The Midnight Twins

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  When they fell from ladders, or popped hernias, needed hips replaced or benign tumors excised, when they had babies that wouldn’t come the regular way or children whose inflamed tonsils kept them coughing and smelling of VapoRub all winter long, the people of Ridgeline met Campbell . . . usually first as a pair of whimsical blue eyes between the rim of her surgical hairnet and the top of her face mask. She was tender and efficient when they fell asleep frightened, cheerful and solicitous when they awoke in pain.

  Her girls were a local landmark. Everyone told the tale of their birth to friends from out of town, if they got around to it, like the story of the hurricane that passed through twenty years before and didn’t destroy one single house but did drive an egg into the trunk of a tree without breaking the shell. Never gave their parents a day’s trouble, neighbors said of the twins—although Campbell would have disputed that point. The twins and their ten-year-old brother, Adam, had never, so far as any of them knew, had an argument of substance with anyone except Drew.

  And those were sacred and planned rituals.

  For him, the twins regularly devised tortures, as if he were still their old playmate on the wooden swing set. They waited until he was parked in the driveway with a date and then dumped a twenty-pound bag of birdseed from their bedroom window onto the roof of his car. Then, patiently as a sibling, Drew waited until the right moment to exact his revenge, with an amiable determination. Color copies of Merry with cucumber slices over her eyes, sunbathing behind the garage in her little brother’s boxers with the Sunday comics spread over her chest, were taped to dozens of the lockers at her school. Mallory’s new Australian fleecy boots, left outside her back door to dry, had cherry tomatoes tucked in the toes.

  The Brynns were not unlike most families in Ridgeline.

  There were fewer divorces than the New York State norm, but the town had its share of single moms. Even in most of the two-parent families, both parents worked. The usual number of children was three instead of two. The Methodist and Presbyterian churches faced each other squarely on corners of the same street. Most kids knew how to skate by the age of three and to ski by the age of five, and even men whose sons had moved to Seattle still turned out for the Friday night football games. The copper mines were gone now, but the copper remained, tinting the soil up in the hills with a sparkly grit. The copper miners were gone, too. But they had left behind large families. In the cemetery, the same names that repeated along ranks of headstones—Morgan, Vaughan, Massenger—still showed up on the athletic plaques at school and the dentists’ shingle at the medical center.

  At its best, Ridgeline was like a family, defending the eccentricities of its elders and generally embracing newcomers who made an effort to put down serious roots. At its worst, it was like a family, withholding approval, trading speculation and gossip, feuding and forgiving. Like a family, at holidays and funerals, weddings and graduations, they gathered to mourn and to celebrate. Fully a tenth of them or more gathered that Friday night to wish the twins a happy passage to the next plateau of their lives.

  That Mallory was being such a mule was made even worse by the fact that they would be spending their real birthday—New Year’s Eve—babysitting their brother and their three younger cousins.

  Campbell had laid down the law. “Dad and I have waited for years to go to New York for New Year’s Eve. You’re needed when you’re needed. And I’m certainly not going to pay a babysitter when I have you two, especially not after throwing you a big birthday bash. So lose the long face, Meredith. Mallory’s taking it okay.”

  “Mallory has no life,” Merry had protested, and got nowhere.

  Now, Merry tried a new tack. “Mal, you’re never going to get a guy. . . .” she said.

  “I told you. I don’t want to get a guy! Not yet. Not this week! It would be . . . like having a job. You know, you have to call them all the time and they have to call you. Look at you and Will Brent. You were supposedly ‘going out’ all last year. You couldn’t even go to the movies. You’re not allowed. You hung around at the mall and held hands. Why would I want to do that? And David, your big crush, he thinks you’re a little baby on a Big Wheels.”

  In the midst of her rant, Mallory thought fleetingly of Drew. She loved Drew, and sometimes her feelings for him were confused. He was her buddy; if Drew came to the door to borrow something or pick them up to drive them to school, and Mally was in her pajamas, she didn’t feel the need to scream and run upstairs. But sometimes, when Drew grinned and tickled her . . . she felt something else. . . .

  She was about to tell Meredith that when Meredith purred, “Let’s see how David feels next year, when I’m in high school.”

