Chapter 2 - The Double Mirror
The neon sign for the Mercy General Hospital Emergency Department hummed through the steady drizzle that had begun to fall over the city.
The first ambulance, carrying Lily, arrived at the bay at precisely 8:03 p.m.
Rachel arrived twelve minutes later. She did not park her station wagon in a space; she slammed the transmission into park directly in the ambulance loading zone, leaving the engine running and the headlights shining brightly into the rain.
She opened the rear door of the car. Inside, stretched across the faded grey fabric of the backseat, was Lucy.
Lucy was wearing a plain grey hooded sweatshirt—two sizes too large—and black cotton sweatpants. Unlike Lily, whose blond hair was pinned with a silver dragonfly, Lucy’s identical blond hair was pulled back with a plain, stretched rubber band. Her skin was not merely pale; it had an oily, yellowish hue under the bright halogen lights of the ambulance bay, and her breath smelled faint and sweet, like overripe apples.
Rachel reached into the back of the car, slid her arms beneath her daughter’s shoulders and knees, and lifted her. Lucy felt impossibly light, like a bundle of dry twigs wrapped in a blanket.
“Mom...” Lucy whimpered, her small forehead resting against Rachel’s wet neck. “The room is tilted.”
“I’ve got you, baby. I’ve got you.”
Rachel carried her through the sliding glass doors of the trauma entrance.
The triage desk was staffed by a veteran nurse named Sarah Miller, who was making notes on a clipboard. When Sarah looked up and saw Rachel carrying a blond, eleven-year-old girl in grey sweatpants, her brow furrowed in utter confusion.
“Wait,” Sarah said, standing up so fast her chair scraped against the linoleum. “Wasn’t she just brought in by Medic 4? We just pushed her into Trauma Three six minutes ago.”
“This is her sister,” Rachel said, her arms trembling under Lucy’s weight as she stood before the desk.
Sarah stared at the child in Rachel’s arms, then looked down the hallway toward the glass doors of Trauma Three, where a team of doctors was currently crowding around a bed.
“Identical twins?” Sarah asked, her fingers hovering over her keyboard.
“Yes. Please. She can’t hold her head up.”
“Name?” Sarah asked, setting her hand on the spacebar.
Rachel tightened her arms around Lucy’s ribcage. She could feel every single bone in her daughter’s spine through the thick fleece of her sweatshirt.
“I need a name for the chart, ma'am,” Sarah repeated, her voice taking on the professional, slightly firm edge of a nurse who had seen every delay tactic imaginable.
“Please just help her first—she’s turning grey—”
“I need to open an intake chart before I can call a stretcher out here,” Sarah said, her eyes narrowing as she looked closely at Rachel’s white face. “What is her name?”
Rachel hesitated. The silence between them stretched for three full seconds—long enough for the rhythmic thump-thump of an automatic blood pressure cuff in the next room to fill the space between them.
“Lucy,” Rachel finally whispered.
“Last name?”
“Harper,” Rachel said. The word felt like lead in her mouth.
Lucy’s eyelashes fluttered open. Her blue eyes—identical in color and shape to Lily’s—searched her mother’s face through a film of exhaustion.
“Mom?”
“I’m right here, sweetie.”
“My chest hurts,” Lucy murmured, her small hand reaching out to clutch the lapel of Rachel’s rain-soaked coat. “It feels like a big rock is sitting on me.”
Sarah Miller took one look at the child’s cyanotic lips and hit the blue button on her wall panel.
“I need a gurney in the waiting room now! Pediatric respiratory distress!”
Within ninety seconds, Lucy was lifted onto a narrow steel gurney and wheeled down the hallway.
The emergency department at Mercy General was designed around a central nursing station surrounded by glass-walled treatment rooms. By pure, horrifying coincidence, the only available bed adjacent to Trauma Three was Trauma Two.
When the nurses pulled back the glass curtain of Trauma Two, Rachel looked through the clear partition separating the rooms.
On the other side of the glass lay Lily.
Lily’s blue school skirt had been cut down the center by medical shears and folded away. Her small chest was covered in round, white cardiac leads connected to a wall monitor that beeped at a frantic, uneven rhythm: 142 beats per minute. An IV line was taped to the back of her left hand, and a plastic nasal cannula was pushing three liters of oxygen into her nose.
