The Third Twin: A Dark Psychological Thriller Read online

  With the horrifically evocative words came what would have seemed an unrelated scene if a new understanding had not accompanied it. The milieu: our house in South Lake Tahoe, where, shortly after Felicia had returned home from the hospital with our newborn twins, she had called me into the bathroom to show me the awful mass of late placenta that had come out of her body and was swimming in the blood-filled bowl. As the shock of the current news fully enveloped me, I knew it had been a vision.

  A twofold vision: one that portended violent abortion; and one that spoke to the then and there, content misunderstood until this exact moment in time nearly fifteen years later when the image revealed itself to be one not of afterbirth, but of mis-birth. That of a daughter who was neither Kathy nor Kristin, but their sibling triplet.

  10

  It was over. The search for answers was finished. I could hold on to only one thing now—Kristin’s very soul. Her body had managed, amazingly, to heal its wounds without infection, but that was as far as any recuperation went. The mind cannot fathom such a husk as occupied that white room. That white, padded room. Though I experienced the fits that possessed her only once, and then just a taste, I saw the aftermath again and again. On every visit she looked the same, as if the devil himself had been inside her. And her eyes . . . god, her eyes. You have never seen such holes. I was deafened by her vast emptiness, rendered miniscule, microscopic. She was like I would imagine the true soul of a god to be, so heavy with the weight of mortal screams as to have collapsed upon itself, bringing everything within its event horizon inside with it. I could not look at her for longer than seconds at a time for fear of suffering exactly that fate. Kathy was far better off than she. At least there, the memories of others sustained you.

  The impact on Felicia was the same. When I looked into her eyes, I was looking into the same eyes that stared back at me from the mirror when I was shaving. But where I only considered the blade, she actually used one. I was in the process of securing a piece of two-by-four across my front door when the news came driving up. Felicia’s friend Nina looked like she had been through the nine circles of hell and had carried all its suffering back with her as she approached, hands unsure what to do with themselves until the tears that she could not contain in my presence gave them purpose. I stood there as she prepared to deliver the next blow in the Ocason cycle, stood there with the power screwdriver in my hand, wondering how long I would be able to stand in place if I tried to bore one of the long wood screws into my skull.

  “I’m so sorry, Barry,” she blurted, just to get the words through the sobs. Then she sort of wailed something I couldn’t decipher.

  When I’d calmed her in my arms, soothing her with the same cold purpose that I’d put into the business I’d been about that morning, events pieced together. Nina had stopped by Felicia’s house to check on her, a daily routine since Felicia had holed herself up in her place of comfort. She had heard her singing on the back porch swing where my ex-wife had settled in, in the drizzly Alaska cold, to bleed out. The emergency staff said she’d sliced deeply, through veins, tendons and all, first in one direction and then the other, inscribing a wicked cross that she would wear for the rest of her life. She would surely have died had Nina not found her when she did. That her life had been in the balance at all should have woken me from my own darkness, but it wasn’t until that afternoon when I finally showed up at the hospital, and then to tell my ex-wife goodbye. I was going on a journey, I said to the pale body that lay there. A journey to the place where Kristin had gone. I would be bringing our daughter back with me or not returning at all.

  No, I wasn’t looking for the whys anymore. In a world like ours the whys are irrelevant. It’s the currents that matter. The freedom to ride them without opposing them, to let oneself forget, to understand that all that has gone before, all the horror, is consigned to oblivion. If assistance was needed in this regard, one could easily re-bleach the walls, floors, and porcelains of the bathroom in which the bloody abortion had been done. Close all the shutters and curtains in the house and secure a piece of two-by-four across the front door. Turn off the phone, close the email accounts, and plant oneself at the computer subsisting on milk, cereal, and water for five days while letting the negative currents of the years drain off in a flood of words that could easily be deleted when the dripping stopped.

  One could call it a psychological mechanism if it made one feel better. One could say the plastering in of the construct’s seams was a touch of irony. But what one could not say was that one’s dead and deranged daughters filled one’s thoughts anymore. A father could go on his journey knowing that when he saw them again, he would have more than a mirror to offer them.

