Look Both Ways (16 page)

With the skirt and sweater and a pair of Mary Janes with one-inch heels in bags knocking against her leg, Mallory and Eden staggered into Pizza Papa.

“I’m weak. I’m violently hungry,” Mallory said, pretending to fall into her side of the booth. She looked up and there was Drew, holding out a menu.

“Don’t pass out on us, Brynn,” he said, with his old Drewsky smile. Mallory was happy to see him happy. Somehow, over the past few weeks, Drew had begun to leave early for school—a clear signal that he wasn’t giving the twins a ride as he had for the past two years. But after she and Eden had ordered a large with double cheese and all the vegetables there were, Drew said, “You can ride with me Monday, Brynn. I had to get in early the past few weeks for National Honor Society junk.”

“You’re in National Honor Society? Drew! Way to go!” Mally jumped up and threw her arms around Drew, as she would have in the old days, but she felt him holding her just a little stiffly, away from him.

“And my girl too!” Drew added.

“Pam is getting inducted? She’s a nice girl, Drew, even if she isn’t a jock,” Mallory said.

“You’re dating Pam Door? The cheerleader? Please! You don’t like girly girls!” Eden teased him.

Drew shrugged. “Things change. Be boring otherwise. I’ll get your ’za.”

Eden whispered, “I always thought he had a crush on you!”

Mallory said, “Things . . . change.”

“What did Cooper say in his letter?” Eden asked. Mallory almost didn’t answer. She was lost in a memory of Drew’s Green Beast, the hideous Toyota truck, coming like a chariot to save her and Merry when David cornered them in the deserted construction site. She thought of Drew’s strong arms around her, patting her head, telling her it was okay. Drew . . . the only person outside the little circle she trusted. What she felt for Cooper wasn’t trust, it was attraction. It wasn’t old, but new and exciting. And still, that wasn’t the same as tested and true. She was totally happy that he was with Pam. Except she wasn’t. If Cooper was a comet, Drew was the North Star, always the same, always steady, looking down on her.

Mallory noticed Eden waiting. She said, “Well, he told me that your grandma gave me the name Wapiw, although I don’t know if I’m saying it right.”

“It means ‘to see.’ And I don’t either because it’s been so long since there were native Cree speakers that even people in the same clan kind of have their own way of saying things.”

“So she knows about me.”

Eden said slowly, “Grandmere’s not like . . . you. But she can tell some things. She’s lived a long time. She’s eighty-five.”

“Get out! She looks so young!”

“My mother is forty-eight, and she has a three-year-old. In my family, the women have lots of babies and late.”

“Wow. My mother would fall over and die from exhaustion if she had a baby now.”

“Most people don’t have eight kids, for sure.”

When the pizza arrived, Mally couldn’t help being distracted by Drew working behind the counter, cleaning up. When they were little kids, Drew’s red hair and big teeth made him look like a cartoon or a puppet. But now, his hair was styled long on top and cut short over the sides and had darkened to a deep, velvety auburn. Years of cross-country had given him strong legs and broad, flat muscles across his shoulders and chest. Braces had restructured his smile. Drew, Mally realized, was . . . more than just nice.

“What else did Coop say?”

“Just that, really, and he gave me an address where I could write to him. They don’t let them have e-mail.”

“Well, he’s coming home in two weeks for a month! I’m so happy. I want him to meet James. He’ll see then. He will, Mally.”

Cooper, home for a month. Why hadn’t he told her? And what could they do? The fact remained that Mallory, despite having lived a lifetime since last winter, wouldn’t be fourteen for another month and a half and wasn’t allowed to date until she was fifteen.

“You’ll come out and see him,” Eden said then, as if reading Mallory’s thoughts.

“I have to go back to the department store,” Mally said.

“Did you forget something?”

“Pants. Power colors. Intense, winter-white shirts. I’ve had six pairs of the same kind of jeans since I was in seventh grade. I just had my mom order more of them after they wore out.”

“You’re going downtown, Mally!”

“You bet,” Mallory said.

But even as she laughed and pretended to be a girl-on-a-spree, she was thinking that Cooper would no more want to meet James than she would want to meet David Jellico’s twin.

