A
s if that explains everything.
As usual, Jake misses the point. He skims the top off things. Sure, what
happened
was that we both sleepwalked to the train station at the same time. And had the same dream. And talked and talked. But that was just the cherry, the whipped cream. Down deep with the hot fudge and ice cream was what
else
happened. What
really
happened. Which was this: we became ourselves. I know, it sounds weird. But it’s like, on the train in the Moffat Tunnel that night, not quite all of us was born. I mean, it looked like all of us was born. But something was missing. The knowing. We didn’t
know
who we were. Not really. (The important word there is
we
.) We just went along with the program for the first
six years, being but not knowing ourselves. Being “twins.” To everybody else: adorable, mysterious twins. To ourselves: Duh, so what’s the big deal?
And then we awoke that night hand in hand at the train station, and it’s like the
rest
of us was finally born. We knew. At last we
knew
. We saw ourselves like everybody else saw us. It suddenly hit us: we’re different!
It’s like a beautiful present had been sitting there for six years and we never noticed it and then finally we did and we tore it open and…
wow!
The present was
us
.
So what exactly is it that we finally knew?
Well, we knew that not everybody can hear their brother from five miles away. We knew that not everybody yells, “I’m stuck!” when it’s happening to somebody else.
Okay, that’s what we knew about everybody else, but what about
us
? What did we finally know about
us
?
We couldn’t say—we could only feel—because there were no words. It’s like, whatever it was, it existed on the other side of words. So if you were following us on the way home from the train
station that night, you wouldn’t have heard regular, full-sentence talk. All you would have heard were scraps, like “Did you see…!” and “What a fantastic…!” and “Do you believe…!” And that’s about all. Because the rest of the talk was happening between our heads, not our mouths.
What an amazing night, the night we unwrapped ourselves. Before we knew it, Jake pointed to the sky and said, “Look—it’s morning!” We had been circling our block all night—two six-year-olds in July in pj’s and bare feet. We raced for home. The front door was wide open. We ran to the kitchen, grabbed cereal boxes and bowls. We were just starting to eat—hard to do when you’re gulping giggles—when Mom came down.
She nearly fainted. “What are you two doing up? You’re never up this early.”
“We’re too excited to sleep,” Jake said.
“It’s our birthday!” I said.
O
ur birthday party was in the backyard. Some cousins were there plus a couple of neighborhood kids. Dad grilled hot dogs and hamburgers. The cake had blue and pink candles. We both blew them out at once. Well, I blew. Lily burped. It was her first public burp. Everybody laughed, so ever since then she thinks she’s the world’s greatest burper. She can burp on command. She practices.
Dad took our picture as we stood next to a stepladder. He said he was going to do it every year on our birthday, to show how we’re growing up the ladder.
For her present, I gave Lily a model train engine. (Mom paid for it.) Lily didn’t even know she wanted it, but I did. I wrapped it in a paper
bag. When I gave it to her, she screeched, “A train!” Mom said, “No fair, you peeked.” But she didn’t peek. She didn’t have to.
Lily gave me a stone. I was already collecting stones by then. She must have found it at the creek, because it was worn smooth as glass. It was the size and shape of a robin’s egg, gray with thin pink lines through it. I still have it.
Every year our parents give us tools. That year it was a tape measure for Lily, a ball-peen hammer for me. Mom and Dad have their own construction business. They build and renovate houses. They don’t believe in buying stuff you can make. Their motto is “If you want it, make it.”
One of the kids at the party was a mystery. Nobody knew him. He said his name was Bump. Turned out he lived up the street. Bump Stubbins. He saw the party going on and invited himself. Nobody had the heart to tell him to scram. He had a Mohawk haircut.
After we opened our presents, I saw him walking away. A couple minutes later he came back with a big grin and said, “Happy birthday,” and gave me a stone. A muddy, ordinary-looking stone. I was
thinking if I washed off the mud maybe it would look pretty neat. But Lily wasn’t fooled. “That’s stinky,” she said. She grabbed the stone from my hand and threw it into the next yard. She snarled at him, “Don’t ever give my brother a stinky stone again.” Already she didn’t like Bump. She turned to Dad. “Daddy, kick him out. Nobody invited him.” Dad just laughed and said, “Now be nice, Lily. You’re the birthday girl.”
That was the day we found out we couldn’t play hide-and-seek. There were no good places to hide in the yard, so us kids were let into the house. “You can hide anywhere downstairs,” my dad told us. “But no upstairs.”
