The Midnight Twins

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  “I can’t wait!” Merry yelled. “I just love those cucumber sandwiches. You only have to eat fifty!”

  The girls exchanged grins.

  “Let’s make toasted bagels and tomatoes with cheese,” they said together.

  “I’ll make,” Merry offered. “I think they’re finally asleep.” Adam was sprawled, of all places, on the dog’s bed in the corner of the living room.

  “Me too,” Mallory said. “I’m so totally excited by babysitting and idiot fireworks I could party all night. But I think I’ll get a ten-minute power nap instead.”

  “You’ll sleep through your own funeral,” Merry said, echoing their father in his litany of complaints about Mallory’s comatose Saturday mornings.

  “God, I hope so,” Mallory said.

  She lay back on the sofa.

  She was drowsy, almost asleep, when the roof fell in. A five-foot burning column from the porch crashed through the roof just over Mallory’s head.

  Before Merry could cross the room, their aunt’s huge brocaded curtains caught and disintegrated, with a sound like a million crushed pine needles, into huge golden torches that fell like fronds onto the couch. Mallory clawed to keep the strands, pliant and sticky as hot sugar, away from her face.

  “Get on the floor! Roll!” Merry screamed as Mallory leaped up, the back of her sweater alight. Merry pushed her sister down and, once sure that Mallory had rolled out the flames and ripped the sweater off as well, leaped up the stairs two at a time. She dragged Hannah and Heather from their bunks and forced them down into a four-legged crawl toward the back stairs, shouting for Alex, who appeared, groggy, in his basketball pajamas, at the door of his room.

  “The house is on fire!” Merry shouted. “The porch roof is on fire! It broke the front window!”

  Smoke was filling the hall. Merry couldn’t figure it out. Somehow, the flames must have penetrated the roof. Glancing into her aunt’s room, she noticed the three baby albums prominently displayed on a whitewashed bookshelf. Ever tenderhearted, Merry dashed to grab them. But as she did, little Heather screamed and scooted under her mother’s bed.

  “Alex!” Meredith shouted. “Get Hannah downstairs. Get Adam outside. See if Mally’s hurt!” His eyes huge, Alex stood still in his doorway, staring. Smoke was beginning to curl around the molding, and the smoke alarms were shrieking. Merry’s throat began to sting. “Alex, go!”

  Alex seemed to find his feet and began to run. Merry couldn’t believe how fast all of it was happening. Coughing, she threw the baby albums down the stairs and crawled across her aunt and uncle’s floor. “Heather! Heather Lynn! Come out here!” She could see Heather, back against the wall under her parents’ headboard. But small as she was, Merry couldn’t work her way under the bed. Heather had thrown herself on her face and was sobbing for her mother. The smoke was thickening. Merry could hear a rumpus downstairs—Mally screaming Adam’s name, the other two crying, the door banging open. Finally, with a mighty lunge that opened a gash in her scalp when she hit her head on the bed frame, Meredith grabbed Heather’s long braid and pulled the squirming child toward her.

  Meredith picked Heather up and held her like a football, as the child fought and choked. Merry tripped over the photo albums on the landing and fell down three steps. Grabbing them, she scrabbled for the back door, pushing Heather ahead of her with her knee. A full second passed before the message reached Merry’s brain that the doorknob was oven-hot and the skin on her hand was already bubbling. She screamed, instinctively turning toward the sink. But the kitchen curtains were crackling. Meredith couldn’t even see into the living room.

  “Mallory!” Meredith called. “Mally!”

  Mallory didn’t reply.

  In the fractional instant it took her to realize that Mallory might not answer, that she might not hear Mally’s voice again except inside her head, Meredith experienced the same yearning her twin had felt hours before.

  Giggy, she thought. Without Mallory, she would not feel halved but erased. She would need to draw herself again from a stick figure, filling in her shape and textures. She would be a flat Meredith, who would disappear when she turned in profile, a silhouette Meredith without color or sound.

  “Mallory!” Even to herself, she sounded like a wounded lamb, bleating.

  She thought she heard a faint answer—where did it come from? The billowing blackness of the living room, the ring of flame left by the open front door? When had all the electricity gone out?

  “Mallory!” Merry called again.

