Read Online The Law of Bound Hearts by Anne Leclaire - Free Book Online

the viewer, their expressions as happy as those of Sam and Libby
in the picture right upstairs on the mantel in the living room, the one taken last
Easter at their grandparents’.
    They have picked names for themselves: Missy (Libby) and Sissy (Sam).
When they are playing this game, they refuse to answer their mother if she
doesn’t use these names. They love imagining themselves connected, actually
yoked by a band of flesh. In the game, they picture a future with them bound together in this way. Sometimes they decide they will be famous—singers or ac
tors or scientists—and other times they determine they will marry. To twin
brothers, they decide. They will have a double wedding. (Missy read in the article that Chang and Eng had both been married.) Naturally they will live in the
same house. They will take turns choosing their clothes each day. They will never
allow anyone to separate them even though Missy has informed Sissy that sometimes an operation can be performed to sever Siamese twins.
    All afternoon they walk as if actually connected at the leg. They like the
idea of being connected forever. Even at ten, Sam cannot picture a future without Libby at her side. She is pleased when strangers comment on how alike they
look, say how if it weren’t for their heights it would be nearly impossible to tell
them apart. Sam likes seeing them as mirror images and sees any difference—
even of height—as a betrayal. They insist on eating dinner tied together, although this annoys their mother, who thinks they take the game too far. At
bedtime she puts her foot down, and in the sharp-edged voice they know better
than to defy, she demands that they remove the scarves.
    Later, as Sam brushes her teeth, she feels off balance, as if a part of her is
lost. They were together and then they weren’t. When she puts on her pajamas,
Sam sees that the skin on her calf is still crimson and sweaty from where it had
been pressed against Libby’s. In bed, without Libby next to her, Sam has trouble
falling asleep; after a while she rises and crosses to her sister. Although Libby’s
bed is narrow—a twin—she does not complain when Sam climbs in with her.
They nestle, spoon fashion, and, with the touch of Libby’s breath wisping against
her neck, Sam feels complete again.
    Many years later Sam would read a phrase in a novel that encapsulated how she had felt when she and Libby were playing their game of Siamese twins. The Law of Bound Hearts: Separate them and only one—at most—would survive.
    Sam woke in the dark and reached out for the figure beside her. Caught in that groggy moment of half sleep when a dream can still seem real, she believed for a moment that it was Libby she was reaching toward, that they were again in their childhood home, sleeping in Libby’s bed. She knew, in those brief seconds, a thrill of joy, of all being right; then her hand registered the contour of Lee’s shoulder, the bulk of his muscles, and the spasm of joy evaporated. Tears suddenly rose and caught in her throat and she swallowed against the burn of them. She
would not
cry. She was done with crying. She’d done her share of that; what was past was past.
    Except, the past wasn’t something you could simply close your eyes and wish away. It refused to stay buried. It was always, inescapably, irrevocably a part of the present, an accumulation of decisions and actions and choices, each bearing its own consequences. She knew this, Lord knows, she knew this, had known it even when she moved to Mattapoisett and then to Sippican and began with fierce determination to build anew. Yet all the days she had spent working toward a future, some part of her had been waiting for the past to come knocking at her door; all that time, she had been waiting for word from Libby, knowing that sooner or later it would come. She had
known
this but still she had been caught unprepared.
    She had to pee—all