by Finley Aaron
And I don’t even want to think about what might happen to these library books if they get ahold of them.
I pinch my eyes shut and picture myself on my bed in my room at home, out of the sleet an blasted cold, with the hand-stitched quilt my grandmother made of blue and green and red cotton.
My warm room, out of the wind, with the radiator under the south window sending out heat in visible waves.
I can almost feel it.
“Ahhh! Rudyard! You dummy, don’t scare me like that. You’re squishing me.”
It’s my sister. She’s on my bed—of course she is. Her bedroom, though bigger and prettier than mine, is a terrible place to be on a blasting cold day like this, because it’s on the north side of the house and the wind rattles straight through the windowpanes. Judy loves to sneak into my bedroom and read, lying backward atop my bed so her book sits in the puddle of sunlight that would have been streaming through the south window up until the storm hit.
I don’t have a problem with my sister being in my room.
I do, however, have a problem with me being in my room.
How did I get here? I shouldn’t be here. What just happened?
Judy’s kind of freaking out and squealing. “It’s not funny to scare a person like that. I didn’t even hear you coming. How did you get up the stairs without making them creak? Or were you hiding out up here the whole time? I thought you were at the library.”
“I was at the library.” I hold out the books in my hands as evidence, and there it is. “Do you see that?” I step closer to my sister so she can see the ice crystals before they melt. “It’s sleeting outside.”
“You let library books get sleeted on?” Judy sounds aghast.
I’m staring at the sleet as it melts into tiny puddles and even starts to evaporate in the warm room.
“I didn’t bring my backpack,” I explain. “When I went to the library, it wasn’t storming yet. I got caught off guard.”
Judy squints down at the melting ice crystals. “How did you get upstairs without me hearing you, before the sleet melted?”
How much do I tell her about what happened? Do I admit I was just in the alley, and now I’m here, and I have no idea how I got here? Or will she think I’m crazy? But she saw the ice and she didn’t hear me coming. If anybody’s going to believe me, Judy will.
“Are Mom and Dad home yet?” I glance furtively around the room.
“Still at work. It’s not after five yet.” Judy’s sitting on the edge of my bed now, her book on her lap, one finger slid between the pages to mark wherever she left off reading when I landed on her.
“Do you want to know how I got up here without creaking the stairs?” I sit on the edge of the bed beside her.
“Yeah.”
“I was walking home from the library. The wind was blasting me, and my library books were getting sleeted on, and I thought, I need to hurry up and get home, so I took the shortcut down the alley.”
“But what about those guys—wait, it’s storming out. They wouldn’t be crazy enough to be out there in the sleet.”
“They were out there. They started giving me a hard time. I thought about turning around and running back the way I came, but it’s icy, and if I slipped and fell—”
Judy shudders so hard, the bed shakes and the floor creaks.
I continue, “You remember what Master Sparks said to do?”
Judy’s in taekwondo with me, so she was there when Master Sparks gave his advice.
She rolls her eyes. “He said to close your eyes and imagine yourself in a safe, peaceful place.”
“Did he say safe and peaceful? I guess I don’t remember his exact words.”
“Something like that. Whatever he said, I don’t see how it could help. You didn’t try that, did you? Those guys would probably tackle you if you did that. You’re not hurt, are you?” Judy leans around and looks in my face.
That’s when it occurs to me—maybe they hit me, and I got a concussion and walked home the rest of the way in a daze, and only snapped out of it when Judy started screaming at me. “Do I look hurt?”
“No. You look perfectly fine. Maybe a little red from the cold.”
There goes that theory. If the guys hit me hard enough to knock me out, it would have to leave a mark.
“How did you get away from them and get up here without creaking the stairs?”
I look my sister full in the face. We’re twins, so in some ways, looking at her is like looking at myself, expect a girl-version of myself. Sometimes she understands what I’m thinking and feeling and reflects that back to me. Occasionally, it’s handy. Other times, it’s annoying.
Right now, I feel like I need her help, because I honest and truly do not know how to explain what happened.
“I did what Master Sparks said to do. I closed my eyes and pictured myself here.”
“And then what? Those guys just walked away and left you alone?”
“I have no idea what they did. One second I was in the alley, the next second you were screaming at me for jumping on your back.”
“It was a mean trick, Roo.” Judy uses the nickname for me only she and our parents are allowed to use. “You shouldn’t jump on people. You could have hurt me.”
“I didn’t jump on you. I just closed my eyes and I was here.”
Judy gives me a skeptical look that says she’s not amused.
“You don’t have to believe me. I just answered your question. You wanted to know how I got up here without creaking the stairs, so I told you. I didn’t take the stairs.”
As I’m finishing talking, I hear the sound of a key in the back door lock. Mom and Dad are home. They both work at the local college, so they share a car and drive home together, or on nice days, they sometimes walk.
Obviously today is not a good day for a walk.
I hear the distinctive sound of the lock disengaging.
“The back door was still locked,” I note.
Judy’s wide eyes tell me she’s listening. She heard the lock, too. “I didn’t even hear you come in the door earlier.”
“But you heard me leave for the library.”
“It’s not humanly possible for you to—”
Before she can finish, Mom and Dad call upstairs to us, asking if we’re home and okay, and all that.
So we holler back down, and Judy jumps off my bed and goes to greet Mom and Dad.
I set my library books on my desk and wipe off the puddled bit of melted sleet.
Maybe Judy’s right. Maybe what just happened is not humanly possible.
But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
CHAPTER TWO
Judy more or less ignores me through supper, until it stops sleeting and Dad offers us each two dollars if we can get the driveway and sidewalks scooped before bedtime.
We bundle up against the cold and go scoop. When we’ve got the front walk done and the driveway off to a good start, Judy stops and leans on the handle of her shovel.
“Okay, Mister Weird-Trick-Roo. Want to know the freakish thing I did the other day?”
I scoop the swath of snow between us and hurl the white stuff toward the bushes. “What freakish thing?”
“Let me see if I can do it again.” She tugs off her gloves as she speaks. “You know a couple weeks ago when we had that crazy cold snap, and I was out here raking the last of the leaves?”
“Yeah?” Of course I remember. She got paid four whole dollars, and I got nothing because I had homework and my parents wouldn’t let me help until I finished my math, and by then Judy had raked and bagged all the leaves herself.
She hasn’t let me forget.
“My fingers got cold. So cold they were numb. So cold they stung.” She holds out her hands right now, with her gloves off, and cups her fingers a foot or so in front of her face. “I wanted to warm them up, so I breathed on them.”
Judy exhales a cloud of moist air, made visible by the cold temperatures around us.
�
�Freakish,” I say, sarcastically.
She makes a face and breathes again.
This time, a flicker of golden flames fills the air between her lips and her hands. She gives me a look that simultaneously says, I told you so, and I’m scared.
I stand there in stunned silence and Judy tugs her gloves back on. I’m breathing slowly and trying to think. Ever since I arrived in my bedroom earlier, I’ve been trying to figure out how I got there.
Even though I don’t know how it might be related, or what good it could possibly do us to speculate, my thoughts keep going back to the great unknown in our history.
See, Judy and I are not our parents’ biological children. Way, way back in the fall of 1974, a teenager found a duffle bag at a rest stop.
The duffle bag made crying sounds.
Judy and I were inside.
The teenager called the police, who took us to the hospital, where they decided we were in fine health and probably about a week old, and the newspapers and tv stations ran stories about us in hopes that someone would know where we’d come from.
No one ever came forward.
Our parents—Mom and Dad, the people who adopted us—had been on a waiting list for a baby for almost a decade, and had all but given up hope when they got a phone call asking if they’d take us.
They did.
We’ve been here ever since.
Most of the time, I don’t worry nearly so much about that duffle bag and who might have left it at the rest stop or why. I’m usually more concerned about making it from the library to my bedroom without damaging my library books.
But ever since this afternoon, getting home from the library is a vastly less pressing concern.
Apparently, I can get home by just imagining myself in my room.
But how is that possible?
Judy hoists her shovel and is about to start scooping again when I ask, “Remember earlier, how you said what I did isn’t humanly possible?”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t think what you just did is humanly possible, either.”
Judy steps closer to me. Half her face is covered by a scarf and the ear flaps of her hat. Basically, the only thing I can see is her eyes.
They look scared.
“You know how, a little over fifteen years ago, we were found at a rest stop in a duffle bag?”
Judy nods. “I’ve been thinking about that, too.”
“Where do you think that duffle bag came from?”
“It was found at an eastbound rest stop, so it probably came out of a vehicle traveling from the west—Colorado or Wyoming, maybe Utah, Nevada, California. But you know, they ran stories in the papers and on the news, asking everybody who knew of women who’d given birth to twins recently, to check to make sure those twins were still there. Everybody’s twins were accounted for. Nobody ever stepped forward. It’s like our mother gave birth in secret and then just…vanished.”
I study my sister’s face closely. It’s difficult to imagine that a woman could hide her pregnancy, give birth in secret, and then leave her baby somewhere for someone else to find. Hard to imagine, but it sometimes happens.
But twins? Don’t women get bigger when they’re having twins? Don’t they have more medical complications? Surely she would have needed help with the delivery. Wouldn’t we have been more noticeable than a single birth, harder to hide?
Or is that precisely why we were abandoned in the first place?
“I think we need to find out where we came from.” I inform my sister.
“We can’t.”
“We need to try.”
“What are you saying? The police tried to find out. They ran news stories, they dusted the duffle bag for finger prints. The FBI even tried to find where we came from, but couldn’t. That was over fifteen years ago. I think we’re now what you call a cold case. The clues are dried up, or whatever. Seriously, where do you think you’re going to start?”
I lean on my shovel and think it over. The rest stop is our last link to whoever left us there. They interviewed the teenager who found us. He said there was another vehicle there when he pulled in. Some kind of Jeep or Suburban or something, maybe a dark color, he wasn’t really sure. No idea on the plates or anything. It pulled away before he thought to pay attention to it.
