During my second year of college, we killed our father. It was his own idea, but it was Charlie’s idea to do it the week before Christmas. Later, I would regret that we hadn’t waited until afterward. Charlie said that Christmas would have depressed the hell out of us regardless and anyway, it was too late to do anything different.

The night before we did it, Charlie was late to pick me up. I stood on the train platform alone, shivering in the cold, cursing his name. The man in the ticket booth peered pityingly at me through the frosted window and didn’t offer to let me stand inside, although I wished desperately that he would. The benches were far too cold and snow-covered to make comfortable seats, so I remained standing, hopping from one foot to the other.

I sighed in relief and pent-up irritation when a familiar station wagon finally swerved into the parking lot, the bright yellow headlights cutting through the dark. I set off toward the car, suitcase nipping at my heels. Charlie parked and opened the door on the driver’s side, poking his head out. He wore a deep green handknit scarf wrapped around his neck, and a matching hat pulled low over his eyebrows. He waved me over, as if there was anyone else at the station he could have been there to pick up. I could see, as I got closer, that his mittens were deep green as well, made from the same yarn. The set was a gift from our mother; a similar one—made from blue yarn—had arrived for me at the dorms in early November. As twins, everything we had was doubled—life, love, death, and everything in between.

The package had come with a note that read only For Carmen, Love, Mom. When I phoned her to say thank you, I got her answering machine.

“Sorry I was late,” Charlie said breathlessly, as if he had been running and not driving.

“It’s alright,” I found myself saying, and was surprised by how much I meant it, how quickly my vexation had dissipated. I was glad to be there with him. “It’s nice to see you.”

He didn’t reciprocate. I didn’t take offence. My presence was a reminder of what lay before us.

Again, it was Dad’s idea. Because he was sick. Months earlier, doctors had told us that he didn’t have much time left, but what that meant, exactly, they couldn’t say. Mom fled to Florida rather than dealing with it, and Charlie and I couldn’t afford to hire anyone to take care of Dad. Charlie dropped out of school and moved back home. We’d argued about it back and forth and ultimately Charlie had won, or lost, depending on which way you looked at it.

The city was empty without him. When I wasn’t in class, I spent most of my time back at the dorms, sitting by the phone, fearing the worst. Not just about Dad’s condition but about other, selfish things; I worried that Charlie’s sacrifice made me look like the lesser twin, a bad daughter. Like a petulant child, I felt left out.

Charlie called to inform me of Dad’s wishes a month before we fulfilled them. I had just come in from class and only had time to take off Mom’s scarf and one of the gloves. I picked up the phone and was brushing snowflakes from the lapel of my coat and there was his voice on the other end of the line, telling me that Dad wanted to go. That we had to help him go. He was in too much pain to bear, Charlie said.

“Did you tell him we’re not doing it?”

“We have to. Dad and I already talked about it. It’s what he wants, for us to do this together.”

“‘Dad and I?’” I was getting warm. I threw off my coat, the second glove. “What about what I think? What if I say no?”

“It’s not about you,” Charlie bit back.

“If I was there, this never would have happened.”

“Well, you’re not here.”

I slammed the phone down, then laid down on my bed and stared at the ceiling. After an hour, I called Charlie back.

“Look,” he said. “When has Dad ever asked us for anything?”

“Okay,” I said. More than anything, I didn’t want to argue with him. Charlie doing it alone was worse than the alternative. “How soon should I come home?”

Dad wanted me to finish my exams, Charlie relayed, so I should keep the train tickets I already had for Christmas break. He wrote down the date I’d be arriving, and promised to pick me up from the station. When we finally hung up, my index finger was bruised purple from where I’d wound the telephone cord around it.

*

The ride home from the train station was shorter than I remembered. The driveway had been shovelled on only one side, into which Charlie pulled the car. He retrieved my suitcase from the trunk and I stalled, my hand hovering over the door handle. Charlie came around to my side and knocked on the window, startling me.

“You coming?” he called, his voice muffled through the glass and the vicious winter winds.

I stepped out of the car, momentarily plunged back into the biting cold. The house was dark and quiet when we entered—the only sound came from our father’s bedroom, his deep snores coming in fits and starts. Charlie had left the door slightly ajar, and through the crack I could see Dad’s limbs splayed this way and that, detangled from the sheets he had kicked off in his sleep. I watched the silhouette of his back heave up and down with each breath. Charlie had warned me that he spent most of his days sleeping, emerging from the dimly lit bedroom only to use the bathroom or for meals. It pained him to do much else, and even trips to the bathroom were assisted by Charlie and took twice as long as they used to.

