Thorn in My Side

by Karin Slaughter

  “God, you’re an asshole.” She grabbed the door handle, but nothing happened. “Unlock the door, you freak.”

  “Just get the hell out of my van!”

  “I’m trying to, you freak.”

  “Stop calling me a freak!” Kirk screamed. I felt a trill run through our body that brought a cold sweat onto my neck and shoulders. Our heart shook as if electrified. I’d seen anger before. I’d seen fury. But this was different.

  “Kirk,” I begged, my throat tightening around the word. It was too late. His fisted hand went up into an arc over his head, and then—carnage.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I looked at the alarm clock on the bedside table. It was 5:58 in the morning. Kirk’s CPAP machine made a noise like a ventilator as he slept soundly beside me. I had my Bible open by my head, but the words kept blurring.

  A man of many companions may come to ruin, but there is no friend who sticks closer than a brother.

  I looked at my brother. Kirk snored softly. The breathing hose wrapped around his face resembled a plastic octopus. Whoever said that bad deeds keep you up at night had never met Kirk. He was sleeping like a baby. The sleep of the guiltless. The sleep of the content.

  Mindy Connor. That was her name. We found her license in her wallet, which was inside her purse, which we only noticed when we were taking out the seats of the Town and Country so we could peel back the carpet and hose everything down.

  The alarm clock changed to 5:59, then 6:00, which sent it into a shrill beeping. Kirk reached over me and groped for the snooze button, but I pushed away his hand.

  “Wha—?” His voice was muffled by the breathing mask. My expression was enough to cut off any comment. He took off the mask, and together, we sat up.

  I followed him into the bathroom, where he emptied our bladder. Silently, we brushed our teeth. He didn’t complain when I flossed, even did his own teeth for a change. I felt like I was in a daze as we went through our usual morning routine: breakfast, coffee, shower, shave. Kirk took longer on his hair than usual, but I didn’t care. I suppose he thought he was being generous when he gave me extra time to empty our bowels. Instead of tapping his foot and repeatedly clearing his throat, he sat silently, waiting. I turned my head away, staring out the bathroom window at the dogwood trees in the yard. Kirk hated gardening. The pansies and gardenias were all done on my days. The rose bushes. The peach tree. All me. All lost the moment they found out about last night.

  That poor woman. That poor, poor woman.

  “Red?” Kirk asked. He was standing in front of our tie rack. We always wore matching ties. It was my one concession to fashion.

  I shrugged.

  He gave a heavy sigh. “Wayne, there’s nothing we can do about it now. What’s done is done.”

  “I notice you didn’t turn on the television.”

  “I was trying not to freak you out.”

  “Freak,” I said. Not meaning him, just saying the word.

  Kirk’s throat bobbed, but that was his only acknowledgment. I stared at him in the mirror as he looped the red silk tie around his neck. I had a flash of last night: the blood, the screaming, the horror.

  What hath thou wrought?

  Not the Bible, but John Greenleaf Whittier. I wonder if they let you read poetry in prison.

  “Wayne?” Kirk’s tone implied a strained patience.

  My hand went up to pull the Windsor knot tight to his throat. He did the same for me, then clipped the tie to my part of our shirt so that it wouldn’t flop down like a hangman’s noose.

  Kirk said, “We’re not going to hang for this.”

  I chewed my lip. “The manhunt shouldn’t take long. ‘Last seen with conjoined twins.’ That’s a long list of suspects. They’re probably already preparing the search warrant.”

  “Stop it, Wayne. What do you want to do—call the police, tell them to come get me?”

  “That’s exactly what we should do.”

  “I’d like to see you try.”

  I glared at him. He glared back.

  I’d never won a staring contest with Kirk in my life. I looked back at the yard, the trees blurring. I cleared my throat. “What you did was wrong.”

  “What about what was done to me? You think I like living this way?” His voice caught. “I woulda been married by now. I woulda had kids. I’d probably be running IBM or something.”

  I hated when he talked like this. It broke my heart because I knew that I was the only thing that stood in his way.

