Chapter One

The Switch

Here's what they weren't. They weren't inseparable. They weren't telepathic. They weren't doubling your pleasure with Doublemint gum. They weren't clones or carbon copies or future spinsters in identical clothes. They weren't in the habit of trading names to confuse people.

But once, many years ago, the Nalwasky twins tried to trick their mother. They were about 2 then; the prank was their father's idea. As the story goes, the sisters played along, Kelly putting on the sweat shirt that said "Caroline" and Caroline putting on the sweat shirt that said "Kelly." They laughed and laughed, waiting for their mother to see them.

When she did, of course, she knew. But she didn't let on.

"How are you, Caroline? Are you ready for supper, Kelly?"

The girls stopped laughing.

"No, I'm Kelly," cried Kelly.

"No, I'm Caroline," cried Caroline.

Here's what they were. They were Caroline and Kelly Nalwasky. They were undeniably separate yet indelibly connected, genetically the same yet destined to be different. They would outgrow the crying but not the need for distinct identities, the desire to show the world that identical twins aren't identical people. That was the challenge of twinship. They knew it at 2. They knew it at 20.

And 20 years of having a twin might have been the only thing that prepared Caroline to lose one.

Chapter Two

The Eulogy

I thought a lot today about what I was going to say. Kelly and I always told each other that if this ever did happen, we'd be the ones to get up and say who each other was. And this is what I came to this morning. I wrote down: "Kelly's greatest gift and ability in life was that of a teacher. She taught me how to love and to live my life to the fullest."

On Feb. 1, 1998, Caroline Nalwasky delivered two eulogies. The first was for Kelly, her 20-year-old sister.

I went to my speech class the other day ... and we had to say something unique about ourselves. And it was immediate, it was like, "I'm a twin. I have a twin sister. She looks just like me. And she's on campus, so if you see her and you think it's me, just say hi -- and she'll figure out how you know her."

Caroline and Kelly had learned to laugh at such mix-ups. And now, in the crowded pews of Baltimore's Second Presbyterian Church, some of the mourners laughed, too. There was a moment of relief, like a cool breeze on a hot afternoon. But Caroline kept talking, about how she and Kelly shared a soul, and her voice broke, and the breeze was gone.

If this ever did happen. It wouldn't happen like this, not in their sophomore year at the University of Maryland, a week after their 20th birthday. A healthy college student doesn't die in her sleep. A brain tumor doesn't kill someone who doesn't know she's sick yet.

Who knows why? Why the seed for one child creates two. Why a cancer grows without symptoms or warning. Cells divide into miracles and tragedies. And here, standing alone behind a microphone, facing 750 people, wearing Kelly's light blue dress with white flowers, was proof of both. Here was Caroline.

It amazed her, how easily the words came, how she hardly used her notes. She just opened her mouth and breathlessly said what she remembered. That she and Kelly used to make each other laugh so hard during car trips that Mom and Dad would pull the car over, saying, "We can't concentrate, you have to stop laughing." That she and Kelly loved Slurpees so much they drank them even in winter.

That it was Kelly, insisting "We gotta go, we gotta go, we gotta go," who persuaded Caroline to join a spring break mission trip to rebuild an Arkansas church gutted by arson. That after a rough semester at Maryland, when Caroline's grade point average and spirits plummeted, Kelly knew just what to say: "It doesn't matter. We're gonna get it back. I know you have it in you."

Of course Caroline remembered Kelly's stories. They were her stories, too. Her stories, her memories, her future, already planned. They were going to graduate from college and move to California. They were going to have a double wedding. Caroline was going to teach parenting classes and Kelly was going to become a pastoral counselor and they were going to celebrate a lifetime of birthdays, 80 at least.

As poised as Caroline was behind the microphone that day, as strong and composed as she would seem in days to come, there were times when she would think of the plans she'd made with Kelly and go to pieces. At the funeral home, before the cremation, Caroline laid her head on her sister's chest and wept. "We were going to get married on the same day," she cried. "We were going to have children."

In the months that followed, she would learn to live without Kelly; she would have to. She would make decisions and face challenges. She would turn 21. Today, nearly a year and a half after losing her sister, Caroline seems so confident, so self-assured and determined, that it's tempting to think she is going on with her life.

But the truth is, when she lost her twin, she lost the only life she knew. On Feb. 1, 1998, Caroline delivered two eulogies, simultaneous goodbyes to her sister and herself, the 20-year-old woman who never doubted who she was.

