The first time wasn’t intentional. Beth passed by the towering, oval mirror, gold-rimmed and tilted against the wall of the second-floor landing. She didn’t want to see her reflection due to the magnificently swollen pimple just above her left eyebrow. Glancing over, however, the mirror revealed nothing but the opposing wall’s flaking, white paint. She stepped closer, waving her hand in front of the mirror. No one waved back.
The action, or power, came naturally. She didn’t have to close her eyes and focus, or wave her hands over her body, or whisper a Latin phrase. She just imagined it, decided she wanted it, and so it would be. It was as easy a movement as breaking into a run or snapping her fingers.
She didn’t do it all the time. Mostly because she rarely found herself alone. Late at night, in bed, she marveled at the impression her hand made over the quilt. Or, standing in the backyard, watching her father chop wood when he thought she was out picking huckleberries. He’d glance in her direction and her skin would prickle with the looking, but his eyes always went through her and away.
She found out her brother had the same skill only a few months later, around their fifteenth birthday. By nature, it was a hard thing to pin down. She couldn’t very well catch him in the act.
She had been watching the sunrise, the grass wet under her legs. The sun, itself, hidden behind the trees but the sky had purpled, thin, creamy swirls of pink clouds winding their way through it. Something prodded her shoulder. She jumped and looked around, but there was nothing and no one to see in the whole clearing. Then came a jab on her other side and a pull on her ponytail, so hard that she fell backwards into the dewy grass. Auggie looked down at her, grinning. He reached out a hand.
“Guess what,” he said, thinking he was something special. That smile disappeared as fast as she did, and she pinched him on the back of the arm.
As far as they could figure out, there were only a few rules. The main one being that though they could create the illusion of invisibility, their bodies still took up physical space. When practicing, Beth often found herself having to leap from her parents upon their sudden approach towards her. Similarly, they could still be heard, like when she scuttled out of the way of her mother’s hand only to see the abject terror on her face when the floorboards creaked.
It was difficult to find things to do with it, especially with where they lived. It wasn’t like flying or teleportation, something that would take them somewhere new. They were the same only now, no one could see them.
They played games, out in the woods, trying to find each other by the sound of their voices. You could only win by grabbing the other person. You weren’t allowed to move, but they did anyway, so the game often lasted a long time. So long, they forgot they were in the midst of playing running laps in the woods. More than anything, they snuck out late at night to watch the stars and jets paint white lines across the sky, wondering what kind of people sat up there. Just before dawn, they’d trudge home, clothes damp with dew, and perch by the living room’s open window to listen to their parents murmur to each other about the outside world and the things that neither Beth nor Auggie had ever seen like dogs and television and a place called McDonald’s that had French fries their mother moaned too much about. Beth didn’t think much could beat Dad’s bacon or even Muma’s bread for best food.
They debated telling their parents about their power. Maybe it was something everyone could do, a sense as obvious as sight or smell and they just hadn’t been told. They didn’t know what their parents withheld, or didn’t, as they were their only source of information. They were the only people Auggie and Beth knew, besides Uncle Caleb, who came by every few months and snuck them presents that they hid under their mattresses, and behind their dressers, and even in hollow nooks of trees. Beth had lost three Hershey bars that she put in a tree she forgot to mark, trying to hide them from Auggie. She hoped the chocolate made the squirrels happy.
Dad said Muma had agoraphobia. They met when Dad was going door to door offering to mow lawns. She opened the door a sliver so his only glimpse of her was a single big toe. He fell in love with that big toe, at least, according to his telling. He convinced her to marry him not long after that and they came out here and built a house. The wall that surrounded the land was tall, made of wood, and impossible to climb. Once, Beth and Auggie found a strip of the wood crumpled away, but a wire fence rose just as tall on its other side. They could see through it, out into nothing but more forest beyond the clearing and mountains past that. They wondered if anyone had ever come across the wall, curious about what hid behind it, or if they were too far away even for that.
