Page 40 of Twin Jeopardy

“Russ lives two houses down, so he volunteered to take it. Didn’t you see him there?”

“I wasn’t paying attention. I was focused on the rescue.”

“Of course. How is the kid who fell?”

“He’s going to be fine. And maybe less quick to run away the next time he and his parents don’t see eye to eye.”

“That’s what happened? He ran away?”

“He probably just wanted to take a walk and let off steam, but he got disoriented in the dark and ended up falling into the canyon. The road is pretty narrow, and the soil on the edge was crumbling. It kept collapsing as we were working, trying to set up the rigging to bring him up.”

“Sounds like it was a happy ending, though.”

“Yeah.”

She took the pizza from the oven and carried it to the table. Vince helped himself to a couple of slices. “What happened today made me think about Valerie,” he said.

“Oh?”

“This kid was a few hundred yards from his house. When he first fell, he must have shouted for help, but those trees and the dirt and everything absorbs sound. Apparently, no one heard him. And though his parents said they searched for him, they couldn’t see him where he was and couldn’t hear him. I wonder if something like that happened with Valerie.”

“I guess it could have happened that way,” she said. “Though you would think, with so many people searching for her, they would have found something.”

“Not if she ended up in a deep crevice or a long way from where she fell.”

“That’s terrible to think about.”

It was, but he had tortured himself for years with speculation about his sister’s fate. No need to pull Tammy into that. “Did you ever get into fights with your parents and leave the house to cool off when you were a teen?” he asked, thinking about his conversation with his fellow volunteers.

She plucked a piece of pepperoni from the pizza and popped it into her mouth. “I wanted to a few times,” she said. “But I never did. My parents had lost one kid. They were terrified of losing another. It made them overprotective, and I chafed against that. But at the same time, I didn’t want to hurt them. At least, not any more than they had already been hurt.”

“Yeah. It was like that for me too,” he said.

She set aside a pizza crust. “I can hardly remember anymore what Mom and Dad were like before my brother died,” she said. “Their pain was part of them, like my mom’s curly hair or my dad’s cleft chin.”

“Yeah. I guess you never get over something like that.”

“Were your parents overprotective too?”

“Not exactly.” It made sense that having lost one child, a parent would hold even more tightly to the offspring left behind. But it hadn’t been like that in his house. How to explain it to her without making his parents sound like terrible people? “Losing Valerie was such a blow they kind of, I don’t know, checked out for a while,” he said. “They couldn’t cope. I knew they loved me—and they tried, they really did. But it was like they were in so much pain they didn’t have more of themselves to give. I was kind of on my own.”

“Oh, Vince.”

He winced at the sympathy in her voice. “It was okay. Most of the time, anyway. Birthdays were hard.”

“Because it was her birthday too.”

“Yeah. When we took that camping trip, my dad tried to make up for me missing my friend’s party by saying that when it was my birthday, I could have a sleepover. Not a joint party with Valerie, the way it usually was, but a celebration just for me and my friends. But that never happened.”

“Did they not celebrate your birthday at all?” Tammy asked.

“There were always presents and a cake. But there was too much sadness. It was like a weight, pressing us down.” He shrugged. “I don’t celebrate my birthday anymore. I can’t.” That day could never be only about him anymore.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “But I get it. I always felt like I didn’t just lose my brother when Adam died. Our whole family lost itself. We couldn’t be the same family we were before, and we never figured out how to completely put ourselves back together.”

“You can’t,” he said. “That one piece is always missing.”

They ate in silence for a while, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. Tammy was the only person he had ever known who truly understood what growing up had been like for him. And he knew what things had been like for her too. He felt closer to her right now than he had to anyone.

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