Twice Kissed (10 page)

Be safe, Mary,
she thought, closing her eyes and remembering her sister as she always had been—a free spirit who, though self-centered, was a person everyone fell in love with. Everyone including Thane Walker. Even he hadn’t been immune to Mary Theresa’s charms. But then why would he have been? He had been a man, and all men, it seemed, were susceptible to Mary Theresa Reilly.

Maggie had first noticed it years ago, when Mitchell, their cousin who had been raised as their brother, had been alive. They’d been young then, barely seventeen, only a few years older than Becca was now, but already Mary Theresa was developing her charms, honing them on all the boys they knew, including the one whom Maggie had considered her brother…

1979

From beneath the water’s shimmering surface, Maggie saw Mary Theresa, sunglasses propped on the bridge of her nose, string bikini showing off every inch of her tan, stroll along the edge of the swimming pool. She kicked out a lounge chair, away from the overhang and shade of the eucalyptus tree, then plopped down just as Maggie’s lungs, burning from her length of time under the water, forced her to swim frantically upward. Shooting through the surface, Maggie gasped, gulped in air, and tossed her wet hair out of her eyes.

“What are you doing?” her twin asked, the corners of her mouth turned down in flat-out disapproval.

“What does it look like? Underwater laps.”

“Why?”

“I’m gonna try out for the swim team.”

“Again?” Mary Theresa sighed dramatically and dabbed at the corner of her mouth where a canker sore dared show on her lips. “You know you’re not going to make it. Just like the last time you tried out when we were in high school. Junior college will be lots tougher.”

“But I talked to the coach. So did Mitch.”

Mary Theresa’s pouty little mouth acted as if it had been drawn together by purse strings, and she swatted at a bee that buzzed near her head. “You asked Mitchell to put in a good word for you?”

“Yeah.”

“With the women’s coach at the college?” Mary Theresa asked, as if Maggie was dense as tar.

Maggie flipped onto her back and started swimming backward. She didn’t need any of Mary Theresa’s crap. Not today. “Uh-huh.”

“Will wonders never cease?”

“What’s it to you?” Maggie knew she shouldn’t let Mary Theresa get to her, but she couldn’t help it. Mary Theresa had become more and more distant and it seemed to have started three or four years ago, about the time her sister’s breasts had developed into “round, ripe melons,” as Billy Norton had been so proud of saying when they’d all been in the eighth grade. Billy was a pimply-faced geek whose talent for math made him think he was God’s gift to teachers and all females on this earth.

“Your sister has the biggest tits in the whole damned school, and that includes Mrs. Nelson, so what happened to you?” He’d looked to his circle of friends for some support as they’d stood in the hallway near the library. It was just after lunch about two days before they’d graduated from George Washington Junior High. The other boys had sniggered loudly, but had been blessed with enough decency to look embarrassed. “I thought you were supposed to be identical twins.” Billy was always persistent.

“And I thought you were supposed to be smart. You figure it out,” she’d retorted angrily, though she’d been dying inside and had wanted to drop through the stain-covered carpeted floor. What was it about boys that found a girl’s breasts so fascinating? It was as if they’d been weaned too early and were, ever since, dying for a peek, or touch, or even grosser yet, a taste of some girl’s tits. The bigger, the better.

“You’re just jealous ’cause you got sold short,” he’d hooted.

“Tell me about it,” she’d said, then narrowed her gaze on his oversize shorts in the area where his alleged male anatomy had been hidden. She’d breezed off, wounded on the inside, her cheeks burning, her eyes filled with unshed tears. Around the corner she made a mad dash to the bathroom, where it took almost ten minutes to regain her composure. By the time she’d returned to the library, class had started. All the kids, sitting in their seats, had stared at her as she’d taken the only desk left, in the front of the room.

Mrs. Brady didn’t ask any questions, just scribbled on a yellow pad, and handed Maggie a copy without so much as faltering over one single syllable as she ranted on and on about the new computer system the school was supposed to get—if there was enough funding, of course. Money was tight in all the public schools, but Mrs. Brady was ever-hopeful. Maggie had clutched the tardy slip in her sweaty fingers, slunk to the desk, and prayed for the humiliating day to be over.

“Hey, what’s the difference between Maggie Reilly and a singer who’s off-key?” Billy had whispered loud enough for her to hear. She felt hot tears glistening in her eyes.

