The Midnight Twins

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  Police swarmed the woods and clearings surrounding the Brynn family’s cabin camp, some restraining great wolf like dogs on leather leashes.

  She had not watched Meredith closely enough. Meredith was dreamy and creative and liked to wander. So long as she held hands mentally with Mallory, she thought she was safe. Someone said that Merry had followed a deer and twin fawns down the hiking path two hours earlier. The sun hadn’t quite set then, and now darkness was closing in. She was such a little girl, and these woods and hills so vast, the cliffs above the river so steep.

  Campbell thought she would like to die that instant. She blamed herself.

  Mallory sat nearby on the grass with her back to her mother, playing with a shell necklace. Tim’s aunt had given the girls the necklaces, identical except for the colors, earlier in the spring. Mallory’s lips were moving as she twirled the shells, but she made no sound that Campbell could hear. Unless she spoke to Mallory, Mallory wouldn’t say a thing, Campbell knew. Not for the second or third or fiftieth time, Campbell thought of Gwenny’s words on the night her daughters were born, about twins being one person. After a while, Campbell asked, softly, “Are you . . . talking to Merry?”

  Mallory, absorbed, didn’t answer. Campbell asked again.

  “Laybite,” she said softly. Campbell knew this meant, in twin code, something about the need to be quiet.

  “Mallory?” Campbell asked again. “Are you talking to Merry?”

  Briefly, but with an effort, Mallory answered, “Yes, Mommy.”

  “Did you tell her to stand still and not be afraid of the big doggies?”

  “Yes, Mommy.”

  “Mally, do you know where she is? Is she afraid?”

  “No, she’s not afraid,” Mally said. “I’m talking her, so she knows the doggies will come.” When Mally was upset, she slipped back into the kind of sentences she’d used when she was three. “By the water drops. Soso. Soso.”

  “So what?” Campbell asked, forgetting a twin word she did know. “Are you sure you don’t mean down by the pond in the middle of the river?” Campbell asked, as she had half a dozen times before, her skin tightening with the fear she felt of the slippery, sucking mud on the riverbank. Meredith and Mallory could swim, but just, like puppies. “Is Merry at the river?”

  “No, Mommy,” Mallory said sharply, dragging her eyes up to meet Campbell’s. “I told you. The water drops. Not the swimming hole.”

  “Rain?”

  “Mommy!” Mallory snapped, suddenly angry. She had always been the more volatile, Merry the more . . . well, merry. Campbell felt a total fool, gingerly trying to avoid riling up a kindergarten child.

  “Just stop you!” Mally cried out.

  Campbell glanced around to see if Tim or his sisters and any of the cousins and their spouses, or his ancient aunties, had noticed Mallory’s outburst. Tim and his father and brothers, compelled by some ancient law of being men, were out following the police, probably messing up the dogs’ scent trails, Campbell thought in a moment of spite. The women remained behind, helplessly making and drinking gallons of coffee.

  Campbell thought that the theory of relativity had never been better illustrated. Every minute was only sixty seconds long, but it stretched out like bubble gum until it sagged and tore and then it stretched again. Besides Campbell, only her mother-in-law, seated lightly on the arm of one of the big swings, never moved. She watched Campbell with an unwavering gaze of pity—though she did not venture closer. Campbell supposed that she was thinking about her own twin as well as her granddaughter.

  Campbell didn’t want to know what her mother-in-law was thinking.

  A half hour passed.

  When Campbell glanced at her watch again, another three minutes had expired.

  Suddenly then, Campbell heard the shouts from the woods: “We found her!” and “She’s fine! We’ve got her!”

  She noticed, with a helpless sadness—how could poor Adam ever understand this?—she had actually gripped her little boy’s wrists so tightly, she had left red finger marks on his skin. Then she let herself take a full breath and began to cry for the first time since Meredith had disappeared.

  A burly older officer carried Merry out of the woods and set her down. She ran toward Campbell’s open arms . . . and straight to Mally.