  But still, what he’d done last night couldn’t be excused. You couldn’t take someone else’s life to pay for your own.

  I said, “They’ll go easier on you if you turn yourself in.”

  “You’ve been watching too many crime shows.”

  “What else am I supposed to do while you’re hanging out in all those chat rooms pretending to be a married father of three looking for some side action?”

  “It’s called a fantasy life, Wayne. Maybe if you had one, you’d understand.”

  “You have no idea what I fantasize about.”

  We exchanged a look. Both of us knew that was not exactly true. While we couldn’t technically read each other’s thoughts, there was an inexplicable connection that clued us each into what the other was thinking.

  Kirk finished his coffee. “Why are you always such a downer? You always think the worst thing is going to happen, and then—”

  “It does.” I tugged at my tie, feeling claustrophobic. The clock on the bedside table read 6:35. “Were going to be late for work.”

  We used to take turns driving to work, but then Kirk got his license revoked for excessive speeding. My brother may be graceful on the dance floor, but his foot is made of lead. Not only did he blast through a school zone, he almost hit a student. A little boy. A cop’s son. Kirk was damn lucky they hadn’t thrown him in jail. He should also be glad I hadn’t strangled him, because of course he tried to tell the judge that it was me, his little brother, who was speeding in front of the Amish Friends School. Thank God the crossing guard’s testimony vindicated me.

  “He had his arm waving out the sunroof,” she said, nodding toward Kirk. “I seen him screaming at the kids to get the hell outta his way.”

  “I was only trying to save them.” Kirk eyed me as if I’d been the one who was hell-bent on taking out a bunch of grade-schoolers.

  “Then why,” the crossing guard countered, “were you callin’ ’em all little bastards and sayin’ you was gonna mow ’em down?”

  Kirk had never liked children. I suppose this came from the high volume of cruelty children had leveled at us when we were ourselves children. And, it must be said, as adults we still come across a lot of rude kids. They’ll scream in terror. They’ll run away from us. The worst will come up and poke at me, as if I’m some Halloween costume. Some of them kick. Some of them punch. A few have even bitten like dogs, clamping their incisors on my arm. It must be a primal urge that compels them to think Kirk is afflicted with some sort of tumor that needs to be chewed off him. Or maybe their parents are just rude, Big-Gulp-guzzling, flip-flop-wearing cretins who haven’t bothered to raise well-mannered children.

  If Kirk hated the children, I hated their parents. These were idiots who’d raised their kids to behave as they like, not as they should. There was no such thing as an “inside voice” for these monsters. There were no manners, no loyalty, and no sense of being but a cog in the greater wheel of society. These were the spoiled idiots who’d bought million-dollar homes on their thirty-thousand-a-year salaries. These were the ones who’d leased Porsches when they should’ve been driving Camrys. They were ticks sucking off the fat of the American dream. And their children were worse, because at least the parents knew better. The kids would be nothing but parasites.

  Just like me.

  “Wayne.” Kirk had been fiddling with the radio. He was looking at me—staring, really. I wanted to smack him for the expression on his face.

  I said, “Just keep your
foot away from the gas pedal, please. We can’t afford for both of us to lose our license.”

  He stared at me for a beat longer, then went back to the radio.

  We weren’t meant to read our medical records, but when we were seventeen, Kirk had perused our charts while we waited for the doctors to come poke and prod and scan and magnetize and radiate and all the other horrors medical science rains down upon the conjoined.

  “You’re a parasite,” he’d told me, but I was already reading the words over his shoulder.

  Through extensive testing, Drs. Shelby and Lovett have concluded that subsequent to his lack of full heart and intestinal function, combined with the obvious inability of twin number two to survive without twin number one, the designation of “parasitic twin” should be used going forward to describe Wayne Edgerton.

  This was 1990. We didn’t have computers where you could WebMD something awful about yourself in the privacy of your own home. We went instead to the university library, where we had to pull from the card catalogue the stack number for a book entitled The Psychological Dysnomia of the Parasitic Twin, written by a man with the jackassian name of Bonneau F. Von Heffinger.

