by Nick Scorza
“Think of it as a lucky charm,” my father said. “Old tradition in this area—always carry a little iron with you.”
“Lucky charm?” I hadn’t expected any of this from my father. Growing up, he’d always been so rational. Just a short while ago, he’d been complaining about how superstitious this town was. “Are you serious?”
“Yes,” he said in a way that made it clear he had nothing else to say about it.
Dad had more work to do, and I wasn’t in any kind of state to go back to town, so I sat in the back yard and read one of the Ghosts of New York books. I probably should have picked something less creepy, but it was the only thing that didn’t feel like history homework. Most of the stories were pretty typical—mysterious ladies in tattered ball gowns haunting old mansions or theaters. There did seem to be a lot of fake castles in New York State, some of them brought over stone by stone, others just reproductions. Every one of them had to have a ghost or two, for the tourists’ sake.
The only story that stood out was about the old Clyburn Hotel. It was just a little anecdote, not really a story, but apparently the hotel had removed all its mirrors. Ever since it opened, guests had been complaining about weird lights in the mirrors that weren’t reflections of anything in their rooms. Some had even reported seeing their reflections move on their own. One man had lost his mind in the hotel, claiming the mirrors were full of shadow people looking for a way to break through. The man was committed to an asylum, but the manager had thought it best to quietly remove the mirrors anyway.
According to the guidebook, the Clyburn Hotel closed down during the Great Depression, but it had been partially renovated, and was now a restaurant “in the quaint former resort town of Redmarch Lake.”
Then I heard something rustle in the undergrowth at the edge of the yard.
I jumped, afraid to look over the edge of my book. I waited, but there were no other noises. Whatever it was had been small, much different from the thing I’d heard in the woods at night; probably a chipmunk or a squirrel.
I put down the book and walked over to where I’d heard the noise. There was an old tree stump there I hadn’t noticed before, standing at the edge of the forest like a warning to the other trees not to get too close to my father’s yard. I came nearer, bracing myself in case I startled any little critters out of the undergrowth.
There was something wedged in a crack on the top of the stump. When I looked closer, I saw it was a piece of paper. One corner of it was just barely sticking out of the crack. I managed to grab hold and slowly pull it free. It couldn’t have been in there long; it was still dry and white, freshly torn from a notebook.
Trembling a little, I unfolded it, completely unprepared for what I’d find. There were a few lines of text, written in neat cursive.
Oad af flor
Par flen shaan
Sen glof vlan
Sen sta gron
A tremor went through me, a ripple of electric grief and memory. To anyone else in the world, that note would have been pure nonsense, but I knew exactly what it meant:
Deep in the wood
Far from the town
They spilled his blood
They let him drown
I shivered again. Hot tears trickled down my cheeks. This was impossible, a sick joke, or else something I couldn’t begin to comprehend.
I hadn’t seen the language in that note since I was a little girl. Since Zoe and I made it up.
VI.
They call it cryptophasia, or twin talk—a sort of pre-language shared by only two people. Most twins grow out of it as soon as they learn to talk for real, but Zoe and I had kept our language alive, keeping it hidden from our parents, who would make us speak properly, and building on it as our world had grown. After I’d lost her, I still felt our words for things coming to my mind, sometimes before the real words.
I’d read every book I could find on the subject. I had to understand it to survive it. The Egyptian Pharaoh Psammetichos had ordered two babies to be raised by she-goats to see if they would emerge speaking the language of the first people. Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II tried something similar, ordering nurses to feed two children in total silence. Wise men throughout history had believed twins spoke the original tongue, the language of Babel.
Losing a twin is not just losing a sibling. I lost a way of life, a whole culture. The common tongue of the land of ClaraandZoe, with all its myth and history.
It had been a thing only the two of us shared. Not even our parents understood it. We’d never even written it down before—this note was the first time I’d seen those words written out and not spoken by my sister or me. I still used it in my head, easpecially when thinking of Zoe, but it had even felt wrong to use it in the reams of letters I’d written her after I’d lost her to help deal with her absence. Until today, I thought I would never hear or see that language outside my own head again.
Was it blind chance—nonsense words written in a way that just happened to match our secret language? Or was I losing my mind, dreaming of what was written on a blank piece of paper? I looked again. It was still there. I could feel the indentation where the pen had touched the paper. I looked frantically for some sane explanation, because the alternatives were just too much to bear. I debated showing my father, or someone else, but I didn’t dare. My father would think it was some kind of traumatic grief relapse—he might think I needed treatment again. And that’s assuming I could even find the words to explain.
I spent the next two days inside. I watched TV on the couch, or helped my father cook and clean. I asked him if he needed help tidying up the attic, or weeding the back yard. When I couldn’t ignore it any more, I searched for news on Neil. There was a report on the local network the first night, but all they said was a boy from the area tragically drowned in a lake after a party in the woods. One of the anchors made a comment about the dangers of underage drinking, and that was that.
I knew I should have gone back to the city, or at least gotten my father to take me somewhere away from this town, but I couldn’t let it go. I couldn’t stand that something so awful had happened to someone I knew, even if I barely knew him, and now it seemed like the whole world was forgetting about it, just like they’d forgotten about Zoe.