When Lily was It, I hid in the back of the closet in the mudroom. As soon as Lily reached one hundred, I heard her call, “Give it up, Jake! I know you’re in the mudroom!”
When I was It, Lily cheated. She sneaked upstairs. My sister cheats a lot. Which is no big deal, because she’s so bad at it she doesn’t fool anybody. She lies too. Anyway, when I finished counting and opened my eyes, I knew exactly where she was. “Lily!” I called. “Come down from behind the
shower curtain!”
“Rats!” I heard her growl.
As she came stomping down the stairs, Mom and Dad were gaping at me boggle-eyed.
J
ake got one thing right—I didn’t like Bump from the start. But more about that meatball later.
Because we had been awake since three o’clock in the morning that sixth birthday, we went to bed right after dinner. The last thing I said to Jake was, “Should we tell Mommy and Daddy?” Jake said, “Not yet.”
Years later
not yet
is still going on.
For a long time our parents didn’t have to tell us to go to bed. We couldn’t wait to be alone in the dark so we could giggle and talk about our amazing secret. Our talk happened in an up-and-down direction because we had bunk beds then. Of course I was on top.
It’s like the secret was our new toy. But it
wasn’t an easy toy to play with. I think at first we thought we were magicians or wizards. We figured we had powers. “Maybe we’re superheroes,” Jake said one day. “Yeah,” I said, “maybe this is what superheroes are like when they’re little kids.” We were actually serious. Well, not serious enough to try flying off our roof. But serious enough to make up magic words and paint a stick gold and convince ourselves it was a magic wand. We tried to make the teakettle talk. We tried to make daggers spring from our fingernails. We tried to set the sofa on fire by staring at it. Nothing worked. Shoot, we couldn’t even make a chair walk across the room.
We tried to wizardize somebody else. Bump Stubbins started coming around on his WonderWheels the day we got our own WonderWheels. We would go riding off down the sidewalk and there he was, pedaling along with us. He kept turning off and saying, “This way! This way!” but we never followed and he had to turn around and catch up with us. One day I had enough. I pointed the gold stick at him and said, “Moozum!” three times and concentrated as hard as I could. At first I pictured his arms falling off. I peeked and saw
that wasn’t happening, so I settled for just making him disappear. But there he was, as visible as ever and even more annoying because he was smirking at me.
So we figured out pretty quick that whatever power we had—we still didn’t have a word for it—was just between the two of us. And we had more to learn. One day I heard a thump in the dining room. Jake was on the floor, ready to cry, rubbing the back of his head. “What happened?” I said. “I let myself fall backward,” he sniveled. “I thought you would catch me.”
Another time I was in the backyard and I wanted Jake to come out and play, so I closed my eyes and I concentrated on his name:
Jake…Jake…come to me
. My eyelids were getting sore, and still he wasn’t coming. I found him in the basement playing with Mom and Dad’s tools.
I would think about cupcakes and say, “What am I thinking about?” and he would say “donkeys” or “Bugs Bunny”—anything but cupcakes.
Every day we said to each other, “What are you thinking? What are you thinking?” We never knew. Weeks went by. Months. Nothing happened.
We tried playing hide-and-seek. We couldn’t find each other. We were back to being ordinary run-of-the-mill twins. It’s like our powers had tricked us. Teased us. Made us feel special, then backed off.
“Maybe it was a phase,” I said.
“What’s a phase?” said Jake.
I had heard our parents use the word. “I think it’s, like, when you outgrow something.”
Jake’s mouth pouted. “I don’t want to outgrow it.”
“Me neither,” I said. Our heads came together and we were sad. We went to bed sad.
But on our next birthday—our seventh—we woke up in the middle of the night. At the train station. To a blinding light. And the smell of pickles.
S
o that’s how it went from then on. Every birthday night—July 29—there we were, at the old train station, in our pajamas, waking up from the same dream, the blinding light of the oncoming train, the smell of pickles. We weren’t worried about our power ditching us anymore. We knew it was there. We knew it would come and go on its own schedule, not ours.
I was happy to call it our “thing” or “power.” But that wasn’t good enough for Lily. She kept saying it had to have its own one-of-a-kind name. Then one school morning I felt something pressing my nose. I opened my eyes. Lily’s face was hanging upside down from her upper bunk. “Goombla,” she said. I just stared. “It’s goombla.” I knew exactly
what she was talking about. We finally had a word for our special thing.
