All That's Left

by Ward Anderson

Genres: Humor & Satire; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

How do you tell identical twins Steven and Scotty apart? Hint: One of them is dead. Steven is the sensible twin with a sensible job, sensible clothes, sensible haircut, and sensible girlfriend. He works as a sommelier and has annoyingly good taste. Scotty is the wild one, a free spirit who travels the world, gets drunk, gets laid, then gets in trouble. They haven't spoken in three years. And now Scotty is dead. Upon hearing the news of his brother's fatal aneurism, Steven hops on a plane to Singapore to retrieve the body. He discovers that his twin had a hot local girlfriend, which isn't surprising. With Scotty, there was always a girl--usually young and pretty, but not the kind of woman to die for. Dania is another story. She's sexy, smart, sings in a cocktail bar, and notices a striking similarity between Steven and his twin: "You look like trouble, too." She must be right because, over the next few days, Steven finds himself shirking his staid life back home, talking to Scotty's ashes--and becoming dangerously involved with the one woman who might know the truth about his brother's death. . .

Release date: April 28, 2015

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

The man sitting behind Steven on the plane is eating his potato chips so loudly that it sounds as if he had been starving to death before he opened the bag. Like he is the last survivor of a terrible crash in the mountains and he had to eat the bodies of the other passengers in order to stay alive and this is the first thing he’s gotten to eat since being rescued.

Steven didn’t bring any earplugs on the plane, and he’s spent the past sixteen hours regretting it. He normally keeps a pair constantly packed in his messenger bag, just in case. He was so busy dealing with Robin and the last-minute attempt at packing, finding a flight, and just getting to the airport that he totally forgot he threw away his last pair. Now he’s listening to the Neanderthal sitting behind him and wondering if jamming napkins into his ears will do the trick and at least muffle the sound.

CRUNCH!

It’s not so much that the man is eating the chips as that he is making a display out of it. He can’t just pop one chip into his mouth, close his lips around it, and then bite down. He takes several open-mouthed bites of the chip, making sure to bring his teeth down very slowly to prolong the noise. It sounds as if he is auditioning for a potato chip commercial and wants to show that he can make the biggest crunch as loud and for as long as possible. Steven wonders just how long one small bag of chips could possibly last. This one seems bottomless.

He turns around and takes a long, cold look at the guy, making sure that his eyes display the anger he feels in his ears. A tall, lanky, Asian man around fifty years old, the guy is staring straight ahead, a look of delight on his face.

They’re just potato chips, Steven thinks. How amazing could they possibly be?

The tall man makes eye contact with Steven, who furrows his brow, sticks his lips into the worst pout he can muster, and generally shoots icicles from his pupils. The Chip Eater looks confused and turns to look over his shoulder to see if Steven could possibly be directing his gaze at anyone else. Realizing there is no one behind him, the man turns back around and faces Steven. With the same dull, confused look on his face, he slowly places another stack of chips onto his tongue.

CRUNCH!

Steven sighs loudly—making certain that Captain Crunch hears him and knows he’s annoyed—and turns back around in his seat. He puts his earbuds in, even though his iPod battery died hours ago. He figures that plugging up his ears might help him relax a bit, at least until the bag of chips is gone.

“Are you okay?” the woman sitting next to him asks, having watched Steven fidget off and on for various stages of the flight, which is almost twenty hours long. Like the Chip Aficionado, she is also Asian, which is not at all odd since most people on the flight are, as well, and the plane is headed to Singapore. Young, with a bright smile, she can’t be more than twenty-five years old. Steven can’t help but think, if he had been in a better mood, he might have thought to engage in conversation with her before the flight was almost over. Instead, he pouted most of the trip.

“Yeah, I’m just a crab, is all,” he says, putting his magazine in the seat pocket in front of him. He’s been reading the same page for almost an hour now, which tells him that he might as well give up for the time being and just forget about it. “Background noise bothers me.”

“It’s not just you,” the young woman whispers, obviously afraid that Mister Munch behind them can hear her. “He’s being loud.”

