The Well

by A. J. Whitten

  No. Impossible.

  Just as I got back into position against the wall, Sergeant Ring turned around. “Yeah, well, nothing here. My shift’s over anyway.” He clutched the bottle to his chest.

  Yeah. Happy hour again. For the thousandth time, I was glad I hadn’t told Mike’s dad anything. He was clearly no help with anything but a corkscrew.

  I wondered why Sam had hid the room behind a mirror. A secret latch. There had to be something here, maybe in that book. I couldn’t be sure until I looked inside, but I wasn’t going to do that in front of Sergeant Ring.

  I took one last look around the room as the cop was closing the door. On the wall hung a small painting, incredibly detailed given how tiny it was, of two men standing in front of the well, back in its glory days when it had been a real working well, used, I guessed, to water the vineyard. Behind them, the old vineyard lay in neat rows, marching down the tidy acres. “Wait.”

  Sergeant Ring paused.

  I stepped back inside the room and stood in front of the oil portrait. The colors were still Crayola bright, as if it had been created yesterday. I couldn’t decipher the artist’s scrawled name in the corner, but I could read the date.

  18o9. The year the vineyard had officially opened for business.

  Beneath the painting, the names Auguste and Gerard Jumel were written in a cursive script.

  Gerard Jumel. I knew that name.

  It was Sam’s great-great-great-times-a-gazillion-grandfather. The guy who’d taken the vineyard and made it an international sensation. He’d practically been canonized by the Jumel family for bringing them all these generations of not just money, but megawealth. He’d passed on the family secrets for the grapes, something that Sam wouldn’t tell anyone except a Jumel heir.

  Whatever. I didn’t want in on his will anyway.

  But … Auguste? I hadn’t heard that name mentioned. Ever. Who was he?

  “Not bad if you like that landscape crap,” Mike’s dad said over my shoulder, gesturing toward the painting. “Though why anyone would want a painting of two guys hanging on their wall is beyond me. Tell your stepdad to get a Hot Babes on Harleys calendar. That’s a real wall hanging, if you ask me.”

  I wasn’t listening. I was staring.

  At myself.

  In double.

  The two guys-and now I realized they weren’t men at all, but teens about my age-Auguste and Gerard, standing in front of the well, were twins. And they looked exactly like me.

  The doorbell dented beneath my finger, chimes screaming for mercy, but I didn’t let go. I fell against the door, panting. After I’d left the winery, grateful that Mike’s dad had decided to go home and “test that wine sample,” I’d booked it for my dad’s house. I wanted to look for Megan, but I was too shaken up to go back in the woods right away, and besides, the vine guys were still waiting for me.

  I opted for a temporary breather. A second to take all this in and figure out what it meant. What Mike’s dad had told me about Sam. Those wine bottles. And now that freaky picture on the wall.

  And maybe here, in the safety of the home where I’d grown up, the place where everything had once been okay, those vines wouldn’t find me, wouldn’t wrap around me, wouldn’t drag me halfway across town and back-

  “Cooper! What are you doing?” My father opened the door and stared at me, as if the alien mother ship had just dumped me on his doorstep.

  “Can I …” I heaved in a breath-at this rate, I was going to need to cart around an oxygen tank. “Can I come in?”

  “Sure, sure.” He opened the door wider and waved me in. “Does your mother know where you are?”

  I sure hoped not. “Of course.”

  A few minutes later, I was sitting on my father’s worn brown leather sofa, drinking a Coke. He sat across from me, arms resting on his knees, waiting. My father did that well, sitting as quietly as a potted plant, his glasses resting on his nose, looking as though they might fall off at any second. He’d warmed up some leftover frozen pizza, the crappy diet kind, but hey, it was food, so I set it between us. We ate a bit, and then I put the Coke can on the old coffee table, the same one we’d had when I was a kid. I thought about that for a moment. Had my mother said to him, You keep the coffee table; I’ll take the kids? “Thanks, Dad.”

  “When are you going to tell me?”

