Angel or Devil?

“Would you like a cookie, love?” The lady in front of me has crinkling eyes and a gentle smile as she bends down and hands me a chocolate chip cookie, my very favorite. I am four years old, in the yard behind the old church on a Sunday morning. In her other hand, she has a plate full of cookies, which she presumably will hand out to the other kids scattered around the churchyard, patiently waiting for their parents to end their conversations and load them in their cars to go home for Sunday lunch. I stare at the plate of cookies, pinning my arms to my sides, as a voice in my head tells me to take the cookie from the nice lady and give her my sweetest smile. But instead, I use both arms to shove her backwards, grabbing the plate as she falls. I’m halfway across the churchyard before anyone gets enough wits about them to start to chase me. I shove the cookies down the front of my dress and hide in a wisteria bush until I have eaten five of them, then I dump the remainder and head home to my punishment.

The memory popped into my head as I sat in my doctor’s waiting room. I was fifteen years old, and the voices in my head had never gone away – the one I named Angelina, who knows what is right, who gives me encouragement and direction and tells me to choose kindness; and the voice I named Onyx, after the shiny, dark, mesmerizing stone in my mother’s favorite necklace. Onyx, who wants me to sow chaos and anger everywhere I go. An angel and devil on my shoulder, like the old cartoons. I spent my childhood being dragged to different psychologists because my parents were unable to understand Onyx, while I was simply unable to control her. Angelina’s voice seemed to grow weaker the older I grew, with Onyx’s voice eclipsing Angelina until only a penumbra of goodness shined through.

The older I became, the more I saw the consequences of listening to Onyx. I saw the other kids turn away from me at school, closing gaps in tables at lunchtime so I couldn’t sit in an open spot. I wasn’t invited to birthday parties, and the neighbors closed their blinds when I knocked on their doors. I wasn’t immune to the slights. I decided, sometime around third grade, to push Onyx to the background and try to listen more to Angelina. I tried to choose her light and goodness, and it would work, for a time. But always, always, Onyx pushed herself to the forefront.

At the doctor’s office, the nurse called us back, and we waited in the exam room for the results of my CAT scan. The pain in my abdomen has been another constant presence in my life, growing with each passing year until each deep breath felt like a bony finger was pressing into my lung. My mother finally started to believe me last year, and Dr. Jemison has been the only doctor who has given me more than a cursory examination and sent me on my way.

The door plunged open, and Dr. Jemison was halfway across the room in two strides. He began typing on the computer, pulled up a screen with a jumble of fuzzy gray blobs, and began without a greeting.

“As you can see here, there is a mass in her left side pressing against her lung. We’ll have to remove the tumor and perform a biopsy, but since she’s been having pain for some years now, I assume it has been growing slowly. We can be hopeful it’s benign. I’m referring you to Dr. Smythe to follow up. Do you have any questions?”

He looked at his watch, looked at my mother, then nodded. “Stop at the front desk on your way out.” With that, he was gone.

A month later, after tests and more tests, I’m here, being threatened with a needle by a nurse with hands so bony it looks as if she can barely hold up the IV bag. Onyx roars up inside me, and I shove the nurse away, calling her names, trying to roll out of the hospital bed in my flimsy gown. The pain squeezing my lung becomes sharp and I fall back, only moments before a burly man in scrubs pins me down while the nurse shoves the IV in my arm. I feel, in that moment, Angelina trying to calm me, telling me that soon, very soon, the tumor will come out, and that more than just the pain in my side will change. I have an understanding, then, that the war between Onyx and Angelina will end when my tumor is gone. I wonder what it will feel like to have that terrible voice in my head erased and hear Angelina clearly. To have her shine through my mind and chase out Onyx’s shadows. To have the source of my darkness removed. I don’t have long to think about it – I quickly feel myself being sucked into a dizzying blackness, and I am under.

