"But the universe of people we're talking about here is small. The number of monozygotic twins is growing, thanks to fertility pills, but it's still not all that large. A little under four births out of every thousand. And of those, the number who end up being raised apart for various reasons is minuscule. Back when Bouchard began, there were only nineteen recorded cases of twins who separated and reunited. Now there's more. The literature contains references to a hundred and twenty-one, and there have been more than thirty books and articles written about them. Still, that's not a lot, and the remarkable feature is the high coincidence of similarities among such a small sample.
"Yes, any two people of roughly the same age — you and me, say — we could sit down to compare notes and pore over our lives and our habits and our tastes until we came up with a whole array of things in common."
She smiled at him here, and he smiled back. He wondered: Was she saying especially you and me?
"In fact, I've done that — I mean, I've set up control groups using two strangers chosen at random to see what they'd come up with. You lock them in a room together, and they're usually able to establish some pretty amazing congruities. But not as many as separated twins, and not in so many different aspects of life. What's interesting about these studies is how the congruities keep occurring over and over in the same areas, as if there were certain categories in which they are allowed to operate. It's almost as if the similarities were preordained. A predispositon to alcoholism or smoking or suicide or insomnia — if you find it in one twin, chances are you'll find it in the other. Why should they end up having the same number of marriages and divorces? Or the same careers and hobbies? Even a lot of their social and political attitudes are alike. Why should twins end up with the same feeling about the death penalty or working mothers or apartheid? Why should their tastes run the same in coffee? But not — and try and figure this one out — in tea?"
She glanced at his empty cup.
"Speaking of which… would you like some more?"
He shook his head no. He didn't want her to stop.
"What will really blow your mind is the parallel tracks of physical development. Twins often get the same diseases at exactly the same ages — okay, you might expect that. But the parallels are so finely tuned. There are cases in which they each grow a blackhead in the exact same spot on the nose at the exact same time. How do you explain that? Is there some vicious little gene lying around whose whole goal is to inject a little spot of misery into the life of an adolescent? Is our whole makeup nothing more than a giant time-release capsule?"
Her eyes were blazing now.
"What's the causative factor — how does this happen? What's the explanation? There are similarities between any two of us, granted. But in monozygotic twins they go beyond the law of averages, and they keep happening in the same spheres. Coffee and not tea — what is that all about?"
The secretary knocked; Dr. Tierney was needed down the hall.
"I'll only be a few minutes," she told Jude. She tossed him The New Yorker.
The article by Lawrence Wright was titled "Double Mystery." It began with a description of identical twin girls, Amy and Beth, born in New York City in the 1960s and placed for adoption in separate homes. They sounded cute: "fair-skinned blondes with small oval faces, blue-gray eyes, and slightly snub noses." By chance, the two families were outwardly similar Jewish, with stay-at-home mothers and an older son as a sibling. But Beth seemed to have drawn the lucky card. Her family was more prosperous and more solid. More important, Beth's mother was loving and accepting; she doted on her new daughter, drew her into the bosom of the family, and provided her with everything she could possibly want. The father was attentive and supportive.
Amy's mother, on the other hand, was overweight and insecure and began to feel competitive with her daughter and regard her as a threat. The family — mother, father and son — closed ranks against the adopted child and excluded her as an outsider. As might be expected, Amy developed problems. She bit her nails, cried when left alone, wet her bed, and had nightmares. By ten she showed the signs of a rejected child — she was shy and insecure, made up illnesses, had an artificial quality that came out in role playing, was confused over her sexual identity and suffered from a serious learning disorder. What would you expect, given her home life?
But how about Beth, with all her advantages?
That was the part of the story that astonished Jude. For she, too, displayed the same signs of inner turmoil as an infant — thumb sucking, nail biting, blanket clenching and bed wetting. She, too, became a hypochondriac and fearful, and as she grew older she, too, fell into an artificial dimension of role playing and had problems with friends and in school. There were some differences, of course. But fundamentally, the secure and loving family, all the advantages, the step up in life — they didn't count for very much when it came to conquering the inner demons.
Jude was fascinated. Why should Beth turn out to be as troubled as Amy? That contradicted common sense and reason. Was there such a thing as total biological destiny? Did it override everything else in determining character — family life, education, inculcated values, chance? And where was free will in all of this? The conviction that comes from the marrow of our bones that we are actually making choices and that we can change ourselves if we try hard enough? All his life, Jude had thought — when he thought about it at all — that he would have been a different person if he had been raised by his parents instead of foster parents — less lonely somehow, more secure, more giving, as Betsy would have put it. Was that wrong?
Dr. Tierney returned, and he closed the magazine. She had changed her doctor's coat for a tweed jacket, worn over a white silk blouse, and he could see one side of a strand of pearls hanging close to her neck and disappearing past the unbuttoned collar. She was clearly getting ready to leave. He was disappointed — he had assumed that they would have more time for the interview, and he was reluctant to break it off.
"I'm afraid — if it's not an imposition — I need a bit more of your time."
"Of course." She smiled faintly. "I'm sorry I have to go now — something's come up. But we can meet again."
"Would tomorrow be okay? I've got to finish this story by the next day at the latest."
"That'll be fine."
"I can meet you somewhere else if it's more convenient. I'll give you a call."
She nodded.
"Thank you, Dr. Tierney. This is a great help."
"Please — Tizzie. That's what most people call me."
"Tizzie, then."
They shook hands.
He took a final look around her office. He saw with a new eye that the framed photographs were mostly of an elderly couple, presumably her parents. There was another one of a beautiful Irish setter and still others of groups — what looked to be friends on a rafting trip and posing by a convertible. He did not, however, see a photo of her alone with a man.
On the street outside later, he wondered why it seemed to matter.
Chapter 7
Skyler ran through the rain, drunk with grief, his clothes soaked through and sticking to his chest and the front of his thighs like weights. He did not know where he was going — he had no plan, other than to get away, to leave them all behind, to find a refuge where he could stop and take his time and formulate a life plan centered on this new thing growing inside his gut like a beast — the need for vengeance. They would pay for her death, he would see to that. Nothing else mattered.
He was aware that his feet were carrying him northward toward the forest, and he dimly thought that the escape route made sense. He knew the paths and the rivers, the ways of snakes and deer and boar. He knew how to live there and he felt at home there; he would hide out and dedicate himself to cultivating and appeasing the beast. He remembered the Shell Ring where he and Raisin had played, a vast circular mound of ancient clam shells and mussel shells and other mollusks built hundreds of years ago, it was said, by the Indians for defense; no one could sneak up on you there. That was the place to be.