The Lucky Ones

by Tiffany Reisz

  “Pathetic,” said Deacon. Allison turned and saw him standing in the kitchen doorway shaking his head.

  “I know,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “But they’re so cute.”

  “They’re terrified,” Deacon said. “And they’re hiding it from each other.”

  That brought Allison back down to earth.

  “It’s so hard to believe,” she said. “He’s thin. He’s old. But he seems okay.”

  “Dad’s doctor told us kidney failure was a ‘gentle’ death. That’s the word she used. Gentle. Gentle for who? The doctors? We don’t want him in pain. But if he were suffering, at least we could tell ourselves dying would be a relief for him. A release from the pain, I guess. This way it feels like he’s being stolen from us.” Deacon looked past her as if he was too raw to make eye contact. “Remind me to die fast. I don’t want anyone knowing it’s coming. Not even me. Basically I want to be murdered. And I want it to make the news. National news. Postmortem dismemberment is a bonus.”

  “Which member?” Allison asked.

  “Lady’s choice. I assume it’s a woman killing me. Thora, most likely.”

  It seemed it wasn’t just Roland and Dr. Capello hiding their fears behind jokes.

  “Well,” Allison said, “best of luck with that.”

  “Thanks, sis. Ready?”

  “Not quite.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out the key chain can of spray he’d given her. She knew who’d hurt her. She didn’t need it anymore. That she and Deacon could joke around like old times was proof she trusted him.

  He raised his eyebrow but didn’t take the spray out of her hand.

  “Keep it,” he said. “A welcome home gift.”

  “You’re weird, you know that, right?”

  “Stop hitting on me, Allison.”

  Allison and Deacon drove separately into town—he on his motorcycle and she in her rental car. She didn’t blame him for wanting to take out his bike on these last good days before the rain started up. Once it got going, it might be next summer before they saw anything but steel-gray clouds again.

  Allison followed Deacon all the way north to Clark Beach, the quaint little tourist town where Dr. Capello had taken them every Saturday to visit the library, get ice cream and look through the telescopes on the beach. Though it was October and the summer tourists were long gone, the streets were still lively with locals taking advantage of one of the last good days of the year to come to the coast, walk on the white sand and watch the puffins and terns playing on the enormous rock stacks at the edge of the water. So little had changed since Allison was last there she almost expected to see a bearded man in khakis and a cardigan walking down the sidewalk with four or five or six or seven kids behind him doing impressive damage to their ice-cream cones.

  Deacon turned into a tiny parking lot next to a gray-shingled, two-story house. Over the glass front door hung a painted sign that read The Glass Dragon.

  “This is my baby,” Deacon said as she joined him on the sidewalk. The front window of the shop was filled entirely with one glass sculpture—a green-and-gold Chinese dragon, four feet high, five feet long and grinning with manic amphibious joy. The face was astonishingly expressive and the detail on the claws and the scales and the individual dots of color on its dappled skin took Allison’s breath away.

  “You did this?” she asked Deacon.

  “You like it?”

  “It’s amazing.”

  “You want one?”

  “Might not fit in my suitcase,” she said.

  “Get a bigger suitcase,” Deacon said, leading her through the front door. Before Allison could look around the shop, she heard a sound—almost a gasp, almost a squeak.

  Allison saw a woman walking toward her—fiery red hair, tall and fiercely lovely. She grabbed Allison in a rough embrace that almost knocked the wind out of her.

  “Good to see you again, too,” Allison said to Thora, and though the words were slightly sarcastic, Allison was surprised by how deeply she meant them. Until she’d seen Thora again, she’d forgotten how much she’d missed her sister. While Allison had worshipped Roland and adored Deacon, she’d simply loved Thora. Her silly big sister. And Thora had been silly—a quirky, kooky kid through and through. She’d called Allison by a different pet name every day—Rascal and Rainmaker, Pilgrim and Tenderfoot. “Blow on my homework, High Roller. Luck be a straight A tonight,” Thora would say as Allison dutifully blew on her assignments like they were dice. Thora did Allison’s hair for her, helped her pick out her clothes for school, helped her buy her first bra, taught her how to shave her legs but told her she never had to if she didn’t want to. Georgia O’Keeffe had been Thora’s patron saint. Allison’s first taste of feminism had come from Thora, and Allison was forever grateful she’d had someone so sweet to help her through those first harrowing days of puberty. Thora had been both a sister and a substitute mother to Allison, a crazy, wonderful woman who apparently still wore her hair in pigtails at the age of twenty-eight, and as she rocked Allison in her arms, both of them wept.

  “Why are you back?” Thora whispered. “I never thought you’d come back.”

  It wasn’t quite the greeting Allison expected, more stunned than happy.

