The Second Life of Samuel Tyne (22 page)

Later, Samuel would take a more tender approach. The next afternoon, Maud and Ama in town, Samuel shuffled into the twins’ room. Removing his hat, he fiddled with it as he waited for his daughters to recover from their surprise. Crouched behind an empty bed, comparing their books, they had thrown them down in tandem as soon as he entered.

Clearing his throat, Samuel lowered himself onto Ama’s cot and, giggling a little, made a conspicuous show of his own nervousness to put them at ease.
“The Idiot, Le Père Goriot
, yes, I myself read those ones in my youth. Quite delightful, quite delightful.” He giggled. “Prince Myshkin and—who is it again?—Nastasya Filippovna, yes, yes. Eugène Rastignac. Quite delightful, quite delightful!”

His daughters’ contemptuous looks silenced him. But just as he was about to speak, he realized he couldn’t tell them apart, and so didn’t know who to apologize to. He cleared his throat, hesitating. Looking from face to face, he said, “With my deepest regret, please accept my apology for having hit you.”

The twin on the left seemed delighted by his indignity. She looked at her sister, who gave Samuel a cold look. He rose to his feet, disappointed, feeling he’d debased himself. Replacing his hat, he left the room.

chapter
TWENTY

A
ma felt drained. She’d taken to spending more time with Yvette and Chloe, only to find them sullen and evasive. Not only did they refuse to speak, but their gestures were restrained and mirrored. At first, Ama thought she had only to keep speaking to get a response. But they maintained their silence. Soon embarrassing herself, Ama would ambush them with constant talk. It wasn’t long before she got the impression they were laughing at her, and, furious, she gave them a dose of her own silence. But she began to feel isolated, as in the darkest weeks of her mother’s illness. Mrs. Ouillet had endured total paralysis, when no single word emerged from her lips. Ama remembered those lips: dry and opalescent, the muscle above them pulsing as she spooned food between them. Perhaps the twins, with their silent rigidity, were making fun of her mother. Ama began to treat the twins with spite.

No sooner had Ama given up on the twins than, lying in bed, unable to sleep in the hot, moist dark, she heard them whispering. Speaking gibberish, as if they knew she eavesdropped. But the fervour in their voices, and the occasionally clear word, told Ama it wasn’t staged. She held her breath and tried not to move.

One of the twins shifted in bed and spoke furiously. The response, also rapid, resounded with forced calm.

There was more shifting, and then Ama heard a high voice unlike either of theirs:
“You’re
Chloe.
I’m
Yvette.”

The other twin cleared her throat, said something in annoyance, and shifted in bed. A week of not speaking had ended to reveal frightened, fighting girls. Ama rolled on her side and tried to sleep.

In the morning, waiting until they’d gone outside, Ama rushed up to the bedroom and, shutting the door behind her, reached under Yvette’s cot to read the letters they’d written her. Finding the space swept bare, she groped first under the extra cot and then under Chloe’s. The letters were gone.

But from the head of Chloe’s bed to its base, arranged in a strict, tidy row, she found two dozen hairbrushes. Some brass, some wooden, some of a plastic fashioned after gold. All lay with their handles at an exacting forty-five-degree angle. Their charms had been lost long ago, most of them broken or bent. Nevertheless, care had been taken with them, their handles glowing with polish, not a single hair to be found in their naked bristles.

It surprised Ama that Chloe could be so delicate with anything. Ama picked one up, fingering its engraved handle. Had these first belonged to Jacob? That idea seemed even stranger. Ama replaced the brush at the same angle as the others and quietly left the room, nervous that Chloe would somehow notice they’d been touched.

But when the twins returned home a few hours later, Ama knew Chloe was too flustered to notice. She seemed tousled these days, a little detached from her surroundings. Yvette did, too, but not as severely. Ama entered the bedroom mid-afternoon to find the twins stuffing something into a pillowcase. As if sensing Ama in the doorway, both twins turned to her.