  “Tell you what?”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing’s going on. I was just thirsty and hungry. So I came by.” I pointed at the empty can and started to rise. “I’m gonna grab another.”

  “Sit down.”

  He had that don’t-argue-with-me tone, the one he didn’t use very often. So I sat.

  My father sighed. He stared at his hands for a long time, then back at me. “Talk to me, Cooper.”

  “About what?”

  “About Megan, for one. I know you’re worried. Has there been any news?”

  I shook my head. Tears sprang into my eyes, but I brushed them away with the back of my fist.

  “I can’t imagine what that family is going through.” He leaned forward. “Or you.”

  “I’m cool.” I wasn’t, but I also wasn’t in any mood to talk about Megan. That would involve starting at the beginning, and I knew my dad didn’t believe in fairy tales with big ugly monsters any more than Faulkner did.

  “Anything I can do, you let me know.”

  I fiddled with my pizza. “Thanks.”

  “I’m here to help you. With anything.” He gave me a smile. “Even your Hamlet paper.”

  “Dad, quit it. You’re not supposed to help me. It’s, like, a conflict of interest or something.”

  He chuckled. I hadn’t seen him laugh in so long, I hadn’t even realized he still could. The sound was … nice. I thought about how when all this was over, I should spend more time with my dad-outside of school. “You’re right.” He pretended to zip his lip and sat back. “When was the last time we did that?”

  “What, talked about Hamlet? Try today. Second period.”

  “No, I meant laughed together, ate pizza, and just talked? I miss having you and your brother around all the time.”

  “Yeah, me too.” Though my parents had joint custody, my dad had never really argued when my mother had asked for more time. He was the peacemaker, figuring if it made my mother happy, that was good enough for him.

  I think he still loved her.

  My father watched me for a long time, then let out another sigh. “There’s more than just Megan’s disappearance bugging you, Cooper. Lately, you haven’t been acting like … yourself. You’re jumpy. Forgetful. And you look like you haven’t slept in a week.”

  I shrugged. “Things suck at home.”

  “How?”

  The words pushed at my throat, crowding together like eleven-year-old girls outside the doors of a Hannah Montana concert. I wanted to tell him; I really did. I wanted to tell someone, someone who could help. Instead I swallowed hard and shoved the truth back to my gut. “The dog died.”

  My father jerked upright. “Whipple? Died? How? When?”

  “I don’t know. Mom said that Sam found him and…”

  My voice trailed off. I had never asked my mother for any details about Whipple. Like where the dog was buried. Then I remembered something else that my mother had told me.

  Sam … found him in the woods.

  In the woods … where? By the well?

  Had the creature gotten Whipple? Or had Sam?

  Could Sam kill my dog? Or had he seen something kill him and just covered up the evidence? A lot of deaths circling around the name Sam lately. Two and two were beginning to add up, and I wasn’t liking the total.

  “And what?” my father pressed.

  “And I don’t know any more than that,” I said, keeping my suspicions to myself. That’s all they were-suspicions. I had no proof of anything.

  My father’s gaze narrowed. He studied me, then turned away and went to the fireplace, his back to me. “What
do you think of Sam?”

  The question caught me off-guard. “I don’t know. I don’t like him, but he’s my stepfather. Kind of comes with the second marriage, doesn’t it?”

  “I suppose it does.”

  “He’s been super uptight lately, too. The vineyard has this big anniversary deal coming up and business is down. He blames everyone for that.” I picked at my fingernails. “Especially me.”

  My father turned around and crossed his arms over his chest. “He’s never really liked you, has he?”

  “I dunno. I’ve never really liked him. We’re even.” I picked at my nails some more, waiting for my father to talk. But he didn’t. He was like that a lot. The kind of guy who could go an hour without saying a word. I wished he’d turn on the television or the radio, anything to make noise. The clock in the hall ticked along. Still my father didn’t say anything. I fidgeted on the couch. Fidgeted some more. “Why didn’t you fight more to keep her?”

