Tandem by Jamie Kahn

There was no beauty in the scene in front of Edna. She held a baby in her right arm; the left sagged empty with missing weight of a second. A ripe and bitter aura had come alive right when the babies were born; one blue faced, one pink. One in hell, she had thought, the other who had created it. It was only now, as she lay on the scratchy sheets and stared into the whiteness, that Edna began to understand that the sting that was splitting her in two was always going to follow her. She wondered if she could make her girls share a birth certificate, at least.

The baby—the one still wild and alive—cried in her arms, and Edna ached all the way from the space between her collarbones to the pocket of raw flesh between her thighs. She felt flatly robbed. There was something ugly in this baby’s face, her eyes like little black pools. Devilish. How could this one grow? How could she keep on crying like this, tainted in original sin twice the helping of anyone? 

Edna was alone in the hospital. Her mother had tried to make it on time, but the babies had rushed out like she was slicked with butter from the inside. So fast for twins, the doctor had said. He’d never seen anything like it.

Edna wasn’t sure she should name the little blue baby, the one who did not cry or move but still very much existed in the world. The nurse said she had to. 

“What’s your name?” Edna asked.

“My name? Perla.”

Edna didn’t like the name much, but she was so tired. “Very well, then,” she said.

She named the little pink baby Perla, and gave the blue baby the name she had loved from the very start. It was all she could do when she found she could no longer say it out loud.

Perla cried in the crib for her whole first year, more wet and desperate and forceful than she had been at the time of her birth. Many days Edna couldn’t do a thing beyond listening to the ring of her cries bounding around the nursery walls and out into the hallway. She didn’t like being reminded of the baby’s humanity. It felt like a taunt, a reminder of the other one that wasn’t. Edna wondered if someone that tiny could curse a person’s whole life, if she could bring upon Edna’s personal apocalypse? If she already had?

Edna tried to devote herself to the job of mothering, but being around Perla felt like an itch—a ringing reminder of what she was capable of, what she had already done. Perla had the ability to reach, demand, take. Edna began to pray, often with Perla in her arms, sometimes wishing there was a force with enough power to replace Perla with her sister, to sneak in and switch them out while Edna slept. She thought about offering sacrifices and making promises, but even Edna didn’t think God was the bargaining type. 

Night after night, Edna listened to Perla cry until she tired herself out. Often, it took hours. Edna’s ears grew sore from the screams and wails, and she woke tired and limp each morning, dragging herself to the nursery. She breastfed, staring dead straight at the double-wide crib, and said to Perla again and again, “You’re all I have. You’re all I have. You’re all I have.”

By her elementary years, Perla became pleasant and beautiful—a carefree child. She frequently rode her bike to her grandmother’s house in the afternoons and spent hours there. In school she made friends, was invited to birthday parties and sleepovers, was liked by adults and peers. She became a sweet and well-adjusted girl, her cheeks keeping the same rosy pink from the day of her birth, her smile constant and unassuming. Even in her most private moments at home, she played peacefully, said please and thank you, and offered to help do the dishes after dinner. 

Edna never stopped seeing Perla like an unwelcome houseguest.

Once, when Perla was nine, Edna left her alone in the back garden and hid to watch. When the child thought she was alone, she began to pluck tiny leaves off a bush by the house, one by one. She tore them apart in her hand, gleeful, like she was practicing for a chaotic dismemberment. She made a pile of the once-living garnishes at her feet. When Edna made herself known by rustling with the screen door, Perla stopped. 

Edna knew she could never tell anyone the truth about Perla. Nobody who knew them would believe her. Even her own mother had taken a special liking to the girl. She couldn’t understand. 

Edna never stopped feeling the need to keep an eye on Perla. She watched her around corners, through doorways. In lingering glances that stirred around her when she got out of the car and walked into school each morning. To Edna, her daughter was like a candle always aflame—if left unattended, who knew what she could manage to burn down?

