Scott Turow - Identical

By the time he got into the house, the full weight of his life was on Tim. He sat down in the living room, still in his overcoat, slumped forward with his big hands between his knees, lacking the will to move any further. He didn’t succumb to this very often. Everybody had things to be sad about, especially when you got to this age and carried with you the thought, only barely submerged, that the end wasn’t far off. But there had been times throughout his life when a sadness thick as glue had immobilized him. As a younger man, he would drink at these moments. Older, he’d just learned to talk himself through it.

When he was born, Tim’s family, the five of them, had lived in a one-bedroom third-story walk-up, about a mile from here. He was the baby, the unexpected child who came eight years after his brother, ten years after his sister. His mother was a frail woman whose nose was always running and who seemed beleaguered by her life. It was his father who held it all together. He was a big man, bigger even than Tim grew to become, who roared rather than spoke, and generally extolled life, and certainly his children and his wife. Whenever he arrived home, Tim was overjoyed.

When Tim was six, his father, a yardman on the Chicago and North Western, fell between two cars and was killed, sliced in half, according to accounts Tim heard years later. His mother was simply beyond herself, shattered by her husband’s death. Tim’s sister, sixteen then, left home, and his brother was parceled out to his mother’s sister. But at the age of six, a bit rambunctious, and morose with the loss of his father, Tim was too much for any relative to take on and his mother deposited him with a brown lacquered valise at St. Mary’s Home, telling him she would be back for him soon. She never came. He cried himself to sleep for over a year.

Most of his buddies on the Force who had Catholic educations tended to down-talk the nuns, telling stories about how the sisters rapped their knuckles with rulers, making out most of them as these dried-up, sexually deprived bitches who’d found their marriage to God as unhappy as everybody else’s. But the sisters and brothers who cared for Tim at St. Mary’s-and him not even born Catholic-they had saved his life. They were kind, and full of faith in the goodness and potential of every child. Even as a kid, missing his mother and his father every day, there was a piece of him that knew he was better off there. He started playing the trombone. Sister Aloysius gave it to him and he got good. “That horn, son, will get you out of here.” It got him a place in the Marine Corps Band, and that in turn got him a place at City College.

He was twenty-four, playing nights in jazz clubs, when his mother walked by him on the street, her arms full of brown grocery bags. He said nothing, but trailed her all the way to a tenement. She went through the door before he could get inside, but he stood on the street and watched the lights go on in a fourth-floor window. When another tenant emerged, he went in.

His mother stood there on the threshold staring at him. Then her nose turned red, and she lifted her apron to her eyes as she cried.

‘Oh, Tim,’ she said. ‘Tim, I didn’t know what to do.’ He heard a child complain inside the apartment, and a girl about ten reached her mother’s side and stared at him darkly. His mother invited him in. He declined out of sheer confusion, but turned back to ask about his brother and sister. Alice, his sister, was unheard of-Tim was in his forties before he found her-and his brother, like him, had gone into the service. The next time Eddie came to town, he looked Tim up.

‘I tried to tell her we had to go see you,’ Eddie said, ‘and she wouldn’t hear of it.’ Ed, a man his father’s size, began to blubber. ‘I was afraid if I put up a fuss, she wouldn’t see me either.’ It was a terrible truth, but Tim understood. He embraced his brother then, and the two were never out of touch again. Eddie called at least once a week, no matter where he was in the world, and the two fished in the Boundary Waters every summer, a place they’d first gone with their father. In time, their sons and daughters came, too. Ed had been gone six years now, dead of cancer in Laguna Beach.

Maria had invited Tim’s mother and his three step-siblings every year at Christmas and they came, but Tim had no feeling for them. Instead, he regarded himself as blessed to have his wife, his daughters, and Eddie. He had people to love, who, best of all, loved him, too. He didn’t feel it made sense to waste the energy on relationships that would only pull him under some emotional waterfall in which he’d never catch his breath.

He’d had it good in the end. They lost Katy, but there were two more girls, good girls, wonderful girls, both now out in Seattle, who traded off calling him every day. Maria had loved music, too-she was a fine pianist and gave lessons to half the kids at St. D’s. They’d made a home full of music and laughter, where they all loved each other just a little bit more because Katy’s death had taught them how precious their lives were.

When he was young, of course, sleeping in the dorms at St. Mary’s, he would wonder if anyone would ever love him, and if he would love anybody else. He had wanted to be close to someone and wondered what it would feel like. Even when he knew he was in love with Maria, he wasn’t certain he’d gotten it completely right. When she turned sick, three years ago, when he began to realize he would have to live without her, as he had lived before they met, he finally knew for sure that he had done what he wanted to as a little boy at St. Mary’s.

Now, alone and missing her terribly, he was left to wonder if it had been equally good for her. He hadn’t been perfect as a husband, especially at the start when the grief of his childhood sometimes made him a roistering fool. Maria was never one to complain much, but when she did, she talked about how closemouthed he was. He never spoke of his childhood, she said, even though she could feel the mark it had laid on him. Had he given her enough, shown her attention she deserved and craved, or simply been consumed with healing his own wounds? Crumbled in a defeated heap in his living room, he was drilled by a fear that had become familiar. Had she reached the end still longing for more he could have given, but hadn’t?

The short answer,” said Dr. Hassam Yavem in his faint Anglo-Pakistani accent, “to the question you posed on the telephone is yes, in theory, given no boundaries on time and money, it might be possible to distinguish reliably between the DNA of identical twins. But you would basically be trying to thread the eye of a very, very small needle from across a football field.”

Evon and Dr. Yavem, in his long white coat, sat in his office adjacent to his DNA lab. A dapper narrow gent, Yavem had a trim black moustache and a bald head that rose to a point, a bit like a hazelnut. His replies to Evon’s questions were preceded generally by a brief, kindly laugh, which exposed a gold cap on one of his front teeth.

Across from him at his desk, Evon felt like she’d tightened the screws on her brain, trying to track what Yavem was saying. Hal had been in a heat as soon as Evon raised the notion of doing DNA tests on the blood found in Dita’s room. She knew her boss would be frustrated if she couldn’t answer all his questions.

“You can stop me when you are hearing too much,” Yavem said. “One of my colleagues in Alabama is about to publish research this month showing that many identical twins are not completely identical genetically. The variations between them are very slight, but in the tens of thousands of genes there may be isolated differences.”