Chapter 3 - THE LICENSE PLATE IN THE RAIN
The word hung in the brisk November air like a gunshot.
Twin.
I stared at the woman on the steps, then back down at the zoomed-in photograph on my phone screen.
"I don't have a brother," I said, the words feeling thick and clumsy on my tongue. "I’m an only child."
Behind me, my father let go of Chloe’s arm and stepped down beside me. He didn't shout this time. Instead, he draped a heavy, paternal arm around my shoulders, lowering his voice to the calm, grief-stricken register he had used every year when we laid wreaths at the empty family plot at Graceland Cemetery.
"Daniel, please," my father said softly, loud enough for the closest groomsmen and Chloe’s parents to hear. "Look at her. This woman is Eleanor Vance—your mother’s estranged younger sister. She’s been in and out of psychiatric facilities in Milwaukee for twenty years."
I froze, looking from my father’s lined, earnest face back to the woman in the stained brown coat.
"Your Aunt Eleanor developed a severe delusion after Helen died in the 2001 fire," my father continued, his voice heavy with sorrow. "She convinced herself that she was Helen, and that the boy she lost to child services in 2003 was you. When she showed up at Chloe’s shelter on Tuesday demanding money, Chloe came straight to Gregory and me. We didn't tell you because we didn't want this heartbreaking illness to ruin your wedding week."
It made sense.
For five agonizing seconds, the ground beneath my custom Italian shoes seemed to steady. My mother had a sister? No—wait. I searched my memory. Whenever I had asked about my mother’s side of the family growing up, my father had said Helen was an only child raised by a widowed carpenter in Green Bay.
I looked at the woman on the steps. She wasn't screaming or ranting like someone caught in a delusion. She was looking at my father’s left hand—where it rested on my tuxedo lapel—with cold, quiet recognition.
"An aunt named Eleanor?" she asked my father calmly. "Is that the story you settled on with Gregory on Tuesday night, Arthur? Because Helen’s birth certificate from St. Norbert’s Parish only lists one daughter born to Thomas and Mary Miller."
She slowly pushed up the stained left sleeve of her brown coat.
Running from her wrist to the crook of her elbow was a wide, jagged lattice of pale skin-graft scars—old third-degree burn marks where skin had been harvested from her thigh decades ago.
And right above her wrist bone, spared by an inch from the graft border, was a faded blue-ink crescent moon birthmark.
I didn't need a photograph for that.
Every time I had woken from a nightmare when I was seven, eight, nine years old, crying in my huge bedroom in Lake Forest, I had rubbed my thumb against the inside of my own left wrist—looking for a little blue moon that wasn't there. Dr. Henderson, the child psychiatrist my father hired, had told me it was a phantom memory of a nursery mobile.
"You have the moon," I whispered, stepping out from under my father’s arm.
"You used to trace it with your finger while I read you Goodnight Moon," she said softly. "Until you fell asleep."
"Then why does the license plate say 2003?" I demanded, the pain in my chest sharpening into desperation. "I was in Lake Forest Elementary in November of 2003! I have class pictures from second grade! I have hospital records from October 2001 when I had smoke inhalation and cranial trauma!"
"Because you were in Lake Forest in 2003, Danny," she said, her eyes glistening. "After your father took you from the hospital in 2001 and told you I was dead. The boy standing beside me in that photograph outside the Ravenswood apartment building in 2003 wasn't you. That was Leo."
My knees went weak. I looked back down at the phone screen.
The little boy in the photograph had the exact same crooked front tooth I’d had before my orthodontist fixed it at age nine. He was wearing my yellow slicker. He even had the tiny crescent scar near his chin—
Wait.
I zoomed in all the way on the little boy’s face in the photo until the pixels blurred.
The tiny scar under the boy’s chin was on the right side of his jawline.
Slowly, I raised my hand and touched my own chin. My scar—from when I fell off a tricycle on our back porch at age three—was on the left.
"Why would a photograph be flipped?" I muttered aloud—and then I looked at the license plate behind us in the photo again. The letters ILLINOIS and NOV 2003 weren't backward. The photograph wasn't flipped.
The boy in the picture was my mirror image. Identical twins often carried mirror features—the same crooked left tooth mirrored on the right, or a mole on opposite cheeks.
"No," I breathed, shaking my head as I looked back at my father. "No, that’s impossible. If I had a twin brother when I was five, I would remember him!"
"You were five years old with a fractured skull and three weeks of heavy barbiturate sedation at Mercy Private Clinic," Helen said, her voice rising for the first time so that the front three rows of wedding guests heard every word. "When the fire broke out in the Ravenswood townhouse on October 14th, 2001, Arthur wasn't living with us anymore. He had left us eighteen months earlier when his father threatened to cut him out of the Vance Logistics trust for marrying a waitress."
My father lunged forward a step, his aristocratic composure cracking. "Shut your mouth! Gregory, call the police captain right now!"
Gregory Sterling didn't pull out his phone. My bride’s father stood frozen by the stone pillar, staring at Helen’s burned arm as if he were watching a ghost walk out of a grave he had helped dig.
"When your grandfather died that September," Helen continued, never taking her eyes off me, "the trust stipulated that Arthur could only inherit control of the company if he had custody of a male Vance heir before the probate closed in November. I refused to sign you boys over to him. On the night of October 14th, someone wedged a chair under our back kitchen door and threw a kerosene rag into the mudroom."
A woman in the second row of guests covered her mouth with both hands.
"You dropped your heavy wooden toy box onto your head trying to climb out the bedroom window, Danny," my mother whispered, tears spilling down her weathered cheeks. "You were unconscious. The smoke was so thick I couldn't carry both of you down the fire escape ladder at once because my left arm caught fire holding the window frame open. I carried you down first and laid you in the grass by the alley. When I climbed back up for Leo, the staircase collapsed. We fell through into the flooded basement laundry room."
I couldn't breathe. The Fragments in my mind—the rain tapping on the window, the smell of wet wool, the hospital ceiling, my father’s voice saying "It’s just you and me now, son, you always only had a father"—slammed together with violent force.
"When Leo and I crawled out the broken coal chute into the neighbor’s yard twenty minutes later," she said, "you were gone. Arthur had pulled up in his Mercedes before the fire trucks even cleared the alley, taken you to a private clinic under his father’s doctors, and paid the county coroner to list two unidentified bodies from a transient squat next door as Helen and Leo Vance."
"If you survived with Leo in 2001," I choked out, grabbing her rough, scarred hands in mine, "where is he? Why are you living in a shelter alone, and how did Chloe get this picture?"
Before my mother could answer, the heavy oak side door of the church rectory banged open.
A seven-year-old boy in a miniature gray ring-bearer suit—Chloe’s little nephew, Toby, who had been waiting inside with the nanny—ran out onto the landing holding Chloe’s white beaded bridal purse.
"Auntie Chloe!" Toby piped up, his small voice carrying clearly over the hushed crowd. "You left your bag in the dressing room, and the man’s watch inside keeps buzzing!"
Toby stumbled on the top step. The clasp of Chloe’s beaded purse popped open, spilling its contents down the limestone stairs right to my feet.
Out tumbled a tube of lipstick, an envelope of cash from St. Jude’s shelter, and an old, heavy silver Seiko wristwatch with a cracked crystal and a dried brown stain across the nylon strap.
May you like
My mother let out a sound like an animal shot through the heart and dropped to her knees on the stone steps, snatching the broken watch before Chloe could kick it away.
"Where did you get this?!" my mother screamed at Chloe, holding the stained watch against her chest. "This was on Leo’s wrist on Tuesday morning when he went to meet your father at the boatyard!"