Ama lost her fear of their synchrony. She saw how it was done: when one decided to move, she alerted her sister with her eyes, and lagging a little, one merely copied the other. Moving so slowly, it was easy to keep pace with each other.

Ama had just entered the room when Mrs. Tyne appeared in the doorway. She herself looked frazzled these days. She fiddled with the clasps on her vinyl raincoat. “Your father’s lying down with a headache in the other room. I’ve got to rush out and pick up our dry cleaning before it closes.” She checked her watch. “Oh, dear. Samuel’s been begging for an aspirin. Do you think you can manage that for me?” Her question was directed at Ama, but it was Chloe who nodded. “Good. I’ll be back in an hour or so.”

The twins rose to get the aspirin. “I’ll hold down the fort,” Ama said. She picked up a book and sat on her cot.

As soon as the twins left the room, Ama lifted Chloe’s pillowcase and reached her hand inside. She found a bundle of crumpled tissues. Something black and spindly was pressed between them, and mistaking this for a dead spider, Ama let out a little cry and dropped the tissue. But when she forced herself to open it, she discovered not an insect, but a small bale of coarse, black hair.

Ama stared at the hair for a moment. Then, as delicately as possible, she rewrapped it and placed it back where she’d found it in the pillowcase. In one smooth gesture, she tried to brush her imprint from the bed, wracking her mind to remember exactly how the sheet had been folded over the pillow. Fumbling, she made a double fold and, once in the hall, stopped to glance back at the bed with apprehension. When the twins appeared at the top of the stairs, she smiled guiltily at them, and excused herself to go the Iron Lung, closing the door behind her.

Maud arrived home more than four hours late, held up by errands. She was conscious of a silence that shouldn’t have existed with three teenage girls in the house. Draping Samuel’s laundered blue suits on the banister, she called her daughters’ names from the bottom of the stairs. Maud made her way to the kitchen, which was filled with austere light, and smelled of the marigolds rotting in a cloudy Mason jar. Maud whisked the jar off the table and tossed it in the garbage. Her eye fell on an open vial of pills on the counter.

Even as her pulse began to quicken, she continued to stand there, silent, unwilling to believe the faded label. Her anxiety hit her all at once, and dropping the bottle, she rushed for the stairs.

“Why did you do this?” said Maud, finding Ama on the landing.

Flushed and breathless, Ama stared, her large eyes confused.

Maud hurried to the master bedroom, with Ama following. Samuel lay on the bed, a dark distinct figure. He looked strange against the pink sheets, weightless; his body seemed to make no impression on the bed at all. Drawing a sharp breath, Maud lowered herself beside him.

“Samuel …
Samuel
, wake up.”

Ignoring Ama’s horrified look, Maud began to slap his cheeks. “Samuel, oh, good, get up. Yes, get up.” Seeing him rouse a little, Maud slapped Samuel a little harder. When he began waking, Maud wiped her eyes on the cuff of her sleeve and turned to Ama. “Don’t just stand there—get him some water.”

Ama stumbled from the room. When she returned to give Maud the glass, her hands shook so much water ran down its sides.

Samuel was fully awake now. He seemed fine, perfectly like himself, excepting the absent bowler, which gave him a curious boyish look. Frowning at the glass forced to his mouth, he kept raising his hand to indicate he wanted to speak. He finished the water, gasping.

“Since when has a man’s sleep attracted so many eyes?” said Samuel.

“How are you feeling?”

“Fine. The twins gave me two aspirins about five hours ago. I feel very much recovered.”

Maud flinched. “My God, they
did
give it to you. But you look all right. How do you feel?”

Samuel smiled at Ama. “Oh, hello. I did not see you there.”

“Samuel,”
said Maud, “how do you feel?”

Samuel shrugged. “Just as I said. Fine. Recovered.”

Maud wiped her eyes again. Samuel looked bewildered. Hesitating, he patted Maud’s elbow.