Gesturing with her pizza crust, gossiping about how much Eva Wiley’s shoes cost and how many pairs Eva had, using her index fingers to stroke her long hair in ribbons behind her ears, laughing until she snorted her soda, Eden looked like any other beautiful girl.

But she wasn’t.

Mallory wished she could talk about all this to Meredith! But Merry was deep in some lost place these days. She came home early and exhausted from the new demands of varsity cheerleading and stayed quiet, moody. And so Mallory kept Eden’s confidence locked away, just as she kept Cooper’s kiss. Two things that meant everything to her—they might never mean a thing to the world outside the private tower room that had become her heart.

O
n a Friday night the week before Thanksgiving, Tim picked the twins up from choir and cheer practice and swung past the hospital to get Campbell. Worn out from an after-school snowball fight and the beginning of his own indoor soccer season, Adam was asleep in the back, slumped sideways in his seat belt.

Tim left the car idling in the circle but he immediately came rushing back out.

“Girls, we might have to leave without her,” he said, pulling the van off to one side as not one but two ambulances, the Boone and Cole County fire department vehicles, swung into the bay.

Frozen, fascinated despite the ugliness of the lights against the dark-denim mackerel sky, the twins and Adam watched as the medics threw open the doors and ejected two men roughly bound to stretchers. Both of them wore vests of hunter orange with tufts of stuffing like cotton candy at the places the paramedics had cut away buttons and sleeves. Bags of the liquid Mally and Merry knew was called Ringer’s were attached to their hands by needles. Campbell rushed out, another nurse behind her.

“Okay, what have we got here?” she asked. She seemed to see her children but not to look at them.

“Thigh laceration, thirty centimeters or more, no involvement with the femoral artery but some kind of fracture . . . and considerable blood loss,” said the paramedic, a woman from Ridgeline who had a kid in Adam’s grade. Mally climbed out of the backseat to watch.

“Get a type and match stat and X-ray,” Campbell said. “Dr. Pennington is on. Not the father, the young woman. The resident. Which is lucky. She’s an orthopedic surgeon. What about the kid?”

“He’s fourteen, fifteen. We don’t know what the heck is wrong with him. He’s shocked, though. He says his uncle was attacked by a lion he shot at,” said the medic from the Cole County Fire and Ambulance. “They were looking for deer up on the ridge.”

Campbell quickly repeated everything to the doctor who ran beside her as they rushed the victims through the huge swinging doors. Mallory recognized Dr. Pennington as the woman who’d looked at her head.

“She’s something else,” Merry finally said. “Mom, I mean, not the doctor.”

“Yep. She knows her stuff,” said Tim, admiration suffusing his voice.

“Why doesn’t she become a doctor?” Mally asked.

“I think someday she might.”

The twins and Adam simultaneously squawked, “What?”

“We think,” Tim said, “Mom may go to medical school.”

“She’s forty-three years old,
DAD
!”

“And that would mean what?” Tim asked. “She’s already got a master’s in nursing, which cuts way down on her time, and she’ll be a resident in at the most four years. She’ll practice for twenty years or more.”

“Is this what all this stuff is about?” Merry asked.

“All what stuff?” Tim asked.

“All this stuff about Mom being tired and junk.”

“Actually, no, that’s not what it’s about,” he said.

“Because this has been going on for months,” Mally said. “She’s exhausted. She’s cranky. She’s moody.”

Tim said, “She’s pregnant.”

“She’s
what
?” Merry nearly screamed.

“She’s pregnant,” Tim said again, dropping his voice. “And if you tell her I said—”

“She’s pregnant with a baby?” Adam asked.

“That’s . . . how it usually goes,” Tim said.

“Dad, don’t goof around. MOM is pregnant?” Mally persisted.

“Look! Do you think we found you under Grandma’s rosebushes?” Tim was finally exasperated. “She’ll kill me so please, please act surprised when she says something about . . .”

“Mom is going to have a baby and study to be a doctor?” Mally went on. “Take my temperature, Meredith. I’m feverish.”

“Not at the same time,” Tim said. “She’ll take some time off and then Aunt Karin . . .”

