Page 7 of Kill Your Darlings

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“It’s the only thing we have in common,” Thom said, a joke he’d made... how many times?

“We can’t be the only ones, of course,” Wendy said. “But I’ve, we’ve, never met anyone else with the same—”

“With the same nightmare,” Thom said.

“Why do you call it a nightmare?” This was from Louise Holly.

She and her husband, Mike, were over for dinner.

It was the first time just the four of them had socialized together.

Mike and Louise were a recently retired couple who had moved to Goose Neck a year and a half earlier.

It was such a small community that Thom and Wendy had seen them often enough, but had never felt the need to have dinner with just them until Thom had discovered that he and Louise shared a love for jazz trumpet.

So, Mike and Louise were over for lasagna and to listen to Thom’s vinyl collection of Miles Davis and Chet Baker records.

And now Thom was opening another bottle of wine even though Mike and Louise were drinking decaf coffee, and they were all talking about the upcoming shared fiftieth birthday party that Thom and Wendy were throwing.

“It’s a nightmare because your birthday is supposed to be a day just for yourself, and I have to share it with my wife. And

she doesn’t even care about her birthday.”

“When I heard you two were doing a shared fiftieth,” Mike said, “I naturally assumed you were combining them because they

were close together, not that you had the exact same birthday.”

“It is strange,” Wendy said.

Mike asked, “When did you realize?” at the same time as Louise said, “Who was born first?”

These were all questions they’d been asked before, of course, multiple times. Whenever anyone learned they were born on the

same day it became the most interesting thing about them.

“I was born close to noon and Thom was born...” She turned her head and looked at him, even though she knew.

“At seventeen minutes past eleven at night. I’m almost a half day younger.”

“God, that’s amazing,” Louise said, sitting up in her chair as though she’d been watching a dull movie and something exciting

had just happened. “I don’t suppose either of you are interested in astrology, are you?”

“That’s my cue to clean up,” Wendy said, rising.

“Wendy is an astrology atheist, and I’m agnostic. You a believer, Louise?”

“Not really, but I read my horoscope daily.”

Still standing, Wendy said, “Thom and I are living proof that it’s all bullshit. We’re astrology twins and totally different.”

“You can’t be completely different,” Mike said. “You share enough in common that you’ve stayed married for...”

“We’re not completely different, of course,” Thom said, “but like I was saying, I quite like my birthday. It feels like a day that you are allowed to do whatever you want. You know, without guilt. It’s all about you. If you want that third martini, then who’s going to say anything about it?”

Wendy, having sat back down again, watched Thom talk about birthdays. It was funny how he always said the same things in the

same way. She was reminded of her mother, who had finally died the previous year after suffering from five years of escalating

dementia. Toward the end she could only ever really talk about things from the past, either her childhood or her own children’s

childhoods, and when she talked about these memories, she’d recount them using the exact same phrases with the exact same

intonations. Wendy’s brother, Alan, always sentimental, found these conversations comforting, as though proof that humans

are made up of memories, while Wendy was secretly alarmed, her mother’s deterioration convincing her that humans were nothing

more than robotic machines, devoid of free will. She’d found it hard to spend time with her mother over the last two years,

so it was a good thing that Alan lived so close. Wendy had done her part by paying for the twenty-four-hour care that Rose

needed in order to stay at home and with her dogs.

“The other thing is,” Thom continued, “Wendy is absolutely overjoyed, because it means one less party per year, aren’t you,

Wen?”

“I do like parties, actually. I’m just not fond of parties that come with a reason.”

“Don’t all parties have reasons?” Mike said. He was either older than his wife, Louise, or else just aging faster. He was

slumped on the sofa in a way that looked like he might need help getting off of it, and he had crumbs in his lap from the

plate of cookies that they’d brought from the dining table to the living room.

“Well, the usual reason is to eat and drink and socialize. The parties I dislike are birthdays and anniversaries and going-away

parties. That kind of thing.”

“What about Valentine’s Day?” Louise said.

“Well,” Thom said, pouring more wine for himself, “since our birthdays are February thirteenth, Valentine’s Day just gets thrown into the mix, and as one of the only men who actually likes that holiday, I lose again.”

