Under Shifting Glass (12 page)

“Oh,” says Zoe.

“And also their liver. They only have one liver.”

“Urgh,” she says. “That's gross.”

Gross
.

I hang up.

She calls back.

“Look,” she says, “I didn't mean gross, like . . . 
gross
.”

“What did you mean?”

“I meant, you know . . . Nothing against your brothers or anything. And I don't have a problem with internal organs, but
livers
. I mean, nobody wants to talk about stuff like that, do they?”

I do. I have to, otherwise it all just sits like a heavy red stone in my brain.

“Since 1950,” I say to my friend Zoe, “seventy-five percent of separations result in one live twin.” This isn't one of Si's statistics. It's one I found myself. Online.

“Seventy-five percent?” queries Zoe, as if she's trying to do the math.

“Yes,” I say. “Or, to put it another way, seventy-five percent of the time, when they separate people who've been”—I pause—“so close . . . one twin dies.”

“Oh,” she says.

“So who do you think it'll be?” I ask.

“Jess . . .” she begins. “
Jess
 . . .”

“Who?” I say.

“Do we have to—”

“Who?” I interrupt. “Which one?”

“Neither—probably neither. Jess—what's gotten into you?”

“You have to say: Richie or Clem.”

Zoe or Jess?

“Why are you asking me this stuff?”

I have a vision: me on my cell phone, Zoe on hers. No wire between us, but joined nonetheless, joined by some powerful but invisible signal, and if I press the red button on my phone, that signal will just snap off, snap away.

I press the red button.

There should be silence. So how come I hear the rip of a surgeon's knife?

The following day we go to the hospital.

“We're going to bring your mom home,” says Si.

“And the babies?”

“No, not the babies. Not yet. And Mom only for the afternoon. Apparently I can't be trusted to bring in the right change of clothes.”

In my pocket I have the flask. It has been quiet and almost colorless every day since I tried to paste the name
Liminal
onto it. But I'm aware of the breath, its quiet ins and outs. Sometimes I think I even hear it when I'm sleeping. Which is impossible.

Only, recently, I've begun to believe that nothing is impossible.

Si turns the radio on and we don't talk much and eventually we arrive at the hospital and ascend fifteen floors in the elevator.

In the Intensive Care Baby Unit, Mom is not on a bed anymore; she's sitting in a chair beside the babies. I've been doing a lot of worrying about the babies, but maybe not enough about Mom. She looks drained and thin.

“Here you are,” she says, and she gets up to greet me. “Missed you.” She gives me a hug and I think I can feel her bones.

“Here's your big sister, boys,” she says to the babies.

I look into the incubator and I expect to see that the twins have grown, because babies do grow fast, everyone says so.
My, how they've grown!
But my brothers still look tiny, their heads still not filling their tiny knitted hats. I pay particular attention to Clem—is he really smaller than his brother? I don't know, maybe not, but his little hand is on Richie's shoulder, so it still looks like he's holding on.

Both babies are asleep, facing each other, their little mouths occasionally munching at precisely the same moment, as if they are having exactly the same eating dream. And then I wonder about their dreams. Do they share dreams, or do they have separate ones?

“Happy dreams,” I whisper down at them. “Have happy dreams.” And they munch and their eyelids flicker, too, and I suddenly feel overwhelmed with love for them.

It seems no time at all before a nurse comes to wheel them away for yet more tests.

“They'll have done so many tests by the time they get out of here,” jokes Si, “they'll be able to go straight to college.”

The nurse laughs, but Mom doesn't. She just watches the babies leave as if somebody were wheeling away her life.

“Come on, now,” says Si. “Let's make the most of the time.”

He takes Mom's suitcase and her hand and helps her into the elevator.

When we get down to ground level and the doors swish open to the outside world, Mom seems to stumble a little, blink in the daylight.

“Are you all right?” says Si. “Are you sure you want to make the journey? I mean, for such a short time?”

