Heather makes contact

I  wrote this story nine years ago!  I have just massively edited it.  Rick, the one-legged surgeon with whom Georgia is smitten and who she met in an earlier story at yoga, is now firmly in the picture.  There are some problems though that are revealed here.  I kind of painted myself into a corner with his cult involvement so I scaled it back/dropped it in later stories.  All kinds of wrong I realize.  In this piece, Georgia's previously unknown twin, Heather O'Thomas, makes contact.

Georgia has been reeling for days.  Her head, her stomach, her intestines, all reeling.  Her heart has been hitting new speeds and her hyper-flexible right shoulder is doing more popping than usual.

“I’m just reeling from this news,” she tells herself again and again as she lies in her bed, the Walmart sheets and duvet pulled up to her shoulders.

The news is Rick’s revelation of belonging to an organization devoted to saving the world from its impending doom.  These words are verbatim what the organization’s mission statement said.

“Oh,” Georgia had said as he sat in her basement suite telling her the news.  “You have a mission statement.”

Turned out the group had not only a mission statement but a confidential newsletter, bi-weekly internet conferences and code names.

“Oh,” she’d said.  “Oh, well, what is your code name, Rick?”

“Georgia, I can’t tell you that as of yet.  But I will.  It will come, I’m certain.”

He may not have been able to tell her about the name but he had no trouble explaining the celibacy promise he’d made to his mother almost twenty years ago.

“To have this work, Georgia, to really, really focus in, we all need to be celibate.  It’s similar say to a Catholic priest, I think that’s a good example.”

Georgia wondered how that could be a good example, considering that in her opinion and in the opinion of many a school-aged boy, Catholic priests weren’t, well, celibate.

“But, Rick,” she said. “You were married for four years.”

“Yes and Georgia, that was difficult.  We were both celibate for the first six weeks.  We’d sleep in the same bed and such but we were committed, so committed to the project.”

“So you had four years minus six weeks of sex?  You said you were only celibate for six weeks” she blurted out, confused.

“Well, yes, that’s true and because of that, I believe our work stalled.  My mother, the other people in the organization, they tried to talk sense into us, but-“

“But you stayed with the group?”  Georgia was floundering. She felt like a lobster being thrown into a pot of boiling water or even more apt, a frog put into cold water that was slowly heating up. 

“I feel a bit like a frog,” she said, “Ribbit.”

“Pardon?”

“Sorry, nothing I’m just – “

“Okay, well, yes, I was allowed to stay with the group.  After my wife and I split up – she wouldn’t agree to go back to the old way – she said she couldn’t do it.  She’s apparently living somewhere off the coast of Maine.” 

“Oh,” said Georgia. 

“And your mother?” Georgia asked.

“Well, as you know, my father is in a nursing home in the final stages of Alzheimer’s.  He’s been sick for years and years.  He didn’t, he didn’t really buy into the ideals of the organization which is ironic since he was the one who got us all into it way back when.

“My mother – certain people are exempt from the celibacy rule.  As her only child, as long as I subscribe to it, she doesn’t have to.”

Georgia was intrigued and repulsed by how convoluted this was becoming.  The sentence at the front of her brain was short and simple, “This man is insane.”

 She kept trying to erase the idea or at least push it to one of her mind’s back burners.  She was 61 years old.  Her knees hurt, she had arthritis in her shoulders from the hyper-flexibility, she was thirty pounds overweight, she liked to take industrial toilet paper rolls from her workplace home in order to save money, she had no savings and didn’t expect to be able to ever have any based on her salary as an ESL teacher, and she was not attracted to men over 50. 

Before Rick, her last relationship with a man had been a series of early night booty calls with a German physic student with a delightful love of older women.  That was ten years ago. They’d had no emotional or intellectual connection however.    It had been over twenty-five years since Georgia had connected with a man on more than a primal level.  There were far more single women than men in Vancouver and she knew she wasn’t the pick of any litter.  She’d trolled Craigslist personals often enough to realize that most unattached men in Vancouver were gay or simply wanted a woman who would tie him up and call him a bad boy.  She wasn’t going to do that again.  She’d begun to think about Tinder but had so far resisted signing up and swiping.

And Rick, as crazy as he may be, was intelligent, left-wing, well-travelled, kind, a doctor, a condon owner, cooked well, was an excellent listener and he liked her.  He liked what she had to say and how she had to say it.  He liked to buy her those foot-long Subway subs she enjoyed.  He liked to make tea.

