She knuckled the sleep out of her eyes with her free hand. Then she said, "I'm hungry. I need breakfast, right now!"
"You WHAT? Would you like to try saying that again missy?"
"Uh....oops.....sorry. May I please have some breakfast Jane nee-chan? Ah. I really AM sorry. I was still mostly asleep I guess."
Jane got her set up with some juice to start. We petted her a bit to let her know that we weren't still angry with her, but I did emphasize that children should not be making demands. She seemed to understand just fine.
Then there was a noise down the hallway that sounded like shuffling feet. Seeing as how there should be only 3 pair of feet in the building, Jane and I snapped our attention to the hall and went into defensive crouches.
A few seconds there was the sound of a coffee mug shattering on the floor of the kitchen. Yes, I know that Jane caught my mug last time -- I still don't know how -- but it requires your attention to do something like that. Her mug shattered about a half second after mine.
While we were both standing there slack-jawed, Kimiko came out of the hall carrying her large brown teddy bear.
She bowed to both of us and asked: "May I please have some breakfast Okaa-san, Jane onee-san? Did I say that right? English is fairly difficult for me. I have not had much...ah..pr...pra...practice."
OK... Sure. Looked to my left. I saw Kimiko sitting at the breakfast bar slurping down her juice. Looked to my right. I saw Kimiko standing at the opening to the hallway. Looked at Jane. Looked at Jane looking at Kimiko and Kimiko.
Well, if it was a hallucination, at least I was sharing it with someone.
"Kumiko, get over here and get something ta eat. They don't bite, ya dummy!"
"I did not think that they did onee-san. I merely wished to give them some time to adjust to my presence."
Jane and I turned our heads back toward Kimiko as if we were both marionettes on the same string. "Did you say Kumiko?"
"Ya don't have the excuse of saying that ya didn't hear me, because we all know that ya always hear exactly what I think at ya. And while you're at it, are ya going to clean up the mess you just made? I don't want Kumiko ta cut her feet on the glass."
Kumiko bowed slightly toward her sister. "Thank you for your consideration onee-san. I would not wish to get blood on the floor when I have just arrived."
Kimiko was back to her usual imperious self. "You heard her. Get with it!"
We got. It took only a minute to clean up the mess.
"Thank you. I appreciate your efforts." Kumiko looked at her sister with mild disapproval. "My sister can be a bit...unrefined at times. Please bear with it. I am sure that she will outgrow it...someday."
"Ah. yes, of course. We've sort of noticed that."
"Welcome to our home. Now a question or five. First of all, Kimiko, no more sarcastic comments. Now is not the time for that. Do you understand me?"
She nodded and went back to sipping her juice.
"All right. Now then."
I turned to face our new arrival, So, you're Kumiko. It's pretty obvious that you're Kimiko's twin. Ah...when did you get here, and how did you get inside without setting off the alarms?"
"That I cannot say. I went to sleep at the orphanage in Asakusa, and I awoke here. How my.....um......transportation was arranged and accomplished I do not know. I am sorry."
She gave me another bow and asked, "May I also have some juice? I find myself very thirsty."
('English is difficult for me' my foot! Except for what looked to be some minor vocabulary problems, she probably 'speaks' it better than I do.)
"Sure honey. Jane will you please get her some juice and then see about some scrambled eggs for all of us. That'll probably be the easiest thing."
"On it Mama. Oh, and by the way, I think that we can put the 'transporting people from place to place' question to rest now. Don't you?"
"It certainly seems that way. It also answers the question I had as to why there are two of everything in their room. Apparently Jerry had some 'help' in picking things out."
"I expect you're right Mama. It looks like someone has already decided we're going to join the dance, ready or not."
"Seems that way. Oh well, I always wanted to learn."
Jane gave me a rather tense smile and went to grab some eggs for breakfast.
I noticed that the girls had their heads together, nearly touching. They broke apart and Kumiko turned to me. (At the moment I could only tell them apart by the animals they were holding. Fortunately I was already getting somewhat different "feelings" from each of them. It was likely that, within a few days, their predominate emotional patterns would make it easy to tell one from the other.)
"Onee-san has 'filled me in' as to what has transpired. It must have been very shocking for all of you, though I daresay that onee-san has borne the brunt of it. A most regrettable chain of circumstances.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
"Still, one must make do with the situation one finds oneself in. I must admit that the surroundings here are much more, ah, congenial than at the orphanage."
Oh my God. Enough was enough. Argggghhhh!
"Kumiko. Stop it. I can't stand it anymore! Please don't tell me again that your English isn't very good. Your vocabulary is at least as good as mine."
<
"I understand that in Japan is it not considered appropriate to brag. I agree that bragging is not a good thing. BUT! Making yourself out to be less than you are is also not good. It encourages misunderstandings.
"So, please, tell me how it is that you learned your English."
"This is unsettling. I...I don't know what is the right thing to do. But, since it is your command, I shall tell you what I can."
Time for a cuddle, a bit of head petting, and a couple of squeezes.
"Kumiko, I'm not commanding. I...we... need your cooperation. We're MORE than happy to have you and Kimiko with us, but making all this legal if we don't learn as much as we can isn't going to be easy, unless we cheat, and I don't want to do that. OK?
"So, please tell me about it. Please?"
"Ah, I see. I was subject to some degree of misunderstanding of your motivation. Very well.
