Last to Know: A Novel(9)

She thought of him now. Was he downstairs, alone in the kitchen, drinking? She could stand it no longer, she would have to find him and ask what was going on, why they were like this.

But suddenly the door was flung open and there Wally was, still fully clothed in jeans and sweater, staring at her as though she were a ghost. Rose stared back, astonished.

Then without warning the whole room turned red, the glass in the windows crackled like tissue paper crushed in the hand, and the following explosion knocked Wally off his feet and Rose out of her bed.





6


Evening Lake, 3 A.M.,

Madison & Frazer Osborne

Madison and Frazer Osborne were not identical twins, something for which every time they looked in the mirror, they thanked God. “At least I got the blond hair,” Madison would say, smugly. And, as Frazer would tell her, she was a bit too smug for her own good, which Madison said sounded like a threat, and inevitably that led to a row.

“Getting on” was what you were supposed to do as a family, their mother informed them, exasperated with their continual bickering.

Rose had her own set of commandments, one of which was “thou shalt not hit each other.” Another was “thou shalt not curse at each other” (the word “f*ck” was definitely out). The third was “thou must remember thou is—” Here Rose had become a little confused with the “thou’s” and the girls giggled. “You are sisters,” Rose had finished firmly. “Sisters don’t fight, they stick up for each other, regardless of who got the blond hair.”

“So why am I the one with the horrible ginger?” Frazer had demanded.

They were standing on the deck at the lake house some weeks ago when this happened. It was evening and the sun was a molten red ball sinking rapidly into the rippled lake, turning Frazer’s orange hair into a true fiery red and her normally blue eyes into spitting red fireballs. Rose told her to ask her father. Wally’s ancestors were Irish redheads. Frazer decided it was all her dad’s fault anyway, but Rose calmed her down, told her her hair was beautiful and that one day she would be really glad she had it. It was what made Frazer different, Rose said firmly.

It was also what made it easy for Rose to distinguish who was who in their darkened bedroom at night, when she stole in to check on her sleeping girls: one pale head on the left pillow, one true red head—nothing carroty about it—on the right.

Plus always on Madison’s bed, on her chest, practically tucked under her chin, was her black rescue cat, Baby Noir. Sleek, and so fat Rose wondered how on earth Madison could stand the weight, though sometimes later when Rose peeked in again, she’d spot Baby Noir at the foot of the bed, yellow eyes glowing menacingly at her in the dark. A one-person cat, Baby Noir’s devotion to Madison was total. Nobody else could so much as get near him and if they tried were rewarded with a swift swipe of a black paw.

Oddly, the cat got along fine with Frazer’s dog, Peggy the Pug, who took up her own small slice of Frazer’s bed: compact, beige-furred and with squashed nose, and always snoring loudly. Rose didn’t know how the girls could stand it but they didn’t even seem aware of it.

Not only was Madison blond, she was also taller than Frazer, a fact of life Frazer also blamed on Rose. “All I did was give birth to you,” Rose countered her accusations calmly. At that time the girls were seven. She’d added, “Anyhow, you’ll grow.” In fact Frazer ended up a mere five-five while Madison was a modelly five-eight.

All their lives, the twins shared a room, complaining about who was hogging the bathroom (their own private attached bathroom so Rose didn’t know what they were grumbling about anyway), so when they were at the lake where each could have had their own room and instead opted to share, Rose was astonished. The bond between twins was there for life. Nothing would ever separate them.

They vowed this to each other, lying on their beds, talking into the middle of the night about anything and everything: school, the prospect of college, what choice to make and if they were both accepted would they go together, or should they finally be separated. And of course, they talked about boys. “Men,” they called them.

With Peggy the Pug snoring at Frazer’s feet and Baby Noir with one yellow eye open keeping an eye on his territory, nightly the two girls hashed out the teenage problems of their lives. Madison would wrap her hair sideways round her head, securing it with a plastic clip that dug into her scalp but which enabled her long blond hair to fall smooth as satin every morning. Frazer’s hair tumbled, like her mother’s, in a chaos of curls around her shoulders. No matter how she tried to tame it, it was what it was. “The red riot,” she called it, and it was true. One day she planned to sneak out and have it cut off, without telling Rose of course because she knew her mom would cry.

Sixteen, the girls decided, was a tough age, neither here nor there, considered by parents still to be a child, by boys to be fair game, and by themselves to be terrified of new feelings and emotions.

“And responsibilities,” Madison whispered to Frazer, still awake though it was almost three o’clock. They were both wearing old T-shirts, soft from many washings, and boys’ boxers which made them feel kind of one up on “them.” “Them” being “men.” Scary as hell and just as exciting, and thankfully, there was a pretty fair assortment of them out here at the lake, some of whom they had grown up with, played with as children, learned to swim with at the long icy pool under the tutelage of April Morecombe. A champion from the grand old age of the sixties and still going strong, with shoulders like a pro wrestler and a heavyweight at that, no child could fear drowning with April standing in back of her, urging her to put her face under the water and just blow a bubble, then kick, girl, for God’s sake kick, don’t you know how? A groan would follow this instruction, but everybody learned to swim and not only that, learned to swim really well. They lived on a lake, on a vast stretch of water, and safe swimmers were what April needed to turn out, and every member of the Osborne family had benefited from her tuition. Even Rose, who had been timid though graceful in the water, became stronger and easier and unafraid of being submerged.