It was the sort of memory that lingered and haunted, lurking in the very marrow of her bones. It arrived when Hazel’s pulse raced—every time she stepped onstage or drove too fast down the highway, she was transported. In the memory, Hazel was just a pumping mass of tissue, blurry and floating. Around her, a darkness that beat like a drum.
There was evidence of this time, in the ultrasound her mother kept balanced on the nightstand. Within the silver frame, Hazel and her sister were two little specks of molecule, growing together in this dark and primitive space. Her mother loved that photo, because you could see it even then, before either of them had ears or toenails. Two tiny webbed hands reaching out to each other, like deep-sea creatures in silent conversation.
In every important second of Hazel’s life, she could hear the phantom sound of her sister’s heartbeat layered over her own, as if they were still suspended together in the womb. It was a familiar syncopation. The most comforting thump. And no matter how far apart they were, how different or distant, Hazel’s hand would lift, always, to meet Jenny’s.
*
The morning Jenny came home from college, Hazel sat in the shower, letting the water beat scalding lashes onto the curve of her back. The seat her parents had installed in the corner of the tub was slippery beneath her bare thighs, and Hazel soaped her knee carefully, running the sponge over scar tissue. The place where the doctors had stitched up her skin was still a furious, blistering red—she could see the exact spot where her own ligament had been reconstructed, replaced with that of a stranger who had died right before surgery. Often, when Hazel looked at her knee, she thought of that nameless person, now just ash or bone.
She shampooed quickly, then turned off the water, listening as her hair dripped onto the shower floor. Downstairs, Hazel’s parents were frantic—her mother was banging idly around the kitchen, fussing with the marinade for the Christmas brisket. Her father’s shovel scraped against the driveway as he cleared the snow for Jenny’s car. They’d been in a blustery panic for days; her mother had wrapped the gifts weeks ago, and they’d been waiting stale beneath the tree ever since, dust gathering on glossy paper. Hazel’s father worked from home, and her mother had transformed his office into a guest room for the occasion, returning from the department store one frigid afternoon, arms filled with curtains, sheets, a generic framed photograph of a beach at sunset. The frenzy, when she realized she’d forgotten the pillowcases at the checkout counter. I don’t think he’ll care if you use the old ones, Hazel had said, from her perpetual spot on the sunken couch.
Hazel stood gingerly, her right foot raised to keep the weight off her knee—she bent over the edge of the slippery porcelain, leaning for the towel. Her arm cramped with the stretch, the muscles limp, unused for months. As she hopped to sit on the lid of the toilet seat, Hazel twisted the towel around her hair, wondering exactly where Jenny was now.
It was a game they’d played as children. A Summoning, they called it.
I can tell when you’re sick, Jenny had said, arriving in the elementary school nurse’s office before their mother had even been called. And I can tell when you’re sad. Jenny would shake Hazel awake in the dead of night, pulling her from the worst of her nightmares. I can read your mind, Jenny would say—and when Hazel startled with the fact of the intrusion, Jenny only looked confused. What? she would ask. Can’t you read mine, too? Hazel would burrow deep into herself, trying to conjure the interior of Jenny’s body the way she conjured her own. She never could read Jenny’s mind, but this didn’t stop her from trying, or from claiming that she had the same telepathic power. You’re lying, she’d guess, when Jenny faked a stomachache. You like that boy, she’d tease, when Jenny crossed her arms over her chest at the middle-school locker. Hazel wouldn’t call this a Summoning—not the kind of thing Jenny could do. It was just intuition, many years of noticing. Hazel knew her sister’s face.
Jenny would be driving now. The route from Northern Vermont University to their suburb outside Burlington was just over an hour. A Nirvana song would be playing, humming crackly from the radio, Jenny’s hands fluttering on the steering wheel. Jenny’s new boyfriend would be sitting in the passenger’s seat—here, the image faded, blurred.
Hazel gathered her crutches, wiped the steam from the mirror. In the dim winter light, she looked pale, grim, lifeless. She did not look like Jenny. She did not even look like herself.
*
Hazel’s real self was not this bathroom ghost. Her real self had cheeks blushing pink beneath scorching bulb lights, hair sprayed back into a slick, glossy bun. She wore long black lashes, glued sticky to her eyelids. Her collarbone jutted out beneath the straps of a corset that tapered down into a custom-designed tutu, glitter dabbed subtly along the ridge of her chest, engineered to reflect the stage lights with a turn or a leap.