Chapter 4: Souvenirs
The week went by in a blur for Clara. She was able to check off most of the things she'd put on her itinerary, but the entire time she felt a little subdued in her enjoyment of the sights and historical exhibits she visited.
Each night she would return to the pub ("The Leaky Cauldron" read the sign on the front- a sign she hadn't seen that freezing night) and ask Tom if there were any messages for her.
There never were.
She hated sounding like a lovesick idiot, but her time was running out. She thought that perhaps he might give her his mailing address. Or, if she could get that giant hunk of junk computer to get back online, maybe she could send him an email if he even had one.
But a voice in the back of her head- the bitter one that sounded so much like her mother's, told her she was being utterly stupid.
Still, she exchanged contact information with Tom and promised to send him a postcard from the States when he mentioned that he'd never heard of this California place and refused to believe that they never had snow.
There was something about the man that reminded Clara of her father, even though they looked and sounded absolutely different. And in the absence of Fred, Clara found herself confiding in the hunched-over proprietor.
She felt somewhat sad when she realized that he wasn't going to appear out of thin air to wish her farewell like some kind of chick flick, but she had begun to think of that first night as one of those pleasant memories that she would look back on fondly.
It wasn't until Clara was three weeks back into second semester of her final year that she found out that somehow, though she took her birth control pill religiously, she had fallen pregnant.
There was no other man she could pull out of the woodwork to attribute her condition to, unless she honestly wanted to go for another virgin birth bid.
But she was no virgin.
And there was only one person it could be.
The worst part about the entire thing was that she was torn about what to do. It seemed like a cut-and-dried scenario- she knew she should terminate and cry and bleed under a blanket at having the crappiest luck ever.
After all, she was almost done with college, and she knew as well as anyone that no one would hire a pregnant college grad, much less a single mother.
But then she would think back to the tiny crinkle on either side of Fred's eyes and the way he'd said "Sometimes you just know."
"I'm being an idiot," she muttered to herself, sitting in the student health center waiting room with her eyes glued to the floor.
Logically, she knew that no one was looking at her, but she could feel people staring. It was almost like they knew.
She knew what she needed to do.
"You're what?!" Clara's mother screeched loudly, "Don't expect me to take care of your bastards, you fat whore!"
Normally, the woman was far less overtly abusive, but after a couple glasses of wine, her tongue loosened considerably.
"Come now, Jenny," Clara's stepfather said, twisting his mustache nervously, "There's no need to be abusive."
"Still," the older woman glared contemptuously at her daughter, "She could have decided to choose a less stressful time to spring this atrocious news on us. After all, we haven't told her our news, have we?"
"News?" Clara asked nervously.
"Why yes," Clara's mother said with a drunken hiccup, "We're moving. Far, far away, where I won't have to see your disappointing fat face. And that means that after this last semester, you're on your own. No more money from the first national bank of Mommy."
"I'm planning on grad-" Clara started.
"Oh are you? With a baby on the way? You must be dumber than you look. A baby is hard work and requires a lot of sacrifice, and that's if you have support, which you obviously don't from the lack of a man at your side. By the looks of it, it's probably a litter," her mother replied with a dismissive wave, "Just don't expect any help from us."
"Sorry, Clara," her stepfather said, but his eyes glinted greedily, obviously glad that their socially pressured financial obligation was almost at an end.
Clara left early and cried into her pillow until she fell asleep.
In the end, it was not her blood relatives but her friends who became her support network. When she found out that she was carrying twins, she cried again, thinking of her mother's cruel yet prophetic words, but her friend Shelly was holding her hand the whole time. She lived in a large Victorian house that had been segmented into multiple rental rooms, and each of her friends made her feel better about her condition. The woman who lived in the attic, Ronnie, worked for the local health clinic and helped walk Clara through all of the various social assistance paperwork to ensure that she could get prenatal care and afford food.
When her water broke, her friend Chris drove her to the ER and when everyone assumed that he was the father, neither of them corrected the staff. Two boys were born after an agonizing twenty hours of labor, their eyes open and curious in this new, strange world. The staff had to prick their feet to make them cry.
Looking at her children, Clara knew she'd made the right decision. Even though she was filled with the deep fear that nothing she could ever do would be enough, she also had to admit that she felt like she was home.
