In shock, Tim handed Mallory the cell and backed slowly out of the parking lot.
She dialed Drew’s home phone, getting a wrong number. “Shit!!” she cried, and Tim, about to shush her, stopped at the look on her face.
Mallory dialed again. No answer.
She couldn’t remember Drew’s cell.
Stop, she thought. Drew’s cell. Five oh nine . . . five oh eight. Yes! But Drew’s voice mail picked up. Sobbing, Mallory shouted, “It might already be too late! You have to go to our camp. Drew! Drew! Wake up!”
“Honey, that’s enough,” Tim said, and Mallory threw the telephone at him.
“Get up!” David told her roughly. “You could’ve said the whole Mass by now.”
“I was praying for you, David,” Merry said. She didn’t know if he heard her. His eyes were like identical pieces of marbled glass, and flecks of spit collected at the corners of his mouth.
“I’ll give you one chance,” he said. “Go ahead and run. Climb up those rocks, little cheerleader, and I’ll count to twenty.”
“Where?” Merry asked, stalling, stalling. Mally! Mally! she screamed in silence.
“You choose. It’s your funeral,” David said.
Meredith tried to pick out a path along the top of the ridge that she could run, as she’d run the balance beam when she was little. Slowly, she began to climb, five feet, six feet, David counting behind her. Another few inches. She gained the top and turned to face David.
“Ready or not, here I come!” he whooped. Merry took a deep breath. She did not need to look down at the jagged rocks that lined the riverbed. If she pushed David, she would still go over.
She gathered her determination and made her choice. Mally, she called once more, but gently. Giggy.
Then she drew herself up.
Just as David’s hands gained the boulder an inch from her feet, Merry flung herself forward over David’s head in a full front flip, landing on both knees, stones biting into her flesh. At once, she was up and running, already imagining the strong hand grabbing her collar, jerking her down. But instead, she heard David roar, “What the hell?”
Merry froze in mid-stride. Did she dare to look back? Would this be her last fraction of a second on earth?
Then she heard a scream—a scream so piercing that it barely sounded human—followed by the sound she would never be able to describe, the wet, heavy, impossibly grotesque thud.
She scrambled to the top of the ridge and looked down, horribly far down, then shut her eyes against the sight of David’s leather jacket, his head, mottled with red . . .
“No!” Merry cried. She grabbed her own head and slid down the rocks, creeping past the graves, moaning and wondering how she would ever make it to the bottom.
At the opening of Canada Road, her legs gave out. And though she didn’t know it, so did her consciousness.
It was the same woman Merry had seen before who bent over her and shook her head sadly, then reached out to reassure Merry. She was not old, after all. She had a young face, but with silvery hair, thick beautiful hair. Grandma Gwenny’s hair was white when she was not much older than Campbell was now. The lady had not pushed David. No one had pushed David. Without words, the lady told Merry this was not her fault. Not her fault. Not her fault.
When Drew Vaughan found her, Merry was asleep, her face streaked with tears and dust, her head pillowed on her hands. She woke when he picked her up.
“David’s down there, Drew,” she said softly. “David fell off the ridge.”
“Sweet Jesus. I’ll call the cops,” Drew said. “Let’s get you down to the car first. Your knees are all swollen and cut up.”
“I can’t feel them,” Merry said. “I’m sorry, Drew.”
“I’m sorry, too,” Drew said. “Bill fired me. I’m the Brynn Emergency Rescue Team of one.” He settled Meredith in the car. “Before I call, what do I say? Do you want me to tell them he tried to hurt you? Did he try to hurt you? Did he do more than try?”
“I’m okay,” Merry said. “Let me think. Tell them I was running and I heard him scream. Yeah. Then I climbed up there and stumbled on the way down because I was in a hurry to call you. That’s all,” Meredith said.
“Why wouldn’t you have called the police first?”
“I’m only thirteen? I’m freaking out? I broke my cell phone? I’d have to really break it then, wouldn’t I?” Merry asked weakly. She pulled her green slimline phone from her jersey pocket. “Good enough. It really is busted, anyhow. How did you know? Oh, sure. I know. Mallory called you.”
