Happy Halloween!

It’s been six years since I’ve walked through this door. The house is even worse for wear than the last time I saw it. The faded mint green paint is chipping, the porch is sagging to one side, and the boards are rotting and moldy. The roof needs replacing as well, or the house should simply be torn down. That would be easiest.

I can’t believe I am doing this. If she brings up our last argument, hoping to pick up where we left off, I will leave again and stay gone, I swear it.

I knock, hearing the horde of cats on the other side of the front door scurry and skitter. The broken panes of the front window and the stench leaking from the seams of the door is heartbreaking to me and I can’t fathom how she lives like this – but I won’t ask. I won’t prod and beg again. She will never change so it’s not worth the argument, I remind myself.

I can hear mother’s slippers kicking through the garbage in the hall. That crunching sound brings back unpleasant memories of CPS stalking down the same halls, searching for me to take me and ship me off to some asshole who would ignore me for a government paycheck. Or worse.

I cringe. That’s the past and I need to leave it there according to my therapist.

The door finally opens. She’s made me wait out here for nearly ten minutes all because she can’t wade through the crap she leaves everywhere. It takes all I have not to scream or run when she opens the door. The smell overwhelms me. My mother stands there in her soiled robe with roaches crawling over the toe of her slippers. I can’t see the floor for all of the cat shit and papers and would probably see things I don’t want to see. Who knows what horrors lie beneath?

Make this quick.

“Hey, mom,” I said a little too loud. My smile feels so fake and I know she must see right through me.

She looks at me, squinting against the morning sunlight. The garbage truck is turning the corner and her next-door neighbor’s car engine revs to life.

Is she going to let me in, or make stand out here in the heat?

She scoots off to the side, allowing me entrance. Not even a hello from her. I wonder if she even knows who I am or perhaps thinks that I’m another visitor from the city.

“Lauren,” she scoffs, and I am somewhat relieved that she recognizes me. “What pulled you all the way out here?”

“I came to see if you were okay, mom.”

“Don’t call me mom,” she snaps. “You been gone for years. All of a sudden you show up and expect to call me mom?”

She wades through more crap as I follow her into the living room – or what used to be the living room. As I get farther into the house it seems to get worse. The smell is definitely worse. I make a mental note to hold whatever bathroom urges I have in.

“I don’t want to talk about when I left. I just want to see how you are doing.”

I am trying to keep my emotions in check but it is difficult. I had forgotten how she can be. She can make you feel so small and insignificant with just a look. And it doesn’t matter that she lives like a slob with trash and food and crap on the floors, somehow she can make me believe that she is far above me.

She sighed hard. “I’m fine. I been fine. Is that it? Is that all you wanted to know?”

I nod. She’s obviously not fine, but she also obviously doesn’t want my help. She doesn’t say anything else and I’m not ready to leave yet. I haven’t decided if I am calling protective services or not. I should. I shouldn’t hesitate because this environment is dangerous.

I sigh. I feel so lost right now. I wander down the hall that leads to my old bedroom. It also leads to Sarah’s bedroom, and realizing that, hurts a little. It’s been twenty years since she disappeared and the pain is so acute it feels like she went missing yesterday.

“This must be how mom feels every day,” I mumble.

They never found her body, but then again, they hadn’t needed to. Robert Walpole admitted that he had taken her from our yard. I don’t want to think about what he said he had done to her.

Pictures of the two of us line the hall. People always think it’s strange when I tell them that I was a twin. Without the other twin, no one really believes you. When she went missing, it was like half of myself disappeared, we were so close.

Most of the pictures were old and dusty, the frames decrepit and covered in roach poop. Seeing the state of the bathroom as I walked by was the last straw – I was definitely calling protective services.

“Mom?”

I stop. Was there someone else here?

“Mom,” the voice calls again. “Is that you in the hall?”

Besides my missing twin, I am an only child. Did my mom pick up some poor kid and bring them to this hell hole?

“Hello?” I call out. “Who are you?”

Sarah’s bedroom door cracks open and I can see a little girl standing there, her silhouette tall and slender. She has to be around ten, maybe eleven.

“Who are you?” she asks me in return.

“I’m Lauren. I’m Bonnie’s daughter.”

“Lauren?”

The girl seems spooked, so I point to the pictures on the wall. “That’s me with my sister when we were about your age.”

