Wednesday, July 4, 2007
Stockton, New Jersey
“If you could trade places with anyone for a day, would you?”
Geno closed his eyes to consider the question. “No,” he said.
Beside him, Kelly Hook turned the page of a small square tome titled, The Book of If.
“If you could spend a day with anyone who is now deceased,” she said, “who would it be?”
“My mom, I guess.”
“Same,” Chris Mudry said, from his sprawl in the leather recliner.
“You’d spend the day with my mom?”
“And night.”
“Chris,” Kelly cried as Geno let out a howl and fired a throw pillow at the recliner.
“Spend that, asshole,” he said, flipping Chris off.
Grinning, Chris fired the cushion back. Geno crossed his arms over it and the two motherless boys locked understanding gazes an instant before looking away. Membership in this unfortunate club allowed them to crack dead mom jokes. But only with each other.
Kelly slouched deeper in the couch cushions and stretched her long legs next to Geno’s on the coffee table. Her smooth calves and pale blue toenails made him swallow hard. Until this year, Kelly Hook had been nothing more than background noise. One of the dozens of girls he’d known since kindergarten. Extras in the drama of his life. Overnight, it seemed, her volume went up. Her presence blocked Geno’s path at every turn. Getting in his way, derailing his train of thought, occupying his waking time and monopolizing his dreams.
This girl is wrecking me.
He kind of loved it.
She had the look. A soap-and-water clean beauty. Long red hair she didn’t do a thing with and a smattering of freckles across her nose. She couldn’t be bothered with makeup and she didn’t need it. She was standalone gorgeous, right down to those blue toenails so close to Geno’s sneakers and the hint of perfume tickling his nose.
It was becoming a bit of a problem.
Resisting the urge to adjust himself, Geno moved the cushion a little lower into his lap.
“Where you there when your mom died?” Kelly asked.
“No, school.”
“But she died at home.”
“Yeah, she was in hospice at that point.”
“Freshman year, right?”
“Sophomore. I was in geometry class. The principal came to get me in the middle of a test.”
“Maybe your mom timed that on purpose,” Chris said.
“Thanks, mom,” Geno said, laughing. “It was weird how Dr. Stanton didn’t say anything. Everyone looked up and he was in the doorway looking right at me. We just held eyes and… I knew.” He freed a hand and held it out to Kelly, his thumb gesturing toward the base of his pinky. “That dot there? Can you see?”
Kelly peered close, her breath tickling his palm. “Yeah.”
“I had my compass in my hand. I sort of slammed my fist down on the desk and the point stabbed into my palm. Right there.”
“Ouch.”
“Show her what’s in your wallet,” Chris said.
Kelly’s copper eyebrows raised. She’d turned more in Geno’s direction. A subtle shift in body language that gave him courage. He fished his wallet out of his pocket and, from its folds, drew a small square of denim. The blue was smeared across with maroon.
“I wiped my hand off on my jeans,” he said. “Got blood on them. I cut this piece off and threw the rest away. Been carrying it with me since.”
“Wow,” Kelly said. Her shoulder was touching Geno’s now, pushing against it. In another minute, she’d meld right into him. The idea made his belly coil like a snake in the sun. Hiding his burning face, he put the scrap of fabric and his wallet away.
“Who did Dr. Stanton tell first?” Kelly asked. “You or your brother?”
“Me,” he said. “Then I went with him up to Carlito’s class.”
“That must’ve been awful.”
“Yeah,” Geno said. “He looked at me a few seconds and then closed his eyes and nodded, like he’d been expecting it.”
“Do you guys ever feel the same things or have a psychic moment?”
“No,” he said, brave enough to give her a playful shove. “I don’t read his mind, he doesn’t feel sad when I do.”
He was lying. He did sometimes feel what Carlos felt. But it was too hard to explain the twin bond and now Kelly was shoving him back. They were nearly wrestling, each trying to knock the other off the couch.
“Get a room,” Chris mumbled, aiming the clicker at the TV.
Kelly laughed and laughed, her hair tumbling over her face and getting in Geno’s mouth. She was writhing to get out of his grasp, but not too hard. All of his skin jumped up and down in curious excitement, wondering what this would be like if he and Kelly were alone. In the dark. Lying down. And naked.
She’s luscious, he thought. One of those words that sounded exactly like what it meant. She was warm and luscious, her muscles firm under his palms, yet soft and springy. Her flesh gave under his touch. He could knead her like dough. Butter her up and eat her.
He chuckled under his breath. Butter was a word that made him giggle since he was a little boy. Butter and pickle.
“You laughing at me?” Kelly said.
“No.”
