Read part 1 here.
Twenty-five years ago, we were nine. Angela was “it."
I could hear her shouting from around the corner of our apartment building, “… NINE … EIGHT … SEVEN …” I sprinted across the burnt grass. It was one of those brutal summer days in suburban Kentucky where the heat quivered in the air.
At the far corner of the property was a rusted metal shed that held the maintenance equipment. Out of breath and slick with sweat, I wedged myself in beside it, hiding in the dark crevice between the shed and a chain-link fence. I’d dirtied my tank top, but the mass of overgrown kudzu that covered my hiding spot made me nearly invisible.
Angie’s voice echoed off a neighboring building, “… TWO … ONE! READY OR NOT, HERE I COME!"
Controlling my breath, I tried to make myself as small as possible. Hide-and-seek was our favorite game, but for different reasons. I was always the one who hid. I enjoyed the sensation of disappearing and the idea of someone looking for me. My twin sister, Angela, always did the seeking. She enjoyed the hunt.
From behind the leaves, I watched her emerge from the side of the apartment building and slink through the midday sun. Angela had long black hair and dark features. At nine years old she was gangly and thin but already filled with a peculiar audacity - a spark of impulsivity that seemed to dance behind her big, brown eyes. Mom called her “a pistol” or “a firecracker." I interpreted that to mean “dangerous.”
As I watched, I realized that she was making a show of looking for me. She tip-toed across the dry grass like a silent movie villain, cartoonishly searching, with one hand shading her eyes. Then she ran over to a plastic bin, the building’s communal outdoor toy chest, and rooted through it, shouting, “Ellis! Oh, Ellis! Are you in here? Where are you?”
Picking a baseball from the bin, she tossed it in the air a few times, scratching her chin as though lost in thought. “Where could he be?” She wondered aloud. “Oh! I know!” Then she swiveled on her toes and threw the ball at me as hard as she could.
It whistled through the air before smacking the side of the metal shed just inches from my face. The deafening clang of the rusted metal siding shocked me, and I jumped out screaming, “Hey, watch it!” But Angie just laughed, doubling over at her own cleverness.
“How’d you know where I was?” I asked.
“I saw the tool shed.”
I turned and looked at the structure behind me. “But how did you see me?"
“I just did. When I closed my eyes and counted.”
“How?”
“In my head, dummy!” And then she fell over laughing.
---
The last number I had for the hospital just rang. I checked online but the Kentucky Division of Behavioral Health's website was a mess of broken links. Eventually, I got through to someone at Health and Human Services and that’s how I learned that Hartman-Neal Psychiatric Hospital closed a week prior.
“You can’t just close a hospital, can you?”
“There were issues with the pipes, sir. Legionella, I believe." She sounded like a bored, government functionary who didn’t need this conversation.
“So what happened to the patients?”
"Most were transferred to different facilities in the system. Are you looking for information on anyone in particular?”
“Yes."
"Well, if you’re listed as the primary caregiver, I could get that for you."
Angie’s primary caregiver? That would have been Mom. “What if I'm a cop?”
“Then there’s a form you can fill out.” I could hear her smirking.
So I leveled with her. “What if… What if I’m looking for my sister and I think she might be in a lot of trouble?”
She paused. “Then… there’s a form.”
I sighed so she could hear it. “Well, what would you do if you needed to know where your sick sister is right now?”
She paused, weighing her options. “Where are you calling from?”
“Los Angeles.”
“Mm,” she mumbled. “She’s probably not far then.”
After hanging up, I searched the Louisville Journal for stories mentioning the hospital and got a handful of hits, mostly about Legionella. One of them stuck out, however. “Kentucky Buses Hundreds of Mentally Ill Patients To Cities Around The Country.”
It was an exposé about the beleaguered Hartman-Neal putting their patients on Greyhounds headed to far-flung locations across America. The writer drew a connection between slashed funding and “mistakes” made. Many of them arrived at their destinations with no plan, no relatives, and no funds. The hospitals in the receiving cities called it "patient dumping."