I’m looking at the other pictures as I walk nearer to her room, and the pictures are newer. There are some recent photos of mom and the little girl. But it can’t be the girl. She looks just like Sarah.

“What are you doing snooping through my house, Lauren?”

“Mom, who is the girl you have staying in Sarah’s room?”

I turn to look at her, but she’s looking past me and at Sarah’s door. I hear the door creak again and know the girl is coming out into the hallway. I turn and my knees almost give.

It is Sarah. She looks just as she did the day she went missing.

“How?” I can feel my mouth falling open as I say it.

“She came back after you left.” Mom said it so matter-of-factly.

“It can’t be,” I said. “This isn’t Sarah, mom. You found some girl on the street who looks like Sarah and brought her in but this isn’t Sarah.”

“Do you want to see my birthmark?” asks the imposter.

I answer quickly. “No.”

She leaves her bedroom, Sarah’s bedroom, and makes her way down the hall toward us. “Do you want me to tell you about the secret language we used to share?”

I shake my head no. How can she know about that? Easy, I tell myself. Most twins have a secret language. It is a lucky guess.

“Do you want me to tell mom about the time that you kicked the neighbor boy, John Andrews, because he wanted to kiss you? It made you feel dirty so you kicked him. Boys touching you always made you feel dirty.”

“Who the hell are you?” I ask.

“It’s Sarah. I already told you,” mom says from somewhere behind me.

I am so angry I feel like screaming. “Cut the crap, mom! This isn’t Sarah. If the real Sarah were here then she would be thirty-two, just like me. This kid is still . . . a kid. It’s not Sarah.”

My mom just gives me a blank look so I storm to the kid and grab her by the arm. If she really is Sarah, then there should be a birthmark high on her left shoulder, shaped like Florida. I yank her sleeve up, ignore that she’s wearing Sarah’s favorite Rainbow Bright t-shirt, and expect to see nothing. I feel like vomiting when I see the Florida birthmark.

I let her go. Touching her burns like holding onto a bad dream. It’s then that I notice the stench coming from her bedroom.

“She came home after you left. She should have been seventeen, like you, but she was still a little girl. The things she told me, the things she knew, I knew it was Sarah. My Sarah. But she wasn’t quite the same anymore. Sarah needed me in a way that you have never needed me.” My mother’s cold voice fluttered down the hallway.

I couldn’t hold the tears back. “I always needed you. Did you think it was easy for me losing my twin? The other half of me? And then to lose you to your shopping and your dumpster dives? I couldn’t do it any longer. You wanted me to keep you afloat but it wasn’t my job to be your mother!”

I can’t look at her as I say it because it will either destroy her, or she will be completely unfazed.

“It was your job to be a decent daughter,” she hisses. “You were always so lazy and self-entitled. I used to wonder why Sarah was taken and not you.”

I am not going to cry. She doesn’t deserve my tears.

I ignore her as best I can. The smell is too great to ignore any longer so I push Sarah out of the way and go into her bedroom. It is packed like the rest of the house, but instead of trash, it is packed with dead bodies. Government officials, inspectors, pest control, all people who have been to the house and could have made mother clean it up. I stumble out, trip over Sarah in the process, and I can feel the bile rising in the back of my throat.

“What is this? Why?” I sob.

Mother answers, “Because my child has to feed.”

I can’t breathe and I’m going to be sick any moment. “This is why you keep the house like this. Your trash hoarding covers up the smell of rot. What is she mom?”

“Well, now that you’ve seen everything we can’t exactly let you leave.”

I turn to look at her but she is already half way back down the hall, leaving me alone with Sarah.

My sister looks to me, her brown eyes, the same eyes I have, have turned red and her teeth have grown to fangs like something out of a horror film. There is no running, not in this house. I came to reconcile with my mother who, after losing my sister, turned into a whole other person. She pushed me out of her life, choosing my sister’s things over me. I guess she wished awful hard to get my sister back. Except it still isn’t Sarah. There’s no warmth, no laughter. And there’s no escape.

“I’ll make it quick, Lauren. I don’t agree with mom. You weren’t hard – she was. She was impossible to live with. When the man came around, I willingly went with him. I would do it all again because it meant that I didn’t have to live under her roof, under her rules. Now, she’s trying to make it up to me.”

She takes my face in her hands, her teeth bared and ready to pierce me. “I always loved you most.”