by Jenna Blum
Karena lights another cigarette and tells her, and the two of them talk until the conversation winds down. Then they just sit together for a while, smoking in companionable silence, watching the news.
29
After Karena kisses Siri on the cheek, leaning into her mom’s smell of night cream and smoke, she goes to the bathroom to lather up her own face with soap and wipe it down with toner, then retires to her room. There she switches off the lamp and hooks the ashtray containing her cigarettes out from under her bed. It’s her parents’ old party ashtray back from the days when Frank still smoked, bright red and about the size of a hubcap. Karena remembers sneaking into the hallway with Charles to watch the grown-ups shriek and laugh, the ashtray brimming the next morning. She sets it on the floor between the twin bed nearest the window and the wall, then wedges herself in there, on the blue-and-green shag rug. Siri has never said anything more about Karena’s smoking than Don’t let the cigarette hang from your mouth like a farmhand, use your fingers. And Frank, who is the worst kind of non-smoker, a former two-pack-a-day man, isn’t home enough to catch Karena and give her one of his interminable lectures. Ditto Charles, who has recently become Smoking Police, Jr. Still, caution is a habit, and Karena exhales through the window, dousing the room with Obsession body spray every few drags.
She curls her knees to her chest and props her chin on them, feeling terrible. She lied to Siri tonight—more than usual. A serious lie, a lie of omission. Karena should have spoken up when Siri mentioned Charles’s medication, because Karena knows Charles isn’t taking it, in fact has been hiding his lithium, and all the other pills Dr. H prescribed, in the very places Charles used to stash his Flintstones vitamins when they were kids. In the holes in the kitchen radiator. Dug into the dirt of the Norwegian pine by the front door. Beneath the davenport cover in the living room, worked into the couch’s seams. It was a full month ago Karena caught him stashing a prescription bottle into a Seagram’s liquor bag, which he stuffed under the cot in his lair the second he saw her. Please don’t tell, K, he said. Please. You know how they make me get. I just get so sick. Please. And Karena, who had watched aghast at the side effects the drugs had produced over the last couple of years, who had sorrowed in secret over her brother’s blackheads and rotten stomach and stutter and shaky hands, had said, I promise.
And she hasn’t told, but maybe she should have. Because what if Charles is lying in a ditch somewhere? Worse, what if he is curled in the front seat of the Healey, knees pulled up, crying in that very specific way—low and drawn out, almost too quiet to hear? What if he is deliberately aiming the little car toward the cement stanchion of an overpass or off a bridge? Karena thinks of Dr. H saying, Ironically, it is when Charles is coming out of a depressive period that he must be watched most closely, for then he is capable of more than suicidal ideation. Then he has energy enough to carry out the act. But Charles hasn’t seemed too down the past few days—has he? He hasn’t been lying in his lair with the lights off. Karena hasn’t needed to station herself down there. Maybe Charles is just off raising hell, as their grandmother Hallingdahl would have said.
Karena rubs out her cigarette, shoves the ashtray under the bed, then climbs on top of it. This is Charles’s old bed, which for some reason was never removed when the twins turned ten and were decreed too old to sleep in the same room, and Charles lobbied for and received his lair in the basement. Karena presses her face into the flowered coverlet and inhales. It doesn’t smell like her brother anymore, of course, but of dust and must and faintly of mildew. A comforting smell. She lies breathing it in and thinking that at least she did tell one truth tonight: Karena has no idea where Charles is. The thought causes her actual physical pain, a needle in her throat. Where are you, Charles? Karena thinks. Do you hear me? Answer. She tries to send out the twindar, imagines herself rising above the room and the house and the yard and the town, traveling across the dark land, peering down to zero in on where Charles is. But the twindar doesn’t work anymore. It seemed to evaporate about the same time as the belief in Santa Claus. All Karena knows is that her brother is out there somewhere without her.
She turns on her side, hugging herself. Eventually she hears Siri’s going-to-bed noises: flush of cigarettes down the toilet, running of water in the sink to rinse Siri’s ashtray, creak of refrigerator to get the last half-open Diet Pepsi. Siri’s door closes, her light clicks, and Karena is left in a silence so profound she seems suspended in it, as if in a hammock. She stares at the wall, the leaf patterns shifting in the orange light from the street. The boughs of the pine scratch at the window screen.
