Strange Creatures Read online

  Back then, when Mom sang prayers to him at bedtime, he’d prayed for me. I was the sibling who would make everything right. The other half that made him whole. He knew I was born before the phone started to ring, before Aunt Jennifer could share the news. He knew it the same way he knew the color red, that Grover was furry, or the special way the crack in the ceiling over his crib formed the shape of a lucky hare. I hadn’t been there, and now I was, and he would never be alone again. The only injustice, he later said, was that he’d been born first. That the rest of the world would never know how we were secretly twins, or how we had been torn apart.

  For me, there was no life before Jamie. He was older, and so his presence shaped everything that came after. And everything came after Jamie. In all things—walking, talking, weaving stories—he came first and, while he was patient with me, in the beginning I could only do my best to keep up with him. I wasn’t merely following in his footsteps. I was tracing those footsteps perfectly, and often in his hand-me-down shoes.

  But Jamie claimed he could remember a time before me. One long, empty year when there was a hole inside him he could not fill. Now, from a rational standpoint, it seems absurd, as absurd as the idea that he remembers all those details from his first birthday. Before I was born, he was an infant who could barely wrap his lips around a small handful of words, much less the idea of a deeper emptiness inside him.

  Still, at home, when it was just the two of us, Jamie was brilliant—a shining gem. He knew the scientific names for all kinds of animals, knew every type of gemstone, knew every knot that could be tied. On the rare occasions that he was ignorant about something, he would press forward with dogged determination until he unlocked that knowledge or skill. One day, when we were very young, Dad brought home a yo-yo. I was hopeless at it, much to my father’s disappointment. But my brother kept at it while I watched him from our back steps, winding and unwinding the string over and over again, until the night was thin and buggy, until our mother beckoned us inside for dinner.

  “Just a minute!” he called, slapping away mosquitoes, his brow furrowed. Jamie, a knot around his middle finger, made the emerald cabochon of plastic spin and glow. By the time we went inside, he not only understood how to make his yo-yo bounce; he knew how to walk the dog and go around the world, too.

  “It’s almost like a superpower, Annie,” he told me later. “If you try hard enough, you can learn to do anything. To be anything.”

  My brother was a genius. I understood that better than anyone, so when he told me that he remembered my birthday, remembered even a time before I was alive, I believed him. Back then, I believed every word he ever said.

  We grew up in Wiltwyck, a sleepy Hudson Valley town wedged between the feet of the Catskills and the roaring Wallkill, two hours north of New York City on days when the traffic was light on the Thruway. There were hippie apothecaries and twisting apple orchards and college students from the university in the next town over, on the hunt for cheap rent. It felt like a place where magic might happen even in the beginning. Perhaps that’s why it did.

  Because as soon as Mom brought me home from the hospital, Jamie and I were always together. Jamie pulled me to my feet for my first steps. He sang me songs in his own secret tongue. In turn, I stole his clothes and toys and laughter. He never seemed to mind that I was his shadow. We were one person, after all, not two.

  On some afternoons, in the gray-gold light of our early childhoods, we would sit together, crisscross applesauce, on Jamie’s bed. I faced him like a mirror, clasping his hands in mine. He would say “Annie Annie Annie,” and I’d drone back “Jamie Jamie Jamie,” until our names were a strange, creaky chorus of meaningless syllables. I studied his trembling chin, his bark-brown eyelashes, the gold flecks in his brown eyes, until, in the dim light, his features would seem to blur and his skin seemed to disappear completely. I could see shadows in his eye sockets, the grown-up teeth waiting in his sinuses, his nasal bones, thin and delicate and just like mine. We were more like each other than we were anyone else, more than Mom or Dad or Poppy or Gram or Grandma or Aunt Jennifer or any of the kids on our street.

  On those afternoons, we’d tumble from his bedroom together, dizzy and exhilarated, half-numb from what we’d done. Dad would see us, and he’d laugh. This was back when his laugh was real, not studied like the laughter of those sitcom dads on TV.

  “What have you two been up to?” he’d ask.

