak things you’d said. I began to doubt you’d said them at all. It might have been simply wishful thinking on my part. Maybe you didn’t say them. Perhaps you’d simply stolen my soul and left me with nothing.

            No, you were never like that in life. You couldn’t be that way in death, a death over which you had no control.

            When I recognized that, I finally started to heal.

            I confess I didn’t come to those conclusions on my own. Nancy made me recognize that.

            I don’t know if you knew Nancy. She’s the girl you teased me for snogging at the infamous party. She came back into my life at the end of Uni, and has continued as my Cariad to the present. No one else knows, but I intend to propose later this year.

She was supposed to be my date to the BAFTAs, but had to have an emergency appendectomy the day before. I asked Mam to go with me, but she didn’t think it was appropriate for a boy to take his mam. So, I asked Amy, and after some coaxing, she agreed. It turns out she wears the same size clothes as Nancy, and was, as she put it, going elegant in Nancy’s gown – Nancy insisted. Oh, and I won the BAFTA – for my first film, too – in case you were wondering.

            So, now I think I’ve got over being angry with you. None of it was your doing. I’ve been trying to make my life something of which you would be proud – since I’m living for us both.

            Do you remember when we used to laugh when people would ask us what it was like to be a twin? We always said we didn’t know what it was like not to be a twin. Well, now I do.  I can’t say it holds a candle to being a twin. I don’t know if singles-from-birth feel the loneliness. That’s the hardest part. It’s a loneliness that no one else can fill.

            You were the best brother. Diolch yn fawr.

            And in case you didn’t know, Someeve, Brynn. Ekee nom.

            Love from this side of the abyss,

            Kit

 

            Amy folded the pages of the letter, and returned them to the back of the book.

            She thought, after Brynn’s death, that she and Kit had become closer. Some people even suggested she was a surrogate for Brynn. Now she knew they were wrong.

            Kit’s openness in what he’d written – perhaps believing that no one would ever see it while he was alive – was shocking. She wasn’t sure she could take it all in. And she’d have to pretend she didn’t know these things. He wouldn’t tell anyone, especially if he hadn’t told Mr. Mac.

            She did wonder why he’d committed this information to paper. Brynn had been so good at keeping a journal, and Kit had been so rubbish at it. Perhaps bursts of candor were the closest he could come.

            Armed with the book Kit had asked for, she left the house.

           

Who Doesn’t Like Babies?

 

The current trend in thinking is that empowerment requires people seeing others who look like them in careers they want to have. 

Although empowerment wasn’t a word I heard growing up, I’ve never thought of it as something others conferred, but something that comes from within. Glass ceilings and empowerment never concerned me. The world was full of possibilities, and if I wanted something, who was the rest of the world to tell me I couldn’t have it?

From my earliest memories, I had a set of things I was never going to be: a nurse, a secretary, a teacher, a waitress, a salesclerk or a mom. I had nothing against people who had those jobs; I simply didn't want them for myself. Oddly, those were pretty much the only things girls could aspire to in those days. Every girl I knew dreamed of getting married and having babies. My other “nevers” were what they would do until they had those babies.

I used to tell my mother I didn’t want to be a secretary, I wanted to have a secretary. She would shake her head and say, “Yes, dear,” and then proceed to tell me why girls didn’t do those things.

Says who? My brothers could aspire to the jobs I wanted. Why should I be punished because my father failed to give me a Y chromosome? I never understood why my parents wanted a girl in the first place, if all I was doomed to become was someone less than. I had no use for a life as a second-class human, which was all someone limited to a few career choices was, in my book.

The message I heard given to my brothers was that they could grow up to be anything they wanted. Well then, I wanted a piece of that, too.

But according to my mother’s thinking, I was a girl, so it didn’t matter what silly thing I wanted to be, I’d have to give it up when I got married and had babies.

Babies? I didn’t want to have babies!

Of course, according to her, all girls wanted to have babies, and I’d change my mind when I was older.

I didn’t see that happening. I didn’t want to be a girl in the first place. I don’t even particularly like babies.

Gasp! That’s a horrible thing to say! Don’t ever tell anyone that!

The fact is, I didn’t, and still don’t. Brief encounters with them are fine, seeing pictures are fine, but having to spend an extended amount of time with them is for others, not for me. Babies are boring. They’re noisy, don’t keep regular hours, and they really don’t do much besides eat, excrete, and cry. I’ve never been a fan of people that needy.

My dolls were not precursors of future babies. They were substitutes for the friends I frequently didn’t have.

When I learned the facts of life on where babies came from, and all of the horrors women had to put up with for the “privilege” of having babies, I was determined that babies weren’t for me. 

Just as not everyone is college material, not all women are meant for motherhood. I never yearned for it. I had no concept of a biological clock. As I’ve always said, if God had intended me to be a parent, I would’ve been born male. Since I wasn’t, all bets are off.

Besides, what if no one wanted to marry me? Considering the fact that no one asked until I was 38 and I didn’t marry until I was 39, my young adulthood bore that idea out. 

