We found coffee at the back of the church hall. He made it with condensed milk. Each morning, we combed through our dreams as we drank it. Summer lived to talk about her dreams.
She stood on his shoulders to clean the stained glass.
Pete grinned by his side wherever he went.
Picking mulberries, still warm from the sun. Riddles as the sky went dark. My stomach hurt. I had swallowed a star.
‘Here’s one,’ said Summer up the plum tree one sunset. ‘What is greater than God, more evil than the devil, the poor have it, the rich need it, and if you eat it you’ll die?’
‘Hmm.’ He chewed awhile. Even the way he ate plums was something. ‘Tricky one, Surf.’
‘Surf?’ said Summer.
‘Summer’s a name for a surfer girl, don’t you think? All blonde and tanned and with a cute nose.’
‘A cute nose? A surfer girl?’ Summer rippled. ‘You have some seriously outdated conceptions of gender.’
‘You have a cute nose,’ said Edward. ‘Oh, wait—sorry, that’s your sister. My bad.’
Summer threw a plum at him. It hit him in the temple.
‘Easy,’ he said as he rubbed his head.
‘You’re easy,’ said Summer.
‘Your mother’s easy,’ said Edward, without thinking.
There was silence.
‘Sorry,’ he said awkwardly. ‘I didn’t mean it. Guess I’m just used to being around dudes. We say things like that. Your mother…’ He swallowed. ‘Is she…I guess she’s not around?’
I should have known we would get here sometime. In my mind, I saw Summer and me on opposite banks of a pounding river. Between us raged our different truths. They clashed into foam.
‘She died when we were born,’ said Summer brusquely. ‘We don’t discuss it. And FYI, our dad was taken by ninjas.’
‘It wasn’t ninjas,’ I said quietly.
But Summer ignored me. ‘The answer is nothing, by the way.’
‘How do you mean?’ Edward asked her.
‘The riddle. Think about it.’
Summer
Winter got it in her head to take the bear for a visit to the forest so it wouldn’t forget its roots, which—as you can imagine—I thought was completely ridiculous. ‘He’s not a Chinese orphan living in America,’ I told her. ‘It’s not like he needs to go to Mandarin School on Saturday afternoons and learn one of those complicated string instruments to keep in touch with his culture. Besides, that forest is creepy. Remember the snake?’
And, of course, though she’d been all gung-ho for it, that was enough to put Winter off, because in our first autumn we had found a snake in there, and I kid you not when I say that it had swallowed a human arm—you could see it through the skin, like the hand was wearing a snakeskin glove. If you think we’d gone more than a few steps into the forest since then, you have a banana for a brain, because even a basketful of fresh mushrooms plucked from the earth wasn’t worth accidentally picking up a stray finger or stepping over a log onto, like, a head with those white, staring eyes you always see in zombie movies at sleepovers, not that we really ever went to that many, because here’s the thing about being a twin: people kind of assume you don’t need other friends, and they’re sort of right.
Try not to get too judgey, but I didn’t even like Winter wearing headphones to watch plane movies—I just didn’t want there ever to be anything between us, for our worlds not to be in perfect sync. And, sure, in hindsight some people could say I was a little controlling, but Winter was the best part of me, and who wouldn’t want to keep that part safe behind glass and shiny for always, especially when nobody else was going to do it?
When The Greying started, we were in Tokyo. I would set my alarm each night just to check Winter’s back as she slept. I tried to hoik up her nightie without waking her to see if she’d caught it but, boy, does she sleep light. ‘Am I dreaming?’ she would murmur, or she’d whisper to herself, ‘Peter Pan, Peter Pan, Peter Pan.’ Who knows what that guy had to do with the whole global pandemic, but some nights, as I lay awake watching to make sure she breathed, I would imagine him flying up onto our windowsill to keep me company, and, truth be told, it helped a little.
‘Dude,’ I would whisper to Imaginary Pan, ‘you know you’ll have to grow up sometime, right? It’s, like, science.’
‘You sound just like Wendy,’ he would whisper back, rolling his eyes. ‘Girls suck so bad.’
‘Good luck finding a girlfriend with that attitude,’ I said.
‘That’s a bit presumptuous, don’t you think?’ said Pan, all snooty. ‘Because FYI, I think I’m actually gay.’
‘You’re a pretty sharp dresser,’ I told him. ‘Makes sense.’
‘Not all gay males are stylish. You’re making assumptions,’ he told me. ‘Again.’
When things got REALLY bad and we left Tokyo for the island, I stopped watching over Winter as she slept. Pops had brought us here to get away from the evils of the world, so I never worried about The Greying following, trailing behind us like a mournful, ashy ghost. It faded away from my thoughts, along with the internet, and dairy products, and sunscreen, and diving training, and hair dryers, and streetlights, and all the other parts of our lives that had once seemed Essential (capital E) but now felt kind of irrelevant. It stopped occurring to me to cut rectangles in the backs of Pops’s old sports T-shirts, which we rumbled around in, thinking they made pretty great mini dresses.
And, sure, some nights I would wake and get all existential: I’d start wondering if we were already sleeping in the building we’d die in, or if we had died already and this was Purgatory, or some kind of big old holding pen where we’d dwell forever in limbo. Generally, though, I thought we were happy in our dreamy, slightly feral aloneness, half in love with reading the classics out loud to each other and perfecting our fire-making skills.
But only a few months before that bear showed up, I was tucked up in the bell tower at sunset, writing a poem about a particularly melancholy goose who gets left behind when his chums fly south for the winter, and it sort of makes me cringe now to think about it, that clunky rhyme, the whole autobiographical angle. I’d been at it all afternoon, deep in my own genius, and now the sun was plunging down through the sky. The sea was milky in the dying winter’s light, and I had my back to the warm stone wall, wrestling with the final stanza as the world burned gently orange around me. Metaphorically speaking.
Three times that afternoon Winter had called up from the bottom of the stairs to offer me snacks and encouragement. She never came up to the bell tower. Most things to do with Pops spooked her right out, and the three things that were left there, out of sight if you weren’t used to looking, were so close to his heart they were practically ventricles. I had sent her away, all sniffy. ‘Real artists starve for their craft,’ I called. ‘But when I’m finished, can you make that dehydrated beef bourguignon?’
When it got too dark to see the page, and I closed my notebook, and looked out through the west arch at the sea, there she was, where the waves slid up on the shore: not heating our dinner on the camp stove, but struggling with the weight of a full backpack as she tried to pull herself up onto what seemed to be a sort of homemade raft.