Flower Moon

by Gina Linko

  “Let me try,” Tempest said, and then she reached out for the book in my hand. And I could see her struggle, see her eyes widen at how hard it was to push through the space toward me.

  “What the heck is—”

  But I didn’t finish my sentence, because as she reached toward me, and even before her hand grasped the matchbook, I watched one of the matches spark a weird, blue-purple color. In a blink, the whole book caught fire, every single match in one big hot flame.

  “Whoa,” Digger yelped from where he stood nearby.

  I hurled the fiery matchbook away, and it landed in a patch of brush near Tempest. The dried grass and brush crackled and caught fire. Tempest took several steps away from me, eyeing me closely.

  “You better cut this out,” I said. “You’re—”

  “It’s not me.” She busied herself stomping out the fire, and Digger joined in, muttering to himself.

  I stared at them, scared to get too close.

  When the flames were out, Digger turned his attention back to me. “What was that? You forget how to light a match?”

  “I … um …” I let my voice trail off as I backed even farther away from Tempest, needing to lessen the pressure on my lungs. I snatched my inhaler from my pocket, took two long pulls. It was still there, coming at me in waves, settling between my eyes like a bad case of brain freeze. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t get a breath. “You got a drink of water?” I squeaked.

  “Yeah,” Digger said, digging into his bag.

  Tempest looked at me all funny. “I just remembered, I gotta go back …” she stammered. “I promised Pa Charlie …” She turned back for camp, and my breathing came easier with each bit of distance Tempest put between us.

  Digger’s eyes were full of questions. “Here.” He gave me a bottle of water, and I took a pull. I felt better already though.

  Digger watched me, but I just ignored him like it was my job, draining the bottle of water.

  Instead of peppering me with the twenty questions I was sure he wanted to ask, Digger let it drop.

  Wonders never cease.

  He took off toward the Spanish oak near the base of the hill. I watched Digger’s silhouette as he climbed up into its massive, kudzu-covered branches.

  “Come on, Tally, you’re missing the view!” he yelled.

  “Uh-huh,” I called. I ran toward the tree, but when I got up into the branches of that old oak, it wasn’t the view that drew my attention. Not the bright sickle moon in the sky or the lit-up constellations in the wide-open country sky. No, it was the tiny, disappearing figure of my sister running back to camp, small and alone, a silhouette against the lights of the carnival and flame of the campfire, her pigtails bouncing with each step she took.

  6

  Tempest pretended to be sleeping when I got back to our trailer—or our pod, as we called it, on account of it was this pod-shaped add-on that Pa Charlie always pulled behind his monster of a motor home. You couldn’t quite stand up in it, but it was ours. A twin bed on each side, some built-in drawers at the foot of each. There was a small, square window in the back, between our beds, and a ladybug suncatcher—one of two we’d made the summer before—still hung there. I squinted, trying to tell if that one had been mine or Tempest’s. I couldn’t tell.

  I stripped out of my clothes and pulled on some pajamas, trying to feel out the atmosphere in our pod, bracing myself for … whatever. But there was nothing weird going on. Whatever had been between us seemed to have evaporated somehow.

  When I finally pulled up the sheet, right to my nose—and it smelled like I remembered: campfire and Tide—I realized I wasn’t tired, but keyed up from all that had happened. “Why are you pretending to be sleeping?” I said into the dark.

  Tempest rolled over, but she said nothing. I sighed.

  “Are you worrying about what happened with the matches?” I waited. And just when I thought she wasn’t going to answer, she did.

  “Are you?”

  “Well, this all began when you started working with the magnets at school. Maybe this is a result of one of your gadgets or—”

  “No.”

  “Maybe you don’t even realize you’re doing it. It’s like a side effect of—”

  “No, it’s not.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to say something horrible, like Maybe you’re doing this in some twin-magic way. Like your mind trick when you kept me from punching Bradley. Maybe you’re pushing me away on purpose. Because you’re tired of me. Because you’re too busy with your new inventions, your new hobbies, your new life. The one that doesn’t have time for me.

