“There’s a lot of people who wouldn’t be cool with what we are,” I said. “Does anyone else know?”
“A few of Dad’s old colleagues.”
“Dr. Feld?” I asked. I thought of his weird reaction to seeing us. Annie nodded in confirmation. “But you’ve never told anyone?”
“No,” she said.
I lay back down on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. I thought of Cameron Schaeffer. With the memory of Zach’s lips on mine so fresh in my mind, I wondered how Annie had done it, how she’d shut Cameron out of her life. Only she never really did shut him out, did she? She tried to pretend she did, but she’d never stopped loving him. It had eaten her up inside, turned her into a hollow shell of herself.
“If you hadn’t broken up with Cameron, you would have had to tell him.”
“That doesn’t have anything to do with this,” she said. Her calm motherly voice had given way to the clipped, angry tone. I’d had to go and pull that scab off the Cameron Schaeffer wound. I was such an idiot.
“But it’s true.” I was nothing if not persistent. “We can never have a normal life. We’ll always have this big dark family secret hanging over our heads.”
Annie’s face softened. She came in and sat beside me on the bed. “Lots of people have secrets,” she said. “This is about Zach, isn’t it?”
She let her hand rest on my shoulder, and I jerked it away. Why did she have to drag Zach into this?
Of course, I couldn’t help but think about him. Did he have secrets? He’d told me his whole life story; it was hard to imagine he could have any secrets, but perhaps there were secrets even he didn’t know about. After all, he didn’t know where he came from. We were so alike that it was like we were fated to be together. Maybe that’s what Zach meant when he said he was drawn to me. I knew what he meant—after all, there was something about him that was irresistible to me. We belonged together.
“Why did you fall in love with Cameron?” I asked.
“Why? Love doesn’t really work like that. It’s one of those things that happens whether you want it to or not.”
“Because two people have a lot in common?”
“Maybe, or simply because. Sometimes it doesn’t make much sense at all. This Zach, he must be something special, I take it.”
I started to blush and tried to will the telltale heat away, but it only seemed to grow hotter.
“He’s a nice guy,” I said, “but it’s not like that. He’s not my boyfriend.”
“Well, why not?”
Because I’m a complete genetic freak and I can never ever tell him that was the first answer that came to mind, but I didn’t voice this out loud.
“I don’t need a boyfriend,” I said.
“Need,” she repeated in a quiet voice. She looked off into space. I worried that I’d upset her somehow, but there was a smile on her face. She returned to earth and said, “When it comes right down to it, nobody needs a boyfriend. We’d probably all be better off without them. Better off, but not necessarily happier.”
I puzzled over this comment. Annie was the last person I expected to be singing the praises of romantic love. How could she, after everything, still equate love with happiness? I thought of that mysterious “someone else.” I hadn’t really believed he’d ever existed, but now I wasn’t so sure. Could that be who she was thinking about whenever she got that dreamy expression on her face, this mysterious other guy that she refused to talk about? Who was he, and what had happened to him? If she was so in love with him, where was he?
“What happened to the guy you dumped Cameron for? Did he die?”
“Yeah,” she said. Her response arrived too quickly, and I saw the way she went rigid, the color draining from her face as soon as the words left my lips. Who was this mystery man, and why wouldn’t she talk about him?
“How did he die? How come you never talk about him?” I knew I sounded like a demanding child, but she was being such a pain about this.
“The thing with love,” Annie said, “is that if you aren’t careful, it can consume you. It doesn’t take much for love to turn into obsession.”
Obsession? Was she talking about Cameron? The mystery man? I wanted answers, but I wasn’t going to get them, at least not just yet. Gracie had gotten home and was shouting up to us, referring to us as lazy slugs for not checking the mail.
“I should get down there,” Annie said. She patted my leg as she stood up. “I didn’t realize how late it was. I’ve got to get dinner started.”
I could tell by the speed (practically running) at which she left my room that she was eager to escape. My questions were not going to be answered. Maybe they would never be answered. After her big revelation, this did seem a bit strange. If she could tell us that we were clones, you would think that telling us something, anything, about some boyfriend she used to have would be nothing.
Twenty minutes later, I finally got up off my bed and trudged downstairs to see what we were doing for dinner.
“You got mail,” Gracie said. She pointed at my place, where I saw a white business-sized envelope.
I went over and picked it up to look at the return address, and saw a college’s name and seal. It was a mark of how completely things had changed for me. As little as a week earlier, the sight of such an envelope would have caused my heart to start racing and a furious tumult of excitement and nervousness to overtake me. Now I felt numb as I stared at it.
“Aren’t you going to open it?” Gracie asked. But I couldn’t see the point of that. It was pretty obvious that I wouldn’t be going off to college, that I would never leave Shallow Pond. The evidence was staring me in the face; Gracie and her supermarket job, Annie and her reclusive ways. If they were both still living in this crappy town long after their eighteenth birthdays, then I knew there wasn’t any possibility that I would ever escape. The sooner I gave up hope, the less painful it would be.
