The woman opposite gets off at Harlem 125th Street and the train trundles on towards Grand Central.
As kids we’d sleep in single beds in the same room. But at five or six years old we started to take naps at the same time. They’d often be just twenty minutes long, that’s all. We got tired at the same time every day, so the synchronised naps worked well. We both fell asleep quickly if we were in the same room and we both woke up together. So, at age twenty-two, we took another power nap. The talking, the honesty, it had all been so tiring. KT told me to take the bed and she’d take the sofa. I insisted she take the bed and I take the sofa. She made it up for me with a tartan blanket and a pillow. She closed the window shutters and got into bed. We both fell asleep in minutes.
Only I didn’t fall asleep.
Because sleep wasn’t part of my plan.
I waited another ten minutes so she’d be in deep sleep. I know her patterns off by heart because they are also my patterns. Her breathing slows the way mine does. She sleeps on her back the same way I do. Her face is turned to the left side to start with, just as mine is. She sleeps with her arms down by her sides under the covers the way I do. So when I crept over to the bed and straddled her holding the pillow she’d lent me, she was pinned down by her own sheet. Her arms were underneath my weight. She tried to move them as she woke and saw me, felt me. But my knees dug into her armpits just as Martinez described. She fought me and I didn’t want that, I wanted a peaceful sleep for her. She’s strong and she tried to wrestle me off but by the time the pillow had been tight against her mouth and nose for a minute or so the fight was leaving her exactly as I had researched. The carbon dioxide poisoning starts to kick in. Consciousness weakens. She went limp. And then she fought back one last time, thrashing with her feet and hands but she couldn’t move. We’re equal weight and almost equal strength and I was on top of her and she was under the sheet. Weakened. I couldn’t hear her words through the pillow, just a dull, distant scream. And then she went quiet.
I disembark the train at Grand Central and walk west towards my hotel.
That afternoon I’d breathed a sigh of relief, the pillow still covering her face, me standing three feet or so away, coming to terms with it all. I steadied myself and then removed the pillow. There are times as a twin when seeing your sibling is a shock. Most times it’s not, it’s perfectly normal, but once a year maybe there is something inexplicably unsettling about seeing yourself away from your own body. One time I saw my twin wearing a dress I’d also bought, unbeknownst to her, and the shock of seeing what it would actually look like on me shook me to my core. You see yourself in a dress through the mirror in a store and that’s one thing. You never get to see a full three-sixty of how it fits your hips or how your legs really look. That night I saw her face. I closed her eyelids, my fingertips covered the whole time because, although our DNA is practically identical, our prints are not. I straightened her sheets. I placed the blanket on her bed and the pillow back with hers. The room was quiet and dark, slivers of streetlight meeting her cheek from the slats of the window shutters. I knelt at her bedside and I told her I loved her.
Chapter 34
I walk from Grand Central to the park. I find a quiet place away from all the tourist hot-spots – the lake, the fountain, the zoo, the rink – and, using my bag as a shield, I slip off my wig and hat. Then I unpick the hem of my skirt until it’s down to my ankles.
Nobody ever tells you how fast you’ll become accustomed to luxury.
I walk into the Ritz-Carlton.
Serious luxury, I mean. I’d have been ecstatic with a superior double in a four-star business hotel. But this. That incredible double-window panorama of the park. My bathroom is the size of an average living room, with a tub that fills in about a minute and a shower that makes me want to stay in there all day long. I open the door and climb in. All the complimentary toiletries are Asprey, a brand I’ve never heard of, but now I’m not sure I can live without them. Maybe, with almost fifty thousand in cash, I won’t need to.
I let the water heat the back of my neck. My mind wanders. To Scott Sbarra. What he’s doing right now. Who he’s with. What he smells like and if he feels guilty about our ‘date’。
After an hour I slip out of the hotel and head down Sixth Avenue clutching the Faraday bag with my two phones within. Luckily my room is available again in the Bedfordshire Midtown Hostel, so I pay up front in cash for six nights. I leave, and take out both phones. I’ll appear on cell tower maps now. I’m traceable. I have a register.