“Oh,” Nora said again. She took the photo, brows knitted. Her nap still clung to her enough to make the whole exchange surreal. The man in the middle of the photo stared back at her with eyes that pinched slightly at the corners the same way hers did, a dimple pocking his right cheek identical to the one on her own. He had one arm around another man, his other around a woman. Nora discreetly gave her thigh a small pinch with her free hand to make sure she was actually awake.
“He was exactly twenty-six there, just like us,” Charlie said. “Look.” He flipped the picture over in Nora’s hand. On the back, in writing she knew nearly as well as her own, were the words “The Bird siblings, Virgo Bay, Nova Scotia, 1996.”
Nora looked up at Charlie. “Virgo Bay? Why does that ring a bell?”
“It’s where Dad grew up. I forgot about it too. He didn’t talk about it much, but there were a bunch of other things from there in that old cigar box of his that Bubbie held on to. Coupla other photos and some seashells and stuff. That’s where I found this.” He poked at the photo, still flipped over in Nora’s hands. She read the inscription again, her already-furrowed brow furrowing further.
“Dad didn’t have siblings.”
“Yeah, I figure that must’ve been his squad. My buddies and I all go by the West Side Horn Dogs, but to each their own. They seem like a fun bunch.”
Nora flipped the photo back over and examined the three figures it held locked in time. The man beside her father was shorter, his hair straight and thinning where her father’s curled around his brows in lush waves, but there was something familiar in the man’s expression that Nora couldn’t shake. The woman on the other side was a delicate thing with birdlike bones and fire in her eyes, standing a whole head shorter than Martin Bird. They were all soaked to the bone in their windbreakers, rain glistening on their faces, ocean waves lifted in a frantic dance behind them.
“This was two years before we were born,” said Nora, transfixed. “Why don’t we know about them?”
Charlie shrugged. “People get weird when they have kids. Friends drop like flies.”
“I guess.” Nora pried her gaze away and looked back to Charlie. “Thanks for this.”
“All good. Figured you’d have more use for it. Everything just gets lost or peed on at my place.”
Nora nodded, slipping the photo into the pocket of her jacket, her mind still half in Virgo Bay.
“Anyhoo, shall we?” Charlie said. He struck the match from the Moon Pie against the motel-brand matchbook in his hand. The little makeshift candle took light, its reflection undulating in the window behind it. “Happy birthday!”
“Happy birthday,” Nora said, allowing herself a small smile. She wouldn’t let that carcinogenic chocolate time bomb of a snack cake anywhere near her internal organs, but it was an unexpectedly sweet gesture all the same. Maybe they could do this. Maybe they could actually do this. Together. The first thing they’d done together in eighteen years, and the most important of their lives.
“We blow it out on the count of three,” said Charlie. “Ready?”
The twins moved over the little flickering match.
“One,” said Charlie. “Two. Thr—”
Someone knocked on the door to a neighboring room. Hard. Another knock sounded from down the hall. And another from the other side.
Nora froze. The knocking continued, getting closer, occasionally interrupted by the sound of a door opening, of words being exchanged, before more knocking resumed.
“Stay here,” Nora said, her stomach suddenly somewhere below her knees. She slunk to the motel room door and pressed an eye to the peephole. A scattered herd of black-clad people lined the hallway, going door to door, a scythe and arrow emblem emblazoned on the backs of their jackets. Nora stepped back from the door, eyes wild. “No. No, no, no.”
“Nor?”
“Shh!” She flicked off the lights and raced back to thewindow, blowing out the match with more spit than air. The room sank into a heavy darkness, the clouds beyond the window staving off any remaining whispers of setting sunlight. “It’s them. They’re coming.”
Before Charlie could open his mouth to reply, a knock sent their door shivering on its hinges.
They were here.
5
“We have to get out of here,” Nora whispered.
“Okay,” said Charlie. “How?”
Nora opened the window and looked down. They were two stories up, the tail of the leaf-filled, T-shaped pool stretching to just beneath them, concrete surrounding it. She looked up and to either side of the window, but the walls were flat and the fire escape was three rooms down. Charlie’s gaze followed hers.
“Jump?” he offered.
“Absolutely not,” said Nora. A twenty-foot drop wasn’t likely to kill them, but the injuries could be immense. Compound fractures, wounds bad enough to require skin grafts, broken ribs that could pierce a lung. She once sorted a fatal fall that involved more impaling than she’d come across since her college medieval history class.
