It took me a while to figure that out because at first all I saw was what he wanted me to see. He was smart and funny and charming and insanely good-looking. I liked that he had a focus, that he seemed to have his life figured out. While the rest of us were still sending out resumes in search of a halfway decent starter job, he’d had internships and fellowships, and clerkships, and his choice of employment options.
He was a rising star at a law firm when I met him at a farmer’s market one rainy Sunday. We’d both reached for the last loaf of peppercorn cheese bread from a local bakery and he’d gallantly relinquished his claim, then followed me around the rest of the afternoon as I shopped for tomatoes and corn and honey.
We’d eaten a food cart lunch while sharing our picks for best Indian food and tiramisu in the city. He couldn’t believe I didn’t like sushi; I was surprised he didn’t care for coffee.
When he bought me a bunch of sunflowers—“to brighten your day as much as you’ve brightened mine,” he said—I’d thought it was a smooth move. When he asked for my number, I gave it to him, never expecting him to follow up.
“Seriously,” I’d told Ripley, “people just don’t meet people like that except in the movies.”
“Does he have a brother?” she’d asked me, which is how she met Jared. They didn’t last as long as Parker and I did and she’d soon moved on to Mikkel, an intense musician who paid the bills working as an IT guy but poured his heart into playing experimental compositions on instruments of his own design.
Parker hadn’t liked Mikkel very much, and not because he’d supplanted Jared in Ripley’s heart and bed. His animosity was rooted in his basic contempt for humankind in general. He was, at heart, a misanthrope.
The first time I felt the weight of his disdain personally had been the night we first made love. I’d put him off for weeks, a bit wary that our “meet cute” and immediate connection was not enough to sustain a real relationship. But he’d launched a charm offensive that had finally won me over.
Afterwards, he told me casually that he thought women who had tattoos were slutty and that if I wanted to be with him, I’d have to remove the tattoo on my left hip.
I bristled at the suggestion.
“No one can see it,” I said.
“I can see it,” he said, “and I don’t like it. It brands you as white trash.”
“No,” I’d said and gotten out of bed to dress, almost weeping with frustration when I couldn’t find my bra.
“Don’t be like that, Hilde,” he’d said. “I just know how people talk about Hugh. I’d hate to have them talk like that about you.”
Parker had sounded so sincere that I’d allowed him to coax me back into bed but the name hung in the air between us like the stench of a particularly nasty fart.
Hugh. My poor troubled twin brother.
I’d gotten the undercover tattoo on our 18th birthday at Hugh’s insistence and he had a matching one on his forearm where it joined a whole sleeve of designs, including an ugly, vaguely bird-like blotch he said was a crow. I always thought it looked like it had been scrawled on his arm with a cheap ballpoint pen but never said so. I understood what he was doing with the skin art. He’d felt like an outsider his whole life and he’d embraced the role when we were just kids, pushing people away with his temper and his poor hygiene and his terrible, horrible, no good, very bad choices.
The tattoos were a way of telling people who he was, a Rosetta stone to decode his soul. All of them had meaning and there was a raw poetry to the story they told. Many of them were based on images he said had come to him in dreams and he was convinced they were messages from our birth mother, a woman our parents claimed to have never met and of whom we could find no trace.
I didn’t want a tattoo but the design he’d sketched out in the dream notebook his shrink made him keep was strangely compelling—interlocking curves and wavy lines that looked like some ancient rune from a lost underwater civilization. Hugh said the design would protect us and that the symbol was called “Ascaris,” but he didn’t have any idea how he knew that or if it even had a meaning.
Hugh almost never asked me for anything, and it seemed like such a silly request that I agreed to it. We had it done by a gender-fluid ink master who had hit on both of us. It wasn’t the first time we’d been invited to take part in a ménage but we declined. Our relationship was already complicated enough without adding incest to the mix.
Our father was horrified when he found out what we’d done but our mother told us she thought it was a beautiful way to celebrate our transition into adulthood.
She had died not long after that and our father, who taught medieval literature at the Portland State University, had turned into an old man overnight.
She had been the love of his life, and without her he seemed to be stumbling his way through perpetual night without so much as a glow-stick to light his way.
He took a leave of absence from the teaching job, supposedly to write a book on gender roles in The Mabinogion, but after a year he’d given up all pretense of working and just stayed in his study and played Assassin’s Creed, his melancholia wrapped around him like a comfortable sweater.
Hugh dealt with his grief by self-medicating, landing in rehab after a second DUI. He’d been clean for a while, but he’d relapsed twice that I knew of and had been dropping in and out of my life ever since.
We still had that spooky extrasensory bond that a lot of twins have, but that and the tattoo on my hip were the strongest connections I still had to my brother and I wasn’t going to risk losing that because the guy I was sleeping with was a snob.
Parker let the matter drop that first night, but over the time we’d dated, I’d heard a lot of complaints about that tattoo. And about Hugh. Some people blow up under that kind of pressure. I imploded, stuffing down my anger until it rebounded on me as depression.
Good times.
I was jostled out of my unhappy thoughts by the arrival of a trio of guys who worked with Ripley at Zulily. They were actors too and always in performance mode. Being around them could be exhausting if you weren’t in the mood.
“Hey, Hilde,” one of them said and came in for the full-body cheek kiss.
“Hey,” I said, giving him a hug instead. “Merry Christmas, Deshawn.”
He smiled and looked over my shoulder, already scoping out the room for an easier target. As he and the other guys moved on, I drifted deeper into the party, still keeping my eye on Parker and his date.
I could see by the proprietary way she kept touching him that she thought they were a couple.
Maybe they were, though Parker’s usual style was to break up before holidays so he wouldn’t be obligated to give his significant other a present. Not that he wasn’t generous; he just didn’t like the implied commitment that came with offering a woman a Valentine’s Day bauble or a shiny trinket at Christmas.
As I watched them, the redheaded girl threw back her head and laughed at something Parker had said. She was wearing a pair of statement earrings that made her slender neck look long and graceful as they swayed back and forth.
Parker smiled at her, that lazy smirk-smile I’d always courted, wanting his approval and appreciation.
Hugh wasn’t the only twin who was looking for love in all the wrong places.
Our parents had loved us dearly but there was still—always—that question for us: Why had our mother given us up?
Hugh’s misbehavior had always been a plea for reassurance, designed to make our adoptive parents prove how much they loved us, to prove that they would never give us away, no matter how bad we were.
The more he acted out, the more I became the “perfect daughter,” the people pleaser. I was still trying to work through that. I hated conflict and would go to great lengths to avoid it.
Which explained a lot about why I had been with Parker.
He liked confrontation and I could turn him loose like a mad dog when there was a problem I needed handled, whether it was a nasty neighbor or a car mechanic who wanted to charge me for a new transmission when all I needed was an oil change.
With Parker around, I didn’t have to worry about things like that.