The alarm went off at five forty-five and Monica Ellis silenced it before the second chime, the way she had learned to silence everything in the house before it could wake the girls. For a moment she lay in the dark and listened to the small twin rhythms of their breathing through the wall β Sanaa's quick and shallow, already dreaming in exclamation points, Zola's slow and deep, the patient tide of a child who kept her thoughts in order before releasing them. Nine years today. At four forty-one this afternoon they would be exactly nine years old, and Monica had been awake since four, turning that fact over in her hands like a stone she had carried so long it had gone smooth.
She padded down the hall in her socks and stood in their doorway. The room smelled of clean laundry and the lavender sachet Aunt Vivian had tucked into each of their pillowcases last summer, a smell Monica associated with every good thing that had ever happened in that house. The girls slept curled toward each other the way they had slept since they were infants, Sanaa's hand flung across Zola's shoulder in her sleep, Zola's cheek pressed to her sister's forearm. Matching pink dresses hung on the closet door, pressed and waiting β dresses they had chosen themselves at the store last month, after a forty-minute deliberation that had involved the entire children's department of a major retailer and ended with both of them pointing at the same hanger at the same time, which Monica had decided to take as a sign from the universe that she could stop worrying about this one decision.
She woke them at six with kisses and the smell of pancakes.
"Mommy, it's still night," Sanaa announced, sitting straight up, her hair a dark storm around her face, her eyes already fully operational. "The sun is being lazy."
"The sun is on a schedule," Monica said, "and so are we. Bathroom, teeth, dresses. The bows are happening whether you cooperate or not."
"Yay, bows," Zola murmured into her pillow, not moving. She was the one who loved the bows most and protested them least, which Monica had long ago decided was the purest form of Zola: devotion disguised as indifference.
The bows were black grosgrain, two inches wide, the unbroken rule since the twins were five: Sanaa's on the left, Zola's on the right. It had started as a practical matter β a way for teachers and babysitters and Monica's own sleep-deprived brain to tell them apart at a glance β and hardened over the years into something closer to law. When they were six, Zola had tried wearing hers on the left for a day, an experiment in anarchy, and by noon she had moved it back herself, saying only, "It itched," though Monica knew perfectly well that what had itched was the wrongness of it. Some things you didn't mess with. The bows were one of those things.
Monica tied them at the kitchen table while the twins were still half asleep, their heads heavy against her hands, the pancakes going slightly cold on their plates. Sanaa's bow first β left side, a crisp loop, the tails even. Sanaa narrated the process with her eyes closed: "You're making the bunny ears, then the bunny hops through, then you pull β I know how bows work, Mommy, I'm practically nine."
"You are practically nine," Monica agreed. "Twenty-two hours and forty-one minutes from now, to be exact. I've counted."
"Has Zola counted?" Sanaa asked, nudging her sister with an elbow.
Zola, eyes still closed, held up ten fingers, then folded one down. Nine. She had counted. Of course she had counted.
"Zola's bow," Monica said softly, and turned to the right side of the second small head. Zola leaned into her mother's hands the way she leaned into everything she trusted β completely, without reservation, as if the world had never once given her a reason to hold back. Monica tied the bow and her throat did something complicated, because nine years ago at this exact hour she had been in a hospital bed in Charlotte with two impossibly small humans on her chest, and a nurse had said, "Look at them looking at you," and Monica had looked, and she had never really stopped looking since.
"Perfect," she said, and her voice only wobbled a little.
The dresses went on over their heads, pink as sunrise, and the girls spun in the kitchen in their socks, and Sanaa declared that they looked like "birthday royalty," and Zola said, very quietly, "We look like us," which Monica wrote down later on the back of a grocery receipt because it was the truest thing anyone had said all week.
Aunt Vivian called from Atlanta at seven-fifteen, already crying.
"Don't you start," Monica warned, laughing, "because if you start I'll start, and then the girls will think somebody died, and nobody died, everybody's fine, it's a birthday."