My Sister Iris (Part Two)
Twelve years later…
“I’m going to fucking stab her if she won’t stay out of my room! Mom!! Make her get out of my room!” I could hear Lizzie screaming all the way down in the basement where I was trying to find the Christmas lights, which were no doubt in a tangled, broken heap somewhere among the mouse turds and spiderwebs. I should just go to Target and buy some new ones.
Footsteps pounded down the basement steps and Maddie appeared. Her cheeks were flushed, and it was apparent that the evening was not going to go well.
“Darling, are you and Lizzie fighting again?”
“She’s such a bitch! I lent her my leather jacket and I need it back and she won’t give it to me!” Maddie and Lizzie had been at each other’s throats since birth. Maybe before birth, for all I know. I’d always thought that twins—especially identical twins—would love each other. You hear stories about twins who refuse to be separated from one another. They sit next to each other at school, go to the same college, tell each other all their secrets, and then marry a set of identical twin boys and live happily ever after. Or some version of that. I did not get anything even remotely close to that version.
“Do you want me to go ask her for it?” I said, giving up on finding the lights.
“Duh, why do you think I came all the way down here?” Someone once told me that thirteen was the most difficult year of a girl’s life, and also the most difficult year of her mother’s life. The twins were only twelve. I wasn’t sure how I was going to survive another year like this. I wasn’t sure how it could be worse than it was right now.
I sighed. “Okay, I’ll ask her. But do you remember how we discussed being respectful to one another? When you say ‘Duh’ I don’t feel respected.”
Maddie rolled her eyes. “Sorry.” The girls had an ethereal beauty that I still couldn’t quite believe. Slender, with long, golden hair and pale skin, perfectly proportioned features. Cat green eyes. They looked nothing like David or me. They were some sort of throwback to an unknown ancestor, or maybe just a lucky combination of genes. I guess it was lucky. People had been staring at them and commenting on their looks since infancy. But now, boys—and men—were starting to look at them in a way that made me uneasy.
My life had turned out to be nothing like I had thought it would. I’d planned on growing old with David, my life continuing on just as it always had. Stupid of me. I’d been the stereotypical clueless wife. My first inkling that something was wrong had been the day Mirna told me she’d seen Iris and David having coffee together. When she said those words, I literally felt the hairs on the back of my neck prickle. That’s a thing that really happens, but it had never happened to me until that moment.
My cell phone buzzed in my back pocket as Maddie and I were climbing the basement stairs to the kitchen. “Let me get this, Maddie, and then I’ll be up. Please, no more yelling.”
“I wasn’t the one yelling, in case you didn’t notice!” Maddie said, and stomped out of the kitchen. I collapsed on a chair at the kitchen island and looked at the caller id. Iris. Why would she be calling?
“Hi,” I said. “What’s up?”
“Nothing, really. Just wondering if you feel like a nightcap. I’ve got a brand new bottle of Baileys.” Iris drank a lot of Baileys, and around Christmas her intake tripled.
“I think I might have to make a Target run for Christmas lights. I can’t seem to find ours.”
“It’s only December 10th—you’ve got plenty of time. Have a Baileys with me.”
I didn’t need much persuading. I’d much rather have a drink than go to Target. Or do anything Christmas related, actually. I keep hoping that somebody, somewhere, will issue a decree that Christmas is henceforth obsolete and we can forget about the whole thing. Maybe not the Baileys part. “Okay,” I said. “Bring it on.”
Iris and I had sort of reconciled our differences since David left. At least he’d waited until after the twins were born. But then he sprang it on me. And to be honest, I think part of the reason Iris stopped being so vile was the schadenfreude of seeing my life become such an unbelievable disaster. One minute—perfect life—next minute—in the toilet.
When I’d asked David about Mirna seeing him with Iris, at Garibaldis, he had an explanation. “Iris needed to borrow some money, and she didn’t want you to know,” he’d said, looking guilty. “So I said I’d meet her at Garibaldi’s to discuss the situation.”
He’d loaned her a large amount, and agreed to make it interest free. He really should have checked with me first, because I was his wife, but whatever. Didn’t bother me that much once I knew what was going on. I was really more annoyed with Iris than with David.
But David continued to behave strangely, an unfamiliar evasiveness in the way he spoke to me, the way he often worked late. I was preoccupied with the pregnancy and planning for the arrival of two babies, and didn’t have time to get to the bottom of things. Until suddenly, I did.
“Lily,” David said, one drizzly Sunday afternoon while I was nursing the twins on the sofa. They were three months old, and colicky, and I was so bleary and foggy all the time that I hardly knew if I were coming or going. But I knew something was wrong when I heard that one word. My name.
I looked up from the sore breast that Maddie—or maybe it was Lizzy—was gumming. It felt like someone was slicing my nipple with a razor blade. “What?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”
“I want a divorce.” He said it just like that. No beating around the bush. Just, ‘I want a divorce’. I knew there had to be another woman. We hadn’t had any arguments—I was too tired to argue. And, instantly, I knew why he had been strange and evasive throughout all those months of pregnancy. Those months when I was the size of an orca, and could never find a comfortable position. The morning sickness, the indigestion, the constant doctor appointments and the fear that something was going to go wrong. All that time he had been seeing some other woman.
“Who?” I asked. My pulse pounded in my ears.
He had the decency to look embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I didn’t plan it, it just happened.”
“Who the fuck is it?” I said.
Still, he hesitated. I felt like screaming. “It’s Mirna,” he said, finally.
He told me the whole sordid story, because I had to know. It was pathetic. She played him like a master. I knew she’d been having some financial difficulties, and I knew she’d always liked David, and that David had liked her, but it had never crossed my mind that she would finagle things behind the scenes to steal him. Because that’s what she did. And I have to hand it to her, she was good. She pulled it off perfectly, just like she did everything else in her life. So I let him go. It wasn’t like I had a choice, anyway. At least he pays the child support on time, so–lucky me.
The doorbell rang. “Look what I found!” Iris said. She was holding a bottle of Baileys in one hand and a bag of Christmas lights in the other. “I’ve got millions. If you need more, just say the word.”
I pulled out two of my largest wine glasses, plunked in some ice and filled them both to the brim with Baileys. We clinked our drinks together. “To sisterhood,” I said.
