The Girls

by Lori Lansens

  I felt Nick twitch beside me. He didn’t like Gideon. He seemed to have sniffed him out, like prey. Nick couldn’t think Gideon was a threat. Or a rival. Nick could not be jealous of Gideon. No matter what I’d imagined about the way he kissed me. And yet when Ruby, in a stroke of genius, remembered that Sherman Merkel was looking for a farmhand, and that Gideon had just lost his apartment, Nick cleared his throat beside me, as though he was holding back a protest.

  So anxious was Gideon to meet Mr. Merkel and win the job of farmhand (and access to the rich-in-artifacts fields) that he suggested they go speak with him right away. Ruby and I needed to go home to rest anyway. And Mrs. Merkel said it was fine with her. I was worried that Ruby might feel thrown over, but she seemed fine as we made our way back to the car.

  Gideon and Mrs. Merkel walked with us, pausing to say good-bye. “You’ll be there, right?” Gideon asked Ruby.

  “I will,” she said brightly.

  “You’re not gonna get on a writing jag and keep her away, right, Rose?” Gideon joked with me. “Promise, right?”

  “Writing jag?” Mrs. Merkel sounded curious rather than astonished.

  “Rose is writing her autobiography,” Gideon explained.

  “Really?” Mrs. Merkel said and moved closer.

  “How many pages have you written, Rose?” Gideon suddenly asked me.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I stopped counting at four hundred.” (Such a lie.)

  “You must be nearly done,” he said.

  I did not see the logic.

  Mrs. Merkel must have seen that I couldn’t see, no matter that I was trying to focus my eyes on the spot where I thought hers would be, but she didn’t comment on my blindness. “I’d like to read it when you’re done,” she said. I couldn’t tell if she meant to be sarcastic or encouraging.

  “I’ll send you a copy of it,” I said. (Not a lie.)

  I didn’t expect Mrs. Merkel to smile at me or kiss me or touch me in any physical way. And she didn’t. But she did lean in and whisper, “I’ll help. Anything you need. I’ll help you and Ruby.” Her voice was so tender I questioned my ear.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Anything,” she repeated.

  “Thanks,” I said again.

  Mrs. Merkel left us, and after a moment, I could hear Gideon’s receding voice as he described to our old neighbor his childhood farm in Glencoe, and his life growing up as an only child. At some point, waiting for Nick to get the stool arranged in the trunk before he helped to ease us into the front seat, we heard the sound of laughter. Ruby and I gripped each other. Though we’d never heard the sound before, Ruby and I both knew it was Cathy Merkel’s laughter. Gideon hadn’t said a single funny thing in the hours we’d spent together. In a million years I couldn’t imagine how he’d made that poor woman laugh.

  Nick started up the car, and when he was sure Ruby couldn’t see, he took my left hand. “Sure you don’t want to see the old house again, Rosie?”

  “No,” Ruby and I said together.

  We rode home in silence, Nick squeezing my hand.

  Ruby fell asleep.

  “Will you keep driving, Nick? Will you just drive around for a while?” I asked.

  He didn’t ask where I wanted to go. He just kept driving the river road, the one the Indians called Eskinippsi, the one that curves and loops and seems to flow back into itself. Once around to the bridge. And back again. And again. And looping and again, like a needle in a groove. We drove until I felt the sun retreat, and I worried that Ruby would get cold.

  “It’s time to go,” I said.

  “I know,” Nick replied.

  He turned down the road that led back to Leaford.

  “Will you come over tonight?” I asked.

  He grunted in the affirmative and we drove in silence, his grip on my hand growing tighter with each city block toward the bungalow.

  It’s Ruby.

  Wow. Where to begin. Or end.

  We went out to the farm today with Gideon and Nick. We got into the Leaford Museum, where we found out there was a key under the mat this whole time! We weren’t there for as long as we thought we’d be, though, because Rose needed to come back home and rest. Nick packed blankets and food and everything, but that’s life. That really is life. You’re just not always in a place for as long as you thought you’d be. Good thing Nick was prepared, but I hope all that food doesn’t go to waste.

  I was a little embarrassed and a little proud about the fuss everyone made over my collection of artifacts. I didn’t remember that there were so many specimens, and so many rare things, and so well preserved.

  Last week Gideon looked at me like I was some kind of expert. Today he looked at me like I was a genius. While I was looking at the things, which I’d forgotten the Historical Society had mounted on this really pretty purple fabric, I saw my whole life flash by.