No one answered, and Maggie hardly dared breathe.

“Nothin’,” Billy said under his breath. “They’re both flat.”

More nervous chuckles. Maggie snapped her pencil in two. Mrs. Brady’s eyes, behind the shield of thick glasses, narrowed on Billy. A tear drizzled from Maggie’s eye, and she brushed it angrily aside before enduring the longest forty minutes of her life.

In the end, because of the tardy slip, she’d had to suffer through work detail, cleaning the hallways of litter before she’d been allowed to graduate.

Billy Norton hadn’t been one to let sleeping dogs lie. He’d found out what day her work detail was scheduled and, knowing she would have to clean it up, had spread the remains of his lunch—an uneaten sloppy joe and french fries drizzled in catsup—on the floor. To add insult to injury, he’d also filled a condom that was probably way too big for him with meat from his sloppy joe, then left the ugly mess in the hallway by the seventh-grade stairs. He and his gang had gotten away scot-free while Maggie had to pick up the icky thin sheath and discard it, along with the rest of the garbage, into a big plastic bag.

All because she had been blessed with smaller boobs than Mary Theresa.

What a joke.

Now, as she stroked easily backward through the sun-warmed water, she told herself not to let Mary Theresa bug her. Lately Mary had been edgy, restless, and secretive. Several times Maggie had come upon her sister and cousin Mitch, whom her parents had adopted before the twins had been born and after his mother had died. They just hung out watching TV or listening to tapes of the Rolling Stones or Pink Floyd. They’d been laughing and talking, pushing each other. Upon spying Maggie, they’d both shut up, smiled falsely, and acted like stone statues. They pretended that nothing was out of the ordinary when there were all sorts of weird vibes sizzling through the air.

It was as if Maggie was suddenly the outsider, when, for most of her time on this earth, she and Mary Theresa had considered Mitch a pain in the butt—the one member of their family who hadn’t fit in.

Mitch had worked hard to foster that separateness, not wanting his younger, dweeby cousins-cum-sisters anywhere near him from the time he’d entered kindergarten. He’d acted as if Maggie and Mary Theresa were strychnine, and his attitude had only gotten worse as the years rolled on.

When the girls had been in second grade, their mother insisted that he walk them to school. He’d grudgingly agreed, as he’d had no choice in the matter, but the minute they turned the corner and were out of view from the kitchen window, he’d ditched them and sworn he’d “beat the shit” out of them if either twin had the guts to rat him out to their parents.

“He’s a jerk,” Mary Theresa had decided.

“Who needs him?” Maggie had preferred to walk to school on her own anyway. “He’s just a pain.”

Mitch had gone to great lengths to show his disdain of the girls. He’d laughed at them with his friends, shown Maggie’s diary to anyone who wanted a peek, and put locks on the door of his room to make sure they wouldn’t violate his privacy and sanctuary.

But now things had changed. Mitch’s animosity had diminished, and Mary T, as he called her, didn’t seem to mind hanging out with him. Maggie secretly thought Mary Theresa had finally figured out that Mitch’s heretofore nerdy friends had become hot when they’d started driving, playing varsity sports, and growing serious facial hair where there had once only been severe cases of acne. Whatever the reason, these days Mary Theresa spent more time with Mitch and his friends than she did with Maggie.

Not that it mattered a whole lot. Sure, Maggie missed hanging out with her twin, but it wasn’t the end of the world. They were starting to separate finally, their interests weren’t the same anymore, and probably the biggest reason they didn’t get along was that Maggie refused to be led by the nose by her sister.

Mary Theresa had always made the decisions about what they were going to do, what friends they would share, or where they would go. But Maggie was sick of it. Sick of being a twin. Especially being the paler version of her flashy sister.

When they had started having “woman cycles” or “the monthly curse,” as their mother had called their periods, Mary Theresa was the first to get a cramp and therefore able to give Maggie more advice than she’d ever hoped to hear by the time her body had come to grips with womanhood six weeks later. Somehow it made Mary Theresa a know-it-all on all things related to blossoming womanhood and femininity.

A few years back Mary Theresa had gotten into clothes and nail polish and lipstick and listening to music that didn’t appeal to Maggie. She’d taken to smoking cigarettes in her room and blowing the smoke out her window late at night, bleaching streaks into her hair, and sneaking out once in a while, never confiding in Maggie about where she was going or what she was doing or whom she was meeting.