“Don’t lie, Geronimo.”
“I’m not.”
“Geronimo,” she shouted, holding the O long as she gave him one last shove to tumble onto the floor. It was an overused joke that came with having a famous name. He didn’t mind it coming from Kelly, though.
Not at all.
He rolled on his stomach, head on his crossed arms, calculating how he could make his move at the party tonight. The logistics were tricky. Kelly Hook’s father was the Stockton Police Chief. Which made him Captain Hook. Which meant Geno couldn’t fuck around with his daughter’s luscious honor.
As he turned scenarios over in his mind, Kelly was on and off the phone, talking to kids coming over that night to swim and cook out. A combined party for the Fourth of July and her birthday.
“Stacey’s coming,” she said to Chris.
Chris’ eyes didn’t leave the TV. “Mm.”
“Stacey likes him?” Geno asked.
“Big time. Is your brother coming?”
“Why, do you like him?”
Her eyes held his like a challenge. “Is he?”
“I told him it was happening but he said he was doing…something. I don’t know.”
He put his head down again and let his mind drift to the right, to the vague place where he stopped and his twin brother began. An imaginary land under a field of glittering stars, where two became one.
Nos, he thought. It was the password to within.
His head turned more to the right. Waiting for the reply which took longer and longer to come these days.
Nos.
Nos…?
The Caan twins had been tangled so intricately in the womb, it took doctors half an hour to sort out arms and legs and cords during the C-section. Put down to sleep in separate swaddles, they worked their arms free while dreaming. Migrating, drifting and turning toward each other. Within minutes, they would be nose to nose, each with a little hand pushed under the other’s cap.
Growing up, they spoke in first person plural. We went. We did. We want. We are. They patted heads to say hello, say goodbye, get each other’s attention. To say without speaking, Brother mine.
Only in adolescence did their paths of interest diverge and their separate selves evolve. Carlos was purely visual, taking in life through his eyes or the lens of his camera. Geno was led by the ear, following talk radio and music and spending his allowance on MP3 players and expensive headphones. The world beckoned like a siren to Carlito, who kept a world map over his bed and stuck pins in the lands he wanted to visit. Geno got slightly anxious when the family traveled. He liked being at their destination, but getting there made him feel cut loose in space. For him, the best part about going somewhere was coming back home.
Home was We. Although he and Carlos were in separate kindergarten classes, they came home with the same self-portrait: two boys, dressed alike, with a field of stars between them. The stars were their third entity. Their two states united in us-ness. They had a name for their shared space, and within it, they had secret identities. Carlos was Los. Geronimo was Mos. Los and Mos lived in the starry world of Nos, Spanish for we. Nos rhymed with dos, Spanish for two.
“Nos,” one would say when they parted ways for the day.
“Dos,” the other replied.
They promised their mother no tattoos until they were in college, but they had it all planned out. A field of stars on their sides, creating Nos when they stood together. In a shifting, changing world, Carlito’s presence was constant and immutable. Either he was physically there, standing next to Geno. Or he was there as Los, tangible in the air to Geno’s right. He only had to turn his head the tiniest bit in that direction to dial into his twin.
Nos, he’d think, and toss it into the star field. Carlito said he could sense it like a flickering light in his peripheral. He’d send his reply back and moments later, it would touch Geno’s ears like a single wind chime.
Dos.
Us two. Together.
“¿Dónde están mis pollitos?” their mother would call when she got home from work.
Where are my little chicks?
Born in Mexico, Analisa kept her maiden name, Gallinero, which was Spanish for henhouse. Geno often envisioned his mother’s love as a little red house, nestled in a glade of trees. Golden light spilling from the windows like a beacon and Analisa waiting within, plump and warm and soft like feathers.
Then she died.
Cancer came the first time when the boys were eleven. Analisa made it a game, letting her chicks dye her hair pink and purple and shave it into a mohawk. Carlos was allowed to photograph her bald scalp close-up, to frame her lash-less, brow-less eyes and capture her hard days. Geno sat with her long hours, listening to NPR. Saturday afternoons with Jonathan Schwartz, who played the music Analisa loved—oldies and show tunes—but had the most God-awful delivery. A slow, gravelly drawl that tried to make everything deep and significant.
As Analisa’s health deteriorated, Geno tried to be brave, but the lights were dim in the henhouse, filling him with anxiety. Of the twins, he was the more introverted and homebound. He’d always had his mother’s love of kitchens and food and hospitality, but when she became ill, the love became a purpose. He took over meals and shopping and laundry, fervently believing if he could keep things running the way they always ran, Analisa would get well.
