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  Prologue

  In my dream Trevor and I were running in opposite directions, but not deliberately. Panic had sent us fleeing, flying off like pieces of the earth thrust into outer space and not drawn toward anything specific. The shadows and whispers that were always there, but easily forgotten or ignored, had grown darker and louder all around us, even before I confronted the ugly truths. Whether I had imagined it or not, the shadows followed us; they were there when we awoke in the morning, and they leaked in under our closed doors and windows when we went to sleep. We were haunted, but pressed our eyes closed tightly and willed them not to be real. Eventually, in my dream, we found ourselves curled up in corners of the old house, hovering, alone.

  But for me there was never any sanctuary in the old shadows that had been there for decades. They couldn’t be ignored. “No one ever thinks,” Mama once said, “that the shadows in a house are as much a part of it as the furniture. The sun and the moon cast them through the windows the same way, always.”

  These shadows were thin and weak and sometimes looked like they were shimmering, as if the house itself was trembling. As Mama wished, I had come to believe this house was alive.

  It spoke to us in so many ways. It had tried not to give up a tragic secret. I knew that it eventually would be telling me how sorry it was. Never once during its construction, its birth from rich, fresh, natural-smelling lumber, did it dream of becoming a shelter for something so ugly. Like someone despondent and depressed, it would have welcomed an all-consuming fire, suicide. But perhaps even that wouldn’t be satisfactory. Its ashes would still reek of sin.

  To be sure, long before all this, both Trevor and I had nightmares, just like anyone else our age who had gone through what we had gone through, listening to the cries of other children, smaller and bigger, younger and older, haunted by the same fear of not being loved, I imagine. Maybe Trevor had more of them than I did. He really never willingly admitted to them. I suspected he had them because when we were little, I heard his whimpering, even his crying out for his mother. He remembered his far more than I remembered mine. For years, the bad dreams were mostly born from our pasts. Trevor was obviously left alone a lot. He hated that, even at the foster home. Eventually, my childhood nightmares and most of his were easily smothered and forgotten after the morning sun had burned them away. However, when its time had come, one particular nightmare began in Mama’s house. It began as what I first thought was an illusion, the mysterious cries. I could call it a hallucination, even though I could touch it and remember the feel of it on my fingertips.

  I think I was always expecting it or something very much like it. As I was growing up, I tried to hide my suspicions from Trevor, but eventually, like water quickly freezing into a shape, it became too real to deny. I had no choice. I finally confronted it. Trevor admitted that he had done the same, long before me. Mama had wanted that.

  But what she hadn’t wanted was how that nightmare came in crashing waves that quickly overtook us all. The longer I had stood there and looked, the deeper I had sunk into the pool of darkness that had for so many years kept it sacrosanct. Even after it was gone and we had both avoided drowning in it, I knew that didn’t mean it was over; it would never be over.

  Trevor and I had been living with so much beautiful music and love, making it easier for me to ignore any trembling and fear that would come and go, the cold breezes that nudged me out of sleep or quickened my heartbeat when we were just reading and studying. I’d stop and listen harder, waiting in dreaded anticipation of the whispers.

  Early on, I sensed that Trevor was more accustomed to the whispers and the darkness. But I always had believed that he had secrets that were uglier than mine, secrets so deep that I understood why he would rather leave them undisturbed like snakes coiled up in a corner, better ignored. Sometimes, however, when we were younger, Trevor might take my hand unexpectedly without looking at me, and then, as quickly as he had tightened his fingers around mine, he would realize what he had done, loosen his grip, and pretend it had never happened. It would do no good to ask him what had happened or why. He wouldn’t remember doing it, and my forcing him to remember would be cruel.

  I instinctively knew not to question him or remind him of it, especially when we grew older. Dark childhood memories could be forced down by sweet nursery rhymes and happy tunes, presents and birthday cakes, and of course, layers and layers of prayers. But all this was only temporary. The memories would always rear their heads from time to time. Even as a child, I could sense the rage floating just below the surface of Trevor. Unlike him, I didn’t have such daunting recollections from the time before we were here. He had lived in his darker time long enough for those troubled times to start shaping who he was before I had set eyes on him. However, when Mama came, saw us, and chose us, we both thought we had been rescued, maybe he more than I.

  I will confess that the smiles that shone upon us in our new home were always reassuring for me. As long as we were all together, I believed we were safe and protected. Rain, as it was for flowers and grass and trees, was full of promise. When it was cold, we were kept warm. And on hot summer days, there was relief at twilight. Tomorrow always meant something better, something good, was coming. It took more to convince me of this than it did him perhaps, but eventually I permitted myself to believe it, stepping into hope like someone easing herself into a warm, reassuring bath. I really believed that we had been successfully planted in a new garden. When you finally accept something and put your faith in it, you become helpless, vulnerable, and naked in the worst way.

  “Have no hope,” Mama might say, “and you’ll have no disappointment. Don’t hope—plot, have a strategy. That’s how I found you. I had planned for it to happen. I knew I would take you away from them.”