Their father built it so Muma would feel safe, so she could go outside and not be too scared. She trembled, and wrung her hands, and never stayed outside for long. But it was better than it used to be. When they were little, clamoring to see her in the morning, Dad would say, “Not today, kids. Maybe tomorrow.” Sometimes they snuck inside the room anyway and found her in the closet, a blanket over her head. She would say nothing; still, as a ghostly specter, waiting for them to shut the door.
The property had a well but no electricity. Uncle Caleb brought flashlights you could shake to light up, but they never lit very bright. He gave Beth a clock that glowed in the dark, but the battery died after a month. The only thing he ever brought that worked was a calculator with a little solar charger in the corner. Beth spent hours putting in endless calculations, pressing the buttons, marveling at how it came up with an answer so quickly. She’d sit by the window with the calculator perched on the sill and stabbed at the keys. She did it for hours, even though Auggie got mad that she hogged it.
Auggie and Beth were twins constantly annoyed by each other and, yet, inseparable. Beth didn’t know what she would do without Auggie. Talk to herself more often, likely. She already did that too much as it was, narrating her actions as if she were a character in a book.
They had two games: Monopoly and Twister. Only Auggie and Beth ever played Twister maneuvering around each other. Dad read the orders off the spinner from his sprawl on the couch. Beth considered going invisible during the game, just to see what Dad would do, but she never did.
Their parents didn’t talk much about the twins’ childhood, only that they used to look exactly alike. So much so that, sometimes, they needed to strip them down naked to tell them apart. Supposedly, the twins liked to swap clothes to add to the trickery. Beth didn’t remember this, and sometimes she thought Dad came up with these elaborate tales just to end their questions, even though usually he ended up just giving them more.
They didn’t know anything about their family history, not even their parents’ real names. Dad was always Dad. Muma always Muma, never Mom. When Beth was little, she used to ask questions all the time, but Muma always cried when she did, fat and silent tears. Uncle Caleb wasn’t any help either. He got fidgety and started patting his chest pocket for his cigarettes, even though he never smoked them while he was there.
“You’ll have to ask your parents,” he said, “Not my business.”
The most shocking thing she had ever learned was that Dad had a twin sister. She often wondered where she was, and why she and Dad had separated. Even though she hated Auggie, she couldn’t imagine life without him.
She liked to think this mysterious aunt looked just like herself and that if she met her now, she would be a vision of Beth’s future.
The only thing the twins really knew about Uncle Caleb was that he wasn’t really their uncle. He was a friend of Dad’s, from a time before them. He told them things they considered abstract at the time, about the cities and countries all around the world. He brought books they could never keep with photographs and drawings. They did get to keep a National Parks set of the game Memory. The twins never played it, only split the cards up between them to flip through when they were feeling bored or claustrophobic nestled under the blankets with their pathetic shakable flashlights.
Muma was afraid of Uncle Caleb as she was afraid of anything from the outside world. She always stayed in her room the entire time he visited. Once, he stayed for a few days and she never left her room. During that trip, Beth got to read the entirety of a book called The Lord of the Flies. She attempted to write it down from memory in one of the notebooks Uncle Caleb had given her, but she couldn’t. It didn’t feel right to make up what she couldn’t exactly remember, and it wouldn’t be the same anyway. Instead, she fantasized about what it would be like if she and Auggie suddenly found themselves on their own. She tried to ignore the jolt of pleasure she got from the thought.
Since Uncle Caleb hadn’t visited in the last few years, the twins entertained themselves. Auggie liked to write. Beth came up with the plots each stranger than the last. He wrote them down and always managed to turn them into something pretty and like something that could happen. She thought up a story about a frog and a dog that robbed a bank, and you could’ve cried hearing Auggie’s story; the frog was going to use the money to save his sick grandfather.
Auggie never wrote anything funny. Everything he wrote was a tragedy and the characters usually died. The frog slit his wrists vertically, just like Muma’s scars. Beth told him no one likes to read that sort of thing.
“Who’s going to read my stories?” he scoffed.
“Me.”
“I don’t care what you think, crazy face.” He called her that sometimes, even though they had the same face.
“There was no reason for him to kill himself, anyway,” she said. “They wouldn’t have caught him. Why would they think a frog and a dog would rob a human bank?”
