Come Clean. Terri Paddock

       CHAPTER THREE

      A week late, dragging along an uninvited guest. That’s how we arrive in this world. It’s that time of day where people don’t know whether to call it night-time or morning and Mom’s been in labour for going on ten years. She alternates between a shade of puce and a white so white you could lose her on the gurney if you crossed your eyes. The doctor shouts at Mom to push and she pushes and pushes and pushes.

      ‘I can see the head!’ bullhorns the doctor. Then, in a motion that might seem sudden if everyone hadn’t been congregating so long round Mom’s nether regions, you slide out.

      ‘It’s a boy!’

      You’re holding on to your winky and wailing. Mom throbs in strobe-light fashion, one constant pulse of pain, but still reaches out to draw you to her bosom. ‘A boy.’ Her lips flutter into a feathery smile.

      ‘Here comes another one!’ announces the doctor.

      ‘Another what?’

      ‘Eh?’ The doctor’s clearly half deaf. How else can his missing that second heartbeat in the first place be explained?

      A fresh contraction doubles Mom up as one of the nurses wrenches you from her. And then here comes me, follow-the-leadering you right out the trap door, a little soggier, a little quieter, with nothing to hold on to but Mom’s umbilical cord, which I let go of pretty swift-like.

      That’s how we imagine our birth, anyway. We can’t say for sure. Mom never told us particulars. When we got to an age of wondering after such things, she’d answer vaguely. ‘It was such a long time ago,’ she’d say. Or, ‘They had me so drugged up, kids, I didn’t know who was coming or going.’ Or, if maybe we’d been why-ing her for awhile already, she’d just snap, ‘Because,’ even though it wasn’t a ‘because’ kind of question in the least, or, ‘Does it really matter?’

      This is what we know for sure: we were born sometime in the morning (5:00 a.m.? 11:52 a.m.?) on 25 August at the University Hospital in Piedmontville, North Carolina, home of the Central State University, where Dad was finishing up his dental degree. You came out first and, seven and a half minutes later, I appeared.

      We’ve never had it confirmed but we strongly suspect Dad was nowhere in the vicinity of the hospital when we made our grand entrance. We figure he arrived later, at a respectable hour, the sun high in the sky. Maybe he’s been taking an exam or memorising a textbook or practising with his drills. Or maybe he’s late because he’s picked Grandma and Grandpa Shirland up from the airport. Grandpa’s still alive at this point though already ancient and doddery, gone soft in the head with age. He clings to Grandma’s arm and stops to let his heart slow down after the excitement of the doors that whooshed open and closed all by themselves.

      Meanwhile, Dad barrels past the nurses’ desk unannounced, his leather soles dog-whistling along the swept salmon-and-lime-speckled tiles. He heads the wrong way, striding purposefully towards geriatrics until some doctor or orderly or whoever it is at the hospital on glad tidings duty recognises him and steers him in the right direction while attempting to share said tidings. Dad listens with one ear and nods his understanding, but all he hears is ‘boy’ and ‘twins’. And his mind adds those two words together in an equation that goes boys + twins = identical = two sons. Because twins mean identical, right, and identical means, if nothing else, same sex. Right?

      You’d think they would have taught him otherwise at some point in all that expensive medical education of his. But what do budding orthodontists know? Dad knows twins are identical and boys are little creatures who grow up into men who carry on the Ziegler name. He hauls up at the viewing station and shoulders his way through some other newborn-gawkers to the front of the glass so he can size us up. We’ve been stashed in the same crib and, to be honest, we’re not too impressive. Downright tiny, only five pounds apiece and drowning in hospital regulation cotton. And we’re yellow, shrivelled and flaky – overcooked, as Mom used to say – these are things she remembered to tell us. But we’re men-to-be. Dad eyes his progenies and, without consulting Mom who’s got many days and weeks of drugged-out-ness ahead, he decrees us Joshua and Justin. He tells the nurse or orderly to write it down. And they keep shtoom, do as they’re told and write down Joshua and Justin Ziegler.

      ‘How adorable,’ coos Grandma who’s just caught up, towing Grandpa behind her like a badly hitched trailer.

      Then Grandpa judders to a halt and follows Grandma’s finger to where it crooks at us through the glass. Just a bundle of baby under a single snowy blanket. He lowers his chin, squints and peers through his Norman Rockwell bifocals. ‘Amazing, Jeff,’ he says to Dad. ‘How on earth did you and Helen manage to have a two-headed baby? Ain’t that funny.’

      That last bit is true, Grandpa really did say that, or words to that effect. Grandma Shirland has been telling us that story for years and others around the family have been retelling it to their neighbours, their friends, mailmen and each other until it comes full circle back to us and they tell us again like we never heard it before.

      And the naming thing was also true, though Dad didn’t let that one get round quite so far. I imagine he was pretty disappointed when he realised I didn’t have a winky. He tacked an E on to my name on the hospital form, wrote it in himself, a big messy capital letter that didn’t match any of the pretty orchid-like penmanship that blossomed across the rest of the page. And I became Justine.