and polish on the days he knew she was coming for a pie visit.

When Clive was alive, being suspicious like he was, he wasn’t that big on letting me see too much of the house. I want to look around now that I got the chance. I leave the parlor and go around the corner to the bathroom door, which is shut. The doorknob sticks, but when I finally jiggle it loose, I’m knocked backwards by the odor.

From the look of things, the sheriff is wrong (big surprise) about Clive getting murdered. He’d been complaining about stomachaches off and on, but I didn’t take that hypochondriacting seriously. I guess I should’ve because it looks like a real sickness is what did him in. Probably influenza. There’s a bad one going around. Old upchuck covers the toilet, the sink, and the green tiled walls. This room also doubled as Clive’s darkroom and his expensive developing equipment is right where he left it, untouched by his retching. The last photographs he took are hanging from the crooked shower rod, held in place by red plastic clothespins. There’s one of me and that’s the most upsetting part of all. Clive really did like me. Sometimes he called me “Peaches.” And he gave me the Lost in Space lunch box after he found it in a ditch by the road.

“Mercy,” I say, moving into the kitchen. The cupboard doors are flung open and what was inside is now on the outside. Dented cans of Campbell’s pork and beans, Clive’s absolute favorite, and a couple of jars of Kraft pimento cheese because sometimes he’d make me a sandwich when we’d play checkers, are lying on the tile next to a bunch of other food items and a whole family of dead mice. Their rotting bodies are part of the real bad stink. The rest of the putrid smell is coming from the overflowing trash can.

The house shutters have begun rattling. The windows, too. It usually takes time for a storm to climb over the mountains and settle into the valley, but every once in a while, one can surprise you like this. I get jumpy around lightning, so I hurry back out to the porch, shut the door of the house, and get Ivory by the collar. “C’mon, ol’ boy. We gotta get home. Something nasty is comin’ our way.”

Chapter Eighteen

Branches are beating against the four-paned window. Our house has gone deep black, which always happens when the wind comes up this fierce. We lose our power. Lou tells Woody and me that it’s a ghost playing a trick on us. I half believe her, because Mr. Cole has tried to fix whatever is wrong in the fuse box time and time again with no luck. I’ve lit a couple of stubby candles, let the wax drip onto the porcelain sink and stuck them.

My shadow is dancing across the white bathroom wall like a chorus girl in a movie musical when I sing for the fifth and, I swear, last time, “When you walk through a storm keep your head up high and don’t be afraid of the dark. At the end of the storm is a golden sky and the sweet silver song of a… bark.” This song from the Carousel album is another one of Woody’s all-time favorites. I have sung it to her enough times down in the root cellar that I know perfectly well that last part’s supposed to go-the sweet silver song of a… lark, but I knew changing it up like that would make her smile.

I already took my bath. Now my sister’s in the claw tub beneath a scattering of bubbles, her freshly shampooed hair floating like seaweed in the ocean. I’ve already inspected her for the dime-sized marks.

The first time I found the purple splotches, I scrubbed and scrubbed and when they wouldn’t come off I asked her, “Did you do a swan dive into a blueberry patch or something?” It was mysterious. And got more so when I noticed that the marks kept showing up even when there weren’t any berries blooming. I figured it out the afternoon I saw Woody running down to the animal cemetery behind the barn. She was going to bury a baby bird that had fallen out of its nest. When I got down to the barn, Pegasus was pawing in the cross ties. Out the door, I could see that Blackie who was here to shoe Papa’s horse had caught Woody. He pried the dead bird out of her hand, threw it as far as he could, and when it landed up against a tree, he laughed and said, “Guess it needs some more practice.” He mimicked Woody’s flapping. “Ya can fool your idiot father, but ya can’t fool me. You’re just puttin’ this shit on.” That’s when he started pinching her all over the place. He only stopped because I yelled out to him, “There’s a woman on the telephone for you, Uncle Blackie. Got a voice like Marilyn Monroe’s. You better come quick.” I wanted to tell Papa on him, but I knew if I did, Blackie would get back at me. The next time he got ahold of my sister, he’d pinch her quarter size.

I sit on the edge of the tub and bury my toes in Ivory’s chocolate back. He looks up at me and gives me a very jolly look. “I were you, I’d wipe that smile off my face. You’re next,” I tell him. “Get out now, Woody. We got to get up to the fort before the rain comes.”

When she stands, I notice how we’re not flat anymore. Our chests are budding. And between our legs wispy hair has come in and we’ve got gentle curves at the waist. Tears spring to my eyes when I do Mama’s job of wrapping my sister up tight in a towel. Woody and I are changing into little women without her.

Due to his unusually small size, Ivory was easy to stuff into the Bucket Express.

Mama was the one who came up with the idea of jerry-rigging a rope to a branch on the tree fort, placing a pully on top and an old wash pail down on the bottom so we could haul stuff up without having to leave the fort. “Mother is the necessity of invention,” she said when she stood back to admire her work, and I just loved that.

Woody, me, and Ivory are snug like spoons in the sleeping corner of our fort, so maybe that’s why the rhyme that Papa liked to recite to us when we’d come up here together to view the spring constellations is popping into my mind no matter how hard I’m trying to push it away.

Hey diddle diddle,

The cat and the fiddle,

The cow jumped over the moon,

The little dog laughed to see such sport,

And the dish ran away with the spoon.

“Right there, girls. See?” Papa would speak softly, like he was hunting and might scare the stars away. “The cat is your birth sign-Leo the lion. And the fiddle is Lyra-the lyre. The cow the rhyme is referring to is Taurus the bull. The little dog is Canis Minor, you see him? And the dish is Crater running away with the spoon, who is the Big Dipper.”

Memories are so two-faced.

One minute they’re hugging you like a long-lost friend, the next minute they’re ripping you apart like your worst enemy.

I whisper into my sister’s hair, “I’m gettin’ so grimmery. ’Bout everything.”

Woody and I are having our pillow talk time the way we always have. I wish she’d start holding up her end again. My thoughts come so fast and furious this time of day. I desperately miss my twin telling me when I would get like this, “Ya know what your problem is, Shenny? You think way too much. Hushacat.

We came into this world knowing a foreign language. Mama thought it was cute and would try to chitter- chatter with us, but Papa made us quit because he said we sounded like little monkeys. So, just like anything else you don’t keep up, we mostly forgot how. We still remember some of the twin talk and use it when we are alone. Before Woody went mute on me, that is. You already know that hushacat means everything is going to be all right no matter how bad it seems at the present time, but what I just told Woody? That I’m feeling grimmery? That’s hard to define in regular English. The closest I can get is-“catastrophically worried to death.” Meetone-means “I’m hungry.” Rabadee-“I’m sorry.” The best twin word of all, though, has got to be boomba-“love.” Not the dependable kind, like when your mother and father who still care for each other are sitting on the back steps discussing their day and their voices come drifting through your bedroom window where you’re sleepy between hung-in-the-sun sheets after a warm bubble bath. And not the kind of romantic love that E. J. feels for Woody and I feel for Bootie Young. No, a boomba is more like how you feel when you get an unexpected gift. Me getting Ivory Minnow into my sister’s arms, for instance. That gave her a boomba.

Speaking of which, poor Clive. I wish I hadn’t run out of Rolaids . Just thinking about him is making my stomach leap about the same way his must’ve before he died. Deceasing all alone like that must’ve been terrible.

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