  I didn’t say it though.

  Tempest turned over again, and I could see that she was facing me now, even though it was dark. I couldn’t quite make out her features, but her eyes reflected a sliver of the moonlight coming in our little pod window. Tempest’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Remember our dog-walking business?”

  “How could I forget?”

  “You mean the rhubarb incident? Come on, that was fun.”

  “Fun? You could say that.” I chuckled, thinking of Mr. Ku’s rottweiler and its penchant for chewing on the rhubarb growing behind Mrs. Culpepper’s garage. “How were we supposed to know that the leaves of rhubarb were poison?”

  “I never saw purple barf before.”

  “We had, what, seventeen dogs at once?”

  “Eighteen if you count that mangy Chihuahua.”

  “Seventeen and a half, maybe.”

  Tempest giggled.

  “We were a well-oiled machine back then, weren’t we, Tempest?” Those had been the days, both of us working on something together, all day, every day, all summer long, inseparable.

  Tempest spoke even more softly now. “Tally, you know I only did stuff like that … Well, I did it ’cause it was fun to do with you.”

  I sat up straight then, leaning toward my sister. “And it was fun to do stuff together, wasn’t it?” I wanted her to say it, to admit she missed us. To agree that we could find a way to get ourselves back to how we were.

  “Tally. Those things though … they never really wound my clock. They weren’t my interests.”

  “Oh,” I said, leaning back on my pillow.

  “I was just always being … your assistant. But eventually I had to get brave enough to become me. Not just a version of you. You understand what I’m getting at?”

  “Not really.”

  “You don’t want to understand.”

  We lay in silence then, for what seemed like a long time, listening to the cricket song outside. Me, trying to control my temper, Tempest being quiet. Oh, how I missed Bones.

  I found myself thinking about Mama and Aunt Grania, about what I’d overheard Mama saying. I felt like I was truly understanding the root of her Sad Mama moments.

  “Never my choice,” she’d said.

  Had Mama been talking about her separation from her sister? Had Aunt Grania slowly grown away from Mama, then up and took off, leaving her for good? Traveling the world, writing her zany magazine articles about crystals and acupuncture and who knows what else? Did Aunt Grania flee into her own grown-up life, never looking back? Just completely forgetting how to make room for her sister in her exciting adventures?

  Or had they argued about something? Right then, lying in the pod, I tried to imagine what in the jelly sandwich could’ve been bad enough for Mama and Aunt Grania to fight about that they wouldn’t want to see each other anymore. I tried out a few theories: Had they fought about who would go with who after their parents’ divorce? Had they fought over money for their colleges, or maybe over a super-handsome, motorcycle-riding boyfriend who ran a mobile kitten shelter?

  It was hard to imagine, really it was. But not impossible.

  A year ago, I wouldn’t have been able to imagine anything like that at all.

  This year, I almost … almost … could.

  Tempest turned back over and brought her knees up, curling herself into he
r sleeping position.

  We shared a lot of things, being identical: looks, genetics, clothes, friends, living quarters, underwear, even. But as I lay there in my bed, that first night back at Pa Charlie’s, I found myself thinking more and more about the day before kindergarten when Mama told us she was putting us in separate classes. “So you can have your own life too,” she’d told us then, her smile faltering just a little.

  “But we’re the same,” was all I could come up with. Tempest had been silent.

  “Come here,” Mama had said, and she’d pulled out a bottle of nail polish. “Give me your index fingers. Both of y’all.”

  We obliged, and I remembered being so surprised when Mama brushed the paint onto the pads of our pointer fingers, instead of on the nails. Then she’d pressed our fingerprints onto an index card, side by side. “Look closely.”

  I’d studied them, narrowing my eyes. “They’re different!” I had said, so surprised after six years of sharing everything with my sister. Our secret sign language of our toddler years, the same bed half the time, the freckle under our eye—hers on the left, mine on the right.