  David Jellico was the older brother of Merry’s best friend, who was, in turn, the daughter of their mother’s best friend, Bonnie. Merry often explained to Mallory that it would just be perfect if she and David grew up and got married because their mothers could be in-laws. David, she prattled on until Mally wanted to scream, was not just cute, like most guys, but truly beautiful, with his perfect nose and slightly olive skin and long blond thatch. Merry thought David’s face looked like something traced from a history book, like a face from a Roman myth. Mallory thought Merry was nuts. She considered David Jellico, with his sweaters tied around his neck like he’d just jumped off a yacht, too much like a boy model to be even semi-interesting.

  She also knew that she could beat him in a race, any day of the week.

  But now, Mallory smiled reluctantly at her sister. Oh well. She’s Merry. Being at the center of a giggling crowd, like a chick surrounded by big peacocks, was Merry’s idea of heaven. She liked it when boys picked her up and held her like a life-size doll; she liked actually wearing a size zero—like the puking girls, but without puking.

  On the other hand, any boy who tried to pick Mallory up like a toy would have faced serious damage to his kneecaps. When Drew told her that legally, she was a midget—as if there were a legal definition for midgetness, as there was for blindness—she popped a bubble from her customary huge wad of gum in his face.

  Despite her devotion to sports, Mallory was still heroically lazy, happiest on the sofa with a ginger ale and a whole tower of saltines for three straight hours of recorded soap operas.

  “How can you stand watching old people talking about sex?” Merry would ask. “How can you stand the creepy hairstyles?”

  “They comfort me,” Mally answered. “They’re like life. Nobody ever talks about anything that matters in real life, either. Like in school. All just a bunch of lies and temper tantrums. Look at you and Kim. And I like that when it’s Halloween on the soaps, it’s Halloween in real life. It’s very fishbowl.” If she ran out of soaps, Mally watched science fiction and mystery movies of every description that were old when their mother was their age. She owned stacks of old tapes she had lugged home from garage sales on her bike, along with the last VCR made in America. Mallory pulled that home in a wagon. Meredith was glad the only one who saw her was Drew, who yelled, “You need some green canvas sneakers and geraniums, Brynn. You look like my grandma Shirley going around the square at the Farmers’ Market!”

  Unperturbed, Mallory set up the cruddy old thing in the living room.

  Merry would come into the house with Kim, and Mallory would hold up her hand in the darkness. “Movie,” she would say. “No idiot speak.” Mallory was as rude as a guy.

  No one, not even Kim, quite “got” the twins. She and her own brother were nowhere near as loyal as Meredith and Mally were. They made fun of each other, but Kim was sure that Mallory would kill anyone who tried to hurt Merry. She hoped David would do the same for her.

  “Mally, come on!” Merry pleaded. Mallory didn’t stir. If anything, she curled tighter into herself. Then finally, for the first time that night, Merry took a long look at Mally’s face.

  Mallory looked lousy, pasty-faced, her big gray-blue eyes darkened, troubled, like puddles muddied by a rainstorm. It wasn’t the party, the clothes, or the boys
. “Anno,” Merry said—old twin language that meant “I care that you hurt. I’m here. You’re not hurting alone.” “Tell me.”

  In a rush, Mally said, “I dreamed that we were in a fire and these burning window drapes fell on me and I suffocated. I woke up totally covered in sweat. I’ve never had a dream like that. Aren’t you supposed to really die if you dream you die?”

  “That’s an old wives’ tale,” Meredith said, feeling that same creep of fear. “It’s just nerves.”

  “It didn’t feel like an old wives’ tale,” Mallory went on, as Meredith slowly got up and began to blow out her twin’s thick black thatch of hair, so that the ends flipped under and lay against Mallory’s cheeks. Mally continued, “I should hate your guts. You didn’t even ask me about my dream. . . .”

  I didn’t want to, Merry thought. It wasn’t just that she didn’t have the time. There was a foreboding for her in hearing this, like seeing ambulance lights revolve in the distance. Merry was trying hard not to absorb her sister’s misery.

  “Just try to let go of it,” Merry advised. “You’re overreacting.”

