The Girls

by Lori Lansens

  Ruby and I stood dumbly by. I couldn’t imagine (and I’ve spent my life imagining things) what the two men were going to do with the twin babies.

  I looked into the pinched face of the baby closest to me, thinking, “Creatura.” (That’s the word Nonna used to describe a newborn. Creatura. “He’s not to be human yet. Is not inside yet, the soul.”) The newborns looked alien, with black insect eyes and noses that were barely there. (Scarce hours ago they’d breathed fluid, not air!) Round bloodless lips. Tufts of black curly hair. (I tried not to think of Taylor, but I heard Aunt Lovey’s voice then, as I do now, insisting I’d later regret that I didn’t look at my newborn daughter, and the truth of that is hard to bear.) I reached out instinctively, aching to hold one of the babies, offering the cradle of my arm, but the bearded man shook his head.

  Instead, the man lifted the infant slowly and gently, in a way that was not frightening to the baby or to Ruby and me, and touched her tiny warm forehead to the spot where we are joined.

  “Oh,” Ruby said. “Oh.”

  The bearded man said some words, quiet words, that might have been holy, or damning. We didn’t know if, in this action, he was asking us to bless the babies or demanding we lift our curse.

  The hairless man raised the second baby and did the same, setting the baby’s tiny warm forehead against the place where Ruby and I are joined, and waited a long moment, before arranging the twins in the cradle once again. Then he lifted his sleeve and pushed a small button on his wristwatch, and I noticed he had the same fake Rolex as Cousin Jerzy.

  Where was Cousin Jerzy? And when could we go home? My feet were aching from the cold stone floor. The hairless man, having checked his watch, seemed suddenly alarmed. He barked something at his bearded friend, who looked at his watch too (another phony Rolex), then suddenly lunged toward me and Ruby and, taking me firmly by the arm, led us to the door. There was nothing of thanks in the way he looked at me and my sister. And no kind of fear. Certainly not reverence. I completely mistrusted my instincts about what was happening. I didn’t know if the man was friend or foe. I’d been wrong about everything in Slovakia. I could not read these people. It was much more than not knowing the language.

  The man opened the door, hurried us out into the cold, and motioned for Ruby and me to follow him to his truck. He gestured for us to climb back into the front seat, which we did. I could feel the quiver in Ruby’s chin when she asked, “Is he taking us back to Cousin Zuza and Velika’s?”

  I would not have remembered which black gravel road brought us to Zuza and Velika’s, but I was sure the one the man turned down wasn’t the same. I could feel that we were driving down the mountain instead of up, to where the old cousins lived. We traveled deeper and deeper into the dark woods. I wondered if the man had an ax in the truck. Of course he did. Then, in the moon’s light, I could see reeds and weeds, and it occurred to me that he was taking us to the pond.

  I had the strangest sense that Ruby and I were kittens in a sack. “I think he’s going to drown us” was all I could think to say.

  “Like kittens in a sack,” Ruby said. And I got gooseflesh.

  I was thinking, as the man pulled (helped?) Ruby and me out of the passenger side of the truck, how ironic that Ruby and I were to be drowned in the same water where Uncle Stash had saved Cousin Marek. Then I saw the further irony that we would die in Mother Darlensky’s birthplace, while she had died in ours. (My sister and I have shared the joint fear of drowning since we were children. I had never considered my fear intuitive or prophetic, just a hangover from what happened at the creek with Ryan Todino.)

  The bearded man lit the ground in front of us with a flashlight he’d found in the truck and held my wrist as he directed us to a spot near a large jagged rock. The ground was cold and pebbly. I stepped lightly on my slippered feet. We stopped in front of the rock. The man turned us around to face the pond. The surrounding woods were silent, but I knew there were bears in these mountains. Wolves. Lynx. Otters. Mink. I wondered which would witness our murder.

  The man said something to us in Slovak. “Picovina,” I answered. I had no idea what he’d said, but “bullshit” seemed the appropriate response.

  Something caught my eye. The faint beams of a vehicle in the distance. And another pair of lights. And another. And another, chugging toward the pond.

