“Whew! And I thought our names were bad! My oldest brother is Cash after Johnny Cash, next is my brother Hank after Hank Williams, and my sister was Minnie after the one and only Minnie Pearl.”
“And Bonnie Rae. Where did that come from?”
“I was named after both my grandmothers.” I heard the bitterness in my voice and shook my head, mentally shaking her off. I didn’t want to think about Gran. “Bonita and Raena. My birth certificate and my driver’s license say Bonita Rae Shelby. Luckily, no one has ever called me Bonita.”
“All right. I gave you Finn. Now you give me something,” Finn demanded.
“Well, Huckleberry.” I grinned at him cheekily, enjoying the fact that his name represented so many possibilities for teasing, which is probably why he went by Clyde. “I am a Pisces, and I enjoy long walks on the beach, sunsets, and romantic dinners.” Clyde sighed and shook his head, clearly not enjoying my sarcasm.
“You said your sister was Minnie. Isn’t she Minnie anymore?”
I lost the cheeky grin. It was too much work to keep it in place. “She will always be Minnie, but she died last October.” I shrugged as if time had already stitched up that particular wound without leaving me uglier for it, the way Appalachian Annie said it would.
“I see.” Clyde didn’t say he was sorry the way most people did. He just stared at the road, and I noticed for the first time that we were back on the freeway, the trees shooting up on either side, reducing our visibility of the world to the space between us, the road behind us, and the never-ending ribbon of black beyond us.
“Are you still taking me with you?” I asked in surprise.
“Is that what you want?”
I looked at him again, wondering if there was something in his words I was missing, some warning signal that I should see, a detectable, cautionary bleeping urging me to get out while I still could.
“Finn?” I liked the way his name sounded. It fit him in a very non-fitting way. Finn was a whimsical name, a name that would be right at home with Peter Pan and the Lost Boys. Finn Clyde was big, scruffy-jawed, and a little intimidating. Definitely not whimsical. But it worked all the same.
“Yeah?” he answered.
“I don’t really want to die.”
Clyde’s eyes slid from the road to search my face before they slid back again.
“I just don’t want to live very bad,” I said. “But maybe that will change if I can just get away for a while, figure out who I am and what I want. So yeah, I want you to take me with you.”
Finn nodded, just a quick jerk of his head, and that was my only response for several minutes.
“Your sister . . . was she older or younger?” Finn asked.
“Younger. By one hour.”
Finn’s eyes snapped to mine in shock.
“What? We were twins,” I explained, his reaction confusing me.
“Identical twins?” His voice sounded funny.
“Yes. Mirror-image twins. Ever heard of that?”
Finn nodded, but the expression on his face was so inscrutable that I thought maybe he needed more explanation.
“If we stood looking at each other, it was like looking in a mirror. Everything was reversed on our faces. I have this mole on my right cheek?” I touched it, drawing his eyes to my face. “Minnie had the same mole, in the same place on her left. I was right-handed, Minnie was left-handed. Even the natural part in our hair is exactly the mirror image of each other. We didn’t ever think much of it until we got into high school and took biology. There was actually a unit on twins. We didn’t realize there was a name for what we were.”
“Mirror-image twins,” Finn said quietly.
“Yeah.” I nodded. “In identical twins the egg actually splits, but in mirror-image twins, it splits later than usual. Quite a bit later. The original right half of the egg becomes one twin and the left half becomes another.” I remembered the text book definition perfectly. I was a half. Minnie and I together made a whole. How could I possibly forget something like that?
“How did she die?”
I looked out the window and laid it out. “Minnie died of leukemia. She was diagnosed when we were fifteen. She got well for a while. Remission. But she got sick again two years ago, and everybody kind of played it down so that I wouldn’t get distracted, so that I would keep singing and touring and sending money home. That was my job. Send money home.”
“You weren’t there when she died?” Finn’s voice was hushed, reverent even.
“No,” I answered woodenly, my attention on the landscape, letting the trees rushing past whisk away the emotion that was brewing beneath the words. “They didn’t tell me until after her funeral, a week later. I was on tour, see. And Gran didn’t want me to cancel the dates. We’re talking big money, sold out shows, powerful interests. Obviously, much more important than Minnie’s funeral or my feelings on the matter.”
The anger came whooshing back, and I opened my mouth to take in more air to release the heat in my chest, but everyone knows that you have to suffocate a fire. The rush of air down my throat only fed the flames. I sat, gasping, my face turned away, and then I held my hand over my mouth in a belated attempt to dampen the blaze. I wondered if Finn could see the smoke curling between my fingers and out my ears. I was so hot with fury that I reached out and unrolled the window, fiercely turning the old handle, letting the icy wind fill the interior of the Blazer and nip at my face and kiss my cheeks. Clyde didn’t complain about the cold or try to speak over the bellowing wind, and I closed my eyes and wished it would whisk me away. But I leaned my face too far out, and without warning, my hat, Bear’s hat, was snatched off my head. I watched it tumbling down the freeway, lost to me, just like Minnie.