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Chris was at the side of the barn, standing in knee-high weeds, grasshoppers leaping around his shins, listening through a crack between two boards. A crack Chrissy had found.
Mama rarely spoke back to Daddy, but that day, after the funeral hack had come and gone, she did.You’re hiding out here, Harold. Can you call yourself a scientist and not want to know what killed your daughter?
I’m not a scientist. I deny science. I’m aninventor! They will cut her up, you stupid woman!
Chris had never heard his father call his mother stupid. Had never even heard him raise his voice to her.
I DON’T CARE!
Screaming! His mother, screaming!
I DON’T CARE! I HAVE TO KNOW!
She got her way. Contrary to the church’s teachings, there was an autopsy on Christine Evangeline Stewart. And it turned out to be something called Brugada Syndrome. His seven-year-old sister had died of a heart attack.
You had to know, Daddy told her later.You had to know, didn’t you? And now you know the boy could have it as well, because it’s hereditary. There’s your knowledge, woman. Your useless and pointless knowledge.
That time they were in the house, but Chris had become quite the accomplished eavesdropper. He didn’t understandhereditary, so he looked it up in the big Webster’s in the lesson room. He understood that what had killed Chrissy could kill him, as well. Of course it could, it made perfect sense, weren’t they twins? Chrissy with her father’s dark hair, Chris with his mother’s blond hair, faces not identical but similar enough so that anyone who saw them knew they were brother and sister. They loved Mama, they loved Daddy, they loved Pastor Jim and Deacon Andy, they loved God and Jesus. But most of all they loved each other and lived in the secret world of Two.
Brugada Syndrome.
Hereditary.
But if Chrissy were alive, if there had been no hand dangling down from the upper bunk in a beam of dusty morning sunlight, then hecould stop worrying that some night his own heart might stop. If Chrissy were still alive, his mother’s pain would be gone.Hispain would be gone as well. The emptiness. The darkness where a monster lurked with its claws outstretched, a monster named BRUGADA. Waiting to pounce.
His father was consoled by the church. It was Chris who consoled his mother. There was no horror the first time he went to Mama wearing one of Chrissy’s dresses. No disgust. She simply opened her arms to him.
“I’ll be your little girl,” he said against her bosom. “I’ll be your little boy, too. I can be both.”
“Our secret,” she said, stroking his hair, as fine as Chrissy’s had been. “Our secret.”
They kept her alive. When Daddy found out and called him a transvestite, Chris had no idea what that meant until he once again went to the Webster’s. Then he had to laugh. He was no such thing, because hewasChrissy. Not all the time, but when he was,shewas.
They had been close; they were close again.
“Leave him alone, Harold.” Not screaming that time, just firm. It was a week after Daddy found out. Harold had taken counseling with the church elders. “All of you, leave him alone. And leaveheralone.”
“Woman,” Harold Stewart said, “you’re crazy.”
“He loves her,” she said (Chris once more listening at the crack in the wall of the Invention Barn). “And I love them both. I’ve given you everything, Harold. I gave up my life for your life and your church. You will not take my daughter away from me, nor his sister from Christopher.”
“He’scrazy!”
“No more crazy than you are, using the tools of science and calling it the will of God.”
“Do you dispute my understanding?” A warning rumble in his voice, like far-off thunder.
“No, Harold. I never have. I’m only saying that, like him, you have two ways of thinking. No… two ways ofbeing. Chris is the same.” A pause. “Andsheis.”
“Will you at least agree to counseling?”
“Yes. If it stays in the church.”
So Chris and Chrissy started going to Andy Fallowes. Andy hadn’t laughed. He tried to understand. The twins would always love him for that.
Does God make mistakes?Deacon Andy asked.
No, course not.