No,
she thought.
And, for the first time, Mally heard her clearly. That one word. In separate rooms, both girls struggled to sit up.
“Hey! Hey! Hi there!” Tim said, jumping out of his chair when he saw Mallory strain against her pillows. “Thank God, oh thank God. Hold on! Go slow, honey.”
More gently than he had ever held his rough-and-tumble child, Tim Brynn slid an arm under Mallory’s back and asked, “Are you
awake
awake now, Mal? Mallory? Do you understand what I’m saying? You gave us quite a scare, little one. You’ve been out of it, well, in and out of it, since the fire. Three
days
ago, Mally. You’re a hero, you know? Did you know that? Alex and Adam and the little girls would never have made it without you two. Don’t. Don’t try to talk. You sucked in half a houseful of smoke.” When she pointed to her face, Tim said, “That’s oxygen going in through your nose, and purified air around you. Your face was just scorched, like a bad sunburn. No scars. I promise.” Ill at ease, when he ought to be happy, for a reason he didn’t quite understand, Tim hurried on, sharing with Mallory a list of details that might have been important to her at any other time but this. “Actually, it’s amazing that the house is not that bad. They’re staying with us now, but the worst thing was the smoke damage. And the porch is wrecked, of course.” He added, “You’ll be out in a few days. I should ring for the nurse. . . .”
Why isn’t he telling me?
Mallory wondered.
He knows it’s the first thing I would want to hear.
On the other side of the wall, Campbell said to Meredith, “Please, honey, stop trying to talk. The oxygen tube isn’t going to let you, anyhow. Your chest is going to hurt for a while, not to mention your poor little hand. And you’ll probably have the worst sore throat ever. Are the pain meds helping?”
Meredith writhed on the bed
. How do they expect me to rest when I can’t hear her? I’m not sure if she can hear me or if I’m dreaming. Why don’t they know?
Campbell said, “Merry-heart. I’ll never forgive . . . myself. I shouldn’t have gone. It was so selfish. . . .” Meredith waved that away, gently shaking her head and pointing at her nose. Campbell recognized the ancient gesture that, in the family, meant “
pay attention
!” Merry looked hard at her mother, unblinking, and touched her heart. Misunderstanding, Campbell broke into tears and said, “I love you, too.” Meredith tapped her heart again, more urgently. Beneath the huge mitt of her bandages, she felt the reprimand of the pain.
She turned her head away from Campbell.
In her own room, Mallory lay back, exhausted and frustrated.
Tim went on, “Honey, don’t get upset. You’re going to be good as new. . . .” Struggling, Mally pointed at her head. Tim tried to interpret what she was saying “Think? How did it happen?” Mally put up two fingers, pointed to her right hand, and shrugged elaborately.
Right-handed
, she tried to tell her father,
right-handed
. She was so used to communicating without so much effort! “Honey, it wasn’t the fireworks. We don’t know who set off the fireworks. Maybe it was the same person who set the fire, maybe it was someone different. What I mean is, it was set in a different way. Some kid threw a gasoline bomb, or whatever, on the roof—gasoline in a Coke bottle for all we know. There was glass up there. God only knows why. Kevin never met a stranger in his life.”
In the next room, Merry gathered her strength and her bandaged paw, then pointed to her left hand.
Left-handed, Mom
, she tried to tell Campbell.
Left-handed
. She had to know, and before she got too sleepy.
In answer, her mother said, “They don’t know who did it. It blew up. They assume a car full of drunk kids . . .”
Meredith croaked.
“Don’t talk,” Campbell soothed her. “Shush now.”
“Mally . . .”
“I’m sorry. I just assumed you two . . . you know. Could hear, like always. Your sister is fine. She inhaled smoke, but she’ll be fine,” Campbell assured her. Campbell wanted to kick herself. More than Tim did, she understood about the tin-can telephone that joined her daughters. “You saved her life, darling. You pulled her out onto the back porch.” Campbell began to cry, fresh unchoked rivulets of tears.
Next door, Mallory first tapped, then pounded on her chest. Tim nodded and said, “Yes, you inhaled smoke.” Mally made her eyes go wide and shook her head violently. Tim reached under the clear tent and gently held Mallory’s shoulders down against the sheets. “Look, Mallory. You need to be quiet now, honey.” Mallory pounded her small chest more frantically. “What?” Tim asked. “Don’t get hysterical . . . I’ll get paper.” He gave Mallory a pencil and a sheet ripped from the telephone book. Mally began to write. Tim ran for Campbell.