  He could also do all of this and fail.

  On the eve of my departure for Munich some inner compass led me back to the hospital. When Felicia made me look deep into her eyes, hear the song of her soul for the first time in what seemed an eon, the simple words, “Kristin needs us,” brought it all down again. While I’d been escaping, you see, she had been returning. All the poisonous blood had been freed from her system, and she now carried a torch before her, acknowledging and armed against the dark corners surrounding her. It had been all she could do, she told me, to obey the doctors and not slip out in her hospital gown to find me, wherever I’d gone, risking involuntary commitment, her daughter’s own fate, by breaking the implied bargain that existed between the shrinks and her. But I had come on my own, she said. I’d come back on my own, and Kristin would be coming back too, in time. Felicia knew this in her deepest core. It wasn’t a question of whether, but when.

  As I spoke the necessary words, I thought of those twin personae that inhabited my body. “I am going, Felicia. I was always going. Kristin is where she is now to ensure that I do not wander from the path.”

  I could tell by the way her eyes searched mine that she understood the inevitability of it, that any attempts at discouragement would be not only wasted ones, but untruthful ones.

  “I’m scared,” she whispered.

  “Me too, Felicia.”

  As I left one facility for the next, I cried for having abandoned the mother of my children. For flying my own shutters at half-mast while there remained even the ghost of a pulse among us.

  ***

  I probably wasn’t in the best condition to be analyzing Barry Ocason, but I found myself doing just that as I drove. My metamorphosis, if it had ever really completed itself, had left me changed. Its reversal had gone only so far, leaving a gap between memory and experience. As I remembered the attack in Tago, for instance, the feelings and sensations that had come with the event did not translate to the now. I had successfully distanced past events, not to their intended destination, oblivion, but to a certain defined area outside of which I hovered, benefiting from as much objectivity as can ever be expected of a sentient being. Where this left me, in a spiritual sense, I wasn’t sure. It did feel as though events had moved into an advanced phase now, things falling into their proper order with the booking of my flight. With the space I’d created for myself, in relegating the past to those fixed parameters, came the ease of movement I’d also been looking for, that ability to ride the currents without opposing them. Only now I wouldn’t have to wait for a trigger to awaken me to my mission. I would have the freedom to oppose when I saw fit to oppose. There was a level of confidence in that, in a business where uncertainty was the rule.

  As I pulled up in the sad parking lot of the sad building, I forsook these thoughts, devoting my mind to what lay ahead.

  My goodbye to Kristin was . . . difficult. The orderly tried to take some of the anxiety out of it by commenting on the way to her room that it had been a good day for her, that she had not had an episode for two days now. But the comforts only went so far in a place where spontaneous cries of fear and rage and anguish were routine; where singing and laughter interspersed in a medley to stir primordial memory; where all the white—coats, doors, walls, padding—only partially concea
led the painfully epitomical deterioration. The flaking paint, chipping plaster, stained fabric, polyurethane. Beneath the sterility, which was not hospital-like at all, the vaguest hint of vomit, bodily fluids, blood. Scents and associations that could not be separated one from the other. It was a nightmare world that existed only within its own walls. Even if little Juneau (or did they come from Skagway and Ketchikan and Sitka, too?) had needed such a place, whispers alone could not have sustained it on the outside. Being there was required, with security standing just outside the door watching through the small window.

  Kristin was sitting in the corner, arms around her knees, staring back into the void. A horrible sight made worse by the ‘encouraging’ words of the orderly. I spoke to her from across a chasm that was as real to me as it must have been to what functions remained active in her. Today, though, the words were different. In a way it was as though I spoke to myself, though no less love went into the effort.

  “Hi Kristin.” It was necessary, even from my distant point, to remain mindful of addressing her by name. I hadn’t needed the staff to tell me that. “Kristin, this is your Daddy-O. I love you, sweetheart. To the four thousand seven hundred and twenty-eighth power. Thiiiiiiiiiis much. Remember when we used to do that? It made you mad when I told you that you couldn’t win because your arms were too short. The arms didn’t matter, you said. It was the number that was important, and you could count all the way up to a billion.