  And we’d answer back together, “Nothing!” and hide our giggles behind our identical sun-browned hands.

  2

  THE BOY WHO WASHED UP on the westerly shore of the Island of Feral Children was different from the others. His body was bruised and battered. There were purple shadows beneath his eyes. Though other children had shown up scratched from mermaid claws before, this boy looked as though his flesh had been through several wars. He bore scars like sidewalk cracks, which had healed poorly and pinkened and bled and wept. Now his skin was gnarled as a baseball mitt. He was a boy, but he did not look like one. There was mourning in his gaze.

  We were lucky, my father always said. Our neighborhood was full of children. When the weather was warm and the light optimistic, the sounds of their voices provided a constant soundtrack. My father said that it was the kind of neighborhood he’d grown up in back in New Jersey, where children wandered in and out of screen doors, stealing snacks from different refrigerators, borrowing each other’s bicycles, waging war on one another across their cul-de-sac.

  In the summer when I was young and our bedtime was early, I’d sit up by my window, watching for fuzzy movement in the yards around us. There were a few girls with swingy ponytails among the older children, but otherwise it was mostly boys who played in the sunset space below. I’d study them as they put together pickup games of Wiffle ball or dodgeball, and then, after dark, watch them disappear together into the woods that bordered the backyards of all the houses on our side of the street. Inside my room, inside my body, I would be filled with an inexplicable hunger. Dad would come by, command me to go back to bed, and I would. But once I was tucked inside my sheets, my mind refused to go quiet. I wanted to understand who they were and where they were going. In my imagination, those teenagers were packs of wandering heroes, off on incredible adventures in the waning summer light.

  My brother didn’t share my fascination. If he was up late, it was with a flashlight, reading books under the covers after our parents went to bed. He learned to read early, and by the summer after first grade was already into Percy Jackson. On warm days, he’d sit in the corner of the sofa, making himself as small as possible, and read and read and read. I couldn’t stand it. I needed to be outside, running under the sprinkler, catching fireflies in our backyard. I spent most of the summer sunburned and bug bitten, while Jamie’s eyes got more and more sunken, his face wan.

  On one August Friday, Dad came home early from work. He saw Jamie there, licking his fingers, turning pages. In a booming voice, Dad commanded my brother to put down his book and get himself some fresh air. I had been alone with my games that summer, utterly ignored by the other neighborhood kids. But Jamie’s presence shifted everything. Even if he was pale and bookish, he was still taller, older, more handsome. Most important, a boy. It didn’t take long for some neighbor kid who was in his grade to wander over to where we sat on the front steps and ask if Jamie wanted to come play football with him.

  My brother hesitated, chewing on his lip. During the school year, I’d heard my parents’ whispered concerns already, that Jamie was having trouble connecting.

  “He’s gifted,” his teachers had said, and Mom had repeated this to us, though Dad had given her a warning glance, as though she wasn’t supposed to tell us that. “But his social skills need work.”

  Was this what his teachers had meant? I watched my brother staring at this boy, and something about the way that their gazes were locked made me feel small. Invisible. The other boy was not my brother, but he had a face full of freckles and eyes th
at were a sparkly chestnut brown. His features were pinched and cunning, and he was at home in his body in that way that boys usually are.

  Go with him, I thought. Play. I would, if he wanted me. Go!

  My brother glanced at me as though I’d spoken aloud and had not merely thought those words. “Okay,” he said, and sighed. “But Annie’s going to come, too.”

  The other boy looked at me, his lips tightening into a frown. It was clear already that I would never be one of the swingy ponytail girls who the boys in the neighborhood tolerated as friends. My differences were obvious to them and to me, though I couldn’t say how we all knew this. Still, my brother was wanted. And so the boy conceded, and waved me along, too.

  “Fine, but she can’t play,” he said. “She’s too little. I guess she can keep score.”

  A grin cracked my face. I pounded one fist into my other palm. “Great,” I told him. “I can count real high.”

  The boy sighed, rolling his eyes. Jamie glanced back at me as we crossed the street, uncertainty bubbling under the surface of his gaze.

