They announce at a dinner party.
The Mother and Father To-Be accept rounds of toasts following a belated, self-conscious applause.
Solid slaps on the shoulder for him. Petite hugs for her.
In the conversations that follow, the couple finds ways to interject how long the pregnancy has been planned, invoking the word “blessed” repeatedly.
Down the formal table, amid held cigarettes and shrimp cocktails, doubt lurks in the corner of compulsory smiles.
Six months later and the twins arrive. A boy, a girl. In that order.
Four years more, and life changes again.
"But they seem so normal," Father mumbles. "So healthy."
The doctor holds his clipboard up like a shield. Mother hides her shock behind a silk scarf held over her mouth. "Are you sure?"
Is disease the right word? Is deficiency? Standing in the disinfected white of a doctor's office, does it matter?
A timeline is given. Condolences are given.
Someone defines the word “congenital” for them as a nurse hands over a pamphlet about grieving and loss. Then another about healthy eating habits for children.
At night, Mother asks herself why nature would create something only meant to die. She stares out pane-less windows into sightless blacks, hugging herself with the puzzled despondence of a victim. She fails to see the absurdity of her question.
It might seem an arbitrary thing—a lighthouse. But then what isn’t?
Had you seen them, had you happened to glance at the twins in passing, you would’ve thought little; for they tinkered through each minute with an engrossed, capricious focus, as children do. Yet had you paused, had you by chance obliged a subconscious whisper to look closer, you might’ve reconsidered; for their eyes windowed a placidity found only among our wisest. As if born with the knowledge of the Ancients.
As it was, neither their zeal nor their wisdom came from life’s nascence, but its brevity. For this reason, we might call them youth but not young. For one is a matter of age, and the other of mind.
Yes, they were small moths to life's massive flame, and more than most, they felt the heat of that flame. It warmed their every sense, their every decision.
So you see, the lighthouse was inevitable.
The house at the cape has never been intended as more than a seasonal escape.
But with the surprise the twins bring, it’s decided best to raise them far from the city and its rousing stir. The ocean air will be good for their disposition, it’s said. A calm life will suit everyone well.
So it’s said.
The car pulls up the singular road that winds blind through hillsides of evergreens. Waves break white down granite pebble beach. In the backseat, the children—old enough to speak now but rarely doing so—stare out the window at conifers rolling in sea wind.
So a family’s summer retreat turns to full-time dwelling. And the final remnant of a high society life before children vanishes.
They never speak to the twins of their uniqueness, of their difference. They never have to.
Amid the open sea, the lighthouse pulses from a single, rocky island.
They are not to go near the water. They are not to stray from sight or through wood. They are to keep their feet dry and noses warm. Mother and Father dictate from behind a dais of their own guilt, very aware of the irony of preserving that which cannot be preserved.
Decrees are how they love. Rules, how they hug.
And yet, far from the house, the girl clambers down scallop-skirted embankments to wade through the shallows of a seaside estuary.
Around her waist, freshwater pulls through salt and weed, and what she searches for is not danger or defiance but spectacular solitude—for that moment-unobserved in which she might speak aloud and unheard. Alone and in love with words, she gushes in the senseless yet purposeful manner that a dreamer dreams: the mind simultaneously creating as it observes.
“. . . sunny silly sprigs wink wild with maybe wind-love so feathers back bug-walk when never ever can big light under and float to tip butter-blossom like . . .”
Much like dreaming, her words only occasionally strike upon meaning. And much like dreaming, the process is direly needed. At water’s edge, she stands upright, watches a piece of cork float out to sea. Gulls perch on driftwood. Crabs shuffle. She has a profound distaste for adverbs.
Just down the shore—equally far from home and equally in trouble—the boy hunches over shallow tidepools etched upon bedrock, his back to the wind, his bare toes lost to wave rush. The tide is leaning towards the moon now, and everywhere, sea urchins freckle rocks the color of bruises, and snails creep their imperceptible creep.
In an hour this will all be underwater, to be reshaped and reborn. Each widowed pool a momentary window. Each a little world so analogous to our own.
The boy’s eyes hold the simplest thing for too long. He assumes adults can see what he sees.
Perhaps it was a result of being raised in such an emotionally sterile environment. Maybe it was a reaction to all that isolation. Maybe it was their mother’s poorly hidden indifference—the most insidious of all catalysts, the most damning of life's caveats.
Maybe it was the rules.
There are others, of course, who have suggested the children were looking for answers, like they were searching for themselves. But that’s nonsense. The twins had no need for self-discovery. Their circumstance dictated an innate knowledge most of us will never know—not with our attachment to the past, not with our fixation on an inevitable future.
Both lacked reverie. Both lacked foresight. Leaving only a breathing present.
Many speculate it was the boy who first proposed the lighthouse.
There is a cat.
Once fed and forever faithful.
He is a loved, silly thing that refuses to be named.
And rightfully so.
He greets through second-story windows; he escorts down the long winding drive, and if the cat dictates a need to stalk through a secret forest or snoop to a forbidden shore, the children feel little choice but to oblige him. He is both unquestioned devotion and life’s secret guide.
He’s also their only source of physical affection.
Together, the three prowl just shy of the beach, hidden among the tall wind-stir of grass, eyeing the touchdown of swarmed seagulls. The cat’s paws kneading the sand in anticipation. The boy inhaling the sound of wing-swoosh. The girl mouthing words only she can hear.
They do this often. It is the only time the cat doesn’t want to be touched.
And rightfully so.
Mother loiters on the porch, behind its tall columns, under its majestic assertion of security and accomplishment, gazing at the world as a parakeet from its cage. Mother . . . with her greeting smile and fainting spells. She grips the thin balustrade, looks down upon trees and rock and ocean, unable to see the view for its familiarity. She hugs herself against wind. She fixates on a disease that isn’t hers, yet she's given.