“I cannot just bid this man adieu,” Georgia tells herself as she flops face down on the bed, her face buried in a pillow.

“Oy,” she says when the phone rings.  She doesn’t have call display but keeps meaning to pay the extra $20 a month just to avoid having to talk to her roommate’s mother. 

She is expecting a call from her sub.  She hates to miss work but having had a headache for three days, she has decided to take one of her four paid sick days a year and stay home tomorrow.

“Hello?”  Georgia turns and lies on her back.

“Hello, I’m looking for Georgia Gatsby?”

“Okay, yeah,” says Georgia, instantly sceptical.

“So this is Georgia Gatsby?”
“Yes, yes, I said yes. Yes.”  A tele-marketer, she thinks.

“Were you born in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1947?”

Georgia sits up quickly and sees stars.

“Who is this?”  She feels her heart move erratically.  Rick, she thinks.  The organization.  Horse heads in beds flick through her mind.

“January 22^nd, yes?”

“Look, who are you?  I don’t know anything, I’ll tell you right now.  All I know is the mission statement and I don’t even really remember that.”

“No, um, no.  Don’t know what you are talking about.”

“What?”

“What?”

“What?”

“Huh?”

“Sorry?”
“What . . .”

“Look, I’m going to hang up here.’

“No, no.  Georgia.  Georgia wait please.  I just needed to make sure but, here’s the thing.”

“The thing.”

“The thing,” The woman sighs and Georgia finds herself calming down.  Just a crackpot maybe, she decides.  A crackpot who knows my birthday.

“Look, Georgia, my name is Heather O’Thomas and – “

“O’Thomas?”

“Yes – “

“O-Thomas, like Irish?”

“Well, yes my parents – well, adopted parents, were Irish.”

“Your adopted parents?  Look, I’ve never had a kid if that is who you are looking for.”  “Oh, no no.  Georgia, I’m 60 years old.”

“Well, yeah, so am I, yeah.  So.”

“We were born together.  60 years ago, in Charlottesville, at Mercy Grace General Hospital.”

“What?  Well, yeah, lots of kids were born on that day there I’m sure.  Is this about a reunion?  Cause I can’t really afford to go to anything right now but thanks anyway.”

“No, no, wait,” says Heather O’Thomas.  “I’m sorry, Georgia, this is taking me far too long to say this, I’m just so nervous I must admit.  Georgia, sixty years ago your parents had twins, I mean I doubt they ever told you that you were a twin.”

“Well, what, yeah, well, look, they did indeed.  My twin died when she was six days old.  Her lungs were underdeveloped and in those days. “Could this woman remember her twin?  Maybe she was in the incubator or incubator area with her?

“Were you incubated too?”

“What no.  Georgia, I am your twin.”

‘What the heck?”

Georgia, out of habit of hanging up on difficult or strange phone calls, presses the end button.  She lies back down, thinking what.  What what what.  The whats get louder until they seem to burst, leaving her more confused and the reeling begins anew.  Her life has become conspiracy theories, celibacy promises and bizarre phone calls. 

“Fuck,” she thinks and dials star sixty nine

It is a Virginia phone number.

A minute later, the operator is asking Heather O’Thomas if she will take a collect call. 

“You startled me,” says Georgia.  “I don’t usually hang up.”

“No problem, Georgia.  I know it’s shocking really. And, look, I have the papers, all of the legal stuff.  In 1947, Jack and Henriette Gadsby had twin daughters.  Fraternal.  One was born with a heart murmur and 60 years ago, well, your parents didn’t know what that would mean and their doctor was not helpful at all.  So they, they gave me up for adoption.  I stayed in at the Sisters of Blessed Holy Mercy for two years until the O’Thomas’ adopted me. They were older and couldn’t have kids of their own.”

“Look, how would you, I mean, why now would you?”

“I don’t know.  I’d avoided this for so long – fearful of what I would find out. But I don’t know I am getting older and I didn’t want to never have done this.  So here I am.”

“Here you are.”

“Here we are.”

“Look I don’t mean to doubt you but this is so so out of the blue. Do you have any evidence, any proof?”

“Yes for sure.  I can e-mail you it if you give me your e-mail.  It’s all there.  Well, as much information as I could get but it’s enough.”

“Okay, okay.  Have you contacted my mother?”

“No, no.  I figured she would be very old now and I didn’t want to scare her.” So the

“Okay,” says Georgia, “E-mail me what you have.”