"Onee-san and I frequently needed to avoid those of a, let us say, foul temperament. Your word is 'bullies'. Onee-san has informed me as to what she told you about how she dealt with it."
She looked at Kimiko, and dang if she doesn't glare just about as well as I do. Whatta girl!
"Contrary to what she implied, she did not fight them off. She coped in one of two ways. She would either ti.tic...tickle?, yes, tickle them into submission, or she would jump or climb to some place that they could not reach and wait for them to go away. In spite of her appearance to the contrary, she can, when avoiding pain, be very, very patient."
Kumiko put on a thoughtful expression and then continued, "Now that I think of it, she has been climbing on things, and jumping around like a giant grasshopper ever since all of us at the orphanage were taken to a local high school to watch a gymnastics demonstration four years ago.
The look she bestowed on Kimiko this time was one of fond exasperation. "I have been forced to watch her, what is the phrase, ah, yes 'show off' whenever she learned some new way to jump or spin or flip herself around ever since then. She went absolutely 'gaga' when she watched the Olympics' gymnastics competitions on TV last year.
"Really, it is so unladylike. I must admit though that she seems to have become rather skilled at it."
I looked over at Kimiko and she somehow managed to be not looking at anything in particular. I decided to let her deception about how she dealt with bullies lie...for now.
"As for myself, if they were not too big, I would, ah, damage them to the point that they would leave me alone. Nobody at or near my own size tried twice. However, I am not skilled in such things, and, when I was small, I needed to flee from the larger bullies. I discovered that they would not invade the personal quarters of the Sisters, so I would go there.
"One Sister in particular, Sister Tabitha, was very sympathetic, and she would always allow me refuge. As payment, she required that I learn Tai Chi and learn to read English. Tai Chi I could and can understand. It is as elegant art and well suited to a true lady. As for the English...frankly I cannot imagine why she insisted that I learn it. It would have made more sense to teach me Japanese, but I was unable to tell her so.
"Therefore, learn English I did. We rather quickly exhausted her tiny store of children's books, so she had me read the others in her library. Unfortunately, perhaps, she was very fond of Victorian Age romances. They were dreadfully boring, but it was better than being beaten.
"It is interesting that avoiding pain is almost as good a teacher as pain itself. Hmmm.... I may pursue that idea someday.
"Therefore it may be that my 'speech' is rather on the formal side, but I cannot say in truth that it is something that I dislike. The cadences of formal language are rather calming."
That certainly explained why she knew so many 'big' words and had trouble with some common ones. I don't imagine that one is tickled very often in a Victorian romance.
Whoops! Looks like Kumiko wasn't quite done yet.
"It pains me to admit it, but, while my 'spoken' English vocabulary is fairly good, I cannot write any better than a child 2-3 years younger than myself. There was little opportunity to practice it as the sister seemed to think that reading was more important. I am most sincerely sorry."
Jane picked up the ball and tore toward the goalpost. "Well, well, what a state of affairs. One that can easily be remedied. When you girls are finished with breakfast, why don't we go see what we can do to work on improving both your written English and Japanese?"
To be completely honest, which I am compelled to be by these difficult circumstances...
<
Jane wasn't looking at either girl when she said it. She was staring at the ceiling again. I was absolutely sure that she was now permanently ready to quit playing with porcelain dolls and was making the switch to living ones.
(Gotcha again Jane....bwahahahaha! It's true too......lol.)
Go ahead. Gloat. You'll get yours, and when you do, Mama, you'll never see it coming.
---------------
As soon as breakfast was finished and we'd cleaned up, Jane herded the girls down to their room just like a mother hen. I went back to reading up on adoption proceedings.
Actually, the process looked pretty much straightforward. For orphans and "developmentally disabled" the procedure was fairly simple. I hate that phrase, but I'll work with it if it makes things easier. There was nothing disabled about my girls at all!
The difficult part would be figuring out how to explain the missing parents and concealing the fact that they were not US citizens. If it came out that Kumiko had made a mystical appearance out of the ethers, we were all in deep kimchi.
We'd have to build a convincing history. But how? Hmmmm.
Yes!
That would work. They were dumped on us by one of my distant cousins as he and his wife ran off, somewhere. Let's see...
Never in school, home schooled because of unspecified problems said cousin had with authority figures, especially the government. Hmmm. Distrustful. Never used his real last name anywhere, so the girls have no idea what it is. Moved every few months. Hints of illegal activities.....ah..... Their parents were likely into burglary, and they left each town after scoring a few thousand more to live on for a couple more months.
We can 'discover' the family history after the girls have been in school for a few months and it becomes obvious that the parents aren't coming back. That'll play into the Oregon adoption laws about relatives adopting abandoned children.
I'd run that by Jane when she surfaced for air, probably sometime that afternoon. For now I'd let her play with her new siblings. It should be good for all three of them.
I shook my head. I really, truly wish that I'd been able to give Jane a more stable childhood. Oh well, at least she had a completely normal high school life. Or, maybe not. Most normal kids don't graduate from 3 schools in a week.
Thinking about 'might have beens' is about the most useless human activity ever invented. I had more important fish to fry, so I turned back to the computer to do some more research.
Mama is soooo silly. I didn't want a "normal" childhood. I wanted to be with you. And I can't imagine a better mother, so quit beating on yourself. Too bad that you won't see this for quite some time, if ever. But I'll make sure that you know how I feel.