Of course, there’s no video surveillance footage or anything. It was 1974.
Judy shovels a couple more scoops of snow, then stops. “Whatever happened to the duffle bag?”
I toss another scoop of snow into the bushes and shrug. “The FBI had it, right? They dusted it for fingerprints?”
Judy’s got this determined look on her face like she sometimes gets. When she gets that look, there’s no sense trying to reason with her. “We need to find that bag.”
We finish scooping the driveway in a big hurry, then tromp inside and peel off our boots and gloves and coats and things on the landing three steps down from the kitchen.
Mom stands at the top of the steps and asks, “Would you two like some hot cocoa?”
“Yes, please.”
By the time we finish hanging up our things to dry, Mom has the cocoa ready.
I’ve been thinking it over ever since Judy brought it up, and I’ve made up my mind. There’s no way we’re going to get anywhere on our search unless we let our parents in on what we’re looking for. We don’t have to tell them about the freakish things we’ve done, but we do need to interview them, at least.
They’re almost like witnesses.
Well, the closest thing we have to witnesses.
I’m about to open my mouth to ask, when Judy swallows a gulp of hot cocoa and poses the question to Mom, point blank.
“Whatever happened to the duffel bag we were found in?”
Mom’s putting away the last of the dinner dishes. She hangs a skillet from the pot rack above our heads with a thoughtful face. “The FBI dusted it for fingerprints. To my knowledge, they never found anything. The bag had a lot of your things in it—clothes, diapers, bottles, formula. They searched through all of it, but they didn’t find any clues.”
“So where is it now?” I ask.
Mom taps one finger against her lips thoughtfully. “I sold most of your baby things on garage sales, or gave them to other new moms. But the duffel bag I kept. I think it’s in the attic.”
Judy stands. “Can we see it?”
“Finish your cocoa first.”
We drain our cups in record time and then shoo Mom ahead of us all the way to the attic. She opens the narrow door in the hallway upstairs, and we immediately feel a whoosh of cold air come down to greet us.
The attic isn’t heated or very well insulated, or any of that. It’s lit by only one lightbulb, and there are cobwebs and even spiders in the corners. We almost never go up there, except to get something that’s been stored away, or to find a place to stash things we don’t regularly use.
“Hmm, bags, bags,” Mom hunts under our luggage and those fancy suit-carrying bags we got as a set and almost never use. “Here it is.”
She holds up a bag by its strap. It’s a plain black bag, a little dusty, I guess maybe from the FBI dusting it for fingerprints. I’m a little surprised by how small it is. I mean, I guess it’s an average-size duffle bag, but the two of us fit in there with clothes and things? I suppose we were small and our clothes were tiny, but I don’t know, I just expected something enormous, like those giant duffels basketball players carry.
Something big enough to hide a clue.
This bag just looks like a plain old bag.
But it’s our only link to whatever we are and wherever we came from.
“Mind if we take it downstairs and look through it?”
Mom hands it over with a bittersweet smile. “It belongs to you.”
Judy and I head to my room (it may be smaller than Judy’s, but it’s warmer, and after being outside and then in the attic, I feel like we need the warm).
There are still some cloth diapers folded i
n a neat little pile inside the bag. Judy takes them out and unfurls them each in turn, as if waiting for a clue to come tumbling out, even though these things were probably wrapped around out bottoms tons of times between when we were found and when we finally got potty trained.
I’m not surprised that none of them contain any clues.
The stairs creak, and Mom and Dad come to stand in the doorway, watching us investigate.
The bag has a few different zippered compartments. I unzip each in turn and feel around carefully, even checking with my flashlight, just in case.
In one of the pockets, I discover a couple of old Kleenex, which do not appear to have been used. They’re neatly folded together and starting to disintegrate, leaving white fibers all over my hands.
“Careful with those. Here, let me see.” Judy takes them and gently unfolds them before lifting one up toward my bedside lamp, and peering at it with one eye closed, as though she might be able to read a secret message, or something.
“Sorry, Judith,” Mom apologizes. “I think those were my Kleenex. We used the duffle as a diaper bag for the first few days that we had you, until we had a chance to buy one of our own.”
I can see the apology on both our parents’ faces. They’ve never hidden from us that we were adopted. In fact, when we were younger, they made it sound extra special, like the stork delivered us to them precisely because it knew they would love us best of all.
But I think they feel bad, not having any information to give us about where we really came from, or our tendencies toward genetic diseases, or any of that.
“It’s okay, Mom.” Judy carefully refolds the Kleenex. “We were just…curious.”
Probably Judy is trying to make Mom feel better, because Judy is all sorts of into people’s feelings and making sure no one is sad.
I, on the other hand, am not yet ready to give up the search. Surely there’s something inside this bag, somewhere. I feel around the main compartment. Maybe there’s a hidden pocket or something sewn into the lining. Anything.
The bottom of the bag has a sort of stiff inner reinforcement thing to help the bag keep its shape. I feel all along the seams. It’s sewn to the bag on three sides, but on the fourth side, there’s no seam.