I'm a twin, she'd said. I have a twin sister.

Chapter Three

The Bedroom

Think of her life as a house with many rooms. Know that the rooms you see are the ones she allows you to enter; the other rooms are private, hidden behind impenetrable walls. Caroline makes no apologies for these walls -- why should she? They keep the ceiling from collapsing. They hide the fact that the floor is gone.

But this isn't a story about walls.

It's a story about rooms.

Start with the bedroom with rainbow-patterned wallpaper, the center of the twins' picture-perfect life in their house on Juniper Road in Guilford.

"You're ugly."

"Mom! She called me ugly."

"If you're ugly," their mother would say, "she's ugly too."

So maybe it wasn't perfect, two strong-willed little girls in one room, name-calling and tattling and dreaming up schemes such as getting out of bed in the middle of the night -- at age 3 -- to hose down the kitchen with the nozzle from the sink. Once, fed up with sharing, Kelly moved herself into the guest room. Within a week, she was back. But not because they missed each other.

"I told her I wouldn't let her move our stuff out," says Caroline.

They shared a room for 18 years, sleeping in cribs, then bunk beds, then a double bed, side by side. No, not just like in the womb; the bed had a lot more squirming and shoving. They'd outgrown the bunks, though, and the double bed was already in the house, so they learned to dodge elbows and stick to their own sides. They had to.

Together they slept. Together they stayed. And together, on a day when they were feeling bored with rainbow wall- paper, Caroline and Kelly made a collage. They cut pictures of animals out of mag-azines and taped them to the wall next to one of their windows. A baboon, a cheetah, some ducks -- a spur-of-the-moment project, nothing more.

But soon there were pictures of oceans and sunsets on the wall too, and diplomas from Roland Park Elementary and Middle School. Eventually, not just one, but all four walls were plastered with angels, street signs, ceramic masks, programs from high school musicals, birthday cards and valentines. There was a boy's phone number on a Post-it note. A poster of the Earth saying "Save What's Left." Bus tickets dated Jan. 22 -- their birthday.

"We didn't need real artwork," says Caroline. "We liked simple things."

The wall decorating started in eighth grade. That was the year they insisted on applying to different, albeit adjoining, Baltimore high schools: Polytechnic Institute for Caroline, all-girls Western for Kelly. They wanted to be two separate people, not KellyandCaroline. Not "one of the twins."

I met Kelly on the first day of high school, a young woman would later write on a Web page dedicated to Kelly. For the first month I thought that she must have super-human speed cuz I would say bye to her in class and about 5 minutes later as I was walking to the bus stop, she would be coming at me from the direction of Poly. It was not until she told me later about Caroline that I put two and two together.

They started high school apart, but they didn't stay that way. Academically, Caroline didn't excel at Poly. Her parents believed she would do better at Western, where Kelly was so successful that Caroline was accepted into the honors program without question. She transferred, reluctantly, in the middle of freshman year.

"I had two upset daughters," says Betty Nalwasky. "Kelly was upset that I had allowed Caroline to switch. Caroline was upset that I was asking her to leave her school."

At Western, they took different classes and made different friends, wore different hairstyles, played different sports. At home, they drank Slurpees and took walks in Sherwood Gardens and shared a bed and covered the walls with their lives. They taped up notes from boys and poems and sketches and a Duke basketball poster and a red paper pompom. They put up Kelly's favorite poster, one titled "How To Be an Artist." Look forward to dreams, it said. Cry during movies. Laugh a lot.

They knew how they were different, which helped them know themselves. Once, leading a service at church, Caroline and Kelly described themselves in terms of the biblical sisters Martha and Mary: Mary, who sits at Jesus' feet, patiently listening, and Martha, who rushes about, preparing the house for his visit.

"I am like Martha," 17-year-old Caroline told the congregation. "I can say to Kelly, 'Tiffany is coming over in 10 minutes, and Mom wants the room cleaned before we leave.' Well, 10 minutes later Tiffany is here and the room is still not cleaned. I end up cleaning the room by myself while Kelly is entertaining our guest."