“I felt my phone vibrate while I was stacking cans of tomato juice. I looked at the number. It was your dad’s number.”
“How do you know my dad’s number?”
“Mally and you and him have numbers only one number off. 6886. 6885. 6884.”
“What will I say to Kim?”
“Meredith, don’t feel guilty. The fact that David caught you up here probably saved a girl’s life. It’s not your fault.”
“That’s what the lady said,” Merry told Drew. “Something scared him when he was coming after me.”
“Okay,” Drew said. “I’m sure you know what that means. Please don’t tell me.”
Campbell was already at the hospital when Drew squealed into the lot with Merry. Mallory was pacing at the front door, dialing her sister’s number over and over on Tim’s phone. Without meaning to, she threw the phone down on the grass when she saw Drew’s car and began to run. Merry was out before Mallory could put her hand on the passenger-side handle.
“Yes, it was!” Meredith said, in answer to a question nobody heard Mallory ask. “I’m fine. I’m okay. I think he’s, Mal, I think . . .”
“He’s dead. I know he’s dead,” Mallory said, reaching for Meredith’s hand, pressing it to her own dirty, hot cheek.
Drew told the Brynns, “David Jellico fell off the ridge. The police are there. Merry called me.”
“Meredith, my God!” Campbell cried, pulling her daughter close to her. “How did it happen?”
“I don’t know. I was running, and I heard him fall!” Merry told her mother.
“Why didn’t you call me? Why did you call Drew?” Tim demanded.
“I pushed the wrong button,” Merry said, wiping her eyes and nose on her palm. She held out the phone.
“This phone is crushed,” Tim said.
“I fell running down,” Merry admitted.
Campbell and Tim stood locked in one spot, a hundred expressions of bewilderment rising to their lips and sinking like mist.
Then Campbell asked, “How do you know David is . . . hurt that badly?”
“He fell too far,” Merry said.
“Oh, my poor Bonnie,” Campbell said, closing her eyes. “I’m going to go.”
“I want them to be looked at,” said Tim. Adam clung to his father’s arm, huge-eyed and stunned silent. “You’re limping, Merry.”
In the hospital that night for observation, Meredith and Mallory slept in the same room. Neither of them dreamed.
HEAR LIES
Hundreds of students lined up outside Lonergan’s Funeral Home in Deptford before the doors opened—hours before the wake began. They waited in a line that snaked around the front of the building and nearly met to form a circle. There were girls holding each other up and sobbing, boys with hair combed flat instead of gelled up, standing stoic and pale beside their parents. Kids from Ridgeline Memorial and Deptford Consolidated. Families from St. Francis. Doctors from the hospital with their wives or husbands.
And every nurse within a radius of twenty miles.
Though David Jellico hadn’t been the best-known kid at school, he’d been good-looking and successful, and had a core of a few loyal friends, mostly other golfers. But more than that drew the town and even the county out that night. The death of any young person was a subtraction of a disproportionately large part of the whole. Ridgeline’s students came out together, with someone there from almost every one of three h
undred families. But kids from surrounding schools were summoned by text and e-mail. Even David’s picture in the Reporter that day was a portrait of poignancy. Everyone felt the assault was greater, and the ripple of empathy was wider than it could have been for any adult, however beloved.
Campbell barely came home for the first three days.
She was with Bonnie day and night.
Even Dave Senior, Kim and David’s dad, could not bear the terrifying whipsaw of grief that battered Bonnie around the clock. But Campbell could. And only Campbell could induce her to take a sip of tea or a bite of toast, a fifteen-minute nap from which she woke shaking and wailing, crying out for Campbell to bring David to her. In Ridgeline, Bonnie was a beloved figure—much better-known to anyone who’d ever broken a leg or had an appendix removed than her professor husband, who taught economics at SUNY Hollendale. Since becoming a department head, Dave Senior often came home only on weekends. But Bonnie had been the Cub Scout den mother. She’d fund-raised for the cheerleaders’ warm-up jackets and uniforms, treated the mounts’ neck strains and the tumblers’ bruises. Kim’s house had been a sort of all-purpose clubhouse, not only for Merry but for a dozen other girls. Unlike Campbell, who made the twins and Adam walk a fairly narrow line, Bonnie was understanding and easygoing. When Caitlin Andersen was caught with a cigarette, Bonnie, not Caitlin’s mom, Rita, administered the talk about wrinkles and skanky skin—and oh, yes, lung cancer and heart disease. And the talk stayed between Bonnie and Caitlin. But Rita knew, and blessed Bonnie for her influence.
