The Midnight Twins

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  Campbell, watching, would have assumed Mallory could simply call Merry on the telepathy beeper. But was that working anymore? Did that work only if both of them had it turned on or if a crisis slammed through whatever else one of them was thinking or doing? She could ask Merry, but Mally was too fierce. Mally would clam up.

  As for Mally, this wasn’t something she wanted to talk about with Merry except if it were face-to-face and with words.

  It was like a dream; but it wasn’t a dream.

  It was, she supposed, a vision. Like the vision she’d had with Eden.

  But why?

  Why then, why just—blam!—walking down the concrete hall that led to the convention center parking lot? What were they even talking about? Adam said he was hungry. Then Adam took off with Mom. Her father was talking about Merry running off with Kim, and about how great Merry was, and how great Tim was . . . but it wasn’t about Tim. Kim.

  That was it!

  Her mother got all pissed that Meredith had a crush on David, how Bonnie would be mad if David liked Merry, too.

  David Jellico.

  And what would her mother say if Mally just blurted it out right now: I saw your best friend’s son kill a dog. I saw it. I saw him hang a dog on a tree until it died.

  She had to see Merry. It was probably better that Merry wasn’t home alone, she thought. But what did it matter? If Kim was there and David showed up, they’d ask him in without even thinking about it. They’d make him hot chocolate. Oh, come on! Maybe she was only mad at David. Maybe she was jealous of Merry’s crush on David and not admitting her own feelings. That was it. No, that wasn’t it. David was an ass. But not a dangerous ass. Just an immature jerk. But where was David? Right now?

  If only there was a way she could put her hands over the eyes of her brain, and stop seeing it over and over and over.

  It was too pitiful and awful. She had to be some kind of lunatic even to think about it. A black-and-white dog, middle-sized, with a ruff on its throat, its legs clawing the air, its mouth dripping foam, a rope around its poor neck, and David (It couldn’t be David!) slowly pulling the rope higher and higher off the ground, over the branch of a tree. She knew the dog. She had seen that dog before. Mallory tried again to wish the picture from her brain. This was going to happen, actually happen. That much she knew for sure. Her heart began to thud, and her breathing came in gasps.

  “Are you feeling faint again?” Campbell asked.

  “No, Mom. I’m fine. I’m totally starving, though,” Mally said, trying to sound like a normal whiny teenager. “I’m tired of sitting here.” God! She had to pretend and see this, too? The movie burst across her mind again. Rocks and trees. Something else in the background—a hill, a cliff? She recognized it, but she couldn’t think. She didn’t know where the freaking place was. “Mom, Dr. Staats, I didn’t have anything to eat since breakfast. I was nauseated at lunch from all the junk we ate in the hotel last night. And then I got hungry but the lines were too long at the concession stand at the meet. That’s what’s really getting to me. It has to be.”

  “Okay, we’ll get your blood drawn and then go to Friendly’s,” said Campbell.

  “I want you to make me grilled cheese at home. The special way,” Mally said. “I can have my blood drawn tomorrow. I just want to go to home. Please, Mom?”

  “You always wanted grilled cheese when you were little and had a cold,” Campbell said, stroking Mallory’s hair. Mally felt like some kind of big emotional turd. She was lying right to her mother’s face and being phony sweet about it, too.

  “Yes, Mommy,” said Mallory, barely able to talk around a lump of self-hatred. But Campbell was undone by Mallory’s gentle appeal.

  “Okay,” Campbell said. “We’ll go home.”

  But when Mallory’s feet hit the porch, she was running for her bedroom, as Campbell called out for her in vain.

  “Listen! Trophy princess!” Mally said, taking Merry’s cell out of her hand and snapping it closed. “Where’s Kim?”

  “She had to go home. Her grandparents are coming over. What is up with you? You just hung up on William.” It was Merry’s new name for Will—part of their semireconciliation. Merry thought it made both of them sound older.

  As if, Mallory thought.

  She said, “I don’t care if I hung up on Prince William. Who I know you think David Jellico looks like. Listen to this. David is going to kill a dog.”

  “Uh, Mal, you have to excuse me. You have me confused with someone from your planet.”