  Ruby and I knew that it wasn’t Aunt Lovey or Uncle Stash or any of the other Slovak Relations. Whoever was coming, they were not coming to save us. Ruby shifted so I could see another train of lights advancing from a different direction. My heart began to beat wildly.

  “Don’t hold your breath,” I instructed. “In the water. Don’t hold your breath.”

  “Okay.”

  I was proud that Ruby didn’t whimper or cry as the vehicles parked nearby. There were the sounds of car doors opening and shutting. I wondered if the villagers had brought shovels to bury us or if they’d leave us to bloat in the pond.

  The bearded man who’d brought us was nowhere to be seen, but we heard him bark orders in the darkness. Whatever they were about to do, it appeared, was going to be done his way. He counted to three. Then there was a symphony of plastic clicking sounds from the flashlights the villagers had brought to light the way to Ruby and me. Except for the bearded man directing the people toward us, it was very quiet and organized, even civilized.

  “Picovina,” I muttered, because cursing made me feel in control. I felt Ruby squeeze her eyes shut as the flashlight circles drew closer. Ruby didn’t cry or even whimper. I hadn’t expected this strength from her and wondered about its origin when I felt my own ebb in proportion.

  I kept my eyes wide open. I wanted to face the twenty flashlights (that’s what I’d estimated) and glimpse just one soul. Whatever they were executing us for being—devils, witches, monsters—I would become that thing and curse just one of them for real.

  No one spoke. At some point the clouds moved away from the moon again, and I noticed that all of the shadowy faces were female. They were, every one of them, looking directly at my sister and me with their round blank faces. One of the women, an elderly lady I remembered seeing on the church steps, croaked out something to the crowd. The bearded man (I knew from his voice that he was behind us) called out something in return. (It sounded contradictory, but to me everything sounds contradictory in Slovak.)

  I squeezed my sister, baffled when the crowd quietly formed an organized line in front of us. The women did not immediately begin to drag us toward the pond as I’d imagined. They appeared not to have stones in their hands or any other crude weapons of murder. The first woman in line stepped forward, pressing a photograph into my hand, whispering something I didn’t understand. I couldn’t see the photo clearly and couldn’t begin to imagine why this stranger was giving it to me. Then, without warning, without asking permission, the woman reached up to touch the spot of our conjoinment. Ruby and I reared back. I was shaking with fear and protest.

  Ruby was brazenly calm. “You can’t just touch us like that,” she told the woman, who obviously did not speak English but somehow understood. The woman found the figure of the bearded man behind us and waited for an explanation.

  The bearded man stepped toward Ruby and me, so close I could feel the heat of his body. His stiff canvas coat brushed up against my back as he put his right hand on Ruby’s shoulder and his left on mine. However gentle his grasp, we understood that he meant to hold us steady so that the other women could touch our heads too.

  “They think you are witch,” said a voice beside us.

  We shifted and turned and found Cousin Jerzy. He grinned and repeated, “They think you are witch.”

  “Take us home, Jerzy,” I said.

  “I will take you to Zuza and Velika,” Cousin Jerzy answered plainly, “after this is done.”

  “This? What is this?”

  Jerzy tossed something at my feet. My shoes.

  “It’s opportunity.” Jerzy grinned. “Opportunity is now knocking.”
He made an insipid knocking sound with his tongue on the side of his mouth. “And I am to answer door. Hello.”

  “Why do they want to touch our heads?” Ruby asked.

  “Why are they giving us things?” I asked.

  “They want what everybody in world want. Luck. They want good luck.” Jerzy found a toothpick in his pocket and stuck it in the wide space between his two front teeth.

  “So they think we’re witches because we’re conjoined? They think we can bring them luck?”

  “You come on St. Katarina. You come with two heads. Joined. Bang.” He slapped his hands together. “You bring good luck to Sonya, so it’s proof. Sonya touches your head there, and the babies don’t die. Even the doctor in Rajnava say the babies will die.” He shrugged, not that he necessarily believed in it, but it was a strong enough case to present.

