Audrey Niffenegger - Her Fearful Symmetry

“Okay, sure.” Valentina turned in her chair and said, “I wish we weren’t going.”

“I know. But it’s like your dad says: you can’t stay home forever.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

Edie smiled. “That’s good.”

“I wish I could stay in this room forever, and sew things.”

“That sounds like a fairy tale.”

Valentina laughed. “I’m Rumpelstiltskin.”

“No, no,” said Edie. She put down the dress pieces and went to Valentina. Edie stood behind her and put her hands on her shoulders. She leaned over and kissed Valentina on her forehead. “You’re the princess.”

Valentina looked up and saw her mother smiling at her upside down. “Am I?”

“Of course,” said Edie. “Always.”

“So we’re going to live happily ever after?”

“Absolutely.”

“Okay.” Valentina had an acute moment, an awareness of a memory being formed. We’re going to live happily ever after? Absolutely. Edie went back to the other dress, and Valentina finished the first sleeve. By the time Jack and Julia got home, Valentina was wearing the violet dress and Edie was crouching in front of her with a mouthful of pins, hemming the skirt. It was all Valentina could do to hold still; she wanted to twirl and make the dress flare out like a carnival ride. I’ll wear it to the ball, she thought, when the prince invites me to dance.

“Can I try it on?” said Julia.

“No,” said Edie through the pins, before Valentina could speak. “This one is hers. Come back later.”

“Okay,” said Julia, and she turned and ran off to wrap the presents Jack had bought.

“See,” said Edie to Valentina. “You just open your mouth and say No .”

“Okay,” said Valentina. She twirled and the dress flared. Edie laughed.

J ACK WALKED into his den and found the twins watching a movie. It was midnight and usually all three of them would have been in bed by now.

“That looks somewhat familiar,” said Jack. “What are you watching?”

“The Filth and the Fury,” Julia said. “It’s a documentary about the Sex Pistols. You and Mom gave it to us for Christmas.”

“Oh.” The twins were sprawled together on the couch, so Jack lowered himself into the recliner. As soon as he was seated he felt exhausted. Jack had always enjoyed Christmas, but the days after Christmas seemed vacant and cheerless. The effect was compounded by the fact that the twins were leaving for London in a few days. Where did the time go? Five days until their twenty-first birthdays. Then gone.

“How’s the packing going?” he asked.

“Okay,” said Valentina. She turned off the sound on the TV. “We’re going to be over the weight limit.”

“Somehow that’s not surprising,” Jack said.

“We need to get converters, you know, to plug in our computers and stuff.” Julia looked at Jack. “Can we go downtown with you tomorrow?”

“Sure. We’ll have lunch at Heaven on Seven,” Jack said. “Your mom will want to come with.” Edie had been shadowing the twins for weeks, hoarding them, memorising them.

“That’s cool, we can go to Water Tower. We need new boots.”

Valentina watched Johnny Rotten singing silently. He looks deranged. That’s a great sweater. She and Julia had studiously prepared for the trip to London, reading Lonely Planet and Charles Dickens, making packing lists and trying to find their new flat on Google Earth. They had speculated endlessly about Aunt Elspeth and the mysterious Mr. Fanshaw, had been very pleasantly surprised by the amount of money in their new bank account at Lloyd’s. Now there was hardly anything left to do, which created an odd void, a feeling of restless dread. Valentina wanted to leave right this minute, or never.

Julia watched her father. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. Why?”

“I dunno, you seem kind of wiped.” You’ve gained a huge amount of weight and you sigh a lot. What’s wrong with you?

“I’m okay. It’s just the holidays.”

“Oh.”

Jack sat trying to imagine the house/his marriage/his life without the twins. He and Edie had been avoiding the subject for months, so now he thought about it obsessively, oscillating between fantasies of marital bliss, his actual memories of the last time the twins had left home and his worries about Edie.

For some time before Elspeth’s death Edie had been distracted. Jack had hired the detective in hope of discovering the reason for her absentmindedness, her vacant stare, her bright, false cheer whenever he asked her about it. But the detective could only observe Edie; he had no answers for Jack’s questions. After Elspeth’s death Edie’s distraction had been replaced by a profound sadness. Jack could not comfort her. He could not seem to say the right thing, though he tried. Now he wondered how Edie would fare once the twins were gone.

Each time the twins left for college, things started out well. Jack and Edie revelled in their freedom: there would be late nights, loud sex, spur-of-the-moment amusements and slightly excessive drinking. But then a kind of bleakness always set in. Soon it would be upon them, their empty house. They would eat dinner together, just the two of them; the evening would stretch out before them in silence, to be filled with a DVD and perhaps a walk down to the beach or the club. Or they would retreat to opposite ends of the house, he to surf the Internet or read a Tom Clancy novel, Edie to work on her needlepoint while listening to an audio book. (She was currently listening to Brideshead Revisited, which Jack thought was pretty much guaranteed to produce a serious bout of depression.)

Tonight he didn’t see much to look forward to after the twins were gone. He felt grateful to them for having stuck around as long as they had, grateful to Edie and Elspeth for having arranged things so that Julia and Valentina could grow up in this ugly, comfortable house, so he could be Dad, so the girls could sit here in his room watching Johnny Rotten spastically singing “God Save the Queen” with the sound turned off; suddenly Jack was overwhelmed with a gratitude that felt like grief, and he struggled out of his chair, muttered Goodnight and left the room, afraid that if he sat there one minute longer he would cry or blurt out something he’d regret. He walked into his bedroom, where Edie slept curled up, faintly blue in the clock-radio light. Jack undressed silently, got into bed without brushing his teeth and lay there in an abyss, unable to imagine any happiness for himself ever again.

Valentina turned off the TV. The twins rose and stretched. “He seems really down,” said Valentina.

“They’re both, like, suicidal,” replied Julia. “I wonder what will happen when we’re gone?”

“Maybe we shouldn’t go.”

Julia looked impatient. “We have to go somewhere, eventually. The sooner we’re gone, the sooner they’ll get over it.”

“I guess.”

“We’ll call them every Sunday. They can come and visit.”

“I know.” Valentina took a breath. “Maybe you should go to London and I’ll stay here with them.”

Julia experienced a frisson of rejection. You’d rather stay with Mom and Dad than be with me? “No!” She paused, trying to quell her irritation. Valentina watched, a little amused. “Mouse, we both have to-”

“I know. Don’t worry. I’m coming with you.” She pressed against Julia, put her arm around Julia’s shoulders. Then they turned out the light and walked to their room, glancing at their parents’ door as they passed.

R OBERT STOOD in Elspeth’s office. The twins would arrive tomorrow. He had brought along an external hard drive and a few boxes from Sainsbury’s; these stood empty and open next to Elspeth’s enormous Victorian desk.