“You don’t understand,” he said, but didn’t explain.
Beth didn’t have any kind of talent like that. Dad said she was scatter-brained like Muma, and it was why she had trouble cooking, and cleaning, and doing anything that required patience and time, which was everything. Beth wanted to be an astronaut, when Uncle Caleb told them there was such a thing.
“There’s probably someone on the moon right now,” he said, pointing at the sky. After that, she always squinted, trying to find someone on its surface. She thought that if she could see them up there, then maybe they could see her too.
Auggie thought Beth was as crazy as her face for wanting to trade their nowhere on earth for that nowhere in the sky “I’m going to live in New York City,” he said. “I’m going to be a taxi driver, taking everyone where they need to go.”
“That’s a stupid dream,” she said. “You’d be a horrible driver.”
He shoved her and she shoved back until Dad told them to get along for once in their lives.
Dad was always the one taking care of them. Muma seemed to forget their existence, sometimes, furrowing her brow like she had to search for the memory of their faces, like she didn’t think that they belonged to her. Neither Beth nor Auggie looked like her much. They had Dad’s black hair, blue eyes, and his height. He was the one who hugged them when they skinned their knees, and played Monopoly, and read stories from his memory; Greek mythology and recitations of old movies. He sang, too. His husky voice backed by the crackling of the fire, or the rain against the roof, or the slap of his palm against his thigh.
But Muma was his priority. Even if she was scared and sad all the time and ignored him. Beth felt bad for him. Beth wanted to hate her for making all of them live out there in the wilderness isolated from the rest of the world. It was hard to ignore your own needs and wants in favor of someone else.
Sometimes Beth thought she had inherited a bit of Muma’s agoraphobia, but Auggie certainly hadn’t. He was always antsy. He fought with Dad, constantly, refusing to do chores and operating on his own schedule. Once, he insisted that their father tell them where they were, demanding he point to their land on a map. He was yelling so loud that Beth knew Muma could hear upstairs, and Dad knew it too.
He slapped Auggie, a sound that chilled Beth. Dad never lost his temper, was always the one quick with a smile to diffuse any tension.
“We live here,” he said. “The outside doesn’t matter. You’re in the best place you can be, with a family that loves you, and that’s all you need to know.”
Then he dragged Auggie upstairs by the arm and locked him in his room. Beth had gone invisible, but she didn’t realize it until Dad came downstairs and called her name. She ignored him, sneaking outside to sit by the creek to calm her shaking.
She worried that Auggie would disappear in the night, find a way out, and leave her behind. She crept into his room many nights after waking up and felt a twist in her stomach that she recognized as his own wanderlust. This happened sometimes, her feeling what he felt. Maybe it was just assumption. It was easy to read his face. To see the position of his eyebrows, or the set of his mouth, and know what emotions he felt. But other times, she understood when they weren’t even in the same room.
Beth stood by his bed, looking at the shape of him under the blanket. She shook his shoulder to wake him up, just to be sure. It was worth it for the reassurance, even when he shoved her away and grumbled, “Stop acting crazy, crazy face.”
A small pond lay within their walls. Beth and Auggie always rushed through their work in the summer months so they could run to the water and dive in and look at the sky through the murky blur of the water.
Afterward, they’d lie in the grass to dry off and make up stories about their parents. Mostly Beth did, and Auggie listened with his eyes closed, hands folded across his stomach like a sage. Her new idea was that they had robbed a bank, like the frog had. She had never been very creative. Auggie was used to her stealing his ideas.
Something went wrong and they had to go into hiding. They funneled the money through Uncle Caleb and used it to build the house and the wall. Maybe they had killed someone. She didn’t tell Auggie that, though, only thought it in her head. In the morbid part where she wondered what it would be like if their parents disappeared. She thought maybe that was why Muma was so distraught, because she was the one who pulled the trigger.
Auggie said Beth had too big of an imagination coming up with these alternative stories about why they were here.
“She’s just sick,” he said. “That’s it.”
