Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger

and ran off to wrap the presents Jack had bought.
    “See,” said Edie to Valentina. “You just open your mouth and say
No
.”
    “Okay,” said Valentina. She twirled and the dress flared. Edie laughed.
     

Boxing Day
    J
ACK WALKED into his den and found the twins watching a movie. It was midnight and usually all three of them would have been in bed by now.
    “That looks somewhat familiar,” said Jack. “What are you watching?”
    “The Filth and the Fury,”
Julia said. “It’s a documentary about the Sex Pistols. You and Mom gave it to us for Christmas.”
    “Oh.” The twins were sprawled together on the couch, so Jack lowered himself into the recliner. As soon as he was seated he felt exhausted. Jack had always enjoyed Christmas, but the days after Christmas seemed vacant and cheerless. The effect was compounded by the fact that the twins were leaving for London in a few days.
Where did the time go? Five days until their twenty-first birthdays. Then gone.
    “How’s the packing going?” he asked.
    “Okay,” said Valentina. She turned off the sound on the TV. “We’re going to be over the weight limit.”
    “Somehow that’s not surprising,” Jack said.
    “We need to get converters, you know, to plug in our computers and stuff.” Julia looked at Jack. “Can we go downtown with you tomorrow?”
    “Sure. We’ll have lunch at Heaven on Seven,” Jack said. “Your mom will want to come with.” Edie had been shadowing the twins for weeks, hoarding them, memorising them.
    “That’s cool, we can go to Water Tower. We need new boots.”
    Valentina watched Johnny Rotten singing silently.
He looks deranged. That’s a great sweater.
She and Julia had studiously prepared for the trip to London, reading
Lonely Planet
and Charles Dickens, making packing lists and trying to find their new flat on Google Earth. They had speculated endlessly about Aunt Elspeth and the mysterious Mr. Fanshaw, had been very pleasantly surprised by the amount of money in their new bank account at Lloyd’s. Now there was hardly anything left to do, which created an odd void, a feeling of restless dread. Valentina wanted to leave right this minute, or never.
    Julia watched her father. “Are you okay?”
    “Yeah, I’m fine. Why?”
    “I dunno, you seem kind of wiped.”
You’ve gained a huge amount of weight and you sigh a lot. What’s wrong with you?
    “I’m okay. It’s just the holidays.”
    “Oh.”
    Jack sat trying to imagine the house/his marriage/his life without the twins. He and Edie had been avoiding the subject for months, so now he thought about it obsessively, oscillating between fantasies of marital bliss, his actual memories of the last time the twins had left home and his worries about Edie.
    For some time before Elspeth’s death Edie had been distracted. Jack had hired the detective in hope of discovering the reason for her absentmindedness, her vacant stare, her bright, false cheer whenever he asked her about it. But the detective could only observe Edie; he had no answers for Jack’s questions. After Elspeth’s death Edie’s distraction had been replaced by a profound sadness. Jack could not comfort her. He could not seem to say the right thing, though he tried. Now he wondered how Edie would fare once the twins were gone.
    Each time the twins left for college, things started out well. Jack and Edie revelled in their freedom: there would be late nights, loud sex, spur-of-the-moment amusements and slightly excessive drinking. But then a kind of bleakness always set in. Soon it would be upon them, their empty house. They would eat dinner together, just the two of them; the evening would stretch out before them in silence, to be filled with a DVD and perhaps a walk down to the beach or the club. Or they would retreat to opposite ends of the house, he to surf the Internet or read a Tom Clancy novel, Edie to work on her needlepoint while listening to an audio book. (She was currently listening