I’m certain she assumes I’m still shut away in the psych ward where she left me. She did everything in her power to make sure I stayed sedated and stashed away under her birth name: Kassie Darrick.
I remember that day seven years ago as if it was yesterday. The day my life became an intrusive nightmare; one I never saw coming. One that took me on a rampage fueled by the twisted lies of my very own identical twin sister. I awoke in her hospital bed, wearing her clothes and peering at the exact framed photo of my daughter I had given to Kassie.
For seven years I suffered from Kassie’s demands to the doctors to keep me sedated and drugged while she lived the luxurious life, pretending to be me... Alaina Shepherd. She loved my husband and raised my daughter, Hailie. I cried, begged, screamed, and prayed. I loathed her every visit as she described her life. I endured seven years of what was my life, pierced deep in my soul at the hands of my sister as she gloated and pranced around in her expensive clothing, advertising her extravagant lifestyle and filling me in on the details and the moments that she unremorsefully stripped from me.
From my room in the psych ward, I watched her attend the televised formal events and fundraisers related to my career; a well-known, pursued artist. She was living the dream career I had built. I was certain she would run it into the ground. But surprisingly, after all these years, she had not.
Tonight, she is speaking at the most distinguished art show in the country, exhibiting all my paintings, as her own of course, and there is nothing that will stop me from attending. Kassie Darrick does not understand what the real Alaina Shepherd is capable of. I am going, and you can bet I will make it known what a conniving fraud she truly is.
“ARE YOU ALMOST READY, Kassie?”
“Yes! Just a minute!” I shouted back to Jonah from upstairs. I wanted everything to be perfect tonight. Life had become so complicated and I quickly learned, especially after just being released from the psych ward, that I still had to play the hospital’s game. I had to stop telling people I was the real Alaina Shepherd. If I continued screaming and pleading with everyone to believe me, they would have me readmitted for sure.
I’d spent the past week preparing for this very event. Everything was going to be perfect, right down to my formal, floor-length red gown; an exact replica of the gown I was wearing the night Corbin Shepherd, my husband, first laid eyes on me. And my hair, lying around my shoulders, perfectly styled in waves exactly as it was that night almost a decade ago.
I know Corbin will be there this evening. He attended every event of mine and stood by my side as the proudest husband in the world. He was my biggest supporter and traveled with me to every gala event, sometimes putting his own events on hold or rescheduling.
When I first met Corbin, Kassie had been in the psych ward for just under three years. I would visit every week and fill her in on life outside the hospital, in the hopes that she would want to get her mental illness under control. I talked to her about Corbin often, and then when I had Hailie ... oh, Hailie. She’s the reason I was impelled to play the hospital’s game the entire time I was falsely admitted. My baby. Although she wouldn’t be much of a baby now. She would be seven years old, but she’s still my baby.
I never thought for one second Kassie would take things into her own hands, attack and switch places with me. The thought never crossed my mind. Not once. I had no idea what she was conspiring to do that day. I should have suspected something when I noticed how cheerful she was. Looking back, that alone should have been a red flag. Kassie was rarely light-hearted, and refused to speak or make eye contact with me. The doctors said that’s how she is every day, emotionless and melancholic. I blamed it on her meds. I talked to her doctor about regulating her meds better, but he assured me the medications and the dosages she was taking were exactly what she needed to be taking for her level of mental illness.
Mental illness ran in my family. For the past fifteen years, my mother has been hospitalized in a different psych ward in my home state of Idaho. My father left when Kassie and I were toddlers. My mother always said it was because he found some younger woman who was much better-looking than her. Someone who was immature enough to believe his lies. She would relentlessly degrade my father. In fact, I don’t recall a time she ever said anything kind about him.
Over the years, I grew to believe my father probably ran off because of my mother. There were numerous times Kassie and I wanted to run away because of her, too. One could never predict who you would be getting when you walked through the door of our run-down, one-bedroom efficiency apartment. Our mother could be happy one minute, then flying off the walls the next.
Growing up, Kassie and I stuck together. I tried to help her, hoping she wouldn’t fall into our mother’s black hole of psychological death. I fought and I fought to make Kassie feel normal, but it began to be almost impossible to reach her. In her early teen years she began to degrade herself, just like my mother degraded my father all those years.
We didn’t have much for close family growing up, and the close family we did have did all they could do to try and take Kassie and me away from our mother. I often wondered if life would have turned out better had they succeeded. Would Kassie have had a