  “Did you watch water?” Mally asked, reaching out to pull a burr from Meredith’s thick, shining, black bobbed hair that swung just above her shoulders. Mallory’s hair was short, swept back in a feathery cap.

  “Beester!” Meredith said. “I watched so long!” Merry then reached up and patted Mallory’s face, as though she, Merry, were blind. To Campbell’s astonishment, Mallory began touching her sister’s elbows and wrists, then her knees, watching Merry’s face for a reaction. She was feeling for broken bones . . . she was making sure that Meredith was not hurt.

  Out of breath from having jogged half a mile back on the pebbled trail down the ridge with his little bundle, the police officer finally caught up and said, “She was sitting still as a mouse, ma’am. Did you teach her to always sit still if she ever got lost? That was wise. She was watching a crack in a rock with the tiniest little—”

  “Waterfall,” Campbell said, pulling Merry back into her lap, holding her close, inhaling the heavy scent of pine that rose from her daughter’s sweet head. “Thank you. Thank you so much.”

  “Exactly,” the heavyset officer continued. “You know the place, then.”

  “Her sister knows,” Campbell told him. She smiled across the yard at her mother-in-law as the relatives swept forward. The older woman nodded, the fingers of both her hands lifted, the fingertips meeting at her lips in a kiss.

  THE LAST BEST NIGHT

  Two nights before New Year’s Day, which would be her thirteenth birthday, Mallory Brynn was certain that she died before she could wake.

  The burning golden panel of cloth fell on her like a great web, sealing her in a searing cocoon. When she tried to breathe, the filaments and sizzling threads of the fabric scorched her throat. Her lungs collapsed into charred, useless flaps. Her last thoughts were of Adam, so little, and her younger cousins. She was sure that Meredith had gotten out with them in time. . . .

  “Sit up!” Meredith shouted. Mallory mumbled, her hands flailing, still fighting the dream. “Mally!” Meredith said again. “I’ve tried to wake you up three times! Could you be more limp? Do you really want to sleep through your own birthday party?” “Oh my God!” Mally whispered, sitting up and pinching her forearms to verify that she was still flesh and bone and not ash. “I forgot all about it. I had the most horrible dream! I dreamed I died in a fire, Merry. I dreamed I was dead.”

  “You were out of it like you were dead, Mallory! I hate when you go random like this. You just don’t care.”

  “I’m tired from practice,” Mallory, who played indoor soccer in the off-season, said. She pulled off her socks and added, “Plus, I hate parties.”

  She did not, but she was so deeply shy that being introduced was, for her, like being scraped with the tines of a fork.

  “You hate parties? How can we be related?”

  “I just . . . don’t know what to say. I can’t say, ‘Oh, Alli’s wearing white and so is Crystal. How totally dorky, hanging with the trendies,’ ” Mally simpered in what she considered a good imitation of her sister’s friends.

  “My friends don’t talk like that.”

  “They do so.”

  “So do yours.”

  “I don’t have any friends like that,” Mallory said.

  Merry realized, with a pang of sympathy, that this was true. Now that they were in junior high, boys didn’t want to hang with Mally for the same reasons she still wanted to hang with them. Mallory’s best friends were high-school girls from the Eighty-Niners, the traveling soccer squad. They liked her enough. But there was no such thing as a high-school girl who would want to sleep over with a thirteen-year-old if she wasn’t babysitting her.

  “Well, when you s
ee people, just say, ‘Thanks for the present,’ ” Merry said, soldiering on. “Say, ‘Thanks for coming.’ Are you stupid or something?”

  “We told them not to bring presents.”

  “But nobody pays attention to that. They’ll bring some anyway,” Meredith said hopefully, examining her reflection in the long mirror their father had glued to the back of their door. Her blunt-cut black hair shone like a new boot. A box-pleated melon miniskirt, the light wool tweed crisscrossed with pale blue strands, worn over white tights, topped off by a cami and a man’s blue twill cuffed shirt, matched her alternating white-and-melon fingertips and toes perfectly. She sighed in hard-earned pleasure. It had taken four hours at the Deptford Mall—an expedition that would have excited Mallory as much as shopping for batteries. But the effect was worth it—casual, not too on-purpose, dressed up a little bit by the three matching pearl studs their parents had given each girl. Their mother had pierced their ears—taking care to put two holes in Mallory’s left ear and two in Meredith’s right ear—to tell them apart. A trio of tiny, perfect pearl studs was their parents’ present to each girl.