Just inside, Father readjusts in his reading chair. He sips coffee, dreads the point in the day when it is too late to sip coffee. Father . . . with his raised chin and deep breaths, as if in constant threat of drowning. A man whose strongest claim is to have remembered every dream he's ever had. Every nightmare, too.
His bifocal gaze lifts, peers over lens and rim through wall-spanning windows to the married split of sea and sky and his wife imposed between. He sips coffee, watches her smooth her hair, returns to his book, ever-patient, awaiting that prophesized point when real life will begin again.
It’ll be hours before either realizes the twins are missing.
Evergreens drip dew on passing skin, clothes, and fur—each needle an owned then donated droplet upon its tip. Among the ancient forest, the boy obsesses over not stepping on capped mushrooms. The girl lets her words flow, hypnotic if not horrifying. The cat leads or follows, depending on how you look at it.
Adults use the word identical: the same but not. But how could they be made of the same substance and be so different? Like peanuts and peanut butter.
Every day starts and ends at each other's side. By dusk, they’ll be homebound though never bound by home.
Those who still visit the house at the cape, who have bore witness to what their mother has become—they have a theory.
If youth is defined as the heart’s desire to look forward—as a congenital bias to yearn for coming days—then age must be defined as a tendency toward nostalgia. The twins must’ve watched their mother cross that fixed place in time: a turning of the inner eye, the soul's sudden change of tense.
Where longings for what-will-be collapse to memories of what-once-was. Where photo albums become soul food. Where rehashed stories become lifeblood. There are those who believe this was the sole cause of what happened. They see her now and simply deduce the effect it would’ve had on the children.
But there’s never just one cause for such things.
It’s never best to simplify that which is not simple.
A morning table of prepared breakfast foods, arranged and superfluous, set then smiled upon.
More a show of means than a meal. More a maternal attempt to feel purpose than a desire to provide. The smile sustains an unnatural stillness.
The boy relishes a strawberry preserve with his eyes closed. The girl eats because she must, food a necessity but also a waste of time.
Father’s newspaper occupies the space eye contact might.
Mother’s hummed ditty decrees the tender family mood she imagines to be real.
Along a prohibited shore, coasting waves wrap down the remnants of a lost pier.
Symmetric, parallel. Matching and pointing. Like a guide to nowhere.
The boy balances on a pylon while her sundress beckons Atlantic breeze and the cat prances and pounces!
Are moments—like jewels—only valuable when there are fewer? Is precious not the right word? Do they all not all sparkle just the same?
Down the continent, the ocean counts on the shore in perfect meter. The lighthouse flashes. The patient tick of a heard clock.
A Saturday evening and the house bubbles in chatter and cocktails. Silverware clinks. Women touch their necks and bend slightly forward with each measured laugh.
One, final, clumsy attempt to regain a lifestyle lost. Almost seven years, now.
Beneath furs, beneath large, white coats, Mother smiles so no one can see, but everyone can see. By the fireplace, Father presents himself as a pool of instructional quips: axiomatic tidbits designed to impose pseudo-wisdom through sloppy metaphor. Men nod. When thrown or nervous, he spouts the wrong one. Men nod.
You poor things . . . Oh, you poor, poor things . . . How terribly brave you must be . . .
These and similar fall from the lips of houseguests with awkward smiles and unconfident hands. But neither the boy nor the girl has any patience for sympathy. For patience is a virtue only by virtue of time, and sympathy a virtue only by virtue of understanding. And how could any of them possibly understand? These are the chronically lost. Condemned to lives of warm tea and warm rooms and cultural constructs created by the mind to ignore what it must.
Whispers of how much time remains before the children’s bodies quit. Whispers of how much Mother has aged.
A congressman’s son proposes a toast. Champagne spills on an irreplaceable rug from an irreplicable century. Some will leave the house in an awkward contemplation of the twins’ fate, while mentally maneuvering around the finality of their own. The children meet each new comment with the serene eyes of the listener who knows more than the speaker.
Through the crowd, they smile at each other without smiling.
Two birthday cakes: identical.
A combined fourteen candles atop a picnic table of late autumn. Father bites his nails in quiet anxiety. Mother sips tea and speaks of the joys of wrapped gifts. The children stay because they’re told to stay. To light a candle is to wait for it to expire.
All those invitations sent. A birthday party unattended.
The next day, the car backs from the drive, followed by a feline cry and the death of an only friend.
Father stands beside the rear tire, mumbling some apology. Mother sighs good riddance to dead mice on doorsteps and hair on coats. The children have no need for graves, any more than they have a need for birthday parties, ceremony a tool of the time-rich.
But the girl does cry. And the boy does sit with crossed legs and pensive reverence over its furry little body. Both wait for their parents to leave. Both know better than to let Mother see.
The girl’s touch on the boy’s shoulder. His hand placed atop hers.
Such is life. Such are candles. The decision is made without so much as a word.
All Father will find is a dropped glove on a footpath somewhere between the water and the house. Mother will scream and scream their names, holding windblown clothes to her chest, squinting into the hazed distance from the porch step she refuses to leave.
Clouds, like drapes, lighten then sift the horizon. Wind tightens; waves sharpen. Against the pier, the dinghy knocks and knocks, as if to protest its fitness for such a precarious endeavor. As if to ask the question: what might nature provide when nurture doesn’t?
Paused on the dock, looking upon gray distance, the girl waits for the swell of words that should come, but language founders on such beautiful seas. By her side, the boy feels the air on his skin, its coldness in his open mouth, the lighthouse, its beacon, its swollen reach.