  “Kristin, I’m coming to find you. I know you’re lost, but I will be there soon. If you don’t hear my voice for a while, don’t worry. It means I’m coming quietly so I can surprise you. It will be your birthday soon. I know you’re looking forward to those skis. Be thinking about them while you’re waiting on me. If Eagle Crest is closed, maybe your mom will let me take you somewhere to try them out. Summer will be here very soon, Kristin, and we’ll have three months to do whatever we want. Doesn’t that sound great? Sweetheart, if it seems dark where you are, you’re probably just dreaming. Remember that, Kristin. You’ll wake up and your dad will be there to give you one of those big hugs you like so much. You know, the ones where I’m acting like I haven’t seen you in moons?

  “Kristin, you haven’t heard your mom’s voice in a while because she has been sick, but she’s starting to get better now. And guess what? I’ve asked Nina to fill in while I’m on my way to get you, so you won’t be by yourself. But you’re never by yourself, sweetheart. Your mom and I are always with you. If you get lonely, think about all those trips we’ve made together. All those wonderful places we’ve seen. Remember that time—Kristin? Baby?”

  She had seized up suddenly, as though a shock of energy had surged upward through her torso, forcing her chest up, her head back. Her teeth were bared, grinding fiercely. Her eyes . . . the flow of energy seemed to have infused them with life, but not of a sort to infuse a father with hope. For the second time—and now two months after the fact—I suffered a flashback to the nightmare I’d had the night Kristin had called with her dream about Kathy, or a girl who was not Kathy, trying to stop me in the airport from boarding the plane for Germany. Unlike the first spontaneous trip through time and state, which had occurred at the peak of my panic attack in Rio Tago, I was in possession of myself to the extent that I retained some semblance of objectivity. It didn’t feel like the memory had been thrust upon me so much as triggered by the sight of my daughter having this seizure. But just like the other flashback, the images were stark, more wholly realized than with the original nightmare. The clutch of the metal vines on my throat was an acute physical sensation. The faces of my offspring struck an emotional chord that could not have been possible during sleep. But it was the premonition within the memory that set the current experience apart, because that unseen something within the dream, that awful, malevolent, merciless, demented something that had yet to break over the dark horizon was now manifested in Kristin’s eyes.

  Every aspect of my reaction—the concern for my daughter, the fear of her, the revulsion to this demonic persona, the belief in the knowledge that empowered the flashback—all of this was realized in a moment’s time. The physical responses that immediately followed the emotional ones happened simultaneously, the door of the cell flying open in the same sweep of motion performed by my arm as I slapped her face so hard it was a wonder I didn’t knock her gnashing teeth out of her head.

  “Get out of her, you fuck!” I screamed as I towered over her long enough to get her own response before the guard was hauling me backward.

  They were words I’d carry with me like Felicia’s torch to Bavaria. Sibilantly spat words that not only reeked of malice, but seemed semiotically structured for dramatic effect:

  “All those wonderful trips . . . ” she hissed, “like Rio Tago?!”

  Then the staff was arriving to help her into the jacket, and I was invited, rather sternly, to come another day. There was nothing I could do there, and if I waited, I might be waiting a long time. Fits of possession were par for the course at the facility for the victims of evolução, where not only was every day a holiday and every night a banquet, they also provided the formal wear. No, best to come another day, sir.

  Other days, as we all know, are like tomorrows. Who’s to say about them?

  ***

  One more goodbye to bid, and that was to Alaska itself. I don’t know how sentimental my visit to the wetlands actually was, but I wondered, as I parked at the trailhead near the mouth of the Mendenhall River, when I would next see the only land that could have replaced Tahoe to my nature-responsive sensibilities. The telephone correspondence that had secured my place on the excursion was a blur, having occurred during my descent into oblivion. But one thing I had committed to memory was to expect to be gone for at least two weeks, depending on weather and other variables such as the fitness of the group—as though the selection process, which required an actual résumé, didn’t obviate that concern. Also sticking with me was the assessment that Ritter, the owner and guide of the operation, had that sort of this-is-my-game personality, right up to the point where I asked him, without warning, if the name Cunhedo meant anything to him. But it was the un-advertised excursion I was concerned with, the excursion beneath the excursion. And the fact that my odd question hadn’t elicited more than a seeming appreciation for the dimension this added to the faceless voice I was to him did not detract from the level of awareness this business demanded. So sayeth the mental case who’d sought to armor himself in ignorant nakedness.

