The Midnight Twins

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  The real Merry began to cry as well.

  That was true enough. Despite everything, Kim had lost the only brother she would ever have, unless Bonnie and David adopted a Chinese baby or something. And they were old, at least probably forty, like her parents.

  Still holding Kim close, Mallory-as-Merry said, “I know he didn’t kill himself, Kim. I know. He was just getting rocks for all those poor cats and dogs. I’m sure he climbed up and down the ridge all the time. It was probably just slippery because there was always a little ice up there this time of year. I’m sure David loves you so much, still, Kimmy. I’m sure he knows how bad you’re hurting.”

  “Did you see if he moved? Do you think he was in pain?” Kim asked.

  “Oh, no. I’m sure he never even knew,” the pretend Merry said.

  Please, no, please, the real Meredith thought, remembering David’s scream.

  “They were going to dig up his pet place,” said Kim.

  “Oh, they won’t do that to Bonnie,” Merry said, pretending to be Mally, using Mally’s firm manner of speech. “You just explain how he had such a soft spot for animals. Some people are like that. David didn’t do anything wrong.” What else is buried there? Merry thought. What else?

  It was almost over, thought Mallory. It was almost over. And it would all be over. And someday no one but Kim’s family would remember. They would grow up, and go to college—in California. No one would know them as the fire-and-death-fall girls. They would just be twins.

  Just plain twins.

  “Will you still be my friend?” Kim asked.

  “Of course I will,” Mallory said, on her sister’s behalf. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  The real Merry thought, I should be. How can I be?

  Kim’s father passed by, gently patting each of the twins’ backs. He stopped and laid his hands on the place where David’s head would be, inside the casket.

  Meredith thought she would throw up for sure then. Behind her, she could hear Bonnie—crying, she supposed, but not like any crying Merry had ever heard, more like the sound of someone being cut open while she was awake, trying to act like it didn’t hurt. Tim came and told them they needed to go home, that Campbell would need their help tomorrow and so would Bonnie. The girls grabbed their Ridgeline letter jackets, sprinting for the car. But they didn’t escape before they heard Deirdre Bradshaw’s comment—a meow and not a whisper. “There they are, Grumpy and Dopey. Wonder how they feel now?”

  But in the same instant, they heard someone else say, “Shut your face. Those little girls have more going for them now than you ever will.” Mallory recognized Eden’s voice.

  And Trevor Solwyn added, “Mally and Merry are our friends. People here love them. That’s how it is.” The twins turned as one to stare in amazement at notoriously snippy Trevor. “Well,” she said. “It’s true! Me putting you down is one thing. I’m not going to stand for her doing it!”

  THE TWO-HEARTED GIFT

  Everyone else at the Brynn family camp was taking advantage of the soft late July afternoon, scrambling into bathing suits from the previous year and complaining that either they were fatter or the suits had shrunk. A swim before dinner was a family tradition. The dip left everyone relaxed, refreshed, and hungry, ready for a meal, a fire, and the kind of night’s sleep they got nowhere else on earth. All of Arthur and Gwenny’s children were there. Tim, Kevin, and Karin brought their families, and the youngest, Aunt Jenny from Portland, brought the man she would marry in the fall. Even Grandpa Arthur’s father, Walker, was there, annoyed at being called “spry” at nearly ninety.

  “It’s just another word for saying I’m still able to move without batteries,” he told Tim. Jenny and her fiancé, Aaron, were staying with Walker in the big cabin—for safekeeping.

  Even this annoyed him.

  The girls overheard Tim telling Campbell he just couldn’t imagine a summer, someday, at the camp without his grandfather.

  “He can’t last forever, but there are some parts of your life you just wish could,” Tim said softly. “This day is one.”

  “And I can think of a few that you don’t,” Campbell replied. The twins knew what she meant. They were grateful to have emerged from the grief and fear of the past six months with their sanity and their reputations intact. It could really have gone another way. Instead, Ridgeline seemed to have closed around the twins and David’s family with love, support, and the gentleness to avoid too many questions.