After I lost my twin, I wanted the world to stop. I wanted things to match the way I felt inside—empty and changed forever—but life just went on, even for my parents. I could see the hurt in their eyes, hear them argue in hushed voices late at night, but my eight-year-old mind just couldn’t understand how they still got up every day and went to work, when I couldn’t even see a reason to get out of bed.
My memory of the first year without her was spotty, a blurred kaleidoscope of hurt, images flowing together. I remembered the doctors and the pills, the kids at school who’d whisper behind my back but wouldn’t look me in the eye, like grief was some kind of contagious disease. I don’t remember the funeral. It’s a big hole in my thoughts, and probably just as well. I don’t think I could stand even the memory of her body.
Most of all, I remember how it felt to see everything happening without her. People became statistics so quickly. Once someone was gone, you had to fight to keep them alive, even if it was only in your mind. That’s why I still tried to talk to my sister, or write her letters. Letting go of her felt like letting go of myself.
There’s a whole institute in California dedicated to studying twin loss. They say the death of an identical twin is one of the most profound losses a person can experience, like nothing else. I know for me it was like falling down a well with no bottom, just falling and falling. I couldn’t get past the thought that I was also dead, and the life going on around me was a hollow fiction. Surviving twins are at a higher risk of depression, addiction, and suicide. I knew that all too well, even before I read it. My parents tried treatment, drugs, all kinds of therapy. My memory is hazy—it’s hard to tell what happened when—most of it didn’t help.
I stopped speaking, I barely ate. I lay a
wake at night and went through my days like a sleepwalker. If going on meant living without Zoe, I wanted to be numb to everything, to freeze it all in place. My parents took me out of school. I don’t know how long I went on like that.
Somehow, in some small way, learning more about it made things better, like putting a name to the thing that was eating you up. At least it helped me see that if I didn’t change, I would go on this way forever, or until I couldn’t take it anymore. I made rules for myself—what I could think about and what I couldn’t, what I had to do to keep my mind occupied. I drew pictures and made collages of my memories with Zoe. I imagined what she would say if she were still beside me, living her life. I wrote down all the things I wanted to tell her in letters I couldn’t send—I wanted to have some part of our life together that would go on and would never be taken from me.
When I got better, we moved to Queens. I had to repeat fourth grade, but I was no longer in a place where everything reminded me of Zoe’s absence, so I didn’t care. Every night, I wrote about the things I saw and did, so that at least in my mind I could still share them with her.
I was glad for any excuse to get away from my parents, who never let me out of their sight at home, always watching me with the same brittle smiles on their faces, as if by acting cheerful they could cheer me up too—meanwhile they argued nonstop behind my back and thought I didn’t notice. I forced myself to talk to people, to explore, to get to know our new neighborhood like I’d been born to it—but a part of me was still falling down that well, and probably always would be.
And now there was this matter of the note, threatening to unravel everything. Whenever I dwelled on it too much, I felt icy fingers of panic worming their way through my brain, stealing the breath from my lungs. It had taken me so long to accept that Zoe was gone, that I only carried her with me in my memory. I almost didn’t want to believe it was real, because if I believed and I was wrong, it would be like losing her all over again. The note was a knife opening up all my old scars, but I couldn’t let it go, I had to know more.
Why would she come back to me now, if that’s really what this was? Was there some connection between her and Neil? They had both drowned, but it had to be more than that. She had also come back to me here, in this strange town our father’s family was from. A place our father had all but refused to talk about. There had to be a connection.
Since I lost her, I’d fought hard to keep her a part of my life instead of someone that only lived in my past. But now here she was, or some part of her anyway, involved in things I barely understood. I had to know more. I had to get to the bottom of it. Even if it was all some misunderstanding, or a cruel joke—I couldn’t leave it be. Even if this crazy town swallowed me whole. I promised myself I wouldn’t leave until I knew how Zoe fit into all of this.
Three days after Neil had died, I told my father that I was borrowing the car, and I drove into town. I shivered when I passed the old hotel, remembering the story about the mirrors. The first thing I did after I parked was walk back down to the lake. I had to see it again.
It was just like the first time I came here, a perfect mirror, undisturbed by the barest ripple, bordered in the distance by slowly receding morning mist. I tried to imagine drowning in that water. I often had drowning nightmares—no surprise there, given what happened to my sister and almost happened to me. In them, I was immobile, sinking, powerless as I felt my lungs fill, all of it with an agonizing slowness, a horrible inevitability—like the universe had decided I must die, and nothing could prevent it. I shuddered imagining that happening to Neil.
Once I saw an M.C. Escher print titled Three Worlds. It showed fallen autumn leaves floating on the surface of a lake. Beneath this, the bare branches of the trees were reflected on the surface. And beneath this, you could just glimpse the ghostly outline of a fish in the depths. I pictured Neil lying beneath the surface of that calm mirror, cold and alone. I couldn’t look at the water anymore.
I turned and walked back up the incline to the town square. Of course, the first thing I saw was the café, with the happy cat perched over his mug of coffee. There was a little HELP WANTED sign in the window, which was awful to see—life just moving on again—but it did give me an idea.