“Oh, my baby!” Campbell cried, diving, oblivious of the protocols, into the tent. “We were so scared you wouldn’t wake up. Merry was sedated, but you . . . you just wouldn’t wake up!” Campbell’s face was smeared with cold tears and spent mascara. She turned to her husband. “You did tell her that Meredith is okay? I don’t think they can hear each other.”
“What?” Tim asked. “Hear each other? They can’t even talk, Cam.”
Campbell ignored him.
“You know Merry is okay, don’t you?” Campbell asked Mallory. Mallory shook her head.
Tim put his hand over his eyes.
“Your sister is fine,” he said. “That’s what she meant, pounding on her chest. Me. She was saying ‘me.’ She meant ‘my twin.’ ”
Finally
. Dad was great, but so thick sometimes.
“Meredith pulled you out of the fire,” Campbell said. “You were this close to the burning couch, and the couch and curtains were an inferno. She . . . does have a bad burn on one of her palms.” Mallory cringed. “But she’ll heal. It’s not nearly as bad as it could have been.”
Mallory fell back, spent, and despite the flicker of guilt, was soon asleep. The paper she had clasped in her hand slipped to the floor. When a nurse picked it up later, she could barely make out the scrawled words:
Merry, Merry, Merry.
HEROES AND VILLAINS
By the end of their first week back at school, Mallory was sick and tired of everyone treating them like little china dolls. It was January, and still no snow, only bleak sleet and mud.
Everybody was so bored that all they could talk about was the fire.
And when they talked about the fire, Mally felt like an idiot.
Mally’s temper matched the weather.
Her voice was no longer hoarse. She still felt dizzy when she ran and had to stop over and over. Both girls had chest X-rays and a frightening examination of their lungs called a broncho-scope that showed, remarkably, nothing much. Despite all that they might have inhaled—from soot to charred fibers. Mallory possibly because she lay facedown, Merry because she held the coat over her face—their lungs seemed relatively fine and would soon be normal.
Despite the physical healing, Mally somehow didn’t feel whole . . . or like herself. If she could not undo the past and will the fire never to have happened, she wished at least that people would stop
talking
about it.
There was the big burst of attention just afterward.
“Don’t you hate this?” Mallory asked Merry one night. Someone from Canada called to ask if they’d be on the radio, and before Merry could stop her, Mally told the woman, “We’re not allowed.”
“No, actually, I think it’s great,” Merry said. “Why shouldn’t we get credit? We, like, almost died. We saved the kids.”
“You’re supposed to save your brother and your cousins, duh,” Mally said. “If we were, like, pioneers, our parents would have already forgotten this. Kids our age pulled their brothers and sisters out of burning tents and junk all the time.”
“Well, we’re not like pioneers.” Merry was sleeping with an eye mask these days, in case someone wanted to take her picture in the morning.
“I just want it to end.”
“I just want it to last forever,” Merry insisted. “My whole season is ruined. I might as well have some fun.” Her picture was being zipped around the county by every kid with a cell phone in Ridgeline. The knowledge of her real, if fleeting, fame was a cozy little cushion of contentment inside her.
Mallory wished she could be invisible.
For starters, in the newspaper photo taken just after they left the hospital, Mally thought that her face, although barely swollen anymore, looked like a ripe plum. She was annoyed every time she had to thank someone for giving her a copy of the picture—as if she might have missed it! She had enough to fill two photo albums!
The headline read, TWINS SAVE SIBS IN BIRTHDAY BLAZE. Pictured with them were the editor of the
Ridgeline Reporter
, Fred Elliott, as well as the mayor, Joan Karls, and Wendell von Pelling, the fire chief. Chief von Pelling looked sheepish, as well he might. The first two calls about a fire were thought to be hoaxes because they obviously came from teenagers, with laughter and the sounds of loud music in the background. The department responded, but there was grumbling. When Grandpa Brynn called, he gave the dispatcher a piece of his mind along with a description of the disaster and reminded her that his son was a lawyer and might sue the department.
The officials presented each of the twins with Public Service medals and five-hundred-dollar scholarships from the state Police and Fire Association.