  Quickly she pushed Heather out the back door—nothing out back was burning now. Merry watched to make sure that Heather jumped down the steps and ran into the yard. Then she grabbed one of the little girl’s coats from the rack and covered her mouth. She dropped to her knees and began to crawl on her elbows toward what she thought should be the couch under the bay window. When she felt what seemed to be Mallory’s shoulder, she hauled her sister on top of her and began to scoot backward toward the door, inch by laborious inch. She could see a lighter rectangle of darkness. Finally. Then she heard a pop and shivering musical sounds of tinkling glass, and then nothing else at all.

  FOREVER TWO

  They lay in a dream, but the dream wasn’t like sleep. It was like suffocation.

  Neither knew how long it lasted.

  Both of them were less troubled by the pain than the unnatural sensation of being unable to hear each other, except dully, as if through a blanket. But time indeed was measured by painful interruptions—the positioning of needles, the reflexive gagging on tubes. Their own groans sounded distant, as if their bodies and voices were a radio left on in an empty room. One sister’s thoughts were indistinct to the other, expanding and contracting in shapes rather than in words. They caught mental glimpses: Difficult, congested breathing for Mallory. Merry’s heartbeat taking off at the approach of a claw that would pull and pinch off skin that was as parched as a dead leaf.

  After a time, the sense of morning, the change of light, even behind closed eyelids, returned.

  That came first.

  Next they heard the oceanic murmur of voices that would rise and subside. Thousands of dots collected into pictures, and faces appeared. Between the girls the images ping-ponged—tiny and far off, or close and stretched, grotesque, misshapen, and huge. First to Merry, then to Mally, there appeared snapshots, for a single second. They saw their father, asleep in a chair. They saw their grandmother Arness, Campbell’s mother, on her farmhouse porch in Virginia. But Grandma Arness was dead. She died when they were ten. They saw Grandma Gwenny peering at them, her wild Welsh eyes, so like their own, filled with aching empathy. Nodding, nodding. Grandma Gwenny cried and nodded. There was Gramps outside Uncle Kevin’s house, clutching his cell phone, his face streaked red and gray by the fire and shadow. Their mother, bending low, brushing their cheeks, flooding them with their mother’s smell—gardenia and rubbing alcohol. The sting of her tears on Mally’s face. Adam, his mouth opening in a dark, sucking, expanding cry.

  The night images were worse.

  First Merry, then Mally, cringed when a tiny black-haired girl in an old-fashioned high-necked dress appeared, leaning over a bridge above a creek, then turned quickly to stare at them, her face zooming nearer, nearer, nearer—her eyes nearly flat against their own eyes. Meredith and Mallory clutched at each other’s minds in fear. The little girl’s face was kind and even familiar, but overflowing with knowledge and mourning. Then David Jellico, in a garden, carefully arranging great circles of smooth white stones or shells. Merry thought it was a religious place. Mally thought it was a graveyard.

  They ran away into sleep.

  Finally real people appeared.

  Kim came, sobbing, pleading with Merry to wake up, kissing Merry when she opened her eyes and blinked to show that she was already awake. Will Brent knelt at Merry’s bedside in prayer.

  Mally, still in and out of consciousness, saw her teammates, led by her friend Eden, carrying a signed ball through th
e hospital’s revolving door. And then they appeared in her room, for real.

  “Way to get attention, Brynn,” Eden said. “Don’t expect to get out of practice this way.” Except it sounded like donexpectogeddoudda . . .

  Finally, each heard words distinct as musical notes: The voice of Dr. Staats, their pediatrician. Their father’s. “Undeniable.” “Without them . . .” “Permanent . . .” “Breathing, at first . . .”

  Mallory wrenched her mind up and out.

  She opened her eyes. What lay over her? A tent? A plastic sheet? In her nose . . . in her nose was a plastic tube. She tugged lightly on it and choked.

  She tried to think her way to Meredith, but she heard only a mewling, like a kitten. Meredith was deep under some kind of syrupy layering, a mental mud of medication. Only when someone changed the dressings on her hand did Meredith stir from the fog of painkillers. As she watched dimly, the nurses replacing the dressings, she would think of her hand as it had been—fluttering, pointing, directing, thrust up in the Y sign, snapping back and forth across her green cheerleader’s sweater in the gestures of the routines, waving when she flirted with the crowd on the bleachers, calling out instructions under her breath to the rest of the squad, “Last time now . . . Ridgeline, so fine!”