  Our hands shook as we opened the first page.

  Dysnomia, from the Greek for “lawlessness.”

  “Sounds more like me than you,” Kirk had said—the most generous statement that has ever come from his mouth before or since.

  The parasitic twin, wrote the esteemed Dr. Von Heffinger, also known as an unequally conjoined twin, is created when twin embryos in utero do not fully separate. As is often found in nature, there is the Darwinian dichotomy; one must struggle against the other for both hormonal support as well as the limited sustenance available in the womb. Thus, one embryo becomes dominant at the expense of the other.

  “Now, that really sounds like me,” Kirk mumbled, licking my finger so I could turn the page.

  In stark juxtaposition is the parasite, which cannot survive without the host. The underdeveloped twin is completely dependent on the dominant twin, also called the autosite. This uneven relationship will often create a lifelong pattern of dependence and hostility.

  Kirk had closed the book on that last sentence. His reading comprehension had never been good, but I could tell he got the gist of the passages. I braced myself for the expected joke, the casually cruel comment that would pierce my soul like a hot knife through a balloon. He had this look on his face—a flash of understanding, a flaming fury burning in his eyes—and then it was gone.

  Kirk dropped the book on a nearby table. He checked my watch, then said, “Why don’t we try that new Mexican place for lunch?”

  At seventeen years old, we were not exactly clueless about our condition. We’d grown up knowing something was seriously wrong. Why else would people in the street stop and stare? Why else would our mother and father abandon us on the steps of the university hospital with a note reading, “Please study thems freaks to help others never live to this same nightmare what nearly tore us apart.”

  Altruistic, one might say. Child abandonment, others might claim. And still others might be shocked by the appalling syntax.

  But our parents had abandoned us to medical study, and study us the medicos did. We were in state care. No one was going to stand up to the doctors who wanted to immerse Kirk’s hand in boiling water to see if I felt pain. No one told them they were wrong to stick probes into my brain while Kirk performed math equations so they could ascertain whether my thoughts were assisting him. No one ever stood up for us to say that we were not guinea pigs. We were not freaks. We were human beings.

  Over tacos, we decided that we weren’t going to go to the hospital anymore. Our eighteenth birthday was less than a month away. We would officially be adults, no longer in the shackles of state care. Thanks to news stories over the years, we had money in the bank. Strangers who had never met us had sent in cash and checks to ward off having a conjoined set of twins in their own family. Over a hundred thousand dollars. That was a lot of money in 1990. It’s a lot of money now, but what it meant to us then was freedom. Freedom from tests. Freedom from scrutiny. Freedom from tyranny.

  “Wayne,” Kirk said. “We’re here.”

  I took a sharp turn into the lot, parking the van in our usual space six down from the blue handicapped spot. We’d never been the types to take advantage. So long as we had two feet, we could walk the short distance to the building.

  I glanced toward the front door as I climbed out of the Town and Country. Dixie Research Center. Not research as you might imagine, but a fancy and rather deceptive name for a call center. Those annoying telephone calls you get at night when you’re trying to enjoy your dinner? That’s either me, or Kirk, or one of our fellow cubicle jockeys trying to sell you siding, new windows, or in-home carpet cleaning. Talking on the phone was something we could do independently, and—I don’t want to brag—we were damn good at it. Kirk and I had traded the top spot back and forth on the “Best Operator of the Month” plaque so many times that they’d given us a lifetime award. We’d worked at Dixie for over twenty years. We made good money here. We could afford a nice car. A nice house. Pansies in the garden. Even a peach tree.

  All of which would be gone once the police found out about Mindy Connor.

  “You have to let it go,” Kirk said, gripping his briefcase as we walked across the parking lot. “Just act cool.”

  “Georgia is a death penalty state, Kirk.”

  “What are they gonna do? Stick the needle in one of us and the poison goes into the other.”

  “I can’t survive prison. I wouldn’t make it.”