  Mally and Merry were about to grab their own suits when Grandma Gwenny stopped them.

  “I’d like to have green beans from the garden to go alongside the corn tonight,” Gwenny said. “But I don’t think I can snap all of them by myself. Would you girls help me?”

  It wasn’t really a question. Both of them knew what was coming and that it wouldn’t be a discussion of green beans. But in a sense, they welcomed it. What would Grandma say, Mallory wondered? Merry suspected that Grandma might want a debriefing on what really happened with David Jellico. Both were curious about what she might say. She seemed to say so much without ever saying hardly anything at all.

  For just a moment, as her family departed, Merry resented not being able to go with them. The day was damp and hot, and the water would be glorious. Then she remembered the riverbank. The swimming hole was far down and around a bend from the place where David landed when he fell. Still, Merry figured it would take her most of the two weeks that her family was staying to work her way down into the river—even though she’d swum in this water since she was a baby.

  So she sat down on the lowest step, beside Mallory. Grandma gave each girl a huge bowl and a brown paper bag for the popped ends, which they would burn in the fire pit. They spread a light blanket over their laps and set to work. Hannah, Alex, and Adam—always the last ones—went pounding past with their towels. They seemed to have grown six inches since winter—to Mally and Meredith’s measly half inch. They sometimes thought that this fraction of height would be the last one they would ever get.

  They were right.

  Grandma asked about cheerleading tryouts, and seemed gently amazed that Meredith had actually made varsity, though she would be on probationary status to see if she could keep up her performance and grades through football season. Mally would try out for the high school soccer team in just two weeks.

  For a while, the only sound was the plink of the plucked beans falling into the big canning pot.

  The lull seemed to stretch out like commercials during the Super Bowl. It finally made Merry so jumpy that she blurted out the fact that, after David’s death, the dreams had stopped. Drew Vaughan, she added, was the only other person on earth who knew this. She joked: Drew was grateful—on his own behalf. As he told Mallory, if next year was anything like last, he’d never have gas money again.

  “It’s great to just be here and feel like ourselves again,” Merry said. Her answer was only silence. They still couldn’t see each other’s dreams, she went on, but they had come to accept this. Safe at camp, surrounded only by people who loved them . . . they no longer felt the burden of adult fears and forebodings. Mally wore unfashionably patched and worn cutoffs with one of Drew’s wretched old shirts, and Merry a bikini top over jean shorts she had artfully and carefully destroyed with bleach and scissors.

  They were contented almost to the point of dozing off when Grandma Gwenny said, “You’re so happy. Not like all year, like little frightened deer. My sweet ones, I hate to say a thing.”

  The mellow sun seemed to wink out. Merry felt the goose bumps rise on her arms.

  It was Mallory who asked, slowly, “What do you mean, Grandma?”

  “I know you think that it’s all over,” Gwenny answered, even more gently. “That it will never come back.”

  “It is,” Mally said. “He was evil. But he’s not a vampire, Grandma. He’s not coming back.”

  “I don’t mean that boy. I mean the sight,” said Grandma, and the twins stopped snapping the little peaked caps off th
e beans.

  “What about it?” Merry asked. “That was a one-time-only thing. Wasn’t it? Because we were supposed to save the kids? And whoever David was going to hurt?”

  Slowly, Gwenny shook her head. “You have to know about your history, now that you know about your future.”

  “Our future?” Mallory cried. “Grandma, it’s not going to happen again, the dream and the whole big dance that goes with it? Is it? Grandma?”

  Gwenny sighed. “Let me try to make you see the chain.”

  She cupped her chin in her hands and glanced up into the trees.

  “I’ll bet you thought we were alone—just the two of you and me, who were like this,” she said. The girls nodded. “But that’s not true. Twins don’t run through the Brynns, but through my side. The Massengers. My mother was an identical twin, and so was her mother, and so was I. And all of us had the sight.”

  The girls were too stunned to speak.