  “So what are we supposed to do?” I asked, looking out over the waiting faces. (There were about two dozen women there, but it felt like a thousand.)

  “Just give them good luck, these women,” Cousin Jerzy said impatiently. “It’s to make them feel better. It’s to give them hope. You understand?”

  “What’s the Slovak word for ‘luck’?” Ruby asked Jerzy.

  “Luck?” Jerzy considered a moment before he answered. “There is stastie and osud and náhoda and úspech.”

  I wanted to do anything and be anywhere else. I almost wished the women had brought shovels instead of hope. I couldn’t speak, though I could feel Jerzy waiting for me to lead our next move. But it was Ruby who pulled us erect. She was looking out over the crowd, taking charge. “We come on St. Katarina’s Day,” she started, “to bring luck to Grozovo. Dobre stastie!” she shouted.

  The women looked at us. There was murmuring now, suspicion, growing discontent. The orderly line was disintegrating. Then someone started shouting. And the women began pressing things at us: more photographs, a pocket watch, a ring, a ceramic toad, a lock of hair. Somehow Ruby and I had gotten turned around, and the surging crowd was pushing us toward the pond.

  “Sing,” I told Ruby. “Sing something.”

  “Sing?”

  “Sing!”

  “Sing what?”

  “Something!”

  “Like what?”

  The women stopped, intrigued, if baffled, by our repartee.

  “Anything. A Christmas carol.”

  “Something happy?”

  “Anything!”

  “‘Holly Jolly Christmas’?”

  “Not that!”

  The crowd was still and quiet as Ruby opened her mouth and began to sing “Silent Night,” the hymn whose lyrics stop you with their beauty and brevity, even if the music’s a tad sentimental. Ruby sang the song—“All is calm all is bright”—better than she ever had before—“Holy infant so tender and mild”—and made me ashamed I’d ever pinched her. Ever. “Sleep in heavenly peee-eace.” My brave sister. “Slee-eep in heavenly peace.” . . . Ruby.

  If our life had been a Hollywood movie, Ruby’s rendition of “Silent Night” would have sent the Slovak women away weeping and satisfied in their blessing, even though we hadn’t let them touch our spot. As our situation was much too strange and surreal to be anything but what it was, the women quickly tired of Ruby’s song and turned to Jerzy and the bearded man to see what they were going to do about our lack of cooperation.

  “You have to let them,” Jerzy said.

  “We don’t,” I said.

  “We’re not,” Ruby added.

  “You have to. They paid good money.”

  “Good money? They paid good money?”

  “You get cut! Of course you get cut!” Jerzy offered, but he was mad at himself for his slip.

  There was no time for fury at Jerzy and his associates for their entrepreneurial atrocity. I felt Ruby looking out over the faces of the women and didn’t know what to do but to follow her lead.

  “Don’t hold your breath,” Ruby whispered as the bearded man herded the women back into line and gestured for the next woman to step forward and touch our heads.

  “I can’t do it,” I whispered.

  “You can,” Ruby said. “Close your eyes.”

  I did.

  “Think of each hand as a story or a poem you’ll write one day. Imagine that the hands aren’t taking something, but that they’re giving something.”

  “Like what?” I asked, petulant.

  “Ideas.”

  I was comforted by my sister’s uncommon wisdom and made no further complaint about the strangers’ hands on my head, though I can still taste the rising bile when I think of them, those women who believed they were extracting some kind of blessing from us conjoined witches.

  When all the women there had touched Ruby and me, Jerzy thumped our shoulders as though we were teammates who’d just won the big game. We listened to the women whisper to one another as they squelched through the mud on the way back to their vehicles. We watched them drive away and followed Cousin Jerzy to a car nearby. I stubbed my toe on something and nearly fell. “Used to be there the old apple tree,” Jerzy said. “They leave too high the stump.”

  On the way back to Cousin Zuza and Velika’s, I was too exhausted and overwhelmed by what had just happened to think clearly or at all. Jerzy snaked along the path that cut through the forest on our way back up the hill, gloating over his success.

