Three

know,” he said. Then, suddenly he was ferociously angry. “He’s in there. He’s coming out. I can feel it, Lois. I can tell.”

  She nodded slowly. “Well, maybe.” Twins like them, she understood, know things about each other—in a mystical kind of way. Mom always said that even when they were little. Dad had no opinion. He had run off by the time they were three.

  “Sure, it’s dangerous,” he said. “That’s one of the reasons he’s doing it. He likes challenges.”

  “He sure does.” She was three years older than her twin brothers, but she had always felt very close to them—almost like a third twin. She could read their minds just by looking at them.

  “I’m not into some of the things he’s into,” he said. “Especially this caving stuff. It’s too—confining.”

  “Claustrophobic,” she said.

  “You can say that again. If you climb a mountain, you can look forward to the view from the top. It draws you on even if the climbing hurts. There’s no view underground. There’s just---more and more cave.”

  “I remember you tried it once.”

  Joel thought about that, remembering back. “I did. He wanted me to. Dared me to--so I did.” He shook his head. “Had to. We competed about everything. You know that. That’s what twins do.” He paused. “I detested caving.”

  “You grew up,” she said. “You got into your own stuff like the biking. And the swimming. Like you won the state freestyle championship. It’s on your bedroom wall—that plaque.”

  “I sure remember that race.”

  “Bryan never liked to swim.”

  Joel nodded. “He knows how ‘, but he hates it.”

  “So you realized you didn’t have to do what he did all the time.”

  He nodded. “Something like that.”

  “The one thing that didn’t change is—”

  “Yeah, we’re both obstinate as hell. You’re always saying that.”

  “Well, you are. Like Bryan is about this silly cave.”

  This is probably the longest, deepest cave in the Northeast,” he said. “Fifty-one miles from one end to the other. And now they’ve found this whole new cave system that leads off it.” He flung himself down on the sofa. “It’s never been explored. That means there’s lots of room to get lost in. Fall down. Get creamed.”

  “Joel, don’t. Please.”

  “Yeah, yeah---sorry. He’s a damn good caver, but a lot of crap can happen down there.” Joel chewed on his lip for a few seconds. “He likes to do it alone. Almost nobody caves alone. It makes it even more dangerous. Cavers always have backup. More than one light, lots of rope, cams, carabiners. At least one partner. It’s a habit, a good habit. Not him.”

  “He’s gotten away with it so far,” she said.

  “So far.” He started to chew on his lip again. “Well, almost. Don’t forget that near miss he had in the Mongrel over in Vermont. Had to drag himself out with a broken foot. I thought he’d learned a lesson there about going it alone.”

  She nodded but was silent.

  He’s my twin,” he said simply. “I want to keep him around.”

  They sat in the half-dark of the living room---staring at the phone, waiting for it to ring again. They knew it would. It was only a question of when. This time, he knew, he would answer it.

  (TWO)

  “Hey, sir, can we talk to you? Ask you about---” A TV news reporter was stopping people on the street, trying to find someone who could tell him more about what had happened. His cameraman followed close behind him.

  The man he approached waved him off. “We don’t talk to newspaper reporters around here.”

  ‘“It’s TV.”

  The man shook his head and hurried on down the main street of this small New Hampshire town.

  “Don’t any of them watch TV?” said the cameraman.

  “Guess not,” said the reporter. “Wait up, here’s someone I bet does. She’s got two kids with her. Mam, do you know anything about the accident? The spelunker who’s lost in a cave?”

  “Spelunker? Oh, you mean caver. Spelunking’s a tourist word,” she said.

  “Yeah, well, they tell us he’s been gone for five days. Probably dead by now, I guess. Did you know him? Mind if we—we’re from KLFN?”

  “It’s okay,” she said. The reporter gestured to his cameraman to get in for a closer shot. “No, I didn’t know him, but I hear he was a nice young fellah. His family goes way back here.”

  “Has this ever happened before?”

  “Couple times maybe. Everybody caves in this town, and mostly they know how to stay out of trouble down there. It’s the outsiders who get hurt.”

  “What are they going to do?”

  “Well, they’ll find him---eventually. Pull him out. I feel bad for his folks.”