The twins’ birthdays were the worst for Edna. She always found herself irritable and overwhelmed. The knowledge that another year had passed—that her little baby girl should be Perla’s age but was instead frozen in time—plagued every minute. Because of this, Perla’s grandmother was often the one who made the cake and threw the celebration. They all liked it better that way.

On the eve of her thirteenth birthday, Perla said, “I think I’d like to become a vegetarian.” Her dark bangs hung above chubby cheeks. She gleamed. 

“Why is that?” Edna stirred in her seat.

“I just don’t like the idea of hurting another living thing.”

“Funny.” Edna said. She was being tested.

“How is that funny?” Perla asked. She was wide-eyed and had a innocent look on her face. She reminded Edna of the day she was born.

“I don’t know.” Edna stood up suddenly and started clearing the plates. When Perla tried to help, she slapped her away. 

Edna had trouble sleeping that night. She tossed and turned. She got hot and sticky, then cold and clammy, then hot again. She writhed. She heard the slam of the front door against the wall and sat up. Someone had just come in, or out. 

Edna switched on all the lights in her path as she made her way towards the front of their little house. A cold breeze skirted past her. When she turned to face it, sure enough, the door was open, smacking against the wall behind it. Edna pressed it closed. Perla was stirring something up. She could just tell. 

From the kitchen, Edna retrieved a knife. Not the largest one they had—she wanted to be reasonable.

“Perla?” She called down the hallway towards her room, and heard nothing. Not even so much as a rustle of sheets or a tired groan. “Perla!” she shouted this time, still into the dry void of silence. She could feel it. This would be the undoing her daughter had always planned. She had arrived at it, led to slaughter like a naïve pig. She held the knife up to poke into Perla’s room, though she doubted it would make much difference.

“Perla?” Edna whispered. Her voice wobbled, though she wasn’t sure why. But Perla was not there.

The bed was untouched, the lavender sheets tucked neatly at the corners. Perla had not even bothered to conceal her absence. A folded paper sat on top of the pillow. Edna felt the weight between her fingers as she unfolded it. Though it took her time to read the name in full, Edna’s hands shook when recognized her lost daughter’s birth certificate. There, in print, that name she still couldn’t say. Her hands shook. The knife fell. The birth certificate followed.

Edna rushed to the kitchen, a tangle of shaking nerves. She had to call her mother. Her house was always the first place Perla turned to. Edna shuffled on the chilly tile. The phone rang and rang. Perla was going to do something awful to her own grandmother. Edna was sure of it.

When the phone ceased ringing, the other end was silent. 

“Mother,” Edna cried. “Is she there?  I need you to believe me. There is something wrong with that child. She was a curse, Mother.  She strangled my real baby to death. You weren’t there when she was born, but I was and I know. There is something wrong there. So wrong. Just so wrong.”

Edna sobbed into the phone. “Mother?” 

“I’m so sorry,” the voice on the line croaked. Perla. Then it sounded like she dropped the phone. There was crying, conversation—all muffled. Edna thought she heard her mother’s voice.

“Mother! Pick up! Please!” Edna cried. The phone shut her out with the snap of the receiver and the hum of the dial tone. 

It was dark and the sharp, starless twilight reached for her through the kitchen window. The girl spoiled all that she touched. Nothing could have prepared her for a child like that, Edna thought. She wiped her tears and looked around her for the knife, unable to remember where it had gone. No matter—she had her two hands, and that was enough. It had to be. She headed for the door, letting it swing behind her. She trembled into the black night feeling like a creature of final justice. She couldn’t rest now, she thought. She had been robbed of everything. 

Jamie Kahn is a Brooklyn-based writer with a BA in English and Writing from Cedar Crest College. Her work has been featured in The Hunger, Rag Queen Periodical, Maudlin House, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, and Oyster River Pages. She is a reader for The Barcelona Review.

20 October 2021