  “He’s going to kill a dog, and . . . and it’s the . . . it’s the Scavos’ border collie, Pippen. I thought of it on the way home. It’s Sunny Scavo’s dog. I know it is.”

  “You’re out of your mind.”

  “Merry. I wish I were. I don’t have any idea why this is happening and why the same thing isn’t happening to you. All I know is that this hasn’t happened yet, but it’s going to.”

  “Did a little voice tell you?” Merry asked, casually opening her flip phone.

  “No. There was no . . . sound at all,” Mallory said, her eyes filling with tears. “I just knew, like the fire, that it was real and it was going to happen. I just spent an hour in the doctor’s office, Merry. When I saw this, I fainted! Ask Mom.” She didn’t realize she was yelling.

  “She fainted,” Campbell called from the bottom of the stairs. “Do you still want grilled cheese? Cheddar or Swiss?”

  “Swiss,” called Merry. “Make mine a little burny.”

  Campbell hollered back, “I wasn’t asking you, Meredith! I’ll make your butt a little burny, miss. You know you weren’t supposed to do any stunts. . . .” Campbell sprinted up the stairs.

  “Mom, the doctor said I should eat,” Mallory reminded her mother quietly.

  “I know. Shoot! I’ll deal with you later,” Campbell told Meredith. “I’m not forgetting.”

  Both girls sat rigid with tension until their mother was out of earshot.

  “I can’t believe they would ground me for doing something right,” Merry said mournfully.

  “Please! How can you think about that now? How can you think about cheerleading? This could already be happening! I’m not kidding,” Mally said as soon as she could shut their door. “Call Kim. Ask where David is.”

  “No.”

  “Then I will.”

  “No.”

  Mallory took out her own cell phone. “I’ll tell her what I think, too.”

  “Go ahead,” Meredith said, setting her jaw. She looked at Mallory then. Mallory looked half out of her mind. This was serious. She felt the wall fall down.

  “Call Sunny, then,” Mallory begged. She slapped the phone so that it went clattering into the corner. “Call her!”

  “Okay, okay. Don’t have a bird,” said Meredith.

  “What are you fighting about?” Tim called up the stairs. “Your mother is down here making cheese sandwiches and you two are up there screeching like cats. Get your big mouths down here. Meredith? Mallory?” They ignored him, knowing he would wander away in a moment’s time.

  A few moments later, Mally listened as Meredith asked for Sunny Scavo.

  “She is? Oh.” Merry listened. Then she said, “When they get back . . . sure. Just tell her I called? Thanks.”

  Meredith turned to Mallory. “She’s not home.”

  “Not home yet or not home?”

  “She’s out with her brother. . . .”

  “Out . . .”

  “Their dog ran away. But he always comes back.”

  “Not tonight,” Mallory said.

  Merry tried to stop herself from looking at Mallory, fearful of what she would see twisting in her twin’s eyes. But she could feel Mally’s thoughts hammering at her mind like fists.

  NO TAKE BACKS

  The twins went to church on Sunday as usual.

  It was Campbell’s morning to sleep in. She was a Presbyterian, and Tim a Catholic. Since she’d had to give her girls and boy to the Catholic Church, she a
t least made their father take them to church while she luxuriated on the weekends of her two weeks off.

  In the hall before Mass, they met Sunny.

  Sunny had clearly been crying.

  “You didn’t find your dog,” Merry said. “Poor baby. Pippen is such a sweetie.”

  “He was my birthday present,” Sunny said, the tears starting fresh. “He was my seventh-birthday present. I can’t stand thinking someone else has him.”

  Someone else doesn’t, Mally thought, but said, “He could come back! You know those stories about dogs following their owners all the way across the country if they get lost!”

  “She’s right!” Merry said, impulsively holding out her arms. Sunny hugged her. Mallory didn’t normally join in such dribble, but felt so sorry for Sunny she couldn’t resist.

  Mass was quick during Lent. Tim announced they were heading to his mom’s for waffles. The girls relaxed in bliss. Grandma Gwenny’s waffles were clouds of cinnamon and powdered sugar. They could forget dead dogs and sad old ladies.

  But Grandma looked as sleep-deprived as they did.