  When the girls turned out to be mirror twins, and the piercings corresponded to the correct side for each girl, Campbell was astonished. When she’d chosen the spots for the piercings, she’d had no idea.

  Merry wondered for a moment if she should ditch her pearls for her white-bead chandeliers. But that would hurt their parents’ feelings.

  Mally was wearing her pearls. That was at least a start.

  So Meredith ransacked her sister’s closet. There were only two remotely possible shirts. The best hope was a cream-colored thing with a hint of a ruffle at the shoulders. It was clearly meant for summer, but Mally could throw it over a long-sleeved tee, if Mally had a tee that didn’t look as if it had gone under the lawn mower. Meredith could lend her a real silk gray turtleneck, but she would spend the whole night watching Mally like a hawk. Mally was such a slob. She threw herself around like an eleven-year-old guy—still! She wore hockey skates! She rode her bike to school in nice weather, to Meredith’s utter humiliation. She slept in Bugs Bunny boxers. Mally’s definition of “dressed up” was wearing something she hadn’t already worn twice—in the same week! And still, all she had to do was brush her hair and zip! Mallory was as beautiful as Merry, except that for Merry it was a full-time job.

  Merry was too young to have any idea that all the washing grains and crunches she inflicted on herself were unnecessary—that both girls’ basic elfin cuteness was genetic. She liked seeing herself as a slave to her appearance. It justified how much she spent on things just because she liked how they smelled. It justified the hours she spent simply stroking her soft, textured garments, nearly in tears because they were so beautiful and they would last long after she, Merry, got old and died. She would never have considered it a selfish thing that she locked the box where she kept her jewelry or crossed elastic bands over the front of the shelves where she stored her sweaters, folded in order not just by color but by shade.

  She wanted to forbid people to touch her things, but couldn’t bear to admit it. It was at odds with her generally sentimental and loving self—about which she was also vain.

  Finally, knowing it would be wrong to let her twin go down to the party looking like a homeless person, she pulled down her silky turtleneck, the color of moonlight on a summer lawn, trying to put the picture of it with a mustard stain on the middle out of her mind.

  “Here, Mal,” Merry said. “You can wear this under your nice cream blouse. . . .”

  “I hate that blouse. It’s too tight!”

  “It’s supposed to be tight, duh! It’s supposed to show you have a waist!”

  Mally grumbled as she rolled out of bed and headed for the shower. “I barely do have a waist.”

  This was true. At four feet and ten inches, neither of the girls had yet what would be termed “figures.”

  Meredith did her best to cinch in at the middle what basically went straight up and back down. Despite the personal distinction she made between herself, a cheerleader, and her sister, a jock, Merry also was a committed and agile athlete. Only eighty-eight pounds, she was the team’s cocaptain and a “flyer,” tossed five feet into the air above the gymnasium floor to land in a basket catch, lifted on the thighs and shoulders of bigger girls of the pyramid.

  Mallory emerged from the shower with wet hair and an alarmed expression.

  “Why did you have to invite guys?” she asked. “Everyone thinks I’m an idiot. I probably dreamed I was on fire because of unconscious free-floating anxiety or something.”

  “Free-floating what? They’re not sleeping over! And no one thinks you’re an idiot,” Meredith explained. “How could they? You never say anything. They probably just think you’re gay.”

  “Maybe I am gay.”

  “Well, then dress up for the girls. Jeez, Mal. You’re trying to drive me crazy,” Meredith finally said, spinning Mallory around, tucking and fussing. “And it’s working. Stand up straight!”

  “Ugh,” Mallory said, and flicked at the ruffles that flattered her strong, broad shoulders. She stood up straight and her natural grace took over. “I look like crap. I wish I was wearing a tracksuit.”

