Under Shifting Glass (11 page)

“I'm sorry I can't come home,” says Mom. “Not yet, anyway.”

“It's okay. I'm fine. How are the babies?”

She lets out a little sigh. “We had some results today. Some of the tests came back.”

“Yes?”

“They share a liver, Jess. Separate hearts, but only one liver.” She pauses. “Do you know what that means?”

“Yes,” I say. Because Si has told me. The more organs the twins share, the more difficult any separation is. “Why can't they stay together?” I burst out then. “Why can't they?”

“I don't know,” Mom says. “I don't know anything anymore.”

And then, very softly, she begins to cry.

Si has barely been home since I informed him he was not my parent, and when he does finally appear, he goes straight into the garage and gets out Roger the Wreck's dolly.

“I have to fix the timing chain,” he announces.

It's the timing chain that drives the camshaft that, in turn, opens the valves that let the fuel mixture in and the exhaust out. I know this because, for nearly a year, Si's been talking about the function and importance of a timing chain and how this particular one could break at any time on account of The Rattle.

“Hear that rattle, Jess?”

Actually, no. Mainly because this boneshaker of a car makes so many bangs and clatters and rattles that distinguishing The Rattle from any number of other rattles is beyond me.

“It's a very distinctive sound,” says Si. “Like a bike chain slopping.”

And the faster the car goes, the louder the rattle.

Apparently.

Anyway, here we are on Good Friday, and Si is all cover-alled up with his tools laid out beside him.

“I have to fix it today,” says Si.

For a whole year he hasn't fixed it.

Why now?

And then I have a totally nonscientific, nonrational thought about the timing chain. Maybe that's why it's called a timing chain, because the timing is crucial. Si has to fix the chain today, otherwise . . . otherwise . . .

Otherwise what?

The monsters will get us.

Have you ever played the Sidewalk Crack Game? Zoe and I used to play it all the time.
If we step on a single crack in the sidewalk on the way to the park, the monsters will get us
. At five, Zoe and I knew every crack between the culde-sac and the swings. We never stepped on a single one, and that's how we kept safe.

I decide the broken timing chain is a crack. If we can mend it today, Si and I, then the monsters won't come. They won't get me, and more importantly, they won't get the twins.

“Do you need some help?” I ask Si.

He stands quite still then and looks me straight in the eye and I hold his gaze. Si could win an Olympic medal for talking, but he doesn't talk now. Which makes me want to say I'm sorry about the parent thing, but I don't know how to, so I just go to the back of the garage and find a pair of blue coveralls. As I roll up the sleeves and the legs, I remember how this man, who is not my father, used to lift me onto his shoulders at the end of a walk too long for my toddler legs. I remember how he was never impatient with me when, with Mom already waiting in the car, I cried for him to take me back into the house so I could check on Spike. And—speaking of monsters—I remember how he would make sure to close the door of my closet at night because he knew I feared the things that lurked there in the dark. I return to Si looking like the Michelin Man. I still don't say anything to him, but he speaks to me.

“Thank you, Jess,” he says. “Thank you very much. I could really use some help today.”

And he smiles one of those smiles like incense.

“First up, the radiator,” says Si.

He begins by loosening the radiator hoses, talking as he goes, explaining what he's doing, and I'd forgotten this about
his maintenance work, how very instructive it is, as though he's passing on wisdom that will, one day, allow me to construct an entire engine from scrap metal and memory alone.

I help him lift out the radiator.

“Now for the crank pulley bolts,” he says. “Pass me the wrench.”

And I do. Like some junior doctor in an operating room.

Which, of course, makes me think about the twins. Though, in fact, I'm never not thinking about the twins.

“Mom told me,” I say, “what the tests said. That they share a liver.”

“Yes,” says Si. “Not great news.”

“So what do the doctors say now?” I ask. “About the operation?”

“Depends which one you ask,” says Si, as he puts metal to metal and turns. “At the last count there were about twenty-two of them.”