  They could hear the doorbell pealing. The party was set up in the garage, which Tim Brynn built with heat pipes when he added it on to the three-story saltbox where Brynn relatives had lived for four generations—mostly so he could use his workshop year-round. Before they moved to their ranch, Tim’s parents had lived in the house, raising their children there. His grandfather, Walker, lived there before then, and his great-grandfather before that. Now, every bike and sled, as well as the library ladder that Adam and Tim hadn’t quite finished in time for Campbell’s Christmas present, was stacked outside and placed under a tarp against the dim possibility of snow. Tim had stocked his pride and joy, a fifties soda machine, with Cokes and Orange Crush, and a long table wobbled under the weight of hot dogs, salsa, chips, dip, and a cake that was half white, half chocolate (Mallory hated chocolate). Tim’s iPod, in its dock of tiny, powerful speakers, was secured on a makeshift shelf far out of anyone’s reach. Campbell was elated. She had earlier called their efforts a “winter wonderland.”

  But that was only in the Brynns’ garage.

  To the disgust of everyone in Ridgeline, there hadn’t been even a halfhearted flake of snow since Halloween. The winter was open and dry, after a bitter and prolonged fall. But tinsel and banners draped the walls, and Campbell had raided both fabric stores at the mall for all the white and silver tulle she could scrounge, to make it as festive inside as it was dreary outside.

  And now, Meredith could hear David’s voice downstairs. He was dropping Kim off, but how long would he stay? David had to see her in her melon skirt!

  “Come on, Ster,” she said softly, hugging Mally, using their baby name for each other, the one Adam still used for both of them. “It was a bad dream, but it was just a dream.”

  “I’m not going to talk about it all night, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Mallory said. Merry jumped. She had been worrying—about just that very thing.

  “I don’t want you to think about it all night,” Merry answered. Since she could feel Mallory’s thoughts, that would be just as awful. “Why worry about something that didn’t happen? Forget it.”

  “That’s your answer to everything,” Mally griped.

  “It works for me!”

  “You didn’t feel it!” Mally paused and asked, “Hey, why didn’t you feel it?”

  Why hadn’t she? Merry set down the blow-dryer.

  When Mallory was knocked flat by an overzealous opponent on the soccer field, Merry, miles away at the mall, had to catch her breath. When Merry started to sweat from nerves before a math quiz, Mally’s palms got sticky. There was nothing eerie about this. They expected it. It was as ordinary to them as Mallory thinking about the right answer to the story problem and Merry writing it down, or Merry defining “cacophony” in her head so that Mally could pass her vocab test. It was like their twin language—so elaborate it included past tenses and the names of everyone in the family, in translation. Their brother Adam was “Liba,” which the twins supposed was a toddler term for “little baby.” They could figure out the toddler derivation of “siow,” which meant “I’m hurt.” But they had no memory of beginning to speak their language. It was as if they’d received it, fully formed, like a book of poems they were expected to memorize.

  In the same way, dreaming the same dreams at the same time was the usual: Their father had watched them in their sleep when they were tiny, one girl talking in her sleep about losing her stuffed poodle, the other asking if she’d found it.

  What was creepy was that there was a dream now that only one of them knew about.

  “If I dreamed it, why didn’t you?” Mally asked again.

  “Because . . . because . . . probably because I was awake,” Meredith explained, after a pause. She was improvising, and Mally knew it. A little spool of nausea began to unwind in her belly. She should have heard Mally’s dream, or felt it. Still, Mally’s moods were going to give Merry an ulcer. “Can we please go downstairs now? We can obsess later on. Otherwise, I’m going without you. I’ve got to dance.”

  Mallory ignored her.

  “Mal,” Merry said after a moment, “this is me.” She began to dance as if the closet door mirror were a cute guy, glancing up at him from under her long eyelashes, then switching her lead and tossing her hair back over her shoulder. Then she stuck out her stomach and rounded her shoulders. “This is you.”

  At last, Mallory laughed.

  She jumped up, perused her actually-pretty-decent reflection, and clattered down the back stairs. They made a grand entrance under the arch Tim had wound with hundreds of white twinkle lights. Even David Jellico seemed to notice.

  And it was that kind of night, a night like ten thousand twinkle lights—the best fun the twins would have . . . to be honest, they told each other later when they talked about it, ever again in their lives.

  The party would be the last time that they didn’t know what they didn’t know—the thing for which Mally’s horrifying dream was only the opening note.

