The Crossing

Tommy was deciding whether or not to run out after them when Gannon, suddenly back to his senses, grabbed his arm. “Tommy...” Gannon said, groggy and slow.

Tommy snatched Gannon’s hand away and shoved him to the far side of the back seat. Then he bolted back just in time for me to slam the door closed, locking the man inside. “Tommy!” Gannon called. He looked out at the boy through the window, a firm calmness in his eyes. “Tommy...open this door.”

Without a word Tommy walked around to the front of the car and picked up the pistol that still lay in the middle of the street.

“I told you to throw that away,” I said.

He tucked the gun into the pocket of his coat. “If you want it, come over here and take it.” His voice was a hard, low warning, something that would let his sister know that for all of my intelligence, despite that flawless, unbreakable memory of mine, he was powerful in his own right. He’d saved me. Not for the first time, and not for the last.

“You’re welcome,” Tommy said.

“It was my idea,” I replied.

“You’re still welcome.”

Then we stood there in the dark and the cold, looking at the man trapped in the back seat of the car. It would be up to me to figure out what to do next. And it would be up to Tommy to do whatever needed to be done. Just like always. I would get us both to Florida in time to watch the launch and then, after that, I wouldn’t need him anymore. And, at the same time, he wouldn’t need me anymore. He’d go off to the war. Do his duty the way his draft notice demanded. He would die.

It was the only way things could turn out for us, no matter how much we wanted it to be different. We couldn’t know that at the time, but years later, the past would be immutable, and I would have to live with it, perfectly preserved in the halls of memory. And, years later, I would be able to speak for my lost brother, to see this trip the way he had seen it. The last great gift he gave to me.

* * *

Tommy hadn’t been a smart boy and he would never become a smart man. But that wasn’t what really bothered my brother. Neither was it that The Disease or the war would one day find him. The latter, in fact, I’d almost say Tommy always saw as something inevitable. Maybe even welcomed.

Tommy told me once that he could never be like me. Not even if he tried at it every single day for five hundred years, cloistered away like a monk. He’d only ever come up short. He said he’d known that for about as far back as he could remember—which wasn’t very far. To be sure, he had memories. As many as most other people did, he figured. He remembered important stuff: the first girl he’d kissed, the first time he got in trouble in grade school, a smattering of song lyrics, a handful of lines from movies. If he was supposed to show up somewhere at a certain time on a certain day he could, for the most part, hold that much in his head. Maybe he’d have to check the calendar again and again in the days before and tell himself, “Now, don’t forget!” But that’s how it went. That’s how it was with everybody.

Everybody except me.

In the last few years before our final trip together, perhaps sensing his growing unease, his body no longer looked like a copy of mine. He had shot up four inches above me and filled out wide and strong. He was all muscle and intention. In spite of the changes to his body, he and I still shared much of the same face. Sometimes when we were together I could look at Tommy and find myself overcome with a feeling of both loneliness and togetherness all at once. Being a twin was cruel in its own way. From the moment you were born you were let in on the dark secret of humanity, the thing that no one wants to know about themselves: that a person is both unique and, at the same time, mass produced. And therefore no better than anyone else.

Hell of a thing for a child to have to grow up knowing.

By the age of twelve Tommy was already being told that he was handsome. Not cute, the way people told it to the other boys his age, but handsome, the way people spoke of grown men. He was athletic. Strong. Everyone knew he would grow up to do something physical. Maybe he’d be a boxer or a wrestler, but never a bully. And then, assuming he lived long enough, the architecture of his physique promised that he could be the type of man that made people feel safe when they had every reason to be afraid. Maybe after he’d been wrestling for a few years he would become a firefighter. Policeman, perhaps. He had a good smile. “A soft smile,” people told him, girls especially. Maybe he’d become a doctor with a stern voice but a soft smile, the kind you trusted to save you no matter what harm you had brought upon yourself.

But that was before things started falling apart. Back when young people like us still thought they could grow up to be something other than what they would come to call us: “Embers.” It was our job, or so the joke went, to be the last remnants of the flame that had burned so long. And, like all Embers, to eventually burn out.

From the time we were five Tommy and I had been shifted from foster home to foster home. Nothing to do with The Disease—that was still years away. But simply because our parents had already died and left us and we became “difficult” children. Maybe it was just the way we were. Or maybe it was because, after their deaths, the only thing we had to remember our parents by was a stack of letters that I’d read once and burned the next day.

