Under Shifting Glass (3 page)

Some movement, a blink, a sigh. A song. Some sadness.

The sensation of life, of a rib cage, breathing.

“Jessica!” That's a shout, a real-world shout. Gran is shouting. “Jessica, Jess!”

I jolt out of myself. “What?”

“The phone, Jess.”

Gran is standing at the bottom of the stairs, the phone in her hand.

It has come. The message. She knows. She knows about the babies.

I abandon everything, fly down the stairs, rip the phone from her.

“Yes?”

It is Si.

“Jess,” he says. “Jess.”

“Yes!”

“They're alive. They're alive, Jess.” His voice doesn't sound like his normal voice, it sounds floating. I conjure his face. His eyes are full of stars.

I know I'm supposed to say something, but I don't know what.

“Isn't it wonderful?” says Gran.

“And they both have a heart,” says Si. “Two hearts, Jess. One heart each.”

Then I find something to say.

“Omphalopagus,” I say.

Omphalopagus is the technical term for babies joined at the lower chest. These type of babies never share a heart, so I don't know why Si is so surprised. After all, it was Si who did the research, hours and hours of it online. Si who taught me the word, made me pronounce it back to him.
Omphalo
—umbilicus.
Pagus
—fastened, fixed. Fixed at the navel. The twins umbilically joined to each other and to Mom and right back through history to the Greeks who coined the word in the first place.

Me and the joins.

Si and the statistics.

Si's endless statistics. Seventy percent of conjoined twins are girls. Thirty-nine percent are stillborn. Thirty-four percent don't make it through the first day of life.

Si's eyes, shining.

“Can you give me back to Gran now, Jess?” says Si.

As I hand over the phone, I remember the night of Mom's nineteen-week scan. I'd come down for a raid on the cereal cupboard. Si and Mom were talking in the sitting room, hushed, serious talk.

“They're gifts of God,” I heard Mom say.

I stood at the door of the kitchen, waiting for Si to put Mom right about that. I waited for him to tell Mom what he'd told me earlier that afternoon that, despite a great deal of mystical mumbo jumbo talked about conjoined twins down the ages, they are actually just biological lapses, slips of nature. Embryos that begin to divide into identical twins, but never complete the process, or split embryos that somehow fuse back together again. A small error, a malfunction, nothing to be surprised about, considering the cellular complexity of a human being.

I wait for him to say this. But he doesn't.

“They're miracles,” Mom says. “Our miracles. And I don't care what anyone says. They're here to stay.”

And Si doesn't go on to mention the thirty-nine percent of conjoined twins who don't make it through the birth canal, or the thirty-four percent who die on day one.

He just takes her in his arms and lets her bury her head in his chest. I see them joined there. Head to chest.

I've only been gone from my bedroom a matter of minutes, but it feels like a lifetime. Even the room doesn't look the way it did before. It's bigger, brighter, there is sunlight splashing through the window.

“The babies,” I shout. “They're alive!” I jump on the bed and throw myself into a wild version of a tribal dance Zoe once taught me. Then I catch sight of myself in the mirror and stop. Immediately.

I also see, in the mirror, the flask. It has fallen over, it's lying on its side on the desk.

No. No!

I scoot off the bed.

Please don't be cracked, please don't be broken
.

The flask has only just entered my life and yet, I realize suddenly, I feel very powerfully about it.
Connected
, even. I find myself lurching forward, grabbing for it. But it isn't my beautiful, breathing flask; it is just a bottle. Something you might dig up in any old backyard. It isn't broken, but it might as well be, because the colors are gone and so are the patterns. No, that's not true; there are whorls on the surface of the glass still, but they aren't moving anymore, and the bubbles, my little seed fish, they aren't swimming. And there is nothing—
nothing
—inside.

I feel a kind of fury, as though somebody has given me something very precious and then just snatched it away again. I realize I already had plans for that flask. I was going to remove the cork and . . .

The cork—where is the cork?

