The Midnight Twins

Table of Contents

 
RAZORBILL
Published by the Penguin Group
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Copyright © 2008 Jacquelyn Mitchard

ISBN : 978-1-1011-5888-3

 
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For Kathy and Karen, and the
s
ingle sentence that inspired this book,
and for their big sister, Deb.
Everything you say is funny or beautiful.

LOOK BOTH WAYS

Meredith and Mallory Brynn looked exactly the same.

So it was natural for people to expect them to be the same.

Of course, not all people who look the same really are.

Meredith and Mallory were identical twins. But they were opposites.

One person made into two by luck or by fate, until they were almost teenagers, they never, not once, thought of themselves as being two separate people. Identical twins often don’t. They knew each other as they would never know anyone else, before they understood even the fact that they were people, before they could talk, before they had names. Yet they acted differently from each other, spoke differently, thought differently, and wanted different things. They played with different toys, laughed at different jokes, excelled at different subjects in school. Their mother stopped dressing them alike when they were just two years old, because Mallory didn’t like dresses and pulled off all the buttons.

In their lives, being identical would be the easy part. Being different would bring them power, and power almost always comes paired with grief.

Most children love hearing the story of their birth, but the Brynn girls heard theirs so often that they got sick of it, even though it was, they had to admit, a pretty unusual story. Their mother, Campbell Brynn, a surgical nurse, went into labor at a New Year’s Eve party. She wasn’t due to have the babies for another three weeks. There was a mad dash to the hospital, where the girls’ father, Tim, and Bonnie Jellico, another nurse and Campbell’s best friend, held her hands while the babies came—with startling speed, quicker than anyone would have imagined for firstborn children. The doctor arrived with just moments to spare.

Meredith was older, born first at 11:59 p.m. Mallory came just two minutes later, at 12:01 a.m., the first baby of the New Year in the small town of Ridgeline, New York. With all the hands and machines and towels and instruments freewheeling around the delivery room (because when twins are born, there needs to be two of everything—two newborn specialists, two neonatal nurses, two warming beds), it took a while for someone to notice and exclaim, “They were born in different years! Identical twins, and they’ll never have the same birthday!”

Now, it wasn’t as though Campbell forced this story on people. It came up naturally. (One thing twins learn early is that, for the rest of their lives, people
are
going to ask, “Which one of you is older?”) Campbell would try to get away with saying that they were born on New Year’s Eve and leave it at that. Or she would try to tell the funny bits, about how furious she got at Tim for ignoring her and watching the shimmering ball above Times Square on TV, as well as admiring women in the crowd who were dressed up in copies of early-twentieth-century finery (since the movie everyone was watching that year was
Titanic
).

At the hospital, as the moment of the birth grew closer, Tim looked up at the TV and said, “We could go there someday. Don’t you think it would be fun? Think about next year and how beautiful you’d look in one of those low-cut dresses. Or we could go there when the twins are three. For the new millennium. Would you like that?”

And Campbell, her face as red and swollen as a cartoon chipmunk’s, said, “I would like it. I would like it even more if you fell off a cliff.”

She told the nurses that they had planned to name the girls Andrea and Arden. But moments after their birth, Tim heard Campbell say, “Hush, little Meredith. There, there, Mallory.” And barely had he opened his mouth to object when Campbell snapped, “I know what we
planned
. But when you give birth to two babies in two minutes, you can name them Batman and Robin if you want.
Their
names are Meredith and Mallory!”

Campbell never forgot to mention that, technically, the girls were born in different years. It made them unique—and if Campbell wanted anything, it was never to diminish the twins’ uniqueness. At least as far as their mother knew, they had little enough of that to begin with—certainly when they were small.

