Runaway Twin (2 page)

No one leaped.

Sometimes I meet other people on the trail, often walking their dogs, but this morning I was alone. A slight breeze rustled the leaves; a bird called to its mate. I sat on the ground and counted the money: eight hundred and twenty dollars!

My hands shook as I stuffed the cash back inside the bag.

I zipped the bag, then stuck it inside my T-shirt, hoping the bulge wasn't obvious. I tucked the shirt into my jeans, to be sure the bag didn't slide out.

All thoughts of a Twinkie vanished as I ran back to Rita's house.

What should I do?

I knew two things for sure:

1. I had to try to find the bag's owner.

2. I wasn't going to tell Rita or my Hiss caseworker or anyone else what I'd found.

If the bag's owner showed up and could prove it was his money, I'd give it back. But if no one identified the bag, the cash was mine. It would be my secret, my ticket to find Starr.

Despite the warm June morning, goose bumps rose on my arms as I thought of my twin sister. No matter where she was living now, this was enough money to get me there, and give the two of us a fresh start, together.

All I had to do was find her.

B
ack in my room, I pulled the beat-up brown suitcase out from under my bed. It contained everything I wanted to remember about my life, which wasn't much. The most important item was a photograph of Grandma holding her little dog. I stood on one side of Grandma, and Starr stood on the other. We were three years old, wearing matching white shorts and pink T-shirts. Wispy ponytails on the sides of our heads were held in place by bright pink ribbons. Both of us grinned at the camera.

My dad had vanished before Starr and I were born, and if Mama knew where he was, she never told. Our last name, Skyland, was the same as Grandma's, and we all lived with her. A few days after the picture was taken, Grandma and Mama died in an auto accident. I don't know what happened to the dog. Maybe he had been in the car, too.

Starr and I didn't go to the funeral. Instead we played in the church's nursery room, supervised by a bored teenager whom we did not know. We were building towers with blocks and knocking them over when the service ended.

Starr and I were taken away in separate cars; I never saw my sister again.

Nobody mentioned Starr to me after that. She had been my constant companion, my playmate, the only person who could understand everything I said because we often spoke what Mama called “twin talk,” a shortcut language that only the two of us knew. Then Starr disappeared, just like Mama and Grandma had disappeared a few days earlier.

I remember looking at the night sky through the car window as I was driven to my new home with my mother's great-aunt Cora. I wished Starr were sitting beside me, and I wondered where she was. I felt as if half of me was missing.

Even then, Twinkies were my favorite treat. I always nibbled the top off first, then scooped out the cream filling with my tongue. Grandma had often made me giggle by singing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” to me, changing the lyrics to “Twinkie, Twinkie, little star.”

As I gazed at the sky that night and thought of my sister, I silently sang my own version:

“Twinkie, Twinkie, little Starr. How I wonder where you are.” Of course I was too young to know that my twin's name was spelled with a double
r
. All I knew was that the song made sense to me.

Since then I had repeated the ditty every time I saw the first star in the evening sky. It was my mantra; it showed that I remembered my sister even though I didn't know where she was.

Great-aunt Cora was ten years older than her sister, my grandma, and had an ailing husband. A three-year-old proved to be more than she could cope with, so she talked her son, Jerod, into taking me. Jerod lived alone and had no desire to share his life with a little kid. Most nights I cried myself to sleep, missing Mama, missing Grandma, missing Starr.

Eventually, I ended up as a ward of the state. Jerod had taken me to Nebraska with him, and then left me behind, locked in an empty third-story apartment, when he moved again. By then I was four—only four but already too familiar with loneliness and loss.

When I woke up alone that morning, and saw that all Jerod's clothes were gone, my first thought had been,
Where will I live now?
I tried to open the door but the knob wouldn't turn. I thought I was locked in.

Mama had taught me to call 911 in an emergency. “Don't call unless someone's very sick, or there's a fire, or a burglar,” she had said. I sat on the floor with my back to the locked door. I wasn't sick; there was no fire or burglar. I waited.

Did anyone know I was in the apartment? I waited for what seemed a long time, but no one came to get me. Even though I wasn't sick, I decided to call 911, but when I picked up the phone, there was no dial tone. The line had been disconnected.

I was hungry, and the only way to get food was to let someone know I was there. I found a blue towel crumpled on the bathroom floor. I opened the apartment window on the street side, and waved the towel out the window until a woman pushing a baby stroller looked up and noticed me. “I'm hungry!” I called.

“Are you alone?” she asked.

“Yes. I'm locked in.”

“I'll get help,” she said, and took a cell phone out of her pocket.

Ten minutes later, two police officers told me how to turn the small lever in the center of the doorknob to unlock the door. When it opened, one officer squatted down so he could talk directly to me. “What's your name, sweetheart?” he asked.

“Sunny Skyland.”

“Where is your mother?”

“She died.”

Those were the only questions I was able to answer. I didn't know Jerod's last name, or where he had gone. I didn't know who my father was. I had no address and no phone number.

Nine years later, sitting in my room at Rita's house, I still felt hollow inside when I remembered how the police officers took me with them and told me not to worry, that I'd be going to a foster home soon. One of them bought me an ice-cream cone, but her kindness didn't make me feel less alone.

My old suitcase contained the clothes I'd been wearing that day. I'm not sure why I kept them. They hold no happy memories, but somehow they prove that I have a past, that I came from somewhere. Someone had bought that flowered yellow sundress for me; someone had buckled those white sandals onto my feet. Someone had cared, at least a little bit.

The suitcase also contained a magazine article that I had read and clipped several years earlier about twin boys who were separated as babies and reunited as adults. I had read it so many times, I could have recited it from memory.

A friend of one twin saw a man in a restaurant who looked so much like his friend that he approached the man's table and asked if he had a brother.