  “They’re kind of the same,” Tempest had said. And I’d snatched the index card again and brought it close to my face to study. The prints swirled up from the bottom in the same fashion, and then whirled counterclockwise. But Tempest’s print was more scrunched, with a few more vertical lines off to the left side. I studied that card closely. Had Tempest smudged hers when she pressed her thumb onto the paper, or something? I mean, shouldn’t we have the same fingerprints?

  I didn’t know much about stuff then, but I did know that Tempest having a different fingerprint than me seemed weird and wrong, in a way that my six-year-old brain couldn’t really put into words.

  “Mama, no,” I said, shoving the index card back at her.

  “Yes,” she explained. “You are not exactly the same. You have your own personalities. You are your own person.”

  I’d scrunched my face into my best angry scowl and aimed a kick right at Mama’s shin.

  I’d been grounded from the television for an entire week because of that.

  Then Tempest had bawled like a baby on the first day of school, and Mrs. Hunter had to pry us apart. I, on the other hand, had just narrowed my eyes at Mama and comforted Tempest, trying so hard to be strong.

  That first night back in our pod, I fell asleep wondering about that conversation. Wondering about Tempest and me. About Aunt Grania and Mama.

  About the matches. About the growing space between us.

  7

  I halfway woke to the breakdown clatter of the carnival rides, tents, and attractions right outside our pod. I fought waking up, pulling the blankets over my head.

  But, of course, I couldn’t get back to sleep. I made myself get out of bed, grumbling under my breath the whole while. I stood and stretched, and my eye caught the red picture frame on the wall of our pod, opposite the lone window.

  That red frame had been there forever, nailed to the wall and secured with heaps of blue sticky tack so it would stay where it was supposed to despite the bumps and thumps of traveling. Inside the picture frame was a silhouette garland my mother had made when she was a kid.

  It was just a fancy version of a paper-doll chain, like the ones we all learned to make in school by folding up a piece of paper just exactly right, and cutting out a stick figure. Then, when you unfolded the paper, accordion style, there were a dozen stick figures, all identical, all holding hands.

  It was like that, but fancier, more beautiful, and incredibly intricate. It was nothing like the plain old paper dolls I could do. Anyone could tell, with just one glance, that Mama was an artist.

  The garland showed a pair of girls. They were bent toward each other at the waist, their noses nearly touching, one heel kicked out behind each of them, forever frozen in the midst of sharing a secret. Their hands held on to an umbrella between them, their pigtails caught mid-swing, defying gravity. The swoop of the girls’ eyelashes was a thing of beauty: so smooth, so tiny, so impossibly fine.

  The pair of them repeated six times inside that red frame.

  But I always liked to think that it really continued outside of that frame. Pair after pair, on and on. Forever.

  At first glance, you would think the girls were identical, but if you looked closely, you’d see there were differences. One of the girls leans in a bit more than the other. Her hand sits higher on the umbrella than the other’s. She’s sheltering her sister from the rain.

  I stepped closer to the frame, thinking of what Fat Sam had said last night around the fire, about Mama and Aunt Grania having an act, cutting out garlands. Suddenly, I was curious.

  Had they both made these silhouettes?

  I studied it closely. I searched the paper, looking for a signature, but found none. However, when I squinted, I could barely see the shadow of writing through the paper, as if something was written on the back.

  I dug my fingers behind that red frame and I pulled it off the wall.

  I flipped the frame over. There was Mama’s handwriting, all loops and even lettering—elegant, just like her. It was clear the entire back of the garland had been written on, but it had obviously been done before the paper had been folded and snipped. But there were snippets of texts left on the paper that I could still make out. I picked out a few words I could read clearly: “you and me,” “forever,” and, strangely, the word “tattoo.” Then, near the top of the cut-out umbrella, I found the phrase “not what I want.”

  And then the last line, the only one without any words snipped out of it, said this: “I won’t tell anyone. Especially not Pa. Not until we have to.”