  Oh man. Where had that come from? How had I let that one out?

  It had to be the stress of the past few days. Or my blood sugar was spiking from the carbs or something.

  My father didn’t say anything. I studied my Vans, sure my dad was glaring at me, afraid to look. Finally, I lifted my head and checked.

  Instead, I found a mixture of surprise and sadness in his eyes. He pushed off from the fireplace and came back to his chair, dropping into it with a long breath. “Your mother’s known Sam a long time.”

  I perked up. “She has?”

  He nodded. “From before you were born. He delivered you.”

  Disgust bubbled up inside me. It was too weird to think about that-StepScrooge Sam’s being at the other end of the birth canal and seeing me pop out. “You’re not serious.”

  “It might have started between them when she was pregnant, but I’m not sure.”

  I pulled childhood memories out of the corners of my mind, shuffled them, dealt them out, and revisited them. My parents on vacation, holding hands, kissing, laughing together. My mother waiting by the door for my father to get home from parent-teacher conferences, tucking her hair behind her ear or checking her lipstick in the hall mirror. My father grabbing her after dinner and giving her a hug just because she had made his favorite meatloaf.

  And then one day, things changed, as fast as I could snap my fingers. She stopped waiting by the door and left TV dinners on the counter with a note. My father stopped smiling when he came home and just headed for the den, burying himself in essay corrections instead of his family. The next thing Faulkner and I knew, we were living in Sam’s mansion and my father was alone.

  “No, Dad, I don’t think it started then. She was happy when we were kids. She loved you.”

  It was as if a flower had bloomed on my father’s face. Hope exploded across his features, brightening his smile, his eyes. He came to life in a way I hadn’t seen in a year and a half. “You … you really think so?”

  “Yeah, Dad,” I said quietly, the two of us connecting across the wooden floor, not with a touch but because we both missed the days of meatloaf and mashed potatoes. “I do.”

  He held that look for one more moment, and then he rose and went back to the fireplace. “Either way, it’s too late now. She married him.”

  “Yeah.”

  He sighed. “Yeah.”

  I got to my feet. “I’m gonna get another Coke.”

  My father didn’t say anything, so I went into the kitchen and grabbed a soda from the fridge. I dug through my father’s cabinets and came up pretty empty in the junk-food haul. My dad’s cholesterol check had come back high a couple months ago, and he’d gone all health commando in his kitchen.

  “Dad, you got any Doritos? Chips? Anything good?”

  “Check the basement. Oh, and Cooper, when you’re down there, get that box by the stairs. Your mother asked me to bring a few things over to the house. I might as well send them home with you. That way I don’t have to go … well, over there. And see them.”

  I headed down there, not just for food, but to get away from the brick of sadness upstairs. My father was clearly holding a Good Old Days vigil, and I didn’t need that. Not now. I had enough trouble with Right This Minute.

  One lone bag of Lay’s sat on the shelf in the basement, stuffed behind enough canned peaches to feed Ethiopia. I grabbed the red bag, then tossed it on top of the cardboard box by the stairs. The box was filled with a jumble of old school papers, a couple of dusty soccer awards for Faulkner and me, and, tucked in the side, a purplish paper with the state of Maine seal at the top.

  In the kitchen, I put the box on the table. My dad was at the sink, filling a glass. I was about to open the chips when I noticed the purple paper again. And the words stamped across the top.

  RECORD OF BIRTH. Beneath that, my name typed into the first box.

  I tugged out the paper and gave it a skim. Father’s name, mother’s name, place of birth, address at time of birthnothing I didn’t already know.

  I was about to put it back when one word grabbed me.

  Plurality.

  “Cooper?” my dad said, coming up behind me.

  But I barely heard him.

  Beside plurality, the word TWIN was bolded. From the sex answer before it, where Male was bolded, I put together that twin was the checked answer.

  Plurality? Twin?

  As in, more than one of me?

  I spun around and stared at my father. “Dad?”