“What is it?” Annie asked.
“From a college I applied to,” I said. Annie turned away from the stove, and Gracie was pretty much ready to explode with anticipation. Great, I had an audience. I sighed, then slipped my fingernail beneath the flap and began to gently pry the envelope open. I pulled out the letter and began to read.
It was a long letter, two pages. I knew that was a good sign. I read it through once, then went back and double-checked it to be sure.
“What does it say?” Gracie asked. In her excitement her voice had grown so high-pitched she was practically squealing.
“I got in,” I said.
“That’s great,” Annie said. “Congratulations!”
“They’re giving me a full scholarship,” I continued.
“Oh my God!” Gracie screamed. “That’s awesome!”
In the second or so it took me to glance back at the letter one more time, Annie and Gracie attacked me as if they were boa constrictors, squeezing me so tight with their hugs that I nearly couldn’t breathe.
“We’re so proud of you,” Annie said. Her voice was cho-ked with tears.
I wouldn’t have minded being able to cry, or at least being able to feel some sort of emotion. Anything would have been better than the weird blankness I felt. My dream had come true. Not only did I get accepted into college, but they were offering me a scholarship. There was nothing standing in my way. The road was clear. But I knew deep down that it didn’t matter. Somehow or other, this was not going to happen.
“I would think you would be at least a tiny bit excited,” Gracie said when she finally released me from her grasp. I shrugged.
“It doesn’t change anything,” I said. It took her a mo-
ment, but then Gracie’s face fell when she realized what I was talking about.
“We’re not going to talk about that,” Gracie said. “Be-sides, I’m not really sure I believe any of it. Annie, you can’t believe anythin
g Dad told you. He was completely crazy.”
“It’s true,” Annie said, “and it doesn’t change anything. Babie is going to college, but first we’re going to eat some dinner.”
I went to bed early. I crawled into my bed, pulled the covers over my head, and tried to escape from everything. I sank into a world of disturbing nightmares. Creepy men in white lab coats chased me down narrow twisting hallways. I escaped only to find myself in a room filled with cages housing scientific experiments gone wrong. A normal-looking girl with octopus tentacles writhed against the bars of her cage. A half-bird, half-human creature made pitiful squawking noises in its cage. There were people with multiple heads and people with too many limbs. Then suddenly I found myself trapped in a cage. I clutched at the bars, shook them in a futile effort to free myself. The men in white lab coats appeared and began to reach through the bars of my cage. They poked and prodded at me. One grabbed my arm. I told myself it was all a bad dream and forced myself to wake up.
My heart raced. I was damp with sweat as I struggled to remember where I was. I wasn’t in the lab anymore. I was in my bedroom. I was safe. The dream still clung to me, and something else. I let out a yelp when I realized one of the men in white coats was still clutching my arm.
“Relax. It’s just me,” Annie said, her voice soft and comforting in the dark room. Fully awake now, I stared into the darkness and saw Annie sitting on the edge of my bed in her white nightgown, her hand on my arm. “You were having a nightmare.”
I sat up and rubbed my eyes. Pieces of the nightmare flashed through my memory. A glimpse of tentacles, the long hallway, a boy with too many heads. I shuddered.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said, but I didn’t want her to go. It was nice to have her there in the darkness. I wasn’t ready to be alone again. “Do you ever get used to it?”
“Does where you come from really matter that much?” she asked.
For some reason, her question made me think of Zach and his mysterious origins. “I think it does matter,” I said.
“Sometimes, if you’re lucky enough,” Annie said, “you find that one person who completes you, the person so perfect that it seems like they were made for you. Love, the truest of loves, is a magical thing. There’s nothing more beautiful or more wonderful, but there’s a dark side too. The world can be a cruel place. Sometimes the person we love is torn away from us, leaving behind an emptiness that can never be filled.”
Was she talking about Cameron? Her mystery man? Her vagueness made things confusing.
“Is that why you never went to college? Is that why you stayed here?”
“He loved her,” she said. “It was like a storybook ro-mance. They were perfect for each other. Theirs was the truest sort of love out there. Then she died suddenly, and way, way too young. He was beside himself with grief. He was left with a big emptiness he had no way of filling. What he did, he did out of desperation; out of love and grief as well.”
She was talking about our father. It took me a few seconds to realize it.
“It wasn’t a rational thing at all,” she went on, “but he needed her, and it was the only way he knew to bring her back to him.”
“Lots of people have their hearts broken without going off and cloning their dead lover,” I said.
“Yeah,” Annie said. “People deal with a lost love in all sorts of different ways. I guess what I’m saying is that if you’re looking for an explanation of what you’re doing here, maybe it helps to think that you’re here because of love. It’s why most people are here. Maybe our creation took a slightly different route, but it’s still the age-old story. Two people fell in love, and now we’re here.”
When she put it that way, it didn’t sound at all like the crazy world of my nightmares. It made us sound almost normal.