“Sure,” says Mom. She nods at me. “I have to see my other baby, don't I?”

Si helps her into the car and we begin the journey home.

“It's amazing,” says Mom.

“What?” asks Si.

“The world,” says Mom, as if she's been gone from it for a hundred years. “It's so bright. And big.” She pauses. “And
busy.” Then she turns around and looks at me. “And you, Jess, even you've changed.”

“Have I?”

“Yes—you've grown up a bit, I think.”

And I don't know if she means
grown up—mature
, or
grown up—taller
or even just
grown up compared with the tiny, tiny twins
, and I don't have time to think about this because Si butts in with: “Jess helped me with Roger the Wreck yesterday. We did the timing chain.”

“The timing chain!” Mom exclaims. “So you've finally done it? Turned Roger the Wreck into, well, just Roger?”

“Well,” says Si, slightly taken aback. “There's always more one can do on a moggie.”

Mom laughs and touches him very lightly on the back of the neck.

And, just for a moment, everything feels all right.

Si asks Mom what she wants to do with her few hours at home.

“I want to eat fresh vegetables,” says Mom, “and go to church.”

There are very few vegetables served in the hospital, apparently, and only frozen ones. Mom wants to eat fresh zucchini and fresh onions and fresh tomatoes and fresh mushrooms.

“And green beans,” says Mom. “I could kill for some green beans.”

So Si says he will drop her at the church and go on a vegetable hunt.

“Will you come with me, Jess?” Mom asks.

Mom doesn't go to church so much for the the services, but for the candles. When we're on vacation, she goes into
every church we pass. She lights candles in memory of my father, and I light them, too.

“Yes,” I say. “Of course.”

Si drops us at St. Nicholas' Church, which is a small flint building with a square tower.

“Do you know what day it is?” she asks as we enter.

“Saturday,” I say.

“Holy Saturday,” she says. “The day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. The day of Christ's entombment.”

“A bardo, then,” I say.

“Huh?” says Mom, but she's not really listening.

We're whispering, even though there is no one in this quiet place but us. The last time I was in this church was at Christmas, when it blazed with light and golden angels and dark holly, and statues of the Holy Family stood in real straw. Now the church is stripped; there are no flowers, the altar is bare, the cross covered in a black cloth.

Mom takes a seat at the back of the church, as though she hasn't quite got the energy to go to the front yet, and I sit beside her. She takes a kneeler and sinks down, head in her hands. I don't know what she's praying about, but I can imagine.

I don't take a kneeler. I just sit on the hard wooden pew and look at the dense gloom in the church. I wish it were
Easter Sunday, I wish someone would just roll back the rock like they did in front of Jesus' tomb and everything would be light and bright again forever.

But maybe nothing's forever.

Zoe.

She's not forever; she's moving on, moving away from me. And if she isn't going all of her own accord, then I'm pushing her, aren't I? I'm just putting the knife in and hanging up the phone to show her I don't care, which just shows how much I do care. Can't she see that?

Then I get cross with myself for sitting in a church and thinking about Zoe when my brothers are probably dying. How can Zoe be as important as the twins? I mean, our relationship, Zoe's and mine, it's hardly life or death, is it?

But that's how it sometimes feels to me.

In fact, more than this. It feels that my join with Zoe, which, okay, didn't start at birth, but was certainly there by the time we were both four, that join sometimes gets all muddled up in my head with the web that joins my brothers. As though what happens between me and Zoe will affect what happens to Richie and Clem.

Yeah, right.

Mom picks herself up from her prayer and pushes the kneeler back under the pew.

“The Anglo-Saxons believed,” she says, “that life is just the flight of a sparrow through a great lighted hall, that we come from the dark and will return to the dark.”

I don't know what this means and I don't ask her, because she looks so sad and I know that she's been to her place when kneeling, just as I've been to mine, and it's probably a private place.

