Little Nightmares, Little Dreams

by Rachel Simon

  Then one December afternoon, Tom, Lizzie, and I leashed Snoopy up for his walk. For some reason, we walked slower than usual. Maybe it was the break we were suddenly getting in the weather, since it had rained heavily for days and now the chill was on. Maybe it was the news that we were going to move again. The divorce was final, and our mother had gotten a new job, one that required we relocate. It would be the third time since our father left, and would be farther away from him, ensuring we’d see him even less. So once again we would be leaving our friends. No more of Maria telling me that in Spanish there are three ways to say “the.” No more playing with Sophia’s baby sister, admiring the gold jewelry in her newly-pierced ears.

  On the footbridge, we paused for a long time to look at the swirling water below. The rain had swelled from the little trickle of a creek to a swiftly flowing river, one that rose so high, we’d had to walk the long way to school. Now we could see that the water had flooded the patch of grass on the other side of the bridge. A lot of junk had washed up there: tires and branches and beer cans and shopping bags.

  “And,” Lizzie burst out, pointing, “the bottle!”

  “It can’t be,” I said.

  “It is!” Tom said.

  We ran across the footbridge, plunged into the muddy field, and jumped over puddles to reach the bottle. Someone had answered us! Our message had made it all the way to them and back!

  I leapt ahead of them, and when I reached the bottle, I knelt down, picked it out of the scattered refuse, and snatched it up. “There’s a note inside!” Tom called out behind me as I held it up, and Lizzie let out a squeal. But as I returned to them, knowing Tom and Lizzie were waiting to see our message from the other side of the world, I glanced through the glass, and made out my own handwriting.

  The note inside was ours. The bottle had probably been stuck right near the bridge all this time, and moved only in the last few days, when the water rose much higher than usual.

  “Let’s read it,” Tom said.

  “Yeah!” Lizzie chimed in.

  I shot Tom a look to calm down. He seemed surprised, but then, as I unscrewed the cap, and pulled out the paper, I could tell he understood. The writing had all blurred. The paper, damp inside, had bubbled. I unrolled the page in my hands.

  “What they say?” Lizzie said.

  I looked down. Behind my back I could feel the house of the lady with the pixie haircut, the lady who had made bad feel good.

  “What they write?” Lizzie asked.

  “They said” — and I looked up at Tom, and we agreed with our eyes that this was the right thing to do — “They said they couldn’t believe they found our bottle, and they were so glad they did.” And then, as she beamed, I read us all their letter.

  Twins

  They came on a Thursday. There were two of them, two girls, and someone told Brenda they were sisters. Brenda was confused about how that could be. She had a sister, and the two of them were girls, but Brenda and her sister didn’t look like Ramona and Remmie. Brenda and her sister were their own selves.

  Not Ramona and Remmie. When you got one, you got the other, like prickers on a rose. Ramona was the one with legs that worked. She had brown hair and blue eyes and she looked pretty normal, except that Remmie grew out of her chest. Remmie was cuter than Ramona, but she was smaller, and her legs looked like mashed potatoes, and were probably about as easy to walk on. Ramona had to carry her everywhere.

  It was a Thursday when Ramona and Remmie first came to Horizons. That’s the place where all the special people in town — people like Brenda — went to work every day. There they did jobs like make boxes and paste on labels: “Things that help out people in the post office or large companies somewhere,” Brenda’s mom once explained to her. On Thursdays Brenda stuffed her week’s load of envelopes into boxes. She liked that better than the jobs she did on other days because it was easy. She didn’t have to worry she’d do it wrong and get her supervisor angry.

  One of the bosses let Ramona and Remmie into the workroom. “We Are the World” was playing on the radio, and Brenda’s buddy Edgar was singing along. It was his favorite song. Edgar wasn’t too handsome — he was tall and fat, and when he worked he forgot to swallow and his chin got wet — but he was nice. He was trying so hard to get the words right on that song and paste his labels on straight that he didn’t even notice them come in.