“Get up and have a stretch around,” she said. “Then we’re going to the hospital.”

Samuel started. “What? Wait, wait, wait. Is it one of the children?”

“You.
You’re
going.”

“Me? Don’t play the goat, I’m fine. What is this hospital business?”

Mrs. Tyne drew a sharp breath. “When I went out, I realized I’d taken the last aspirin three days ago, so I bought a new package. Only I come home to find
this
sitting on the counter. It’s codeine, Samuel. I didn’t even realize Jacob had this in the house.” Sniffling, she turned to Ama. “Where on earth did you even find this? And how could you give it to him when we all know how allergic he is?”

The look of terror on Ama’s face made Maud relent. The girl had probably had nothing to do with it, but it pained Maud too much to confront the alternate possibility. She gave Ama an apologetic look. She examined Samuel for signs of illness.

He looked shaken. “I do not feel dead, so perhaps I have outgrown my allergy.” He exhaled. “A little light-headed maybe, but I do not need any hospital.”

Maud considered. “At least let me call Eudora.”

“Oh, certainly, call her.” Samuel laughed a little. “But if you choose to do so, know that you are forfeiting the rest of your night to inane conversation. The woman is tenacious as a tick. Besides, I will not let her near me.”

“Samuel.”

“No, I mean it, call her. Just picture the headline for the next National Association of Petulant Bossy Women newsletter. ‘Another Domestic Crime Story,’ by Dora Frank. What news that would make.”

Maud scoffed, but he had hit a nerve. “Tell you what. If you get up out of bed, do something active for the next few hours, and let me check on you, we don’t have to go.”

“Amen,” said Samuel. He attempted to rise from the bed, but fell back, looking a little faint. “Just give me one minute.”

“Ama,” said Maud in a gentle voice. “Can we get your help?”

And with their help, one on each side of him, Samuel was lifted from the bed.

He did a little light gardening in the yard, cleared some sludge from the cellar, and by evening he felt strong enough to sit down to a broken television in his study. Maud and Ama kept an eye on him, checking for signs of his dying, and satisfied he wasn’t, they retired to the family room to knit. During the whole tense day no one mentioned the twins, not even to call them down for dinner. They likewise remained hidden, the door of their bedroom only opening when no one was upstairs. Maud heard its hinges creak from the kitchen.

But by dusk she could no longer ignore them. Leaving Ama, she crept upstairs and stood at the threshold of her daughters’ closed door. Raising a fist, she paused before knocking. There was no invitation to enter, but she did so anyway, frowning at the twins, who lay side by side on Chloe’s cot, reading. When they looked at her, their faces made her feel ashamed of what she’d come to say. But she cleared her throat.

“You gave the wrong pills on purpose,” she said, surprised at hearing these words instead of the speech she’d prepared. She was surprised, too, at the lack of conviction in her voice, a pleading sound. “You gave the wrong pills on purpose,” she said again, this time more firmly. She realized she wanted them to defend themselves.

The twins regarded her in silence. A fleeting look of fear crossed Yvette’s face. But she recovered quickly, her features filling with an indifferent, challenging look.

Maud felt an ache in her throat. Not knowing what to say, she left them to their reading.

chapter
TWENTY-ONE

A
naturally morose man, Samuel’s thoughts turned morbid after the pill incident. He’d read in a book that human allergies were cyclical, shed and acquired every seven years. These changes had no precise demarcation; you only found out when exposed to new or neutralized dangers. Samuel felt grateful to have outgrown his allergy to codeine, which he’d discovered in his youth the day it had almost killed him.

It had happened during his flight from his old home to his new. Jacob slept beside him. To his left sat a dark-haired Englishwoman, fussy, nervous, who laughed every time he looked at her. Samuel at first thought he frightened her, but it soon became apparent she suffered from a general self-consciousness. Samuel concluded that her desire to appear ladylike was undermined by her vices. She ate snacks from her pocket, flushing with embarrassment. When her meal came, she ate with great relish, sopping up the sauce with a squalid bun.

