Locking hands to cross P Street, Liam and Anna Muir are struck and killed by a hit and run driver after getting double scoops of ice cream at Thomas Sweet’s in Georgetown. With the Vice-President, members of the Foreign Service, friends and family in attendance, Scott Muir gives a moving eulogy about the lifetime they shared, comparing their parents to his favorite Greek myth about Baucis and Philemon, an old married couple who welcomed the Gods into their home as guests when they visited in human form disguised as homeless people. In return, the Gods granted the couple’s one wish that when the end came for one of them, the other would die at the same time. When Baucis and Philemon passed away, the Gods turned the couple into trees with branches intertwined so the couple would forever be holding hands. His brother did not speak at the funeral.
Alone at the house in the country overlooking the Potomac River, a grieving Rodney pores through family photo albums, preserved schoolwork papers, Super Bowl souvenir seat cushions from San Diego, Bolletieri tennis camp trophies, library shelves filled with biographies of political figures, countless cookbooks with flour-covered pages, and signed novels authored by Liam and Anna’s friends over several decades. In the pages of a Nancy Friday book called My Mother, My Self, Rodney stumbles on something completely unexpected: a folded up sonogram of triplets in utero. Their mother had wished loudly and often for a daughter but her production deal shuttered after their delivery at Sibley Hospital. The sonogram reminds Rodney of a crowded selfie at the Oscars. Heading back to the city, Rodney texts his twin—
Rodney: you’re not gonna believe what I found in the river house
Scott: porn?
Rodney: sonogram says we were triplets
Scott: no way
Rodney: …
Scott: where is sis now?
Rodney: don’t joke
Scott: forgotten on birthday I’d be pissed
Rodney: …
Scott: google fetus in fetu
Rodney: don’t call her a teratoma
Scott: don’t text and drive
Seeking answers, Rodney treks to Sibley Hospital on MacArthur Boulevard where a wrinkled nurse named Mrs. Green confides to him about an incident at Sibley she witnessed on the day they were born. Working in the OB/GYN ward (her position entailed sweeping after-birth detritus), the nurse glimpsed something slithering around the operating room floor and reported the occurrence to a hospital volunteer whose name she could not recall, a foster caregiver for disadvantaged children. Rodney hires a private investigator and learns the name of the Sibley Hospital volunteer. According to www.findagrave.com, Alma Trout provided mental care for troubled orphans at a foster care home until a suspicious fire destroyed the facility in Silver Spring, Maryland ten years after the Muir triplets were born at Sibley hospital—
Rodney: I went to her grave
Scott: ???
Rodney: Alma Trout
Scott: our sister?
Rodney: the orphanage lady who got murdered
Scott: you need to get laid
Rodney: she’s buried next to Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald at Old Saint Mary’s cemetery
Scott: so what
Rodney: the expiration date on Alma Trout’s headstone matches the date of the orphanage blaze
Scott: