From as far back as Gretchen could remember, her mother had been unable to utter anything but the cold, unvarnished truth—or, at least, the truth according to Annika—and, as Gretchen learned quickly enough as a child, often the truth set no one free and was downright painful besides.

As when the twins were born when Gretchen was five. “They are not right,” Annika had insisted, her pale hair wild and hands on her hips, such a ferocious frown on her lips that it looked as though she might want to take them back to the county hospital posthaste.

Which had Gretchen wondering if one could return babies the same way one returned a glass bottle drained of soda to the grocer’s for a nickel.

“Do you not see what I see?” Annika had nagged her very tolerant husband.

“They look fine to me,” Gretchen’s father had replied, and he’d bent over the double-wide crib to first rub Bennie’s belly and then Trudy’s. “They’ve each got ten fingers and ten toes, a perfect button nose, and ears like tiny seashells.”

“Then you are as blind as they are,” Annika had bluntly stated. “Look at their eyes! They’re such a milky blue, and neither so much as blinks when I pass my hand before them. Do you think it’s my fault, for painting while I was pregnant?” she had asked, madly pacing. “Was it the fumes from the oils or the turpentine? As an artist, I can’t imagine a more horrible curse than to lose one’s sight!”

“Oh, I can think of plenty,” Gretchen’s father had coolly replied, his knuckles turning white as he gripped the crib’s railing. “Would you cast out a calf because it couldn’t see, when its milk will be no different than a cow with sight?”

“Please!” Annika had loudly and dismissively snorted. “I know you believe animals are like people because you spend more time with beasts than humans,” she’d told him, “but these are our daughters, not barnyard creatures!”

For a long moment, Gretchen had shut out their voices. She’d heard them argue enough before about her father’s job as a farm veterinarian, how it kept them in Walnut Ridge when Annika found so much about small-town life uncultured and unfit.

Instead, Gretchen had crept toward the bars of the crib and peered through as if staring at a pair of sleeping monkeys at the zoo. If there was something wrong with her new sisters, she couldn’t see it from where she stood.

“C’mon, Anni, enough.” Her father had expelled a weary sigh. “Nothing’s your fault. Nothing’s anyone’s fault. Sometimes things just happen, and no one’s to blame. If it’s not life or death, we’ll get through it.”

“They will never have normal lives.”

“Normal is overrated,” he’d declared, shaking his head. It was a minute before he seemed to realize Gretchen was there beside him, her upturned face full of worry. “Better to be different, don’t you think, sweet pea?” he had said, his voice suddenly lighter as he ruffled her bright yellow curls. “That’s how you make your mark. Not by being the same as everyone else.”

But Gretchen had not agreed. Her mother’s words had her frightened.

“What will happen to them?” she’d asked and had slipped a small hand through the crib rails to poke tiny Trudy. She was no bigger than a pot roast, although pot roasts didn’t drool in their sleep. “We’ll keep them, won’t we?”

“Of course we’ll keep them,” Daddy had told her, squatting down at her side. “They’re your sisters, and we love them. Everything will be fine.”

Annika had groaned. “How can you tell her that in all good conscience? Because you can’t possibly know. You’ve never been blind. Neither of us can be sure of what will become of them.”

“They have us to protect them,” her daddy had said with a nod. “That’s all that children need.”

“But what happens when we die? Who will they have then?” her mother had cried. “We have no family anywhere near.”

“Me,” Gretchen had said quietly as her fingers reached for Trudy’s dimpled elbow. “They’ll have me. I won’t let anything happen to them, Mommy. I promise.”

And Gretchen had meant it.

The twins were eventually diagnosed as legally blind, their sight limited to discerning shadows and shapes, darkness and light. But there was nothing positive about their situation in Annika’s eyes. When they went into town to visit the shops on Main Street, Annika would push Trudy and Bennie up the sidewalk in the double stroller and Gretchen would walk a few steps behind, peering into windows and listening to her mother bluntly answer those who asked, “How are your darling babies?”

“They are as blind as bats,” she’d tell them, sounding as if it were the kiss of death. “I hope we can keep them with us and won’t be forced to send them to an institution.”

