Twining

By Emmanuelle

And we end our focus on true twin stories with this last pair:

Candy and Cindy were born of a Filipino father and an American mother, both Protestant missionaries and visiting university professors. As the case was with parents such as theirs, the twins grew up traipsing from one island to another. Once or twice a week, they would wear their required Sunday best – dress, shoes, socks and hair ribbons all in sinless white. Most days, the twins would be in faded t-shirts and pants or shorts, barefooted or shod in flip-flops, waist-length reddish-brown hair twisted in knots.

As the usual case with identical twins, one would have to be their parents to distinguish Candy from Cindy at first glance. You see, aside from being too pretty, they were also too naughty and too smart. Their main source of fun and preoccupation was making people take Candy for Cindy and Cindy for Candy. They would laugh themselves silly afterwards, with the victims joining in.

The twins were good in all subjects, but Candy excelled more in the languages and the social sciences while Cindy breezed through math and the natural sciences. So, how come they both registered almost the same grades on all subjects when the principals insisted on assigning each twin to different sections throughout elementary and high school to avoid teachers’ confusion? At year’s end, they would end up first honors both, or first and second, the teachers not any wiser about who should be first or second. Candy or Cindy would charge the adviser with favoritism. It would be all in jest, of course.

In college, when both took up Nursing, the same was the case. One fills up for the other’s weakness, one speaks for the other, or one takes over the other – when necessary. Or to liven things up a bit. Or just to banish boredom. The twin graduated with flying colors! Present during their capping, graduation and oath taking ceremonies were the twins’ parents and the twin’s boyfriends, who were brothers too. Not twins though.

Not to forget to mention, the twins sidelined as commercial models during their college years. Their long, healthy, silky wavy hair successfully promoted a popular brand of shampoo! And their fair, clear skin made young women and their mothers rush to the supermarket to clean off rows of a brand of pink soap.

When they went to the USA to work as nurses, the fiancées followed. They had a twin wedding ceremony, what else? They also had a baby each on their first year of marriage.

One day on their second year of stay, Cindy developed high fever with no accompanying colds or cough. It didn’t seem to drop off even after taking a cold bath and popping a lot of acetaminophen. In the middle of the night, her husband Sam dropped off their baby with Candy. He drove Cindy to the hospital where she worked. They refused to admit her. He brought her to two other hospitals farther from the first. These hospitals refused to admit her too. It was a time when the scare of AIDS and EBOLA was at its height.

Cindy was delirious with her fever by then, her breath raspy. So her husband brought her home to make her more comfortable. At dawn, her breath was not raspy anymore. It had stopped.

When Cindy was buried, Sam was inconsolable. He refused to look at Candy; she was so much like Cindy. He refused to look at their baby; it was too much like Cindy and Candy. After the burial, he left the baby in Candy’s care. He left it forever with her.

How would one help mend a broken heart? One can’t. One lets it heal by itself. For a long, long time, years even, Sam didn’t visit his child. He just made phone calls to ask how it was.

Finally, when he showed up, it was to give his legal authorization for the child to be adopted by Candy and her husband, or by the twin’s parents.

Not that Sam loved Cindy less, or their child any lesser. He said: I failed to save Cindy’s life. May our child take over the life that I had failed to safeguard.

When Sam left, the twin’s combined smiles in the framed photo over the fireplace opposite the main door seemed to blaze its colors even more brightly.

(For past columns, click http://sundaypunch.prepys.com/archives/category/opinion/feelings/)

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