“I just saw girls naked in the grove!” Mallory told Drew. “I mean, they will be naked in the grove in the spring. There were leaves on the trees.”
“Well, uh, how about that,” Drew said. “That’s a real shocker. Whoever they were, they wouldn’t be the first. Ow!” Mallory punched him again. The grove, near Mountain Home Cemetery, had been a make-out spot for generations.
“But ... none of them was with a guy! And one of them was ... like ... What were they doing? They were, like, dancing,” Mally said. “One of them put some ... hair in the fire. And I could tell it was a baby’s hair, not someone with tight curls. It was silky blond baby hair. And then when it started to burn, they danced faster.”
“With each other?”
“Yes, but not like dancing regular people do. And they weren’t naked-naked, but they had on these things you could see right through. And there were other girls, too, with really big ...”
“Describe it in detail,” Drew said. “Leave nothing out.”
“Rear ends,” said Mallory. “That’s what I was going to say. I hate myself when I tell you anything serious.”
“That’s why I opt for kissing rather than talking. Be reasonable,” Drew said. Mallory kissed Drew again. And then, again, her eyes rolled back. Drew gasped. A double-header! This was unprecedented. “Mallory! Mallory? Brynn, come on. What’s wrong?”
Just seconds later, Mallory said softly, “It’s Owen. Something’s wrong with Owen.”
“What? What could be wrong? He’s in the house with the sitter. It is Carla today, right?” Drew said.
“Carla? She creeps me out, anyhow. What if she slapped him or left him alone or something?”
Suddenly, both Drew and Mally heard the whoop of the fire engine. Pilgrim Street was one of the four roads that extended out from the downtown square like spokes of a wheel. It was only four miles to the ends of the roads—except the one that led out to Deptford and the mall. It was only four miles from the fire station.
Closer, they could hear it come. And closer.
Then the huge red truck flashed past, followed by an ambulance, lurching to a stop in front of Mallory’s house. Mally took off at a run without a backward glance. “Let it not be anything bad! I take back everything I said about my house.”
Mallory burst through the door just after the paramedics.
Big Carla hunched in the rocking chair while a paramedic worked over Owen, who lay on his back on a blanket on the floor. Even before she got inside, Mallory could hear her twin, Meredith, crying, as well as one side of a telephone conversation that Carla was apparently having on her cell phone with the twins’ mother, who was working at the hospital.
“Campbell, I don’t think he had a fever when I got here,” Carla said. “Sasha said he was just fine all morning when he was with her.”
Mallory looked down at Owen’s little face with its tiny clefted chin. He was pale, nearly gray, and while he was breathing, it was in small gasps, the way he did when he finished his bottle and drifted off to sleep. His eyes were open only a slit, revealing the whites, like a cracked hard-boiled egg. “He didn’t feel hot or even warm. He simply began to vomit,” Carla added. “Oh, Jesus help him. Oh, merciful Lord! He looks like Ellie did. So closed and blue ...” To the twins’ surprise, tears began to course down Big Carla’s rough-hewn face and her shoulders shook. “I didn’t mean to hurt him.”
“You didn’t mean to hurt him?” Mallory said sharply. “What happened?”
“I mean, I didn’t mean for him to get sick....I should have protected him. I should have protected Ellie.” Carla seemed to be on the verge of collapse, but suddenly, and with a big effort, she got control of herself. She wiped away the tears and spoke calmly to the medics.
“He was sick all day,” Merry whispered to Mallory. She added the words for “she’s silly,” in ancient twin language, “Folamish due, ’Ster. He just passed out a few minutes ago. I freaked out when I couldn’t see anything after that and cut out of practice. Sasha brought me home.”