“Sweetie, are you awake?” I hear my mom’s voice over background noises of footsteps, whirring machines, and hushed voices. I gradually regain my awareness, and soon I hear another voice, a man talking softly with my mother. “Is she still asleep?” he asks.

“I think so,” my mom replies.

“Good,” the voice continues. “I wanted to go over what I found during the surgery. I’ve never seen anything like it, only heard about it in textbooks. Were you told when you were pregnant with her that you had twins?”

“Twins?” asks my mom. “No, I wasn’t pregnant with twins. Maya wasn’t a twin.”

“When I removed the tumor, it was quite a shock. The tumor had…teeth. And what seemed to be hair. When I cut it open, the mass also had what looked like bones.”

I hear my mom gasp. “What in the world?”

The voice continues, “There’s something that can happen in pregnancy, where a twin dies in utero and is absorbed by the other twin. It’s called ‘parasitic twins,’ and usually the condition is caught when the surviving twin is a baby. But sometimes it stays undetected, and the absorbed twin becomes a problem later in life. I think that this is what happened to Maya. The mass has been growing in her abdomen, pressing against her lung more and more. This is a very rare thing.”

I hear my mom sit down in the chair next to me, and I feel her take my hand. “I can’t believe this. I was out of the country for the first half of my pregnancy, so I didn’t have an ultrasound until halfway through. Maybe that’s why I never knew. Will Maya be okay?”

“Yes, she should be fine. We’ll monitor her going forward, to make sure we got all of the mass and that any cells left behind don’t grow, but she should have an excellent prognosis.”

I have been becoming gradually aware of a new feeling inside of me as they speak, a hollowness, not in my abdomen, but in my…feelings, maybe? My consciousness? It is as if I am missing a vital part of myself, but I am too numbed by the anesthesia to understand what has changed. But as I listen to the story of my twin, this other being that had been absorbed by my body, I feel the pieces start to come together. All of these years, hearing Onyx’s voice, the uncontrollable feelings that came over me to do harm – all of that had come from this tumor, this parasite, growing inside of me. I start to feel elation. Onyx is gone. I’ll finally be able to walk into a room without my parents startling and looking afraid, peering at me out of the sides of their eyes with distrust. I will make friends at school, and the other kids won’t avoid me and whisper behind my back. I’ll finally be free.

As I recover over the next few days, I feel a shift inside of me, a reorganizing of not just my body, where the tumor used to be, but also of my mind. I feel space for my consciousness to expand, and I feel a sense of wholeness that I’ve never felt before. A piece of me is gone, but it wasn’t actually a piece of me. It was a piece of a whole different person.

We’re finally given the all-clear to leave the hospital. I sit in the car next to my mom, and we start the drive home. I haven’t heard my internal voice yet, but I know that I will, and I can feel that Angelina must be getting closer to the surface. As we turn down familiar streets, past my school, past the church, past the houses of my classmates, I start to hear her. Joy begins to fill me, a surge of happiness, of rightness, that she is coming back. I will finally hear the voice that will set my life on the path I’ve always wanted.

We make a final turn, and I see the house of our neighbors, the Pattersons, swing into view, a plain two-story eighties house with white siding. I have memories of trying to sell wrapping paper for school fundraisers and having Mrs. Patterson shut the door in my face. I remember her knocking on our door and telling my mom that I had unlatched their gate and let their dog out (I did, but how dare she assume it was me?). I remember how I snuck out at night and cut down her rosebushes that she had bragged about so much. The memories, pouring in now, unlock something in my head, and I finally hear the voice I have been waiting for. But instead of telling me to leave the Pattersons alone, to control my impulses, the voice reminds me that they are going to be out of town for the month. I’m confused. Why would Angelina tell me this? And then, in a voice that is unmistakably that of Onyx, I hear the words, slowly and clearly, “Burn the house down.”

And that’s when I know. The tumor, the monster in my body and in my head, wasn’t Onyx. It was Angelina. And I’ll never have to listen to her again.