The Single Twin

by Sean Little

  Amity stopped and faced him. “I do. Why?”

  “I need a way to get close to Robert Stevens and his son, Marcus.”

  Amity chuckled quietly. “Good luck.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “The man is a senator. He has been in Washington for four decades. He is bullet-proof at this point. I have been donating to the Illinois Dems for fifty years, and I have never even shaken the man’s hand. I highly doubt you and your little friend will be able to waltz up and say hello.”

  Duff rolled his eyes before he could stop himself. “Why? Why you gotta do that, Ma?”

  “Do what? And do not call me ‘Ma.’ That word sounds like a goat’s bleating.”

  “You know exactly what you did. You called Abe my ‘little friend.’ We’re in our mid-forties, Ma. We’re grown men. We don’t have little friends anymore. Abe has a teenage daughter. She doesn’t even have ‘little friends’ anymore. Don’t minimize me like that.”

  “You chose to pursue a life of simplicity and ease when you had all the mental acuity to pursue any field of academia this world had to offer. You clearly have never made a mature decision in your life, and that is why you still have little friends, Clive.”

  “That was your vision for my life, Ma. I wanted nothing to do with it. Not after Becca—”

  “What happened to Rebecca is the past. You threw away your entire life because of it. It is a sin I cannot seem to forgive.”

  “Lucky for me, I don’t really believe in the concept of sin. That was Dad’s arena.”

  Amity looked taken aback for a moment. She was an atheist herself but she had always indulged her husband’s fascination with religion. You had to accept that when you chose to marry a theology scholar. “Your father would be disappointed to hear you felt that way. He tried to raise you well in the Church.”

  Duff shrugged. “Yeah, the Church never really helped itself in regard to keeping me interested. That’s not why I’m here, though. I don’t want to rehash all my shortcomings and failures with you. I came because I needed your help. If you can’t help, I’ll go. I smelled a hot dog stand near here and it’s calling my name. If you really want to bring up the past, I got a long list of your failures I’ve been itching to address for a couple decades now.”

  If Amity took any offense she did not show it. “I had known this day would come eventually. I always wondered if it would be in person or at my funeral.”

  “I wasn’t going to attend your funeral.”

  “I had hoped we could have buried some of the old animosity between us, but I suppose that was erroneous thinking on my part.”

  “You and Dad screwed me up and then complained when I acted screwed up. Instead of trying to be a parent, you just sent me away because you could not deal with a child who actually thought for himself.”

  “I suppose some of that is true, but in truth, Clive, you were a challenging teen.”

  “Bullshit! Compared to ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the teens in America I was a goddamned gift from the heavens. I never stayed out late. I kept my room clean. I got straight As. I never asked you for anything. I was golden. But when I needed you, when I actually needed my parents to be parents, it was too much for you and you just sent me fifteen hundred miles away to live with strangers. That’s where the animosity lies, lady. And you’ve never done anything to make up for it. Hell, you’ve never even apologized for it.”

  Amity was quiet for a moment. “I suppose there are elements of truth to what you are saying. But, I still contend you were a difficult child.”

  “Fuck you, Ma.”

  “Hardly an appropriate response.”

  “I don’t care.” Duff turned and walked away, kicking open the door of the porch with his foot so hard it slammed back against the house with a sharp clatter. “I don’t want your help anymore. If you could hurry up and contract cancer and die like most of the other cranky-ass old bats your age, that’d be great.” Duff shoved his hands in his pockets and stomped across the yard. Somehow, no matter how old you are in reality, your parents always see you as fourteen, and they have a way of making you feel and act fourteen again. It made Duff angry.

  Amity followed him, stopping at the porch door. She gestured at the door. “See? You are still a difficult child.”

  Duff didn’t even look over his shoulder. “I’m forty-four years old, Ma. You’re the one who never matured.” He strode across the lawn toward the sidewalk. He treated himself to punting a decorative lawn gnome in the face. It only tipped over unbroken much to his chagrin. He would have liked to have seen the thing explode like the Death Star at the end of Star Wars. He took two steps on the sidewalk.