It isn't in the bottle. I scan the desk. It isn't on the desk. But how can it be anywhere but in the bottle or on the desk? Did I imagine a cork? No, I saw it: a hard, discolored thing, lodged in the throat of the flask. I look into the empty bottle, as if the cork might just miraculously appear. But it doesn't. The smell of the bottle is of cold and dust. There can't have been anything in that bottle.

And yet there was.

There was something crouched inside that glass, waiting.

No, not crouched; that makes it sound like an animal. And the thing didn't have that sort of form, it was just something moving, stirring. Then I see it, the cork. Look! There on the floor. It's not close to the flask, not just fallen out and lying on the desk, but a full yard away. Maybe more. To carry the cork that far, something big, something powerful, must have come out of the flask, burst from it.

So where is that thing now?

It's on the windowsill.

What I thought was a patch of sunlight isn't sunlight at all. It's bright like sunlight, but it doesn't fall right, doesn't cast the right shadows. Light coming through a window-pane starts at the sun and travels for millions of miles in dead straight lines. You learn that in fifth grade. Light from the sun is not curved, or lit from inside, or suddenly iridescent as a soap bubble or milky as a pearl. It doesn't expand and pulse and move. It doesn't breathe. Whatever is on the windowsill, it isn't light from the sun.

I go toward it. It would be a lie to say I'm not frightened. I am frightened, terrified even, but I'm also drawn. I can't help myself. I remember my old math teacher, Mr. Brand, breaking off from equations one day and going to stand at
the window where there was a slanted sunbeam. He cupped his hands in the beam and looked at the light he held—and didn't hold.

“You can't have it,” he said. “You can't ever have it.”

And all of the class laughed at him. Except me. I knew what he meant because I've tried to capture sunbeams, too.

And now I want the thing on the windowsill, because it is strange and beautiful and I don't want to lose it again. I don't want to feel what I felt when I saw that the flask was empty, which is sick and hollow, my stomach clutching just like in the moment when Mom told me Aunt Edie was dead.

So I move very slowly and quietly, as though the thing is an animal after all and might flee in fear. And it does seem to be vibrating—or trembling, I can't tell which—as though it is aware of me, watching me, though something without eyes cannot watch.

“It's all right,” I find myself saying. “It's all right. I won't hurt you.”

I won't hurt it! What about it hurting me?

My room's not big, as I've said, but it takes an age to cross. I am just a hand-stretch away from the pearly, pulsing light when there is a sudden whoosh, like a wind got up from nowhere, and I feel a rush and panic, but I don't know if it is my rush and panic or that of the thing that
seems to whip and curl past my head and pour itself back into the flask.

Back into the flask!

Quick as a flash, I put my thumb over the opening and I hold it down tight as I scrabble in the desk for my sticky tape. I pull at the tape, bite some off, jam it over the open throat of the flask, and then wind it again and again around the neck so the thing cannot escape.

I have it captured.

Captured!

Then I feel like one of those boys you read about in books who pull the wings off flies: violent, cruel. But here's the question: If you had something in your bedroom that flew and breathed and didn't obey the laws of science, would you want it at liberty?

That's what I thought.

When my heart calms down, I feel I owe the flask (or the thing inside it) an explanation. I think I should tell the truth, about the fear as well as the excitement. But I don't know who or what I'm dealing with, so I also feel I shouldn't give too much away. I should be cautious. Si's always saying that
A man of science proceeds with care
. Or,
If you're going to mix chemicals, Jess, put your goggles on
.

I'm not sure what sort of goggles I need to deal with the thing in the flask, but I think the least I can try is an apology.

“I'm sorry about the sticky tape,” I say.

I'm not really expecting a reply and I don't get one, but the movement inside the flask does seem to become a little less frantic, so I have the feeling the thing is listening.

“I guess you must have been in that flask a long time,” I say next.