  “Stop your whining.” He kicked at a broken piece of asphalt. “Don’t we always take care of each other?”

  “Well—” I began, but I didn’t finish the sentence.

  Did Kirk always take care of me? I suppose if you just looked at the case of the fire, you would say yes. This was nineteen years ago. We were living in an apartment off of Peachtree Street. The old woman next door had fallen asleep with a cigarette in her mouth. Kirk had awakened to the smell of smoke. I’ve always been a pretty deep sleeper, and it was only because he roused me out of bed that I managed to make it out of the fire.

  “But Kirk made it out, too,” you might say.

  Maybe I should give you a more complicated example from twelve years ago. Last night wasn’t the first time Kirk risked our freedom. He’s always been a brawler. I suppose some might say he had a chip on his shoulder, but then they might also say that the chip was me. He’s always felt like he had something to prove.

  “Young, dumb, and full of come,” as Kirk would say.

  What happened was, some jerk at a bar wouldn’t leave us alone. He kept poking Kirk, prodding at him like he was a specimen in the lab.

  “Freak! Freak! Freak!” he kept saying, like a duck quacking.

  I ignored the jerk, which I’ve always felt is the best way to deal with bullies. Kirk couldn’t do the same. There was something about this guy that got under his skin. The taunting led to threats. The threats led to pushing. The pushing led to shoving. The shoving led to punching, and before either of us knew it, fists were flying.

  Kirk’s fists.

  My fists.

  Who knew?

  Freak, the guy had called us. The same word our parents had used. The same word that rude, obnoxious children use before they run and hide behind their mommy’s skirts.

  Our only defense in the courtroom was Kirk. He told our lawyer to sit down, and he told anyone who would listen that we had come into this world together and we would defend ourselves together. Not that I was capable of doing anything of the sort. I was sobbing so hard at the time that I could barely form words. Kirk had told the judge he wasn’t sure who had punched the guy so badly that his ear had snapped off. He didn’t know who’d broken the man’s jaw or stomped on his hand. The truth of the matter was that one of us had been attacked, so both of us had been attacked.

  We were brothers. We wer
e bound not just by blood, but by skin and flesh and bone. Hurt one of us and the other bleeds. Strike one of us and the other is stricken.

  What finally swayed the judge was Kirk’s tearful admission: the man in the bar, the so-called victim, had called us a freak. Not even freaks. Just one freak. As if we weren’t two separate people. We each had our own social security numbers. We each paid taxes. We each had to pass the test before we could receive our individual driver’s license. Were we not men? Were we not of two separate brains, two separate thoughts?

  And then Kirk had played what the newspapers called the “conjoined card.”

  If we had been not conjoined, but separate—two brothers, one looking out for the other—would both of us now be facing eight to ten years in prison? Could this judge really punish one brother for coming to the defense of the other? Could he send one man to prison, thus damning the other man to pay the heavy price for a crime he did not commit?

  Granted, the judge had been confused, but it was Kirk’s eloquent homily to brotherhood that swung things our way. Even I was swayed. My sobbing turned into tears of gratitude for the loving words that came from my brother’s mouth.

  Five years’ probation. Medical costs for the victim.

  And, like that, we were free men. That was all that mattered to me. That one night in jail when we were arrested was enough to scare me straight. And Kirk, by default, was scared straight along with me. Every time he raised his fist or threatened someone, I was there to smooth things over. To calm him down. To diffuse the situation.

  Until last night.

  Kirk opened the front door to the Dixie Research Center. Wilhelmina Lenting, the receptionist, was sitting behind the half-circle of her desk, looking smart in a blue blouse and matching earrings.

  Kirk never gave Willie the time of day. He knew how I felt about her—that the graceful curve of her neck could flood my mind with bad poetry, that the dulcet tones of her voice sent a shiver up my side of our spine. Yet, in the ten years Willie had been working at Dixie, he’d never done more than glance at her when we walked in the door. His impatience to get to work was always such that I barely had time to tell her hello before we were practically jogging toward our cubicle.