  No, she thought.

  And, for the first time, Mally heard her clearly. That one word. In separate rooms, both girls struggled to sit up.

  “Hey! Hey! Hi there!” Tim said, jumping out of his chair when he saw Mallory strain against her pillows. “Thank God, oh thank God. Hold on! Go slow, honey.”

  More gently than he had ever held his rough-and-tumble child, Tim Brynn slid an arm under Mallory’s back and asked, “Are you awake awake now, Mal? Mallory? Do you understand what I’m saying? You gave us quite a scare, little one. You’ve been out of it, well, in and out of it, since the fire. Three days ago, Mally. You’re a hero, you know? Did you know that? Alex and Adam and the little girls would never have made it without you two. Don’t. Don’t try to talk. You sucked in half a houseful of smoke.” When she pointed to her face, Tim said, “That’s oxygen going in through your nose, and purified air around you. Your face was just scorched, like a bad sunburn. No scars. I promise.” Ill at ease, when he ought to be happy, for a reason he didn’t quite understand, Tim hurried on, sharing with Mallory a list of details that might have been important to her at any other time but this. “Actually, it’s amazing that the house is not that bad. They’re staying with us now, but the worst thing was the smoke damage. And the porch is wrecked, of course.” He added, “You’ll be out in a few days. I should ring for the nurse. . . .”

  Why isn’t he telling me? Mallory wondered. He knows it’s the first thing I would want to hear.

  On the other side of the wall, Campbell said to Meredith, “Please, honey, stop trying to talk. The oxygen tube isn’t going to let you, anyhow. Your chest is going to hurt for a while, not to mention your poor little hand. And you’ll probably have the worst sore throat ever. Are the pain meds helping?”

  Meredith writhed on the bed. How do they expect me to rest when I can’t hear her? I’m not sure if she can hear me or if I’m dreaming. Why don’t they know?

  Campbell said, “Merry-heart. I’ll never forgive . . . myself. I shouldn’t have gone. It was so selfish. . . .” Meredith waved that away, gently shaking her head and pointing at her nose. Campbell recognized the ancient gesture that, in the family, meant “pay attention !” Merry looked hard at her mother, unblinking, and touched her heart. Misunderstanding, Campbell broke into tears and said, “I love you, too.” Meredith tapped her heart again, more urgently. Beneath the huge mitt of her bandages, she felt the reprimand of the pain.

  She turned her head away from Campbell.

  In her own room, Mallory lay back, exhausted and frustrated.

  Tim went on, “Honey, don’t get upset. You’re going to be good as new. . . .” Struggling, Mally pointed at her head. Tim tried to interpret what she was saying “Think? How did it happen?” Mally put up two fingers, pointed to her right hand, and shrugged elaborately. Right-handed, she tried to tell her father, right-handed. She was so used to communicating without so much effort! “Honey, it wasn’t the fireworks. We don’t know who set off the fireworks. Maybe it was the same person who set the fire, maybe it was someone different. What I mean is, it was set in a different way. Some kid threw a gasoline bomb, or whatever, on the roof—gasoline in a Coke bottle for all we know. There was glass up there. God only knows why. Kevin never met a stranger in his life.”

  In the next room, Merry gathered her strength and her bandaged paw, then pointed to her left hand. Left-handed, Mom, she tried to tell Campbell. Left-handed. She had to know, and before she got too sleepy.

  In answer, her mother said, “They don’t know who did it. It blew up. They assume a car full of drunk kids . . .”

  Meredith croaked.

  “Don’t talk,” Campbell soothed her. “Shush now.”

  “Mally . . .”

  “I’m sorry. I just assumed you two . . . you know. Could hear, like always. Your sister is fine. She inhaled smoke, but she’ll be fine,” Campbell assured her. Campbell wanted to kick herself. More than Tim did, she understood about the tin-can telephone that joined her daughters. “You saved her life, darling. You pulled her out onto the back porch.” Campbell began to cry, fresh unchoked rivulets of tears.

  Next door, Mallory first tapped, then pounded on her chest. Tim nodded and said, “Yes, you inhaled smoke.” Mally made her eyes go wide and shook her head violently. Tim reached under the clear tent and gently held Mallory’s shoulders down against the sheets. “Look, Mallory. You need to be quiet now, honey.” Mallory pounded her small chest more frantically. “What?” Tim asked. “Don’t get hysterical . . . I’ll get paper.” He gave Mallory a pencil and a sheet ripped from the telephone book. Mally began to write. Tim ran for Campbell.