“I’m glad it’s not just me,” Steven says, but he knows that—most of the time—it is just him. His doctor calls it misophonia. Sound intolerance. Any little thing can give him headaches and just generally irritate him senseless. The sound of people eating is the worst and can actually make him get up and move to another seat if one is available. But it’s not just that; it’s the sound of candy wrappers or the sound of gum chewing. Even the sounds of fingers tapping on a computer keyboard can make his blood boil. He tried for years to ignore it until Robin made him go see an ear doctor. Until then, he just figured he was an asshole.

Now he’s an asshole constantly wearing earplugs. Or listening to his iPod. Or sitting alone, away from anyone who might be making any noise. Steven often wonders how much time he has wasted changing seats in theaters and restaurants just to avoid listening to the sounds people make. He also wonders how many people he knows who can’t stand him because of it.

“First time going to Singapore?” the young woman asks and, for the first time, Steven notices that she’s very, very pretty. He wonders for a brief second if she’s flirting with him. He’s always been oblivious to that sort of thing anyway, but it’s been even worse the past couple of years. Robin has always made certain that he noticed only her.

“Yes, it is,” he says, and looks at his watch. Two hours to go. That’s either enough time to have a nice conversation with this young woman and make the flight zip by or enough time to sit awkwardly next to her for what will wind up feeling like an eternity. “You?”

“Oh, no,” she says. “My family lives there. My grandparents. I visit every Christmas.”

“That’s nice.” Steven nods.

“You going for business or holiday?”

“Neither,” he says, and tries to smile so she won’t feel awkward. “Death in the family.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she says, and it seems genuine. In fact, she seems more upset when she hears it than Robin did when Steven told her about it the day before.

“That’s okay,” he says. “We weren’t close or anything like that.”

He doesn’t know why he just lied to her, but it seemed for a second like he should, so he just let it out. How would she ever know, anyway? When he gets off this plane, he’ll never see her again, and she’ll feel better thinking that some distant uncle died or something like that. Besides, he doesn’t really feel like explaining it to her.

Being Steven’s identical twin automatically excludes Scotty from being a distant relative. And, for most of their thirty-four years on the planet, they were actually pretty close. But Steven feels an odd poke in his stomach when he does the math and realizes they haven’t seen each other in almost three years. It stings a bit more when he thinks about how—the next time he does see his brother—it will only be Scotty’s body. And that will be it.

“Well, good luck with that.” The Asian girl nods politely, although she probably isn’t any more certain of what “that” is supposed to be than Steven is. She turns to look out the window at absolutely nothing. Steven understands and simply looks at the seat in front of him. It’s actually a relief, because he didn’t want to talk about Scotty in the first place. He feels his headache getting worse and takes off his glasses so he can rub his temples for a few minutes.

Scotty never wore his glasses. Not since he was twenty or so. Before Scotty grew his hair long, it had been the easiest way to tell him and Steven apart. They were roughly the same height, same build. Same everything. When they were kids, even their parents didn’t know which one was which half the time. But Scotty snapped out of that the minute he left college. The hair, the tattoos. Steven looked like an older version of the two of them at seventeen, while Scotty went on to look like the two of them at fourteen. He was always Mr. Hyde to Steven’s Dr. Jekyll.

And now he was gone.

It was 3 p.m. when the hospital in Singapore called to tell Steven the bad news. They said that the aneurysm hit Scotty so fast that he was probably dead before he hit the ground. People who had been in the bar with him said he had complained his head hurt. A few minutes later, he was dead. And it was all because of another one of his headaches.

You never wore your glasses, Scotty, Steven thought. Scotty always had bad headaches. Ever since he was twenty. Ever since their parents died. Scotty blamed the headaches on his refusal to wear his glasses. Steven thought it was stress. Or from the accident.

SLURP!

The man behind Steven has switched from potato chips to Coke. Steven actually envies him a little bit. Ten years working as a sommelier, and he has never enjoyed food or drinks as much as this guy is right now. A bag of Ruffles and a can of pop, and this guy is in heaven. It would take a very expensive, very rare steak and amazing, very rare Chianti to get half that response out of Steven.

He looks down at his nails and wishes that his manicure set were in his carry-on instead of his checked luggage. He really wasn’t sure if airport security would let him on the plane with it or not. The last thing he wanted was to have his nice nail clippers and scissors thrown away because someone thought he might try and hijack a plane by giving the pilots a nail buff. But now his fingers feel rough, and a little filing would distract him from Mister Noise sitting behind him.