  I was remembering the farm, walking the fields in the spring, Aunt Lovey saying, Don’t let Mrs. Merkel see you—it’ll make her think of Larry. I told Gideon the idea about making our old orange farmhouse into the new Leaford Museum. He got really excited about that.

  And then—I guess it’s not that weird or coincidental because she does live across the road—Mrs. Merkel came into the museum. Rose said it’s appropriate that Mrs. Merkel should appear again near the end of our lives, since she was there at the very beginning. Rose said everything comes around again, some things more obviously than others.

  Rose says the book is done.

  So I’m writing to say good-bye.

  Rose said a life story should be like a life, too short, no matter how long a person lives, and not sewn up, but joined up, the end joined up somehow to the beginning. Besides, we can’t sew things up at the end, the way you might if the story wasn’t a true one. Rose and I realize that we’ll likely never know the truth about our own mother. Alive? Dead? Name? And we’ll likely never find Rose’s daughter, Taylor, or even see her face in a picture. That’s just a reality. Just, like Rose says, part of our story.

  It turns out that Rose is done, so the book is done, instead of the other way around. She said whatever it was she wanted to say, she’s said. And the stories she wanted to tell, she’s told. She said it’s like a feeling of being full. You don’t always know, until you try to put the spoon in your mouth, that you just can’t take another bite.

  She hasn’t written much about our years in the bungalow. And—I know because I asked—she’s left out some good stories about things that have happened at our work. And about Verbeena. She said that when she started writing this book she never thought about the ending, but I don’t believe her. I think she’s been writing her final chapter all along. She’s not calling it Autobiography of a Conjoined Twin anymore. She says the story is more than the title says, more than just the story of us, but she hasn’t thought of anything better yet. We laughed, remembering how Aunt Lovey said if Rose ever wrote a story about her life with me she should call it Double Duty.

  We talked about the things we want to do with the time we have left. Gideon thinks if my collection of artifacts is moved to another museum, I should help pack the things, and I would like to do that. I would like to hold those things in my hands again and close my eyes and imagine myself five hundred years ago, grinding maize, smoking my turtlehead pipe. I trust the vibration of objects. Rose trusts her words on a page.

  One thing Rose didn’t tell you, because she doesn’t know, is that I was looking at Mrs. Merkel in the Leaford Museum today and I had this weird déjà vu, and then I had this vision of me and Ruby and Nick and Gideon and Mr. and Mrs. Merkel at the cottage, ringing in the New Year. I nearly laughed out loud to think it, but found myself trembling. Stranger things have happened, though. Look at Rose and me.

  Rose says, now that her book is finished, she’s just going to put it in a box. She said she doesn’t want to think about the book anymore. She says she doesn’t care, but I’ll bet she’ll haunt Nick to read it, or maybe Roz or Whiffer
. (I wonder if he’s still connected to the friend’s friend who knows a publisher in New York?) I can’t imagine a writer spending so much time arranging words on a page and not caring if someone had a look.

  Rose says she just wants to spend time with Nick. Maybe edit a few old love poems.

  I cannot believe I am choked up to write this last bit.

  I never expected to feel like you were so real, but that thing Rose said about writing to a friend, it really stuck with me, you know?

  We’re not leaving right away. But we won’t see you again before we go.

  I’ll miss you.

  I’ll miss you, and I’m not just saying that.

  Writers & Readers

  My sister, Ruby, has always been cold, especially her hands and feet (Raynaud’s, it’s called, a circulatory problem), while I have always been warm and have hated to be overdressed or seated near a fireplace. When Ruby and I were little, she used to put her delicate hands inside my shirt, on the skin of my back, or sometimes my tummy. Her clubfeet she’d press to my thighs. She’d giggle and tease, “I’m taking your warm, Rose. I’m taking all your warm.” I never minded, and never protested, because I felt that while she was taking my warm, I was taking her cool.

  In the end, I want Nick to be right. Just that I wrote the book, I want that to be enough. I’m printing this whole thing up tonight, for the first time since I started writing. I’m not going to read it again, but put it in a box, and let the gods decide its fate. If ever these words and sentences and paragraphs and accumulated pages from this story of my life find the eyes of a reader, this chapter is for you. It’s the second chapter I’ve written today. And the last chapter I will write.

  I have an urge to apologize for my mountain-climbing metaphors while begging patience for one more. Because, my friends, I can see the summit. It appears bitten, scalloped white against this azure sky. There are other people there too. And not all of them writers.