She and most of the mothers and fathers who had kids at Ridgeline Junior High and Memorial felt they had a duty to Bonnie not only to comfort her but to mourn David ritually—for he could have been, so easily, one of their own daughters or sons. And Bonnie saw them, though only Dave could shake their hands. Bonnie was barely able to dress. Campbell helped her pull on stockings and a light blue wool dress. She sat clinging to Campbell—who had held Bonnie’s hand when she gave birth to David, and later, to Kim; who had sweated with Bonnie and the surgeons over dozens of lives, old and young, grieved mightily when they lost, and felt like Olympians when they beat death back.
A surgeon never saw David.
The fire ambulance that drove down from Crying Woman Ridge after firefighters gently lifted him up from the riverbed proceeded swiftly through town with no lights or sirens.
Meredith had begged her parents to allow them to stay home. In grim silence, Mallory didn’t even try—knowing it would be unendurable to Campbell to even suspect that her daughters would not want to comfort their oldest friend in her deepest misery. And so Meredith and Mallory dressed identically on purpose, so that no one but their parents could entirely prove which of them was which. In fawn-colored wide-legged pants and modest navy cardigans, they sat with Adam in a corner, on a triangular sofa, their hair drawn back in velvet scrunchies, trying to be as inconspicuous and expressionless as they were able to be. The long wide legs of the pants hid Merry’s swollen knees. They let people think that the closeness of the two families kept them from praying at the kneeler near the closed coffin or gently touching the big boards of photos of David as a little football player, a junior golfer or, last summer, swimming in one of the natural pools of the river where he’d died, or patting his nine-iron, leaning against the wall.
In some of the early pictures, the Brynns were with the Jellicos, at July Fourth picnics, birthday parties. Merry could not stop staring out of the corners of her eyes at those pictures and the astonishing lie they told, which only she and Mallory would ever understand.
In the front row of baby-blue cushioned folding chairs, each wrapped in fabric skirts like seats at a wedding, Kim cradled David’s brown leather jacket in her arms like a baby and wept constantly, surrounded by all the cheerleaders except Merry. Merry knew she must go, should go, but couldn’t bring herself to take the twenty steps. Even a sharp look from Campbell couldn’t convince her. She was sure that standing near the casket long enough to comfort Kim would make her truly, violently ill. Her few bites of dinner sat in her stomach like lumps of paste; she could feel her guts folding and rolling. She had not told even Mallory all of it—not the words David had said or the animal scowl on his face, not the blank spaces that were his eyes, the sound of his scream and of his fall, and Meredith’s eerie, puzzling certainty that someone or something unseen had come between her and her death.
She finally knew for real how Mal had felt before—when all of it was to come, and all of it was hers alone to bear.
The chain that bound Merry to all this intolerable grief would never be broken. She couldn’t bear knowing what David would have been, or what he might already have done. Mally might have done it better. Mally was built tougher. But telling Mally everything she didn’t see wouldn’t cut the chain in half between them. It would double the weight. She held Adam’s hand and tried to think of the lyrics of songs.
When she saw her father approaching, her hands and feet went icy.
“You need to see Bonnie and Kim. And Dave. You need to, both of you. I’ll stay with Adam,” Tim said. “Imagine if it were one of you.”
I did, Merry thought.
I can, Mally thought.
“If it were one of you—and last New Year’s Eve, it could have been one of you—your mother and I would try to live, but we would never be ourselves again,” Tim said. “Dave and Bonnie will never be the same.” Tim dropped to a crouch by the sofa. “I know it’s worse for you than the others because you, Meredith, were there by accident and Mallory, well, you knew. That doesn’t excuse you from ordinary human sympathy, girls. Get up now.”
Meredith walked as if against a strong current across the cool, blue, peaceful room where canned organ music made her feel as though she were inside a huge cheesy music box. Mallory walked beside her. They felt the stares—just because of the way they looked, so small and so utterly the same.
Everyone knew that Meredith had found David after his fall.
Everyone knew that Mallory had a seizure of some kind the same day.
They were “the twins who saved the kids from the fire,” not just “the twins.” They were “the twins who were there when Bonnie Jellico’s boy fell off the cliff,” not just “the twins.” Or so they thought.
In fact, no one who saw Mally and Merry felt anything but pity. Nothing had gone right for these little girls this year. They had been through so much, the poor things—from the fire to losing their lifelong friend. Many mothers watched Mallory and Meredith pass and hoped that this could be the end of their innocent suffering. Their hearts embraced the Jellicos, but recognized how much loss the Brynns had endured as well, in six short months. Two families and so close. It must end now, people said to themselves. At least now, perhaps Campbell and Tim’s girls could get on with their growing. And in time, poor little Kim.
But as she felt everyone’s eyes inch their way over her and her sister, Merry didn’t know that. If it had been possible, she would have snapped her fingers and moved their house to Massachusetts or Denver by time travel. She would never see her teammates again, or let them hoist her into her beautifully balanced “lib,” or catch her in the basket. She would give it all up. Just to disappear.
Mally didn’t notice anyone noticing her twin and her. If only this moment could end, this moment and the funeral tomorrow, she thought. She had never wanted anything more, except for her family to survive—not an iPod, not an honor-roll grade, not to win. With the pessimism and weariness of a disillusioned adult, all she wanted was for this to end.
Finally, both of them stood inches from Kim’s bowed head, with its wavy corkscrew curls in messy curtains across her face, and the jacket—that jacket—clutched beneath her chin. Merry thought, I’ll run. She would turn and run out of the door and run along School Street all the way back to Ridgeline, up onto her porch, up onto the swing, to lie on the swing until her father came home, even if it was morning. All the way back to a childhood when she stepped out onto her porc
h each summer morning to greetings and approval from everyone on the street, greetings from people who all knew her name and her parents and their parents, smiles and nods that felt to her like the touch of gentle hands. And that had been just a year ago.
But just as Meredith began to turn away, Mallory saved her. It was Mallory who knelt down next to Kim.
It would work, Merry thought: The twins were dressed exactly the same. She almost didn’t believe it. Mallory was pretending to be her. She sounded just like her. Mallory had removed her earring. Weak with gratitude, Merry reached up and removed hers.
“Kimmy,” Mally-as-Merry said. “Kimmy, nothing in the world I can say to you can change this. But you know I love you so, so, so much. And you know I totally cared about David. I would have done anything. I would still do anything. I’m so sorry I was such a silly little girl,” Mallory said, in perfect imitation of her sister. “I’ll always feel like I was such a stupid idiot. Maybe someday you can forgive me.”
“And me,” Merry said, mimicking Mallory’s diffident, slightly reluctant speech. “That goes for me too, Kim. Honest.”
For only the second time since they played baby tricks, Mallory went on pretending to be her sister. She stood the way Merry stood. She smiled the way Merry smiled. Thank you, Ster, Merry thought.
Kim didn’t move or look up, and the group of girls around them seemed collectively to hold their breath. Merry thought, I’ll scream and scream and scream and scream. . . .
And then Kim got up and threw her arms around Mallory-as-Merry and gasped, “I thought you didn’t care at all!”
Mallory-as-Merry began to cry—that wasn’t hard—and said, “How could you think that? I was just staying away because I felt like such an idiot. . . .”
“You don’t think he killed himself, do you, Mer? You don’t think that. The police thought maybe because of how hard it would have been to climb up there that he killed himself. But why would David kill himself? He had everything he wanted. Girls and grades and looks! We all loved him so much. My big brother. My only big brother.”