Eventually Karena gives in and allows herself to replay her favorite memory, which she does only on nights when missing Charles is too bad for sleep. The recollection is of an afternoon when Karena and Charles were four, when Siri had put them down for a nap and Charles was sleeping but Karena wasn’t. This was unusual, since normally the situation was reversed: Karena spent naptime lying with her arms straight at her sides, pretending to sleep, while Charles banged his head against the wall and sang, Say, say, my playmate / come out and play with me / and bring your dollies three / climb up my apple tree / slide down my rain barrel / into my cellar door / and we’ll be jolly friends / forevermore. . . . He did this so frequently the plaster behind his bed was cracked in a bowl shape. But on this particular day Charles was sprawled on his stomach, his face mashed into the pillow and his lips pooched out, probably because he’d been up the last four nights in a row, bouncing off the walls and screaming whenever Siri tried to calm him down.
So Karena alone was awake in the hot flat heat, listening to the ticka-ticka-ticka of the air pump from the gas station across the street—a sound that contained all the mystery of the sleepy midafternoon and would continue to signify all things adult and secret even after she was grown. And she alone saw the sun squares dim on the shade, saw the canvas puff out and suck back in, heard the wind come up and hiss through the trees. The room darkened and there was shouting outside, and when Karena went to the window she saw people running. Charles, Karena said, Charles, wake up. She shook him. His body was damp, his hair curling in wet white-blond commas on his forehead. He clucked when she pinched him. But he didn’t wake. Neither did Siri: In her parents’ bedroom, where Karena pushed and pulled at Siri and begged, Siri just kept snoring. Later Karena would understand about the prescription bottle on her mom’s bedside table, the sleeping pills Siri sometimes used to buy herself and Charles some much-needed rest. But meanwhile the window screens clattered in their frames and the jewelry and Kleenex boxes slid across the dresser as if pushed by invisible hands, and Siri slept on.
Since the Hallingdahls are farm people on both sides of the family, Karena had known since toddlerhood what a green sky and sirens meant: Go to the cellar. But she didn’t want to sit down there on the braided rag rug while her brother and mom slept on upstairs; what if they died? While she was left alive? She pushed herself instead under the davenport in the living room, and from there she watched the hail fall, closing her eyes when it shattered Mrs. Zimmerman’s windshield next door, opened them again just in time to see the twister silhouetted perfectly in the picture window. It moved lazily from left to right, the bottom of its tail twitching, a black and sinuous rope. Then it pulled up, like the finger of a glove turning inside out, and was gone. Later that evening, when the sun was shining again as though nothing had happened, Karena heard her dad saying the Ryans’ hog operation just west of town was gone too.
This is the part of her memory Charles debates, how Karena could have seen the tornado from beneath the couch, how at age four she could remember so accurately the direction in which it moved. He argues that its path would have made it almost impossible to see from their house, the town’s rooftops being in the way. He has presented Karena with several photocopies of the New Heidelburg Eagle from that day, eyewitness accounts claiming that the ’74 Tornado was not an elephant trunk but an inverted triangle, like an ice cream cone. Kare
na doesn’t care. Let Charles have his say. She knows he needs to dismiss what she saw because one of the greatest disappointments of his life is that he slept through it. And it’s not the tornado part of this memory Karena treasures anyway, no matter what Charles believes. It’s the part beforehand, the peaceful time before anything started to happen. Just Karena and Charles in their room together on a hot, quiet afternoon, their shade breathing in and out, its thread-wrapped ring ticking gently, intermittently, against the sill.
30
Charles doesn’t come home for three more days, and although she has been waiting and hoping and praying for his return, Karena is unprepared when it happens. She has just gotten back herself, coming off her shift at the Chat ’n’ Chew, and is in the bathroom changing into her bikini so she can catch an hour’s rays at the town pool with Tiff before supper. Karena is hanging her head upside down and applying an extra layer of Aqua Net, just to be sure, when the door flies open to reveal her brother’s sneakered feet and hairy calves.