Differences, yes. But in that bedroom, no one went to sleep angry. Apologies were unnecessary; hurt feelings were as short-lived as rainbows. Good things happened there, simple things: Caroline waking Kelly up for school, Kelly helping Caroline decide what to wear. Both sisters staying up late after baby-sitting to talk about the children they loved, and the curfew they hated, and the classes they took together, and the Lilith Fair music they listened to, and the liberal politics they believed in, and the Gap clothes they shared, and the friends they hung out with, because by senior year, separation just wasn't as important. "In the end, I'm glad that we were at the same school," says Caroline. "Because we grew a lot. And eventually ... we became really good friends."

They didn't insist on going to the same college; they applied to some different schools. But when they drove through the gates at the University of Maryland in College Park, when they walked across the vast campus, past the stadium and the red brick buildings and all those trees, they had the same thought: This is where I belong.

On their 18th birthday, Kelly gave Caroline a card. "I think that we are two different people that share one soul," it said. "This is definitely a good thing because my soul would get lonely without you.

"I am glad that you and I are going to the same college. It will make college life easier with you there. I know that we will still fight but it is all good."

Chapter Four

The Dorm Room

Kelly and Caroline never considered sharing a dorm room freshman year. They wanted to try something new. But they chose the same no-drinking, no-smoking floor in LaPlata Hall. They eventually held the same work-study jobs at the counseling center. And by the time they were sophomores, they'd begun to think about living together junior year. They hadn't realized until they'd left home how much they liked sharing a room.

"I could talk to her before I went to sleep," says Caroline. "That was nice. It would wind me down. We'd talk out loud, quietly, about anything that was in your head ... movies, songs, even serious conversations, about our friends or stuff like that. ... And I don't remember her ever falling asleep before I did."

It was Jan. 29, 1998, in the late afternoon, two days into the winter semester of their sophomore year, when Caroline and her boyfriend, Pierre Depestre, decided to visit Kelly in her dorm room. They walked down the hallway, from room 8101 to 8112. When they opened the door, Kelly was lying face down on her bed.

Caroline went to wake her sister, as she'd done so many times before, all those mornings in their bedroom on Juniper Road, inside the scrapbook of their walls. But now Kelly wouldn't wake up, and her skin was cold, and her body was rigid. Caroline screamed, and Pierre called 911. "She's gone," Caroline heard him tell the dispatcher. "She's gone. She's gone."

This is where her life story splits in two. This is why a jagged line separates Caroline's future from her past. Except that the next few hours weren't the future or the past; they were the line itself, a black crevasse, a surreal space and time in which Caroline was sent to her dorm room to wait and wonder what had happened, to count the minutes and start imagining that maybe Kelly was alive after all, because if she were dead why were the paramedics taking so long? But then an officer came and said, As you know, your sister died, and Caroline wanted to call her parents, but the police insisted on driving her to Baltimore to notify them in person.

When they got home her parents weren't there, and no one knew where to find them, not a neighbor, not the pastor at Second Presbyterian, where her mom works. Caroline tried to stay calm and not tell anyone, because she wanted her parents to hear first, but then she got Lori Easterlin on the phone and couldn't hide it, and Lori screamed, because Caroline and Kelly weren't just her baby-sitters, they were like members of her family, and then it was Caroline and Pierre and Lori and the pastor and the police, all waiting in the house for the Nalwaskys to get home from the movies. When the car pulled up, Caroline went outside, saying "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," and told them. Betty Nalwasky clenched her fists and cried. Richard Nalwasky looked at the sky and yelled, "Why, God, why?"

It wasn't the past. It wasn't the future. It was the space in between. It was Caroline, walking away from Kelly's dorm room, thinking, I don't know how to do this. I don't know how to do this without her.

That night, Caroline had no idea how she was going to fall asleep. There was too much adrenalin rushing through her body, too many unfathomable thoughts filling her mind. She wanted to distract herself. She wanted to think about something else. She wanted to talk to Pierre.

It was after midnight when she called his parents' house in Randallstown. Pierre couldn't sleep, either. Caroline had an idea. Lie still, she told him. Relax your toes. Relax your feet. Relax your ankles. She kept talking until he hung up, half-asleep.

And then Caroline got into bed by herself. When she finally slept, it wasn't for long. And when she woke up, in the bedroom she'd shared with her sister, she was screaming.

Chapter Five

Pierre

Who knows why? Why strangers meet. Why lives intersect. Why people pair and split, so many cells in a petri dish. Why Caroline was visiting a friend's dorm room one day when a wayward soccer ball rolled through the door, followed by Pierre Depestre.

