It wasn’t like we knew our mom was different. Looking back, we had nothing to go on. By the time my sister and I were found, it was too late to go back. That was six years ago, when you read this, we’ll be gone.
Liz and I knew we were odd, but it never bothered us. Even so, the world had no right to intervene. Once you read to the end of this, you’ll probably agree.
Mom, Liz and me lived in a sprawling hundred year old Tudor estate on six acres of private gardens in Pasadena. The house belonged to our family, and it was our world. With countless rooms on each of the three stories, hidden rooms, and a tunnel to the coach house, my sister and I had plenty to explore.
Mom taught us English, math, history, and science. She also taught us a skewed and alternate view of the world, a view I’ll never shake. It didn’t matter, Liz and I had each other.
We were together all the time, but then, we had no choice we were conjoined at the skull at birth.
You’ve seen us, you’ve heard of us. We were a spectacle to be paraded in media. We were living breathing clickbait pseudo-journalists used to get ratings, and mom used us to get richer.
The endless questions about how we slept, how we bathed, how we shit, we got them all. Fuck, when Liz got her period two months before me, it made the news. Thing is, Liz and I knew it was bullshit, but what else was there to do?
We didn’t know our dad or knew that dads where a thing until he came out and all hell broke loose. It should’ve been a happy day, right? It wasn’t, it was the end of us, but it was mom who got the shit end of the stick.
‘Never Has The World Seen Such Cruelty’ was the title of the breaking Reuter’s story about mom. To this day, I think our undoing had little to do with her, it was dad and the outside world who destroyed us.
Our mom wasn’t cruel, her only wish was Liz and I have each other. Mom made sure we formed a tight and loving bond.
And that we did. Our best days were when we’d explore the old grounds of the estate, we’d walk the overgrown lawns, walk the tunnel to the coach house, dig around the old guest house, then head to the pool on the edge of the canyon for a swim.
It would be during our very last swim our lives would hit a wall. It was midday when we’d finished swimming to sit on the edge of the canyon to warm up.
The sky was blue, the sun warm on our skin. Above us the ravens swooped and dove on a thermal, while across the arroyo a man we did not see, watched, and recorded us on a zoom-lensed camcorder. Another thing we didn’t know, was he’d recorded us before and given the footage to police.
Had we not been wet, none of this would have happened, had we not gone swimming, or sat to watch the ravens, we might still be together.
Minutes later, the police cut the gargantuan iron gates at the entrance to our property. Even after mom told them to go away, the dark uniformed men and women charged our home. They’d come prepared with warrants for her arrest.
When Liz and I rushed in, we were still wet- a detail that matters. What we weren’t ready for was the gasping, the staring and the female officer who turned her head away from the sight of us.
Liz and I stood at the foot of the wide stairs and stared back. It wasn’t until a woman in a dress approached us to study our wet hair at the part where we are conjoined that we knew something was up. The woman reached to touch our part but pulled back in fear.
“Who did this?” The woman’s chocolate eyes pierced ours and we weren’t sure what she meant. Then mom cut in and said, “You have no right.”
Liz and me felt the same, we wanted these people out of our house. But Liz and I were fourteen, we had no choice in the matter, and there was dad.
That same day, the day of our last swim, Liz and I would be taken away. We never saw mom again. Mom was replaced by dad, a man we’d never met. A nothing man.
We sat in a sterile room with the nothing man. It was his job to explain the truth to us. A doctor with a sad face stood by him as he showed us pictures of our conjoined skull.
Nothing new, Liz and I knew the bumps, grooves, and fused skin via mirrors at home. But what dad said next is what almost divided me and Liz forever. Our fusion was artificial, our fusion wasn’t created by nature, but by mom.
The man who meant nothing to us placed another picture on the table in front of us. It was an old picture of dad standing behind two unconnected babies, next to him was our much younger mom in a hospital bed. “That’s you,” he said.
Liz’s body shook, she had my hand in a hard grip and it hurt. The sad doctor behind dad said, “It’s the truth, you were born apart.” They said more, a lot more, but there’s only so much truth you can take at once.
That night we were given a video to watch, again by the sad faced doctor. It was mom being interviewed by a detective. Mom’s hair was a mess, she wore sweatpants and some weird shirt, and explained how we came to be.
Without prompting, Mom told the grisly details of threading a long sewing needle with dissolvable suture to sew the skin at our skulls. She treated the sight with topical painkillers, but Liz still cried. She said it wasn’t as hard as she’d thought, it was mostly a matter of sewing skin and not scraping skull.
We watched the video in fascination as mom explained the months after our fusion were the hardest. When the site became infected, mom treated it herself. Keeping us calm was vital, it was the only way to assure the fuse held.
Mom said she’d taken us away from dad after our birth. She said he’d been arrested for molesting a little girl. She’d kept him quiet with money, but he wanted more.
What people don’t understand is our lack of anger at our mother.
When mom was killed at the women’s prison, both Liz and I grieved and cried endlessly, much to the chagrin of the entire world it seemed. Because of our grief, we were called freaks.
Dad too, went to prison. The nothing man, in our opinion, deserved it. We blame him for our pains.
The courts and a group of surgeons decided the best thing for us, for Liz and me, was to separate us. As minors who were wards of the state, we had no choice but to run away.
I can’t tell you where we are, but we are happy, together, alone, and making it just fine. Wish us well. As always, we wish you well.