  Their backyard was spare—the lawn cut short and emerald green whereas ours was always shaggy and dotted with weeds. There was a privacy fence around it, and inside, a trampoline, a tree house, a soccer net. Big-kid accoutrements. Our yard, on the other hand, was mostly cluttered with sun-bleached preschool toys and a kiddie pool full of mosquitoes that Mom always forgot to drain. But there was one other important difference: this yard was full of big kids. This boy’s older brother and his friends were here, and they were nearing the edge of childhood already.

  “Who’s that?” one of the big boys asked. He had a football tucked under his arm like someone out of a soup commercial. My brother hesitated, stubbing his sneaker on the grass. He didn’t speak, so I spoke for both of us.

  “That’s Jamie. I’m Annie.”

  The big boy looked at us, and then at the little brother who had led us here like a pied piper.

  “Are you sure?”

  “We need another player, don’t we?”

  The older boy snorted, nodded. He gestured first to himself, then to his brother next to him. “Fine. I’m Calvin. This is Neal. C’mon, Jamie.”

  Calvin didn’t invite me to play, but I hadn’t expected him to. I climbed up onto the trampoline and dangled my legs off to watch.

  I knew the rules of their game already, or vaguely did, from watching through the window. And I knew that Jamie didn’t. He didn’t care about football at all. He was already lost. But I couldn’t help him here, in this world of boys. I knew somehow, instinctively, that it would only make things worse for him if I told him about the rules. So I watched the big boys kneel over the football, listened to Neal shout something at his brother, watched the ball go sailing into his waiting hands and then watched as Neal pitched the ball toward Jamie.

  The problem was that my brother hadn’t been watching. Jamie had been staring, instead, somewhere off into the middle distance, following a pair of monarch butterflies with his eyes. When he turned and noticed the football careening toward him, he let out a scream and ducked. The ball bounced on the lawn several feet away from him, and my brother just crouched there as the other boys tumbled past him. Even from the trampoline, I could feel the fear rising up off him. These boys were wild animals, growling, snarling, their fingernails sharp as claws and twice as dirty.

  When the play was over, Neal looked at Jamie, who was still crouched on the ground, and he spat on it, somewhere between the two of them. “Crybaby,” he said.

  A few minutes later, my brother and I were walking home together. His steps were trembling, uncertain. He rubbed his pink-rimmed eyes and his snotty nose against the back of his hand.

  “It’s okay,” I told him, putting my arm over his shoulders. “You’ll do better next time.”

  My brother didn’t answer. His body was rigid beside mine. He only let out a tiny, wordless nod.

  Jamie’s sensitivity, and his brilliance—in those early days they were two sides of the same coin, in much the same way that Jamie and I were two sides of a bigger, different coin. At temple, he would sing the words of the prayers along with Mom, right out of the prayer book. He sang in Hebrew, his voice clear and angelic. But then on Purim, he’d throw his hands over his ears every time Haman’s name was mentioned, wincing at the cacophony of groggers and shouts. Eventually, he would start crying, and Mom would take him out to the hall where she’d dance with him, or slip him a book from her purse and let him read to her aloud. Leaving me and Dad alone with strangers to hear the rest of the whole megillah.

  Back then, Mom and Dad didn’t fight much. But on the ride home from synagogue, when they thought we were asleep, I heard them talk in low voices. As always, they talked about Jamie. Never about anything else.

  “You coddle him too much,” Dad said.

  Mom sighed. “He’s sensitive. We don’t want to snuff that out of him, do we? The world will do it soon enough.”

  Dad let out a grunt, his eyes searching the dark Woodstock roads as our car wound down the mountain. “You’re the one who insisted we join the synagogue,” he muttered. “It’s so expensive. And you don’t even stay for the services.”

  Mom didn’t answer. She only switched on the radio and scanned through the stations without settling on anything.

  When we got home, they carried us inside to our respective rooms, Jamie tucked inside Mom’s arms, me in my father’s. When he set me down in my bed, I kicked off the plastic heels that were supposed to make me look beautiful, like Esther, but had just made my feet hurt.

