All that to say he wasn’t home right now, which the twins figured out immediately.
“Onnie Betsy?”
“Sorry; thinking. Your mom’s coming now.” I started pulling smoothie ingredients from the fridge, because I knew my pal would need one. The kitchen door swung in and, as we both were prone to do, she was in midfret and didn’t bother with social niceties like “hello” or “get your big white butt off the counter—we eat there!”
“I can’t find the babies again, will you please help me l— Oh.” She saw her newborns, who were on either side of me and chewing like piranhas to get rid of the cookie evidence. “Oh.” She managed a smile and put the big Barnes and Noble bag she had with her on the counter. That was a little odd; I knew she hadn’t left the mansion all day. Probably full of clothes for Goodwill. Or even books. “There you are.”
I sympathized. Could not imagine what parenting these darling weirdos was like. Well, I could, because I saw a lot of it, but stressful didn’t begin to cover it.
Jessica and Dick were unique in our house: they were run-of-the-mill normals in a house of the undead. But somehow, when Jessica got pregnant, her proximity to me as I was learning how to navigate other dimensions (Hell) and time travel backward (Salem during the witch hunts, also known as Hell) and forward (Minnesota in the future was a winter wasteland, twenty feet of snow in July, also known as Hell) affected her unborn twins.
Jessica’s twins were drawn to this mansion, this timeline, and to me. Any of her twins. From any reality out there. In one universe, she’d had her babies a few years earlier, thus: the kindergarten newborns sucking down Thin Mints. In another, she and Dick had known each other in high school and she’d gotten pregnant on graduation night: the twins who had driver’s licenses.
We should have been tipped off during her pregnancy, except anyone in the house (where Jessica and I spent most of our time) either wouldn’t notice something was very, very odd, or we’d notice but didn’t find it alarming. My mother eventually figured it out, and that only because she didn’t live here. One day Jess wasn’t showing, the next she’d look eleven months pregnant, then later that week she’d barely be showing again. Jessica’s weird babies were weird even in the womb.18
Without exception, the twins always knew who we were and where they were. They were never alarmed to find themselves in an entirely different universe. And they would disappear as mysteriously as they’d arrived. It took some getting used to—we still weren’t, not really—but most of the time it was jarring but also kind of cool.
Most of the time.
“What’s this?” Jessica asked, bending down to peer at her daughter’s mouth. The girl gave an elaborate, overly innocent shrug. “Hon? What are you eating?”
A head shake. Big wide innocent eyes got bigger and wider and innocenter.
“Answer me, please.”
“She has linjinitis,” the boy suggested, lightly spraying his mother with Thin Mint crumbs.
I snickered. “Laryngitis.” Everybody was always correcting me. It was nice being the one to do the correcting. I figured I should enjoy the twins until they were smarter than me in another four, maybe five years. “When you can’t talk? That’s what she’s got.”
“Sure she does.” I got a Defcon 2–level glare and pretended not to be terrified. “Betsy, hand me those baby wipes.”
I obeyed at once.
“Aw, Mommy, those are for babies. We’re not babies because, look! We’re big kids. And mmpphh!”
“Don’t fight it,” I advised the boy.
“Shush.”
We all obeyed her. I watched my friend scrub away all traces of Thin Mint crime and wondered how long this iteration would hang out. It was never for very long—I think a half hour or so was the max—but again, this had only been going on for a few weeks. We’d never seen them leave. They just walked through a door—usually the mudroom—and vanished.
Once they didn’t know who Dick was. At all. They were in fourth grade, they were both wearing dresses for some reason, purple for him and orange for her (the future must have a more enlightened view of gender roles and clothing for same), they both thought I was the greatest thing since sling-backs, and they had no idea who their dad was. And not in a “Dad died last year, so sad” way. A “we never knew our dad, Mom never talks about him and we’ve given up asking” way.
Once only the boy came. Sinclair and I were getting cozy while slugging down the dregs of a fantastic banana strawberry smoothie and while Marc made shooing motions with his hands—“Jeez, you have a room for that shit, go away”—and we were starting to make out solely to piss him off, groaning into each other’s mouths and groping at each other with smoothie-sticky hands, we sensed something and turned.