Jake and Lily
Jake and Lily
TO THE KIDS,
BOTH GRAND AND GREAT-GRAND,
WHO HAVE ARRIVED SINCE THE LAST LIST:
Wesley
Lulu
Oli
Vika
Kolia
I’m Jake Wambold.
I’m Lily Wambold.
This is the story of our lives.
Life.
Whatever. We’re taking turns.
For this intro, we’re taking turns on lines.
Like, this line is me (Jake).
And this line is me (Lily).
Then we’ll take turns on chapters.
We don’t know how many chapters this book will have.
But even if it had a million chapters,
we couldn’t tell you the whole story.
Because
well
uh
it’s hard to explain.
You’ll just have to take our word for it.
Especially the beginning. You might think it’s weird.
Forget
might
. They’re
gonna
think it’s weird.
Anyway, first you’re going to hear from me
(Jake) because
Don’t say it.
I’m older.
Ha!
That’s why I did the first line too.
Whoopee.
But that’s not the cool thing.
Finally he’s off who’s older, who’s first.
The cool thing is, we can do this without looking at
what each other is writing.
We
could
show each other, but we don’t have
to.
I told you you might think it’s weird.
Gonna.
Let’s get started before we weird them away.
Not so fast. Tell them how
much
older you are than me.
Here we go.
Tell them.
Eleven minutes. Happy?
Eleven measly minutes.
First is first.
Because of eleven minutes,
I’ll be in second place my whole life.
Boohoo.
One more thing.
So you probably figured it out by now. We’re not just brother and sister. We’re
twins!
(That last word was done by both of us.)
L
ight!
Hurricane of light coming at me. Swallows me. I am blinding, screaming light. It’s gone. I’m still here. Dark. Cool. Silent.
Below me railroad tracks gleam in moonlight. Cool, rough cement on my bare feet. Somewhere a clock strikes. I count. Three. In the morning? I’m in my pajamas. Where am I? Why aren’t I in bed? Am I dreaming?
I smell pickles.
I am not alone. I hold out my hand.
O
ur hands touch. Everything is okay.
“I just had a dream,” he says.
“What about?” I say.
“I was standing down there”—he points to the tracks—“and there was a bright light and—”
“—and a train went through you!”
He looks at me. “How did you know?”
“I had the same dream.”
We look at each other. We look up the tracks. There is no sign of a train.
“Maybe we’re still dreaming,” he says. “Poke me.”
I poke him.
“Harder.”
I poke harder.
He squeals, “Ow!”
“Tickle me,” I say.
He tickles me, in my worst spot.
I howl.
“We’re not dreaming,” he says.
“Not anymore,” I say.
“Where are we?” he says.
We look around. Railroad tracks. Benches. Wooden posts prop up a roof that brims out over the concrete platform we stand on. A dim mist of light from the street behind.
“I think it’s the train station,” he says.
“What are we doing at the train station?” I say.
“How did we get here?” he says.
We stare at each other.
“Sleepwalk?” I say, not believing myself.
“Sleepwalk?” he says. “I don’t sleepwalk.”
“Me neither,” I say.
We stare into the darkness. Crickets shake their rattles.
“Well,” I say, “I guess we do now.”
We’re quiet some more. Thinking. Or trying to. How do you think about something you don’t understand?
“Lil?” he says.
“Huh?”
“In the dream?”
“Yeah?”
“Did you smell something?”
“Yeah.”
“What?”
“You say it.”
“Let’s both say it.”
“Pickles!”
More silence. A distant voice shouts but I can’t make out the word.
“Jake?”
“Huh?”
“Are you scared?”
“No.”
“Me neither.”
Silence. Night.
“Jake?”
“Huh?”
“When the train came?”
“Yeah?”
“Did you feel something?”
“What do you mean?”
“
Feel
. When the train came, did it
feel
like something?”
“Yeah. It felt like a train coming.”
“What else?”
“Huh?”
“What
else
? What else did it
feel
like?”
He looks at me. His eyes go wide. He smiles. “Home.”
T
hat’s how it started. I said “home” and my sister smiled and then for no good reason we both started giggling, just standing there giggling on the train platform in the middle of the night.
We left the station. We started walking down the street. Talking…
a
nd talking…
a
nd talking.
We were only six then, but we were old enough to know something amazing had just happened. We had both sleepwalked to the
same place
at the
same time
—
on July 29, our birthday!
And there was more—the train station, the train. All our lives we had been hearing the story: we were born on a famous train, the California Zephyr. Our parents already knew they were going to have twins, but we weren’t supposed to come out for another month, so Mom figured they had plenty of time to go to San Francisco for Uncle Peaceboy’s wedding. They took the cross-country train instead of flying so Mom could be more comfortable. After the wedding, on the train back, we
were born to the surprise of everybody. In the Moffat Tunnel. The Moffat Tunnel is over six miles long and goes under the mountains in Colorado. Personally, I was perfectly happy to wait till Mom got home to be born. But Lily, of course, being Lily, she couldn’t wait. I swear if I concentrate real hard, I can remember her inside our mother pushing me from behind. So into the world we came, first me (I’ll say it for her: ha!), then Lily, in a compartment in a sleeping car. By the dark windows of the Moffat Tunnel. And pickle smell. Because it happened so fast that Dad came rushing from the club car, where he had just bought and taken his first bite out of a big fat dill pickle. There was no doctor, just Dad and the conductor and two waitresses from the dining car.
So now we walked along the night-lit streets and talked about that and boggled over it and nudged each other and giggled at the amazement of it all. And we started to remember things, things that up till then we hadn’t thought much about. Like the time Lily was crying, “I’m stuck! I’m stuck!” only she wasn’t. She was sitting on the living room floor with a coloring book. It was
me
who was stuck.
Mom found me in the backyard. My foot had gotten caught beneath the fence and I couldn’t pull it loose.
Like the time I yelled “Stop!” and Lily heard me and stopped—just as she was about to chase a ball into the street when a car was coming. No big deal, maybe you’re saying, except at the time I was at the dentist—
five miles away
.