The Twin Prophecies: Rebirth - Special Edition

by Nina Perez

  Violet skipped her last two classes of the day and went home. As houses in South Rosemont went, the Ross’ was modest. It wasn’t as big as Liza’s or filled with as many expensive things, but Violet loved it because she knew how much it meant to her parents. They hadn’t always lived there. When Violet was in elementary school, they lived in a smaller house on the other side of town. Brad Ross, her father, opened his own dental practice and they moved into what her mother called their dream home.

  Her mother, Marianne Ross, worked as an emergency room nurse in Little City and spent days and long nights tending to people with major traumas. She often said it was a great relief to drive across the Newton Bridge and leave it all behind. She’d decorated their home to be a haven: open spaces with lots of light and plants and flowers in every room. Her favorite was a sitting room just off of the entryway. A plush chaise sat surrounded by plants and candles and a stack of books Marianne planned on reading if she ever had the time. Violet was curled up on the chaise wrapped in a chenille throw when her mother came home from work that afternoon.

  Violet assured her mother she wasn’t sick; just tired, and was feeling much better after coming home early to nap. She didn’t tell her mother about the alcohol at the party or that she’d had a headache brought on as a side effect from some freaky power. She’d rather confess about the alcohol over the latter, but didn’t think her mother would respond well to either.

  Later, she was in her room doing homework when her mother knocked on her door, then entered.

  “Violet? We’re leaving soon. Do you need anything?”

  Violet had forgotten that it was her parents’ monthly Date Night.

  “Nope.”

  Violet smiled. Looking at her mother was like looking at a future version of herself. They had the same almond-shaped eyes, dark hair and full lips. The only facial difference was that Violet had her father’s upturned nose. When Violet was a child, her father would call her Mini Marianne and it made her feel like the most beautiful girl in the world.

  “We can stay home if you’re not feeling well.”

  “No, I want you to go. Have fun.”

  “Is that an order?” Brad Ross poked his head through the doorway.

  “Hey, Daddy.”

  Her father sat on the edge of Violet’s bed. “What’s this about you leaving school early?”

  “I was just really tired.”

  “Hmmm. Still think partying on a school night is a good idea?” His voice was stern, but his smile reached his eyes causing wrinkles to appear at the corners.

  Violet ducked her head as her father playfully ruffled the top of her hair. “Probably not,” she said.

  “We won’t be late. Only dinner tonight, no movie. Your mother and I couldn’t agree on one. She wanted to see some romantic comedy with that woman from that awful show. What’s it called? You know the one about the hospital where the doctors are too busy fooling around to actually heal anyone?”

  “I did not!” Violet’s mother protested from the doorway.

  “You did! I said we should see that ocean documentary, but you thought it would be too depressing. Something about seeing enough heartache at work.”

  “Well, that part is true.”

  Violet watched her parents’ good-natured bickering. She wondered if she’d ever find someone she could be that comfortable with. She knew they loved her, but sometimes she envied their closeness and ability to finish each other’s sentences and push one another’s buttons.

  As soon as she got the idea, she knew it was wrong. It was intrusive, but she wanted to know - needed to know - what it felt like to be that close to someone. Besides, she reasoned, it probably wouldn’t work. She’d never purposely connected to anyone and she didn’t even know that she could. Violet closed her eyes, cleared her thoughts, and focused on her mother. In her mind, she saw her mother standing in the doorway, a black shawl draped across her shoulders and arms, with one hip against the doorjamb and a hand on the other. Her black hair was pinned up and she wore the gold necklace her mother had left to her after she died; before Violet was born.

  Violet felt the connection, the static, the hum and then she felt happiness, giddiness, anticipation. Without opening her eyes, she could see her mother smiling at her father and rolling her eyes playfully. Violet concentrated on her father. The hum was louder, perhaps because he was closer. The connection was made, but Violet felt nothing.

  The two bridges that crossed the Preston River, connecting Little City to South Rosemont, were the Sagaw and the Newton. The Newton went from the warehouse district of Little City into the west side of South Rosemont and the Sagaw started at the tip of the shopping district and deposited commuters on the east side. Residents joked that from the sky you could tell the annual income of each side of South Rosemont simply by the make and model of the cars going across either bridge - the east side residents tending to be a bit more of the working-stiff variety.

  Either way, it wasn’t something spoken about too often or too loudly. Rosemont residents liked to think that no matter their socioeconomic divisions, they were still better off than people living in a city like Philadelphia or New York. They considered Rosemont one of the best truly all-American small towns on the east coast.

  Like all small towns, Rosemont had its traditions and stories, passed down from generation to the next, losing a bit of detail and truth along the way. There were incidents the town would never forget, like the time a fire claimed the lives of ten nuns in a Catholic church in southwest Rosemont. That story was told so many times in so many ways, that by the latest retelling, the nuns’ screams could be heard for miles before the fire trucks arrived. In truth, the nuns had been long dead – suffocated on the smoke - before anyone knew to call for help.

  For many years people would talk about what happened on Maclean Road one evening in early September. They’d talk about the bizarreness of the accident and the sadness of it all. And, one day, they’d talk about how that was the start of everything.