The man said, “No.”

“I'm sorry to have bothered you. It's uncanny, how much you resemble my friend. I would have sworn you were his brother.”

As he turned to leave, the other man asked, “Was your friend adopted?”

It turned out that he was.

This conversation led to a meeting of the look-alikes where the two men discovered they had been born on the same day and had been adopted from the same agency. Further research proved that they were identical twins.

I didn't know if Starr and I were identical or fraternal twins, but ever since I had read that article, I had daydreamed about someone coming up to me and asking if I had a sister. This stranger would swear that I looked exactly like someone she knew, and that someone, of course, would turn out to be Starr.

It made a good daydream, but I've learned that if you want dreams to come true, you have to take action. Sitting around and hoping someone might look at me and notice a resemblance to Starr was not likely to produce my twin. If I was ever going to find her, I needed to do it myself.

I put the bag of cash at the bottom of the suitcase, laid my belongings on top, and added a pile of school papers that I'd brought home the day before. I was pretty sure Rita wouldn't snoop in my things, but the suitcase didn't have a lock and if it got opened, I wanted the bag of money to be well hidden.

I shoved the suitcase back under my bed and went downstairs, humming “Twinkie, Twinkie, little Starr.” Usually the tune made me sad and lonely. That day it made my heart soar.

I was going to find Starr. Somehow, some way, I would find my sister and when I did, I would finally have a family again.

T
hat afternoon I went to the office of the local paper and paid cash for a classified ad. “Found money. To claim, identify amount, what it's in, and where you lost it.”

I didn't want anyone to call Rita's house, so I used my e-mail address. Rita gave me an account on her computer, with my own e-mail address, even though I didn't have anyone to write to. I knew I'd be the only one who would read any responses to the ad.

I placed an identical ad on Craigslist, and then started watching my e-mail. I got one response right away that said, “I lost my rent money and I am going to be evicted tomorrow. I don't know where I lost it. You are my only hope. Please help me. Angie.”

I noticed the writer did not say how much was lost, nor did she mention the zippered bag, so I figured this message was not from the rightful owner. Probably Angie hadn't lost any money at all but thought she could trick me into parting with what I had found. Well, Sunny Skyland is not easily tricked.

The newspaper ad ran the next afternoon. I checked the paper to be sure it was right.

My second response came a day later. It said, “The money is mine. I had it in my pocket and I'm not sure exactly how much there was, but now it's gone. I could have dropped it anywhere. I can meet you tonight to get it back, just tell me what time and where, and I'll be there.”

I'll bet you will,
I thought. How stupid do people think I am? If anyone had lost eight hundred and twenty dollars that was in a zippered bag, the bag is the first thing they'd tell me about.

I let both ads run for a week. A few more responses arrived, all equally unbelievable. As the days went by and there was no legitimate claim, my excitement grew. I started a list of things I wanted to tell Starr after I found her.

One e-mail said, “That money was left to me by my fathur who died of hart falure yesturday. It is all I have in the wurld. Pleez do not rob me of my futur by keeping it.”

I shook my head. The ad had been running for five days before that person's father died—if he had died.

At the end of the week, I replied to all the people I'd heard from. I wrote, “Sorry. The money was claimed by someone who knew exactly how much it was, and what container it was in.” I didn't say that the someone was me.

Meanwhile, I had searched for Starr online. It wasn't the first time I'd done that, and the result was the same as it had always been. I found towns named Skyland and people whose last name was Starr and even a group of amateur astronomers, but there was no record of a Starr Skyland in Google or Yahoo or anywhere else. She was not on Facebook or MySpace or any of the other social networks. It was as if my sister had fallen off the Earth. I tried spelling her name with only one
r
, but that didn't make any difference.

It occurred to me that whoever Starr was living with now might have had her use their last name instead of her own. For that matter, they might have given her a new first name, too. Maybe she wasn't bouncing around in foster homes like I was. Maybe she had been adopted.

I decided my best chance of finding her would be to return to where we had lived at the time of the accident. I would talk to people in our old neighborhood. Some of them might have been there when we were, and would remember us. They might know who had taken Starr, and where she is now.

I didn't know the name of the street where we had lived, but I knew the town because it was written, along with
Starr and Sunny, Loretta and Frisky
, on the back of that old snapshot.
Enumclaw, Washington.
I could also make out a house number, 1041, over the door.

According to the Census Bureau, Enumclaw has a population of eleven thousand two hundred people. That wasn't too big. Even without a specific street, I should be able to find someone who had known my mother or my grandma. I could go to every street in town and find number 1041. I could stop at the high school, and ask to see old yearbooks in case my mother had been a student there.

Starr might still live in Enumclaw. Wouldn't that be something? While I was driving away with Great-aunt Cora, Starr could have been moving in with our next-door neighbors. Perhaps she still lived there, in number 1039 or 1043. It was possible.

I studied a map of the United States. I was approximately thirteen hundred miles from Enumclaw, Washington. The closest airport to there was Seattle, but I had already decided not to fly. Instead, I planned to take the bus. It would take me longer to get there, but it would be harder for Rita and Hiss to find me if I bought a series of bus tickets from place to place than if I got on a plane.

I knew from watching the news that flying requires photo ID, which I didn't have because the photos for student ID cards at my current school had been taken while I was still living with She-Who and attending a different school. Also, a kid flying alone and paying cash for a plane ticket might attract attention. Better to travel a short distance by bus, maybe stay over a night or two, and then go a little way farther.

I decided to leave Rita a note. Although she'd probably still report that I was missing, if she knew I had not been abducted but had left on purpose, the cops wouldn't issue an Amber Alert, and the media wouldn't broadcast my picture. A foster kid who runs away, especially one who has run away twice before, would not be newsworthy.