Wood Sprites

“I always said that we were adopted,” Jillian said once the nurse left them alone. While their dusky skin could be a blending of their two parents, the twins’ silky straight brown hair was too well behaved to be from either of their parents, and it was becoming apparent that they were never going to be tall.

“We can’t be adopted,” Louise said. “There’s that icky video of us being born. All that screaming and blood and everything. That was Mom saying the S and F words.”

Jillian giggled. Their parents had planned to watch the birth videos — again — on their birthday until Jillian reminded them how many times their mother cursed while giving birth. Luckily their parents hadn’t mastered video editing to the point that they could simply erase out the swear words.

“Maybe we got it wrong on how blood type works,” Jillian said.

“It’s not that complicated.” Louise sketched out the four boxes on the sheet of the bed with her fingernail. “At least — it didn’t seem that complicated.”

“Their donor cards are wrong?” Jillian suggested.

Louise shook her head. “They’re universal donors. The blood bank wouldn’t get that wrong. It would be bad.”

However they considered it, the facts just didn’t seem to add up.

Eventually their parents swept in, smelling of smoke and radiating concern.

“What were you doing in your playhouse that made it explode?” their mother asked. She cupped Jillian’s chin with her elegant dark hands and made a sound of dismay over the stitches at the edge of her scalp.

“Honey,” their father said in the tone that said he thought their mother was being silly. As they got older, they were realizing that their father was child-naïve at times.

“George, don’t baby them. They’re too intelligent to be babied.”

Jillian got all wide-eyed innocent again, which didn’t work nearly as well without the streaming blood, but the stitches helped. “All we were doing was playing with our dolls. Barbie had spun out in the driving snow—”

“The flour and the sifter and the fan?” their mother asked.

“It was a blizzard,” Louise explained since Jillian was losing ground. “The flour was snow.”

“What you did was very dangerous.” Their father fell back to truth number three: stating the obvious.

“We had no idea—” Louise started

Jillian kicked her and gave her a look that said that it was the wrong thing to do. Jillian was much better at lying, so Louise shut up. “We have no idea what happened. Why did our playhouse blow up?”

“Flour can explode when it fills up the air like that,” their father explained patiently. “Don’t ever play with flour like that again.”

Their mother knew them better. “Or anything like flour. Baby powder. Corn starch. Sawdust.”

“Where would they get sawdust?” their father asked. He might not know them, but he knew their neighborhood. Sawdust had proved impossible to find within an easy walk of their house.

“Non-dairy creamer. Baking soda. Sugar.” Obviously their mother had spent time researching dust explosions before this conversation. “Anything like flour. Understand?”

They nodded meekly while Jillian bit down on a “darn it.”

“Mom.” Louise held out her wrist with the plastic bracelet on it. “Why are we AB positive when both you and Dad are O? Isn’t that impossible?”

Both of their parents flinched as if struck.

“Baby, that’s very complicated,” their father started.

“If we don’t tell them,” their mother murmured, “they’ll only guess — and they’ll probably guess wrong.”

Their parents gazed at each other as if having a long, silent discussion. Finally their father sighed. “Okay, we’ll tell them. Babies, we wanted to have children very, very much, but no matter how hard we tried, for a long time, we couldn’t. We started to look into adoption when I was offered my position at Cryobank. It’s an embryo bank — umm — where — where people who — umm. .”

“It’s like an adoption service.” Their mother took up the explanation. “But instead of babies that have already been born, it’s babies that haven’t been born yet.”

They frowned at their parents until their father added, “It’s like Easter, but instead of chicken eggs in your basket, you get — umm — fertilized human eggs.”

Their mother covered her face, which meant they weren’t to listen to anything their father said. It also meant that they probably weren’t going to get a better explanation.

“Soooo, Mommy put these Easter eggs into her tummy and had us,” Louise said.

“But they weren’t Mommy’s Easter eggs. They were someone else’s,” Jillian said.

“Yes, exactly,” their father said.

“Close enough,” their mother mumbled into her hands still covering her face.

Louise sighed. They were going to have to research this when they got home.

* * *

The seventh life lesson of the day was that when you’re nine years old (minus one week) and you blow up your playhouse while you’re in it, every adult in the world thinks a night at the hospital is a good idea. Thus they weren’t able to investigate their conception until the next morning.