“You wouldn’t understand,” she’d said once when Maggie had caught her slipping through the window. Mary Theresa had been wearing skintight white shorts and a cropped-off yellow top that showed off her flat abdomen. “Just cover for me.”

“And say what?”

“I don’t know. Use your imagination. You’re supposed to be so good at it. All the English teachers say so,” she added with an envious edge to her voice. “As if you’re gonna be a writer or somethin’.”

“Well, I can’t
imagine
where you’re going or how I’m going to lie to Mom and Dad.”

“You’ll come up with something,” Mary Theresa had replied, clutching her pack of Virginia Slims in one hand while holding on to the sill with her other. She flashed her sister a radiant smile, then slipped into the yard, ducking past the pools of lights from lamps placed strategically between the rosebushes that had been in full, fragrant blossom.

Fortunately, their parents had never noticed Mary Theresa’s absences, and Maggie had never been forced to lie. Well, not yet anyway.

Now as she skimmed through the water and closed her eyes, concentrating on her breathing and the steady rhythm of her strokes, the unrest in the family ate at her, destroying her concentration.

Whenever Mitch’s friends came around, Mary Theresa lit up like a Christmas tree while Maggie felt as if she disappeared into the woodwork. Mary Theresa flirted and giggled, dodging playful pinches, hot-blooded leers, and sensual remarks with an aplomb that left Maggie speechless.

It was bound to happen, she supposed. Who cared anyway?

She sensed rather than saw the edge of the pool, touched it with the tips of her fingers, and tucked quickly into an underwater somersault that propelled her back toward the house where Mary Theresa, disgruntled at the shade cast by the hedge, was shifting in the chaise.

Quickly Maggie swam twenty laps without a break. Her muscles began to ache. One more turn. She saw the edge of the pool near the house and knifed through the water. Stroke, stroke, stroke. Her lungs burned. She stretched and finally her fingers touched cement at the shallow end. She broke surface and gulped in air.

“Done already?” Mary Theresa asked, one eyebrow lifting over the tops of her Ray-Bans. Her body was slick with oil, tanned to a dark tawny shade, her hair piled onto her head.

“For now.” Maggie snagged the white towel she’d dropped at the pool’s lip.

Mary Theresa sighed. “Waste of time,” she muttered under her breath.

Irritated, Maggie patted her face dry, then, spying Mary Theresa basking with conceited calm on the lounge, she reached into the water, and on a whim, flung some cool drips onto Mary’s flat belly.

“Hey!” Mary Theresa shrieked and shot out of the chair. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Nothin’.”

“Nothin’,” Mary Theresa mimed in a high-pitched voice, her face pulled into a nasty pout. “Pulllease, grow up for God’s sake, Maggie. Do you know what an embarrassment you are?”

Unperturbed, Maggie placed her hands on the ledge and hauled her body out of the water in a quick, lithe motion. She didn’t see how she could be
that
much of an embarrassment because she looked a lot like her sister. Maybe not quite as pretty, but close enough that once in a while people called them the wrong names. Oh, that really burned Mary Theresa’s butt. Maggie loved it. “You’re an idiot, a…a…kid. Why don’t you go and ride your damned horse or something?”

“I will.” It sounded like heaven. Anything to get away from this house and all the ill will that seemed to grow as the summer wore on. When had it started to happen, Maggie wondered, thinking back to when she and Maggie were in junior high and Mitch had just started high school. They’d been happier then. All of them.

Maggie didn’t remember the muffled arguments behind her parents’ bedroom door, or the empty vodka bottles piled high in the trash, or the frigid silence from their mother, an intense, heavy lack of conversation that seemed to radiate from her while quieting everyone else. Bernice Reilly’s deadly silence was able to numb them all. One icy look from her furious eyes was capable of bringing conversation and laughter to a standstill at the dinner table or stopping all communication in the car.

As Mary Theresa brushed the offending water droplets from her body, Maggie eyed the long, rambling house set on the crest of the hill. This place had been her parents’ dream, and recently, she thought, it had turned into a nightmare. Ancient oaks, olives, and eucalyptuses shaded a well-tended yard and the stucco house where they resided. Painted a soft dun color and resplendent with a sweeping red-tile roof and terra-cotta patio that stretched to the pool—their father’s pride and joy—the house seemed cold and empty as a tomb to Maggie, and she longed for their little three-bedroom rambler in the valley.