“You’re the only one around here with a lick of common sense,” she said, sitting in her clean kitchen with a cup of tea, watching Geno chop vegetables and stir soup, burn the rice and grate his own knuckles. Sometimes coaching him through recipes, sometimes too tired to do anything but watch him figure it out.
He basked in the simple compliment, knowing it wasn’t lip service because he’d overheard her say it to a friend on the phone: “Nathan and Carlito are like two deer in the headlights sometimes. Geno’s the sensible one.”
She went into remission and everything was fine again.
Until it wasn’t.
Until the cancer came back to finish the job.
Until Analisa was too weak to sit in the kitchen and too sedated to make jokes about Jonathan Schwartz’s voice. Music made her fretful. Talk shows made her agitated and she couldn’t sip anything more than water.
One day, Geno walked into geometry class a normal kid and walked out under the arm of the principal with bloodstains on his jeans.
He discovered death hurt like hell. He was unprepared for the sheer physicality of sadness. His skin, bones, teeth, hair follicles and fingernails ached with the loss. Grieving was like being in a really bad car accident. All day long.
Every day.
It was in the midst of this physical ordeal that Geno realized Analisa was right: While he had sensibly braced himself for her death, his father and Carlos had stared into its blinding light and let themselves be sideswiped.
Nathan Caan was there for his boys. Physically there, although overnight he seemed two inches shorter and twenty pounds thinner. His diminished body was present but his twinkling eyes had gone flat, burned out by death’s headlights. He stared into space for long stretches of time. His sentences trailed off as if he forgot what he was saying as he was saying it. Worst of all, he began to mix up the boys’ names. Once he boasted he could tell them apart blindfolded. Now he’d be mid-conversation with one twin and realize he thought he was talking to the other. It started out amusing. Then became disconcerting and finally, hurtful. Because after Analisa died, Geno and Carlos became utterly unalike.
In the first months of mourning, Geno was afraid to leave the house while Carlos seemed afraid to be in it. Carlos threw himself into his photography. Disappearing until dinner, saying he had an after-school job. Busy, busy, busy. While Geno sat alone in blood-stained jeans, listening to the radio.
He reached out. Nos.
The reply took forever. It hit his ear like a squeal of tires or a needle-scratched record. A burst of static heralding a disinterested Dos.
Geno wore his same jeans to death while Carlos was taking great pains with his appearance. Monopolizing the bathroom and taking innumerable selfies. He started dressing almost exclusively in black and sporting an expensive leather jacket.
“Where’d you get that?” Geno asked.
Carlos hitched it a little higher on his shoulders and turned in front of the mirror. “Bought it.”
Everything was changing.
The henhouse was empty and Carlos was harder and harder to find in the Land of Two. Only a few weeks ago, Geno was doing laundry, emptying pants pockets of loose change and other junk, and he drew a handful of folded-up notes from Carlos’ expensive jeans.
Come see me soon.
I don’t feel alive if you’re not around.
—A
I could barely let you go yesterday.
My cells cried after you were gone.
I love you so much, I need two of you.
—A
“Holy crap,” Geno said under his breath, eyebrows raised. Carlos had a girlfriend? He was always surrounded by chicks at school, but he seemed unfazed by their company to the point of boredom. Had one of them broken through his aloof facade? Geno ran a roll call of female classmates with A names but none turned on a lightbulb. He couldn’t reconcile any of the Amys, Amandas, Andreas or Ariannas with these passionate sentiments.
Your body is so beautiful.
Your soul is a double helix.
I want to gather it to both sides of me.
—A
Geno rolled his eyes. He was no poet, but he was sure he could do better.
It hurts when you deny me
What I want so badly.
What I need if I’m to love you completely.
It’s all or nothing.
You know this yet you keep half back.
Nothing is finished because you don’t love me.
Don’t come here anymore.
—A
“High maintenance,” Geno mumbled. “And she definitely wants to get in your pants, dude.”
His eyebrows wrinkled at the next bit of crumpled paper. Carlos’ handwriting this time:
Please let me come back.
I can’t live without you.
You’re the only one who knows me.
The only one who sees me.
Please.
Please.
—C
This one leaned on Geno’s stomach, like being punched in slow motion. I know you, he thought, wounded. I see you. I was born tangled with you. We started as one cell before becoming two.
His relief was almost smug when he read the reply, written directly below:
No.
—A
“Harsh,” he said. He stuffed the notes back in the jeans pocket and threw them into the washer. The ink would run and be rinsed away. The paper would disintegrate to shredded bits in the lint trap. Carlos would get over it.
Until then, Geno would be waiting for him in the Land of Nos, keeping the lights on in the little red henhouse.