“Aunt Karin’s having another baby?”

“No,” Tim said of his sister. “Aunt Karin will take care of the baby while Mom works part-time and goes to school part-time. Sheesh! That’s part of the master plan. She took the job in the ER before this happened.”

“Happened?” Merry asked. “It happened, like a thunderstorm?”

“We didn’t plan it,” Tim said. “Gosh, this is pretty personal.”

“It’s just biology!” Merry and Mally teased him, again simultaneously.

“These things happen,” Tim said.

“And you’re always on our case about, ‘When you’re thirty-five, you have to use two kinds of birth control.’”

A woman and a young teenager, people Mally assumed were family to the hunter and the kid, rushed past them, their tearful faces maps of strain and worry. For a moment, the Brynns were silenced by their grief.

Then Tim went on fending off his daughters’ assault. “By the time you’re thirty-five, you’ll be married,” he said. Tim began to walk toward the doors of the emergency room.

“What about us?” Adam yelled.

“We’re planning on keeping you,” Tim said casually, shoving his hands into his jacket pockets. But the three kids leaped out of the car to chase him.

“I thought Adam was the accident,” Meredith went on.

“Perfection is never an accident,” Adam replied, pulling up the sleeve of his fleece to display his minute bicep.

“Really, Dad,” Meredith went on. “Mom said she didn’t necessarily plan to have Adam . . . that you guys just didn’t try to stop him. Aren’t you a little old for this?”

“Movie stars do it all the time,” Tim said, taking a seat in the ER lobby and seriously studying a copy of
Sports Illustrated
that was at least two months old.

“The Cubs won the Series, Dad, which means they got into the play-offs,” Mallory told him, peering at him over the top of the magazine. “It happened two months ago, which means you aren’t reading that magazine. You’re avoiding us. What you’re saying is that you were irresponsible. And now Mom is going to possibly die from having a baby too late in life!”

“Mallory Arness Brynn, sit down,” Tim finally said. “You’re smart, and you certainly have the most opinions per pound in the family. But this is none of your business. Your mother has wanted another child for years. I didn’t when the business was getting up and running. And she figured she’d never do it once she was in medical school. So we gave it a short period of trying and . . . it worked. And by the way, she’s fine. And so is your little brother.”

“A boy? A guy baby?” Adam pumped the air with his fist.

“Our little brother? You can already tell?” Merry marveled.

“Mom is more than four months along in her pregnancy,” their father said, as though he were reading the news.

Adam began counting on his fingers.

“He’ll be born around my birthday!” Adam said. “We could name him Alphonse or Amadeus or . . .”

“Artichoke, or maybe Math Genius!” Mallory said. “It took you five minutes to think of how many months there were between four and nine! Ant, be quiet. This means . . . they were fooling around again when we were up on vacation at the camp.” Once again, eleven years after Adam’s birth, Tim and Campbell evidently forgot all the lessons they had played with all the subtlety of the percussion section of a marching band, during their two-week vacation up at the Brynn family’s cabins.

Mallory almost forgave them. The camp was the place where they all forgot their real selves and simply played, kids and grown-ups alike. Even though they were almost grown, at least in their own eyes, and even though their “vacation” took place no more than ten miles from their front step, the twins still loved the cabin camp, and their time there with their cousins—fishing and swimming in the Tipiskaw River that rumbled over the rocks below Crying Woman Ridge. Nobody thought about makeup or gossip or homework. Days began slowly and ended even more so.

While Campbell sometimes grumbled that other families went to Disney World, when they had gone there, the year Adam was six, the girls actually preferred throwing potatoes into the fire pit to cook to riding the latest roller coaster at Epcot.

Some of their father’s great-uncles and their families still came to the camp during the two full summer months that Grandma and Grandpa spent up there, from July until school. Mallory never entirely understood that, because Grandma Gwenny had more gardens than an English countess and had to pay a kid to weed them while they were “gone,” though they probably could have seen their yard from the top of the ridge. Mallory knew that the roses, for example, were at their most glorious when Gwenny wasn’t there, though she drove down a couple of times a week to bring huge cuttings up to the camp and to the nursing home.