Much sweeter were the little notes from Hannah and Heather and Alex. Hannah’s began, “We love Twin . . .” (Their cousins, like most of their teachers, couldn’t tell Mallory and Meredith apart, and called them, separately and collectively, “Twin.”) Aunt Kate was ridiculously moved by Meredith’s gutsy effort to save the baby books. She bought her a hundred-dollar gift certificate to Scrips-and-Scraps—which Merry intended to use entirely for commemorating her cheerleading career. For Mallory, her aunt and uncle provided a year’s worth of weekly tickets to the Overture Cinema Center in Deptford. Mally was grateful, but didn’t know how her aunt thought she was going to pop over to the Deptford Mall on her own. Maybe Drew or Eden would take her.
Drew came over every day to look at her like she was a science project. “I can’t believe you went through that,” he said, and begged for detail after detail. He brought Mally two more of his outgrown cross-country shirts and one that was new. “All guys are pyros,” Drew said. “But this had to be some kind of psycho if he knew people were in there.”
“Maybe it was a girl,” Mally suggested, just to bug him.
“No, a girl wouldn’t do that. I looked it up.”
“Oh, well, if you looked it up . . .” Mallory mocked him. Drew’s face flushed. Mally felt sorry for redheads: They would never be able to play poker.
“It’s true. Girls don’t have the same thing with fire. They’ll catch him, though, because they always make a mistake.”
“The one who burned down the church in Tremont didn’t.”
“That’s the one fire everyone always brings up. . . .” Drew said. “But I read about it on the Internet, and it said they always make a mistake. Like on purpose. They’re proud of what they do. Arsonists. I don’t know about that church in Tremont. Maybe somebody did it who’s already in jail for something else. Whenever I talk about this, someone mentions the church.”
“That’s because it was the only other one there was,” Mally told him. “We don’t get a lot of arson in Ridgeline. I Googled the last murder. It was in 1956. That was, like, years before my mother was born.”
“Who was it?” Drew asked.
“Guy shot his wife’s boyfriend. Very boring.”
“What about the cat murders?” he asked Mallory.
“I’m not counting cat murders. People poison cats all the time. It’s creepy, but people just hate cats. There actually are too many cats, Drewsky. And cats don’t really like people, either.”
“I like my cat,” Drew objected. His ancient one-eyed cat, Fluffy, slept every night practically on Drew’s head. Drew smelled like shampoo and mint kitty litter.
“Do you want to go to the movies?” Mally finally asked.
Drew blushed again. “Like, with you?” he mumbled.
“No, like by yourself,” Mally replied. “I’m not asking you out! God! That would only be so sick.”
Drew personally didn’t think it was sick. He adored Mallory and couldn’t wait until she was fifteen, when Campbell and Tim would allow “group dates.” He would come back from college for it. If he waited only forever, he knew Mallory would marry him. But Mally said, “It’s just that my aunt gave me enough movie passes to last until I’m thirty for saving the kids.”
“Well, you did.”
“Yeah, but it wasn’t like I had a choice. Merry did it all. I was out of it. . . .”
“Still, Mallory. People run from fires. I’ve heard of parents running from a fire with their own kids inside.”
“No way.”
“Way,” Drew said.
“Did you Google that, too?”
“No,” Drew said. He had.
Mallory sighed and said, “Well, I’m watching
Days
here, if you don’t mind. So do you want to go to the movies? Or should I just give you some of the fourteen thousand passes I have and you can take a real girl?”
“I’ll go,” Drew told her. “You’ll have to wear a mask, though.”
Mallory threw her hands up over her face. Drew wanted to punch himself. She thought he meant the faint rosy remains of the scorch burns on her face.
“I only meant that everyone recognizes you.”
“I’ll go dressed as Meredith. I’ll put on false eyelashes.”
“That’ll do it. No one will recognize Meredith,” Drew said. “I feel better already.”
Later that day, Drew hung around outside the dining room while Mallory and Meredith were interviewed by the state fire inspector. Mallory didn’t tell Drew, but she found the state fire investigator sexy and fascinating, though he was old, probably thirty.
The girls sat side by side across from him at the dining room table. From his briefcase, he took a stack of photos and a folder filled with dozens of reports detailing anonymous tips. He used a fountain pen, like Mallory’s father, and squared a clean stack of blank paper before he wrote down the date and
Third Brynn Twins Interview
.