  “You look normal, Mal. You’re not used to normal. Most people don’t wear gym shorts in December with T-shirts that have stupid graffiti jokes on them.”

  “I love my shirts! Drew gave me those shirts.” The girls’ next-door neighbor was a boy three years older, but had grown up with the twins. When Drew’s mother, Hilary, wanted to torment them, she brought out photos of all three of them wearing diapers and nothing else. Now, Drew had a special place in their hearts because he had recently acquired both his older sister’s Toyota truck and his driver’s license.

  “He gave them to you after he wore them until they were too small!” Merry snapped.

  “That’s what I think was so sweet,” Mallory replied in Drew’s defense.

  “They have sweat stains on the pits!” Merry sneered.

  “Big deal. I wear them to sleep in! What’s wrong with sweat?” Mallory used their ancient language to warn Merry to stop talking. “Laybite!”

  After a long, tense pause, Merry said with a sigh, “Listen, Mallory. I’ll shut up in a minute. People have been planning for this for weeks.”

  A hundred kids had been invited by e-mail, most of them eighth graders and freshmen. But Drew, still a steadfast friend, especially to Mallory, despite the great divide that had opened between them two years before when Drew went to high school, was bringing at least six of his cross-country teammates. Who knew who else might hear about the party and show up to affect nonchalance? Maybe her best friend Kim’s older brother, David!

  Merry shivered with excitement over this fact alone.

  “Mally, just make an appearance,” Merry pleaded. “Pretend you’re going to have fun. It’s my birthday, too, and you have no right to make me feel guilty for being excited.”

  “Of course. It’s all about you, Merry.”

  “Well, if you sit up here, people all over town are going to think you’re a mutant or something! No one misses her own birthday party. It’ll be all over town tomorrow.”

  In this she was correct. In Ridgeline, population 1,501, everyone knew the Brynn twins.

  If they didn’t know the twins to speak to, they’d seen their soccer and cheerleading photos—from the first grade to last year’s snapshots—displayed on the wall behind the counter at Domino Sporting Goods, the store Tim owned with his best friend, Rick Domini. Everyone in town passed through Domino Sports, to buy backyard tetherballs and knee braces and hockey sticks and team uniforms and running shoes—although the Target out by the Deptford Mall was cheaper. Loyalty made them spend the extra dollar or three—that, and the confidence that came from Tim’s amiable ability to remember to ask about their trick knees or shin splints.

  People liked making the Saturday morning circuit around Ridgeline’s brick-paved town squ
are. It hadn’t changed in any essential way for 160 years.

  The Mountain Beanery Coffee Shop had replaced the dress-maker, and the Ridge State Bank had taken over Helmsley’s Funeral Home. (People still saw this as a fair exchange and made jokes about it.) When Miss Alice’s daughter, Jenny, took over Miss Alice’s Dance and made it into Jenny’s Leap Beyond and Fitness Fit for You, she built her own little square studio out near the middle school, making way for Open Sesame, the Greenbergs’ bagel bakery and deli.

  In the middle of the square was a larger-than-life-size bronze that people had seen all their lives but which few understood. A woman in a long, sweeping cloak held two children’s faces against her skirts. Although it was called Courage, the statue depicted the widow of one of the miners who died ninety years before when a shaft collapsed in a copper vein up off Canada Road. Out from the square, like four spokes, the four arteries—Main Street, Pilgrim Road, School Street, and Cemetery Road—led to the places anyone might imagine and a few that no one would.

  Main Street got most of the traffic. It went to the big concrete loop that formed the entrance to the highway into New York City, one hundred miles away. If people went straight, past the highway overpass, eventually they came to the Deptford Mall and Cinema. School Street passed all six area schools—the elementary, the middle school, the two public high schools, Saint Francis of Assisi, and Ridgeford Community College.

  By contrast, Pilgrim Road was barely traveled—and to the annoyance of its residents, only sporadically plowed. Just a few blocks out were the big, three-story clapboard homes that had been farmhouses before Ridgeline was a proper town. In one of them, Tim and Campbell Brynn lived with their family.