“Now I am going to start cleaning up,” Wendy said.

After the Hollys had left, Thom came into the kitchen to offer help just as Wendy had almost finished loading the dishwasher.

“You have fun?” he said.

“They’re nice,” she said.

“But dull.”

“A bit dull.”

In bed Wendy was starting the new Jane Austen biography she’d been gifted at Christmas when Thom, undressing, said, “You do

know that it’s not the only thing we have in common?”

“What is?”

“Our birthdays.”

“I know. We have lots in common.”

“Do we?” Thom sounded genuinely surprised. Wendy laughed.

“Our lovely son,” she said.

“Having a child together doesn’t mean that we have something in common.”

“If you want to be pedantic about it, I suppose not. But I was thinking that we both love him. That’s something we have in

common.”

Thom, wearing only a T-shirt and socks, was thinking. Wendy was about to return to her book when he said, “We love him differently,

though.”

“Do we? How so?”

“I think that you love him in a healthy way. You want him to do well in life and succeed and fly the coop and all that.”

“You don’t want that?”

“No, I do, in theory, but I think... down deep, that I love him sometimes so much that I want him to break his back or something and then he’d live forever with us. He’d never leave.”

Wendy started to laugh, but Thom, now naked, actually had a serious look in his eyes. “I just want him safe here, with us.”

“With a broken back?”

“Well, no. I was being extreme. But my love feels almost psychotic sometimes. Like a combination of fear and madness. And,

no, I don’t want him to get hurt, but I think I grieve sometimes that we no longer take care of him the way we did when he

was younger. I miss his helplessness.”

“We have Samsa,” Wendy said.

“Samsa’s not helpless exactly,” and their cat, sleeping on the extreme corner of their king-sized bed, twitched an ear at

the sound of his name.

“No, but he needs to be fed and he likes to be picked up.”

Getting into bed on his side, his reading glasses in one hand and his own book—a paperback copy of A Little Life —in the other, Thom said, “When I was little, I did have this fantasy that I would find a bird with a broken wing and that

I would take care of it and it would become attached to me. It didn’t need to be a bird, I guess, it could be a sick squirrel.

Any small animal.”

“You didn’t go out and break a bird’s wing to make it come true, did you?”

“My father made that joke at the time and I remember considering it, like maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea after all. I think

I’m too drunk to read.”

Thom turned to his side, bringing the duvet with him, in order to put his book and reading glasses on the bedside table, then

curled up, facing away from Wendy.

“I’ll read a little more,” she said, returning to the sentence she’d marked with a finger. But she’d read less than thirty seconds when Thom said, his voice muffled by the pillow, “You called us twins to the Hollys.”

“Did I?”

“I think so.”

“No, I just said we were astrological twins.”

“I guess you’re right. Still...”

Wendy, angered slightly, didn’t immediately respond, knowing that another thirty seconds of silence would ensure that her

husband would be asleep. A short, guttural snore indicated that he was. She tried to return to her book but kept thinking

about his twin comment. Yes, that was one of their rules, one of their secrets. For almost as many years as they’d known each

other, they’d been referring to each other as twins. It had started as a joke, not just because of their shared birthday but

the fact that they looked a little bit alike. They each had large dark-brown eyes and high hairlines and compact mouths that

seemed a little too close to their noses. Their skin was the same hue as well, pale as skim milk in wintertime, although Thom

could actually get a tan in summertime, while Wendy burned. “We’re twins, you know, not actual twins, but cosmic ones.” That

had been Thom, years ago. She’d probably grimaced and told him that she’d rather not think of him as a sibling. But it had

stuck, this idea that they were connected in ways far more significant than marriage or parenthood or even love. This twindom,

or twinhood, whatever you wanted to call it, became one of their secrets. It was never to be spoken out loud to anyone else,

in the same way that so many things were never to be spoken out loud to anyone else. They didn’t talk about Wendy’s first

marriage, or the fact that they re-met at that conference in Ohio in 1991, or anything else that happened that following year.

They didn’t talk about guilt or regrets. The past was the past.