  “Oh, my baby!” Campbell cried, diving, oblivious of the protocols, into the tent. “We were so scared you wouldn’t wake up. Merry was sedated, but you . . . you just wouldn’t wake up!” Campbell’s face was smeared with cold tears and spent mascara. She turned to her husband. “You did tell her that Meredith is okay? I don’t think they can hear each other.”

  “What?” Tim asked. “Hear each other? They can’t even talk, Cam.”

  Campbell ignored him.

  “You know Merry is okay, don’t you?” Campbell asked Mallory. Mallory shook her head.

  Tim put his hand over his eyes.

  “Your sister is fine,” he said. “That’s what she meant, pounding on her chest. Me. She was saying ‘me.’ She meant ‘my twin.’ ” Finally. Dad was great, but so thick sometimes.

  “Meredith pulled you out of the fire,” Campbell said. “You were this close to the burning couch, and the couch and curtains were an inferno. She . . . does have a bad burn on one of her palms.” Mallory cringed. “But she’ll heal. It’s not nearly as bad as it could have been.”

  Mallory fell back, spent, and despite the flicker of guilt, was soon asleep. The paper she had clasped in her hand slipped to the floor. When a nurse picked it up later, she could barely make out the scrawled words: Merry, Merry, Merry.

  HEROES AND VILLAINS

  By the end of their first week back at school, Mallory was sick and tired of everyone treating them like little china dolls. It was January, and still no snow, only bleak sleet and mud.

  Everybody was so bored that all they could talk about was the fire.

  And when they talked about the fire, Mally felt like an idiot.

  Mally’s temper matched the weather.

  Her voice was no longer hoarse. She still felt dizzy when she ran and had to stop over and over. Both girls had chest X-rays and a frightening examination of their lungs called a broncho-scope that showed, remarkably, nothing much. Despite all that they might have inhaled—from soot to charred fibers. Mallory possibly because she lay facedown, Merry because she held the coat over her face—the
ir lungs seemed relatively fine and would soon be normal.

  Despite the physical healing, Mally somehow didn’t feel whole . . . or like herself. If she could not undo the past and will the fire never to have happened, she wished at least that people would stop talking about it.

  There was the big burst of attention just afterward.

  “Don’t you hate this?” Mallory asked Merry one night. Someone from Canada called to ask if they’d be on the radio, and before Merry could stop her, Mally told the woman, “We’re not allowed.”

  “No, actually, I think it’s great,” Merry said. “Why shouldn’t we get credit? We, like, almost died. We saved the kids.”

  “You’re supposed to save your brother and your cousins, duh,” Mally said. “If we were, like, pioneers, our parents would have already forgotten this. Kids our age pulled their brothers and sisters out of burning tents and junk all the time.”

  “Well, we’re not like pioneers.” Merry was sleeping with an eye mask these days, in case someone wanted to take her picture in the morning.

  “I just want it to end.”

  “I just want it to last forever,” Merry insisted. “My whole season is ruined. I might as well have some fun.” Her picture was being zipped around the county by every kid with a cell phone in Ridgeline. The knowledge of her real, if fleeting, fame was a cozy little cushion of contentment inside her.

  Mallory wished she could be invisible.

  For starters, in the newspaper photo taken just after they left the hospital, Mally thought that her face, although barely swollen anymore, looked like a ripe plum. She was annoyed every time she had to thank someone for giving her a copy of the picture—as if she might have missed it! She had enough to fill two photo albums!

  The headline read, TWINS SAVE SIBS IN BIRTHDAY BLAZE. Pictured with them were the editor of the Ridgeline Reporter, Fred Elliott, as well as the mayor, Joan Karls, and Wendell von Pelling, the fire chief. Chief von Pelling looked sheepish, as well he might. The first two calls about a fire were thought to be hoaxes because they obviously came from teenagers, with laughter and the sounds of loud music in the background. The department responded, but there was grumbling. When Grandpa Brynn called, he gave the dispatcher a piece of his mind along with a description of the disaster and reminded her that his son was a lawyer and might sue the department.