“There’s leftover pizza in the fridge, if you want,” Charlie jostled me with his shoulder on his way up the stairs, my suitcase in his hands. I tore my gaze away from the dark bedroom. “Not sure how long it’s been there though.”

I wrinkled my nose. I didn’t think I could stomach any food. “I’ll pass.”

I followed him up the stairs and into my old bedroom. It was even more foreign to me than the last time I was there—the walls seemed to creep closer together with each passing year, compressing the room into a small box painted pale pink and filled with the remnants of some other life. Charlie dumped my suitcase next to the double bed and I cast a cursory glance around the room. There was a pang in my chest when I clocked the thin layer of dust that covered everything from the dresser to the bookshelf. The room was barely touched in my absence, it existed only in tandem with me. I swallowed the panic that threatened to rise about how little time I had spent with Dad in his last days.

Charlie looked at me. “It wasn’t any easier for me here, you know.”

Quietly, I said, “I know.”

“Goodnight then,” Charlie said finally, clearing his throat to dispel the silence that had settled between us like the dust that surrounded us. Our souls were equally burdened with the weight of actions we hadn’t yet taken. He shut the door softly behind him when he left.

*

Charlie woke before me and hogged the bathroom. The second floor of the house was small; there was only mine and Charlie’s bedrooms and our shared bathroom, which had remained an area of contention even into our young adulthood.

I banged on the door and it rattled on its old hinges. “Get out of there, would you?”

I didn’t even care about using the bathroom. It was just that hounding Charlie for it felt natural, normal. Upon waking, a feeling of dread had crept into my stomach and wouldn’t leave.

“I’m almost done,” came the reply through the door. The faucet in the bath was running and I figured he was washing his hair, holding his head upside down under the stream like Mom had taught us when she’d grown tired of washing our hair for us as kids. When the door finally opened ten minutes later, the hem and shoulders of his t-shirt were wet and his brown hair dripped all over the floor at our feet. Behind him the bathroom was full of steam, the mirror was more of an opaque wall than a reflective surface.

“Morning,” the smile didn’t quite reach his eyes. I grimaced. We were going through the motions.

“I’ll only be a moment. Wait for me?”

It wasn’t a real question. Of course he would. We were fated to do everything together, especially this. Life, love, death.

Charlie sat on the floor outside the bathroom until I was ready. When we finally went downstairs, he said he would go get Dad. I wrung my hands together and paced the tiled kitchen floor. My back ached and my feet hurt from invisible pressures, and I wanted to sit down but I remained standing. I kept pacing. I could hear their conversation faintly—Charlie’s soft voice and Dad’s sleepy mumbles. Then there was the shuffling, the heavy tread on the wooden floor. They came around the corner and into the kitchen, Charlie’s arm looped through Dad’s, Dad leaning heavily on Charlie. Charlie’s steps were deliberately slowed, and Dad’s, I could tell, were as fast as they could be. He looked up at where I stood by the counter.

“Carmen.”

I almost started to cry, right then and there. Charlie looked away and told me to take Dad to the living room while he prepared breakfast, so I replaced Charlie’s arm with my own and directed Dad toward the couch. I sat next to him, holding his hands in between mine, trying not to think about how this was it.

Dad asked me about school so I told him about my classes and the horrible food they served in the dining hall. (Also: Charlie pulled a bottle of pills from the cupboard and they rattled furiously as he dumped them all into a small ceramic bowl). I told Dad about the knitwear from Mom, how they kept me warm on the frigid walks to the school library during final exams. (Charlie crushed the pills beneath the backside of a spoon. This took a while).

I reminded Dad about the time he took Charlie and I fishing, how he stuck bait on each of our hooks because we were too scared to touch the worms, how he purchased the three measly fish we’d caught and cooked them for dinner. We’d been violently ill that night but the next weekend, we asked to go fishing again. He squeezed my hand, resting on top of his. I think it hurt him to say anything, but there was so much that I wanted to ask. I wanted to know who he was. I had all these memories of him strung together like Polaroids on twine, the gaps between them were palpable and incorrigible. Has anybody ever managed to be more than their father’s child?

(Charlie poured a glass of orange juice and tipped the contents of the ceramic bowl inside. He mixed them with the same spoon and the metal clinked against the glass with each turn).

I told Dad that I loved him.

Charlie put his hand on my shoulder. He handed me the glass, and I gave it to Dad. In this way, it felt like all of us, together. But in the end Dad was alone. Charlie and I stood on the front porch and waited longer, surely, than we needed to. It was all much quieter than I was expecting.

We crossed the street and called the ambulance from the neighbours’. The trucks arrived within a few minutes and washed the whole street in red and blue. Charlie and I stood in the road and held hands without speaking. We didn’t have to. Everything we felt was doubled. Life, love, death.