The Midnight Twins (6 page)

The charms would later be found in the yard, under a frosting of broken glass.

They hauled Adam across both their laps and started tickle-torturing him in gratitude.

Then all three were all but knocked backward by a sudden uprush of air from the half-open double doors at the front of the house.

The plastic covering Uncle Kevin had put in place of the screen flew off with a whickering sound.

And then, the very windows shook in their frames with the force of the explosion.

“What the hell is that?” Merry shouted.

All of them could see vivid angry outbursts rocketing up from every window. They heard the whistle and saw fountains of red, gold, green. Next came the staccato of strings of firecrackers and the deep gutturals of cherry bombs.

“Cool!” Adam shouted, over the screams of the younger children. “Is this why you were going on about the fireworks? Is it a surprise?”

“Adam Brynn!” Mallory shouted, noticing that Hannah and Heather were now crying hard and clinging to Merry. “Look at how much you scared the little kids. I told you, no fireworks!”

Adam’s freckled face was a map of shocked betrayal. “Me? Those aren’t mine! I don’t know what they are!”

All six of them ran out the front door, but the girls couldn’t focus: Fireworks were exploding behind the house, too, in the rock garden, near the back door.

“I don’t see anybody!” Mally yelled.

“Me neither!” said Merry, trying to keep both Hannah and Heather from simultaneously climbing her like a jungle gym. The fireworks weren’t corner-store sparklers, but big, deafening, semi-pro, the real thing.

“Should we call the fire department?” Merry asked over the din.

“They don’t seem to be doing anything, just exploding,” Mallory shouted as they herded the kids back onto the porch. “Adam, swear on Mom’s head, you didn’t know a thing about this?”

“I swear. I asked David Jellico to get fireworks for me ten times, and he wouldn’t!”

Merry’s cell phone began to vibrate in her hip pocket and to play “Song of Joy.” She answered: It was Will Brent, wishing her a happy birthday.

“I can’t talk,” she said. “Some neighborhood idiot set off a mess of fireworks, and it’s not even midnight!” She glanced up at Mallory. “Me too,” she said quietly. Mallory smirked. Then the telephone inside the house began to ring and they ran for it. By the time the twins got everyone back inside and explained to their grandmother that what she was hearing through the receiver was not a gunfight on Pumpkin Hollow Road, they were too exhausted to do anything but flop down into the big couch under the front window.

Merry thought of it first.

Why had Gwenny called?

It wasn’t near time for her to come over.

“What’s up, Grandma?” she remembered asking.

“I was thinking about those fireworks,” Grandma Gwenny had said.

But no one had told Grandma Gwenny about the fireworks until after she called.

She could be as strange as they were.

“Don’t worry,” Grandma had said. “It was just a prank. No one is hurt. Right? You’re sure? I’ll be there soon.”

“No one is hurt. But you sound funny. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Gwenny Brynn said. And she told herself,
Be still, Gwen, it’s nothing!
But she knew it was
something
. . . though not what the something was.

“What was all that about?” Meredith asked. “Did you arrange with Grandma to call?”

“Not me,” Mally said.

“So what do you think that was? Who did it? The neighbors?”

“I don’t even think the neighbors are over there. Their house is totally dark.”

“Maybe they were inside making out.”

“And then they jumped up from making out and decided to set off eighty million fireworks all around the house of the people next door?”

“There is that,” Merry admitted.

“It was probably Will,” Mallory ventured, knowing even as she said it that Will Brent was as likely to pull off a scary practical joke as the girl at the Video Box was likely to be polite.

“You know it wasn’t.”

“Well, he called right then!”

“He knew it was the time I was putting the little kids to bed. Well, almost time. He’s at Lizzy White’s party. He knew it was a time when I could talk. I should call him back.”

“Do you have to? Right now?”

“No,” Merry said finally. “He can wait. You’re supposed to let guys wait.”

Mally asked, “Are you hungry?”

“Only so I could eat my own leg. Maybe Grandma will bring something. She’ll be here any minute, trust me. She sounded all weird. She probably thinks we’re dead out in the yard,” Merry answered.

“She’ll bring cucumber and cream cheese on toast squares!” Mallory said with a laugh.