After the letters were gone there were only Tommy and me, and we were always together. Only twice had anyone tried to separate us. Tommy had been the one they wanted.

The first time, no less than a day after Tommy had gone, I ran away from the group home in which he had left me behind and found his new home. It wasn’t difficult. Just a matter of getting the records from the social worker’s paperwork when she wasn’t looking. I snuck into Tommy’s room at night, took his hand and left. We made it a day and a half on our own before we were found. The couple who had taken him in gave him up after that and the two of us returned to the same foster home we had been in before. We were together again.

The second time it happened—again, he had been the one the adoptive family wanted—we were thirteen. We ran away again and made it alone together for almost a week. During that week, Tommy thought of a dozen good reasons why we should keep going. He had this idea of picking a direction—any direction—and simply going until that direction ran out. The world was big and we could get lost in it. And even though we would be lost, we would be together the way we had always been.

“We’re too young to keep running,” I said. “Nobody searches for anyone as hard as they search for lost kids.”

“We’re not kids,” Tommy said, and in just saying so I realized how young he sounded. “They’ll break us up again if we go back, Ginny.”

“Don’t call me Ginny,” I answered. “It’s what you called me when we were babies. And I’m not a baby anymore.”

We were standing beneath an overpass just after sunset, listening to the sound of the cars racing by in light rain, their tires sizzling like bacon. When the big trucks went by overhead there was the calump-calump-calump of the expansion gaps in the concrete.

“We’ll go back and I’ll tell them what they need to hear to make sure they keep us together,” I said. I tucked my hands in my pockets and stared off into the distance. The entire conversation was only a formality to be endured before it led to its obvious conclusion.

Tommy’s face tightened into a knot. “Dammit, Virginia!” he said, leaning hard on my name after planting the flag of “dammit.” Curse words were still new to him and still had power. “We can find somewhere to live.” We could both feel the momentum of words building inside him, like a shopping cart just beginning to rattle down a steep hill. “We can go off and make a home. We’re each other’s home when you really stop to think about it!” He belted the words out. He opened his arms, proudly, like a carnival barker making his greatest pitch.

He searched for words that would undo me, but found only the empty breath inside his lungs. If he tried to press me he knew I could always bring up facts and figures, numbers and math enough to break down anything he said. I could recite articles verbatim about the survival rates of runaways if I wanted. True stories of children found dead. Statistics about how badly everything could go for us if the world so decided. I could crunch the math in my head and rattle off the probabilities: such and such a chance of getting kidnapped, such and such a percentage of turning to drugs or prostitution or anything else. On and on, I always knew how to break down any resistance he ever had to anything.

Tommy looked at me, his face soft and afraid and frustrated all at the same time. His mind reached for something to say but his lips knew the fact of futility. Only I could change it. Only I could let him win the argument that he so desperately needed to win.

And he knew—we both knew, and hated—that I wouldn’t let him win.

Rather than fight it, rather than try to make the case for the things he thought we should do, he conceded. Tommy’s life was always easier when he just did what I wanted.

“So be it,” he said.

“Tommy?”

“What?” he answered, sighing the word as his body slumped upon its frame, resigned to defeat.

“They’re never going to break us apart,” I said.

“Then why do they keep trying?”

I walked over and wrapped my arms around him. He was outgrowing me already and my arms had to work to surround him, but the work was rewarded by the feeling of my brother captured, like some splendid and frail animal, in my arms. I had to protect him. It was my job.

“We won’t ever be separated,” I said.

“But—”

“I promise, Tommy.”

“You can’t know that, Ginny. Mom and Dad said they’d always be here too.”

Tommy’s body shuddered and I knew that he was crying. He wrapped his arms around me, if only to keep me from seeing his tears the way boys and men are known to do.

“Mom and Dad haven’t left,” I said. “They’re in me. In The Memory Gospel. And they’re in you too.”

“I can’t remember like you can,” Tommy said, almost as an apology.

“It doesn’t matter. They’re in you. We’re together. A family. And we’ll always be that.”

“You promise?”

“Just as sure as my name’s Ginny.”

We stood for a long time, holding one another, and the world passed us by.

...calump-calump-calump...