  Their grandmother went on, “If I had to say, I’d guess that it wasn’t as strong for any of us as it is for you.” Mallory nodded, unsure of what she was approving. “Alice, my grandmother, and her sister—that was Aunt Annie—they saw our female ancestors. Just saw the past as it was lived. Like you see the past, Merry. Annie saw the recent past, the ones who had passed over, saying good-bye. Alice saw the long past. All the Massengers who came from Wales, oh, ten, twelve generations ago. The men were miners and some farmers. This camp was actually built near some ground that my family owned. They hoped it would be a mine, for zinc or salt. An old uncle bought it with his last bit of savings.”

  Gwenny got up to open another bag of beans. Mallory thought that if her grandmother didn’t speed things up, she would jump out of her scalp. Why did old people insist on dragging every story out for hours? Maybe it was because they were used to people not paying much attention to them—but that wasn’t the case with Grandma Gwenny. She was always on the go, messing around in her four hundred or so flower beds, going hiking with her friends. (“My mother-in-law has better thighs than I do,” Campbell complained.) She even brought food to “the elderly,” as if she, Gwenny, were still “the youngerly.”

  But since no one ever got her to do anything any other way but her own, Mallory took some deep breaths until her grandmother resumed the story. “All this land is Brynn land. And what isn’t is Massenger land. Our families grew up nearly side by side, Arthur’s and mine. We knew each other from when we were Adam’s age. In fact, my grandmother’s ashes were buried near that place where that Jellico boy died. She died young, of influenza, during the epidemic.”

  Meredith’s skin crawled with the telltale chill. If the woman died young . . .

  “Did your grandmother have this thick white hair? Beautiful hair? So she looked old but was really sort of young? As in, young like my mother, but white-haired?” Meredith asked.

  “She did have hair just like that,” Gwenny said. “Have you seen her, Merry?”

  “Yes,” Meredith said, as though they were talking about the best thing to use on a sunburn.

  “Up there?”

  “Yes,” Merry said. “And in dreams.”

  “I have, too,” Gwenny said. “It’s a comfort. I loved her so. And did you see my sister?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know how your sister looked.”

  “Why, she looked like any little girl, I suppose,” Grandma Gwenny said. “Of course, we wore skirts then, not trousers so much. She had black hair, just like you, and wore it long in a braid. So did I.”

  Merry thought of her hospital visions, of the little girl on the bridge with the great sad eyes, rushing toward her.

  “I guess I have, Grandma. I saw her standing on a bridge over a river or a creek.”

  Gwenny said sadly, “I guess you would have seen her there. Did she see you?”

  “She looked at me,” Merry admitted, with a gulp.

  “Me too,” Mallory said. “We thought she was a hallucination.”

  “No, not that. Not at all. I’m sure she actually looked at you.”

  “That’s just great,” Mallory told her, covering her eyes. “Hello! The sister from another generation.”

  “I’m sure she loves you very much and wishes she could meet you in this world, girls. She was the sweet one, my twin sister. I was the toughie.”

  “Grandma, what did you and your sister see?” Mallory asked.

  “Well, let’s talk about my mother, Catherine, and her sister, Corinna, first.”

  “Okay,” Mally agreed.

  “Now, my mother, Cathy, could look into anyone’s past or present and see more than life the way it was lived, more than my grandmother saw. She could see into the secrets. Anyone in any town. She could see sad things, like illnesses. She could see love people felt and fear and anger. It was just like the houses didn’t have walls. You can imagine, she had to keep so much to herself, though of course, she could tell Aunt Nini! There were quite a few babies born who weren’t the sons of the fathers whose names they had! Quite a few women who wore white wedding gowns . . . but this isn’t really talk for you kids.”

  “What about Corinna?” Mallory asked.

  “Corinna. We called her Aunt Nini,” Gwenny said. “She could see inside people, not houses. She could see what they were really thinking, no matter what awful thing was behind a big smile.”

  “Now that would be the kind I’d like to have!” Meredith said. “I’d love to know who was talking about me. I’d love to know if someone was getting—”

  “Laybite, Merry. For heaven’s sake,” Mallory said. She turned to her grandmother and persisted, “But you. And your sister.”