On this side of the glass lay Lucy.
A second medical team swarmed around her bed, cutting through the grey sweatshirt, attaching identical cardiac leads, and inserting an IV line into her right arm.
Dr. Maya Bennett, the attending pediatric emergency physician on duty, stood in the doorway between the two rooms. She was a woman in her early fortnight of her residency rotation as an attending, with sharp, dark eyes, short dark hair, and a crisp white coat that showed the ink marks of dozens of calculated drug dosages on the cuff.
Maya moved between the two beds, comparing the two wall monitors.
The two cardiac monitors were beating in near-perfect, terrifying unison.
Lily: HR 142, BP 82/48.
Lucy: HR 146, BP 78/42.
“Is this a toxic exposure?” Maya asked, turning toward Rachel, who was standing in the narrow space between the two sliding glass doors, her wet hair sticking to her cheeks. “Did they ingest something at home? Pesticide? Cleaning chemicals? Carbon monoxide?”
“No,” Rachel said, shaking her head violently. “No, nothing like that. They weren't even in the same place! Lily was at school for choir practice. Lucy was at home with her father.”
Maya stepped closer to Lucy’s bed, taking the child’s small wrist between her fingers. Lucy’s skin felt cold and doughy, her radial pulse threadlike beneath Maya’s thumb.
“Has either child ever been diagnosed with a metabolic or muscular disorder?” Maya asked, her gaze swinging back to Rachel. “A mitochondrial condition? Glycogen storage disease?”
“No,” Rachel breathed. “They’ve... they’ve always been tired children. Doctors told us Lily had mild asthma when she was six. Lucy... a clinic doctor in Ohio told us two years ago that she might have chronic iron-deficiency anemia.”
Maya’s head snapped toward Rachel.
“Ohio?” Maya asked, her eyebrows drawing together. “Where has Lucy been receiving her primary care?”
“Different clinics,” Rachel said, her eyes dropping toward the floor tiles.
“Which clinics?”
Before Rachel could answer, the automatic double doors at the end of the trauma corridor slid open with a heavy pneumatic hiss.
Daniel Harper stepped into the bright, sterile corridor.
His white dress shirt was unbuttoned at the collar and pulled untucked from his trousers. His hair was wet from the rain, sticking to his forehead in clumped strands. But what caught Maya Bennett’s eye was a wide, chalky white streak of kitchen flour smeared across the navy wool of his left sleeve—the mark from where he had knelt on the floor beside Lucy before lifting her into the car.
Daniel stopped dead in the center of the hallway when he saw both glass doors open.
He looked through the left door at Lily, lying under her oxygen tube.
He looked through the right door at Lucy, lying under her monitoring leads.
He walked up to Rachel, stopping two inches from her face.
“What did you do?” he asked. His voice was barely a breath, but it was laden with ten years of dark, accumulated terror.
“She couldn't breathe, Daniel,” Rachel said, staring back at him without flinching. “She was dying on the floor.”
“You should have called me!”
“You were already with her!” Rachel hissed back, her fingers curling into tight fists at her sides. “You were watching her die in the kitchen while I was watching Lily collapse on a stage!”
“You know what I mean, Rachel,” Daniel whispered, his voice dropping into a dangerous, jagged register. “You know what you’ve done by bringing her here.”
Maya Bennett stepped directly between the couple, her white coat cutting off their line of sight.
“Both of your daughters are in acute multi-organ failure,” Maya said, her voice dropping into the absolute, authoritative tone reserved for life-and-death emergencies. “Whatever private dispute you two are having can wait until I make sure their hearts don't stop.”
Daniel looked at Maya’s name badge, reading the black letters: MAYA BENNETT, MD - PEDIATRIC CRITICAL CARE.
“Are they going to be okay?” he asked, his voice suddenly sounding tiny, stripped of all its anger.
“I don't know,” Maya said truthfully. “Their blood chemistry just came back from the lab, and it makes no sense.”
May you like
She held up two yellow printout sheets.
“Both girls have serum creatine kinase levels over twelve thousand,” Maya said. “Their liver enzymes are four times the upper limit of normal. Their potassium levels are dangerously high, and their cardiac troponin levels indicate that their heart muscles are under extreme, catastrophic stress. It looks like their muscle cells are literally dissolving from the inside out.”