  As time passed, thirteen years of not knowing would seem a kind of blessing. Mallory would often remind Merry that she hadn’t really wanted to turn thirteen. Something about it nagged at her. She figured she simply was still too happy to be a kid, not really ready to be an official teenager. But after they knew the real reason, even Merry would mourn all the days she spent so freely, unburdened by awareness, and wish she had treasured them.

  At the party that night, Mally got over her fear of guys long enough to dance with Justin Springer, Dane Greenberg, and Daniel Eppelin. She smiled, showing the dimple in her left cheek, all but flirting with everybody.

  “Daniel likes you,” Merry told her, showing the dimple in her right cheek. “He looks all mushed.”

  “Merry, be real. We danced, like, twice,” Mally said. “It’s not like a big romance.”

  “It’s good enough,” Merry said, who got her first kiss that night, from Will Brent—who was trying hard to win her back and almost succeeding. But she also got a crashing headache, as if Mally’s dream had passed to her like a virus.

  Generally, though, it was a great party, although most people wouldn’t think of it that way. They would remember only that they’d seen the twins just two nights before the fire.

  UNLUCKY THIRTEEN

  “You have Auntie Karin’s cell number,” Campbell reminded them for the hundredth time as the family piled into the van. Dutifully, Merry fished the list out of her pocket and held it up, rolling her eyes. “And Mallory, you brought the nice video games for the little kids, and the party hats? I want them all in bed by nine thirty, but you can have them watch the New Year—”

  “On TV, at seven p.m. from London,” Mally repeated. “Mom! You’ve told us all this so many times I could write a song about it! We know what to do!”

  It was five p.m., barely dark, as they set out down Pilgrim and out Cemetery Road.

  Ce
metery Road curved up toward Mountain Rest Cemetery. At a respectful distance, the ancient cemetery now overlooked a spanking-new housing development called Bell Fields. Plunked down in the middle of what was still mostly a sweep of cropland was a neat grid of what Tim called “phony Colon-ies,” half-acre houses on one-acre lawns, houses with vinyl siding and each with two white colonnaded pillars holding up peaked porticoes—porches with light fixtures that Tim said cost more than the porches. Tim Brynn’s parents and brother lived there, on one of those spiffy streets with names that the Chicago developers imagined would appeal to upstate New York sensibilities—names such as Pumpkin Hollow and Concord Green and Roanoke Way.

  No one considered this place the “real” Ridgeline, although Tim envied his brother’s sodded lawn, which was like the softest green suede (Tim’s own lawn still occasionally sprouted alfalfa). But more of the in-towners were moving out to Bell Fields, where the walls might be thinner, but all the bathrooms had Jacuzzis. Gwenny liked the fact that her ranch had been a model and had been planted with at least six perennial gardens and a dozen fruit trees, to which she had added a dozen more gardens and six more fruit trees—until the facade itself was nearly completely concealed. Tim and his sister and brother said their parents’ house resembled the kind of place anyone called Hansel or Gretel should avoid.

  Campbell and Tim were in-town stalwarts. They held on, as did some older couples and some newlyweds—gentrifiers delighted at buying big old Gambrel houses for a song and then spending a hundred thousand dollars on new wiring and Jacuzzis.

  Campbell was wearing her clingy little black dress and a red Irish cloak Tim had given her for her birthday.

  “You look like a fallen woman,” their father said. Campbell got all gooey and flirty.

  Mallory wanted to gag.

  When they got to Aunt Kate and Uncle Kevin’s, Mally glanced around for new craft projects. This time, it was a snow village on the mantel—parent snow people and their three teeny round babies, made from Sculpey clay. Uncle Kevin and Aunt Kate’s house never seemed to accumulate big drifts of magazines and clean laundry no one folded that was just moved from one corner to another when someone swept the floor. Even though they also had three kids, younger than the twins and Adam, their house always looked ready for the arrival of a photography crew from an interior-decorating magazine. Aunt Kate did all sorts of things Mallory liked, in theory, although she would have rather had an appendectomy with a dull stick than do them herself. Aunt Kate had baked a loaf of braided bread and shellacked it, then tied a gingham ribbon around it to match her blue kitchen curtains and table napkins.