the Third Twin (1996)

For a moment his mother just stared at him, then she said: “Oh, boy—you’ve got it bad.”

“Well, not necessarily.…” He stopped himself. “Yeah, you’re right. I’m crazy about her.”

“Does she feel the same?”

“Not yet.”

His mother smiled fondly. “Go on, go see her. I hope she deserves you.”

He kissed her. “How did you get to be such a good person?”

“Practice,” she said.

Steve’s car was parked outside; they had picked it up from the Jones Falls campus and his mother had driven it back to Washington. Now he got on I-95 and drove back to Baltimore.

Jeannie was ready for some tender loving care. She had told him, when he called her, how her father had robbed her and the university president had betrayed her. She needed someone to cherish her, and that was a job he was qualified to do.

As he drove he pictured her sitting next to him on a couch, laughing, and saying things like “I’m so glad you came over, you’ve made me feel much better, why don’t we just take off all our clothes and get into bed?”

He stopped at a strip mall in the Mount Washington neighborhood and bought a seafood pizza, a ten-dollar bottle of chardonnay, a container of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream—Rainforest Crunch flavor—and ten yellow carnations. The front page of The Wall Street Journal caught his eye with a headline about Genetico Inc. That was the company that funded Jeannie’s research into twins, he recalled. It seemed they were about to be taken over by Landsmann, a German conglomerate. He bought the paper.

His delightful fantasies were clouded by the worrying thought that Jeannie might have gone out since he had talked to her. Or she might be in, but not answering the door. Or she might have visitors.

He was pleased to see a red Mercedes 230C parked near her house; she must be in. Then he realized she might have gone out on foot. Or in a taxi. Or in a friend’s car.

She had an entry phone. He pressed the bell and stared at the Speaker, willing it to make a noise. Nothing happened. He rang again. There was a crackling noise. His heart leaped. An irritable voice said: “Who is it?”

“It’s Steve Logan. I came to cheer you up.”

There was a long pause. “Steve, I don’t feel like having visitors.”

“At least let me give you these flowers.”

She did not reply. She was scared, he thought, and he felt bitterly disappointed. She had said she believed he was innocent, but that was when he was safely behind bars. Now that he was on her doorstep and she was alone, it was not so easy. “You haven’t changed your mind about me, have you?” he said. “You still believe I’m innocent? If not, I’ll just go away.”

The buzzer sounded and the door opened.

She was a woman who could not resist a challenge, he thought.

He stepped into a tiny lobby with two more doors. One stood open and led to a flight of stairs. At the top stood Jeannie, in a bright green T-shirt.

“I guess you’d better come up,” she said.

It was not the most enthusiastic of welcomes, but he smiled and went up the stairs, carrying his gifts in a paper sack. She showed him into a little living room with a kitchen nook. She liked black and white with splashes of vivid color, he noted. She had a black-upholstered couch with orange cushions, an electric-blue clock on a white- painted wall, bright yellow lampshades, and a white kitchen counter with red coffee mugs.

He put his sack on the kitchen counter. “Look,” he said, “you need something to eat, to make you feel better.” He took out the pizza. “And a glass of wine to ease the tension. Then, when you’re ready to give yourself a special treat, you can eat this ice cream right out of the carton, don’t even put it in a dish. And after the food and drink is all gone you’ll still have the flowers. See?”

She stared at him as if he were a man from Mars.

He added: “And anyway, I figured you needed someone to come over here and tell you that you’re a wonderful, special person.”

Her eyes filled with tears. “Fuck you!” she said. “I never cry!”

He put his hands on her shoulders. It was the first time he had touched her. Tentatively he drew her to him. She did not resist. Hardly able to believe his luck, he put his arms around her. She was nearly as tall as he. She rested her head on his shoulder, and her body shook with sobs. He stroked her hair. It was soft and heavy. He got a hard-on like a fire hose, and he eased away from her a fraction, hoping she would not notice. “It’s going to be all right,” he said. “You’ll work things out.”

She remained slumped in his arms for a long, delicious moment. He felt the warmth of her body and inhaled her scent. He wondered whether to kiss her. He hesitated, afraid that if he rushed her she would reject him. Then the moment passed and she moved away.

She wiped her nose on the hem of her baggy T-shirt, giving him a sexy glimpse of a flat, suntanned stomach. “Thanks,” she said. “I needed a shoulder to cry on.”

He felt let down by her matter-of-fact tone. For him it had been a moment of intense feeling; for her, no more than a release of tension. “All part of the service,” he said facetiously, then wished he had kept quiet.

She opened a cupboard and took out plates. “I feel better already,” she said. “Let’s eat.”

He perched on a stool at her kitchen counter. She cut the pizza and took the cork out of the wine. He enjoyed watching her move around her home, closing a drawer with her hip, squinting at a wineglass to see if it was clean, picking up a corkscrew with her long, capable fingers. He remembered the first girl he ever fell in love with. Her name was Bonnie, and she was seven, the same age as he; and he had stared at her strawberry blond ringlets and green eyes and thought what a miracle it was that someone so perfect could exist in the playground of Spillar Road Grade School. For some time he had entertained the notion that she might actually be an angel.

He did not think Jeannie was an angel, but there was a fluid physical grace about her that gave him the same awestruck sensation.

“You’re resilient,” she commented. “Last time I saw you, you looked awful. It was only twenty-four hours ago, but you seem completely recovered.”

“I got off lightly. I have a sore place where Detective Allaston banged my head on the wall, and a big bruise where Porky Butcher kicked me in the ribs at five o’clock this morning, but I’ll be okay, so long as I never have to go back inside that jail.” He put the thought out of his mind. He was not going back; the DNA test would eliminate him as a suspect.

He looked at her bookshelf. She had a lot of nonfiction, biographies of Darwin and Einstein and Francis Bacon; some women novelists he had not read, Erica Jong and Joyce Carol Oates; five or six Edith Whartons; some modern classics. “Hey, you have my all-time favorite novel!” he said.

“Let me guess: To Kill a Mockingbird.”

He was astonished. “How did you know?”

“Come on. The hero is a lawyer who defies social prejudice to defend an innocent man. Isn’t that your dream? Besides, I didn’t think you’d pick The Women’s Room.”

He shook his head in resignation. “You know so much about me. It’s unnerving.”

“What do you think is my favorite book?”

“Is this a test?”

“You bet.”

“Oh … uh, Middlemarch.”

“Why?”

“It has a strong, independent-minded heroine.”

“But she doesn’t do anything! Anyway, the book I’m thinking of isn’t a novel. Guess again.”

He shook his head. “A nonfiction book.” Then inspiration struck. “I know. The story of a brilliant, elegant scientific discovery that explained something crucial about human life. I bet it’s The Double Helix.”

“Hey, very good!”

They started to eat. The pizza was still warm. Jeannie was thoughtfully silent for a while, then she said: “I really messed up today. I can see it now. I needed to keep the whole crisis low-key. I should have kept saying, ‘Well, maybe, we can discuss that, let’s not make any hasty decisions.’ Instead I defied the university, then made it