  He saw what I had in my hands, then nodded. “We should have told you a long time ago. Your mother thought it would upset you to know when you were little, and then as the years passed, it just seemed like we could never find the right time.”

  I glanced down at the paper again. “I’m a twin? I have a…?”

  “Brother.” My father put a hand on my shoulder. “But he died at birth. Stillborn. I’m sorry.”

  That word came back to me: TWIN.

  “But how … ? I …” I couldn’t get a full sentence out. My mind tried to wrap itself around the information and kept failing.

  Shouldn’t I have felt something? Had some inkling of a connection? Wasn’t that what they were always saying on the Discovery Channel, that people who had a twin that died at birth always felt this missing half? But then again, my life in the past couple years had been far from normal-and heck, in the past few months it had been close to Hollyweird-so I could have had all kinds of absent-twin feelings and been so wrapped up in all this other crap that I’d missed them, like a zit on the back of my elbow.

  “It was strange,” my father mused, looking at the birth certificate. “Twins never ran in the family. We were so surprised-pleasantly surprised-when we heard your mom was carrying two boys.”

  I sank into a chair. My father sat opposite me and took off his glasses. He swiped at his face, but all that did was deepen the lines under his eyes. My father seemed to have aged fifteen years in the past two minutes.

  “Poor kid. He never had a chance,” my father said.

  The whole thing didn’t seem real. Couldn’t seem to sink in. I tried to digest it, to imagine another me, and I just …

  Couldn’t.

  Tears filled my father’s eyes. I’d never seen him cry, not even when my mother moved out of our house, not when my grandmother died, not once. He was what people called stoic. Some people thought he was cold, but I knew better. He just wasn’t comfortable around people. Give him a book, and he was as happy as a hot dog in a roll. Put him in a crowd, and he clammed right up.

  He let out a breath that shook like a tree in a storm, then lifted his gaze to meet mine. “Let me tell you something, Cooper. You lose a kid-I don’t care how or when-you never get over it.

  I glanced down at my birth certificate, staring at the four letters of TWIN. There had been another me, another half to me, and it had died.

  And I’d never known.

  But one other person, besides my parents, had known, had been there, had been there and held that baby. And h
ad never said a word.

  Sam.

  Why? Why the big secret?

  “I’m sorry,” I said. To my dad. To myself. And to the brother who hadn’t even had a chance to breathe. Then it finally hit me, and I felt a loss so hard, it seemed as if a part of me had been left behind, as if I’d forgotten something vital in a store somewhere, something so important, and I couldn’t ever get it back.

  I wanted to cry. For something I’d never seen, never held, never known. Only knew I could never have, because it was too late.

  “I’m sorry, Dad,” I said again, softer this time.

  “I’m sorry, too.” My father reached across the table, wrapped a hand around my neck, and drew me into his sweater. It scratched my face a little.

  But I didn’t mind.

  As soon as my father went to bed, I went up to my old room, shut the door, and upended the backpack onto my bed. Before I went after that thing and got Megan, I wanted to see if anything I’d grabbed today would give me more ammunition. I needed to know more about what I was dealing with.

  The wine bottle rolled to the side. I let it go and reached for the book. I brushed off a thick layer of dust, revealing a cursive GMJ on the front.

  It didn’t take a rocket scientist to put that together with the painting I’d seen in the office. Gerard Jumel. Something M for his middle name. I turned the leather cover and the first yellowed page. The paper nearly crumpled in my hands. But there, in ink faded by age, were the words Journal of Gerard jumel.

  A chill ran up my spine. Was it just that these were the words of a guy who was dead? Or of a guy who was in that picture in Sam’s office?

  Or was it that a part of me knew, somehow, this was all wrapped up together?

  I hesitated, then turned the next page. The first entry was dated October i o, 18 o 8. The words were hard to read-the old ink grayed over the years, the pages as fragile as autumn leaves. But I could make out most of it.

  The new property Father bought is ripe for farming. There are grapes everywhere. The old man here before us let it go to weeds. It will be a good year before we can open the winery. Must get back to work.