  “Well, you know, I have never told you about my sister.”

  “But we know she died when she was little,” Merry said.

  “Not little. Only in size. Like you are. She was eleven. She drowned, my dears. And ever after, I never felt quite the same. Not even with Grandpa and the children, as dearly as I love all of you. I still grieve for her, sixty years later and more.” Gwenny sighed and said, “But she was . . . I would say that she was born sad. Vera.”

  “Why?” asked Mallory, certain that she knew.

  “I think because we . . . well, we were the first ones in the family to foresee the future. I saw the births, the weddings, the letters in the mailboxes that brought hope from far away, the happy beginnings. But Vera saw the endings. She foresaw death.”

  Mallory let her hands drop into her lap. Broken beans scattered in the dirt.

  “Vera saw the babies who would be born with something wrong, even while they were still inside their mothers and the girls were knitting little blankets and thanking God for answering their prayers. She told me, but, of course, she could never tell anyone else. She would have been seen to be crazy, or even worse—cursed or witched or something. What she saw couldn’t be changed, you understand. It wasn’t as though she’d been asked to intervene. And she knew it.”

  Merry was about to interrupt when Gwenny said, “Let’s get these beans finished. We’re going to have to have supper and I want your brother to shuck the corn. I really should set the water boiling for that, too.”

  “But Grandma, go on,” Meredith prompted her.

  “I know I’m rambling, Merry. I don’t like to say it. It’s been years since I talked about my Vera. I think she was tormented because she didn’t have the gift you have, to step in front of fate. She foresaw our father’s death in the mines. She foresaw it, and begged him not to go that day. Of course, he didn’t listen. We were nine. Moira was fourteen and Jane was twelve. Thea was sixteen, already working in the city. The little boys, our brothers, were four and two. After the accident, Vera never told our mother. How could she have lived with knowing her own little girl might have saved her daddy? We moved to just this side of Deptford, at first, to a boardinghouse near the wider part of this river. My mother cleaned houses and took in fine sewing. She left the care of the little boys to us when she went out to work. The only schooling we had a
fter that was what she taught us at home. But she tried hard to teach us well. She saved her money and bought us schoolbooks that the library was selling for a nickel or a dime.”

  “You were too young,” said Merry.

  “Not for those times,” Gwenny told her. Laughter and splashing sang up the path from the swimmers below. Grandma seemed to tense at the sound. “Yes, you should know that it’s water that is dangerous for us, for all of us, we Massenger women. That was why I knew the fire wouldn’t truly hurt you.”

  “You . . . knew about the fire?” Mallory breathed softly.

  “I didn’t really. Not as such. What I felt was that Vera knew about the fire. I felt something, from her. Not a message of death. But a message. At least, I seemed to. Sometimes, I think I hear her speak to me. But you see, I can’t get in the way of changing fate. Not as you can. There was nothing I could do. I didn’t know when it would happen or how.”

  “Did . . . did our aunt Vera know she was going to die?”

  “You never know about yourself,” Grandma Gwenny said.

  “Why didn’t I see David coming for Merry?” asked Mallory. “Because she is just like myself? I saw at the last minute, when it was too late.”

  “I don’t know why,” Grandma Gwenny said. “I don’t know everything.” Her eyes filled. “Just to tell you the last thing. Vera lost her footing.”

  “She was on that bridge. . . .” Mallory said.

  “Yes, and she saw our younger brother, your uncle Keenan, who was too little to know better, wade in after a shiny rock, and saw him slip. That is, before he slipped. She ran to help.”

  “Did you see her drown?” Merry asked.

  “No. But I saw her afterward,” Gwenny said. A hunger and an anger crossed her face as quickly as clouds and did not invite more questions. “I hoped she was happy then.”

  “Why didn’t your names match?” Meredith asked, as much from curiosity as to distract her grandmother from the memory picture she could almost see—of her grandmother’s still, small sister, lying on a kitchen table with water pooling around her blue cotton dress, strands of water lily in her dark hair. “Not that they have to match. But people do that when they have twins.”