THE CANNERY WHARF · SATURDAY, NOON

For one long minute after the roof came down, nobody on the wharf moved. There was only the roar of the fire and the hiss of the hoses and Charlotte Kennard's voice, saying "Teddy, Teddy, Teddy" over and over, as if saying it enough times could bring him out.

Then a shape came through the smoke at the south door. A big man, bent nearly double, with another man over his shoulders.

The harbor master made it ten more steps onto the wharf and went down on his knees, and the firemen were all over them both. Chief Lynch got Theodore onto his back on the planks. He was black with soot and not moving. Then he coughed, a terrible, tearing cough, and Charlotte sat right down on the wet wharf in her good dress and cried.

"Both of them, to the clinic," the Chief said. "Now."

THE PORT ELLERY CLINIC · ONE O'CLOCK

Pamela Warford was still in her pale green bridesmaid's dress, with a white coat thrown over it, when they brought them in. Two men, two beds, side by side, two oxygen masks. The doctor was on his way from the mainland on the afternoon ferry. Until then, it was Pamela.

She worked fast. Blood pressure, pulse, the burn on Mr. Kennard's left hand, the burn along the harbor master's jaw, where the fire had singed his white beard half away. She had to trim the rest of it off to clean the burn. Then she took a basin of warm water and a cloth and began to wash the soot off their faces, first one, then the other, so she could see what she was dealing with.

She finished Theodore Kennard's face. She turned to the next bed and finished the harbor master's.

Then she stopped, with the wet cloth in her hand, and looked from one bed to the other, and back again.

Without the beard Leland Palmquist had worn since the day he got off the ferry, without the good gray suit and the old harbor jacket, it was the same face. The same nose. The same deep line between the eyebrows. The same ears. The same face, twice.

Behind her, the door opened. Charlotte Kennard came in, still in her wet dress, with her handbag over her arm. She looked at her husband. Then she looked at the man in the other bed.

Her handbag fell on the floor, and everything in it went across the tiles, and on top of it all, the white envelope from Portland.

Leland Palmquist pulled the mask off his face.

"Hello, Charlotte," he said. His voice was rough from the smoke. "I'm sorry. I meant to tell him myself. I meant to tell him for thirty years."

THE CLINIC · LATER

He told it to the two women in a low voice, while Theodore slept.

He had been born in the farmhouse on the hill in February of 1931, in a snowstorm, about twenty minutes after his brother. It was the worst winter of the hard times, and the Kennards could barely feed one baby. The doctor couldn't get through the snow. His grandmother made the decision, the way people did then: she sent the second baby north with a cousin, to a family named Palmquist who farmed potatoes up in Aroostook County and had lost their own baby that fall. His mother was told the second child had died. She never knew otherwise.

"I found out in 1968," Leland said. "When my mother died, the one who raised me. There was a letter in her Bible. So I came down here the next summer. Just to see him. I thought I'd walk up and shake his hand." He shook his head. "I stood outside the cannery for a week and couldn't do it. And then I went to the Fourth of July dance at the Grange."

Pamela felt her heart start to pound.

"There was a girl there who ran the coffee urn. She took me for a summer fellow, with my beard and my city shirt, and when she asked my name I told her Ted. I don't know why. I'd been saying my brother's name in my head for a year. We had three weeks. We left notes for each other in a tobacco tin under the old wharf. Then the wharf was sold, and the men tore it up, and I never got her last letters." He looked at the ceiling. "Then I lost my nerve, about everything, and I went home without saying goodbye, and I've been sorry every day since. I never knew. About the boy. I swear to you I never knew, until I came back this winter and saw him on the wharf, and he had my father's walk."

Charlotte had both hands over her mouth.

Pamela said, very slowly, "Mrs. Kennard. Identical twins have the same DNA. All of it. That test can't tell one of them from the other."

"Then Teddy never..."

"Teddy never," Leland said. "It was me, Charlotte. Teddy never even knew she wrote to a T."

"His mother," Charlotte whispered. "Teddy's mother. She kept everything that ever came up to the house, every scrap. She must have put that tin in the attic herself, and she never said a word."

In the other bed, behind the oxygen mask, Theodore Kennard's eyes were open. Nobody knew how long he had been listening.

THE HARBOR LIGHT DINER · EVENING

The CLOSED sign was on the door. Helen Posey sat alone in the last booth with a cup of coffee she hadn't touched. Eric came in without knocking.

"Pam told me," he said.

Helen nodded.

"His name was Ted," she said at last. "That's all I ever knew. A summer man named Ted, with a black beard and sad eyes. When he left I thought he'd gone back to Boston, or wherever summer people go. Your father asked me to marry him in August, and I said yes, and I never once regretted it, Eric. Not once. Mark Posey was your father. Whatever any test says."

Eric sat down across from her. He looked at his hands, the hands everybody always said were just like his father's.

"So I'm a Kennard either way," he said. And he laughed, an awful laugh, and put his face in his hands.

THE END OF THE WHARF · SUNSET

Kimberly was sitting at the very end of the old Posey wharf in jeans and a sweatshirt, with her feet hanging over the water, where Eric had asked her to marry him in the snow. He came and sat beside her. Neither of them said anything for a while. The tide was coming in.

"Cousins," Kimberly said finally.

"If Pam's right."

"Pam's always right."

He reached over and took her hand, and she let him, and they sat there and watched the lighthouse come on.

THE CANNERY, THE NORTH WING · NIGHT

Chief Lynch walked through the wet black ruins with a flashlight. Behind what was left of the office wall, he stopped and crouched down, and picked something up with his handkerchief.

A red gas can. Melted on one side. Empty.

Lee Callen held the light while the Chief turned it over. "Chief," he said quietly, "there's something I didn't tell anybody. At eleven o'clock, during the wedding, a car went down the cannery road. I only saw the back of it. A silver car. With Massachusetts plates."

Chief Lynch looked up at him. Everybody in Port Ellery knew exactly one silver car with Massachusetts plates.

~