Gretchen usually tried to remain silent and not challenge anything Annika said, but with each passing year, she had found it harder and harder not to chip in her two cents. “Bennie can hear the postman coming way before I can see him,” she had finally dared to rebut, “and Trudy knows every spice in the rack by scent alone.”

“Is that so?” Annika had said, her pale eyes narrowed.

“It is,” Gretchen had replied and had managed not to flinch, even though she knew it wasn’t precisely the truth, merely a candy-coated lie. Bennie
could
hear things before anyone else, and Trudy
could
identify countless items by their smell alone.

Her sisters were special, Gretchen knew, regardless of what their mother believed, and she was determined to prove that they had no limitations.

So as the twins had grown, Gretchen had been their shepherd, watching over her sheep. She took them by their hands when they were old enough to walk, teaching them where every stick of furniture sat in the house, where every tree grew outside, where every step or gate or wall existed. Even more important, she reminded them over and over again that they were no less for not having eyeballs that worked like everyone else’s.

“Maybe your gifts are in your other senses,” she would tell them, and Bennie and Trudy would smile their precious smiles as if such a thing seemed perfectly reasonable.

When Gretchen was in the fifth grade, she learned that the school librarian, Miss Childs, had grown up with a blind mother and knew Braille well enough to instruct Bennie and Trudy. Miss Childs also took the liberty of ordering them Braille textbooks and such. Soon Gretchen’s father asked the librarian outright if she’d become the girls’ private tutor. She did such a good job with the twins that Annika ceased uttering the word
institution,
and Gretchen’s father seemed happier just having the very agreeable Miss Childs around.

By the time Gretchen was in high school, Bennie and Trudy had blossomed into capable young ladies, able to do all the things that Gretchen did around the house: dress themselves, tie bows in their hair, make their beds, clean their rooms, sweep the porch, and even climb the lowest branches of the maple tree out front. Thanks to Miss Childs, both girls were reading well beyond their grade level. Indeed, Gretchen’s father had become so fond of their tutor that he’d left to drive her home one day and had never returned.

I’m sorry, Anni
—had read the note he’d left behind—
but I can’t handle so much truth anymore. Sometimes ignorance is truly bliss, and what I need is more bliss in my life.

Her mother had cried on Gretchen’s shoulder, asking her, “Am I so horrible to be around? Am I that unlovable?”

Instead of being honest, Gretchen had told Annika what she knew her mother had wanted to hear, words cribbed from
Wanton Wild Love,
the romance novel she was in the midst of reading, tucked upstairs beneath her pillow. “Miss Childs was nothing but a temptress, Mother, a seductress out to lure away what belonged to another.”

“Do you truly think so?”

“I do,” she said, even though Miss Childs looked nothing like the half-naked woman with flowing red hair on the book’s torrid cover. In her prim sweater sets and too-long skirts, with her plain brown hair and bespectacled eyes, Miss Childs had appeared the very stereotype of what she was: a school librarian. Still, Gretchen’s lie seemed to make Annika feel better, so what was the harm?

It would not be the first nor the last time she fibbed to her mother.

The year her father left, during the summer before her senior year in high school, when Gretchen lost her virginity to a questionable young man and wound up pregnant, she lied to her mother again. Only that particular lie was different. That lie was a lot like her belly: it just kept growing and growing until it created a life all its own.

The Twister

And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth,

even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind.

—
REVELATIONS 6:13

One

April 2010

Bam bam bam!

Loose shutters banged against the house, pounding the clapboards like angry fists as the wind kicked up and howled around the eaves, drawing Gretchen Brink to the half-opened window above the kitchen sink.

A minute earlier, the sky had been a pristine blue, the April sun showering warmth upon the walnut farm while a gentle breeze ruffled the leaves of the just-bloomed peonies below the sill. Out of nowhere, fierce gusts forced their way through the window screen, batting at Gretchen’s hair and stirring up the scent of rain and the rumble of thunder. Beyond her pale reflection in the glass, the sky turned black as pitch and a startling crack rent the air. A great
boom
followed as a bolt of lightning hit, causing her to see stars and jarring the floor beneath her feet.

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