THERE WAS A CUTTER WHO HAD SCARS like tiny plastic slugs up and down her arm, and a guy who had torched his high school gym with a bucket of gasoline, his neck and jaw still shiny and melted. They were kids who had been given everything and still terrified their families with an unexplainable urge to destroy. All they need is self-confidence, promised Outward Bound, we’ve seen it time and time again. But I knew, even before I went, when Mom had set the catalog in front of me and showed me the pages of pasty kids smiling, arm-in-arm at the summit of a Teton, that the trip wasn’t for me. I don’t belong on this, I’d wanted to tell her. All I’d done was lose my twin.

But marching up our granite walkway, pushing open our heavy front door and entering again the familiar air of home, I was ready, after twenty-eight days in the woods, to put that behind me. I was ready, in a way, to start again.

The front hallway smelled of Pine-Sol, and even though I knew better, I charged in with my boots, their hard muddy soles echoing with each step, and turned the corner hoping to see my mother, to appear before her with my big, dirty backpack and my face darkened by the Wyoming sun, and show her, in a single glimpse, that I had changed. But neither of my parents were in the living room. Instead, two boys were on the floor in front of the television, leaning forward as if transfixed.

"Hello?” I said. They turned their heads, staring at me for a long moment. On the television, a game show contestant was being suspended from a helicopter by a cable. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I live here.”

Finally one of them climbed to his feet. “I am Heintz,” he said, holding out his hand. He was small and soft, a mop-headed blonde who wore a tight polo shirt over his doughy middle. As I shook his hand, the other one came up beside him. He was scrawny as a marathoner and wore a baggy tank top that exposed his entire bony torso through the holes at his armpits. Neither could’ve been more than fourteen. Grinning shoulder-to-shoulder before me, they made a perfect number 10.

“And who are you guys?” I said.

“They’re our guests,” said Mom, coming in from the kitchen, wiping her hands on an apron tied around her waist. She seemed to have shrunken while I was gone, as if all that time at the beach had somehow boiled her down to her concentrated core. Her hair had grown and been bleached by the sun, its straight golden strands pulled back and barretted over its sandy base. She reached up and cupped her cool hands along my jaw. It had been a month since I’d shaved, which at seventeen was an experiment akin to watching weeds grow in an abandoned lot. “Your hair,” she said, grabbing a shaggy bit that poked out from behind my ear. “It’s so long.”

She stepped back, clutching the clumps of hair behind my ears, as if trying to picture me without it. “There you are,” she said, and kissed me, almost angrily, on the cheek.

The boys had come from Austria, she said, part of a summer exchange program for German-speaking youth called “Surfin’ USA!”

“Stupid name,” said Deiter, shaking his head at me. “Nobody even surfs.”

“That’s not true!” chimed in Heintz from the kitchen. “We went at Block Island.”

“That was boogie boarding! It’s not the same.” Deiter looked at me and rolled his eyes. “It’s for babies.”

As I sank into the sofa, I suddenly felt filthy. There were dark strips on my polypropylene shirt from the pack straps and my armpits were nearly black. The little one was hustling around the kitchen, carrying trays and bowls back and forth for my mother. Mom had always been a health nut, serving us celery chutes after school and, much to Carter’s and my embarrassment, tempeh cheese steaks to our friends. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever seen her bake.

“Who wants a coo-kie?” said Heintz, carrying in a plate piled high with warm Tollhouse.

“These boys can eat,” said Mom, and Heintz lit up with a crumbly smile. “I’m at the grocery every other day.”

“It’s Deiter,” said Heintz. “He’s so greedy.”

“What?” said Deiter, launching into a long stream of German. “Heintzy is so stupid,” he said to me finally, shaking his head. “See for yourself.” He pointed to his chest, then at Heintz’s round belly. “Who eats more?”

“You’re both beautiful,” said my mother, and we sat for a moment with that thought and the soft crunching of our cookies.

“Who are these people?” I said. I had called from the airport and she hadn’t said a word.

“Peter,” said Mom with a sigh. “They lost their exchange family and were going to have to stay in a motel.” She shook her head. “They’re great kids.” Heintz kicked his feet, the toes of his socks flapping.

My father came down the stairs in his pajamas. It was late for him, and I could tell he had been sleeping. He wore his hair pulled back, no ponytail, like an Italian soccer star, and had his suits snugly tailored by a man who did the same for GQ. He had a bony face that he shaved smooth each night, shaking his razor in the sink so that it sounded, from my room down the hall, like a school of minnows was surfacing. He held his arms out but his hug was feather-light. He eased himself beside me on the sofa and I could see for the first time, under the living room lamps, that he had been dying his hair.

“So tell us everything,” said Mom. “I want to hear the whole trip.” She leaned back and, in her snug workout clothes, was swallowed by the armchair. It seemed a feat for a woman of her size to have borne a child at all, much less twins who had towered over her from the fifth grade.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It was a lot of hiking.”

She nodded. “And what did you learn?”

