TWELVE

I don’t think it is possible to overstate how much a union was expected between John and I. From the moment his father took up the deed to the estate bordering my father’s when I was six, it was as though our mutual fates were sealed, the banns read, the knot irrevocably tied.

John certainly viewed it thus. I must have been eight, putting him at around eleven, the first time John asked me to marry him.

It was summer, one of those rare still and clear-skied days when it could take nearly a whole afternoon to trace a single cloud’s progress across the entire bright expanse of blue. John was seated on a white-painted lawn chair, legs ranged forward, Louisa’s cape draped around him, so we might play a game of my own making, entitled Twins. He was supposed to be mine. He had been looking at me for some time without speaking and I had begun to feel as unsettled by it as a bug realizing a two-legged creature possessed of far fewer eyes is staring it down nonetheless.

“What are you staring at?” I asked suspiciously, accusingly.

“You,” he replied.

“That is obvious. But I do wish you would stop. You are beginning to make me quite uncomfortable, and,” I added, “I am quite certain rudely staring at me is not one of the rules of Twins.”

“Perhaps not,” he conceded, “but I don’t believe you can do anything to stop me.”

This was a new John, a different John from the one I’d grown used to.

“Not stop you?” I barked an unsure laugh. “I’m sure I could.”

His words came out in slow measures. “No, I don’t think so. You could try, of course. But I am now quite a bit bigger than you, and if it pleases me to look on you, I don’t imagine you can stop me anymore at all.”

The nerve!

Never one to place much of a barrier between my brain and my vocal cords, no sooner had I thought the words than: “You cannot do whatever you want to, John Smith, just because now you fancy yourself bigger than me!” Studying those rangy legs, I felt even testier. “Fine. So maybe you did get awfully bigger overnight, but that still gives you no right—”

“Marry me, Emma?”

“Are you insane?!”

“Possibly. But I do know that, already it seems as though I’ve known you my whole life. I’ll never meet anybody I’ll know better.”

“You are insane, John! I’m eight!”

“Fine. Then I’ll ask you again next year. Maybe by then you will have grown up.”

“Oh…oh…oh…give me back Louisa’s cape!”