When Samuel glanced at the tabloid she was reading, she laughed nervously. “I don’t usually read such nonsense,” she said, “but flights will do that to you, won’t they?
That’s
what I brought.” She pointed to a pristine copy of Woolf’s
To the Lighthouse
, stuffed into the seat pouch in front of her.

Samuel stared at her. Who did she think she was fooling? But he wouldn’t have noticed had she not felt compelled to point out her weaknesses to strangers.

He should have known better than to accept this woman’s advice. But Samuel’s excitement had kept him awake for thirty hours straight, and Jacob looked so peaceful beside him.

“Well, it’s not right for you to be left behind, is it?” she said, pointing to Jacob. She searched through her purse, retrieving an unmarked vial, and shook two pills onto her small, anemic hand. “It’s codeine,” she said. “You’ll sleep like a lamb.”

Sleep like a lamb he did, and almost didn’t wake. He was only roused five hours later in an Algerian hospital. They’d had to ground the plane and take him there, so severe was his swelling, his toxic shock. When it became clear he would live, Jacob berated him for days: “Before this, I had never seen so old a brain on so young a body. Now it is the other way around.”

Now, after having had no reaction to a second dose of codeine, Samuel wondered if the woman on the plane had given him codeine at all.

Samuel sat in his shop. No one came to offer condolences, and though glad no one knew of his accident, he couldn’t help feeling somewhat disliked. Maud had gotten consolation for
her
accident. His mind was taken off his childish bitterness only by the arrival of Ray Frank, who’d run over on his lunch break from his parts shop.

Propping the door open with his foot, soot on his cheeks, Ray called, “Don’t suppose you know much about tractor parts?”

Samuel shrugged. “Not really.”

“You sure? You’d make good money. I’m doing the rest, but there’s a part for the engine I just can’t get from my distributors. Can you check with yours? I’ll cut you fifteen per cent.”

“Oh, you do not have to do that,” laughed Samuel. “Just find out about Jacob’s will for me, and we can call things even.”

Ray winked. “I appreciate it,” he said, his eyes trailing a thin, haughty-looking woman pushing a stroller past the shop. Only when she’d passed did he focus again. “All right, Sam, take down this serial number.” He recited it off the back of his hand.

“Wait, wait, let me get my book.”

“Hurry, Samuel, I’ve got to motor.”

Samuel fussed with the wires and papers strewn all over the counter, pressured by Ray’s impatience. He found what he was looking for under his stool. “All right, give it to me again.” But as soon as Ray began to speak, Samuel realized he had the wrong ledger. This one was filled with childish writing.

“Got that?” called Ray, already out the door.

Samuel flipped to a blank page. “Let me double-check. Just say it one more time.”

Ray made an exasperated noise, but recited it a final time, emphasizing each number as though speaking to an imbecile. He rushed out the door.

Samuel waited until he couldn’t see Ray from the window any more to open the ledger. The twins often helped themselves to the empty green ledgers in his study, a hoard of thirty or so he’d permanently borrowed from the government office. Sure enough, on the front cover Chloe had inscribed her name.

Wed. July. 5. Y. stared at Asthma during dinner tonight—secret friendship? Thur. July. 13. Y. leaned over my soup when I went to bathroom—silica gel? Varnish? Did not finish soup. Y. alone in alcove with grape juice, seemed scared when I came in for cup. Did not drink juice. Mon. July. 17 9:45 a.m. I go to bathroom. 9:48 a.m. Y. gets up to go to bathroom. 10:02 a.m. I yawn and roll on my right side. 10:03 a.m. Y. yawns and rolls on her right side. 11:55 a.m. I roll over to read—got
my exact book
in her hands, has just rolled over to read. Tue. July. 18. Y. stuttering. Saw a gleam in her eye at top of the stairs—moved out of way before she could push me. Wed. July. 19. Y. still blames me—detergent in my juice—didn’t drink it
.