  “What do you think happened?”

  She drew the youngest child to her and looked off toward the nearby mountains where the cave was located. She had the lined face of someone who’d fought off many New Hampshire winters. “He must have fallen. The fact is there’s a million bad things can happen to you in those caves,” she said. “You can’t call out. Cells don’t work. If you’re alone, you have to rescue yourself---if you can.”

  • • •

  Joel closed his cell phone with a snap, held it for a second and slammed it across the room. It banged against the wall and fell into three pieces onto the living room rug.

  “For God’s sake,” said Lois. “What good does that do?”

  “I’m killing the messenger,” he said with a grimace.

  “So what did they tell you?” his sister asked.

  “They went in seven or eight miles. There was no sign of him.”

  “How do you know they went in where he went in?”

  “He left markers. He also left a button off his shirt.”

  “How do they know it was his? Could have been any old button.”

  “They described it. I know his clothes. It was his. ‘Give it up,’ they said. ‘He’s done for. It’s too long a time. Sure, he didn’t know these new caves, but five days--- He could have gone all the way to Vermont and back If he was okay.’” Joel ran his fingers through his hair. “I know he had food. He must have--fallen. Hurt himself.” He collapsed onto the sofa and buried his head in his hands.

  His sister moved quickly to sit by him. She held him while he sobbed. “Oh, Lois. He can’t be gone. I won’t let him be gone.”

  “We have to accept it,” she said. She was crying now. “Maybe it was quick---like he hit his head or something.” She took a sudden breath. “I sure hope so.”

  “No!” he said loudly. “No, no, no!” He was almost yelling. “Stop talking about him in the past tense. What if he’s still alive? He might be.”

  She looked away. She knew this kind of talk was useless. “Let him go, Joel,” she said.

  “I wish it had been me, Lois,” he said softly.

  “I don’t buy that kind of talk. You’re two different people, Joel. You would never have done anything like this. You’re too smart.”

  She reached out to hug him, but he pushed her away and got up. “I’m sorry, Lo. I have to deal with this by myself.” He ran upstairs to his bedroom, slammed the door and flopped down on the bed.

  Left alone, Lois reached her mother at the Kansas City Airport.

  “I’m catching the first plane back I can, honey. I had to drive three hours to get here. I’ll be there late tonight. How’s he doing?”

  “Not so good, Mom. He’s upstairs in his room. Maybe trying to sleep.”

  “Best thing,” she said. “Sleep’s best for everything. This is so horrible. I can’t believe it happened.” She paused a long moment. Finally, she whispered: “Poor little guys. They were tight as tight those two.” Lois was starting to cry. “Don’t, honey. You’ll have me blubbering in a
minute. Someone has to be strong for him right now. That’s got to be us. Especially you. He’s about as close to you as Bryan was to him.” She stopped herself, obviously stricken. “I meant to say ‘is’---as he is to Bryan. Oh, honey, I want to believe he’s alive too.” She was beginning to weep, too.

  He had indeed gone to sleep. And now he was dreaming, dreaming of long ago, of two boys romping through summer days and happy times. His sister was roughhousing with them, shrieking and out of breath and laughing and gasping. And, then, she was being serious. “You are so lucky to have a twin,” she said in the dream. “Both of you. A twin to look at like he’s a mirror. Like you don’t need a mirror. You just look at each other, and, oh, that’s me.” She pouted for a moment. “I wish I had a sister, doesn’t have to be a twin, just any old sister.”

  “That’s stupid!” shouted Bryan. “Stupid, stupid, stupid!”

  Joel stared at him in his dream, stared at his twin and loved that his twin was a mirror of himself. It was special and wonderful and magical to have a twin. And, then, he woke up.

  It was darkly quiet in the room. A very different place from the dream and yet—the feel of that faraway time lingered. It was still overpoweringly vivid. He felt Bryan was right there with him—alive, alive, alive. And it came to him that all this was on purpose. He had dreamed about Bryan because Bryan had made him do it. Dreamed the past into the present. Why? There could only be one possible reason. He really was alive.

  He was lunging off the bed. “Wait for me,” he said under his breath. “Wait till I come.” He had made up his mind. So maybe the whole idea of going into Slater’s