  Brenda watched them go across the room and walk up to an empty table. Ramona sat down on the bench and put Remmie on the table in front of her, real gentle, like she was putting down a big dish. They both wore shirts that were bunched up around their chests, and the bunch on Ramona’s shirt was pressed up against the one on Remmie’s shirt. They sat close together.

  Edgar looked over their way. His tongue was sticking out like it always did when he took note of something. Brenda looked around and saw everybody else was checking them out. Even Lisa Cumbermiller, and she never noticed anything except her work and her lunch and her cigarettes. She even ignored her clothes — her bra straps always showed. But these girls were something Lisa couldn’t ignore.

  Brenda wanted to look too — they were so strange — and then this little voice popped into her head. It said, “Don’t stare. It’s not nice.” Usually Brenda heard voices saying that whenever she went out shopping. Not voices in her head, like Ritchie Vailer said he heard. But voices from people around her. It used to get to her when she was little, and she’d be in the Shop-Rite with her mom, and other moms would say it to their kids. “Don’t stare.” It used to make her cry. Her mom had to take her out and put her in the car and talk to her till she calmed down. But now she was used to it. She was grown up. Now she thought “Don’t stare” was a polite thing to say.

  So Brenda went back to work. She heard the supervisor explain things to the girls, like when they stopped for lunch and that there was no fighting over the radio and what kinds of jobs they’d do. He said that most of them on Brenda’s part of the floor did labels and envelopes, and the girls would be sorting labels today. The girls talked to him. Brenda couldn’t make out what they were saying but she figured the words were real and made sense, because the supervisor didn’t say “What?” or tell Edgar to turn down the radio so he could hear better. Then he gave them a tray of labels and told them to sort by letter.

  Brenda never sorted by letter. When she first came to Horizons three years ago, they taught her to sort labels by color. She was too old for school anymore, and her mom felt bad about Brenda sitting around the house by herself all day long, going out only when she walked the dogs or worked in the garden. The labels were tough at the beginning; Brenda kept picking up two or three at a time and not even knowing it. But finally she got it down, she did a whole box perfectly. Her mom told everyone on the block. She called Brenda’s sister, Ellie. Ellie didn’t need to live at home like Brenda did. A week later Brenda got a letter from her. Her mom read it to Brenda. It said, “Congratulations on your new success. I bet you feel so grown up. Now you can start being more independent.”

  After the supervisor walked away, no one talked for a long time, so Brenda could tell that everybody was still watching the girls. She tried to keep her mind on the radio, but the man who talked on it thought he was better than everyone else; he put anyone not like him down and acted like it was funny. Sometimes people at Horizons laughed along, but Brenda never saw the joke. So instead she listened for whether these girls talked, and once in a while she’d look up to see what they were doing. They were working, like everyone else. Brenda passed them when she went to the bathroom and checked out the bunch on their shirts; maybe there’d be a hole and she could see what was going on underneath. But there wasn’t a hole. And then when she was in the bathroom she wondered how they did that.

  By the time lunch rolled around, everyone had started to talk again. Some of them talked about TV from Wednesday night, but a lot of them talked about the girls. Brenda could hear them. They said, “Wonder if they’re people,” and other things li
ke that. Nothing Brenda cared to remember.

  At lunch, the girls sat off in a corner by themselves. No one went over to them or sat at the tables nearby. And Brenda wasn’t going to either. She sat at the same table every day, with Marty and Edgar.

  Marty was one of the only black people at Horizons or in the whole town, even. He worked with the broom-and-mop guys upstairs. They came to work later than anyone else and stayed till after dark, so they could clean up the place before the next day. Sometimes they’d go on trips to clean churches, and they’d get to meet the priest there and shake his hand. Marty was skinny and his hair was cut short. He wasn’t bad-looking except for how yellow his teeth were.