Beth watched Muma a lot, out of the corner of her eye. Muma often ate dinner with her eyes shut, mouth working at a piece of bread. She’d sit in the living room, in the dark, braiding her own hair or just pulling at the strands looking out the window. Once, Beth woke up and saw her outside in the grass, bare foot. Her legs translucent under the moon. Her hair fallen to her waist and it seemed to glitter like millions of tiny fireflies had burrowed themselves inside. She was beautiful once upon a time. She was still beautiful, but her sadness and her sickness blurred it up so much. Dad still saw it. He looked at her like she held the whole night sky in her face.
Muma walked to the edge of the wood and just stood there like something possessed then turned back to the house, knelt and pressed her face into the grass. Beth went into Auggie’s room to show him, but by the time she got upstairs, Muma was gone. Auggie turned over in bed with a sigh as the stairs creaked in the hall.
Muma loved the stars, even though she usually watched them through the window. Auggie said it was ironic, but he said everything was ironic. Muma could sit all night reading her little book on the constellations and their stories. She used to point them out one by one when they were little.
“That’s Cassiopeia. Now go find it.”
They’d run outside, trying to keep the image of the map inside their slippery memories and searched the sky. If they found it, both scrambled back into the house trying to take credit. Muma smiled and offered congratulations, letting them sit on either side of her and place her arms around them. Beth always waited for that arm. Sometimes she couldn’t believe that she had grown inside this person, that she had been a part of her once.
A few months before it all ended, before the lights, and the strangers, and the noise, and Muma staring past Beth and Auggie like they were nothing to her, the twins snuck downstairs, invisible. The two of them sat pressed together on the bottom step, knowing if their parents approached, they’d have to run upstairs and the loose steps would creak like screams under their feet. Beth was beginning to suspect that Muma thought there was a ghost in the house. She once came out of the bedroom when Beth opened her door. She stared at the open sliver of darkness, terror in her eyes, her tongue poking out through her teeth. She was too afraid to come into Beth’s room to check on her and went back into her own room and shut the door.
“What will we do?” Muma asked as Beth and Auggie huddled together on the stairs. “They’re so old now. It’s been so long.”
“We’ll figure it out,” Dad said. “I don’t think they want to leave. They love it here.”
“Does it matter if they don’t?” she asked. Neither spoke for a long time. Wind whistled through the house, and Beth was glad for the warmth of Auggie’s arm pressing into hers.
Dad murmured something as if consoling her, but Muma grew more hysterical.
“I never wanted this,” she said, and started to say it louder, until her voice was abruptly muffled. After a long moment, tears in her trembling voice, “I just want to go home.”
“This is your home. This is where you’re meant to be. They need a mother.”
There was a long stretch of silence. Beth could hear Auggie’s breathing, strangled, nearly a pant.
“Yes,” Muma said.
“And our children?” Dad asked.
Beth thought it strange, how he emphasized ‘our’. Auggie’s fingers dug painfully into her thigh amidst another pause.
“Yes.”
Their voices grew quieter. Beth glanced over at Auggie even though she couldn’t see him. His hand fumbled around, tracing along her arm until it found her fingers, and squeezed. They snuck outside, through the back door that didn’t squeak quite so much as the front. The wall was fifteen minutes away, still so impossibly tall even as they themselves grew taller. They marked their heights at this spot, straight spine and chin up against the wood as the other dashed a line with a crayon. They grew at almost the same rate, aside from Auggie’s growth spurt at twelve. Their last crayon marks were parallel and hadn’t changed in a year.
They were both visible, again, though only in shadows under the overcast sky. Auggie kicked the fence, letting out a scream that didn’t seem to come from him at all. It was a sound that pierced the air and called the whole world to attention. Beth thought, everyone can finally hear us now. But when he finished, and stood there with chest heaving, the nighttime sounds filtered back in, as constant as ever. The crickets chirped, the leaves stirred in the gusty wind, and an animal snuffled somewhere far off in the brush.
It was a cruel joke, this power. No one could see them anyway. They were already invisible.
Caitlin Helsel graduated from University of Illinois with a degree in Creative Writing after also attending school in New York City and Chicago. She continued traveling after school, working two years in Yellowstone National Park and traveling around the country before finally settling down in Indiana.