You should apply for his job, Zoe would say.
“That’s crazy,” I muttered to myself, glad I was alone on the square.
No, think about it—what better way to find out what happened to him.
“And what you have to do with it,” I said.
And me. Besides, he was nice to you when no one else was.
Zoe’s sense of justice was always far too strong for her own good, or mine. I barely knew Neil. This wasn’t up to me. Still, I found myself walking toward the café door. Somewhere inside, I knew she was right. This was the right thing to do, and the only way to find out where that note came from.
I walked in. Once again, Clyde the cat looked up to give me a baleful glare before returning to his pillow. A woman about my parents’ age stood behind the counter this time. Her hair was dyed a bright red and curled in ringlets, and she wore a big necklace of polished amber stones, with rings to match. On her head was an old-fashioned hat with a little black veil hanging down over her eyes. Mourning Neil, I guessed.
“What can I do for you, sweetheart?”
That wasn’t the reception I’d come to expect in this town, and I was amazed and a bit embarrassed by the warm surge of relief and gratitude that came welling up in me. I didn’t think I needed other people’s kindness that much.
“I’m here about the job, actually,” I said.
“Such a tragedy,” she said. “I loved having Neil work here. I could never replace him, but I just can’t be here enough myself.”
“I know,” I said. “I barely knew him, but he seemed like a really nice guy. I—well, I hope I can do right by the job in his memory.”
“Do you have any experience working in a coffee shop?”
“No, but I can make anything someone would order.”
She raised a delicately plucked eyebrow at this. I knew a challenge when I saw one.
Last year, I’d briefly dated a barista, until I caught him hooking up with Marcia Klein at a party I brought him to. In fact, I’m not even sure he’d have said we were dating if you’d asked him, but that doesn’t matter now. Luckily, I’d gotten him to teach me all the tricks of the trade before he ended up with Marcia. Then my mother had bought a fancy home espresso machine, and I’d kept our mugs full of cappuccinos and caffe macchiatos through the winter.
I stepped behind the bar, taking a minute or two to familiarize myself with the hardware. I whipped up a double espresso, then a cappuccino, then a latte. As a final touch, I slowly poured the milk to make a delicate leaf pattern on the surface. I’d practiced for hours back home until I’d gotten it just right. My leaf was still a little deformed, but the woman I assumed was the owner was impressed.
“Wow, well, what’s your name then, dear?”
“Clara Morris.”
“Oh, are you Tom Morris’s daughter? Tom showed me a picture of you the last time he was here, from quite a while ago I guess. I haven’t seen him around lately.”
“He stays home way too much,” I said.
She nodded.
“Well, pleased to meet you, Clara Morris. I’m Lady Daphne. No need to curtsy, it’s not a title. First name Lady, last name Daphne.”
This town was too much. I could imagine Zoe chuckling and pretending to take a sip of tea, little finger raised in proper posh fashion. My friends back in the city would have lost it, but just now I was ready to pledge my sword to defend Lady Daphne’s honor.
“We open at eight, so you have the first hour to set up and feed Mr. Clyde here. You’ll have a few hours of overlap in the afternoon when the evening girl comes in. So, by any chance, could you start today? I canceled all my appointments, but some of them may still be coming in.”
I nodded, and Lady Daphne breathed a theatrical sigh of re
lief.
“Wonderful. The café belonged to my parents, and I see it as a familial obligation. It’s an obligation to the town, really—family tradition is important here, and someone’s got to run the café, but I’m actually a full-time clairvoyant.”
She said this like someone would say they were a medical technician.
“Mostly I see auras, not full visions. You’re looking a bit dark blue today. It could mean you can’t let go of something from your past, or you’re afraid of acknowledging something in the here and now. That’s a freebie, by the way. Once I had an actual experience of clairalience—that’s extrasensory smelling, it’s very rare. I smelled fire and ashes for an entire week when no one else could smell anything similar. It turned out my cousin’s house up in Buffalo had burned down.”
Lady laughed at this, so I guessed her cousin had come out of it all right; still, I couldn’t imagine that story was a hit at family gatherings. Lady Daphne assured me she had lots more stories about her psychic abilities. She didn’t seem like a fake—I think she definitely believed she had these powers. I kind of wished I believed it, too; life would be more interesting if auras and telepathy were real, but I just couldn’t buy it.
If things like that really existed, I had a feeling they would be far more confusing and terrifying. Imagine if, just once, something fell up instead of down. One day you toss a pebble and, instead of falling to the ground, it shoots off into the stratosphere. It sounds like a joke, but just think if it really happened to you—you’d be terrified. I know I would be. And in a town as strange as this, it seemed to me any actual psychics would go totally bonkers.
Then again, bonkers sort of fit Lady Daphne. I was relieved when she finally took off on her errands and left me to manage the café with her sour-faced spirit animal Mr. Clyde. I found a spare apron in the back, and I cleaned the machines to keep busy. There was no morning rush, and after I’d found most of what I’d need and cleaned every piece of coffee hardware, I just watched the square of sun from the skylight slowly migrate across the floor like a ghostly glacier.