Robin thinks he’s a snob. She doesn’t think he suffers from misophonia as much as he does from OCD. With all of the grooming and cleaning and rearranging he does, she’s frequently called him a “neat freak.” Steven thinks of all the times he’s heard women complain about the men in their lives being slobs and finds it ironic that the woman he lives with would love a little bit of that.

“Sometimes I want to break things to get your attention,” she yelled at him just a week before, standing over him with her arms folded, her curly red hair falling over one eye. “But then I know it would only be a matter of minutes before you cleaned up the mess and replaced whatever was broken. It would be like it never happened at all.”

“You’re exaggerating,” he told her at the time, not realizing that he was arranging a stack of magazines on the coffee table into a perfect square. He doesn’t even realize sometimes that he’s doing it. But liking things to be in order is hardly the same as having OCD.

She wound up proving him wrong, and it only took two days. Steven came home from work in the evening only to find that she’d gone into the wine chiller, taken the 2005 Henschke Hill of Grace he was keeping, and shattered the bottle in the middle of the living room floor. She didn’t even bother to drink any; she just took the bottle and threw it to the ground, leaving it for him to discover, like a vandal who sprays graffiti across a newly painted building. By the time Robin got back late that night from being out with a friend, all trace of the mess was gone, and he was sipping a twenty-dollar bottle of red by himself while watching TV.

Idiot, he thinks to himself, staring at the seat in front of him. He had the chance to talk to her, the chance to work things out. The chance to do something—anything—that would keep her from banging one more nail in the coffin of the past two years. Instead, he just did what he always did, which was nothing at all. The next day he got the call about Scotty.

Not that the death of a family member is ever convenient, but flying across the globe now to bring Scott’s body back to Toronto was especially terrible timing. Things with Robin were already pretty awful, and Steven knows that getting up and leaving in the midst of it isn’t going to help, especially not with Christmas only weeks away. Robin never met Scotty, but made it perfectly clear that she didn’t care for him anyway. She thought Steven was a snob, but she hated Scotty’s being the wild child even more. And she hated the fact that he always needed money.

“It’s his money,” Steven would say to her, every time Scotty called or sent an e-mail. “I can’t tell him he can’t have what is his.”

“Then why does he ask you at all?” she always said, even though she knew he had no choice. That was the deal his parents laid out in the will. There was money, and plenty of it. But neither one of them could touch it without the consent of the other. It was his parents’ attempt to keep their little twins constantly the best of friends: to make them partners in all things inheritance.

Scott always needed the money more than Steven ever did. Steven was the one with a great salary, a great apartment. He always got to drink expensive wine and tell other people they should drink it, too. Scotty traveled the world and stayed in hostels and took awful jobs and lived out of his suitcase. The least Steven could do is let him have the money when he came asking. Still, it never made Robin think very highly of Scott. She thought he was a bum.

“I believe people call it ‘free spirit,’ ” Steven told her after another request from Scotty for another wire transfer. That’s what people had been calling Scotty for years, even before their parents died. He never had the desire to stay in school like Steven did, even though he was easily just as smart. He liked to travel, to get his hands dirty. He was okay with numbers, but terrible with writing and grammar. He couldn’t spell worth a damn. He changed his mind a lot and lost interest in things almost as quickly as he started getting into them.

Then there was the accident.

Scotty dropped out of school almost immediately once their parents were gone. That’s when he stopped being a twin altogether and just started being the brother who looked a lot like Steven. Then came the long hair and the tattoos and the piercings. That’s when Scotty did the summer on the fishing boat in Alaska, even though he didn’t need the money and wasn’t going back to school anyway. There was also the scooter rental business, and—of course—all of the traveling.

At least the traveling made him happy, Steven thinks.

It was the only thing that seemed to work. Before that, Scotty would go through weeks of seeming out of sorts or depressed. Then, he’d bounce back and be happy again for a little while. There would be a new job, or a new woman, or a new idea. But he’d been in Singapore for almost two years. It was the longest he’d ever stayed in one place. Steven figured he must have finally been happy. They’d grown apart and had only spoken on occasion, but things had recently started to look better. That was before last week, when Scotty came looking for money.

BING!