  Brenda pulled out her sandwich and looked over to those girls. “What do you think’s going on with them?” she asked. They were sitting with their heads bent close together and weren’t looking into the room at all.

  “Ain’t got a clue,” Marty said.

  Edgar just rested his head in his hands and looked their way. “They’s pretty,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Brenda said. “Pretty as people on TV.”

  “They’re weird,” Marty said. “The Devil makes rats prettier’n them.”

  Brenda had seen rats a few times in books, and they sure didn’t look like those girls. But there was no use arguing with Marty. He stuck to his guns when he made up his mind about something. Brenda bit into her tuna fish sandwich. She wondered if the girls ate tuna fish.

  Then Lisa Cumbermiller came over, pushing a chair in front of her. “Those twinkies stole my place,” she said, pulling the chair up to Brenda’s table and plopping down into it. It was the first time she’d ever talked to them. Her bra strap was sticking out, and it looked like she’d never thrown it in the wash.

  Brenda said, “We don’t mind if you sit with us.”

  “I do,” Marty said, and he shot Brenda this look.

  Lisa Cumbermiller put her lunch box on the table and pulled out three sandwiches, two bags of Cheese Doodles, two Cokes, and a fudge brownie.

  “Why you eating so much?” Marty asked. “You fat enough already.”

  “That’s not nice,” Edgar said. He stuck his elbow into Marty’s side. Edgar knew good manners. He always said thank you when the supervisors gave him work.

  Once, when Horizons took the whole work crew on a picnic, a group of kids stood in the bushes and shouted things at them, calling them “retards” and “half-brains” and making sounds like they were monkeys. After a while, the kids rode their bikes off to the next field and started playing ball. Later on, they hit the ball so hard, it rolled clear over to the picnic. No one from Horizons wanted to get near it except Edgar. He just picked it up and carried it across the field to them. The kids asked him to stay. He said no and thanked them for asking. They followed him all the way back to the picnic and kept asking him over and over, and he didn’t even cry. He just kept saying, “No thank you, no thank you,” till the counselors got up and made the kids leave.

  Lisa chomped down on a sandwich. “I’m not fat,” she said. “I’m gonna have a baby.”

  Marty sat up taller. “Then why you working? Ladies who gonna have babies should stay home in bed.”

  “Not me. I can do whatever I want since I’m not keeping it.”

  Brenda had always wanted a baby, but her mom said they need to depend on you too much so she shouldn’t even think about it. “Why aren’t you going to keep it?” she asked.

  Lisa stuffed in half a sandwich and said with her mouth full, “It’ll have something wrong. I bet it will.”

  “How do you know that?” Brenda asked. “You can’t know that.”

  “Yes I can. I’m going to see my doctor and he’ll put a pin in my stomach to see if anything funny’s going on.”

  Brenda said, “What if they find something wrong?”

  “They’ll take it out so I won’t have it.”

  That made Brenda lean back and think. She wondered what kind of thing could be so wrong that they’d have to take the baby out of Lisa.

  They sat and chewed on their food. Marty finished before the rest of them and burped. Then he said, “My mama keep saying we might move back to where she from.”

  “Why does she want to do that?” Brenda asked.

  “She say she don’t want my sisters marrying white men. And the two in high school, only boys they talk about is white boys. She worried about them, and the younger ones too.”

  “You can’t move,” Brenda said. “You’re our friend.”

  Edgar looked like he might cry. “We won’t be able to eat lunch with you if you go.”

  “She say, ‘The world be a better place if people stayed with they own kinds.’ And sometime, like when we shopping in town and everybody be white and walking around us and holding they bags close, I think she right.”

  Brenda pointed across the room. “What about them? We’re not their type.”

  Marty nodded. “That’s right. And they shouldn’t be here.”

  “What are they, anyway?” Brenda said.

  Lisa Cumbermiller scrunched up a Cheese Doodles bag. “They’re twins. I heard the supervisors talking.”

  “They not twins,” Marty said. “They don’t look like each other. Look at that little one. She look like pot cheese.”