  I’d picked up a couple of Alaska Ambers on the way, stuffing the extra beer in the inside pocket of a jacket I did not need on the pleasantly mild spring afternoon. In spite of the weather, which came on the heels of a rainy cold spell but was not really unusual for May, I had the trail to myself. That I’d beaten the after-work strollers and joggers suited me just fine as I sipped my Amber, admiring the view of the mountains that surrounded Gastineau Channel and the birdwatcher’s and duck hunter’s paradise that was the wetlands. The variety of birds in Southeast Alaska, both resident and migratory, never ceased to impress, and nowhere better represented than on this expanse of moist ground between the airport, along whose perimeter I walked, and the northern end of Douglas Island, my residence. The tracks were everywhere, a secret language inscribed in patterns across the flats to complement the vocal dialects of flock, flotilla, and gaggle. Gulls, teals, mallards, goldeneyes, Canadian geese, snow geese, sandpipers, heron, trumpeter swans, a whole catalog of shore species pecking at the sand, splashing in shallow pools, rising on one spontaneous wing, calling warnings as bald eagles (of which I saw several in the trees lining the path) soared too near. A made-to-document aviary that rarely quit its flourishing symphony.

  Today, I paid no mind to which specimens had come out, though the usual abundance of ducks and geese could not be ignored. My senses were busy with the larger experience of this branch of the Inside Passage, which was lorded over by mountains bearing names like Jumbo and Thunder—the latter for the rumbling
avalanches that plunged down its chutes. Off to the northwest the jagged line of the perpetually snowcapped Chilkats, on the other side of which lay Glacier Bay, brought home the scope of the whole mountainous archipelago that is Southeast Alaska, dazzling the imagination, muting any notions of individual significance. While I had experienced my share of dramatic mountain settings, none were more awe-inspiring than this region.

  On the one hand, the expanses of open sea between the rugged bodies of land made it all more accessible, but on the other, the isolation of one geological entity from the next created a sense of mind-boggling vastness. If you let your senses go, your imagination run with its layman’s knowledge of the forces that shaped these mountains—the glaciers, the tectonic plate collisions—you found yourself literally terror-struck standing in the midst of such raw and magnificent power. The implications assumed cosmological proportions. It was all so grandly complex, there must be a god behind it. Yet you, the asserter, were so diminutive, insignificant, purposeless, God couldn’t possibly exist.

  Inevitably, by the time I opened my second beer, the ideas of vastness and grand designs had spawned associations of Kristin and the great void accessed by her eyes, of evolução and its uses of her and me in its progression, of a third daughter manifested in dreams. Hail, that little contrivance, the cell phone, which rang in at just the right time. By the end of my conversation with Investigator Pinto, I’d finished the rest of my beer, which suppressed the imagination’s call to wing.

  Pinto’s contacting me with the development in my case was sort of an absurd counterpoint to my visit to the padded room, the news as surreal as it was anti anticlimactic. The perpetrator, the investigator said, had been photographically identified. He had gone missing from São Paulo four months ago, and his family had been looking for him, their hired investigator following a lead that he had fled his life for Rio de Janeiro. It was believed by authorities in São Paulo that three corpses had been left in his wake, though that had only come to light recently. The wife and son, who had identified him, claimed that the pressures of his job in the financial sector had caused him to tip over an edge he had been riding for some time, abusing alcohol, cocaine, sometimes them. While Pinto was not altogether sure about their reasons for chasing down the man who had abandoned them (he intimated the opinion that money was at the heart of it), he had no reason to doubt the authenticity of the identification. The son could have passed for the old man if he’d had the years on him.