The Other Half of My Heart Read online

  ALSO BY SUNDEE T. FRAZIER

  Brendan Buckley’s Universe and Everything in It

  For my precious pearls,

  Skye Lettiann and Umbria Mae

  Contents

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Minni’s heart soared as the small plane’s wheels lifted from the ground. She loved being up in the clouds with Keira, Mama and Daddy, looking down on the lush carpet of evergreens, the never-ending blue-gray ocean, and the rugged mountain peaks. Gliding, like a bird on the wind.

  Keira sank her nails into Minni’s arm. It hurt, but Minni didn’t pull away. It wasn’t often that she got to be the brave one.

  People who didn’t know Keira thought she wasn’t afraid of anything. After all, she’d been the first person on the Jefferson County gymnastics team, boy or girl, to execute a double front flip without a trampoline.

  But Minni knew her sister better than anyone, and after reading out loud in front of others, Keira’s next greatest fear was of riding in the tiny single-engine plane. She only ever got into Daddy’s Cessna 172 out of loyalty—because she prized being together as a family more than she feared falling from the sky. She had told Minni this when they were curled up in their giant zipped-together sleeping bags, lying under the stars on the back deck, listening to the ocean waves pound the rocks like the earth’s heartbeat.

  The engine’s rumble filled Minni’s head, and her chest vibrated along with its purring. The crowded space inside the four-seater smelled like gasoline. Daddy must have spilled some fuel on his pants or hands, which were covered in grease more often than not. Mama said the skin under Daddy’s nails had been permanently turned black. “Just like half my heart,” he would always reply.

  The plane bumped over a rough patch of air, and Keira’s nails dug in a little deeper. Mama’s voice crackled through Minni’s headset. “The Sisters are out today.” She pointed to the Olympic range.

  The two mountains were actually called the Brothers, but their family called them the Sisters. They stood side by side, connected at the hip. The taller one the family had dubbed Minni, and the shorter one was Keira. Minni gazed at the twin peaks, dusted with patches of snow even in late June.

  “Just in time for our story,” Daddy said. This was their tradition. Every year on June twenty-third, for as long as Minni could remember—first, pastrami and pickle sandwiches at Jerry’s, and then, a spin in Daddy’s plane. Their destination was always the same: Forks, Washington. And along the way, they heard The Story.

  “The day you were born,” Daddy said, “you made news around the world.”

  Mama didn’t much like talking about it, even though it had turned out to be the best day of her life, seeing that she’d gotten Minni and Keira in the end. To her it was a tragedy narrowly escaped, but to Daddy it was an escapade, an adventure, the way Daddy saw everything in life.

  After so many years, Mama must have decided it was okay. She didn’t even say, “Oh, Gordon, do you have to?”

  Daddy liked to say the crazy in him called out to the cautious in Mama, and the steady in Mama called out to the roller coaster in him, and that was how they got together. “The day you were born,” Daddy continued, “the crazy won over the cautious.”

  Minni looked out at the mountains and listened to Daddy tell them again how she and her twin sister had come into the world, exactly eleven years ago.

  It was a clear day, one of those days when the sky is so blue you wish the world would tip upside down so you could fall into the heavens and splash around. Those days were rare where they lived on the Olympic Peninsula—that part of Washington State that stuck out into the Pacific Ocean like a giant crab claw—which was why Daddy had wanted to take Mama flying in the first place. “Might be our last chance for a while,” he said.

  So Mama climbed into Daddy’s plane even though the babies inside her were only six weeks from being due. Her stomach was too big to fit in the front seat, so she got in the back and Daddy flew her around like a chauffeur in the sky.

  Mama had rubbed on her belly as if it were a magic lantern. Through the headphones, Daddy heard her telling her babies not to worry, that every little thing would be all right.

  “It was the sun and moon told me,” Mama said. “I knew things would work out because they were in the sky together that day—just like my babies were together inside me.” It was good luck, she said, and was why Keira got named after the sun and Minni got the middle name Lunette, which meant “little moon.”

  When Mama’s stomach started feeling funny, she didn’t tell Daddy right away. She thought it was the pastrami and pickle she’d eaten before they took off. Or her body getting used to the lighter air thousands of feet above solid ground. Or the banked turn Daddy was making when she felt those first, hard squeezes.

  But it wasn’t the sandwich or the air or the turn.

  “You were ready to come into the world,” Daddy said. “Didn’t matter to you that your mama was six thousand feet up.”

  “It was Keira,” Minni said, elbowing her sister in the side. Keira had finally released her grip and held Minni’s hand instead. “She was the one in a rush.”

  “I just wanted to give Daddy the chance to be a hero.” Keira grinned and batted her eyelashes at Daddy.

  “But you made sure not to come out first.” Minni narrowed her eyes, even though she wasn’t really mad at her sister about that.

  When Mama finally faced the facts and told Daddy that it was time for the girls to be born, they were too far from Port Townsend to go back.