Sasha Avery, one of the other sitters, was a transfer student to Ridgeline, starting over at a new school senior year—which was hard on anyone. She was from Texas and had joined the work-study program. Merry knew her better than Mallory did because she’d also been an immediate sensation on the cheerleading squad, elevated to varsity in week one with a special tryout. But no one knew very much about Sasha. She didn’t talk about it, but her parents had apparently died pretty recently. And her older sister was in college. According to the older girls on the squad, she lived part of the time with an aunt over in Deptford and part of the time with another family she worked for. That made Merry feel sorry for Sasha, who was so nice that Meredith, even though she was fiercely protective of her role on the team, didn’t mind Sasha being the star for a while.
Sasha had had a sad life.
And, Merry reasoned, worse come to worst, Sasha was not going to dominate anyone on the squad for long: She was going to graduate in a few months anyhow and that would be that.
Sasha had started working for the Brynns in August when Campbell began medical school, caring for Owen two mornings a week for her Child Development credit and working two mornings with Campbell at the hospital, for her Professional Experience segment.
At practice that day, when Merry said her brother was ill, Sasha was so concerned about Owen that she had driven Merry home from practice in her little beat-up car, the one she’d driven all the way from Texas to Ridgeline, New York. Even though Sasha had to run to get to her evening job, she made Meredith promise to call her the minute they knew what was up with the baby she called “Little Fella.”
As he did with everyone, Owen had stolen Sasha’s heart in just a few months. Sasha hadn’t asked any questions about how Merry knew Owen was sick, a lucky thing to Merry’s way of thinking. The twins never stopped worrying that “the gift” would be found out.
Kneeling in the kitchen, Merry still wore her cheerleading warm-ups and her letter jacket. She hustled on hands and knees over to the place where the medics were starting an intravenous line of what both girls knew was basically sugar water, in case they had to give Owen medicine through a vein later. Owen’s arm was so little, like a doll’s, his skin so soft and translucent that the twins and Drew, who had crowded into the kitchen, were glad he probably couldn’t feel the paramedic prodding for one of his threadlike little veins. “I saw him throwing up all day in school,” Meredith said a second time.
Neither had to explain to the other how it was that Merry could have seen her infant brother throw up six hours earlier. But she could not have seen what would come next. Only Mally could see the future, the emergency, and one contradictory complication of “the gift” was that if the person in trouble was someone super close to the twins, such as Owen, Mally was somehow prevented from seeing the urgency until the last moment—if at all. The visions weren’t like home movies, in which every movement was clear. They were more like those blurry slide shows that biology students were forced to watch.
Suddenly, Mallory slumped down beside her sister.
Drew started toward her, recognizing the tiny trance that usually accompanied a daytime vision. But Mallory was already awakening. No one else had seen.
“Siow,” Mallory told Merry in twin language, their word for “hurt” or “worry.” She had seen a hand wiping baby Owen’s chin as he vomited so profusely that he finally lost consciousness. For some reason, the sensation that accompanied this gentle gesture felt sinister.
On top of it, Owen’s vomiting spell had already happened!
Mallory’s vision was telling her it was going to happen again.
She was about to confide more about it to Merry when the female paramedic spoke up.
“He’s coming around,” the paramedic said quietly. “We’re going to take him in.”
Merry and Mally exchanged looks.
Each of them could hear an echo from her sister’s thoughts. Each was wondering if Owen’s fain
t meant that he had some horrible legacy from them. Worse, did he just have a touch of flu, this little baby who came along so late in their mother’s life that they expected to feel like his aunts instead of his sisters? Or did he have some grotesque disease that would take him away forever? Neither the twins nor Adam had expected to love Owen with such a total love it was almost crazy. But Owen was a heart-stealer, and every one of them competed to be his favorite.
“I’ll come too,” said Carla, pulling on her orange jacket from Alley Cats Bowlerama over in Deptford. She sniffed at the sleeve. “Darn it! Smells like smoke. Wish the girls at work who smoke would hang their coats somewhere else after they go outside and light up.” Mally took a long breath of relief. At least Carla wasn’t smoking around their house, unless she was trying to cover it up. Both of them had believed they smelled cigarette smoke on her before and wondered if she left Owen alone to sneak outside for a butt.
