the Third Twin (1996)

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?”