  My stomach plummeted. Wouldn’t tell what? What secret were they sharing? And had it somehow lead to their big fight? To their separation? To the reason Aunt Grania chose to leave?

  There was a clearly drawn circle too, near the bottom of the garland, partially snipped off, but it was half-shaded in with pencil, like a half-eaten pie, or diagram in a math book that designated the fraction 1/2.

  What in the world was this supposed to mean? Was it a reference to their twin-ness? How they were each one half of a whole?

  I stared at the back of that silhouette garland for a good, long while, and I wondered at my mother, at her sister, at their entire lifetime of sisterhood, in a way that I hadn’t quite done before. Had they told their own inside jokes? Did they share friends and help each other with homework? Did they argue over whose turn it was to clean the litter box?

  Had they been able to have an entire conversation with just the wrinkle of a nose or the raising of an eyebrow?

  It was kind of a revelation. Of course. Mama and Grania must have been just like Tempest and me.

  Until … what? Until they weren’t anymore. And how had that happened?

  I hung that red frame back on the pod wall, mulling it all over. What hadn’t Mama told anyone? What would she not tell Pa?

  Aunt Grania and Mama kept some kind of secret, stayed separated in their whole adult life, and Mama said it was never her choice. When I paired all that information with my mother’s Sad Mama moments, I felt a growing uneasiness.

  I quickly grabbed my stuff for the shower and took off out of our pod. The whole time I was shampooing my hair, I worried over Mama and Aunt Grania’s secrets. And what was with that half-shaded circle? Was it some kind of code? Or more like a secret wink, an emoji, just some sign shared between the two of them?

  I dressed quickly and hurried to find my sister.

  Fat Sam called out his hellos from near the Spaceship 3000. “Have you seen Tempest?” I asked him.

  “She’s having breakfast with Molly-Mae.”

  “Thanks.” I took off down the midway. I wanted to find Tempest, to tell her about what I’d found, whatever it meant. Maybe she’d help me look for more clues.

  It seemed to me that if I could pinpoint what made Aunt Grania decide to leave Mama behind, then maybe, just maybe, I could keep
Tempest from abandoning me.

  When I got to the Candy Wagon, Tempest was there at the counter, eating an omelet, a tall glass of orange juice in front of her, Molly-Mae at the fryer.

  “I could teach you bridge or pinochle,” Molly-Mae was saying. “Or poker. We could have some fun betting.” Molly-Mae was always jumping at the chance to spend more time with us, proposing all kinds of bonding moments. We could visit the new Sea Animal Sanctuary in Brunswick. She could teach us how to make stained glass. She could take us for tea at the King and Prince Hotel on St. Simons.

  Molly-Mae was an excitable lady.

  She and Tempest probably had big plans for the summer already. Heck, Tempest might have been writing her letters all year long, for all I knew.

  Molly-Mae noticed me. “Oh, Tally! I’m making your favorite. Just give me a minute. The hash browns have to brown up.”

  “Glory, hallelujah!” I said. “I’m hungry.” I took a seat next to my sister. “I nearly slept through teardown. Can’t say that I’m sorry.”

  “Sounds about right,” Tempest said.

  “Listen, I gotta tell you something.” I already had it all planned in my head. How we’d do some interrogations, sleuth out whatever secret thing had wedged its way between Mama and Aunt Grania, then we’d spend the rest of our carnival summer laughing about how we would never be so dramatic, our bond thick and strong again. It was a plot straight out of a Trenton Sisters Double-Special Holiday Mystery.

  We’d get back to being inseparable again.

  But just as I was about to tell Tempest, I noticed she wasn’t just eating her breakfast. She was eating her breakfast with a teacup-sized, black-and-white kitten sitting in her lap. The kitten was all whiskers and ears with a tiny, pink nose. And the tip of her tail looked like it had been plopped into a can of white paint.

  “Well, good morning!” I said, taking the kitten from Tempest and placing her in my lap.

  Tempest’s face went sour. “Tally, I was petting her!”

  “Animals like me better,” I said.