BIRTHDAYS

Of course my angry stunt did not kill the Twins. They forced the door open, but nothing could force me back to the pharmacy. And even though we lived across the street from each other, their schedules were so predictable that it was easy to avoid them. Occasionally, from our rooms, Mom and I would glimpse them dashing about behind their windows. Sometimes they paced rapidly back and forth, talking wildly with their hands. Sometimes their crooked outlines stared out at us from behind a curtain pulled aside, or in uneven slices from between the venetian blinds. They stood perfectly motionless for so long that I guessed it was not them at all but their mothers, which they wheeled into position to keep an eye on us while they worked down in their basement.

I had to prove to the Twins that I made my own decisions and that I wasn’t some animal, or plant, that was predetermined to be one thing and one thing only. I had a will and a mind of my own and could carve out my own life and make my own decisions. I told myself the curse was as phony as the myth of Dracula. I laughed at the thought of placing a braid of garlic around my neck to keep vampires and Rumbaughs at bay. It was all a primitive superstition. I mocked it and felt better for being so smug. It seemed to me my anger was the antidote to the curse.

Yet I had my doubts.

 

I must have learned all I needed to learn about taxidermy, because my interest in it declined once I stayed away from the pharmacy. Instead, I volunteered to stay after school at the church and work with Sister Nancy in their day-care program. It was good to put all my attention into something that was alive instead of constantly trying to enliven the dead. No longer did I look at lifeless creatures and wonder what natural pose I’d have to force onto their stiff bones and tendons, or what clothes and cosmetics they needed to look authentic, or what theatrical background I might paint for their species habitat. I began to enjoy them as living things that were more fun in motion than trapped inside a glass case. And when Mom came home after work, we ended up cooking, and chatting, and reading, and just being around each other in the most everyday sort of ways.

It was not the extraordinary events that drew me closer to my mother but the mundane. The constant pace of our lives, the comfort of our habits encouraged my love for her. It was a faithful love, and yet my fear of her death persisted, so that loving her and fearing her loss were always disturbingly together in the same thought. They were twin sensations, which I came to understand were more commanding than the living Twins across the street.

This entwined love and fear is why her birthday, which should have been a time of celebration, was always an uneasy reminder of her mortality. Her birthday was in January—a barren, icy month—and for weeks leading up to it I was always conflicted because I had to celebrate a day that announced she was one year closer to death. But my last semester of high school she decided that we would shake off the cold weather and take a vacation to celebrate her birthday in the Caribbean—at a nature preserve where we could live in a tent close to the sea. She was aware that in the fall I would be going off to Seton Hill to study religion as I had promised her, and I know she wanted to do something memorable with me before inching me out of the nest.

A few days before her birthday we were picked up by a shuttle service and driven to the airport. What I thought would simply be a trip where we would relax, celebrate her birthday, and escape the cold turned into a test of wills between the love curse and myself. I should have seen this clash coming, but I didn’t.

After a few blissful days on the island, I suddenly began to think that if I changed my environment I could change who I was. This idea wasn’t something unheard of, but when it just popped into my head like an unexpected guest, it got my attention. Perhaps, I thought, living in that old town, in that old hotel across from the crazy old Twins, was filling me with some old curse and all I had to do was move away and find some fresh air and warm water and beautiful gardens and I could be reborn in some tropical Eden without the burden of that curse haunting me day and night, so that when I looked at my mother I would feel only love without the fear.

I was still young and naïve enough to think disregarding my past was an option. I thought that I could will myself into becoming another person and that all I needed was a change of scenery in order to have a change of heart. It’s not that I was infected with a curse, I thought, but the curse was an affliction upon me, and all I had to do was choose to turn my back and walk away from it.

In her own way, Mom was doing the same thing. She was tired of her work and the small town and the Twins, and she just wanted a break from it all, too. And she got it. Overnight we were wearing bathing suits and living in a tent on a sandy beach. After those first few days of pure happiness, I was convinced that changing myself was absolutely possible. The curse seemed to evaporate under the sun, and I remained a cheery teenage girl who wanted her mother to be wonderfully happy on her birthday. The more I thought like this the happier I became.

All Mom wanted as a gift from me was for us to be normal. So on the night of her birthday, I cooked snapper on a camp stove under the stars. Then I made her close her eyes and I led her down the beach.

“No peeking,” I said, leading the way to a huge cake I had earlier built out of sand. I had stuck candles all over it.

“One more minute,” I said to her, and quickly lit the candles. “Okay, now open your eyes,” I shouted, and when she did I sang “Happy Birthday” and we danced in each other’s arms in the candlelight as small waves patted the shore. We were surrounded by nature and animals, and even without saying so to each other we felt we had become a part of the world, instead of being apart from the world.

It was a marvelous celebration. She looked so healthy. So happy. So young. And my love for her felt entirely free from my fear of her death. It was heavenly. I didn’t think of home, or school, or the pharmacy. She was joyful and so I was joyful. And when I suddenly realized just how vastly the change in scenery had affected me, it seemed there was a way to escape my old self forever and be this happy all the time, and in an instant the trip was all about me again.

The next day we were side by side on a hammock reading beach novels when I lowered my book and blurted out, “Did we take this vacation because you knew a change of scenery would do me good?”

She smiled. “A change of scenery does everybody good,” she replied.

“Then,” I reasoned, “if we moved from Mount Pleasant, maybe we’d be happy like this all the time?”

“I’m already happy with you all the time,” Mom said, and kissed me.

“I think a move would be a good idea,” I continued.

“After you finish college,” she replied with some gravity.