“Twenty-two!”

“Four surgeons, four anesthesiologists . . . Can you pass me that hammer?” I pass him the little copper mallet and he begins a soft tap-tap-tapping. “Remember, always go gently on a crank pulley,” he says, tap-tap-tapping. “Although they won't all be in the operating room at once. They have to work in shifts. Ah, here we go.” The crank
pulley comes out. “Now for the timing chain cover. Ratchet, please, and socket.”

There are about twenty small tubular attachments in the socket tray. “What size?” I ask.

“Nine-sixteenths should do it, I reckon.”

I pass him the right socket and he screws it onto the ratchet head.

“But when are they going to do it?” I ask. “The operation?”

“Not for a few months still,” says Si. His arm is deep inside the car engine. “It's safer for the babies if they can grow a bit first. Hmm. I think I'm going to have to go at this from underneath.”

I get out the jack for him and wheel it under a jack point.

“Haven't forgotten everything, then, have you?” says Si. And he's pleased with me, and right now I like him being pleased with me.

He cranks the car up and then goes to fetch the dolly.

And with the dolly come the twins, of course, one underneath the car and one hopping about for a wrench.

“And what,” I say, “what are their . . .” Only I can't finish the sentence.

“Chances?” says Si. “Good. Basically good, I think. But no one's really prepared to stick their neck out. There are so many different factors to be taken into consideration.”

He slips himself under the car and I go with him, elbowing my way along the oily cardboard so I'm lying right beside him. Almost as close, I think, as Clem is to Richie. But not quite.

“If it was just their livers that were joined, that would be one thing. But it's also the lower sternum and the ribs and some part of the abdominal cavity and . . .” He pauses to fit the socket head over the lowest bolt.

“But the heart, they don't share a heart,” I say. I hadn't realized I'd been hanging on to this fact. “That's the main thing, isn't it?”

“Well, apparently there may be a small joining of the pericardium, after all.” He begins to turn the wrench. “That's the covering of the heart. And Clem's VSD doesn't help, and . . .” He spins the ratchet. “Ow! Ow! Jeez!” A stream of curses follows.

Instead of catching the bolt, he's caught his knuckles.

He kicks himself out from under the car, still cursing, and I scuttle out behind him.

His knuckles are bleeding and I don't like the blood, not because my stepfather is hurting, but because the blood came when he was speaking about Clem and that brings the monsters closer. I mean, why did it have to be Clem, the weaker twin, the one who
dips
—why did it
have to be Clem's name all spilled and spattered with blood?

“Half-inch,” says Si, sucking at his fist. “Should have used a half-inch, not a nine-sixteenth. Idiot.”

I need to do something to help. “Want me to get you a Band-Aid?”

“Yes—over there.” He nods at a cabinet at the other end of the garage, beneath the Morris Authorized Dealer sign and a bunch of red onions. “Top drawer, I think.”

I find an old box with a random selection of differentsized Band-Aids and help him patch himself up. Mom would have made him wash his hands first.

“First rule of mechanics—check your socket size. Right. Let's try again.”

I hand him a half-inch socket and we resume positions underneath the car. This time the bolts come away easily.

He removes the timing chain cover and then slides out again.

“We'll do the timing marks from up top,” he says. “They need to be lined up and the crank has to be at TDC,” he says. “Do you remember TDC?”

“Top Dead Center,” I say.

“That's my girl!” he says.

His girl.

He works in silence for a while, but his mind, not unlike mine, remains with the twins, because then he says, “There'll be a rehearsal operation first.”

“What?”

“A rehearsal. When they go through everything. Who's going to do what on the day. So, unlike us, they don't end up with the wrong-sized socket.”

“But what if they do end up with something wrong?”

He pauses. “They won't. That's exactly the point of the rehearsal.” He smiles, but this time it's a little tight. “Come on, now—chain tensioner.”