“I can’t wait!” Merry yelled. “I just love those cucumber sandwiches. You only have to eat fifty!”

The girls exchanged grins.

“Let’s make toasted bagels and tomatoes with cheese,” they said together.

“I’ll make,” Merry offered. “I think they’re finally asleep.” Adam was sprawled, of all places, on the dog’s bed in the corner of the living room.

“Me too,” Mallory said. “I’m so totally excited by babysitting and idiot fireworks I could party all night. But I think I’ll get a ten-minute power nap instead.”

“You’ll sleep through your own funeral,” Merry said, echoing their father in his litany of complaints about Mallory’s comatose Saturday mornings.

“God, I hope so,” Mallory said.

She lay back on the sofa.

She was drowsy, almost asleep, when the roof fell in. A five-foot burning column from the porch crashed through the roof just over Mallory’s head.

Before Merry could cross the room, their aunt’s huge brocaded curtains caught and disintegrated, with a sound like a million crushed pine needles, into huge golden torches that fell like fronds onto the couch. Mallory clawed to keep the strands, pliant and sticky as hot sugar, away from her face.

“Get on the floor! Roll!” Merry screamed as Mallory leaped up, the back of her sweater alight. Merry pushed her sister down and, once sure that Mallory had rolled out the flames and ripped the sweater off as well, leaped up the stairs two at a time. She dragged Hannah and Heather from their bunks and forced them down into a four-legged crawl toward the back stairs, shouting for Alex, who appeared, groggy, in his basketball pajamas, at the door of his room.

“The house is on fire!” Merry shouted. “The porch roof is on fire! It broke the front window!”

Smoke was filling the hall. Merry couldn’t figure it out. Somehow, the flames must have penetrated the roof. Glancing into her aunt’s room, she noticed the three baby albums prominently displayed on a whitewashed bookshelf. Ever tenderhearted, Merry dashed to grab them. But as she did, little Heather screamed and scooted under her mother’s bed.

“Alex!” Meredith shouted. “Get Hannah downstairs. Get Adam outside. See if Mally’s hurt!” His eyes huge, Alex stood still in his doorway, staring. Smoke was beginning to curl around the molding, and the smoke alarms were shrieking. Merry’s throat began to sting. “Alex, go!”

Alex seemed to find his feet and began to run. Merry couldn’t believe how fast all of it was happening. Coughing, she threw the baby albums down the stairs and crawled across her aunt and uncle’s floor. “Heather! Heather Lynn! Come out here!” She could see Heather, back against the wall under her parents’ headboard. But small as she was, Merry couldn’t work her way under the bed. Heather had thrown herself on her face and was sobbing for her mother. The smoke was thickening. Merry could hear a rumpus downstairs—Mally screaming Adam’s name, the other two crying, the door banging open. Finally, with a mighty lunge that opened a gash in her scalp when she hit her head on the bed frame, Meredith grabbed Heather’s long braid and pulled the squirming child toward her.

Meredith picked Heather up and held her like a football, as the child fought and choked. Merry tripped over the photo albums on the landing and fell down three steps. Grabbing them, she scrabbled for the back door, pushing Heather ahead of her with her knee. A full second passed before the message reached Merry’s brain that the doorknob was oven-hot and the skin on her hand was already bubbling. She screamed, instinctively turning toward the sink. But the kitchen curtains were crackling. Meredith couldn’t even see into the living room.

“Mallory!” Meredith called. “Mally!”

Mallory didn’t reply.

In the fractional instant it took her to realize that Mallory might not answer, that she might not hear Mally’s voice again except inside her head, Meredith experienced the same yearning her twin had felt hours before.

Giggy
, she thought. Without Mallory, she would not feel halved but erased. She would need to draw herself again from a stick figure, filling in her shape and textures. She would be a flat Meredith, who would disappear when she turned in profile, a silhouette Meredith without color or sound.

“Mallory!” Even to herself, she sounded like a wounded lamb, bleating.

She thought she heard a faint answer—where did it come from? The billowing blackness of the living room, the ring of flame left by the open front door? When had all the electricity gone out?

“Mallory!” Merry called again.