We go together and then toward the front of the church where there's a candle rack, four rows of little black metal dishes with black metal candle spikes in the middle, and a locked box for donations. There are normally one or two pale, thin candles burning here, but today there are none and Mom hesitates, as though maybe we shouldn't be lighting candles here on Holy Saturday, maybe we should wait until the Easter light comes in on Sunday.

But she won't be here on Easter Sunday. And there are candles waiting beneath the rack, so she takes three and puts money in the box.

Three candles. She has never taken three candles before.

“First,” she says, “for your father.”

I hold the candle and she strikes the match.

“For Jeremy,” she says as the wick catches.

“For Dad,” I say, and I push the thin wax end onto the
spike. You mustn't push too hard; the candles are so thin that if you do, they can split and fall.

There's a moment's silence between us and then she says she wants to light candles for the babies. And part of me wants to stop her. I want to say,
We can't light a candle for Dad, who's dead, and for the babies, who
 . . .

Mom interrupts my thought. “I'll do one for Richie. Will you do Clem's?”

Which brings me the monsters.

Because sometimes, when you light one candle from another, one of the flames gutters, it dies.

“Yes,” I say, “I'll do it.”

The Sidewalk Crack Game.

Mom holds Richie's candle. I hold Clem's. If either of the flames gutters . . .

I light mine first, from Dad's, and I do it very, very carefully and the flame leaps up. It burns strong and bright, and I let out the breath I've been holding and push the candle end very gently onto the spike.

Clem lives.

Then Mom takes Richie's candle and lights it from Clem's and it doesn't take immediately, so she pushes down a little harder and there's a sudden fizz and when she takes
the candle away, Richie's candle is lit and Clem's is extinguished.

Clem's candle is dead.

Clem again. Why Clem? The monsters laugh, just like they did in the garage when Clem got all spattered with Si's blood.

I hear myself gasp, but Mom just says, “Oh, shoot. Let's try that again.”

She places Richie's candle on the rack and relights Clem's from Dad's. It burns brightly, innocently.

“There,” she says. “God bless and look after them all.”

But I don't think he will.

All of a sudden, I don't think He Gives a Damn.

When we get back home, Mom organizes clean clothes for herself and Si makes some sort of stew with the vegetables. By the time we sit down to eat it's about 3
P.M
.

I sit at the table, but even though it's late, I'm not hungry—and it's not the fact that it's a plate of vegetables. I like vegetables just fine. It's about what happened in the church; it's about playing the Sidewalk Crack Game and losing.

“I'm not hungry,” I say.

“Eat,” says Si.

So I do. It feels like a kind of giving-in. Afterward, while Mom and I do the dishes, Si drives off to get more gas for the return journey to the hospital.

Mom has been home less than three hours and soon she will be gone again, who knows for how long.

“Mom . . .” I say.

“Yes, Jess?”

“Do you know anyone in Aunt Edie's life named Rob?”

“Rob?” says Mom. “Rob who?”

So I tell her about Aunt Edie's song “For Rob.”

“Must have been someone really important,” I say.

“How do you know that?”

“Because of the music. Because of what she wrote.”

Mom pauses. “No, sorry, doesn't mean anything to me. Why don't you ask Gran?”

And I say I will, but I won't, of course, because whatever Gran knows, she's not telling.

There's a silence and then Mom says, “Do you want to know why I really came home today, Jess?”

“Vegetables?” I offer.

Mom laughs. “Of course not. And not for church or the clothes either. I came home to see you.”

“I know. You said.”

“Did I?” She looks at me quizzically.

“At the hospital.”

“Yes. I suppose I did. But no one but you would have noticed, Jess. You're a really special person, you know that?”

I shrug.

“And sensitive. And sometimes . . .”

I wait.

“Sometimes I'm a bit like that, too. I can tell what people are saying when they're not saying things.”

This would be a muddle in anyone else's mouth, but I know exactly what Mom means.