  “C.S.”

  Duff stopped. She only called him C.S., his preferred form of address if one must use any form of his Christian name, when she was trying to make inroads with him. He turned back toward her. She had stepped out onto the sidewalk. Even in her cardigan and corduroys, the heat did not seem to faze her.

  She took a few tentative steps toward Duffy. She was walking like the new dog at the park, nervous and ready to run if something did not smell right. “There is an event in town tomorrow night. A fundraiser. I have two tickets. You can have them. I was not planning to attend, regardless. Stevens should be there. I do not know if Marcus will be, though. He may be, given the campaign season is in full swing.”

  “Are you setting me up for a fall?”

  “No.” Amity shook her head. To Duff, she looked to be sincere. “I would only like to know why you wish to see him.”

  Duff looked up and down the street. It was after dark, and the sidewalks were empty. “Abe and I were hired to find a woman’s long-lost brother. We have reason to believe Stevens conducted an illegal adoption of that brother, and now he, or someone in his camp, is trying to silence our client before she learns the truth.”

  Amity put a hand over her mouth in shock. It was close to being the most emotion Duff had ever seen his mother emote. “That cannot be true.”

  “It’s what we’re working to figure out.”

  “No. I am saying he never adopted a child. Kimberly Stevens was pregnant. She gave birth. I remember seeing her swollen as a tick at a function many years ago.”

  “Really?”

  “I am certain of it. You were there with me. You were ten, I believe. You were reading one of those horrible trash novels about dragons you favored then.”

  Duff thought back to when he was ten. He had a tremendous memory, but his methods of memory retention had not fully developed then. Everything prior to seventh grade was a succession of images and vignettes. He remembered a lot of it, just not in the correct order. He thought about the books he read in fourth grade. He was already far beyond the academic output of his fellow students, so he alleviated his boredom by tearing through fantasy novels. His teachers, angry at his lack of focus at first, eventually gave up reprimanding him and left him alone. He was getting straight As. He could answer any question in any subject they threw at him. He aced all their tests. His teachers realized he should not have been in their classes, but there was not a lot they could find for him to do that challenged him. Most public schools were not prepared for genius-level students in the ‘80s. It was common practice to just ignore the smart kids figuring they’d be fine on their own. That was why so many gifted-and-talented program kids failed at college in the ‘90s.

  Duff’s parents, both college professors in esoteric subjects, were demanding. They gave him Eliot, Proust, Shakespeare, and Poe to read, following it up with Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Dickens, and Steinbeck. Duff read it all, as asked. However, he preferred novels about dragons, swords, and fantasy realms where his parents did not exist. It is part of the reason the novels he was reading for pleasure stuck in his head so vividly. He was in the midst of the Dragonlance Chronicles at the time, wrapped up in the adventures of Tanis, Tasslehoff, and Kitiara.

  He had a smattering of images in his head from his time reading that book, litt
le flashes of moments. He closed his eyes and sought through his mental files, trying to call up any image he associated with the novel. A few came slowly out of his haze of memory: riding the school bus and trying to concentrate as the words bounced along with the bus’s shocks, sitting in at a city council meeting with his father, and the rally his mother attended.

  The rally was foggy in his mind. His mother had woken him early and driven him to Chicago to participate. They were still living in Waukesha at the time. There were a lot of women in a room together, some holding signs, some wearing buttons. A few women spoke into a microphone on a stage before the room. There were some cheers and a lot of applause for the speakers. Duff tried his best to block out the noise, letting the story in the book carry him away from the rally at which he had no desire to be in the first place. In the jumble of sights, smells, and sounds from the rally that bounced around in his hippocampus, he did remember flashes of seeing a pregnant African American woman on the stage. She wore a lovely blue floral-print dress with simple white leather heels, had her hair done up in a large style as was the fashion in the mid-80s, and she had a reserved smile, not big and toothy like most of the politicians or politicians’ wives. She was polite and pleasant. She spoke plainly and earnestly. She looked out of place in a room which was ninety-nine percent white. A fly in the milk, Duff’s slightly racist grandfather would have said. Duff did not know her name was Kimberly Stevens at the time. He would not have cared. She was simply one of the many nameless female candidates or politicians’ wives his mother blindly supported. But, there she was in his memory as solid as stonework. She was much younger, and her face was much fuller and rounder because of her advanced pregnancy—but it was definitely Kimberly Stevens. And she was definitely pregnant.

