Page 14 of Kill Your Darlings

“You don’t want that?”

“No, I do, in theory, but I think... down deep, that I love him sometimes so much that I want him to break his back or something and then he’d live forever with us. He’d never leave.”

Wendy started to laugh, but Thom, now naked, actually had a serious look in his eyes. “I just want him safe here, with us.”

“With a broken back?”

“Well, no. I was being extreme. But my love feels almost psychotic sometimes. Like a combination of fear and madness. And, no, I don’t want him to get hurt, but I think I grieve sometimes that we no longer take care of him the way we did when he was younger. I miss his helplessness.”

“We have Samsa,” Wendy said.

“Samsa’s not helpless exactly,” and their cat, sleeping on the extreme corner of their king-sized bed, twitched an ear at the sound of his name.

“No, but he needs to be fed and he likes to be picked up.”

Getting into bed on his side, his reading glasses in one hand and his own book—a paperback copy ofA Little Life—in the other, Thom said, “When I was little, I did have this fantasy that I would find a bird with a broken wing and that I would take care of it and it would become attached to me. It didn’t need to be a bird, I guess, it could be a sick squirrel. Any small animal.”

“You didn’t go out and break a bird’s wing to make it come true, did you?”

“My father made that joke at the time and I remember considering it, like maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea after all. I think I’m too drunk to read.”

Thom turned to his side, bringing the duvet with him, in order to put his book and reading glasses on the bedside table, then curled up, facing away from Wendy.

“I’ll read a little more,” she said, returning to the sentence she’dmarked with a finger. But she’d read less than thirty seconds when Thom said, his voice muffled by the pillow, “You called us twins to the Hollys.”

“Did I?”

“I think so.”

“No, I just said we were astrological twins.”

“I guess you’re right. Still...”

Wendy, angered slightly, didn’t immediately respond, knowing that another thirty seconds of silence would ensure that her husband would be asleep. A short, guttural snore indicated that he was. She tried to return to her book but kept thinking about his twin comment. Yes, that was one of their rules, one of their secrets. For almost as many years as they’d known each other, they’d been referring to each other as twins. It had started as a joke, not just because of their shared birthday but the fact that they looked a little bit alike. They each had large dark-brown eyes and high hairlines and compact mouths that seemed a little too close to their noses. Their skin was the same hue as well, pale as skim milk in wintertime, although Thom could actually get a tan in summertime, while Wendy burned. “We’re twins, you know, not actual twins, but cosmic ones.” That had been Thom, years ago. She’d probably grimaced and told him that she’d rather not think of him as a sibling. But it had stuck, this idea that they were connected in ways far more significant than marriage or parenthood or even love. This twindom, or twinhood, whatever you wanted to call it, became one of their secrets. It was never to be spoken out loud to anyone else, in the same way that so many things were never to be spoken out loud to anyone else. They didn’t talk about Wendy’s first marriage, or the fact that they re-met at that conference in Ohio in 1991, or anything else that happened that following year. They didn’t talk about guilt or regrets. The past was the past.

It was Thom, though, who most often broke these rules, especially lately, so Wendy seethed a little that he’d dared to call her outon referring to them as astrological twins. She composed a speech in her mind, telling him all the times in the past couple of years when he’d drunk too much and made jokes about his and Wendy’s dark history, or given speeches about how the guilty were never truly punished. Then she threw the speech away. In the morning this would all be forgotten, and they had a party to plan, and according to the latest weather reports, a storm moving in. There would be things to do. Wendy closed her own book and turned off her reading lamp.

ii

“What do you think?” Jason said. Five minutes earlier he’d handed his father a printed list of possible songs for that night’s birthday bash. Thom was at the kitchen island, slowly working his way through a dry ham sandwich, and even though he’d been staring at the list his son had produced, his mind had been elsewhere.

“Etta James?” Thom said, picking the first track his eyes landed on. “How old do you think your mother and I are?”

“Mom said it was one of her favorites.”

“I can’t even remember how it goes.”

Jason sang “At Last” in his shaky baritone. He’d been late to puberty, and Thom sometimes found himself shocked by his son’s altered voice, even though he was now seventeen, waiting to hear from colleges he’d applied to, and with a serious girlfriend to boot, one he was almost certainly having sex with.

“Oh, right. Scratch that one out. Your mom will never notice. Besides, this is a dance party.”

“Scratch Etta James,” Jason said, swinging the list toward him and producing a pen. When Wendy and Thom had agreed to let him DJ the event, neither had been really prepared for how seriously he would take the task. He’d strategically divided the playlist betweensongs that would set the proper mood, songs that would get the fifty-year-olds onto the dance floor, and songs that “were so banging they could simply not be ignored.”

“No wedding songs,” Thom said.

“Define a wedding song.”

“I’ll know it when I hear it. No chicken dance, no Meat Loaf.”

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