“Wait up!” Merry said as Carla found her purse and prepared to leave with the paramedics. “He’s my brother.”
“But what can you do?” Carla asked reasonably, all professional now. “You weren’t here when he got sick. You can’t describe for your mother or the doctors how it was. And are you going to leave Adam here alone?”
“I guess not,” Mallory said. “You’re right.”
“I just feel it should be one of us,” Merry said.
“One person can come,” said the lead medic, as they covered Owen up and lifted him gently on a flat blue plastic board with straps that bound him at the chest and hips.
“Sisssa!” he cried, now fully awake and spotting the girls. It was his interchangeable name for them. Owen sobbed, but no tears came. He struggled to sit up.
“Go ‘bye bye to see Mama, Owen,” Merry said. “Go ’bye bye with Carla in the car to Mama.”
“So he’s that dehydrated?” Carla asked the paramedic. “So much he can’t cry?”
“I do think he is, and that he’ll probably have to be on IV fluids overnight,” the medic said softly.
“I wondered why he didn’t wet his diaper,” Carla said. “Huh.”
“You wondered?” Merry asked. “Didn’t you know?”
“You don’t go jumping to conclusions over everything with a sick baby. They can be fine one minute and terribly sick the next. You watch. That’s what you do. I noticed, and I kept track of how many diapers he wet. But there were no other obvious signs of dehydration. I am trained!” Carla said bluntly.
“Well, sorry,” Merry said. “I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Carla,” Mallory said. “Will you call us?”
“I guess,” Carla said. “Well. Maybe your mom better do that. She said he’d probably be okay.”
“That’s a comfort ... probably,” Mallory said. Carla was about as with it as a snail.
Now, looking like some kind of trucker in her big buckle boots and orange coat, Carla shrugged. “There are no guarantees with little kids. They get better from things that should kill them, and things that they should live through take them away.” She sighed and looked down at a charm on her keychain that seemed to enclose a picture neither of the girls could see plainly. “Life goes on.”
“Sayso nay,” Merry said, twin language for “what’s she talking about?”
“What about your car?” Mally said.
“I took the bus over. No reason to waste gas. I’ll just take it home too from the hospital.” And they watched as the paramedics gently loaded Owen into the ambulance and Carla clambered in behind him, without so much as a goodbye to them or Adam. Through the window of the ambulance, the girls could see Carla stroking Owen’s head. It looked like she was crying again.
“Do you think there’s any chance that Carla did something wrong?” Merry asked. “What did she mean with all that stuff?”
“Who’s Ellie?” Drew asked, breaking his silence for the first time since the crisis had begun.
“No idea,” Mallory said. “Maybe her ... no, her daughter’s named after her.”
Merry said, “Well, I guess whoever Ellie is, what Carla says is actually good news. If even Mom thinks he’s going to be fine, he will be. You know how she is.”
Mallory’s stress slipped down a few degrees. She had to agree that their mother was the most overprotective woman, if not the most overprotective human being, in the galaxy. When Merry and Mallory began to have the tiny fainting spells, tied to their visions—they were now adept at concealing them by lying down or sitting—Campbell had them screened for everything from Lyme disease to epilepsy. And when nothing showed up, their mother seemed almost disappointed—or so the twins thought.
A moment later, before the truck was even out of sight, Meredith’s phone rang.
“It’s Luna Verdgris,” said a soft voice from the other end of the phone. “I sense an atmosphere of trouble. I’m getting bad vibes.”
“Slow night on the police band?” asked Merry.
The twins knew how Luna “sensed” most things in Ridgeline.
Her mother, Bettina, spent her days in a dark room reading tarot cards for locals and tourists—or monitoring her state-of-the-art police-band radio. Luna had heard from her mom that the ambulance was called to the Brynns’ house. Bettina used the radio in other ways. She was able to tell her wealthy clients that the son who’d gotten four speeding tickets in a row was “basically good” and would “straighten himself out.”