The list filled half the pages of the notebook. Samuel closed it, sitting for a minute on his chair. He didn’t know what to think; he refused to see anything in it, taking it for a game he would make sure the twins gave up. But he had a feeling. Not a mild feeling, like a hunch or even intuition. Dread.

To clear his mind, Samuel worked on his prototypes. All had been going just as planned, save the base costs, which were more demanding than he’d predicted and had begun to strain him a little. His friendship with Ray helped interest a few local investors, and having fronted him money, they merely waited to see what he came up with before giving him more. In all other matters he was his own man. He had proved himself, and felt vindicated. He was so close to justifying his life with a great work that it scared him to move too fast. And with Maud finally a little convinced of the plan’s ingenuity, if not its practicality, he accepted the eventuality of fame and threw himself headlong into it.

But he couldn’t keep his thoughts on the work, and closing early, he drove home.

The Tyne house was filled with grainy light that made the furniture look stark and severe. It was so quiet that Samuel could hear the water heaters ticking, the sound of wind in the grass out back. On the kitchen table Maud had placed a bouquet of fake roses in a horn-shaped brass vase, and Samuel felt for the first time all summer his uncle’s presence in the house. Here was a part of himself Jacob hadn’t managed to take with him to the grave. Seeing the vase, which Jacob had spent decades polishing, Samuel was reminded of the jealousy he’d felt towards it as a young man. How he had spat on it when ignored by his uncle, filled it with filth, and even, one time, attempted to throw it in a fire. But the vase survived, and he lived alongside it, despising it like a gifted sibling he was hopeless to outdo.

Samuel picked it up, running a finger along its nicks and scars. Someone else was home. A loud thud shook the house to its foundations, followed by silence, then a second thump. Still clutching the vase, Samuel left the kitchen and started upstairs. At the threshold of the twins’ room, he paused for a minute before turning the doorknob.

In the centre of the room, one twin sat on top of her sister, who lay on her back. The curtains were unfastened, and the shade made it difficult to see exactly what they were doing. Neither noticed their father. The one on the bottom whimpered, and in response, the other lifted her sister’s head by the ears and threw it down with a resounding thud. When the girl cried out in pain, the twin on top grabbed her head again and slammed it on the hardwood. The whole thing seemed like some grotesque joke, a sickening scene they’d read somewhere and were re-enacting. The girl lying down began to moan, and her sister seized her by the head again.

Samuel yanked the girl off her sister. Stupefied, pained, his right eye began to spasm. The twins seemed so indistinguishable to him that his inability to tell the victim from the perpetrator only added to his distress. The girl who’d lain down stood up, dazed, and Samuel watched helplessly as, instead of gratitude or even fear, she gave him a look full of disgust, as though he’d humiliated her.

“What manner of game are you playing here?” he said, his voice cracking. “What manner of game is this?”

At the sound of his voice, the perpetrator ran from the room. Before he could stop her, the other ran after her, and he followed them down the stairs.

“You wait,” he yelled, “you wait one second.”

But they sped up, and in seconds they’d run through the house and out the bay door. Helpless, he watched their figures cross the grassy fields.

