Dead Sleep

“It’s amazing that you found each other,” Lenz says without a trace of judgment in his eyes. “This did not end well, of course.”

“We managed to keep our relationship secret for most of the year. During that time, he opened up about Vietnam, and through his eyes I experienced things my father must have seen as well. Seen, but kept out of his letters. Even out of his photographs. In April, one of David’s neighbors saw us kissing at the creek behind his house – with my fla

“A future?” Lenz finishes.

“Right. Two nights later, he went down to the creek and managed to drown himself. The coroner called it an accident, but David had enough scotch in him to sedate a bull.”

“I’m sorry.”

My eyes seek out the porthole again, a round well of night. “I like to think he was unconscious when he went under the water. He probably thought his death would end the scandal, but it only got worse. Jane had a breakdown brought on by social embarrassment. My mother just drank more. There was talk of putting us in foster homes. I went back to school with my head high, but it didn’t last. My Star Student award was revoked. Then my appointment book went blank. No one wanted me shooting their family portraits. I’d done a lot of the senior pictures, but people didn’t even pick them up. They had them reshot elsewhere. When I refused to abase myself in contrition, various mothers told the school board that they didn’t want their daughters exposed to a ‘teenage Jezebel.’ They really called me that. Before long, the ostracism bled over onto Jane. She was cut dead a hundred times on the street by parents who thought she was me. At that point, I did what David should have done. I had three thousand dollars in the bank. I took two thousand, packed my clothes and cameras, rode the bus to New Orleans, got a judge to emancipate me, and scratched up a job developing prints for the staff photographers at the Times-Picayune. A year later, I was a staff photographer myself.”

“Did you continue to support your family financially?”

“Yes. But things between Jane and me only got worse.”

“Why?”

“She was obsessed with being a Chi-O. She thought-”

“Excuse me? A what?”

“A Chi-Omega. It’s a sorority. The apogee of southern womanhood at Ole Miss. Blue-eyed blondes raised with silver spoons in their mouths. Like that song, ‘Summertime’? ‘Your daddy’s rich, and your mama’s good-lookin’…‘”

“Ah.”

“Several of her cheerleaders friends were going to pledge Chi-O. Their sisters were already in, or their mothers. Like that.”

“Legacies,” says Lenz.

“Whatever. Jane really thought she had a chance. She thought I was the only obstacle to her getting it. She claimed active Chi-Os had seen me around Oxford on my bike, looking ratty and saying whatever I felt like, and thought I was her. That probably did happen. But the truth was, she never had a chance. Those bitches wouldn’t have given her that. They got their self-esteem from excluding girls like Jane, who wanted it terribly but had some flaw. And Jane had several. She had no money – therefore no high-end clothes, car, or any of the other trappings; her father had been a celebrity, but not the right kind; and then there was me. Jane was prettier than all of them, too. You hear beauty is its own aristocracy, but that’s not always true. A lot of attractive women fear beauty.”

“Interesting, isn’t it?” Lenz’s eyes play over my body in a strange way, not lustfully, but in a coldly appraising ma

“She wouldn’t leave the house. But when they started talking about making us wards of the state, she went back to school. She graduated salutatorian, but she never got to be a Chi-O. She pledged Delta Gamma, which was considered decent but definitely second tier.”

“You’ve asserted how beautiful Jane was. You’re her identical twin. How do you feel about your own looks?”

“I know I’m attractive. But Jane cultivated her looks in a way I never have. Toward the ideals of southern beauty, you know? That’s a weird thing that extends from your appearance right into your personality. For me looks are secondary. I’ve used them to gain advantage in my work -I’d be a fool not to – but it makes me uncomfortable. Beauty is an accident of genetics for which I deserve no credit.”

“That’s disingenuous, to say the least.”

This makes me laugh. “You’re a man, okay? You don’t know how many times I’ve listened to my mother whine about how much ‘potential’ I have, that if I’d just do something with it, fix myself up a little – like Jane, is the subtext – I’d find a wonderful provider who’d marry me and take care of me for the rest of my life. Well, wake up, Mom. I don’t need a goddamn provider, okay? I am one.”

“For whom do you provide, Jordan?”

“Myself.”

“I see.” Lenz looks at his watch, then taps his knees. “Jane married a wealthy attorney?”

“That’s right.”

“Jump to her disappearance. You didn’t handle it well? The file says you interfered with the investigation.”

“I don’t take exclusion well, okay? I’m a journalist. This was my sister. And the FBI was getting exactly nowhere with the case. I badgered them for the victims’ families, walked the streets, worked my old contacts at the Times-Picayune. But none of it did any good.”

“So what did you finally do?”

“Took off and tried to bury myself in work. Literally. I went to Sierra Leone. I took crazy risks, had some close calls. Word got back to my agency. They begged me to slow down, so I did. I slowed down so much that I couldn’t get out of bed. I was sleeping around the clock. When I finally came out of that, I couldn’t sleep at all. I had to have prescription drugs just to close my eyes without seeing Jane being raped, tied hand and foot in some dark room.”

“Was rape a particular fear of hers?”

“It’s a particular fear for every woman.”

“What about you? You must have placed yourself in some very dangerous situations vis-a-vis rape. War zones full of men. Teenagers with guns.”

“I can take care of myself. Jane’s a lot softer.”

Lenz nods slowly. “If we found Jane tomorrow – alive -what would you say to her? In other words, what have you most regretted not saying to her?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“I’ve explained why-”

“Some things are too personal, Doctor. Let’s leave it at that.”

Lenz rubs his face with his hands, then inclines his head to me. “Some years ago, I worked a very difficult murder case. I lost my wife during that investigation. She was murdered. Violently. Viciously. And I felt responsible. Perhaps I was. We had grown apart in our marriage, but that hardly lessened the agony. We’ve all done terrible things to the people we love, Jordan. It’s our nature as humans. If there’s something like that between you and your sister, it would help me to know. To see her as she really was.”

The pain in Lenz’s eyes looks genuine, but he’s an old hand at this game. He could have a stock of stories like this one, barter beads he uses to elicit intimacies.

“There’s nothing like that.”

He takes a frustrated breath through his nose, and I’m reminded of a surgeon working to remove a bullet, his gloved thumb and finger in forceps, trying first one angle and then another, probing for a route to the heart of the wound.