  Everyone says “Don’t look down,” but I did look down, at where I’ve been, how far I’ve come, how high I’ve climbed. Where I thought I’d made a single trail in the snow, I’ve made a thousand, blighted by debris, the bits of me I’ve left behind. And tools I didn’t even know I had. My ax wedged between the rock and the hard place where I’d been stuck for so long. My gloves in a crevice, way back there, where I’d camped in that little cave. A boot down that direction, nearly covered over by the snowfall last night. A tube of lipstick glinting in the sun (which must belong to Ruby). The story of me, of Ruby and me, of Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash, and the Merkels and the others, it’s hard to let go.

  It’s hard to let go.

  It is night. Cold. The air from the furnace grate makes the room feel drafty instead of warm. I kick an extra blanket over Ruby’s legs. Nick has come and gone and I’m still blushing, or have a fever. He kissed me. He did kiss me. With the lights on. Looking straight into my eyes. We did not declare our love for each other. We did not promise anything beyond the moment. We just kissed. Not a dry, chaste kiss, but one that was moist, and openmouthed, and warm. It should be carved somewhere on a tree: “Nick kissed Rose.” I don’t feel sated, though. I want more.

  Ruby and I talked for a while after Nick left. She’s writing in her yellow pad this moment. About today? About the Leaford Museum? About Gideon? Is she saying good-bye? Usually I can read her mind. Not tonight. And it’s just as well. Technically—I sound like my sister—we’ve agreed to terms and conditions about our individual final chapters. We’re in agreement about the whole rest of our lives.

  All those years ago, when Uncle Stash was building our elaborate metal bus shelter at the end of the lane, I asked him impatiently when he was going to be finished. He laughed and said, “People don’t finish, Rose. People stop. To finish is to say okay, now it’s right, never I’m going to change it. To stop is to say okay, it’s not perfect, but I have to go to something else.”

  You hold this book, our story, in your hands (let me fantasize it’s in hardcover with a brilliant jacket design), now with considerably more pages on the left side than on the right. Like you, I’ve been there a thousand times. We both know, writer and reader, like the proverbial sand in the hourglass, the seconds on the shot clock, the story is over.

  I returned to the first chapter of this book, which I haven’t read since my last crisis of confidence. I might alter it now to read: I have never looked into my sister’s eyes, but I’ve seen inside her soul. I have never worn a hat, but I have been kissed like that. I have never raised both arms at once, but the moon beguiled me still. Sleep is for suckers. I like the bus just fine. And though I’ve never climbed a tree, I’ve scaled a mountain, and that’s a hell of a thing.

  One more change I might make is to say that I wouldn’t live a thousand lives, but a million to infinity, to live the life I’ve lived as me. I am Rose Darlen of Baldoon County. Beloved sister of Ruby. The world’s oldest surviving craniopagus twins. Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash were right. How lucky Ruby and I have been to be “The Girls.”

  And there it is, where it’s been all along, the title I’ve been looking for.

  The end, taking me back to the beginning.

  The Girls.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Michael Pietsch, my publisher at Little, Brown and Company in New York. Special thanks to editor Judy Clain, who steered me in this direction.

  I would like to thank my editor, Diane Martin, my publisher, Louise Dennys, my publicist, Sharon Klein, and the talented team at Knopf Canada/Random House of Canada Limited for their enthusiasm and commitment.

  I would also like to thank my agent, Denise Bukowski, who read pages early on and gave me confidence and good counsel.

  Thanks as always to my husband, my children, my parents, my brothers and their families, the Rowland family, and my husband’s family. Special thanks to Dennis and Barb Loyer, and Wilfred and Trudy Loyer, for sharing their stories.

  I consulted numerous works while writing this novel and wish to cite a few that were especially helpful: Conjoined Twins: An Historical, Biological, and Ethical Issues Encyclopedia by Christine Quigley; The Two-Headed Boy and Other Medical Marvels by Jan Bondeson; One of Us: Conjoined Twins and the Future of Normal by Alice Domurat Dreger; Entwined Lives: Twins and What They Tell Us About Human Behavior by Nancy L. Segal; Psychological Profiles of Conjoined Twins by J. David Smith; Millie-Christine: Fearfully and Wonderfully Made by Joanne Martell.

  Finally, my thanks to the people of southwestern Ontario, gracious hosts who continue to indulge my imagination.

  About the Author

  Lori Lansens has written several films and is the author of the internationally acclaimed novel Rush Home Road. This is her second book.