  It had also turned gray, and Mama wasn’t so sure anymore that every little thing would be all right. The sun and moon had disappeared and it was raining, and their plane bounced like a ball on the water, and Mama yelled at Daddy, “Get this thing down!” and Daddy said, “You don’t have to yell,” because they were wearing the headsets, and Mama yelled, “Yes I do!” and Daddy didn’t say any more. He just got the plane down.

  Daddy had to land them on the tiny airstrip in Forks, the rainiest town in the continental United States. One hundred and twenty inches of rain a year. Ten feet! Put that all together, and Minni and Keira could do their stunt where Keira stood on Minni’s shoulders, and all you’d see would be Keira’s tight black curls floating on the water.

  The rest of the story was that Daddy got them down before they made their grand entrance, but just barely. He had sent an urgent message to Forks’s air traffic control. The ambulance’s flashing red li
ghts cut through the gray air as the plane bumped to the ground. They were born in the backseat of Daddy’s Cessna 172. Mama was too far along in the process, and nothing and nobody was going to make her get out.

  In the end, it was a good thing Minni and Keira came when they did. Keira’s cord was wrapped tightly around her neck. Mama joked Keira had been practicing her gymnastics in her belly and got tangled up in it. Minni’s theory was that her sister had done a last-second backflip to avoid being born first and getting The Name. Minerva. After Grandmother Johnson, who had somehow gotten Mama to agree to the idea.

  Mama always tried to make Minni feel better by reminding her that her name meant “goddess of wisdom.” It never worked. If only their grandmother had been named Jacqueline or Samantha or Coretta…

  Keira, which meant “sun” in Persian, was given the middle name Sol—“sun” in Spanish—so between her two names, she was one big fireball. Daddy also liked the name because it sounded like “soul” and they could tell the way she came out kicking and screaming—in spite of the cord—that she would have plenty of that.

  Whatever the reason, Minni had come out first, staring with big blue eyes at a big new world, and then Keira, squalling as if she wanted her presence to be known for miles around.

  The location of their birth got them on the evening news all across the country, but what got just as much attention, if not more, was something else.

  Something they’d been told all their lives didn’t really mean anything.

  Same Mama and Daddy. Born seven minutes apart in the back of their daddy’s plane.

  But Keira, with her dark curly hair and cinnamon-brown skin, was black, like their mama, while Minni, with her reddish blond hair and milky pale skin, was white, like their daddy. At least that was what the articles on the Internet said.

  One-in-a-million twins.

  Daddy and Mama hardly ever mentioned it, but Minni knew from the Web that people had heard about them as far away as London, England. They weren’t alone, either. She had seen pictures of other twins who came out looking as different from each other as she and Keira did. There were no pictures of her and Keira on the Internet, though. Mama would never allow that.

  Some people said it couldn’t be true. How could two babies, one black and one white, come from the same mama? Their story had even appeared on one of those Web sites that tell whether something is a hoax…which of course they weren’t, and the Web site said so. Minni and Keira really existed, and they really were twins, although Minni sometimes wondered herself how it had happened.

  She’d asked Mama once, “Am I just white? Or am I black, too?” because when she looked at her pale skin next to her sister’s and Mama’s rich brown, it sure was hard to see how she could be called black.

  “Of course you are,” Mama said, not really answering her question. Then she rested her hand on Minni’s cheek. “Your blackness is just hidden a little deeper—like a vein of gold running deep within the soil of your soul.”

  Mama was always pointing out that of the millions of genes that made them all human, only seven or eight told their skin what color to be. A minuscule amount, she said. A very small difference.

  So that was what Minni chose to believe, even though somewhere deep inside her brain, in a little drawer she rarely let herself open, lived the concern that the difference she’d been assured didn’t matter actually mattered a lot. That what she’d been told was small might be enormous. Not here, with her family in the sky. Never here. But somewhere. Maybe even everywhere except here.

  A tingle ran down Minni’s spine as Daddy dipped the right wing and circled over Forks. She squeezed her sister’s hand and made an early birthday wish: May nothing ever, ever come between Keira and me. Nothing—big or small.

  Chapter Two

  Minni’s mood plummeted as the plane touched down back home. As much as she loved life here in Port Townsend, it was always hard to leave the sky.

  Daddy turned the Cessna toward the small airport. Minni’s spirits sank even further when she saw the man with the rough red nose standing in the doorway of their shared hangar. He chewed on the end of his cigar. As usual, his eyes stuck to her family like magnets to metal.

  “They both yours?” he’d asked once when Minni and Keira had come with Daddy to fly into Seattle for the day.

  “Since the moment they were conceived!” Daddy replied.

  “They got the same mama?”

  Keira’s hands flew to her hips. “You ever heard of twins coming from different mamas?”

  The man’s cigar had practically dropped from his mouth.

  Daddy just smiled. Then he took them up into the air where they could be free.