But even before they were born, the babies knew how it was to be completely bonded and completely opposite. Meredith was happy by basic nature. She would always love pretty things, pretty people, and hopeful solutions. Mallory was intense and would always worry, even when she didn’t need to. She would look at questions in complicated ways and refuse to accept the easy answer. Merry would attract friends the way Velcro picks up tennis balls, while Mallory, unless she was playing sports, would spend most of her time with her sister or else alone by choice. Before they came into the great world, she was the baby content to float in the warm dark seas, examining her fingertips and stroking her cheek, trying to figure out what being a person meant. Meredith wanted to feel and find everything. Side to side and up and down she zoomed, like a mermaid in flight. All that zooming got on Mallory’s nerves as months passed, and the quarters got closer in there. She sometimes put out a tiny hand to slow her sister down. And Meredith always responded. At Mallory’s touch she settled down and, entwined, head to foot, they would drift into sleep, as the voices from outside slipped into their dreams.

These voices were ones they grew to recognize, as they bloomed from pink buds to babies fully formed—with fingers and toes and personalities—separated only by a wall of muscle from the great world all around them. They heard the voice of their mother, giving and taking orders all day, a quick, light, practical note in a room where the beeping and whooshing and clanging were the music. There was their father—friendly and loud, but also protective and calm. There was the voice of their grandmother, a soft voice that always alerted the babies to listen closely, even before they were born.

One day, the twins listened as Gwenny told her daughter-in-law that both babies were girls. Much as she loved her mother-in-law, Campbell was annoyed. Like any new mother—or at least most of them—she wanted the surprise. So her voice was sharper than she meant it to be when she asked just how her mother-in-law knew the babies’ gender and why she considered this so important. Yes, she knew that all the women in her husband’s family
supposedly
had “the sight.” But at least back then, Campbell thought that “the sight” was a bunch of baloney. And so Gwenny’s prediction was just a lucky guess. Campbell wiggled her foot with impatience. She wished that Gwenny would get on with it.

“Well, they’re both girls. So they’re probably identical twins. Identical twin girls run in our family,” Gwenny said. “I thought you should be ready. Twins are different from other babies. And not just because there are two of them. They’re joined. Not joined like kids who are born sharing a hip or a rib. Joined by the spirit.”

Campbell still didn’t get why this was such a big deal. She’d read up on identical twins, in several authoritative books from the library. What Gwenny seemed to want to tell her was something else, something more; but she didn’t say anything else, or anything more. Finally Campbell decided that Gwenny was being unnecessarily dramatic. Being dramatic seemed to run in her husband’s family, too. The baby twins sensed, however, not with words but with feelings, that what Gwenny said about their being inseparable was important.

And they were inseparable.

After they were born, for example, they fretted and sobbed in their sweet little cradles. Meredith couldn’t bear to be away from Mallory. Mallory was cranky and tense if she couldn’t see her twin.

Their mother finally decided to ignore the experts’ advice.

Weary to the ends of her fingers, she put them together in one cradle next to their parents’ big bed. From then on, she found them each morning, one right side up and one upside down, each clasping the other’s tiny foot. At precisely the same moments, throughout the night, they made precisely the same sounds—chirping and cooing—turning over at precisely the same time. They never woke up for feeding, though they drained Campbell during the day. She didn’t realize it, but she had given them what they wanted most of all. They needed nothing, not even food, more than they needed each other. In fact, on the night they were born, Meredith, as excitable and bouncy in the world as she had been before she arrived, wriggled and shuddered with angry, piercing cries the moment she slid with a smack into the doctor’s hands. The huge, cold new place was bad enough. Being alone—without her other—was even worse. The doctor was just glad that this baby was a live wire, because twins who came early could be tiny and in trouble. But the first baby girl grew calm as soon as her sister arrived, just two minutes later, quietly gazing around her and breathing slowly on her own. He couldn’t have known why. Without being able to speak aloud, Mallory and Meredith were already speaking to each other in what would become their private language. Mallory thought her way to Meredith.
Soso,
Mallory thought to her sobbing twin.
Soso . . . don’t cry. Everything is all right.
Meredith heard and quieted down. It would always be “soso,” a word that meant nothing to anyone but to them.
Soso . . . don’t cry. Siow . . . I’m scared. I’m hurt.

Bonnie Jellico, who had never witnessed twins born in such a short time except through a surgery, remembered thinking it was like seeing two copies glide out of the portal of a copy machine. They were beautiful, with thick black hair and softly pointed chins.