  “Huh.” Duff was at a loss for words. “I guess she was pregnant.”

  “Why would she adopt a baby, then?”

  “Maybe she miscarried?”

  Amity shook her head. “That late in the term it would have been called stillbirth, not miscarriage. And why would they need to adopt a child in secret if the baby was stillborn? A stillbirth would have been front-page news and probably would have given Robert Stevens an election victory simply through the sympathy vote. I cannot imagine they would have kept it quiet.”

  “Maybe they didn’t want it leaking out to the press because it would have been too painful to bear?”

  Amity arched an eyebrow. “A politician? Honestly, I’ve never met one yet who would not milk a personal tragedy for all it was worth. A stillbirth would have been a guaranteed win. Why keep it hidden?”

  The horrible puzzle piece clicked into place in Duff’s brain. His stomach twisted a bit at the thought of it. In his mind, there was only one logical reason: “He killed the baby.”

  “What?”

  “Stevens. He killed his infant son.” Data points were connecting like dominoes in Duff’s brain. He began to get excited, energized. When things made sense to him, it was like electricity in his brain. “Think about it, Ma: a secret adoption far away from his home in Chicago, far from Washington D.C. where he’d just won his first term as a senator. An African American senator in the ‘80s was rare. If it ever got out he killed his own child, it would have been bad for race relations as a whole. So, he and someone in his campaign arranged to more or less get a baby close enough in age to his real child and raise it as a replacement for the child he killed—no harm, no foul. If no one ever found out, nothing would ever happen. So, what did he do? He bought a baby off a stupid teenage girl and paid her to keep quiet, which she did, right up until her deathbed when the morphine addled her brain.”

  “That is highly ridiculous,” said Amity. “That is tinfoil-hat conspiracy thinking, Clive.”

  “It’s what makes sense, Ma. A case like this spanning almost four decades, no rhyme or reason behind it, you start looking for any edges that fit together. When they start to fit, no matter how bizarre it sounds, that’s what you go on until you find evidence to the contrary, and then you reshape your theory.”

  Amity took in a deep, calming breath of air. Even in the summer swelter, even in her ludicrous outfit for summer, she was not sweating. Duff wondered if she was part-lizard. “C.S., if any of this is true, you are barking at the moon.”

  “I know, Ma.”

  “You will never find evidence. If what you said was true and if Stevens was smart enough to essentially hide an adoption and play it off as his flesh-and-blood child, then he was smart enough to bury any evidence of infanticide or even accidental death.”

  Duff knew she was right. If it had been him, he would have rented a boat on the Chesapeake, driven ten miles from shore, weighted down the baby’s corpse with a chain, and tossed it to the crabs. It was horrible and stomach-churning to think about, and it clearly said something very dark about anyone who was capable of doing it, but it would have eliminated the body completely. A bit of misdirection on the original baby’s birth certificate and no one would ever know. It was a perfect crime. Almost. “So, he’s going to get away with murder. If Mindy tries to expose him, he’ll probably plead ignorance. His paperwork will be in order. Short of a DNA test, he goes scot-free. Even with a D.N.A. test, he probably goes scot-free. It’s a thirty-five-year-old crime.”

  The puzzle, strange as it was, made sense from the elements of a powerful person putting it into play, to the need for an infant to replace a dead one, to trying to silence Mindy for looking into her brother’s existence. It was a bizarre story, but to Duff’s mind it was clear. It might not be correct given his lack of evidence to prove it, but what else could it be?