  Diane Morrow and Marianne Ross thought nothing of it when their husbands each took the wrong bridge home. It would have made more sense for the Morrows to have taken the Sagaw, and the Rosses the Newton, considering where they lived, but the women were so content from a wonderful night of good food and conversation that they welcomed the extra time the scenic routes provided.

  Diane rested her hand on Nick’s thigh as he drove, looking out the window and smiling to herself. The Preston River was calm to their right and the nearly naked trees of the woods swayed to their left. Dinner with the Loebs had gone well. Joseph Loeb was building a community of condos outside of Philadelphia and Nick wanted in on the contract. He could use the work, and they could use the money. Nick hummed as he drove, and Diane knew he thought the dinner had been a success as well.

  Heading westward, the Rosses were also feeling good about life. They had no financial worries – their issue was time. After all these years, Marianne’s hours at the hospital still caused problems. The couple could go days without seeing each other and family meals were often Brad and Violet eating alone at the island in the kitchen, for it seemed a waste to set the table for only two. Date Night provided them with the opportunity to reconnect, recharge, and rekindle.

  Marianne leaned forward, looking past Brad to get a better view of the river. In the moonlight, the water looked as endless as the sky and shimmered like onyx. It reminded her of the evening they’d had an anniversary dinner there; a nighttime picnic under the stars. It would be the last happy thought she’d ever have.

  She opened her mouth to recall the memory aloud when Brad jerked the steering wheel of their mid-size SUV sharply to the left, into the other lane of traffic. Where it had seemed just a moment before that they were the only ones on the road for a mile in either direction, Marianne was now staring in horror at two headlights, coming at them fast.

  In the other car, Diane screamed for Nick to look out, and briefly thought they were going to avoid the accid
ent. Nick stared straight ahead, but instead of swerving or applying the brakes, he pressed down hard on the accelerator and pointed the nose of their sedan directly at the SUV.

  He never stopped humming.

  Metal met metal. The engine of the late-model sedan entered the front of the car, shredding Nick Morrow’s lower half and killing him instantly. The Ross’ SUV rose up from the rear, threatening to flip the whole vehicle upside down, atop the sedan. Instead, as the sedan spun violently towards the river, the momentum caused the SUV to spin too, and land on its side. Brad Ross died instantly as well; his neck broken.

  When it was over, Marianne Ross lay pinned inside her car listening to the hiss of steam, the leaking of fluids and her own struggle to breathe as her lungs filled with blood. She’d been a nurse long enough to know what was happening to her.

  A few feet away in the mangled sedan, stopped dangerously close to going into the river by a guardrail, Diane Morrow was also dying. She thought about only one thing: Jack. She knew he’d be taken care of, but it wouldn’t be the same. A child needs a mother.

  As Marianne felt herself fading away, there was great sadness that she wouldn’t see Violet graduate high school, get married and have children of her own. A girl would need her mother for such things.

  As both women let go of the last threads of life, they prayed their children would have a mother to care for them, somehow. And though they had never met, their last thoughts were of each other.

  Chapter Two

  Like Finding Out You’d Been Confessing Your Secrets to Batman

  Violet sat at the end of a long conference table, a soft drink and a bottle of water in front of her. When the round-faced secretary with short, spiky, blonde hair had asked which she’d like to drink, Violet had stared at her blankly, so she brought both. The secretary’s plump hands shook slightly as she placed them on the table alongside a small stack of napkins and two straws. “Here you go, just in case.” It looked like she attempted to say more, but thought better of it and left the room. Violet suspected that she already knew what Violet herself had recently learned: there really isn’t a right thing to say to a child with dead parents.

  Violet had no solid memory of taking care of herself over the past five days. She didn’t remember bathing, eating, or drinking, but she must have, because she was still here. She’d stood at her parents’ funeral, wearing a black dress her mother had picked out for her months ago because she’d said every young woman should have a simple black dress. Her hair was combed and she didn’t look - or at least she didn’t think she looked - as torn up as she felt inside.

  From the night the police came to tell her about the accident, she’d stayed with their neighbor next door, Ms. Harkin. She fussed over Violet, constantly offering her food and comfort. The reality sunk in three days later when Ms. Harkin had returned from Violet’s house with the black dress on a hanger.

  “I thought you might like to wear this to the service.”

  Violet was sitting at Ms. Harkin’s kitchen table and looked up at the word. Service. There would be a service. There would be tears and flowers and then her parents would be put into the ground because they were dead.

  And then Violet finally cried - big, wracking, sobs that seemed to come from the deepest part of her. A place she didn’t know existed. How could she? She had never imagined this kind of grief; much less where it might be stored, waiting for the unthinkable.

  “Oh, sweetheart.” Ms. Harkin laid the dress across the table and wrapped her arms around Violet’s shoulders. Still seated, Violet allowed herself to melt into Ms. Harkin’s bosom, her cries more like howls. She’d always looked at Ms. Harkin, with her flower-print dresses and red hair streaked with gray, as a grandmother. Her embracing Violet now almost made the situation worse. It reminded Violet that she didn’t have a grandmother. She didn’t have aunts or uncles or cousins. All she had were her parents and now they were gone.

