Life Expectancy

now."
        He stared at the hand that had once been cursed with syndactyly. He spread the fingers, worked them independently of one another, as though they had been separated only yesterday, as though he were still learning how to use them.
        "Your mama was beautiful, too," said Charlene, "and as sweet as a child, but fragile."
        Looking up from his hand, he returned by long habit to the mad fantasy that his father had concocted: "She was murdered by the doctor because-"
        "None of that," Charlene interrupted. "You know crazy when you hear it, as sure as I do. When you pretend to believe things that aren't true, just because it's easier than dealing with the facts, you turn your whole life into a lie. And where's that get you?"
        "Here," he acknowledged.
        "When I say your mama was fragile, I don't mean just because she died giving birth, which she did, though the good doctor tried everything to save her. Her spirit was fragile, too. Someone seemed to have broken it. She was a frightened little thing, afraid of more than just childbirth. She grabbed my hand and didn't want to let go, wanted to tell me things, I think, but was scared to hear herself say the words."
        I sensed that if Punchinello had not been chained to the table and that if the posted rules of conduct had permitted it, he would have reached out to Charlene, as his mother had done. He stared at her, transfixed. His countenance was a pool of sorrow, with drowned hopes in his eyes, and on the surface floated a childlike longing.
        "Though your mama died," Charlene continued, "she gave birth to healthy twins. You were the smaller. Jimmy was the bigger."
        I studied him as he gazed at Charlene, and thought how different my life would have been if she had scooped him up to save him instead of scooping me.
        The possibility of our lives exchanged, his for mine, should have made it easier for me to see him as my brother, but I could not get my heart around him. He remained a stranger to me.
        "Maddy Tock," Charlene told Punchinello, "had difficult labor, too, but it turned out opposite from what happened to your mother. Maddy lived, and her baby died. Her final contraction was so painful she passed out-and never knew her child was stillborn. I took the precious little bundle and put him in a bassinet in the creche, so she wouldn't see his tiny body when she woke… and wouldn't have to see him at all if she decided not to."
        Curiously, when I thought of that stillborn infant, I mourned him as a lost brother, as I could never mourn Punchinello.
        Lorrie said, "Then Dr. MacDonald went to the expectant-father's lounge to console Konrad Beezo for the loss of his wife, Rudy Tock for the loss of his child."
        "We were shorthanded that night," Charlene recalled. "A mean virus had been making the rounds, people were out sick. Lois Hanson was the only delivery nurse available besides me. When we heard Konrad Beezo shouting at the doctor, so bitter, accusing, and such shameful profanity, we both thought of the twins, but for different reasons.
        Lois, she figured the sight of his babies would calm Konrad, but I'd come off a marriage to a cruel man, and I knew I heard the same violence in this one, rage that can't be put out by kindness, that could only burn itself out in fury. My only thought was to get the babies safe. Lois took you down the hall toward the lounge and got herself shot to death, but I went the other way with Jimmy here, and hid out."
        I had worried that in spite of the revelation that we had both been born with syndactyly, Punchinello would receive Charlene's story with skepticism if he didn't reject it outright. Instead, he appeared not merely to believe it but to be enraptured by her account.
        Perhaps he warmed to the romantic notion that he had much in common with the betrayed title character in Alexandre Dumas's The Man in the Iron Mask, that he was the equivalent of a heroic peasant while I, his twin, had ascended to the throne of France.
        "When I discovered that sweet man, our lovely Dr. MacDonald, had been murdered, and Lois Hanson, too," Charlene continued, "I realized I was the only living soul who knew Maddy's baby was born dead and Natalie Beezo had given birth to twin boys. If I did nothing, Maddy and Rudy would have a tragedy at the center of their lives, an awful thing to get around. And the baby I saved would be