Goombla.
I just didn’t like her timing. It was five o’clock. “Go to sleep,” I growled, and turned over.
Every birthday I gave Lily a train car. Every year she gave me a stone. But there were no more parties at the house. Lily was afraid Bump Stubbins would show up again, so she begged our parents to do our birthdays at The Happy Hippo.
One thing was the same for every birthday: we got twin presents from Grandpa Dooley (our mom’s dad). We call him Poppy. Poppy and Grandma Dooley lived in California. Dad says they were flower children left over from the seventies. They were hippies. They lived over a garage and drank green tea, and Grandma wore a flower in her hair every day like it was still the seventies. In pictures we saw, Poppy’s hair was as long as Grandma’s. The only shoes they had were sandals.
Grandma died trying to save the redwoods. She was perched in a giant redwood two hundred feet up for eight days and refused to come down until they stopped cutting down the trees. But something broke up there and she fell. And then, in a
way, so did Poppy.
“Poppy went off the deep end,” Mom and Dad told us. He tried to be a regular person. He got a haircut. And socks. He got a job in a supermarket and then an office and then a bank. But he just couldn’t do it, not without Grandma. One day he walked out of the bank and never came back. He walked clear out of California. He was gone by the time of Uncle Peaceboy’s wedding and our birth on the train. Nobody heard from him until a strange box came to the house the day before our second birthday. It was from Mexico and inside it were two sombreros. Even though they were kid-sized they were still too big for us, but we wore them anyway, down over our faces, because we loved them so much.
Poppy sailed to every continent. He worked on freighters and tankers. Every birthday a box arrived from a different country. We got bolos from Argentina, tiny silver elephants from India, emu feathers from Australia, voodoo masks from Haiti. The two gifts were always identical.
“Why doesn’t Poppy ever come see us?” We were always asking that. The only answer we ever
got was, “He’s trying to find himself.” That made no sense. When we got old enough to have our own email address, we kept sending messages to his BlackBerry: “Hurry up and find yourself so you can come see us.” He always answered us, but the only thing that showed up on our porch was a birthday box every July 29.
Bump Stubbins kept showing up too. Lily kept telling him to get lost. He was a real clown. He would crash his bike into a telephone pole. He would pretend to walk into a wall. He would reach into his nose with the tip of his tongue. For a while there he had a new act every day. I guess he figured if he could make Lily laugh, she would let him join us. But she wouldn’t even look at him. Me? I just thought he was funny.
He was especially funny the day Lily and I were on the porch wearing our sombreros and practicing our Mexican: “
Si si!
” and “
Muchos gracias!
” Bump comes along, and before you know it he snatches my hat and plops it on his own head. I was mad at first, but when I saw how funny he looked, all I could do was laugh. But Lily went after him. He jumped down from the porch and started running.
That’s the day he found out how fast Lily is. She caught him and grabbed for the hat. But it didn’t come right off because it had a string that went under the chin, and when she pulled at the hat the string caught his neck and he jerked to a stop. Lily grabbed the hat and brought it back to me. Bump staggered home whimpering, and we figured that was that.
That day after dinner Bump showed up with his mom. She showed our parents the mark on his neck. And here’s where it got surprising for Mrs. Stubbins. Before she had a chance to say anything else, Lily squeezed out from between Mom and Dad and piped up, all cheery, “I did it!” Mrs. Stubbins first looked shocked, then disappointed because she didn’t have a chance to complain or accuse anybody. She glared at Lily, glared at me, glared at our parents. “Well,” she said, “I hope you’re going to punish her for choking my son.”
“Oh, we will,” our father said.
I guess Bump still wasn’t satisfied, because then he snarled at Lily, “And you ain’t
twins
neither. Twins look exactly
alike
.”
Lily went for him, but Dad caught her by the
shirt collar. He smiled at Mrs. Stubbins. “We have it covered.”
After Bump and his mom stomped off, Dad said one simple word to Lily: “Room.”
Lily put a grump on her face and slumped upstairs. She wasn’t going to our room but to the Cool-It Room. Lily will explain that in a minute.
See, what Mrs. Stubbins didn’t know is that Lily confesses. (I already told you that she lies, but she never lies when the question is, “Did you do it?” She steals my pumpkin seeds but never denies it.) Confessing is very rare among kids. And she didn’t mind getting punished, especially when punishment was the Cool-It Room.