Chapter
“IT’S YOUR BIRTHDAY?” David messages Archie privately. Archie stares at the accusing words on his lock screen. Stephen’s birthday. “When was the last time you spoke to your twin?” an invisible voice whispers. I’d like to forget, like Stephen had my birthday. Our birthday. Archie pushes his plate of half-eaten apple pie toward Nadine, bumping his coffee cup. It’s empty, and the waitress arrives at that moment to refill their cups. The other three pick their cups up and hold them out to make it easier for her to refill them. Archie leaves his cup in place. The waitress reaches past Andrew and refills his cup.
“Can’t I get you heroes anything else?” she asks them brightly.
“Not right now. Coffee is fine,” Andrew replies, raising his cup to her in thanks.
“Okay. Just holler if you need anything.”
“Will do,” Andrew assures her.
Andrew turns to David and cocks an eyebrow. David taps furiously on his iPhone, and all three are in a group message. “It’s Archie’s birthday.”
Andrew slaps his forehead: “Oh my God, I forgot!”
Nadine lifts her head from her iPhone’s screen and says: “Me too.”
“We have to have cake,” David messages the group.
Andrew nods and looks around for the waitress. He signals when she turns her head in their direction. “We have a birthday boy in our midst,” he points to Archie, “and we went and forgot all about it. Can you do a little something for him?”
Archie half-raises a hand to say, “No, don’t do anything,” but the waitress is saying sprightly, “Of course,” before he can voice his desire for avoidance. She disappears through the kitchen’s swinging doors.
Archie frowns.
David messages: “Yeah, man, we’re gonna do something. Suck it up.”
Andrew laughs and slaps Archie on the back. “Looks like you have no choice.”
Archie smiles with his mouth.
“Don’t you have a twin?” Nadine asks.
“Yeah,” Archie answers.
“What do you guys do, you know, twins, do you, like, wish each other happy birthday or something?”
Archie shakes his head. He’s catching David’s muteness. He clears his throat and answers: “No.”
“No,” Nadine says, nodding her head, “That’d be weird, eh?”
“Sometimes,” Archie says, grinning despite himself as a fun memory surfaces.
“C’mon, tell us!” David messages Archie.
At that moment, the waitress arrives with the biggest chocolate cupcake with blue icing and white and red sprinkles on top. A single candle is lit, and its yellow flame wavers as she places it down on the table in front of Archie. The waitress begins to sing: “Happy birthday to you!” Andrew and Nadine join in as David messages Archie the merry song. Suddenly, the entire restaurant is singing along with the three, baritones underneath Nadine’s resonant alto and female sopranos at the surrounding tables. A red tide swoops up Archie’s neck, spreads along his chin and into his cheeks, branches out around his eyes, and flushes his forehead. His eyes glisten. The waitress chirrups: “Make a wish!” All the customers turn in their chairs to see what they can of Archie as he lowers his head with its spiky crown of black hair and blows once, hard, at the little flame. It flattens and then puffs out with a wisp of smoke.
The restaurant claps, and a couple of men shout: “Happy birthday, eh? Thanks for fighting for us!”
Archie nods in their general direction.
The waitress hurries off to see if the new customers who’d just walked in, shaking the rain off their coats, wanted some hot coffee to warm them up from the gale outside.
Archie’s iPhone pings. He reads David’s message. Archie lifts his deep brown eyes from the screen to David, fathomless in their depths of unsaid memories. He struggles to retrieve the happy memory, the one that had flown into his consciousness when Nadine had asked him, “Do you wish each other a happy birthday?”
“Yeah,” Archie answers her question at last. “There was this one time.” A rare look of mischief and glee crosses his face. He half-laughs.
“Yeah?” Andrew and Nadine prompt him in chorus as David joins them in leaning towards Archie.
Archie sits back. He picks up his fork and fiddles with it, smiling wickedly. He puts it down next to his cupcake plate at an odd angle, and Andrew’s hand twitches. But he refrains from straightening it to lie exactly parallel to the plate.
Archie sits forward and pushes his cupcake plate slightly away to his right and leans his arms on the table. “Stephen was the firstborn.”
“Yeah, we know that,” Nadine says, her familiar impatience making Archie smile. He ducks his head and says: “Yeah, okay.”
David messages the group: “Let him tell his story.”
Nadine berates David good-humouredly, “Hey! If I want to interrupt, I can. I’m his superior, okay?”
David holds up both his hands in surrender.
Nadine turns back to Archie and makes a winding motion with her right hand: “Go on.”
Archie draws in a silent breath, suddenly not sure if he can. Andrew grins strength at him as he grips his shoulder. “Tell the story in your own time, Archie.”
The supportive warmth from Andrew’s large, meaty hand soaks into Archie. Suddenly, he wants to remember that happy memory. “As I was saying,” Archie begins with a significant look from his smiling eyes. Nadine grins back. “As you were saying, Archie?”
“Yeah, as I was saying, Stephen is my older brother, as he likes to remind me. He was the firstborn. By two minutes,” Archie holds his first two fingers up in the V-for-Victory sign. “He came out wailing, Ma said. But I came out silent like a lamb.”
Nadine snorts: “You, a lamb?”
Archie takes on a mock serious expression: “Yes, ma’am. Me.”
Nadine shakes her head and chuckles.
Archie huffs and continues: “I was the silent as a lamb one. Pawpaw gave me all the good stuff on our birthdays because of that. He figured I needed boosting up cause all the attention went to Stephen, the eldest one. He’ll inherit the house, Sir used to say. I figured he could have the house. It was run down, paint peeling all over the place, and there was only one toi-let.” Archie draws the corners of his lips down.
Nadine shudders. “All those males and only one toilet? How’d your mother survive?”
“She made do.”
“I feel for her, I really do.”
“Hey!” David messages Nadine. “We’re well behaved.”
Nadine turns to David and informs him: “That’s cause I trained you.”
Male laughter surrounds her. Nadine raises her eyebrows at them. “It’s true.”
“Not for me,” Archie retorts. “Ma taught me properly, taught us twins properly.”
“Okay, okay.” Nadine gives in, with a half-grin, but her eyes say she isn’t giving a millimetre on her claim.
“Anyway, as I was say-ing.” Archie angles his chest forward a little and settles onto his forearms, relaxing on the table. “It was our ninth birthday. I woke up first. Stephen always woke up first. But I did that time. I went into the kitchen where Ma was making us our special birthday pancakes and cooking up a pile of bacon for us all. Pawpaw was already there with his present for me wrapped up in a box. He and Ma were arguing cause Pawpaw hadn’t gotten Stephen one. They didn’t see me. Stephen had lorded it over me all year about him having better marks, him being more popular with the kids, the teachers liking him better cause he was smart and I was dumb. Pawpaw was saying I needed to feel special. Ma was saying he needed to treat us the same. ‘No one else does,’ Pawpaw shouted, and slammed his fist down on our table. Ma jumped, and I scurried away before she saw me lurking there in the doorway. I scrambled back into bed and watched Stephen pretend sleeping.
“I knew he was awake cause he always did this stretching thing like Sir did, like he was a man. Stephen was no man. My twin was a boy like me. And Pawpaw had gotten me a present but not him. He didn’t know it yet. When he looked over at me, I grinned and laughed. ‘What’s so funny?’ he says. He hated not knowing what I knew. And I knew something he didn’t. ‘Happy birthday,’ I shot back. Stephen got all magnanimous like he was the one with favour not me and trying to look like he didn’t care I knew something he didn’t. ‘Happy birthday,’ he said, bowing his head like he was some kind of king. So like we get up and go into the kitchen. You could hear Stephen coming a mile away. He wanted everyone to know when he was coming and when he was in the room. Not me. The louder he got, the quieter I got. You find out things when people don’t hear you coming.”
“Or hear you standing there,” Nadine interrupts mildly.
Archie nods and continues: “So Stephen, he spots Pawpaw’s gift, the box with the bright blue paper with cowboys and guns all over it. He goes over to grab that present, and Pawpaw he whips it away from him. He says, ‘Not for you, son. This is for Archie.’ Pawpaw hands it to me, right in front of Stephen. You shoulda seen Stephen’s face. His jaw dropped, he was that shocked. For an entire year, no one minded me, they all gave him things and ignored me. But that birthday, it was the opposite. I said, ‘Happy birthday’ to Stephen again, stuck my tongue out at him, and opened the present right in front of him. He was maa-ad.” Archie’s eyes shine with the blackness of remembered one-upmanship, one of the few times he’d triumphed over his twin.
“Revenge was sweet, eh?” Nadine says.
“Yeah. And I didn’t even make it happen.”
“But you took advantage of it?”
Archie nods, his lips straightening out from his grin, his eyebrows’ inner ends wrinkling up. Nadine says: “It made you feel good. Did it last?”
Archie’s eyes flatten into matte black-brown discs. “No.”
Nadine nods. She says: “Revenge never does. But the moment your grandfather tried to balance out the attention for you was good. That moment lasted?”
Archie looks at the cupcake and its candle with its wick burnt black, a couple of drips of white wax stark on the blue icing. “Yes.” Archie breathes for a few seconds. “Pawpaw always tried to even out the balance.” He looks up at them. “Right to the day I enlisted. He left me his gun. It was the only thing he trusted, and he trusted me with it. He didn’t let Stephen ever touch it. But Pawpaw taught me. He taught me how to hold it, how to pull its trigger, how to load it, how to shoot it. He let me clean it the last year of his life. We went target shooting with that gun every weekend, every Friday after school, after that birthday. I had to get good grades to go on Friday shoots with him. He said he wanted me to do better than him, to ignore my parents saying I could never be as good as Stephen. He knew I could be as good as I wanted to be and whatever that was, was good enough for him. But I had to stretch myself. ‘No laying about, Archie!’” Archie laughs mirthlessly. “Pawpaw was smart. He didn’t rely on my word. He taught me, ‘Trust the word and back it up with checking.’ That’s how my word became trustworthy. You never know when you’ll be back checked. Yeah, Pawpaw was good. He demanded to see my tests and report cards. Yeah, Pawpaw took care of me.” Archie falls silent. The other three sit with him, their sorrow for him stretching around him like a comforting blanket of energy. They know the story he’s now tumbling into. He’d told them that day in Afghanistan, the day he’d first relived his righteous shoot.