  “Twins don’t have to look the same,” Lisa said.

  That was news to Brenda. All the twins she saw on TV and in stores looked just like each other. If one had legs, the other did too. Even their clothes matched and their hair was done the same. But not these girls. Ramona had on a brown dress and wore a ponytail. Remmie had on a pink dress, and her hair was curly and long and she had bangs. Brenda didn’t see how they could be twins. And stuck togeher like that too.

  But she didn’t ask questions. She just worked on her sandwich. After all, Lisa was pregnant, so Brenda guessed she was an expert on babies. She guessed Lisa knew about things like twins.

  After work Brenda took the Horizons van to her house. She could hardly wait for her mom to get home so she could tell her about Ramona and Remmie. They didn’t ride with the rest of the Horizons people. Their dad picked them up. He looked just like other dads.

  At home Brenda did like she always did. First she walked the dogs. She really liked dogs, especially dogs with papers. She took care of four every day after work. The dog owners were different from most of the people who lived near her — they said hi if they saw her. The other neighbors just weren’t friendly. They usually didn’t even look Brenda’s way when she passed by. Except for the kids. Sometimes after dinner, Brenda would turn off the lights in the living room so no one outside could see her, and she’d look out the window and watch the kids playing in the street. They would say mean things to each other, but never as mean as what they said to Brenda.

  When she got home from walking the dogs, Brenda went out back to work in her garden. That’s how she learned to read — her mom put sticks in the ground with letters for each plant so Brenda would know what was coming up. Sometimes she wished her mom had put up whole words because maybe then Brenda would have learned how to read more than just letters. It didn’t matter, really. She did what she liked without having to read. And she liked gardens. The thing she liked best about them was making a plan and then watching it happen just like you wanted it to. As long as you were careful, it always turned out right.

  That day her mom got home while Brenda was still in the garden. Brenda knew she was there when she smelled hot dogs. She went inside and washed up and came to the table.

  Her mom passed Brenda a roll. “Any sign of the carrots yet?”

  “Just a little,” Brenda said. “They like to hide away from everything else.”

  Brenda’s mom put a hot dog on Brenda’s roll. “I hope they come up soon. I told the people at work I’d bring some in.”

  “Don’t they have gardens, too?”

  “A lot of them do, but the vegetables from yours come out especially delicious. You take such good care, everything’s so neat
and evenly spaced.”

  There was a while when her mom didn’t pay so much attention to Brenda. That was because her mom used to need to sleep a lot; she’d come home from work and just conk out. Brenda guessed she was unhappy. But just before Brenda began at Horizons, her mom started staying up till bedtime and taking note of what Brenda did. Like Brenda had always forgotten when her period was coming and what to do when she got it. Her mom didn’t care for a long time. Then when the Horizons people called and said Brenda could start in a month, her mom said she should learn. Her mom got a doll and fed it red water and made Brenda practice helping the doll till she got good at it. Now, Brenda can even figure out when she’ll get it and how much napkin stuff she’ll need for the day. Her mom calls her an expert.

  Brenda sat down to start eating, but before she picked up her fork she said, “Mom, we got these new people at Horizons today. Lisa Cumbermiller says they’re twins. They’re, like, stuck together” — she tapped her chest — “here.”

  Her mom stared at Brenda for a second. “Do they look the same?”

  “Sort of. They’re both cute and got the same color hair and eyes. But one can’t walk. The other one holds her.”

  At first her mom looked like she didn’t understand. Brenda wondered if she’d messed up her words again. She hadn’t done that in a long time.

  “Oh,” her mom said suddenly, “they’re Siamese twins. I saw them in the paper.”

  “What’s that?”

  “They’re like regular twins, except when they were inside their mother they never split apart into two independent people.”

  Brenda said, “I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

  “That’s because there aren’t many of them. And this pair at Horizons, well, they’re extra-unusual, even for Siamese twins.”