Chapter Three
I hurry after him, afraid for his safety as much as my own. We can’t be doing this. We can’t be offering ourselves up to the night like this. Not here.
I don’t question why I think this, and so emphatically.
It’s no doubt because he is leading me into an alley. A dark alley in between high, tight buildings.
I stop at the mouth of the broken-bricked passageway. I can’t go any farther. What’s worse—the clock tower, the face in the
window, or the stereotypical dark alley where nothing good ever befalls a woman, short skirt or otherwise? Panic is closing
my throat. I can’t breathe. I can’t—
But Logan grips my elbow and tows me along with him.
And with him is better than being eaten alive by my own fear, so I let him, even though the alleyway is dark and potent with danger. I’d
rather take my chances touring about some of the less savory neighborhoods in the Bronx than do this, but Logan is pulling
me along with him whether I like it or not. I see the glint of something and tell myself it’s glass, not eyes. I kick something that rustles and tell myself it’s the discarded wrapper of whatever food people here eat, not something horrible, like skin.
I tell myself it’s charming, actually, this cozy alley hemming us in and seeming to constrict around us as we move—
Bullshit, myself replies.
Then we’re on the other side, and I can breathe again. Though it’s dark here, too, I have the sense of more space than the
claustrophobic shadow press of bricks and bad vibes we just emerged from.
I yank my arm away from Logan and lean heavily on the handle of my roller bag, vaguely contemplating using it as a weapon.
Possibly against my twin. But before I can wield it against him, I realize that I can’t see the clock tower. The knitting
shop and whatever is above it sits at the perfect angle to hide it from view.
I try not to let the rush of relief take me out at the knees, then try to focus on the house set back from the shop, across
a grassy yard. The darkness in this town is thick and heavy, but there’s a big pole with a security light somewhere behind
the house that gives an idea of its shape and size. And confirms that it is, in fact, a house.
But it’s tiny. So tiny I’m not sure how it’s even standing on its own.
In the dark, the yard feels like an overgrown threat. Maybe when someone lived here it was neatly manicured, but not now.
I assume it’s all grass, though in the dim light it’s impossible to tell what might lurk where it grows higher.
Logan marches confidently forward to the door. He doesn’t seem to notice the little pair of glowing eyes in the grass, and
this time it’s definitely eyes, not glass. My throat closes up. I’m frozen in place, watching those eyes glow, then blink,
then—
I must make some kind of noise, because Logan peers back at me. He sighs heavily, as if he has borne my particular brand of paranoia all his life.
Because he has.
“It’s some kitschy garden gnome, Lex. Just looks scary because the security light is hitting it at an odd angle,” he tells
me, again with that gentleness that has me hurrying to follow him up one crumbling concrete step, then another, to the small,
dark porch, even though I don’t want to go into this house, or be here at all.
He puts the key into the lock and twists the knob. “Home sweet home,” he says, in what I hope is a sardonic manner.
He steps inside first, flips a switch he finds with no trouble all, and a weak light falls out from within to illuminate the
yard. It also makes the darkness outside seem to choke me, so I follow him inside. Reluctantly, but quickly, I step over what
looks like the watermark of a welcome mat where no mat now sits.
I’m not sure what I expect inside, but at least when I close the front door behind me I don’t feel that crawling darkness
all over my skin, so that’s predisposing me to like the place.
We’re in a living room with old, worn furniture and notably colorful rugs that I immediately recognize as homemade rag rugs—something
I tried my hand at during a regretful period of my textile studies. But these are surprisingly interesting, the craftsmanship
impeccable.
I don’t know that everything screams grandmother, but it’s definitely a little . . . old. It smells like some kind of citrusy cleaning solution even though there’s a faint
layer of dust over everything. I get the impression it was immaculately clean when someone lived here. This is time stamping
itself on her belongings, not neglect.
I’m about to move to see what else the house has to offer, but I stop short right here in this cozy, if a bit cluttered, living room. Because on the mantelpiece are a clutch of photographs in a variety of mismatched frames. And the people in the pictures, for the most part, are familiar.
They’re us. Logan and me across the years, school pictures and candids and some shots I don’t think I’ve ever seen before.
We might not have known about our grandmother, but she knew about us. And our father has clearly been more in touch with her
over the years than he’s let on. How else would she have these?
I move closer to peer at the pictures and see it’s not only us on the mantel. There’s a black-and-white picture of two nearly
identical women, arms locked, bundled up against the winter around them, grinning at the camera. In another one, more recently
taken, there’s a young woman I don’t recognize in front of what looks like an old-timey plane, though she’s wearing modern
clothes. There’s another young girl smiling behind a counter holding knitting needles.