  At the funeral, four days after her parents’ death, Violet sat between Ms. Harkin and other women from their neighborhood. They didn’t sit with their own husbands and children. They’d adopted her. They pitied her. She knew this not from looking into their eyes or by anything they’d said. She’d connected to them and she’d felt it. She pitied herself.

  After everyone had run out of words of condolences and gone home to their own families, Violet received a call from the lawyer’s secretary asking if she could be at his office late the next afternoon. Just getting through the service had drained Violet of all her energy. She didn’t have any left to think about what came next. Sitting in the conference room, it occurred to her that the lawyer was probably going to tell her she would be going into foster care. That had to be it. There was no one else. Any money that her parents had saved would most likely be unavailable until she turned eighteen.

  That’s three years. Three years of living with strangers.

  She couldn’t imagine that was what her parents would have wanted, but they couldn’t have planned on dying together and definitely not so soon. How do you plan for something like that? For days, Violet hadn’t thought about much of anything, but now she was being forced to think about her future. She wasn’t sure what it held, but she had a feeling it included the boy with the unruly hair who was sitting across the table.

  Jack had never met Violet, but he knew who she was the moment she walked in the room. She was the other one.

  When the doorbell rang that night, Jack knew police were at the door before he opened it. Their red and blue lights from atop their car danced across the windows and filtered through the curtains, making his living room look like some kind of sick disco. The officers wanted to know if there was someone they could call to be with Jack before they delivered the news. He insisted that there was no one, and that they could say whatever they had to right then and there.

  As one of the officers spoke, the other placed his hand on Jack’s bare arm and it was if someone had pressed ‘play’ on his brain. His mind filled with images: the wrecked cars, broken glass, and blood. It was similar to what he’d seen before Bobby’s accident, but now it had more detail, like an empty set of a stage had suddenly been filled with cast members. He saw his dead parents; his father with his eyes open and his mother covered in blood. There was another couple he didn’t recognize.

  He’d pushed the officer’s hand away and ran to the kitchen. He came in too fast and hit his head against the faucet as he threw up into the sink. The officers followed, and Jack managed to croak out a feeble, “Don’t touch me,” between heaves.

  So, now I’m seeing the past. What a time for that to start, Jack thought. As the police gave him the general information surrounding the accident, Jack recalled the images he’d just seen. He had to hold on to the side of the sink just to remain on his feet.

  He stayed at home that night, alone, refusing offers of comfortable guest rooms by well-meaning neighbors. His mother’s boss, Ms. Decklan, flew out of the country the next day, but called several times offering him a place to stay. He refused this too, having only met her a few times. Staying with her would be awkward and feel too much like charity. By the next afternoon the voicemail was full of condolences, including one call from Dr. Tesla asking Jack to call him back as soon as possible. He didn’t return the call. He didn’t need more therapy. He needed parents. He needed answers. He’d seen what was going to happen to Bobby before it happened; yet when his father had touched him the day he died, nothing. Perhaps whatever or whoever was behind the visions felt he didn’t deserve the heads up - it’s not like it did Bobby any good. However, he hadn’t been spared the images of the accident after the fact and this made Jack angry.

  After his parents’ funeral, when the house was filled with casseroles and whispered sympathy, he heard talk of “the other poor thing” - the other child that had lost both parents that night. He wondered if, right then, she was being offered covered dishes like food would make it all better.

  Now Jack wondered, as he watched Vi
olet push a bottle of water with her index finger, if this lawyer was going to have information on what caused their parents’ accident. He had overheard his neighbors talking at the house. The police thought it was a freak accident – maybe one car lost control or a deer ran into the road. Maybe they figured out that a third car was involved and an arrest had been made. Jack held on to that possibility. He needed someone to blame.

  He opened his own water bottle and took a sip. When he swallowed, he felt a tingling in his ears and little electric charges exploding across his face. He coughed, choking on the water. Jack looked over at Violet, who was looking at him intensely. When they made eye contact, she moved back a few inches in her chair, surprised.

  What the heck did she just do to me?

  The lawyer entered the conference room and found Jack and Violet staring at each other. The look on Jack’s face was accusatory; Violet looked confused. He felt sorry for them.

  “Hello. I’m Mr. Gervais, your parents’ estate attorney.”

  This time there was confusion on both of their faces - this man didn’t look much like a lawyer at all. He looked to be about twenty-five, tops. Instead of a suit he wore a black leather jacket over a black T-shirt and jeans. He had scruff on his face like he hadn’t shaved in days and his light brown hair fell to the nape of his neck. Jack wondered if they could trust the legitimacy of anything he said.

  “You’re my parents’ lawyer?” he asked.

  “Yes. Both of your parents.”

  Violet looked from Mr. Gervais to Jack. “Well, what happens now?”

  Gervais consulted documents on the table in front of him. “I would normally do this separately, but considering the circumstances it seemed best to… well… I’m getting ahead of myself.”