“Aha,” Charles says in his Inspector Clouseau voice. “I knew there was somebody in this rheum.”
“Jesus, Charles,” Karena says, flipping upright and putting a palm on her breastbone, her heart galloping beneath it. “Ever hear of knocking?”
Charles flaps his hand in front of his face. “Ever hear of the ozone layer? It’s like solid hairspray in here.”
“Well, nobody asked you to come in,” Karena says. But secretly she’s so happy he has. She puts on more eyeliner so she can inspect him covertly in the mirror: He has no new scratches, no bumps or bruises or black eyes, thank goodness. Instead Charles is deeply tanned, his hair bleached from the sun and curling over his shirt collar in the back, his eyes clear and deep brown. As always when she sees her brother after an absence Karena is struck by how different they look for twins, and she wonders whether maybe it’s true, what Grandmother Hallingdahl says about Charles having gotten some Sioux blood. The great-great-Hallingdahls did have a soddie in South Dakota, prime Lakota country, and maybe one day great-great-grandmother Lisbet did turn from the creek, adjusting the water bucket yoke on her shoulders, when BOOM! she spotted a handsome brave on the bank. Whether this is true or not, Karena looks like the quintessential pale Norwegian, whereas Charles appears dipped in honey. It is hardly fair. But what’s most important is he looks healthy and whole. And like himself. There is no sign of the Stranger—that dark brooding expression, the condescending amusement, that energy like a basket of snakes beneath his skin. At the moment, anyway.
“What’re you looking at me like that for?” Charles says.
“I’m not looking at you like anything. Could you be more vain?”
“Hey, I’m not the one plastering on the war paint,” Charles says. “Who’re you after, anyway? Schwartz? Wisneski?”
Karena flushes. “Nobody. Just going to freshen up the tan.”
“Uh-huh,” says Charles. He leans against the counter, arms crossed. “That a new bikini?”
“Yes,” says Karena, looking around for her T-shirt. “Why?”
“It’s nice. Makes you look like you actually have a rack.”
Karena swats at him, but he ducks away. “You are a filthy pig,” she says.
“I try,” Charles says modestly. He digs in the pocket of his Jams. “Think fast!”
He tosses something at Karena, a clear plastic bubble. She fumbles it with her right hand, catches it with her left. Both twins are ambidextrous.
“What is it?” she says suspiciously. It looks like the prize from a gumball machine.
Charles shrugs. “Open it and find out.”
Karena starts to pry off the lid. “It’s not something that’s going to jump out and hit me in the eye, is it?”
“Jesus, K,” says Charles, “paranoid much?” He beckons for the bubble and Karena hands it over.
“Ow,” he says, recoiling as he opens it, “my eye! . . . Just kidding. Look, it’s a necklace.”
He dangles it before her and Karena sees it’s a lightning bolt on a black lanyard. “That’s nice, Charles,” she says, a little puzzled. It doesn’t look like something she’d normally wear—her taste runs more to rhinestones—whereas Charles is usually very good with presents, giving people exactly what they didn’t even know they wanted.
“Thanks,” she says, pretending enthusiasm. “It’s really neat. Where’d you get it?”
“Little mom-and-pop grocery store,” Charles says, “on the Nebraska Panhandle. I had to feed about a hundred quarters in the machine to get it too. Want me to put it on you?”
“Sure.”
Karena turns and lifts her crunchy hair off her neck so Charles can fasten the clasp. She can feel his body heat radiating at her back, his breath on her nape. He smells like he always does, of Irish Spring and fast food. Karena’s heart convulses, seems to swell up into her throat. She has never said this to anyone, not even Tiff, for fear of being ridiculed or told she’s wrong, but Karena has a very clear and treasured memory of herself and Charles in the womb. It was like being peas in a pod, lying at a forty-five-degree angle with her feet uptilted, resting on Charles, the pea behind her. Watching light flicker through a red membrane, almost like what Karena sees when she closes her eyes in the sun. When they saw slides in health class of babies in utero, including twins, Tiff had leaned to Karena and whispered, Look, it’s you and Thing Number Two, and Karena had nodded, thinking, Yup, that’s just how it was. Now Charles is a head taller than Karena. How did this happen?