  Our gorgeous braggart cousin explained that the villagers had been talking about the “two-faced girl” responsible for the safe delivery of not one but two healthy babies to sickly Sonya Shetlasky. Jerzy and his associate, the pregnant woman’s husband, had decided to capitalize on a relative commodity. They charged each woman ten koruny for our special moonlight appearance, and were splitting the proceeds with the hairless man.

  I was outraged. If they were splitting proceeds, how dare they consider leaving Ruby and me out? (Not that I wanted the money, but the nerve of these guys.) Jerzy understood my indignation and generously offered to cut us in on an exclusive engagement, for the duration of the Witches’ Days, for appearances nightly at the pond. He felt certain they could spread the word to the neighboring villages. It occurred to him they could arrange some bus groups from nearby Rajnava and Kalinka.

  He counted out a number of koruny from his pocket and stuffed them into my palm. It didn’t matter, he told us, if we were witches, or even if we believed in witches. We’d already brought good luck to Grozovo. The rest, the truth, was irrelevant. He parked in front of Cousin Zuza and Velika’s and said we shouldn’t answer right away, but think about it.

  I looked at the koruny in my fist, feeling strangely like I’d earned them. “You should move to America,” I said.

  “But I’m Slovak,” he answered. And that was all.

  We watched the rising sun cut pink ribbons in the clouds over the church at the top of the hill. The sky promised a better day. Jerzy and Ruby talked about American movies, and though I couldn’t leave, I wandered away, knowing there’d be hell to pay when Uncle Stash and Aunt Lovey found out where we’d been and what had happened at the pond. (We were too old for punishment but endured Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash’s disappointment for our remaining days in Slovakia, and that was hell enough.)

  The day we left, I put the koruny Jerzy had given me in Zuza and Velika’s Bible.

  I RECALL FEW of the details of the return flight to Detroit. One moment we were standing in the short line at the airport in Kosice not being stared at, the next moment we were ensconced in the backseat of the maroon Impala, savoring the blackness in the long tunnel back to Canada. Then we were easing into the passing lane of moonlit Highway 401, astonished by the deep blanket of snow that the radio said had fallen within the past twenty-four hours. You just don’t see snow that deep in late November. I thought Leaford might have been still in our absence, pining for our return. But life had gone on, hugely and splendidly, without Ruby and me.

  It’s Ruby.

  This will be a short chapter because we are late for work. Rose
made me be perfectly still for nearly ten minutes while she put on that lipstick I gave her for our birthday. Now that her skin is getting paler, the color seems to suit her better, or maybe I’m just used to it. I’m glad to see she’s taking an interest in her appearance. It’s about time. But I hate being late for work.

  We have a school group from seventh grade coming in today, and we are nervous. I will admit it. Rose will not. But why else would she be taking ten minutes to put on lipstick? First, the school group is from an all-girls’ private school in London, and girls can be quite scary. Especially so many. And if they go to an all-girls’ private school, they’re usually rich too. A dozen rich twelve-year-old girls is really very scary. The other thing that is in the back of our minds, but something that Rose and I don’t talk about, is that these girls in seventh grade are about the same age as Taylor is. And, for all we know, one of these girls could be Taylor.

  One time, a few years ago, a class of grade fours from Oil Springs came in, and there was this one girl where something about her reminded me of me. There was something about the way she moved and the curve of her eyebrow and her lips and high cheekbones, and I said something about it to Rose. We managed to get closer to the girl and had a good look, but Rose said it wasn’t her daughter because she would have known. She said she’d have seen some recognizable light in her eye. And then, in bed that night, she said, Don’t do that anymore. Don’t point out girls who might be Taylor.

  I was embarrassed that Rose had to point out that what I did was sort of cruel. So I made fun of her for being so touchy about it, since we were pretty sure Taylor was adopted by someone in Michigan and wouldn’t be walking into the Leaford Library anytime soon. I wish I hadn’t done that.

  Nick is driving us to work today. He has been very helpful lately.

  Rose wants me to ask him what he got sent to jail for. I’m trying to work up the nerve.

  Home Again, Home Again