Free The Other Girl by Pam Jenoff Page A

after the invasion. Overhearing, Helena had been surprised. It was a war, for goodness’ sake, and their mother was at the heart of it. But Tata hadn’t said anything. Looking around the sanatorium now, Helena was struck by how little had changed—the machines still hummed and the patients still moaned, trapped in their own private battles. So the fiction had persisted.
    Beside Helena, her mother stirred. “Mama?” Helena leaned forward, hope rising in her as she kissed her mother on her papery cheek.
    But her mother only looked at her blankly. Did she wonder why her beloved husband no longer came to visit, or had she not noticed? “Ruti?” she asked, using her pet name for Helena’s sister.
    Helena blanched. No, it wasn’t Ruth who was sturdy enough to make the journey, or brave enough to try. But if thinking it was so brought their mother comfort, Helena would play along. “Yes, Mama, it’s me.” It should have been Ruth here, Helena reflected. She had always been closer to Mama, sitting at their mother’s side, learning with rapt attention how to cook and sew while thick-fingered Helena followed Tata into the woods, gathering kindling and roots. Sometimes it seemed as though she and Ruth had been cast into those roles at birth. “The pretty one,” she’d heard people remark more than once about Ruth—but how was that possible when they were twins and meant to look just the same? She herself had been deemed sturdy and capable for so long she could not fathom where the idea had first arisen. Had their parents noted these differences in them from the start and nurtured them, or had they grown to play the parts they had been given?
    â€œJealous, even as a baby,” their mother had remarked of Helena more than once over the years. “You would give me such a look when I held your sister instead of you.” I wasn’t jealous, Helena had wanted to respond later, when she was old enough to understand. I just wanted to be held, too, to be a part of things before you had to set us down and move on to the next task or chore. But it was always that way with twins, never enough time or arms to go around, and the extra always seemed to go to sweet, helpful Ruth.
    The sisters had always been a great source of curiosity in the town, the first set of twins seen there in more than a generation. “And after, when the midwife put you both in the cradle, the first thing you did was hold hands,” Mama was fond of recalling. “She’d said she’d never heard of such a thing.”
    Whenever they went out, people made sport of trying to guess which one was which. “No, no, don’t tell me!” In fact, the sisters had subtle differences: Ruth had a rounder face and large blue eyes while Helena’s own features were plainer, her skin more ruddy than luminescent. And there was the birthmark, too, heart-shaped just below Ruth’s right ear, which Ruth desperately tried to conceal, that made them impossible to confuse if one looked closely. But to the casual observer, they were indistinguishable.
    Helena sat in silence for several minutes. There were things she wanted to ask her mother now, about how to make a good poultice for the goat’s wounded leg, and the way to get the cabinet above the stove to stop sticking. She wanted to tell her mother that Dorie had lost another tooth, how Karolina was starting to speak a bit. But she was never sure if hearing about the children would make Mama happy or more forlorn, or even if she remembered them at all.
    She searched her mother’s face, looking for some words that would change it all. But she had stopped believing in magic years ago, and prayers were Ruth’s province. “Come back to us,” she said plaintively, knowing there would be no response.
    Helena opened the drawer on the night table and busied herself taking inventory of the scant contents, taking note of the spare