My Twin
After my divorce was finalized, I quit my job. I quit my book club. My monthly poker game. I canceled my gym membership and my weekly tennis lesson. I deleted my social-media accounts. I left every group text.
It’s easier this way.
Now I work from home—an apartment, actually. I’m a freelance copywriter. I microwave nearly all of my meals, and each evening after dinner, I scoop ice cream into a fussy teacup that I got at a consignment shop. I eat it while my TV plays something from one of the various streaming platforms. I watch until I hear the mockingbird’s call. From some unknown tree outside my window, he pleads for me to go to bed. I comply.
In my bedroom, I don’t read. I don’t dream. I wake without an alarm, in the dark, before the sun. I don’t even drink coffee anymore.
When I get lonely, I call my divorce lawyer. She always has answers to my questions.
“Hello, Min Epstein.”
“Hello to you, my friend.”
“We’re friends?”
“If we aren’t, this call will cost you approximately $300.”
We both laugh.
“I’m headed back from my mom’s party now,” Min Epstein says, and I wonder what that’s like. I haven’t talked to my parents since the divorce.
Instead, I ask her if she has any tattoos. She says, “Objection, relevance,” but she eventually says she doesn’t have any, which is what I expected.
I hang up a few minutes later, feeling, as always, less alone.
In the silence that follows our call, I practice slowing my breath. Any minute now, the mockingbird will trill at me to go to bed. Is it the same bird every night or different ones?
I read that they’re male birds luring mates with their fraudulent calls. Like all men.
I stand from my consignment couch, stretching, when a knock sounds at the door. I freeze, unsure what to do. No one aside from random delivery guys has ever knocked on my door, not even Min Epstein. I pay my rent via electronic check to a faceless management company, and I don’t have any of my old friends. It’s nearly 10 in the evening.
There’s a second knock.
“Hello?” I call out, tiptoeing toward the door.
“Hello,” someone—a woman—replies.
I open the door a crack, and in that sliver of space I see my upstairs neighbor, Katie or Karla or something. Occasionally, I hear her boyfriend through my ceiling: Katie/Karla, your tea is ready. Next to their front door hangs a heavy wind chime that goes ballistic during the Santa Anas. I can hear it above us now, already cranky.
I open the door wider. She stands there in sweats and an old T-shirt, flip-flops, her toes painted red as a lunar-new-year envelope. Even this outfit can’t camouflage her youth and beauty. How long before her average-looking boyfriend tires of her perfection and mangles her heart?
She says, “I told Pablo you’d be up!”
“I am,” I say.
“I’m Katie,” she says. “From Unit Four?”
“Simone. Do you need something?”
“Well, I—I had to tell you.” Suddenly, Katie is nervous. No one has had news for me since Frank—
“The strangest thing happened today,” she continues. “I saw your … do you have a twin?”
“A twin? Nope.”
“Oh, well, duh, she said she didn’t either.” Katie grins. “I found your long-lost twin! Hashtag doppelgänger!” She rolls her eyes at her own stupid joke. “I’m telling you, she had your exact hair and the same brown eyes. The same face! Like, she had your big nose.” She blushes. “Sorry—I didn’t mean it in a bad way! I love your nose.”
“Thanks. I know it’s big.”
“Suits your face.”
“Where did you see her?”
“That coffee bar on Fig. The one with the Spanish tiles.”
I pretend I know which one she means. “She works there?” I ask.
Katie explains that my twin was camped out at one of the tables, on her computer. Katie thought she was me, so they talked. The woman goes there a lot to work. She loves their cappuccinos. Katie didn’t get her name and didn’t know mine until now.
I absorb all of this information with a polite smile. As I close the door, Katie’s walking backwards and saying, “Go meet her! She says she’s there a lot. She didn’t believe me about you.”
The wind chime is loud now. Not as loud as the mockingbird though.
There he
