Identical by Scott Turow Page A

of every child. Even as a kid, missing his mother and his father every day, there was a piece of him that knew he was better off there. He started playing the trombone. Sister Aloysius gave it to him and he got good. “That horn, son, will get you out of here.” It got him a place in the Marine Corps Band, and that in turn got him a place at City College.
    He was twenty-four, playing nights in jazz clubs, when his mother walked by him on the street, her arms full of brown grocery bags. He said nothing, but trailed her all the way to a tenement. She went through the door before he could get inside, but he stood on the street and watched the lights go on in a fourth-floor window. When another tenant emerged, he went in.
    His mother stood there on the threshold staring at him. Then her nose turned red, and she lifted her apron to her eyes as she cried.
    ‘Oh, Tim,’ she said. ‘Tim, I didn’t know what to do.’ He heard a child complain inside the apartment, and a girl about ten reached her mother’s side and stared at him darkly. His mother invited him in. He declined out of sheer confusion, but turned back to ask about his brother and sister. Alice, his sister, was unheard of-Tim was in his forties before he found her-and his brother, like him, had gone into the service. The next time Eddie came to town, he looked Tim up.
    ‘I tried to tell her we had to go see you,’ Eddie said, ‘and she wouldn’t hear of it.’ Ed, a man his father’s size, began to blubber. ‘I was afraid if I put up a fuss, she wouldn’t see me either.’ It was a terrible truth, but Tim understood. He embraced his brother then, and the two were never out of touch again. Eddie called at least once a week, no matter where he was in the world, and the two fished in the Boundary Waters every summer, a place they’d first gone with their father. In time, their sons and daughters came, too. Ed had been gone six years now, dead of cancer in Laguna Beach.
    Maria had invited Tim’s mother and his three step-siblings every year at Christmas and they came, but Tim had no feeling for them. Instead, he regarded himself as blessed to have his wife, his daughters, and Eddie. He had people to love, who, best of all, loved him, too. He didn’t feel it made sense to waste the energy on relationships that would only pull him under some emotional waterfall in which he’d never catch his breath.
    He’d had it good in the end. They lost Katy, but there were two more girls, good girls, wonderful girls, both now out in Seattle, who traded off calling him every day. Maria had loved music, too-she was a fine pianist and gave lessons to half the kids at St. D’s. They’d made a home full of music and laughter, where they all loved each other just a little bit more because Katy’s death had taught them how precious their lives were.
    When he was young, of course, sleeping in the dorms at St. Mary’s, he would wonder if anyone would ever love him, and if he would love anybody else. He had wanted to be close to someone and wondered what it would feel like. Even when he knew he was in love with Maria, he wasn’t certain he’d gotten it completely right. When she turned sick, three years ago, when he began to realize he would have to live without her, as he had lived before they met, he finally knew for sure that he had done what he wanted to as a little boy at St. Mary’s.
    Now, alone and missing her terribly, he was left to wonder if it had been equally good for her. He hadn’t been perfect as a husband, especially at the start when the grief of his childhood sometimes made him a roistering fool. Maria was never one to complain much, but when she did, she talked about how closemouthed he was. He never spoke of his childhood, she said, even though she could feel the mark it had laid on him. Had he given her enough, shown her attention she deserved and craved, or simply been consumed with healing his own wounds? Crumbled in a defeated heap in his living room,