"An anchor," Nathan said. "A small anchor, tattooed here." He turned his own left hand over and held it out across the table, wrist up. Then his right, for good measure. Both wrists were bare: pale skin, a scar across one knuckle. No ink. There had never been any ink.
"Now mine."
Leo stared.
He stared for a long time. Nathan watched the knowledge move across his face the way you watch a tide go out. The boy reached out, very slowly, and put two fingers on Nathan's wrist, as if ink might be hiding under the skin. His fingers were cold.
"You could have taken it off," he said, but the conviction had gone out of him, and his voice was small. "People can. On the television a lady — "
"Leo," Emma said, very softly, from behind him.
"You could have!"
"I couldn't, Leo." Nathan kept his hand exactly where it was, wrist up, offered. "A tattoo like that doesn't come off clean. There'd be a mark. And I never had one. My — " He had to stop. He had said the word in eulogies and toasts, and now it stuck like a bone. "The man in the photograph had a name I haven't said out loud in a long time. His name was Daniel. He was my brother. My twin brother. We were identical. That is why he has my face."
"Your brother," Leo repeated, in a flat, testing voice.
"My twin. Two of us, born together. Same face." Nathan chose his words the way he chose footholds on a bad roof. "He worked on boats, down at the coast — a carpenter, and he taught people to sail. He got that anchor done at nineteen, in Astoria, and our mother cried, and he laughed and said now nobody would ever mix us up again." A sound came out of him that was not quite a laugh. "It was his joke. His whole life, if someone mixed us up, he'd turn his wrist over and show them. Like this."
He turned his bare wrist over and back, helplessly.
Emma put her hand over her mouth, her eyes bright with tears. "I never saw it," she whispered. "In all the times I looked at that photograph after she died, I only saw your face. I saw you on the news in February, the rescue on the bridge, and I thought: there he is. There's the man who never came."
"You thought I was him too," Nathan said.
"I thought you were a man who'd walked away from my sister. I have thought it for four months, every time Leo asked where his daddy was." She wiped her face, hard. "It never occurred to me that you might be his brother. Sarah said his name was Daniel in the first year. After the crash, she never said it again. She said 'Leo's father', or she said nothing."
Leo had not moved. His two fingers were still resting on Nathan's wrist, as if he had forgotten them there.
Leo asked, in a voice he was clearly keeping on a short lead, what Daniel had sounded like. Nathan had to think, which shamed him; it should have been instant, a thing carried in the ear like a heartbeat. Lower than mine, he said. Faster. Daniel had laughed first and then said the thing, so you were already laughing before you knew why; all through school Nathan had been told off for a laugh in a corridor that was never his, and had said, every time, that's how you can tell it wasn't me, I never laughed first. And then Leo asked whether Daniel had known about him, in the picture, and Nathan made him look again at the arm around his mother: not a man passing through, that. A man who had been told the best news of his life and was holding on to it with his whole arm. He knew, Leo. He knew before you had a name. Leo nodded once, with enormous care, like a person carrying a full cup across a room and determined not to spill a drop of it.
"So the man in the picture is dead," he said.
Nathan could lie kindly then — gone, away, any of the soft words adults keep in a drawer for this. Emma's warning stood in the room with them: He has had enough of people being kind instead of true.
"Yes," Nathan said. "Daniel died, Leo. Seven years ago, in October, before you were born. A car crash, on the highway. He died very quickly. He didn't suffer. And I am so, so sorry, but I am not him. I wish — " His voice failed then, honestly and completely. "You have no idea how much I wish I could tell you different."
Leo took his fingers back. He folded them, precisely, into fists at his sides.
"Then it's a trick," he announced, and there was a terrible dignity in it. "It's a trick picture. Mum wouldn't lie. She said I'd know him. She said — " The dignity cracked down the middle. "SHE SAID I'D KNOW HIS FACE!"
His voice rose into a wail on the last word and Emma caught him as he hurled himself at Nathan, all seven years of grief arriving at once in a crew room with a kettle in it — and Nathan, who could have stepped back, did not. He let the small fists land where they landed, and put one hand, very lightly, on the back of the heaving small head, and said nothing at all, because there was nothing.
"I know his face," Leo sobbed, into the front of a fire captain's uniform. "I know it. I know it. I know it."
"I know you do, mate," Nathan said at last, quietly, to the top of his head. "That's the worst of it. So do I."
Chapter 4: The Brother I Buried
He did not go home after the fair.
Home was a condo ten minutes from the station, with a fridge containing mustard, eggs and good intentions, and a silence so complete that Nathan had long ago started leaving the radio on in the kitchen, just to have a voice in the place that wasn't his own. Tonight he could not face it. He sat in his truck in the station car park with his forehead resting, briefly, on the steering wheel, and then he did what he had done for seven Octobers running: he drove to Derek's.
Derek opened the door in socks, holding a spatula. "You look like a man who's seen a ghost," he said, and then, looking closer, stopped joking. "Nathan?"
"I have," Nathan said. "Sort of. Mine."
Over burnt garlic bread and the pasta Derek had been making for himself, he told it. All of it: the tug on the sleeve, the question, the photograph, the wrist. Derek, who had been at the funeral, who had stood in the rain at the cemetery in his dress uniform and held an umbrella over Margaret Reed while she did not cry, listened the way firefighters listen to mayday calls: completely, and without interrupting to make it smaller.
"A kid," Derek said at last. "Daniel had a kid."
"Daniel had a kid."