I was never boy crazy. When friends married at 19 or 20, I thought, good luck with that. I have things that are more important to me.

Okay, that meant I’d need to pursue a career. So there, Mother!

While circumstances have, at times, put me in the situation where I had to, for a time, be a teacher and a salesclerk – the latter because the former in a Catholic school didn’t pay enough to keep body and soul together – I did not stay in that situation for very long.

In college, I was a food service worker, although not a waitress. But that was to maintain some amount of financial independence from my parents without interfering with my classes, and to finance my semester abroad that my parents couldn’t afford to give me. (“If you want to do it, you have to be able to pay for it. We can’t. And if you think about calling home asking for more money, don’t.”)

I also had to do food service when I first graduated because I couldn’t get a job in my field without experience. Of course, one cannot get experience without a job. This is why you don’t see me on the nightly news.

Fortunately, I didn’t have the right skill set to ever be a secretary. In those days of sexism, before HR and sexual harassment rules, secretaries were expected to make and serve coffee. I still don’t know how to make coffee, since I don’t drink it. And had a boss ever called me “honey” and patted me on the butt, I would have decked him, and been looking for a new job the same day.

No, in truth, the way I was “groomed” as a child, I would have been too shy to actually deck the boss. Instead my letter of resignation would have been on his desk the next morning. Fortunately, I didn’t have to learn secretarial skills in high school since I was in college prep classes.

I never went anywhere near a nursing career. Instead, by default of not being able to get into the career of my choice, I ended up in a healthcare career that, while somewhat rewarding, meant I spent 30 years in a career I never actually wanted.

And my career did involve working with children. I do like school-aged children, even the preschoolers -- as long as they're not "runners". The advantage that my job had was that at the end of the day, I gave them back and went home to my dog – and eventually to a husband.

But where my colleagues go gaga over babies and toddlers, I step back and say, “No, thank you.”

What I like best are third through 12^th grade students, particularly middle schoolers and teens. I like them. They’re funny, you can joke with them, have an intelligent conversation with them, and while some are sometimes moody – as are adults, by the way – you can reason with them. All it requires is that you respect them and listen to what they have to say. 

I don’t have that nails-on-chalkboard high-pitched “baby voice” I hear many people use when talking at small children. I was always insulted by being spoken to that way when I was a kid, so I never developed that tone myself.

The funny thing is, many people recoil at the idea of dealing with teens. They freely admit that they don’t like teens, or else they make disparaging remarks about them that makes their attitude clear. Yet, if I dare to say I don’t like babies, they’re horrified.

I’m not saying do away with babies. There are plenty of people who love babies and can take care of them, so I shouldn’t have to. My mother was one of those people. But teens need proponents, too. That is where my talents lie.

“But who doesn’t like babies?” they ask.

 Well, I don’t.

           

 

Having a "Huh?" Moment

 

 

            “You’re something the Catholic Church fears: a thinking Catholic.”

Those words were uttered to me by a priest once, a million years ago, when I was in my 20s.

No this is not a blast on Catholicism, or even a blog about religion. It’s more of a “Huh?” about the modern world.

To put the statement in context, I used to sing and play guitar for our parish’s guitar Mass. Every year, the group had a picnic at a park about an hour from where we lived. I always found that odd, since there were parks closer to home, it was usually a hot day, and there was no place at the park to swim. We would invite the priests, but they usually didn’t come.

One year, one of the priests, who liked our group’s music, decided to go to the picnic. He didn’t know how to get there, and I didn’t have a car, so he offered to drive me there since I could show him the way.

Along the way we chatted about miscellaneous and sundry things, and at one point got into a conversation about that day’s gospel, which was the one about the rich man giving his money to three of his servants and telling them to take care of it until he returned. Two of the servants invested the money, which I considered a risky thing to do with someone else’s money. They were lucky they didn’t lose everything, and they were rewarded for making extra money for him, which, in my opinion, he had no reason to expect. The third did exactly what he was told to do, and buried the money, giving the man back exactly the amount he was given, exactly, to my mind, all that the man should have expected back. And that servant was punished. I thought that was grossly unfair.

Yes, yes, I understand the point that the money --“Talents” -- was a metaphor for one’s talent in life, but taking it on face value, the parable is unjust.

When I pointed out that one of the men investing the money should have suffered losses, since that was a real world situation -- just as having talent in an area, but life situations preventing it from being used -- he told me I was putting 20^th century values -- this happened back then -- on the gospel. Quite the “Huh?” moment.

Of course, I felt that if it wasn’t relevant to the century we’re living in, what’s the point, anyway? And then he said what I quoted at the beginning of the blog.

I apparently don’t pick up the undercurrents of things people tell me. Perhaps that’s why I don’t understand the world I find myself living in.

For example, when I was a wee, small child, my mother told me that we shouldn’t judge people by their race, religion, gender, ethnic background, and by extension, sexual orientation, we should look at the individual, and decide by their values and behavior whether or not we wanted them as friends.

 I took that to heart to such an extent that sometimes, if someone else mentions someone race, religion, gender, ethnic background or sexual orientation, I have to stop and think, “Really? I never noticed.”