Where does that remark come from? From the cold and the dust I smelled in the bottle? Or from some storybook knowledge of things in bottles, genies in lamps? What am I imagining, that the thing is some trapped spirit cursed to remain in the flask for a thousand years until—until what? Until Jessica Walton arrives with her father's ill-fitting slide rule? They say (correction: Si says) if you put a sane person in a lunatic asylum for any length of time they become as mad as the inmates. Me? I'm talking to a thing in a flask.

I'm calling it
you
.

The word
you
implies that the thing I'm talking to is alive. I mean, you don't say
you
to a box of tissues, do you? Or to a hairbrush or a necklace or a cell phone. So I am making a definite assumption about the thing being alive. Mr. Pug, our biology teacher, says that only things that carry out all seven of the life processes can be said to be alive. Pug calls all seven life processes Mrs. Nerg.

M—for movement

N—for nutrition

R—for reproduction

E—for excretion

S—for sensitivity

R—for respiration

G—for growth

I look at the thing in the flask. Movement—no doubt about that. Reproduction—I'm not sure I want to think about that right now. Sensitivity—definitely. It's sensitive to me, I'm sensitive to it. Nutrition—does the thing eat? Unlikely. It doesn't have a mouth. But then plants eat and they don't have mouths. Excretion—not important. If you don't eat you don't need to excrete. Respiration—yes, it breathes, doesn't it? And it has to get energy from somewhere or it couldn't move—and it certainly moves. Growth—yes again; I think I can imagine it growing.

To be alive, Pug says, you have to be able to carry out all seven of the processes. Not two, or five, or one. All seven.

I think Pug may have missed out on some of his training. This thing is definitely alive.

“Who are you?” I say. “What are you?”

The thing does not respond.

I retreat a bit. “I think you'll be safer in the flask for a while,” I say.

I mean, of course, that I'll feel safer if the thing is in the flask. I've heard adults do this. They tell you something they want by making it sound useful to you, like,
You'll be much warmer in your coat, won't you?

“Because,” I add, “I have to go to the hospital in a minute. Gran's taking me to the hospital.”

No reply.

“To see the babies.”

No reply.

“So I'm just going to pop you (
you
) back in the desk for a bit.”

No reply.

“Okay?”

“You see, I noticed how you rushed back in the flask yourself, so it must be your home, I guess. Am I right?”

No reply.

“My name's Jess, by the way.”

Some little silver seed fish, swimming.

“How do you do that? How do you make the fish swim?”

No reply.

“It's beautiful.”

No reply.

“So just wait, okay?”

No reply.

“Promise?”

Very gently, I place the flask back into the dark space behind the left-hand drawer in the desk.

“See you later,” I say as I leave the room.

Our local hospital is too small to deal with cases like the twins', so we have to go to the city. It's a long drive.

“Your Mom will be very tired. You know that, don't you?” Gran says.

She makes it sound like we shouldn't be going, but I know why we we're going. In case the twins belong in the thirty-four percent who die on day one.

The Intensive Care Baby Unit is in the high-rise part of the hospital, on the fifteenth floor. We come out of the elevator facing a message telling us we are
In the Zone
and to make sure we scrub ourselves with the Hygienic Hand Rub. The doors to the unit are locked and we have to buzz to be let in.

Si hears us as we check in at the nurses' station and comes out to greet us.

“Angela,” he says to Gran and then, “Jess.” And he puts his hand out to touch me, which he doesn't usually. I look at his eyes. They aren't sparkling, but they are smiling. “Come on in.”

There are four incubators in the room and five nurses. Two of the nurses are wearing flimsy pink disposable aprons and throwing things into bins. There's an air of serious hush, broken only by the steady blip of ventilators. Beside each cot is a screen with wavy lines of electronic blue, green, and yellow. I don't know what they measure, but they're the sort of machines you see in movies that go into a single flat line when people die. Mom is not sitting or standing, but lying on a bed. They must have wheeled her in on that bed, and parked her next to the twins. She doesn't look up immediately when we come into the room; all her focus, all her attention, is on my brothers.