  Even the murder of the man who attacked Abe in Mindy’s apartment fit: a guy is hired by the senator to find something in the apartment. He fails. The senator cleans up the loose ends with a bullet to the chest in a dark alley. It was a grand story and all the puzzle pieces seemed to fit, but how could they prove any of it? One does not simply walk up to a sitting U.S. senator and demand he spits into a vial so you can test his D.N.A.

  “Let sleeping dogs lie, Clive.” Amity reached out and put a hand on Duff’s forearm. It was the first time she had physically touched him since he was fourteen. It sent a cold shiver up Duff’s spine. “The prudent measure would be to walk away from this. Contact your client. Tell her to give this up, as well. It has been thirty-five years. No good can come of this.”

  “I can’t, Ma. I don’t know where this will end up, but I just can’t let it go. I’ll take what I know to the cops. If they want to let it lie, then I’ll walk away.”

  “That is all I can ask, then. Do you still want the tickets to the fundraiser?”

  “Please. I might not use them, but it would be nice to have them in case we need to get closer.”

  “Come back to the house, then.” Amity walked back to her home and disappeared inside. Duff waited on the top step. He did not want to break the seal of her home again. In a moment, she returned with a certified mail envelope and handed it to him. “The tickets are not addressed, so anyone should be able to use them. It will probably cost you some sort of monetary donation to get in, though.”

  “That’s fine.” Duff accepted the tickets, folding the envelope once and tucking it into the back pocket of his jeans. “Thanks, Ma.”

  Duff turned to walk away. He took a few steps down the sidewalk. “I’ll be seeing you.” He said it even though he knew he probably wouldn’t.

  “C.S.”

  Duff stopped and turned to look at his mother. She inclined her head almost like bowing. “Thank you for stopping by.”

  He nodded and started to walk again. Amity called out to him again. He turned.

  “Perhaps you should lose some weight.”

  Duff chuckled. “Ma, just because you said that, I’m going to go eat three hot dogs instead of the two I was planning on having.”

  “I am only thinking of your health. No one likes someone who presents a fat and slovenly image, Clive. You could put a little more effort into your app
earance. You need to be more of a professional. Try a little harder to rise above the hoi polloi, why don’t you?”

  Duff touched two fingers to the brim of his cap in salute. “Ma, I happen to really like being part of the hoi polloi.” He turned and walked away, striding purposefully.

  Amity did not call to him again.

  Duff only ordered two hot dogs at the stand two blocks away, despite the threat he gave his mother. However, he did have them add chili, beer-cheese, and extra onions. And he ordered a tall beer, too. He ate his dinner leaning against a stand-up counter. Then, he hailed a cab. He needed to get back to Abe.

  ABE DROPPED MATILDA at home after an hour and a half of pizza and chatting. He hated watching her walk into the house. She always stopped and gave him a wave before she disappeared inside. Abe always felt like he should follow her. He felt like his time with Matilda should not be something that had limits and barriers. It hurt each time he had to watch her go. Little icy pins stabbed at his heart. He reminded himself in three years, she’d be in college. She’d be living her own life. Even now, she was vastly more independent than Abe had been at her age. Maybe the divorce had something to do with it. Maybe it was just how she always was. Either way, Abe had to remind himself she did not need him as much anymore. It was supposed to be this way. They had raised her to be smart, think quickly, and make good decisions, and at some point, you just have to take the training wheels off and hope she doesn’t fall.

  Sometimes Katherine came to the door to wave goodbye, or she’d peer out the window and smile. It was good they could be civil, even friendly. Abe wondered if it would change once Tilda went to college, especially if she went someplace more than an hour away. Would he and Katherine still chat occasionally? Would they just become strangers?

  Abe drove back to his bachelor estate apartment listening to the talking heads on the radio prattle on about the election. He was only interested in hearing what they said about Robert Stevens. Most of what they said was what they had been saying for years: incumbent, blah, blah, blah; well-loved, yadda, yadda, yadda. After so many years in Congress, he did not need a platform anymore. He would win on name recognition alone.