Escape From Norriswood

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Tara had been quiet for most of the truck ride, unsure what to say, what to think, her doppelganger (no, doppelganger wasn't the right word, this girl looked too much like Tara to be her doppelganger), her clone sitting in the back of the cab. After a while, Tara realized the other girl had been severely quite, as well.

"We just need to go somewhere where I can make sure no one will see you two together," Terry had said. He'd wound the pickup through the shifting, potholed back roads of Norriswood, taking them further and further west. Taking them further and further away from the town center, and closer to the brush that surrounded the town.

Eventually he came to a place where the road was no longer paved, nor lit, and instead cranked forward through the brush, wide enough for one lane, just wide enough for his truck to get in. Trees scraped Tara's window, and the truck climbed over and rolled down the humps in the trail.

About 10 or 15 minutes of travelling like this, the pickup had emerged at a point where the road widened out. On the right, a large pond sat quiet beneath the night sky, a small gazebo resting at its shore. Terry had pulled the truck off the road, and they'd all hopped out.

Sitting now in a circle in the gazebo, Terry turned to Tara. A small, battery-powered lamp hung from the ceiling, and she could hear the moths throw their bodies against it.

"Tara, let's just keep calling you Tara, since you're our guest," Terry said. "And you can go by your middle name...which is?" He looked at the other girl, who looked down, her eyes skirting along the wooden floor.

"Hardy," Tara's lookalike said.

"Great, then," Terry said. Tara watched Hardy shift her green eyes towards him.

"Alright, I'll get to the point," Terry said. "Look, full disclosure, Tara. I've been caught up in this mess one way or another since I was a kid. Since I was like, fourteen, or fifteen. I got tangled up with something big to do with a paper mill back then, on the east coast. People started going missing in town, and the people around the mill started getting wind that some of the workers there were actually there doing something else. Some other job, something funded secretly by the government, some kind of anonymous oligarchy at the top, that didn't leave a paper trail."

Tara scraped her sneaker against the floorboard. She found it hard to make eye contact with Hardy, and felt like every time she did, the two girls would begin thinking the exact same thought.

"Well, were the people right?" Hardy said.

Terry looked away from her, toward the lamp on the ceiling. Tara watched his pupils constrict, and thought she could see the rest of his face pull tighter together.

"No," Terry said. "But there was something going on over there, and when I got out of that town a few years later, I started moving around different parts of the continent, always going to one mill town or another, always in-directly working for one. What I saw when I was 15 stayed with me, and I've spent the last 20-25 years rolling that experience around in my head, trying to make sense of it. And trying to make sure something like that doesn't happen again."

"But what was it?' Tara said.

"That," Terry said. "I really don't know."

"But what about us?" Hardy said. "How can we exist?"

"I cannot explain how you two are with each other now, in the same town, on the same planet."

"What do you mean by that?" Tara said. "You think one of us is from another dimension or something?" she laughed, then. It sounded like some kind of theory Bobby and his Visual Arts friends would have talked about if they were stoned enough.

"No...but I don't know. If I were to guess, I would say some kind of multi-dimensional twins would be the right answer. I mean, genetically, you two are probably almost clones of one another. The only thing that's different is your experiences, the difference in the way you two have lived through time." Tara found herself eyeing Hardy then, and her gaze ran along her body, her paint-stained coveralls, her white t-shirt underneath, her jaw line that seemed like a cutout of Tara's own, even down to the micro blonde hairs caught in the yellow light of the lamp.

"What do you mean our experiences are different?" Tara said, and felt her cheeks grow rouged.

"Well," Terry said. "Hardy didn't go to university."

"So you never met Bobby?" Tara said.

Hardy shook her head. "I stayed here after high school. I still haven't gone to school. But I'm not sure I want to."

"Also," Terry said. "Hardy doesn't know a Rosalyn." Tara flexed her leg up, and brought it back down onto the gazebo floor.

"That's not to say there isn't a Rosalyn here. They've just never met."

Rosalyn. Tara's thoughts raced to some destination in her head then, and she realized it had always been there, just laying covered, invisible to her. Was Rosalyn the reason she left Norriswood to go to school at St. Edward? Was it some subconscious thing she'd realized about her, about the way she lived that she knew she had to get away?

She realized that Terry had continued talking, and she brought herself back down then, back to the gazebo, back to the conversation.

"I discovered this town a few months ago. Around the same time I met your dad and his buddies in the other Norriswood, Tara. I've been travelling back and forth since then, trying to make sense of what's been going on. Anyway, Hardy and I...there's probably something you should know about us."

Beside Terry, Hardy nodded, and her hand felt its way over to Terry's thigh, to his own hand. Tara watched the man's wrinkled, suntanned palm swallow a replica of her own faint, tepid one.

"I'm pregnant," Hardy said. "I'm one month pregnant." Hardy beamed at her then. All whites, all unblemished skin stretched back, all eyes glowing beneath her short bangs. Tara felt it was a face she'd seen in every bathroom, and bedroom mirror, but it was an expression she'd never noticed before. It was an expression she'd never felt, never had occasion to wear.

"Who knows, maybe if we figure out this mess you can come to the wedding," Hardy said. Terry glanced away. "You know, like long lost sisters."

"But we're not sisters," Tara said. "We're not even close to being the same person."

She stood up then, and opened the door to the gazebo. Outside, the night smelled of decay. The first leaves already rotting, the muck of the pond wafting toward her. The air hummed with the late-season mosquitos. From afar then, somewhere over the trees and hills she heard something ring out across the night.

She poked her head back in the gazebo. "Sounds like the mill just caught fire," she said.

Terry was silent for a second. "You should try calling Rosalyn," he said. "Call my phone. Tell her we need to get you two somewhere safe to stay tonight.