“I don’t want to wait that long,” I said. “Let’s just do it now.”

“You know we have to stay,” she said, referring to my promise to Sister Nancy that I’d study religion. “Then I can think about taking a different job and we can move out of town. I agree that the place has put a damper on us.”

“Yes,” I said with the enthusiasm of a new discovery. “Because if we move I can get away from the curse for good. I can love you without always thinking I’m going to lose you. And you can love me without thinking there is something wrong inside me, like Mrs. Rumbaugh always thought there was something wrong with the Twins. All we have to do is move. It’s as simple as that.”

“I agree that a change of scenery is helpful. But I also think that if you really want to change, you will,” she said slowly, deliberately. “You can change at any time. You can’t give up hope that you’ll lick that curse.” She reached out and touched me, and I held her hand as her strength and hope became my strength and hope.

“Yes,” I said quietly. “I can change.”

“See how easy it is to work out a problem when you talk about it?” she said.

“A worry shared is a worry halved,” I recited. “That’s what they say back at the pharmacy.”

“The real curse is having to hang around with a bunch of Rumbaughs,” Mom said jokingly. “Get rid of them and you’ll be fine.”

I laughed because she laughed. It was as simple as that—get rid of them and get rid of the curse. It seemed too good to be true.

The next day I was sitting on the same beach staring at her. Her body was so young and firm, and after the days of sun she looked radiant while collecting shells and pieces of beach glass and bird feathers. She could live forever, I thought, as she waded out into knee-deep water that was patchy with white sand and coral heads. The more I watched her the more I thought of our bright future together. Forever—it was a word with an endless echo.

Suddenly she cried out in pain. I jumped up and ran down to the water’s edge as she hobbled toward the shore. My heart raced.

“I’ve stepped on something sharp,” she called out.

“What happened?” I asked as I held her arm and steadied her.

“A sea urchin,” she said, and winced.

We crossed the sand and dropped down beneath the shade of a coconut palm. I lifted her foot and looked at the sole.

There were about a dozen black urchin spines snapped off inside her heel. “Did you pack tweezers?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said as I stood up. “And bring a candle and matches, too. I read somewhere that you have to drip hot wax on the spines to draw them up above the surface of the skin so you can get a grip on them.”

I dashed over to the tent and quickly sorted through our little first-aid kit for the tweezers and gauze. The extra birthday candles and matches were on a wooden pallet we used as a deck.

When I returned I lit a candle.

“This may hurt,” I said.

“I don’t like pain,” she warned me, and rolled over onto her stomach with her foot upturned, “but do what you have to do to get them out.” Then she buried her face into her crossed arms.

I dripped the hot wax over the broken ends of the spines. When the wax cooled I carefully peeled some away with the edge of the tweezers until I found where just the head of a dark spine had risen above the surface. With the tweezers I deftly gripped it, then gingerly pulled it out. A drop of blood seeped up behind it. “One down,” I said to her, and dabbed at the blood with a tissue.

Methodically I tracked down each spine. My gift of focus was on her. I wanted to fix her. To have her be as good as new. To make all her pain go away. To have her back the way she was—sunning and prancing along the beach without a care in the world.

After I removed the last spine, she sighed and the pooled blood on her heel slipped down her oily calf.

And in my own way I slipped, too. It was seeing that red streak that caused me to recall something the Twins had drilled into me over and over as we worked in the taxidermy shop. “A person’s blood is the key to their future,” Ab lectured. “One drop and everything will be revealed, just like opening a book. Whoever examines your blood will know your eye color, will know if you stutter, or if you are left-handed or right-. They’ll know if you wear glasses and how tall you are. They’ll know your IQ and what medications you should be taking and just how much you love your mother. In one strand of DNA they’ll find out things about you that you don’t even know about yourself. The genetic trail doesn’t lie,” he stressed. “The mind may choose to ignore science, but science never ignores the mind.”

I didn’t want to recall the Twins. But it was too late. I had opened the door to my past, and in that moment everything snapped back to how I was. I looked up for a moment at the ocean and the sand and the trees, and suddenly all the beauty around me was just as counterfeit as the belief that I was free to steer my own future. That wretched curse surfaced like a bloated corpse, and I could feel the coldness of my mother’s death in my hands while my fears ran through me like a predator tracking down whatever hope I sheltered.

My fingers began to shake. As I examined her foot one last time, the tweezers scraped across the tiny cuts on her skin, and she trembled as the blood continued to run down her leg.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, but I wasn’t.

I didn’t have the heart to tell her I had reverted for the worse. Her hope had been my hope. The curse may have taken my hope away, but I could not be a curse to her.

Carefully, I wrapped her foot with gauze. Afterward I stood over her and reached down for her hand.

“It will be sore for a little bit,” I cautioned. “But I’m sure I got them all out.”

“You are a love,” she said, and kissed me. She was fine, but I wasn’t. I helped her over to the tent and propped her foot up on a pillow and got her a cold drink and a magazine.

Ab and Dolph had secrets they could not share with the world, but at least they had each other. As I sat by my mother’s side, the loneliness I felt from not sharing my despair was defeating. My secrets were a cage visible only to me. I was trapped with knowing that fearing my mother’s death was the same as predicting her death. I didn’t know when it would happen, or how. But it would. Warning her would serve no purpose because there was no hiding from the inevitable.

Three days later we returned to Mount Pleasant. It was just as cold and dreary as when we had left. After my first day back at school, I hurried home to our rooms. I peeked out from behind the curtains and watched the Twins come and go. It seemed that I was always engaged in pushing them away or being pulled toward them. Either way, something within me was not quite settled.