One line of the article stood out to me. “Nearly a third of patients released were sent to California, including several hundred to Los Angeles County.”
---
What’s so unnerving about the person on the other side of the mirror is that they are both exactly you and exactly the opposite of you, which is an apt description of my twin sister, Angela. Angie was strong where I was weak. Confident where I was self-conscious. Sick where I was sane.
I understood from a young age that the world was dangerous, and I withdrew from it. I remember watching as people flitted through social gatherings, dipping and diving through small talk like figure skaters. I felt very much apart from that experience. I was always more comfortable observing or dissecting than participating. People called me “quiet” when they knew I could hear them and “haunted” when they didn’t.
Angie was the opposite. She was maniacally social and attracted people like a magnet. Beautiful and effervescent, there was something devious and fun about her. As a kid, when you were with Angie, it was like watching a rated ‘R’ movie or sneaking a drink from the liquor cabinet. There was something about her that felt wrong.
I remember she used to tell kids on the school bus that we were Siamese twins. She could hold a dozen sixth-graders under her spell with the story. “We were born with our hands fused together. Doctors had to cut us apart.”
Her audience of schoolgirls would squint at one another, neither believing her nor refuting her, so Angie would shrug and say, “Ask him.” They’d turn to look at me at the back of the bus, so I’d look up from my book and nod my head, confirming the lie. Pretty soon the whole school knew our fake origin story, ridiculous as it was.
But in our freshman year of high school, something happened. Where once Angie had been bright and witty, she became moody. Where she was effervescent, she’d become dark. She had always been impulsive, but now she was erratic.
On an October afternoon, I was sitting in the back of my social studies class when Officer Sullivan, the school’s police officer, came to the door and asked for me. “Ellis? Can you come over here, please?” There was a low chorus of “ooohs” from the class as I stood up. “Grab your things, son,” Officer Sullivan said, and the “ooohs” grew louder.
I picked up my backpack and followed him into the hall. Tall and thick, Sullivan led me to the front office, saying, “You’re not in any trouble." When I didn’t respond, he explained, “We just want to make sure you’re safe.” He took me to the school secretary, who asked me to sit in the lobby until my mother came to pick me up. I asked her why, but she just shook her head.
I slumped into the glass-fronted lobby, dropped my backpack, then looked outside to see Angie, with handcuffs on her wrists and ankles, being dragged by several cops, kicking and screaming, into the back of a waiting police cruiser. With her hair smeared across her face, she struggled and jerked to free herself. Once locked in the back of the squad car, she lay on the seat and kicked at the windows with the heels of her sneakers until she was driven away.
I wouldn’t find out until I returned to school a few weeks later that the vice-principal found mom’s chef knife in Angie’s locker. When administrators asked for an explanation, what she said frightened them. For the next two weeks, Angie slept in mom’s room and we weren’t allowed to see each other. There were a lot of concerned phone calls from the school and a series of doctor visits for my sister.
One day, a van parked in front of our building and I watched from my bedroom as Angie was escorted into it by a heavyset man in nurse’s scrubs. Before she got in, she looked up at our building - right at me - and then she stepped into the van and was gone.
That night, in a terse conversation at the dinner table, mom stared at her plate as she told me, “Angela has something called a recurring delusion, honey. And she thinks that if she hurts you, it might make it stop. When she knows that’s not true, she can come back to live with us again.” She looked up at me, crying openly. “I love you both... So much. But your sister’s very sick right now. And we don’t know if she’s going to get better."
That was how my sister became my secret. We didn’t talk about her anymore. I understood that her illness never changed, but only because I was never informed of any changes. In fact, I was told nothing. As a child, I was never taken to visit her, and as an adult, I maintained the tradition.
I never wrote her. I never called her.
I don’t know why.
