The Third Twin - Ken Follett [29]
She looked awkward again. “It’s a little difficult,” she said. “This has never happened before.”
Suddenly he realized. It was obvious, but so surprising that he had not guessed until now. “You think I have a twin that I don’t know about?” he said incredulously.
“I can’t think of any gradual way to tell you,” she said with evident chagrin. “Yes, we do.”
“Wow.” He felt dazed: it was hard to take in.
“I’m really sorry.”
“Nothing to apologize for, I guess.”
“But there is. Normally people know they’re twins before they come to us. However, I’ve pioneered a new way of recruiting subjects for this study, and you’re the first. Actually, the fact that you don’t know you have a twin is a tremendous vindication of my system. But I didn’t foresee that we might be giving people shocking news.”
“I always wanted a brother,” Steve said. He was an only child, born when his parents were in their late thirties. “Is it a brother?”
“Yes. You’re identical.”
“An identical twin brother,” Steve murmured. “But how could it happen without my knowledge?”
She looked mortified.
“Wait a minute, I can work it out,” Steve said. “I could be adopted.”
She nodded.
It was an even more shocking thought: Mom and Dad might not be his parents. “Or my twin could have been adopted.”
“Yes.”
“Or both, like Benny and Arnold.”
“Or both,” she repeated solemnly. She was gazing intently at him with those dark eyes. Despite the turmoil in his mind he could not help thinking how lovely she was. He wanted her to stare at him like this forever.
She said: “In my experience, even if a subject doesn’t know he or she is a twin, they normally know they were adopted. Even so, I should have guessed you might be different.”
Steve said painfully: “I just can’t believe Mom and Dad would have kept adoption a secret from me. It’s not their style.”
“Tell me about your parents.”
He knew she was making him talk to help him work through the shock, but that was okay. He collected his thoughts. “Mom’s kind of exceptional. You’ve heard of her, her name’s Lorraine Logan.”
“The lonelyhearts columnist?”
“Right. Syndicated in four hundred newspapers, author of six best-sellers about women’s health. Rich and famous, and she deserves it.”
“Why do you say that?”
“She really cares about the people who write to her. She answers thousands of letters. You know, they basically want her to wave a magic wand—make their unwanted pregnancies vanish, get their kids off drugs, turn their abusive men into kindly and supportive husbands. She always gives them the information they need and tells them it’s their decision what to do, trust your feelings and don’t let anyone bully you. It’s a good philosophy.”
“And your father?”
“Dad’s pretty ordinary, I guess. He’s in the military, works at the Pentagon, he’s a colonel. He does public relations, writes speeches for generals, that kind of thing.”
“A disciplinarian?”
Steve smiled. “He has a highly developed sense of duty. But he’s not a violent man. He saw some action in Asia, before I was born, but he never brought it home.”
“Did you require discipline?”
Steve laughed. “I was the naughtiest boy in class, all through school. Constantly in trouble.”
“What for?”
“Breaking the rules. Running in the hallway. Wearing red socks. Chewing gum in class. Kissing Wendy Prasker behind the biology shelf in the school library when I was thirteen.”
“Why?”
“Because she was so pretty.”
She laughed again. “I meant, why did you break all the other rules?”
He shook his head. “I just couldn’t be obedient. I did what I wanted to do. The rules seemed stupid, and I got bored. They would have thrown me out of school, but I always got good grades, and I was usually captain of one sports team or another: football, basketball, baseball, track. I don’t understand myself. Am I a weirdo?”
“Everybody’s weird in their own way.”
“I guess so. Why d’you wear the nose ring?”
She raised her dark eyebrows, as if to say “I ask the questions around here,” but she answered him just the same. “I went through a punk phase when I was about fourteen: