“Spider-Man!” said my father, after we had pulled onto Route 50 and passed a sign that read WASHINGTON, D.C. 29 MILES. “Aren’t you excited?” He reached over and rubbed my head with his fist. Had my mother been with me, she would not have spoken at all, but my father talked the whole way, about Spider-Man, about the mall, about the Farrah Fawcett look-alike who was also scheduled to appear; he asked me repeatedly if the prospect of seeing such things didn’t make me excited, though he knew I would not answer him. I hadn’t spoken a word or uttered a sound since my brother’s funeral.
Spider-Man was a great disappointment. When my father brought me close for an autograph, I saw that his Spider-Suit was badly sewn, and glossy in a gross sort of way; his voice, when he said, “Hey there, Spider-Fan,” pitched high like a little mouse’s. He was an utter fake. I ran away from him, across the mall; my father did not catch me until I had made it all the way to the Smithsonian Castle. He didn’t yell at me. It only made him sad when I acted so peculiarly. My mother sometimes lost her temper and would scream out that I was a twisted little fruitcake, and why couldn’t I ever make anything easy? She would apologize later, but never with the same ferocity, and so it seemed to me not to count. I always hoped she would burst into my room later on in the night, to wake me by screaming how sorry she was, to slap herself, and maybe me too, because she was so regretful.
“So much for Spider-Man,” said my father. He took me to see the topiary buffalo, and for a while we sat in the grass, saying nothing, until he asked me if I wouldn’t go back with him. I did, and though we had missed the Farrah Fawcett look-alike’s rendition of “Feelings,” he got to meet her, because he had connections with the Leukemia Society. She said I was cute and gave me an autographed picture that I later gave to my father because I could tell he wanted it.
When we got home I went up to my room and tossed all my Spider-Man comic books and action figures into the deepest recesses of my closet. Then I took a book out onto the roof. I sat and read Stuart Little for the fifth time. Below me, in the yard next door, I could see Molly playing, just as silent as I was. Every once in a while she would look up and catch me looking at her, and she would smile down at her plastic dolls. We had interacted like this before, me reading and her playing, but on this day, for some reason, she spoke to me. She held my gaze for a few moments, then laughed coyly and said, “Would you like to see my bodkin?” I shrugged, then climbed down and followed her into the ravine behind our houses. I did not know what a bodkin was. I thought she was going to make me look inside her panties, like Judy Corcoran had done about three weeks before, trying to make me swear not to tell about the boring thing I had seen.
But what Molly showed me — after we had gone down about thirty feet into the bushes and she had knelt near the arrow-shaped gravestone of our English sheepdog, Gulliver, and after she dug briefly in the dry dirt — was a dagger. It was about a foot long, and ornate, encrusted with what looked like real emeralds and rubies, with a great blue stone set in the pommel, and a rose etched in relief on the upper part of the blade.
“Do you like it?” she asked me. “My father gave it to me. It used to belong to a medieval princess.” I did like it. I reached out for it, but she drew it back to her chest and said, “No! You may not touch it.” She ran off down the ravine, toward the river; I didn’t follow. I sat on Gulliver’s stone and thought about all the little dead animals, and I knew — even a little mind could make the connection — that Molly had been murdering them. But I didn’t give much thought to it, besides a brief reflection on how sharp the blade must be to make such clean wounds. I walked back to my house and went down to the basement to watch The Bionic Woman, my new favorite.
After Colm’s death I got into the habit of staring, sometimes for hours at a time, at my image in the mirror. My parents thought it was just another of my new autistic tendencies, and they both discouraged it, even going so far as to remove the mirror from my bedroom. What they didn’t know was that the image I was looking at was not really my own; it was Colm’s. When I looked in the mirror I saw the face we had shared. We were mirror twins, our faces perfectly symmetrical, the gold flecks in my left eye mirrored in Colm’s right, a small flaw at the right edge of his lips mirrored by one at the left edge of mine. So when I looked in the mirror, even the small things that made my face my own made my face into his, and if I waited long enough he would speak to me. He would tell me about heaven, about all sorts of little details, like that nobody ever had to go to the bathroom there. We had both considered that necessity to be a great inconvenience and a bore. He said he was watching me all the time.
There was a connection between us, he often said, even when he was alive, that the surgeons had not broken when we were separated. It was something unseen. We did not have quite two souls between us; it was more that we had one and a half. Sometimes he would hide from me, somewhere in our great big house, and insist that I find him. Usually I couldn’t, but he always found me; I couldn’t hide from him anywhere in the house, or, I suspected, anywhere on earth.
After he died I found him, not just in mirrors but in every reflective surface. Ponds and puddles or the backs of spoons, anything would do. And invariably the last thing he would say to me was “When are you going to come and be with me again?”
Molly appeared that night at my window. I was still awake when she came. At first I thought she was Colm, until a flash of heat lightning illuminated her and I saw who she was. Glimpsing the dagger flashing in her hand, I was certain she had come to kill me, but when she came over to my bed, she said only, “Do you want to come out with me?” Another flash of lightning lit up the room. The lightning was the reason I had been awake — on hot summer nights Colm and I would stay up for hours watching it flash over the river. Sometimes our parents would let us sleep on the porch, where the view was even better.
She sat down on my bed. “I like your room” she said, looking around. There was light from the hall, enough to make out the general lay of the room. Our father had built it up to look like a ship for Colm and me, complete with sea-blue carpeting and a raised wooden deck with railings and a ship’s wheel. Above one bed was an authentic-looking sign that read CAPTAIn’s BUNK; the other bed belonged to the first mate. While he lived we had switched beds every night, in the interest of absolute equality, unless one of us was feeling afraid, in which case we shared the same bed. The last time he slept in the room he had been in the captain’s bed, and because the cycle could not go on any longer I had been in the first mate’s bed ever since.
Molly pulled my sheets back, and while I dressed she looked around the room for my shoes. When she found them she brought them to me and said, “Come on.”
I followed her — out the window, over the roof, and down the blue spruce that grew close to my house. She walked along our road, to the golf course around which part of our community was built. The site, once a Baptist girls’ camp, had in the century since its founding turned into a place where well-to-do white people lived in rustic pseudo-isolation. It was called Severna Forest. You couldn’t live there if you were Jewish or Italian, and in the summer they made you lock up your dog in a communal kennel. The golf course had only nine holes. It was a very hilly course, bordered by ravines in some places and in others by the Severn River. Molly took me to a wide piece of rough on the fourth hole, only about half a mile from our houses. Though the moon was down, I could see under the starlight that rabbits had gathered in the tall grass and the dandelions. I bent at my knees and picked a stalk. I was about to puff on it and scatter the seeds when Molly held my arm and said, “Don’t, you’ll frighten them.”