  “You’re awake,” he said.

  I nodded, grabbing the blanket and pulling it up so that it covered my whole body. “Is there something wrong with Jamie?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Your brother is different,” he said. He didn’t have to tell me that. I knew. I was different, too. “But different isn’t wrong. Just—we have to make sure that we’re there for him, to help him when he needs us. Okay, Annie?”

  I nodded, settling lower under the blankets. I could help Jamie. It’s all I ever wanted. To help him. Even then, I could feel him somewhere, past the edge of my awareness. Like a dream I hadn’t quite forgotten upon waking. Pleasant and warm and loved. Precious. And he needed me, which meant I was precious, too.

  “Okay, Daddy,” I said.

  My father didn’t kiss me, but I saw the light of his smile in the darkness as he flicked off my bedroom light.

  3

  IT WAS IJAH WHO FOUND the boy, a sopping bundle between two cairns, waterlogged and just waking to life. When Ijah offered his hand, the boy refused to take it. He wouldn’t touch anyone, not with those toughened, thick fingers. When Ijah led him to the sacred pool, the boy simply stripped down naked, crouched low, and poured the water over himself.

  “What’s your name?” Ijah asked, expecting the triumphant declaration that usually accompanied a soak in the pool.

  The boy simply squinted and pulled himself from the water. “What’s a name?” he asked.

  So Jamie was different from the other kids we knew. I was, too, of course, but it mattered less for me. I didn’t mind being strange, and no one was really paying any attention to me, anyway. But everyone had their eyes on Jamie. Mom thought he might someday become a great artist—a poet, or maybe a painter, even though his drawings were terrible and the watercolors he did at school, even worse. She wanted to sign him up for ballet classes, or maybe take him to lectures at the local Buddhist temple. She wanted to teach him how to knit, just like her grandma Pearl had taught her.

  But Dad wanted him to play soccer on Saturday mornings. Dad wanted to sign him up for Cub Scouts. Dad had learned certain things in boyhood, and he wanted my brother to learn them, too.

  “It’s why we moved here,” we heard Dad remind our mother. “You wanted to raise free-range children. You wanted them to have a chance to play.”

  In the end, my father won. He knew what it was to be a man, after all. There was no ba
llet. My brother’s knitting was abandoned between the sofa cushions. And though sometimes I suspected that my brother wanted to go to the Buddhist temple with my mother, before long he’d come to spend his weekend afternoons throwing and catching a ball in the backyard with Dad instead.

  “I’ll do it,” I told him one day, watching while my brother carefully tied his shoelaces into bows. “I already know how to catch. Maybe Dad will show me how to throw a fastball.”

  My brother looked at me with eyes that were flat, clear mirrors of my own. He didn’t bother sighing. He didn’t need to. We both knew that Dad had no interest in teaching me anything.

  “It’s okay, Annie,” he told me, though his voice sounded studied when he spoke—careful, like he didn’t want to show how he really felt. “Dad wants me to go out for Little League when I’m older. It’s something I need to learn.”

  I waited for them in the gray solemnity of my bedroom while I drew pictures of fairies and knights and a dragon who wrapped her long tail around the naked body of a girl. I colored in the girl’s bruisey skin with the pencils Mom had bought for Jamie and Jamie had given to me. The window was open, and I could hear the sound of the baseball hitting Dad’s old mitt. Thwack, thwack, over and over again, for what felt like hours.

  And then a sound that was different from the others, sharper and more percussive. I saw it in my mind’s eye: a flash of red, then white, like an explosion on TV. I pressed the tip of my pencil too hard into the paper, and it broke, but I hardly noticed. Instead, I was on my feet instantly, rushing down the stairs and outside.

  Mom was already there—heavily pregnant by then with what would be our youngest sibling. She was taking up too much space in the sliding door, letting out an anguished cry. Outside was Dad, kneeling in front of Jamie, whose face was an explosion of blood. Jamie wasn’t crying, though. Jamie was only nodding calmly, listening to our father.