Twenty-Four
We had a half day, because of a teacher inservice, and there were still a couple of hours before I was due at the call center. So, instead of heading home, I walked to the cemetery. I could remember visiting it when we were kids, placing flowers on our “mother’s” grave on Mother’s Day, but it had been years since I’d been there.
When my father died, he was cremated. His ashes sat in an urn in his old room. There had been no procession to the cemetery. That had all happened six years before, and it had been at least that long since we’d been to the cemetery. Probably even longer than that. I didn’t know what drew me to the place now.
A short stone wall topped by an iron fence surrounded the small graveyard. The big iron gate was standing open when I got there. Large towering elm trees lined the perimeter, with a few more in the center. Their leaves had long since been shed, and their bare branches looked dark and menacing against the pale gray sky. It was cold out, but it felt even colder as I stepped through the gates. It was a bleak and creepy place. I wondered if this was why we’d stopped coming here.
I had a vague idea of where her grave was, but I couldn’t remember for sure. I wandered in what I thought was the general direction, stumbling over the frozen, uneven ground. Each marker I passed represented a dead Shallow Pond resident, and I wondered about these people who had lived and died in this sad town. Had they been born and raised here? Had fate brought them here? Had fate kept them here against their wishes? I imagined three more headstones that would someday join the others here. The three strange Bunting sisters who would be buried along with their secret. It felt weird to think about, but I was spared these morbid thoughts when the familiar name caught my attention.
Susie Bunting. I stared at the engraved name on the smooth marble surface. Below her name it read, Beloved wife and mother. I stared at the epitaph without really seeing it. There was something weird about this tombstone, and it took me a few minutes to realize what it was. There were no dates. I glanced around. All the other markers I saw had birth and death dates. Many only had a name followed by the dates, which were the sole bits of information about these other Shallow Pond residents. But how old was Susie Bunting when she died? Too young was all I knew, since there was no indication on her tombstone of how young she’d been.
Staring at the tombstone, I noticed something else. The surface of the stone where the epitaph was carved was rougher than the rest of the stone. It didn’t have that smooth, polished look. I wondered if the stone was defective, or if the person carving it had made a mistake. My father had been pretty good about pinching his pennies, but I tried to imagine the grief-stricken man Annie had described agreeing to use a defective tombstone for his wife’s grave if he could get it for half price. No, the rough area of the stone was no accident. It had probably contained her birth and death dates initially, but then my father realized that those dates would be inconsistent with the ages of her “children.” He must have had the dates removed and replaced with the inaccurate phrase Beloved wife and mother. To keep his secret—our secret—safe.
I wondered how many of the things I’d taken for granted in my life were also part of the carefully created illusion. Is that what we were doing in Shallow Pond? Had we come to this town in the middle of nowhere because no one knew us, no one could question where we’d come from or who our mother really was? Did I actually have family out there somewhere? Grandparents? Aunts and uncles? Cousins? I’d always been told that there were no living relatives, but now I realized how unlikely this was. Either my family was the unhealthiest, most ill-fated family of all time or my father had broken off ties with relatives on both sides to keep his secret safe.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized it must be true. It probably wouldn’t be that hard to track them down, but what would I do then? How could I explain who I was? I imagined finding my grandparents—no, they wouldn’t really be my grandparents. They were more like my parents, though that wasn’t quite true either. What would happen if
I located them … if I found Susie’s parents and showed up
>
on their doorstep, looking like the carbon copy of the daughter they’d lost so many years ago? They would have a heart attack, for sure, but then what? They would want an explanation, and if I told them everything, they could very easily go to the authorities. Those creepy men in the white coats would become more than just the shadowy figures in a bad nightmare.
I reached my hand out and ran my fingers over the carved letters on the cold stone. It was the closest I could get to knowing her, this mysterious woman who was and wasn’t the same person I was. She was dead, had been dead for a long time, but in some ways she wasn’t. She still lived on in the three of us, more so than someone lived on through their actual children. We weren’t simply offspring but younger versions of her. I wished I’d had the chance to know her, that she hadn’t died so young … but then, if she hadn’t died, I wouldn’t exist. It was a weird, dizzying feeling. I took a step back from the stone.
“Babie?”
I jumped at the sound of my name in the quiet cemetery. For one brief moment I thought the voice was in my head, that somehow Susie, alive through my own DNA, our shared DNA, was talking to me from beyond the grave. Then I turned and saw a figure a few rows away. He waved, and I recognized Cameron Schaeffer.
I wondered how long he’d been there. I began to step quickly away from Susie’s grave, as though just my presence there would tip him off to the great big secret. As I walked over to Cameron, I saw the headstone in front of him—his father. There were a bunch of different Schaeffers in the surrounding area. Apparently quite a few of them had lived
and died in Shallow Pond over the years. Cameron had escaped for a little bit, but now he was back in this town that had claimed the lives of so many of his relatives.
“Your mother?” he asked. I nodded. He pointed toward his father’s marker. “Today was his birthday.” His eyes were dry, but red as if he had been crying earlier.
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