  “What’s wrong, Ma?” Tim asked immediately. “Is Dad sick?” The Brynn brothers and sisters were close, even the sister who didn’t live in the area anymore, but out in Portland. Tim talked to his brothers and sisters almost daily—if only to shoot them an e-mail—and saw his parents at least once a week.

  “We’re fine,” Gwenny sighed, hugging Adam and fixing her eyes on Merry and Mally. “What’s up with you two?”

  “Nothing,” the girls said together, and tried weakly to laugh.

  “It’s important to be careful,” Gwenny said. “I mean it. This isn’t a joke.”

  “Mom!” Tim cried, thinking for a horrible moment, with all the recent talk about puberty and womanhood, that Gwenny was talking about birth control. “They’re not even thirteen and a half!”

  “Hush, Tim. The girls are fine physically. They know what I mean.”

  Mallory longed to ask Grandma more specific questions. She wished Dad would quit yakking to his mother and leave—at least leave the room. Meredith hoped he’d say even more meaningless things. Then Grandma wouldn’t say another word about any of it, they could go home and it . . . just wouldn’t happen anymore. Her fingers itched for her cell phone. She wanted to call . . . anyone.

  Gwenny turned on her heel, and they all followed her slim, straight back into her big country kitchen in the ranch-style house where they’d moved after Tim and Campbell had the twins. The table was set and the batter ready to pour. Grandma had made chamomile tea. Tim devoured his waffle and sat back to relax.

  “Honey,” she said to Tim. “Your dad’s out back.”

  Tim grabbed another waffle. If he didn’t run every night on the treadmill in the basement, Mally thought, he’d weigh four hundred pounds.

  “How’s cheerleading?” Gwenny asked Merry, as she watched Tim cross the yard and slap his father on the back.

  “Well, after the big meet yesterday . . . it’s going to be nothing,” Merry answered. “We won. You know that. Did Dad call you?” Gwenny nodded. “We don’t cheer for, like, baseball or golf.”

  “How’s soccer?” Grandma Gwenny asked Mallory.

  “I’m doing good. Not as good as I should be.”

  “How’s swimming?” Grandma asked Adam.

  “I hate the butterfly, but I’m the only guy who can do it, so they make me.”

  “Give you great shoulders someday. Your dad did the butterfly. Regional champion.”

  “Yeah,” Adam said, diving into his waffles and sausage. “He shows us the pictures all the time.”

  “Want to watch TV, Adam?” Grandma asked.

  “Okay,” Adam answered, mystified. None of the parents and grandparents treated TV as anything but the last refuge. Grandma carried Adam’s waffles to the den on a tray and then came back to join the girls.

  “You girls want to learn to knit?” Grandma asked the twins.

  The twins looked at each other.

  Gwenny rummaged in the closet and dragged out a giant wicker hamper. She began picking through her yarn. When Tim and his father clattered in at the back door, Gwenny suggested, “Why don’t you two boys take Adam and get some lunch? I’m going to teach the girls a little craft.”

  From the other room Adam said, “I just ate four waffles!”

  “You’re growing,” Gwenny told Adam. She gave her husband a meaningful look—one he recognized from long association. Soon, he and Tim were backing the car out of the driveway with Adam in the back.

  Of course, nobody ever unwound the skeins of yarn. Gwenny did demonstrate how to use the needles to cast on stitches, just so as not to lie on a Sunday. Months later, she did use those first stitches to make long, looped scarves for each girl, green for Merry and navy blue for Mallory. As Gwenny wound the yarn around her fingers and began to slide it onto the continuous round needle, Mallory asked, “Do you know about our dreams?”

  Gwenny put the yarn aside and nodded.

  Mally went on, “You don’t see what they are, but about being separate, you know that. And how it hurts us? Do you think there’s a reason? A reason why I see what will happen, and she knows that it did happen?”

  “I’m sure! Why is that useful?” Merry chimed in.

  “David Jellico . . .” Mallory interrupted. She paused before she went on. “He’s not how he seems.”

  Their grandmother listened.