“There you go, sistah,” says Charles and steps back. Karena lets her hair fall and glances down.
“Oh my God,” she says in delight, “it’s turning colors!”
For the lightning bolt is green, then cobalt, then bright aqua.
“I know,” says Charles. “Just like that ring you loved so much and lost—when we were kids, remember? The mood ring.”
“Of course I do,” says Karena. She throws her arms around him and hugs him. “Oh, thank you so much! I love it, Charles.”
“I know,” says Charles. He reaches into his shirt and brings out his own bolt, which, like Karena’s, is glowing turquoise. “I got one for myself too, see? I figured it’d be really cool when you’re up at the U to call you and see if we’re in the same mood at the same time.”
“Totally,” says Karena, “we have to do that,” and then she takes her time pulling her shirt on so Charles can’t see her face. Her stomach plummets whenever he mentions college—which is stupid, because it’s not as though she’s not going. She sure as hell is. She’s worked hard for her scholarship, and she can’t wait to get out of New Hellishburg, as Charles calls it. And it’s not her fault Charles isn’t going—he should have spent more time in school and less on his stormchase trips. But what is going to happen to Charles once Karena leaves? She can’t stand to think about it.
“What’re you doing now?” Charles says when she’s dressed.
“What does it look like? Going to the pool.”
“To meet Shamu?” Charles asks.
“Don’t call her that, Charles. Tiff’s not fat.”
“Sure she isn’t,” says Charles. “She’s just calorically dense.”
“And you’re an asshole.”
“Sorry, sorry,” says Charles, grinning. “Oh, look what I got for our madre,” and he whips a lighter out of his pocket. GO HUSKERS, it says on it in big red letters, and when Charles depresses the button a foot-high flame leaps forth. Karena jumps back.
“Jesus, Charles,” she says, “not in here! The hairspray? Hello?”
“I know,” says Charles. He grins more widely, and Karena knows he’s thinking of the time he turned Tiff’s lighter all the way up at Jeff W’s house party so that when Tiff tried to light her cigarette, the flame shot up through her carefully sprayed bangs and incinerated them. Everyone had fled the room, saying things like Phew, it totally reeks in here! while poor Tiff screamed and grabbed her suddenly bald fo rehead.
“That was the antithes
is of funny, Charles,” Karena says.
“Actually it was extremely funny,” says Charles. “But anyway. You’re not going to the pool.”
“Oh, really?”
“Nuh-uh. Come downstairs with me—I want to show you what I’ve been doing.”
“But Charles—”
“Oh, don’t worry about Shamu,” says Charles, tugging Karena from the bathroom by the wrist. “She’ll forgive you. She’ll probably be thrilled when you don’t show up. It’ll give her a chance to stoop for the troops in the pool locker room.”
“Charles, you are foul beyond redemption,” Karena says as she lets herself be pulled through the kitchen and dining area toward the stairs that lead to the basement. Karena does glance at the kitchen wall phone as they pass, but Charles is right about one thing: Tiff won’t mind so much if Karena doesn’t show. She’s got her eye on Tim McDermott, the lifeguard who always carries a copy of Catcher in the Rye and who Tiff says will clearly be a good lover because he’s sensitive. Karena will call her later to find out what happened and to say Siri came home and made Karena start supper. Karena certainly won’t tell Tiff the real reason Karena’s standing her up, which is that it’s so rare to see Charles these days, and especially in this kind of mood, and Karena has so little time with him left.
The temperature drops ten degrees as they descend into the basement. The smell of old linoleum, musty and sweet, never fails to remind Karena of all the nights she and Siri and Charles spent down here, when the tornado siren went off and Siri burst into their room and grabbed a twin under each arm and ran them to the cellar. And how they sat on the oval braided rug at the foot of the steps and Siri smoked her Marlboros while Karena and Charles puffed candy cigarettes and they watched the storms rocket past the picture window upstairs with the speed and ferocity of freight trains. There was a poster of Laurel and Hardy down here too, and Karena has always been scared of the two comedians because when the lightning strobed it animated their faces and made them look alive.