It was a good question. On day three the cutter had arranged a group rendezvous, where we’d met in the dark nearly a mile from camp and snorted meth that she’d smuggled in the hem of her rain pants. I felt again for a moment the awful burn it produced in the back of my throat, then the exhilarating lift as my skeleton took flight. Of all the discoveries I was supposed to have made, the only one that felt real was that when you lose your identical twin, in a way you become two people.

“I learned how to tie a bowline,” I said.

She squinted at me, and I could see the same urgency she’d had when she’d signed me up to go. Though small, she was a little knot of muscle who could silence an entire sleepover with a single look. “And what else?”

I knew what she was looking for so I made up a story about running into a grizzly while I was peeing on a young alder tree. I told them about how I held my arms up and said, “Hey bear! Hey bear!” as they’d instructed us, and that the massive animal had wandered away, bewildered, while my pants were still around my knees. “It wasn’t until he left that I realized I was still peeing.”

Heintz and Deiter laughed at this and I could tell Mom was satisfied. Who knew, really, what I’d been sent away to learn. “It sounds transformative,” she said, standing up and brushing the crumbs from her lap. She clapped. “Alright, boys, it’s bedtime.”

Dad put a hand on my shoulder, his spidered eyes fighting sleep. “We’ve missed you,” he said. I started to say something in return, but he clenched his eyes and let out a moaning yawn, as Mom leaned over and kissed the Austrians on the forehead.

When you’re twins in a town like ours you become a kind of institution. Carter and I, at eight, modeled for the local department store, and a billboard of us in matching corduroy jackets had hung outside the public library until we were well into middle school. Everywhere I went people knew me, the way a mascot is never anonymous, and they often referenced conversations I’d never had, mistaking me for my brother and assuming what was said to one was said to the other. At the wake, the house teeming with strangers, people kept touching me, hands on my back and head and neck, as though in doing so they were reaching across the divide, as if I was a creature with one foot in this world and one in the next.

I had been gone all of July, and now the heavy days of August had set in, leaving even the beaches in our seaside town crowded and airless. I sat with Ian in his lifeguard chair, perched high above the packed beach, while he twirled and untwirled his whistle around two fingers. While I was away he’d had his nipples pierced with two heavy rings. Now there was only one, the other covered by an x of Band-Aids.

“Shit got ripped clean off,” he said and made a slicing motion with his hand. “I swear to God if I ever see that asshole—” he stopped. “Three o’clock,” he said as a clump of seventh-grade girls scuttled past in faded one-pieces. They were all skinny and self-conscious, not a real breast among them.

“You’re sick.”

“I’m just predicting the future,” he said, and scanned the beach. Somewhere in that patchwork of towels the Austrians were sharing an umbrella and fanning themselves with my mother’s sun hat.

“Germans are a trip, huh?”

“They’re Austrian.”

“Whatever. They kill me. I saw them at the grocery store with your mom. The little one gave me a hug.” He looked back the other way. “Mm mm mm,” he said. “I’ll tell you what, forget about the college girls. What I’m talking about are some of the older ladies.” This had been Ian and Carter’s territory, the two of them heading out to private school dances and outdoor wedding receptions, places with open bars and no discernable guest list, to work some kind of magic I had never possessed. When Ian gave the eulogy, I kept waiting for it to devolve into a tale of pantyless girls in party dresses.

“Dude,” I said, shaking my head. “You spend way too much time up here.”

“No, listen. This town attracts them like bees to honey. Foxy moms are what’s up this summer. While you were off hugging trees, Pete, you have missed a seismic cultural shift.”

There was a haze above the surface of the water, as though what little of it was left in Long Island Sound was evaporating before our eyes. Underneath, who knew what’d be there. There could be whole canyons. It could be like the briny surface of the moon. There would also be dead things, a whole pit of them, a mass grave. As children, Carter and I would spend hours on those jetties, hunting for crab shells beneath the giant stones, amazed again and again by the husks that’d been discarded there.

“You only like going after the women in this town you can’t have.”

“There’s this one lady—” he paused, as if to conjure her precisely in his mind. “So foxy.”

I’d seen this routine before. “So you’re fucking her.”

He grinned and raised his eyebrows. “Excuse me, I gotta guard some lives.” He stood up, blowing his whistle at some kids who’d passed the swim buoy.

“You’ll see,” he said when he sat down. “They’ll be at your parents’ party.”

“What party?”

Off in the water, Heintz was running with a Styrofoam kickboard, trying to catch a wave. The water was still as a bath, but eventually the wake from a passing boat gave him enough momentum to float up onto the sand. He grinned over at Mom and gave her two thumbs up before wading out into the water to try again.

“It’s a going-away thing. For Hans and Franz.”

“I haven’t heard about a party.”

“Whatever, dude, it’s small. Like family and close friends.”

“And you.”

He grinned. “Pete, I’m like a son to them.” He hung his heavy arm around my neck. It was sticky with sunscreen. “You and me,” he said. “We’re like brothers.”

to top | next
Comment on it |