Who knows why it felt so comfortable, talking about their lives, why every detail they shared seemed like another piece of the same puzzle, musical tastes fitting in next to politics, values connecting to beliefs. And then: family.

Caroline had a twin, closer than blood. Pierre had a cousin, close as a brother.

A cousin? No, not the same. Not hardly. But there was something in the way Pierre talked about Dom Apollon that sounded familiar to Caroline, something intimate and intense. Here were cousins who were more like best friends, who knew everything about each other and could tell each other anything. Pierre felt lost when Dom, four years older, moved to Virginia for college, leaving Pierre to navigate high school by himself. But the two stayed close despite the distance, and one summer, when Dom moved to California for graduate school, the cousins drove across the country together. Those 12 days were some of the best in Pierre's life.

Pierre loved California. Caroline wanted to live there someday. Who knows, maybe they'd all end up together, Dom and Pierre, Kelly and Caroline.

So Pierre and Caroline started hanging out, and one thing led to another, and, to make a long story short, Pierre started drinking a lot of Slurpees. One day, on their way to 7-Eleven, they had a silly conversation, Pierre saying that if they were both single when they turned 50, they ought to marry each other.

Which, naturally, raised the question of who would turn 50 first.

And that is how Caroline discovered that she and Pierre were born the same day.

Chapter Six

Just Caroline

I woke up the day after, from a night of hardly any sleep due to the passing tears and the clogged nose, and screamed and pounded and clenched my chest as my heart ached. I realized in those moments what true loneliness was and no amount of screams or comfort could appease that loneliness. ... If I could scream every day I would. But if I did, then I could not live every day.

-- Caroline Nalwasky, 10 months after Kelly's death, writing about the morning after it.

When the autopsy revealed a tumor in Kelly's brain, a tumor with no apparent symptoms, the Nalwaskys were terrified that Caroline had one, too. But in her own head, Caroline knew, even before the MRI confirmed it: She had no tumor. She was different. She wasn't Kelly.

No, I'm Caroline.

She knew it at 2. She knew it at 20. She knew it because she had to know it -- how else would she survive? She had been a whole person with a twin; she would be a whole person without one. She would put her life back on track and be the Caroline she was before.

This was the Caroline who returned to school a week after Kelly's funeral, who kept her job at the counseling center, who dropped only one class. Who chose not to move out of her eighth-floor room in LaPlata, even though she still had to walk past the door to Kelly's empty room every day.

This was the Caroline who told friends she was feeling fine even on days when she wasn't. Who admitted to a professor that she was having trouble concentrating but didn't say why to avoid a "gift grade." Who didn't talk about her sister's death with her hallmates, and yet made a collage -- covered with photographs of her twin and newspaper articles about her death -- to hang on Kelly's door, where everyone could see it.

This was the Caroline who tried not to let other people see her cry. It wasn't the perception of weakness she feared; it was the pity, scrutiny, special treatment. If people saw her tears, they weren't seeing the Caroline she wanted to be, the forward-looking, persevering Caroline who could still hang out and have fun, who could be the same student and worker and friend she used to be.

"I feel like everyone is staring at me and saying, 'Look at her, her sister died and she is here now; how does she do it?' " Caroline wrote, trying to express in a journal entry what she couldn't say out loud. "They stay away from me and make allowances for me. The quest to be normal is a battle because no one sees you as that; they see you as a wound."

Other people saw the tight-lipped, tearless Caroline and worried that she wasn't talking enough, revealing enough, dealing enough with losing Kelly. But who, Caroline countered, knew what the right way to grieve was? She'd lost her future overnight; it was up to her to find a new one. She saw a therapist, scanned the Internet, read a dozen books on bereavement, but nothing gave her the map she was looking for, the guide to wherever she was going. She heard about a Twinless Twins organization, even sent away for the newsletter, but Caroline didn't consider herself a twin anymore, let alone a twinless one. She didn't want to define herself by what she was missing.

"I see myself as standing in a desert completely alone and stripped of myself, because there is nothing there to remind me of me," she wrote. "I must walk on. ... I am grieving, but searching for something, which I think is myself."

She'd never taken a journey by herself before. She'd never faced a crisis or envisioned a future or celebrated a birthday alone. Not at 2. Not at 20. And not when Jessica Rossman came to Baltimore, two days after Kelly died.