Under "father," Clara simply wrote "Fred." She had never learned what his last name was. But she knew what she would name her children without a second thought. She named the twin that was born first after her father, Ryan, in honor of the man who had loved her as much as her mother apparently didn't. The second son she named for Fred, giving him the longer spelling of Frederick, as she doubted that Fred was her mystery man's full name.
She tried to send letters to Tom at The Leaky Cauldron, but after the third one, she received a piece of folded yellowed stationary on her front doorstep that merely said, "Do not contact me again" with no signature.
She took it as a sign to close the door on the past and move forward with her life.
Strange things always seemed to happen around the Summers twins. Inseparable from birth, the two were always into something or other. More than once, Clara found her toddler sons on the top of the high cabinet in the living room of the house she rented with her friends. Things would go missing from locked rooms and appear in their crib days later. And as they grew, they developed their own language, looking at each other almost as though reading each other's minds. They had their mother's eyes, but their hair was as red as blood, their faces freckled in the California sun. Clara was able to find work with the college as a librarian after graduation and the reasonably priced on-campus nursery in the family student housing area was a godsend. She was able to save up and take advantage of the faculty housing, eventually securing a two bedroom apartment next to campus.
Her sons grew up happy and healthy, though Clara could only provide them with modest means. But they were never hungry and they were never poor. In school, they went by Rick and Ryan, their names spoken by their peers as though they referred to only one person. They got up to all sorts of mischief, but no one could ever catch them at it, somehow. Everyone knew it was them, though, much to the eternal chagrin of the teachers, who tried to keep the two separated to no avail.
It was a beautiful summer morning, and she'd just finished grinding the beans for her morning coffee, when Clara heard a loud tapping on the windows and the sound of wings beating against glass. The boys were watching cartoons, wrapped in blankets and hunched over the coffee table with bowls of sugary marshmallow cereal. Clara had been eternally grateful that they seemed to take after their father's more svelte figure. Both were skinny as rails even though they ate like their legs were hollow.
She pulled back the curtain and was utterly flabbergasted to see two speckled owls beating against the kitchen window.
"Whatever could the matter be?" she muttered to herself, opening the window.
She'd never seen an owl so close-up before. She'd expected her actions to scare them away, but they seemed to be encouraged by the opened window. Both landed on the sil and extended a leg.
Clara stifled a chuckle because they almost looked like the owl version of showgirls doing the can-can with their legs stuck out at the same time.
Something was attached to their legs.
"You want me to take those off of your poor legs?" Clara asked the owls, feeling stupid when they just looked back at her as though to say you do know that owls can't talk, right lady?
She untied the string and pulled the small wrapped bundle from the first owl's foot and then went to the second owl's foot and did the same. Both seemed to look at her expectantly and she realized that they were waiting for something.
"What exactly do owls eat?" she asked, more to herself than anything.
The owls looked at each other as though to say, oh good lord, the things we have to put up with.
"Erm...do you eat bacon?" Clara asked, holding a piece timidly in a pair of tongs.
The owls both ruffled their feathers and bobbed their heads, but since Clara did not speak Owl, she had no way of knowing what this meant.
She extended the bacon to one of the owls and it pecked dubiously it for a moment, its eyes widening as it speared and gulped it down greedily, hooting with satisfaction.
"Ok, ok, I'll get one for your friend," Clara said, spearing another with her tongs and extending it to the second owl.
The second owl simply grabbed and gulped it down even more quickly than the first, its eyes going half-lidded in an owl-approximation of a satisfied smile before it hooted softly and they took off together.
"Well, that was strange," Clara said, unwrapping the small packages, finding a small brass knob, the kind that might attach to a cabinet, in each, along with a smart linen envelope with a very official looking wax seal on the back.
She turned them over and her eyes widened
Each was addressed to one of her sons.
"Hogwarts School….of Witchcraft and Wizardry?" she gasped, looking at the return address as she sat down far too hard on the wooden dining room chair.
And suddenly, everything came back to her in a rush of memory- the lights dimming, the glowing fox that spoke with a human voice...and she knew.
Breaking the seals on each letter, she pulled out the stationary within and began to read.