The Monster in the Closet

Lisa J. Bigelow

In The Secret Garden, Mary hears Colin’s cries within a matter of days and knows there is another child in the house, hidden as the garden for which the book is named, tucked behind velvet curtains you could drown in and gilt-framed portraits of old-fashioned ladies and gentlemen contemplating lemons.

Tuck couldn’t remember when he first realized there was another child; he’d always been aware. It was like television signals keening to your haunted ears, like knowing who your mother is. His father pressured and coddled him through an obstacle course of distractions: bike riding, piano playing, scout hiking, deer slaying, and long, sticky visits to the county fair. Yet Tuck knew.

Some say twins have a spiritual connection not approached by brotherhood or parenthood or priesthood, which may have contributed, but there were tangible explanations as well; Tuck was not oblivious. His mother weary and bleary, his father’s raw temper, the muffled animal’s whimper that slipped from the forbidden wing into the rest of the house, like a hiss of icy wind on a day otherwise filled with sunburn and watermelon.

Tuck was never told of his twin until his mother died. A heart attack. His father called not only the coroner but the state mental hospital, and Tuck watched the jocular, white-shoed young men enter the forbidden wing and carry out someone Tuck’s size but twisted and flailing and howling in an eery angel's tongue and make it stop make it stop please take it away it’s scaring me oh —

Gruffly, without a hint of apology or regret, Tuck’s father told him that the twins had had scarlet fever when they were infants. Tuck recovered completely. His twin’s brain was damaged. This was all the explanation that Tuck, eight years old, received for the fact that his twin had been locked in a room for seven years with only his mother to feed him and change him, talk with him and weep over him, and to eventually die because of him, her immense and awful secret.

So the twin — what was his name? — was institutionalized and Tuck carried on as a normal boy: two-facing, playing varsity, drag-racing, trips to the city, and smoking behind the bleachers. All the while, buried deep in his mind behind tenuous folds of distraction and assumed innocence, was the knowledge that half his soul lay in tortured isolation in a far-away tower, waiting for Tuck to grow up and, like a staggering, blood-soaked slayer of serpents, perform the rescue twenty years too late.