  Neither of us had ever felt any emotional connection to Fred or Shirley Wexler, who ran our group foster care home along with a nurse we called Nanny Too. We named her that probably because we were old enough to comprehend who she was and what she did at the home. She had told us she was a nurse and now she was our nanny, too. We eventually learned that she was the Wexlers’ real daughter, Joanna Birch Wexler, and when Mama Eden thought we were old enough to understand, she told us Nanny Too had been a nun for nearly ten years and had worked in a Catholic health clinic in El Salvador. “But she had to leave because she had broken some of the rules,” Mama said. “She was unmarried, of course, and you probably remember she looked like a female Ichabod Crane.

  “Ooh,” she said, smiling and shaking herself the way you might shake off water after a downpour. “She’s gone, gone.”

  We smiled at that. We wanted to shake off the visions and the sounds and vacuum up every recollection like dust just the way Mama was teaching us to do.

  Both Trevor and I had been brought to the Wexlers when we were infants, Trevor older. Why neither of us had been adopted before Mama Eden found us was a mystery until Mama told us the Wexlers made money housing foster children. “They received a subsidy from the state, but they gave you the minimum of anything and everything. Their old tourist house that Fred Wexler had inherited enabled them to have as many as twelve children at one time. They were scroungers squeezing every penny out of the state the way you might squeeze an orange until it was nothing but pulp and skin.
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  “When someone came to consider adopting one of you, they often managed to discourage them, telling them untruths about you, your behavior and health, and the older you became, the more money they received to keep you. They’re closed down now, and who knows where your Nanny Too has ended up. Probably tormenting the elderly in some adult residence.”

  We had little reason not to believe her then.

  With the Wexlers taking so little personal interest in us, and our mysterious backgrounds, and their never mentioning anyone in our families, we had to adopt Mama’s and Big John’s folks as our own. Mama especially assured us we would digest every story she told about her family, inhale every memento, absorb every keepsake and souvenir, and make it part of who we were. We believed it because we needed it and wanted it so much, no doubt Trevor more than I. As Mama said, “Even a leaf remembers a branch; even a branch remembers a tree, and a tree remembers the seed that gave birth to it. Now you will have my seeds to remember and, most important, claim as your own.”

  We took comfort in the family fairy tales she could express as easily as she breathed. Her words wove themselves around us into an impenetrable coat, an armor standing between us and the vultures of evil that floated around us, jealous birds with bloody eyes that Mama swore were always out there. Our home, our house, was our fortress, our refuge. Everything and anything around us in it had a family to recall and, in recalling, gave itself meaning and identity. As she had told us many times, where would we be—what would we be—without one? Of course, we who had been adopted had to now be the ones who adopted, adopted a family.

  As we grew up, our house became a big classroom, a family museum. Practically everything in it had some historical meaning, a chronology that provided structure and significance, especially for Mama since it was her house. Sometimes her memories would seep into her smile. Almost anything old in the house could bring it out. She’d pick up a glass from the shelf above the kitchen counter and say, “This Waterford crystal glass is the glass my grandmother used to keep her dentures within reach when she went to sleep or just wanted to rest her gums. Don’t ever drink from it. The taste of her false teeth is in the glass itself.”

  She so wanted us to envision her father sitting in his easy chair when she handed us his meerschaum pipe. Both of us gently pressed our fingers around it, smelled it, and looked at each other, anticipating the other to say something, do something that would convince Mama we did indeed see him.

  If she wasn’t satisfied, she’d say, “It takes time. Don’t worry. It will happen.”

  Neither of us was quite sure what exactly would happen, but I knew we had to believe that something significant would, and soon, or Mama might stop loving us. I think Trevor feared that more than I did. Although he never came out and said it, I was sure that he believed she might even think she had made a mistake and take us back to the Wexlers’, or another place like it.

  Big John wasn’t as intent on or as willing to talk about his past. When we finally heard some of it, we understood why, but he never disagreed with Mama about what we needed in order to have meaning for ourselves. He often said he wished he had as much family as Mama’s family, the Petersens, did.

  At night, very late, when it was quiet in the house, Trevor and I would wake and listen as hard as we could, hoping to hear the whispers and laughter Mama said we would. We couldn’t lie to each other; we couldn’t pretend we had, even though we were each afraid the other would and Mama’s love would abandon the one who hadn’t. Trevor was so much more afraid of that than I was. I never told him I knew that was so, and I never tried to find out why—why was Mama’s love so much more important to him than it was to me?

  Once or twice, I thought I did hear someone sobbing. It sounded muffled, just the way it would be if it was stuck in a wall. Was that what Mama meant? I looked at Trevor. He had his eyes open, but he hadn’t turned to indicate he had heard anything. When it stopped, I was afraid to say I had heard it. He might think just what I feared: one of us would lie to get Mama to love that one more.

  But Mama always seemed confident that we wouldn’t lie to her when it came to our family and ourselves especially. Ironically, she felt sorry for us because of that.

