Abby had been Tommy’s twin, but The Saltwater Twin was mine-and she gave me a way to escape. Abby drowned in the Atlantic when we were three, leaving her brother, leaving all of us behind. Her family lived on my cousins’ street, but she was already gone by the time they moved in. She was an ordinary kid named Abby Mahoney, a sandy-haired, freckle-faced girl-that is, if she looked anything like her twin brother, who was my age. She didn’t start out as a mythical creature.
In my imagination, she became mythic: The Saltwater Twin. She wore a necklace of coral, swam seal-like through shimmering clouds of fish, and slept in an underwater cave with a nightlight of luminescent plankton.
Her hair grew into delicate ropes of seaweed her skin turned opalescent like the inside of a shell. I imagined she floated like a bright October leaf, unhurried, lazily seesawing in the current until at last she came to rest on the ocean floor. I pictured her below the waves where the water was gentle.
We have lingered in the chambers of the seaīy sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