  “Roland asked me to,” Allison said. Thora pulled back and held her by the upper arms. Thora’s eyes were red-rimmed with tears as they searched Allison’s face.

  “I couldn’t believe it,” Thora said. “When they told me you showed up last night, I just... I couldn’t believe it.”

  “Believe it,” Deacon said. “That’s her. I checked.”

  “You really thought you’d never see me again?” Allison asked.

  Thora glanced over at Deacon and then met Allison’s eyes again.

  “You know, after all that happened,” Thora said.

  “All in the past,” Allison said. Dr. Capello had hinted he’d prefer she not discuss Oliver with anyone. Even Thora.

  “Good,” Thora said and hugged her again.

  “Come on, Al. Enough hugging. I want to show you the hot shop,” Deacon said. He waved her through the small front room and then through an industrial-looking metal door. The second she stepped through the door, Allison was hit with a blast of heat.

  “Wow, that’s hot,” she said, blinking. “I think my face melted.”

  “You get used to it,” Deacon said as he stripped out of his leather jacket down to his sleeveless T-shirt.

  “I thought the no-sleeves thing was because you like to show off your tattoos,” Allison said. “I see now it has a practical benefit.”

  “No,” Thora said, coming in behind them. “It’s to show off the tattoos.”

  Allison took off her own jacket. She’d already started sweating.

  “Truth,” Deacon said, and Thora rolled her eyes. “This is the hot shop. Named because it is really hot.”

  “How hot?” Allison asked.

  “Ninety,” Thora said, glancing at a thermometer on the wall. “Ninety in the room. About a thousand in there.”

  She pointed at a large round floor-to-ceiling oven.

  “A thousand degrees?” Allison repeated.

  “Fahrenheit,” Deacon said. “This is the crucible.” He opened the door to the oven and Allison saw an orange glow emanating from inside. “It’s the reason our electric bill is four thousand dollars a month.”

  “You’re kidding,” Allison said.

  “Good thing I make bank doing this,” Deacon said as he grabbed a long metal pole and twirled it in his hands.

  “What are you doing with that pole?” Allison asked, suspicious.

  “This is the pipe,” he said. “Not a pole. A pipe.”

  “Pipe. Got it.”

  “This—” he pointed at something that looked kind of like an open flame gas grill “—is the pipe warmer. The pipe is room temperature now, and we have to get it hot so the molten glass will stick to it.”

  He put the end of the pipe in the pipe warmer and turned it rapi
dly.

  “How heavy is that thing?”

  “Oh...twenty pounds or so?”

  “So this is how you got the Popeye forearms,” Allison said.

  “You turn a twenty-pound steel pipe for hours every day for five years and you’ll get pretty good arms, too.”

  “Don’t stroke his ego,” Thora said to her. “He’s already impossible to live with. Artists. Can’t live with them. Can’t stuff their bodies in the crucible.”

  Allison laughed. The Twins were still the Twins, through and through.

  “So, you run the shop?” Allison asked Thora as she took a seat far away from the action. The hot shop looked more like a mad scientist’s laboratory to her than an artist’s studio. Everywhere she looked, she saw large and dangerous equipment—steel pipes and blazing ovens, blowtorches and jars upon jars of color chips in every hue of the rainbow and then some.

  “Yep,” Thora said. “I do all the bookkeeping, the accounting, pay the bills, set up museum showings, arrange payment for the pieces he sells. Honestly, dealing with shipping his monsters is the hardest part of the job.”

  “Does he sell a lot?” Allison asked as Thora pulled a metal chair next to her.

  “A lot,” she said, nodding. “Last week we sold a pair of dragons like the one in the window to a hotel in Seattle. Sixty K.”

  Allison blinked. She had to sleep with McQueen for six years to get fifty out of him.

  “Holy... Guess that pays the electric bill,” Allison said.

  “He pretends to be arrogant,” Thora whispered, “but it’s a cover-up for his modesty. He’s becoming very well-known as one of the foremost glass artists in the world.”

  “That’s fantastic,” Allison said. “Our brother is a famous artist.”

  “No autographs, please,” Deacon said, and winked at her.

  Deacon finally pulled the pipe out of the warmer. “Come here, Al. I’ll show you how to sculpt glass.”

  “Me?” Allison said, pointing at herself and looking around.

  “You,” Deacon said. “Come on. I taught Dad, I taught Thor, I taught Ro. I can teach you.”

  “Are you sure this is safe?” Allison asked as she crept from her chair over to the giant round furnace near the wall.

  “Safe enough,” he said. “Long as you don’t do something actively stupid, we’ll be fine.”

  “Okay, I’ll stick to passively stupid. What now?”

