I was born on the night of summer solstice, when the sun had just slipped beneath the horizon and fireflies were beginning to spark in the fields. Mom doesn’t recall much about that night—she claims she was in too much pain to remember anything past the blinding agony of childbirth—but she does remember the shocking purple of the night sky and the twinkle of lights that shimmered over the field outside the second-story window of her hospital room. Every other detail is lost to a fast and unmedicated delivery. I’ve never asked Mom if her pain was physical or emotional. I don’t dare. I’m afraid of her answer.
From what I do know of the story, Rebecca Connor had arrived in Jericho, Iowa, just six months before, following the promise of a job at the door factory. She’d circled the ad in a newspaper in Rapid City and driven into Jericho the very next day with nothing but her car and the contents of the backseat: some clothes and a pair of hiking boots, a shoebox filled with photos, the Braga, and two sleeping bags that zipped together but were now bundled apart. She had just under three hundred dollars in cash, and nowhere else to go. Rebecca’s family was from another small town in eastern Iowa, but after a whirlwind romance lured her west, she returned to the heartland penniless, alone, and thirteen weeks pregnant. She couldn’t bring herself to go home. It’s probably for the best—neither I nor Jonathan have ever met our maternal grandparents.
My mother met Lawrence Baker a week after she arrived in Jericho, at the counter in Cunningham’s. She’d gotten the job on the production line at the door factory, and was renting a furnished one-bedroom apartment above the cafe. It was dark and smelled of grease, but Patricia—the owner of both the cafe and the apartment—kept her mug full of hot coffee in the mornings and refused to charge her for it. Law found Rebecca nursing a cup at the farthest end of the long cafe counter early one Saturday morning. He watched her from his booth for the better part of an hour, and when he worked up the courage to finally slip onto the sticky green stool beside her, she rewarded his moxie by letting him buy her a caramel pecan roll for breakfast.
To hear Mom tell it, their courtship was quick and practical, nothing like the passionate affair that caused her to abandon her life and drive across the country for love. Of course, that’s my spin on it, not hers. But I have to be right. When I was twelve years old and desperate for every scrap of information I could glean about my father—my real father—I found a small, cream-colored envelope hidden inside an empty cello case in my mother’s music room. In my desperation to leave no stone unturned, I tipped it forward and realized it was hollow. Or, almost. The envelope was inside, tucked into the very bottom.
When I lifted the flap, there wasn’t much to see. A pressed flower that turned to dust in my fingers was lying on top of a small sheaf of letters. I unfolded the first one and was surprised to find it written in a dignified, upright cursive. I read the first few lines, but even as a preteen I knew I was trespassing in an unforgivable way. Still, I turned the sheet over to find a signature. A name. They were all signed the same: Love, me.
Me. I wanted to take my mother by the shoulders and shake her. Who was me? I was so desperate for answers, I felt like my heart had been scooped out of my chest. But as I was replacing the envelope, something slid and tapped against the side. When I looked again, I found a necklace coiled in the corner. It was a tangled mess, the chain knotted in so many places I wondered if it could ever be undone. But the charms hung free, and it only took me a second to realize what they were. Juniper berries.
I didn’t think twice: I grabbed it. Obviously, it was mine.
The knots took me hours to unravel, and I had to work with straight pins that pricked my fingers and left tiny dots of blood on my skin. But the next morning I walked downstairs with the necklace hanging bold against my T-shirt. When my mother saw it, she looked as if she had been punched. Her eyes went huge and hurt, and then she blinked and the expression was gone as quickly as it had come. She gave me a soft smile and never said another word about the necklace. But the next day when I looked for the envelope of letters, it was gone.
That was passion. That was the kind of romance that stories were written about, that launched a thousand ships. I knew the look in my mother’s eyes; even though I couldn’t fully understand it and had never experienced it myself, it strummed something deep and essential inside me. Something uniquely and painfully human. It was longing, an ache that was so real I could feel it exhale in the room between us. And it was the heartbreaking certainty that the thing she wanted most she could never, ever have. I witnessed the moment that she remembered—and lost him all over again.
My mother has never looked at Lawrence Baker that way.
And yet, for the entire month after they first met, Law showed up at Cunningham’s on Saturday morning and bought Rebecca a caramel pecan roll. On the fourth week, he dared to reach out his hand and tuck a strand of dark hair behind her ear. She let him. She also let him call her Reb, take her out on a few real dates, and a couple of months later propose with his grandmother’s wedding ring, a simple gold band that had been etched by years of wear and hard work. She still wears that plain ring.
I guess it’s a different kind of love.
Law knew Reb was pregnant with another man’s baby. And to absolutely no one’s great surprise, he took her anyway. Who else would marry Lawrence Baker? There’s no male equivalent—“bachelor” didn’t quite do justice to his situation—but he was clearly an old maid, gruff and past his prime and not husband material. Of course, Mom has never used those words with me. She paints the picture much differently, insisting that they needed each other, that they were an unexpectedly perfect fit. But it’s not hard to read between the lines. They’ve always been a mismatch: Reb with her music and her artist’s soul, her slender wrists and hair black as the river at night; Law with his shock of close-cropped, steel-wool curls, acne-scarred skin, hands as big as a bear’s paws. They’re night and day, dark and light, and though they seem to work in their own surprising way, it’s always a bit disconcerting to see. They’re a curious pair and always have been.
A couple months after I was born, my mom was pregnant again.
This time, a boy. Jonathan was born on May 8, exactly six weeks and two days before my first birthday. Law had made a few bad investments (Mom would never say what, just that things were tight), so after Jonathan moved out of the bassinet, he moved into my crib. And I guess the rest is history.
Why we go camping with our friends to commemorate the window of time that we’re virtual twins is a bit more murky, but this is our third (and probably final) year, and I’m not about to question tradition. Still, something about this trip hums in warning, like the charge in the air around an electric fence. I can’t shake the feeling I’m in for a shock.
“I have the tent, the air mattress, and the cooler,” Ashley tells me over french fries from the drive-in on the edge of town. We’re sitting cross-legged on the lawn in front of the community center because Ashley’s walked over to keep me company during my lunch break. I suspect she needs a little adult interaction, and as payment for intelligent conversation, she’s brought a large order of Davey’s crinkle fries and a chocolate shake to share. She’s also brought the twins, and they’re side by side in a double stroller, babbling to each other and gumming french fries to mush. Bella’s fry squishes through her overzealous chokehold and hits the ground in pieces. I hand her another before she starts to wail.
“Sounds good,” I say, but I’m distracted, and Ashley knows it.
“What sounds good?”
“What you said.”
“Mmhmm. And what are you bringing?”
I lift one shoulder, hoping she’ll fill in the blanks like she always does.
But Ashley just gives me a disgusted look. “You’re half gone, aren’t you?”
I’m not sure if she’s talking about college, or the fact that my lunch break is almost up. A couple of my arts and crafts campers have already filtered past where we’re sitting in the shade of a giant cottonwood. I wave and smile as another one walks by, then force myself to give Ashley my full attention and say, “Just a little distracted, I guess.”