Quickly she pushed Heather out the back door—nothing out back was burning now. Merry watched to make sure that Heather jumped down the steps and ran into the yard. Then she grabbed one of the little girl’s coats from the rack and covered her mouth. She dropped to her knees and began to crawl on her elbows toward what she thought should be the couch under the bay window. When she felt what seemed to be Mallory’s shoulder, she hauled her sister on top of her and began to scoot backward toward the door, inch by laborious inch. She could see a lighter rectangle of darkness.
Finally
. Then she heard a pop and shivering musical sounds of tinkling glass, and then nothing else at all.

FOREVER TWO

They lay in a dream, but the dream wasn’t like sleep. It was like suffocation.

Neither knew how long it lasted.

Both of them were less troubled by the pain than the unnatural sensation of being unable to hear each other, except dully, as if through a blanket. But time indeed was measured by painful interruptions—the positioning of needles, the reflexive gagging on tubes. Their own groans sounded distant, as if their bodies and voices were a radio left on in an empty room. One sister’s thoughts were indistinct to the other, expanding and contracting in shapes rather than in words. They caught mental glimpses: Difficult, congested breathing for Mallory. Merry’s heartbeat taking off at the approach of a claw that would pull and pinch off skin that was as parched as a dead leaf.

After a time, the sense of morning, the change of light, even behind closed eyelids, returned.

That came first.

Next they heard the oceanic murmur of voices that would rise and subside. Thousands of dots collected into pictures, and faces appeared. Between the girls the images ping-ponged—tiny and far off, or close and stretched, grotesque, misshapen, and huge. First to Merry, then to Mally, there appeared snapshots, for a single second. They saw their father, asleep in a chair. They saw their grandmother Arness, Campbell’s mother, on her farmhouse porch in Virginia. But Grandma Arness was dead. She died when they were ten. They saw Grandma Gwenny peering at them, her wild Welsh eyes, so like their own, filled with aching empathy. Nodding, nodding. Grandma Gwenny cried and nodded. There was Gramps outside Uncle Kevin’s house, clutching his cell phone, his face streaked red and gray by the fire and shadow. Their mother, bending low, brushing their cheeks, flooding them with their mother’s smell—gardenia and rubbing alcohol. The sting of her tears on Mally’s face. Adam, his mouth opening in a dark, sucking, expanding cry.

The night images were worse.

First Merry, then Mally, cringed when a tiny black-haired girl in an old-fashioned high-necked dress appeared, leaning over a bridge above a creek, then turned quickly to stare at them, her face zooming nearer, nearer, nearer—her eyes nearly flat against their own eyes. Meredith and Mallory clutched at each other’s minds in fear. The little girl’s face was kind and even familiar, but overflowing with knowledge and mourning. Then David Jellico, in a garden, carefully arranging great circles of smooth white stones or shells. Merry thought it was a religious place. Mally thought it was a graveyard.

They ran away into sleep.

Finally real people appeared.

Kim came, sobbing, pleading with Merry to wake up, kissing Merry when she opened her eyes and blinked to show that she was already awake. Will Brent knelt at Merry’s bedside in prayer.

Mally, still in and out of consciousness, saw her teammates, led by her friend Eden, carrying a signed ball through the hospital’s revolving door. And then they appeared in her room, for real.

“Way to get attention, Brynn,” Eden said. “Don’t expect to get out of practice this way.” Except it sounded like
donexpectogeddoudda
. . .

Finally, each heard words distinct as musical notes: The voice of Dr. Staats, their pediatrician. Their father’s. “Undeniable.” “Without them . . .” “Permanent . . .” “Breathing, at first . . .”

Mallory wrenched her mind up and out.

She opened her eyes. What lay over her? A tent? A plastic sheet? In her nose . . . in her nose was a plastic tube. She tugged lightly on it and choked.

She tried to think her way to Meredith, but she heard only a mewling, like a kitten. Meredith was deep under some kind of syrupy layering, a mental mud of medication. Only when someone changed the dressings on her hand did Meredith stir from the fog of painkillers. As she watched dimly, the nurses replacing the dressings, she would think of her hand as it had been—fluttering, pointing, directing, thrust up in the Y sign, snapping back and forth across her green cheerleader’s sweater in the gestures of the routines, waving when she flirted with the crowd on the bleachers, calling out instructions under her breath to the rest of the squad, “Last time now . . . Ridgeline, so fine!”