“He said the marriage counselor suggested you take a vacation together.”
“He told you we were seeing a counselor?”
“He said she has this really annoying habit of saying ‘you see’ before making a point. Like ‘You see, you’re misdirecting your anger again,’ or ‘You see, now is a time for compassion.’” Sylvia sat on the floor and pulled her legs underneath her. “Where do you think you’ll go for this vacation?”
“We don’t know.” I couldn’t help but feel, through these secret conversations with my husband, that my sister had gained a kind of power over me. “Did Mark sound like he wanted to go away with me?”
“He said he was on the fence.”
“We’re on the fence about a lot of things.”
She asked if I wanted to hear a song she’d recorded with her old band. I nodded, trying to imagine my husband standing somewhere in our house and listening to my sister’s voice on the other end of the line.
Sylvia slipped a CD into the stereo, battery-operated, on hand for the storms. When the song came on, I recognized it as the one we had danced to many years ago, when we were college students, and felt an awful pang.
“Sylvia,” I said. “That’s David Bowie.”
“Wrong track,” she said. “It’s a mix.” She pressed a button and turned up the volume. A woman’s voice overwhelmed the room. It was hollow, stretched thin, the words so elongated I couldn’t understand the lyrics. An electric guitar kicked in, then drums. Sylvia tapped her fingers against her thighs, bobbed her head. The woman’s voice grew shrill. I heard tambourines, another electric guitar. The song ended with the crash of cymbals.
“Which part were you?” I asked.
“The singer,” she said.
The woman singing had sounded nothing like my sister.
“You don’t believe me?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Fine,” she said. “I’ll play you another.”
The next song opened with rapid-fire guitar and drums, breathless lyrics. I put my hands over my eyes and listened. I haven’t seen her in ages, I told myself. How would I know what her singing voice was like? But the more I listened, the more I knew it wasn’t her.
I uncovered my eyes. Sylvia was dancing, in her sweatpants and socked feet and transparent shirt. The candles cast strange shadows onto her face; I could see the outline of her breasts. She raised her arms, and I caught the glint of the belly-button ring. She opened her mouth wide and words came out, her voice clashing with the singer on the stereo. Was this me in another life, me in an alternate ending? I’d heard stories about twins having secret languages and dreaming the same dreams, but I had no idea if my sister was happy or sad or terrified. She turned the volume even higher. The candles flickered. The apartment was hot.
“Sylvia,” I shouted over the noise. I tried again and again. Finally I got up and put my face close to her face and called her name.
“What?” she screamed back.
“Why am I here?”
* * *
My sister told me that she wanted to change identities. I wouldn’t have to do much, just show up for her job at the Bortaga, a club on Miami Beach, and hang around the apartment for a few days. Sylvia explained this to me after she’d turned off the music and sat back down on the floor. I was still on the couch, studying her face as she spoke. There was a man. He was married. She’d been having an affair with him for the last year. His wife, suspicious, had hired a private detective, who had taken photographs. Once the wife knew what Sylvia looked like and where she lived, she’d started following her. Sylvia would leave her building and see this woman parked on the street, or look over her shoulder while on the sidewalk and spot the woman behind her. She had followed Sylvia to work, the grocery, the park, the post office, the beach, the hardware store, the hair salon. My sister and the married man had decided to end things, but they wanted one last fling. He wanted to take her to the Isle of Youth, an island off the coast of Cuba, Isla de la Juventud in Spanish. There were stories about the isle being a sacred area, a place that hurricanes always missed, a place on the right side of luck.
“But you can’t leave because you have this woman following you,” I said. “And if you and her husband are gone at the same time, she’ll never believe he’s away on business or whatever he plans to tell her.”
“Bingo,” Sylvia said.
“I didn’t see anyone loitering outside your building,” I said. “I didn’t see any suspicious cars.”
“I hope she’s not deranged enough to stalk me during a hurricane,” my sister said.
“When were you planning to leave for this Isle of Youth?”
“Tomorrow night, if I can get you on board.”
“Will the airport be open by then?”
“It’ll be open before noon,” she said. “We know how to recover quickly.”
I heard a loud crash outside. A candle on the coffee table went out.
“You won’t be able to wear the clothes you brought,” Sylvia said. “You’ll have to take things from my closet while I’m gone.”
“What are you doing for work?”
“Stamping hands at a nightclub. One of those ‘in the meantime’ things.”
I stood and walked over to the boarded-up doors. “There’s no way I could pass for you in a nightclub.”
“A comprehensive makeover is in order,” Sylvia said. “Hair, makeup, clothes. The way I’ll send you home will do more for your marriage than any romantic getaway.”
“Speaking of Mark, what am I supposed to tell him?”
“That you’ve decided to extend your stay. That we’re helping the city of Miami with hurricane cleanup. That I’m teaching you to snorkel. It doesn’t matter.”
All of a sudden my sister was behind me. I knew she was there, felt her heat, without turning around. “I think Mark and I have lied to each other enough,” I said.
“Deception is necessary. In marriage, in life. Otherwise the world will just sandblast us away. You have to keep something for yourself.”
“There’s not one good reason why I should do this for you.”
“Well, for one thing, you don’t like where you are right now. You’ve been wanting a change, an escape, for a while.” She put her chin on my shoulder. She touched my hair. “Here’s another one: you’ve always wanted to know what it would be like to be me.”
* * *
The makeover began at midnight. I sat on a stool in the kitchen. Sylvia placed her supplies — a makeup bag, comb, hair spray, scissors, a glass of water — on the counter. She propped a flashlight on top of the microwave, so it shone in my face. She dipped the comb in the water and picked at my hair until it hung straight. She took a few inches off my bangs and then used a white sponge for foundation, a big brush for powder and blush, little brushes for eye shadow. She tweezed my brows, pulled at the skin beneath my eyes as she smudged on black liner and laced mascara through my lashes. She used her thumb to apply red lipstick, another tiny brush for the gloss. She swept my bangs to the side with the comb and dusted them with hair spray. Through all this, we were silent, serious. By the time she finished, the candles were melting into wax stumps and the wind was still howling.
“You’ve got quite a collection of beauty products,” I said.
“I used to work at a salon, before the band,” Sylvia said. “But you wouldn’t know about that, either.”
She held a mirror in front of me. In the half-lit kitchen, it was like looking at myself in a carnival mirror: my face was slimmer, my cheekbones higher, my lips swollen with color, my bangs stiff with hair spray and curving over my left eye. My sister crouched beside me and squeezed her face into the frame. We looked identical. I brought my fingers to my mouth and Sylvia batted my hand away, saying I would mess up my lipstick.