“That must be the shop,” Logan says a little gruffly from beside me, taking that picture out of my hand and scowling at it.
But I can’t be bothered by his sudden interest in the yarn shop—not his usual point of focus—because there’s also a picture
of our dad looking young and handsome. Next to a wedding picture that he’s also in . . . which, of course, means that the
woman in the photo is our mother.
I have seen a different angle of this same moment before, our parents beaming at each other in wedding clothes. Dad has a
photograph like this that he never leaves out, but I’ve seen it here and there in various drawers over the years. Enough to
recognize it immediately.
Our mother died giving birth to us, so I never really met her. I know my father loved her, because it took him a solid eighteen years for him to even consider going on a date again. He spoke of her, but sparingly. He showed us pictures of her, but he didn’t keep them on display.
He tried to give us pieces of her, but in the end, I think it hurt him too much.
It probably also hurt him that it doesn’t hurt us the same way.
Logan and I miss the idea of a mother, when we are confronted by the fact we don’t have one. But it’s not her, specifically, that we miss. And we have never known anything different.
So it’s beyond strange to see pictures of what I guess is us as a family, scattered about in the house of a woman I never
met or heard my father speak of at all.
A woman who, until recently, was alive. Living right here in this tiny house and apparently aware of us all along.
“I thought it was a no-contact situation,” I say to Logan, who is still gripping that knitting photo. But I can see that he’s
as shocked and uncomfortable as I am to see a picture of us at ten, posing back-to-back in matching outfits like a pageant
of cringe that should feature in a bad sitcom, next to a dual frame with Logan’s law school graduation picture on one side
and me at my first design show on the other. “How did she get these photographs if Dad didn’t send them to her?”
“We don’t know when they went no contact.”
“These pictures are only a few years old. He never spoke of her, Logan. And he didn’t want us coming here.”
Our father would never forbid us anything. Obviously, we’re adults now, but he’s always been happy to let us do as we please.
Yet, he was visibly disapproving of this venture.
Even when Logan explained that, legally, we’re responsible for everything in this house and all her belongings.
Not to mention almost half of the knitting shop and its contents.
Because our mysterious grandmother left the shop not just to us, but also to two other people.
One who works in the shop and one who’s supposedly a second cousin of ours or something.
I feel myself panicking a little bit—hardly the first time since we got news of this grandmother. “This second cousin. Is
that Dad’s side or Mom’s? Was Mom from here?”
“I don’t know. I tried to sort it out, but Dad was unhelpful, and I was a little busy trying to wade through the legality
of all this while also arranging time off work to come down here.”
“We should have figured it out before we came. We should have—”
“We’ll figure it all out tomorrow when we meet them.”
Logan is always sure he’ll figure it out. Because he hasn’t spent his life unable to sleep at will and without effort. Because he has never seemed to have dark voices in his head, like some, though I’ve always wondered if that’s just because he has me. I have all those things for the both
of us.
Because everything works out for Logan Darling.
If I didn’t love him, I really would hate him.
“For now,” he’s saying, and I watch him place that knitting shop photo back on the mantel, very gingerly, “I want to sleep
for approximately ten hours.”
I look around. Dubiously. “Where?”
He shrugs, so we explore more. Off the living room in the back of the house is a compact kitchen with much the same vibe as
the living room. Tight, cozy, overstuffed but not . . . elderly exactly. Not terribly off-putting.
We retrace our very few steps to the living room and find a short hallway. There is one door off it. Logan moves forward and
pushes it open.
This is the only other room, and it’s a bedroom with a tiny en-suite bathroom.
Logan and I stare at the lone bed in the middle of the room. Except it’s clear it’s not one bed. It’s two twin beds shoved together.
“This could not have been comfortable,” he says.
At the same time I say, “There’s no way I’m sharing a room with you.”
“There are two beds,” Logan points out. “They are literally called twin beds, Lex.”
I shrug. “Tough luck for you, twin brother. I was willing to let you handle this alone. You insisted I come. Which means I get the beds and the bedroom, and you get the couch.”
“I’m twice the size of the couch.”
“You can sleep anywhere. You are forever bragging about it.”
I get my suitcase from the front door, all of three steps away, and roll it into the corner of the small room. Then, despite
my trepidation about what might be lurking under the bed, I sprawl myself across it.
Logan surveys me with that narrow lawyer look of his. “Watch out for mice,” he says, and saunters out of the room.