  “Gathering glass,” he said, opening the small round hole to the crucible. As soon as that door opened, Allison felt her mascara melt and congeal. She stepped back, watching from a safe distance as Deacon inserted the pipe into the crucible and started to rotate it again. Standing up on her tiptoes she peeked in and saw a round blob of orange goo taking shape at the end of Deacon’s pipe.

  “What are we making?” Allison asked him.

  “You wanted a dragon, didn’t you?”

  “It’ll have to be a baby dragon,” she said. “My rental car’s a compact.”

  “I can make a baby dragon,” Deacon said. “Go to the jars over there and pick out a color.”

  Allison eyed the jars and picked a blue halfway between sea and sky.

  “Now what?” she asked.

  Thora came over and took the jar from Allison’s hand, opened it and spread color chips the size of Legos on a metal table.

  “Step back a little,” Deacon said as he brought the spinning orange blob of glass to the table. He dipped the ball into the color chips and they instantly melted into the blazing-hot glass.

  “I’m going to do the hard part now,” Deacon said. “But you’re going to twist the tail. Ready?”

  “For what?” Allison asked.

  “To be impressed,” Deacon said, grinning again.

  “Ready,” she said.

  Deacon carried the blue blob on his pipe to a wooden stand. He grabbed giant metal tongs, dipped them into a bucket of water and before Allison could wrap her mind around his movements, he’d begun to spin the pipe and pinch the molten glass with his tongs. In seconds it seemed, the little ball turned into a vague lizard shape and then into a dragon with ears like a puppy and a scaly spine.

  “That’s so bizarre,” Allison breathed. “You’re pulling glass like taffy.”

  “Fun fact,” Deacon said. “Glass isn’t quite a solid or a liquid. It’s its own weird thing.”

  “It doesn’t seem right that you can do that. It looks so solid,” Allison said.

  “It’s already solidifying,” Deacon said. “Better make this quick.”

  He dipped his tongs back into the water bucket and then passed them to her.

  “What do I do?” she asked.

  “Pull and twist, twist and pull,” Deacon said. “I’m talking about the glass, by the way.”

  Allison grabbed the dragon’s tail with the tip of the tongs and did as Deacon asked, wincing as the glass stretched and turned and twisted.

  “It’s like a piggy tail,” Thora said, kneeling at the stand to eye the creature. “He’s very cute.”

  “He’s supposed to be scary,” Deacon said as he put on a large oven mitt. Using a wooden block he knocked the dragon off the end of the pipe and onto his gloved hand. “Maybe I can put some big teeth in his mouth.”

  “No, I like him cute,” Allison said. And it was cute, this blue-green little beast with scales and claws and small enough to fit into the palms of her two hands. It was so cute she instinctively reached out to touch it. Thora immediately shoved Deacon so hard the dragon dropped out of his glove. When it landed on the floor, it didn’t break, but merely splatted like blue pancake batter.

  “Oh, shit, I’m sorry,” Allison said.

  “You okay?” Deacon asked, eyes wide.

  “Fine, fine. Just...forgot it was still warm.”

  “Warm?” Deacon said. “It’s nine-hundred degrees. You would have burned your hand off.”

  “So much for not doing anything actively stupid,” Allison said, on the verge of tears. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to break it.”

  “I can make another one in five minutes,” Deacon said. “Can’t make another Allison. Good reflexes, Thor.”

  Allison laughed that sort of relieved, terrified laugh of someone who’d dodged a bullet. But Thora wasn’t laughing. She grabbed Allison and hugged her tight again.

  “You okay?” Thora asked.

  “I’m fine. Except I feel like an idiot,” she said. “You saved me from a dragon. You should be knighted.”

  “Sisters protect each other,” Thora said. “Right?”

  “Right,” Allison said, trying to smile through her shaking. Thora had shoved Deacon so hard he probably had a bruise on his arm.

  After the almost-tragedy, none of them were in the mood to keep playing in the hot shop. Deacon and Thora quickly finished up their paperwork while Allison poked around the front of the shop where Deacon’s premade items were for sale. Glass wind chimes, glass Christmas ornaments and her favorite—hourglasses filled with sand from Clark Beach.

  She paused and studied one particularly strange glass sculpture sitting on a shelf—a skull with a large hole in the top.

  “What’s this?” she asked. “You make a boo-boo, Deacon?” Allison pointed to the hole the head.

  Deacon stood up and turned her way, his hand resting on Thora’s shoulder.

  “Don’t ask what that is,” Deacon said. “Ask who.”

  “Okay,” Allison said, happy to bite. “Who is this?”

  “That’s Phineas Gage,” Deacon said. “He’s the guy who got the iron rod shot through his head in the 1800s. I think he was a railroad worker.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Allison said, eyeing the quarter-sized hole in the glass skull. “I remember reading about him in high school. He survived, right?”

  “Sort of,” Thora said. “He had a completely different