  “The world is so much more difficult for people who cannot lie,” she had once said, more to herself than to us.

  “Why?” I asked. Nanny Too had taught us it was terrible to lie, a sin for which you would burn in hell.

  Mama Eden looked at me, clearly surprised I had heard her, but now she was forced to explain. Trevor looked at her expectantly, too. Her explanation didn’t help us then. We were both too young. I wasn’t sure it helped us even now.

  “I hate logic and truth because there’s no escape from them, like there is from something you believe.”

  We were both staring at her. These words were like clouds too high to touch and too quickly thinning and becoming air. She saw our confusion, but she just smiled, stroked our hair, petted us like our two cats, and, with the promise that we would understand it all one day, sent us off to play and forget our questions and our doubts.

  For the longest time, for most of our younger years, forgetting frightening, confusing, and unpleasant things became easier to do, especially for me. I think Mama knew that it wasn’t as simple for Trevor. She knew things about him that I was afraid to know. To this day I think that was the real reason that Mama had the Cemetery for Unhappiness.

  If something precious broke, she would take it out, bringing us along, and dig a grave. Then she would have one of us bury it, most often Trevor. She did this even with things you couldn’t see, like a nasty word or idea that either I, Big John, or, rarely, Trevor uttered. “We’ll bury that,” she’d declare. We would have to stop everything we were doing and dig a hole in her Cemetery for Unhappiness. We were to concentrate to see the nasty words smothered. Looking down, she’d repeat them and then cry, “Be gone!”

  Maybe it was a good idea back then. Maybe it helped Trevor more than it helped me, but I know we both felt better and safer when we returned to the house with her. Big John never came with us when he was home. Only once or twice did he ever say anything critical about the cemetery, and when he did, Mama slapped her hands together like anyone would to kill a mosquito and then turned around and went back to the cemetery to bury what he had just said. So after a while, he knew to keep his thoughts as hidden as he could.

  “Oh, Paula,” he might start to say, only to smile and quickly add, “Whatever makes you happier.”

  Contented, she would forget that he even once had suggested she not have funerals in front of us for the unpleasant things, the ugly and fearful things, claiming it would give us terrible nightmares. Neither of us had breathed after Big John said that, so dramatically questioning what she was doing for us, until she nodded and led us out to the cemetery again to bury his very words. Her sigh of relief seemed to echo off the house. We both looked around to see if trees would shake or leaves would fall.

  More often than not, we reacted that way, mirroring her mood. We smiled when she smiled, became angry when something made her angry, and felt sad when she became maudlin and stared at nothing. Trevor and I circled her moods like satellites with eyes watching the earth. Big John said we looked like we were attached. Mama liked that. Precious and loving words had to be cherished. When she told him so, he thought a moment and then said, “Maybe you should have a Garden of Happiness, then.”

  She smiled; she liked that, too.

  “Maybe I will,” she said.

  There was so much to smile about, and there was so much laughter and music back then, that we were sure the garden would be greater than the cemetery. But Mama had her warnings about it.

  “Happiness is like a beautiful flower, dazzling and wonderful for a while and then, unfortunately, fading. There should be only one season: spring. If I could keep you young forever, you would be safe. I’ll do my best.”

  But, of course, she couldn’t keep us from growing and maturing.
Despite how much magic and fantasy there was for us as children, we wanted to grow older. Maybe I wanted it more than Trevor did. I wanted to step out and into the world whizzing by us, a world we could only glance at or see through the window of television. Trevor was never as ambitious. Sometimes I envied him for being so contented, and sometimes I hated him for it.

  But the tragedy that befell us didn’t come from stepping out. It came from stepping in, stepping deeper into ourselves and who we had become.

  Eventually, the house had worked its magic. We didn’t have to lie; we could hear the whispers and the laughter and the crying. When we ran our fingers over his meerschaum pipe, we could see Grandfather. We sank deeper and deeper into Mama’s world.

  And contrary to what she had hoped and we had expected, we desperately tried to flee from it, knowing in our hearts that there was really no escape.

  In the end, when all truth came out of the shadows, I knew that we would take it with us wherever we went, whether we were still together or not.

  one

  Mama Eden was whispering in the darkness with the low hall light smothered in the shadows behind her. Streaming through our bedroom windows, the moonlight turned her face into a silvery mask. Her eyes seemed like emerald-green marbles. Her lips were the shade of faded roses.

  I could see her airy words turn into bubbles and float over us. There was always something magical about her. Her words often became wondrous things when she spoke. If she was angry, they’d become darts or rocks, and if she was happy, they were drops of honey.

  The wind slithered through the cobweb-thin cracks in our window frames, as if Nature was whispering back to her tonight. I knew she thought I was asleep because Trevor was, and she was used to us doing the same things at the same time. Just that morning, Big John had said it was uncanny, “cryin’, laughin’, hungry, thirsty, one wantin’ to do what the other does all the time. Uncanny. You’d think they really were brother and sister—or even Siamese twins.”