  “She’s crazy,” Merry insisted. “She thinks David is some psycho wacko creep who sets fires and kills animals.” Grandma Gwenny said nothing. “She thinks that. I don’t! I don’t have any proof.” Grandma Gwenny still didn’t speak. “And I don’t want proof! Grandma, how can you go along with this junk?”

  “It’s not junk,” said Mallory.

  “It’s only since the fire that you went loony tunes,” Merry said. “Okay, if you think David is up to something, what do you want to do about it? What would you do if you could?”

  “I’d see where he goes,” Mallory said, after a long moment.

  “How?”

  “I don’t know that. Grandma, would you do that?”

  Grandma Gwenny shrugged and shook her head.

  “I guess I could use my bike. . . .” Mally began.

  “I guess I couldn’t. I don’t ride a bike anymore,” Merry said. “She does, to humiliate me! I gave mine to Adam a year ago, and even then I hardly ever used it.”

  “I think we should find a way to follow him. Maybe not physically. A phone tree or something,” Mallory continued. “That would mean telling people, though. Outsiders. But Mom says where there’s a will, there’s a way. I think we should.”

  Merry asked, “Do you promise to shut up when we find out David’s only a softhearted guy who plays practical jokes?”

  “Do you promise to shut up if we find out he’s a freakazoid who likes to kill animals and set fires?” Mally shot back.

  “Maybe it’s better just to ask questions quietly than take big actions, and not get others involved,” Gwenny said.

  Mally stirred impatiently. “I can be . . . what’s the word?” she asked. “Subtle. I can be subtle. I can listen more than talk. I used to be good at that. Now, I seem to be all over the place with my mouth.”

  “You probably feel confused. We all act differently when we’re confused and frightened.”

  “I’m never subtle,” Merry said.

  Even Mallory had to smile. “But you’re always random.”

  After they kissed their grandmother good-bye, both realized that Grandma Gwenny had said only two sentences about their problem during the whole hour they’d spent at her house. And still, in her silence, Mallory believed she gave them tacit permission for what they began to call Operation David Detective.

  At first, it was almost a joke.

  For the first time in their lives, the twins set out to prove each other wrong.

  Pippen the dog never did return.

  After days and days passed, S
unny gave up.

  “I hope it was a nice family who took him,” she told Mally, taping a picture of her little border collie inside her locker with a yellow ribbon tied above it. A cold pebble of misery settled in Mallory’s belly. It was the dog she had seen, as if through a curtain of fog, in her dream. She expected to feel triumphant, but instead was miserable when she motioned Meredith away from the group of girls crowded around Sunday’s locker. She pinched Merry’s arm, and whispered, “Don’t you feel terrible now? Still think it was my imagination?”

  “Quit being such a jerk!” Merry whispered back, pulling her arm away. “How can you talk about it that way at a time like this? Dogs run away all the time. Why do you have to make a big crime drama out of it and try to get some poor guy involved?”

  It’s Merry’s friends who really love drama, Mallory thought with an inward sneer. Especially somebody else’s. She watched them as they fluttered away for second bell. They all wanted to be the first to say, “I am so totally sorry. . . .” They would throw themselves around, remembering their own sad losses of doggies and kitties, crying big, fat tears until someone started comforting them. They looked like the twins’ great-aunt Thea at the wake of one of their ancient cousins.

  “Wakes,” said Uncle Henry, Thea’s husband. “They’re like the World Series to her.” Aunt Thea even went to funerals of people she wasn’t related to. She came from out of state for them.

  That day after school, Mally visited Grandma Gwenny on her own. She took her run late in the day, all the way to Gwenny’s, a five-mile jigsaw of roads from her own house.

  Her grandmother was delighted—but not, Mally quickly realized, entirely surprised when her granddaughter showed up. After she showered and got into one of Gwenny’s old tracksuits, she said, “I hate fighting with my sister. This dream thing was already between us. Now the David thing is between us.”

  “Maybe you could pray about it,” Gwenny answered. “I don’t like bothering the Lord with human problems. But I think saints like conversation. They used to be human. They probably remember making mistakes. I favor Saint Anthony, the patron of lost things, because I’m always losing something. But for visionaries, like you, you can’t beat Saint Bridget of Sweden.”