It was harder for Luna to be an individual given how ... individualistic her mother was. She tried hard to look as weird as possible, dressing entirely in black with at least six scarves draped around her neck at all times. She described herself as a “wiccan.” She was also a top-notch babysitter who had a job every night of the week (because she was pure magic with kids) and a Sunday school teacher at the Good Shepherd Lutheran Church. Luna (whose real name, the twins learned from Luna’s little sister, was Laura) probably wouldn’t have been so annoying if she hadn’t insisted on grabbing the twins’ left palms, which were identical but opposite—Merry’s right hand was still scarred from the fire—and “reading” their futures once or twice a week.
She had predicted that Meredith would become involved with a young, brown-haired guy, which described half the guys in New York state.
She had “predicted” that Mally would find happiness with a red-haired thin boy, which described 100 percent of the boys who lived next door to the Brynns.
“Owen’s sick,” Merry admitted.
“Was he rushed to the hospital?” Luna asked. “Was that who went?”
“Yes,” Merry said.
“Mer, I’m really sorry. I hope he’s okay. Can I help you guys any way?”
“No, Luna. We’re steady here.”
“Let me know, huh?” Luna asked.
“You bet,” Merry said.
“Let me talk to her for a minute,” Mallory said. Merry handed her twin the telephone. “Luna, this is going to sound weird. But do you ever have, like, a meeting ... in the grove?”
“I know how you heard this,” Luna said in disgust. “And it sucks the tailpipe. It’s Corey Gilbertson. Her mother made her quit even though Wicca is totally a nature religion. She said we were Satanists. And it’s not naked, it’s called ‘sky clad,’ and it’s not a sex thing and I’m not gay....”
“Whoa!” Mally said. “That’s way more information than I need. I never thought you were a Satanist. Are you?” Drew, about to leave, made a throat-cutting motion with his hand. Mallory could be way too blunt, which she admitted every time she realized she’d been way too blunt.
“Are you nuts? I’m a Lutheran!” Luna said. “It’s just interesting, is all. Ridgeline! You might as well wear a T-shirt that says everything you do to save people the trouble of finding out! We only did it twice, last year at the fall and spring ... whatever ... the equinox. Mallory. It’s an interesting thing. So-called witches are always persecuted. They’ve been persecuted since the beginning of time. Anyone with any healing ability or visions is always
persecuted and called evil.”
“I totally agree,” Mallory said.
“You totally agree?”
“Yeah,” Mallory said.
“I’m ... I’m going to put a spell on Corey Gilbertson. Don’t worry. I can’t do really bad spells. But maybe something in an itch ...”
“Oh leave her be, Luna,” Mally said. “She didn’t tell me.”
“Then who did?”
“I saw it in a vision.”
“Don’t make fun of me, Mallory!” Luna said.
“I’m not.”
“I just wanted to know about Owen. Geez!” Luna hung up.
“What was that about?” Merry asked.
“Luna was dancing naked in the grove with some other witches,” Mallory said.
“Oh,” Merry said. “Here I was thinking that it was something weird.”
Just then, Mallory’s cell phone rang. It was Grandma Gwenny, calling from her yoga class. She was out of breath because the whole class had been struggling with their cobras.
“I want you girls to know that Owen will be just fine!” Grandma Gwenny said. “He just needs fluids.”
“How did you know? Did Dad call?” Mally asked.
“Well, actually he didn’t,” Grandma said.
“It’s bad enough for us to be like this,” Mally said, trying to joke with a thin will for it. “Having a nutty adult in the family is too much.”
“Of course, you don’t mean me!” Grandma exclaimed with a dry little laugh. “I know you’re worried, so I’m coming over to drive you and Adam to the hospital. In fact, I’m already heading for the car.” She wondered aloud what people at the hospital would make of an “old gal” such as herself in her bright yellow tie-dyed yoga duds.
“You’re something else, Grandma,” Mallory said.
“I’m a hip chick,” Grandma Gwenny said, and Mallory smiled for the first time all day.
Drew had to get to work, so he gave Merry a shoulder hug and kissed Mallory on the nose.