  As much as Minni didn’t like the staring, she was used to it. Seemed like people stared at them everywhere they went. The locals all knew them, but Port Townsend was a major tourist destination on the Peninsula, and Minni had seen plenty of gawkers, as if their family was one of the small town’s attractions.

  Even in Seattle, where they went to visit the aquarium or ride the ferries and eat greasy fish and chips on the waterfront, people sometimes stared. Mama and Daddy would hold hands, and if there was room on the sidewalk, Minni would grab Mama’s hand and Keira would grab Daddy’s. They’d walk down the street looking like a chessboard row. The inseparable Kings.

  Minni knew people were just trying to figure her family out—how they fit together—since they weren’t all the same color like most families. But she still wished there weren’t quite so much staring.

  Today she ignored the man with the cigar, grasped her sister’s hand, and swung it all the way to the parking lot.

  Back in the car, zooming toward home, they belted out “Lean on Me” at the top of their lungs. Minni and Keira took turns leaning into each other—as far as they could with their seat belts on.

  They passed the big wooden sign painted in red and light blue: WELCOME TO PORT TOWNSEND—VICTORIAN SEAPORT AND ARTS COMMUNITY. They had lived here all their lives, in this little oceanside town, where it seemed as if half the people were artists and the other half wanted to be.

  Mama was no wannabe. She was the real deal. Acrylics, watercolors, even fiber arts. She and twenty-some other artisans operated a collective shop in town called the Water Street Gallery.

  “I need to make a quick stop at the food co-op,” Mama said. “We’re out of milk. And we can’t have our birthday cake later tonight without milk!” She smiled over her shoulder.

  Daddy pulled into the parking lot and Mama ran in. Her tightly twisted locks bounced with each step. Across the street stood the Family Veterinary Center, which also operated the local animal shelter. Minni had gone in this past week and asked if she could volunteer. She’d be helping feed and care for the animals three times a week once she got trained. She couldn’t wait.

  A few minutes later, Mama returned, carton in hand, and they headed for home.

  In the kitchen, Minni ignored the blinking light on the answering machine and got herself two cookies from the cookie jar. She climbed into a chair at the kitchen island.

  Keira ran straight in and pressed the message button. The recording played. “Lizette, it’s your mother.”

  Keira’s lips twisted in disappointment. “As if you wouldn’t recognize that voice,” she muttered, taking the milk from Mama and pouring a glass.

  Grandmother Johnson’s voice was pointed, like a newly sharpened pencil. “Call me immediately. It’s urgent. And happy birthday to the girls. I assume they got my card.” Click.

  Mama sighed. “Now what? I swear, that woman should have gone into theater instead of education.” Even after more than twenty years in the Pacific Northwest, Mama’s lilting voice still hinted at the fact that she wasn’t from around there. She sat kitty-corner from Minni and flipped through her new copy of Art & Design magazine.

  Daddy pulled out the whole package of cookies from the jar and put them on the island. “Aren’t you going to call? She said it was urgent.”

/>   “You know what that means,” Mama said, not looking up from the page.

  “Yeah, one of her prize flowers got bugs and she can’t enter it in the biggest show of the century.” Keira grabbed a cookie and dunked it in her milk.

  Bugs had been the emergency once—as if Mama could do anything about it from four thousand miles away. Or would know what to do if she could. Another time it had been raccoons in the trash. Grandmother Johnson also seemed to have a lot of health issues. Last fall she’d gotten something called gout in her big toe, which had required minor surgery. More recently, it was some kind of intestinal trouble.

  “I’ll be in our bedroom, in case anyone important calls,” Keira said, heading for the hallway with her milk and cookies.

  “Hey, young lady, she’s still your grandmother. Show some respect.” Mama raised her eyes to meet Keira’s.

  “A-l-l-l right,” Keira groaned. She disappeared down the hall.

  “You’re not exactly walking your talk,” Daddy said.

  Mama narrowed her eyes at him, but she didn’t argue. “Little Moon, hand me the phone. Please.”

  Minni hopped down and grabbed the phone from its cradle. Mama pushed the buttons slowly, still reading her magazine.

  Minni stayed to listen. As snooty as Grandmother Johnson could be, she had a certain mystique. She reminded Minni of Gigi’s antique German clock. The one under the glass dome their other grandmother kept on her mantel. Minni could stand forever and watch that clock’s wheels and sprockets spinning. She wanted to understand how it all fit together—literally, what made it tick—and how it kept time so precisely. If Grandmother Johnson was anything, she was complicated, just like that clock.

  “Mother? What’s wrong?”

  Grandmother Johnson’s voice pierced the air but Minni couldn’t make out what she was saying.

  “No, I suppose you didn’t say something was wrong.” Mama rolled her eyes at Daddy, pressed the phone between her ear and shoulder and went to the sink to fill her glass. “Okay, so what’s urgent?”