This is not to say my mother didn’t have her own prejudices; she did, and I recognized them when I was much older.

However, when I was in seventh grade, my teacher, who was a nun, started a conversation with my class about a movie that had just come out, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, which 1) we were not old enough to see, since it had an R rating, and 2) involved bi-racial dating, something that was apparently taboo at the time. After telling us the premise of the movie, she asked us -- 12 and 13-year-olds, who were too young to be allowed to date -- if we would date someone of a different race. Keep in mind, this was an all-white school in an all-white suburb in the late 1960s, when integration in schools was in its infancy in the US.

I listened with increasing disgust as my classmates said they would, but their parents wouldn’t let them -- always blame someone else -- and very few were brave enough to admit they would never consider it. The hypocrisy was overwhelming.

I finally raised my hand and told the good sister that I wouldn’t have a problem with it, and told her what my mother had taught me. Sister was apparently pleased at my parents’ forward-thinking ideals. I was proud of myself and my family.

But when I arrived home, my mother was less than proud of me when I told her about what happened in school.

“You said WHAT???!!”

Another “Huh?” moment.

Apparently, what I was taught at home was a state secret, because, if discovered, what would the neighbors think? My mother, it seemed, was afraid of my classmates’ parents thinking ill of my family because of what I had said. I didn’t think it was memorable enough for them to tell their parents.

My thinking was that people should be happy to see that someone was living according to what Jesus was telling us in church every Sunday. Sigh. I just didn’t get it.

Flash forward to today.

I used to feel safe going into Philadelphia. However, with the uptick in gun violence, I don’t have it on my radar as a place to go.

“Oh, you don’t have to worry. That only happens in the neighborhoods,” people often tell me. And while that’s somewhat true, “The neighborhoods” is racist code for certain parts of the city. However, at least two deaths and a couple of other shootings in Dilworth Plaza, which is part of City Hall’s footprint, the very epicenter of Center City, puts the lie to the idea that shootings only happen in “the neighborhoods.”

And people wonder why I think they’re ridiculous telling me I’m brave to travel to Europe alone? I feel safe in London; not so much in Philadelphia.

So it was a real shock on my latest visit to the UK when I heard that someone had been shot and killed -- randomly -- in Wallasey, near Liverpool. Add to that the fact that, when I heard about the shooting, I was visiting a cousin in Wallasey, and it had only happened a few days earlier.

Beyond the sadness that this had happened, especially since it had happened on Christmas Eve, was my first thought: where did someone in England get a handgun? That was also the first thing I was asked by my friends at home when I told them about the incident.

I live in a country that, sadly, has reached the point that gun violence on a daily basis is almost expected. But the Wallasey shooting was yet another “Huh?” moment.

Back in America, I think something needs to be done about the violence, although, given our laws and the people who think anyone who doesn’t own a gun is a radical looking to take away their guns, I don’t know what we can do about it or how to even start. (Don’t get me started on guns. If you really want to know, check out my previous blog, “The Not So Okay Corral,” Aug, 2018.)

It’s sad to think I have to go to another country to have a good day out.

That’s not to say I’d go to just any other country. There are several I don’t care to go to, either because they’re such crowded places, or because of their political regimes.

For example, although I’ve been to Russia in better times, I wouldn’t go there again as long as their current leader is in power. That means I’ll probably not be able to go there again in my lifetime.

New Zealand, on the other hand, is definitely on my list of must-see places.

I love to travel and meet people different from myself, but I can’t always do so, which means I need to stay in my own country sometimes. And I do realize that other countries have their own problems, some of them the same situations we have here. I know that some situations I’ve seen reported on television are almost world-wide, and it saddens me, mainly because it demonstrates that humans largely haven’t learned from the past.

The other day I saw a report on someone being attacked solely for being Jewish. My immediate response was, “What is wrong with people?” (ask Blue Scream of Jeff – read his blogs –and he can tell you. He was there when I said it.) I feel the same when someone is attacked for being Black.

Every time I hear about a Jewish group being attacked, I ask myself if we’re living in 1930s Germany or Russia, and if not, why we’re still not better than that. Ditto for blacks, women and LGBTQ+ people.

Every time I hear about “ethnic” groups being attacked in countries around the world, I think about the fact that those same countries have been through this before. Why haven’t they learned from it yet?

To quote a song by the Manic Street Preachers, "If you tolerate this, your children will be next."

We seem to be going backwards, too far backwards.

I’m a child of the ‘60s. Peace, love and understanding -- and by the way, some fantastic music! We protested against war. We protested against injustice. We marched for civil rights. 

If we’re going to go backwards, let’s go back to those ideals, not the wild west, or the ethnic cleansing of the 1930s and ‘40s, or even the so-called Communist purging of the 1950s. I was raised with the ideal of eradicating bigotry as far as possible. I was educated in schools that emphasized social justice.

Although I wasn’t a member of Girl Scouts, they have a basic rule that you leave a place better than the way you found it. I’ve always tried to be that person. Or, to quote Maya Angelou, “When you know better, you do better.”