In high school, Jessica and Caroline had been best friends, poetry-writing, note-passing confidants. After a falling out in 11th grade, the friendship never fully recovered, and in the last few years they'd only spoken sporadically. But Jessica, who goes to college in California, got on a plane hours after she heard about Kelly. She took a week off school to keep Caroline company, to fill the empty space in her double bed, to go out with her for coffee and to the mall and talk about things other than losing a twin. To propel Caroline into what she would come to call her "survival mode."

"For that week," she later wrote Jessica, "I will never be able to thank you."

Caroline believed people came into her life for a reason. If Jessica was the friend who helped her find the energy to return to school, Pierre was the one who helped her stay there. In the first few months after Kelly died, Pierre and Caroline were rarely apart. Without him, she never would have joined the grief support group that formed on campus that semester. At the first meeting, Pierre did the talking, because Caroline could only manage a few words without crying. But she returned, week after week, to share her story with strangers, to meet people whose good grades and new jobs and control over their lives showed her that she might not feel so lost forever. People like Hannah Bennett, the freshman who started college a month after her mother died of cancer.

Hannah was the first friend who could say "I understand" to Caroline and mean it. She knew what it was like to face the future without the one person she'd counted on most.

"You think, when I get married, my mom's going to be there," says Hannah. "And when I have a kid, my mom's going to be there. And when I get a 100 percent on an exam, I'm going to be able to tell my mom about it. And all those things are just, like, no more."

And yet, there she was, an A-student, strong, adventurous, hilarious. She was an inspiration to Caroline, but also a new friend. Someone who had never met Kelly, who knew only Caroline.

It was hard sometimes for Caroline to go places where she and Kelly were known together. Their first year of college, they had joined United Campus Ministries, a non-denominational fellowship group for students. Afterr Kelly died, Caroline stopped going to the meetings for a while, and in those weeks she made a decision: She would finish her sophomore year living in LaPlata, but her junior year, she would move to a new dorm, on the other side of campus.

Yet when Caroline returned to the fellowship group a few months after Kelly's death, it wasn't with the intention of finding a person to live with her junior year. She certainly hadn't planned on asking Jenny Cree -- someone she barely knew -- to be her roommate. And she was actually a little nervous when Jenny said yes.

Chapter 7

Jenny

They were born the same day, three minutes apart.

"Happy birthday," Catie Cree would say.

"Happy birthday," Jenny Cree would answer.

The identical twins from Virginia Beach didn't need elaborate birthday rituals. It was enough to be together, telling each other "Happy birthday, happy birthday," whenever they felt like it, savoring the singular pleasure of sharing the day.

At 18, the Crees struggled with the decision to go to separate colleges. They had never spent more than a week apart in their lives. But the sisters agreed: They needed to gain strength through separation. They needed to follow their interests down different paths. For Catie, a communications major, the road led to Appalachian State University; for Jenny, an aspiring FBI medical examiner, the University of Maryland.

Freshman year, Jenny drove Catie to ASU's western North Carolina campus, then sat with her sister on the bed, unable to speak. Leaving Catie, Jenny felt like she was losing her twin.

A few weeks later, on Sept. 16, 1997, Jenny held the telephone receiver to her ear and celebrated her 19th birthday, the loneliest in her life.

"Happy birthday," said Catie, in Boone, N.C.

"Happy birthday," said Jenny, in College Park.

Her first semester of college, Jenny joined a fellowship group; the members, she discovered, included a set of identical twin sisters. Jenny didn't know much about Kelly and Caroline Nalwasky, but they had a way of communicating with looks, speaking in knowing glances and grins, that Jenny recognized.

Not long after the start of winter semester, someone told Jenny that Kelly Nalwasky had died. Jenny couldn't get back to her room fast enough, couldn't dial the phone quick enough, couldn't find enough words to tell Catie how she felt.

"It just made me feel better to know that if something did happen to my sister, she knows that I love her," Jenny says. "Catie was like, 'Don't worry, I already knew.'"

A few weeks before their 20th birthday, knowing they wouldn't be together, Jenny and Catie exchanged gifts at home. Catie gave Jenny a pendant, half a gold heart on a chain; the other half, Catie kept for herself. The necklace is inscribed, but the words, from the book of Genesis, only make sense when the two halves are united: "The Lord watch between me and thee when we are absent one from another."

(CONTINUED) Pub Date: 06/13/99