He fiddles with something I can't see and the timing chain comes free. It looks like nothing much; it looks like a slightly bigger version of a bicycle chain. Yet it can rattle and break and make the engine fail. The car remains all mixed up with Clem.

“Now all we have to do,” Si says, holding the new chain, “is fit this little beauty and redo everything in reverse order.”

But it doesn't happen quite that way, because when he's fitted the new chain and checked the timing marks again and refitted the tensioner, he has to turn the crankshaft two revolutions, and when he does that one of the chain teeth jumps and the timing marks are out of alignment.

“Typical!” he says. He looks at his watch. “Maybe we should break,” he says. “Get some lunch.”

“No,” I say, “we have to finish it. Get the job done. Now.”

“Since when did you become chief mechanic?” he says, but he's smiling as he starts all over again.

I wonder then what will happen with the babies if something goes wrong, because an operation is not like a car, and the doctors won't be able to just start it all over again, will they?

Eventually Si gets the cover back on and checks and seals the new gasket so it doesn't leak oil. Then he reassembles the radiator. It's late, late into the afternoon now.

“Now for the moment of truth,” Si says, and he starts the engine.

The car coughs and spits and rattles and then roars to life.

“Fantastic,” he says. “Listen.”

I listen.

“Not a peep,” he says, face beaming.

So we won this one, I think, despite the blood on Clem. We've kept the monsters at bay.

Si turns the engine off, gets out, and pats the car's hood. “My perfect, perfect little moggie.”

I think about perfect.

I think about this Morris Traveller 1000, Si's little moggie, which still rattles and bangs and splutters, but is—according to its loving owner—perfect.

I think about the flask, which is slightly lopsided, the glass of one of its shoulders slightly thicker than the other. I actually go upstairs and hold it in my hand. The little seed fish (which aren't swimming today) are actually blemishes, bubbles in the glass that shouldn't really be there, mistakes in the glassmaking process. These imperfections are also the beautiful part of the flask. They are what shimmer and shine as the flask breathes, lives.

Then I think about my brothers lying together in their cot. They are not perfect; they are not even
normal
, according to Paddy.

They're not any old twins. They're Siamese
.

In the old days, before medicine could make people perfect, conjoined twins stayed the way they were born. Like Chang and Eng. Si showed me pictures of them online. Born in Thailand (or Siam, as it was then) in 1811, Chang and Eng were joined down the chest in just the same way as Richie and Clem. They began life in the circus, just like Paddy said, being exhibited as “curiosities” all over the world. But soon they left, bought a plantation, ran their own businesses, got married to sisters, and had twenty-one children between them. They were happy and lived until they were seventy-two.

No one tried to separate Chang and Eng. They were allowed to stay together.

Then I wonder—what's more perfect? Two little boys separated, or two little boys joined? And I try to imagine a world where everyone is born conjoined and only once every thousand, thousand births, do separate human beings arrive. Then I watch conjoined people bending over the separate cots and gasping. And, all at once, a team of twenty-two doctors (in eleven pairs of two) arrives
to sew those little babies together again, so nobody will ever know they were born apart. And when the doctors have done their work and it's all gone all right, I hear the relatives heave sighs of relief and say, “What perfect little boys.”

While I'm on perfect, I think about Zoe. I haven't spoken to her since I discovered her name means
life
, since she shouted over her shoulder,
Since when were we joined at the hip?

And she hasn't spoken to me either.

This friend I made in kindergarten. This person who bounds up my stairs and into my life and with whom I've been as close as Richie is to Clem.

I decide to call her. I decide to tell her about her beautiful life-giving name.

“Hello,” I say brightly.

“Hi,” she says, but she sounds suspicious, like I'm just about to to get all serious on her again.

So what I actually say is “They share more organs than we thought.” It just sort of falls out of me, so maybe I was always going to say this.

“What?” says Zoe.

“The twins. They share ribs and a bit of their lower sternum and their abdominal cavity and a bit of pericardium, which is the heart. Their heart.”