“What manner of game is this?” he muttered, sitting on the arm of a couch. He realized he was still holding the vase and, with an anguished noise, threw it on the floor. Had it all been a game, or had she intended to kill her sister? Was it some ritual he didn’t understand, something they’d read in a book? Should their books be taken from them? When it occurred to Samuel his daughters might be possessed, he was astonished that the thought didn’t resonate like it should have. Perhaps, unconsciously, he’d thought it before. He’d certainly seen cases of possession, and though he’d been a skeptic at the time, they remained remarkable to him. As a young man, he and his westernized classmates had taken a road trip to a tiny village where a public exorcism had drawn a crowd into a dusty compound. A man with an angular face sat on the ground at the centre, wearing mudcloth. Someone called from deep in his throat, and the horde clapped and called back. The air was heavy with smoke. For a long time nothing happened, and Samuel and his friends grew bored. Finally, the young man’s hands rose and trembled. His voice silenced the crowd, deep and prophetic, like the voice of a man already dead. The exorcist addressed him casually, as though they’d chanced to meet on a bus. But after a few minutes the afflicted interrupted and, in a way that would have humiliated him if he were sentient, began to scuttle in the dust like a land crab. The crowd taunted him, and he spat and banged his head on the concrete until knocked unconscious. Facing the crowd, the exorcist prayed over him and within minutes the afflicted had been restored to himself. When Samuel and his classmates broke through the crowd, the exorcist assured them the man had been fully cured and told them to go away. A hoax, Samuel and his mates agreed with smug, full-bellied looks.

Samuel attended two more exorcisms alone; one in which a woman was troubled by the spirit of a goat she’d reputedly poisoned, the other the case of an elder who’d negligently buried his only granddaughter. In both cases the same prayer technique was used, and both times Samuel carried away the same misgiving. Whether it was his scientific training or a more congenital skepticism, he refused to accept the authenticity of what he saw. It all seemed too comical, too dramatic, to have the depth of a miracle. He dismissed it as ambitious fraud, a dark industry from which the government profited as much as the average charlatan. The fraud often backfired on the “specialists,” with everyone from farmers to politicians using them as scapegoats. In March of that year, even, the Tanzanian government had jailed five rainmakers for allegedly creating too much rain and destroying farmers’ crops. Samuel found this ludicrous, the creation of rain so beyond the realm of man. But driving home from the last spectacle, he was depressed by an ancestral desire to believe, and lamented with bitter humour that too much schooling had made a white man of him. He never attended another event.

Jacob’s grave was shallow and unblessed. Perhaps the old truths were right. Perhaps the twins’ behaviour was the dead talking through the living. Jacob was still wrestling his angel. And Samuel held the key to his peace and wouldn’t use it. He hadn’t bothered with a funeral and the time for libations was long gone; perhaps it was affecting his family more than he cared to admit.

The thought appalled him. Even if there were some truth to it, Jacob, though not kind, had never been vengeful. Lately Samuel had been wondering how Jacob could possibly have relied on Saul Porter for anything, never mind comfort in his staid old age. Samuel tried to reconcile the memory of one man to the reality of the other. Porter’s ancestors had probably been money-doublers: that odious breed of
juju
men who convince dupes to leave money in agreed-upon places, promising that by some prayer-incited miracle the money will multiply, and arranging a date for it to be collected. Of course, the
juju
man collects it first, leaving rocks, empty boxes or sandbags to replace the stolen savings. Even professors and church pastors had fallen prey to his kind.

Samuel looked across the way at Porter’s house. Last week, Porter had forcefully extended his property lines, cutting down trees on the Tyne side. Samuel was fed up. He rushed through the grass, surprised that Saul wasn’t grooming the grounds. The Porter’s rotting wood door gave Samuel a sliver, and spiders like ripe Spanish grapes draped the eaves. Samuel hadn’t considered his speech beforehand, planning to let the force of his anger drive his words. He wiped wet dust from a window and tried to see past the treated glass; it felt like his whole life would pass before the door opened. He knocked again, and still no one answered. Backing away, he listened, trying to decipher human sounds. It appeared no one was home, but so it always did when the Porters kept indoors, and Samuel refused to be their fool a second time, to walk away while they watched his retreat from the shadows. Guarding his knuckles with his cuffs, he banged with the insistence of a landlord. Stillness responded, like a parody of silence, a held breath. Behind him, the heat slid off the green riding mower in trembling sheets.

“Will you come out,” Samuel yelled, “or do we wait for this tedium to kill me and leave my body on your threshold as evidence of your malice?”