The “fasten seat belt” bell rings so loudly, it snaps Steven out of his thoughts, and he feels himself jump a little in his seat. The pretty Asian girl next to him jumps, but not because of the bell as much as because his reaction startles her. She was starting to doze off while leaning against the window, and he just woke her. Steven figures it doesn’t really matter. He can feel the plane decreasing altitude and knows that they’ll be landing before too long.

Fifteen grand. That’s how much money Scotty came asking for when they spoke last week, not even a week before he died. It was more than he’d ever come asking for, and he never said why he wanted it. And then, a few days later, he was dead. It was all too weird. He was prone to the migraines, but it never seemed to be anything that serious. Yet a few days after he comes looking for a ton of cash, he falls down dead somewhere in Asia.

“He was obviously dirty,” Robin had said while Steven packed his suitcase. “He was into drugs or something like that. He owed money to the wrong people.”

For once, Steven was inclined to agree with her, although not about the drugs. Scotty hated that sort of thing and was into too much healthy New Age nonsense to be into drugs. Besides, he had money in the bank that Steven let him have whenever he wanted it. Scotty could have easily gotten it—and drugs—if that had been his thing. It wasn’t drugs, but there was something shady going on in Scott’s life; Steven was pretty sure of that. He just had no clue what it could be.

In the end, Scotty never got the money. Steven dragged his feet on the transfer because the amount was so much he wanted to know what it was all about. He was waiting to hear back from Scotty before he finalized it with the bank. When the phone call from Singapore had come in the afternoon before, he had figured it was Scotty calling to explain. Instead, it was the hospital telling him his brother was dead and how to claim his body.

What the hell were you doing, big brother? Steven thinks. Scotty was born four minutes earlier than Steven, and the two of them had been pointing it out to each other their entire lives. Mostly, Scott didn’t want Steven to forget who the eldest twin was.

Steven winces as he fastens his seat belt and reaches for his magazine. He’s not very good with landings and tries to read his way through them. Right now, however, he’s too busy thinking about his dead brother lying in some morgue in the middle of Singapore and his dead relationship lying in ruins back in Toronto. The magazine will probably go unread until the flight home.

“Merry Christmas, Darling” by the Carpenters pops into his head for no reason, and he suddenly remembers that it’s that time of year again. As the plane touches down, he realizes that he forgot to send Scotty a card this year. It’s the first time he’s ever done that.

The heat in Singapore is brutal, and it is matched only by the intense humidity. Steven thought the summers in Toronto were rough, but they have nothing on December in Singapore. He knew it was hot because he did some reading online about the entire country when Scotty wound up there and said he was going to stay for a while. That still didn’t prepare Steven for what it was going to feel like when his shirt stuck to his skin the second he stepped out of the airport and flagged down a cab.

He keeps thinking that it’s way too hot and humid for it to feel like Christmas, but the decorations are everywhere. He’d heard that Singapore was mostly Buddhist but, looking around, it looks more Christian than Canada. The enormous Christmas tree in the middle of the baggage claim area didn’t even have ornaments of Buddha on it. “Let It Snow” was playing on the radio when he passed through customs. Now that the heat is beating down on him, Steven finds himself really missing Toronto.

Dear God, he thinks as he asks the taxi driver to crank up the air-conditioning. Please, let it goddamned snow.

The Christmas decorations are not limited to the airport and, while taking the long drive to the Furama hotel, Steven is bombarded by lit-up reindeer and snowflakes and Christmas trees everywhere he looks. The city is in the spirit, even if he’s not feeling it. Something about it doesn’t seem right. Maybe it’s the brutal weather, but it doesn’t feel like Christmas, even if it looks like it.

“You American?” the taxi driver says. He is a young Asian man, about thirty years old, with a very crisp, blue, button-up shirt with short sleeves. He makes eye contact with Steven through the rearview mirror, glancing forward at the busy street every few seconds.

“Canadian,” Steven says. The traffic is intense, but it’s moving quickly. He knew that Singapore City was big, but it towers over him. He’s seen skyscrapers before, but these buildings seem twice as big as any of the towers in Toronto.

“Ah, Canada!” The cabbie speaks in short staccatos, his English good but frequently broken. “You like hockey?”

“Sure,” Steven says. He figures there’s no reason to tell some cab driver the truth.

“Hockey very exciting. Canada very nice.”

“Yep.”

“Like Canada very much.”

“Uh-huh. Can you turn the AC up a bit more, please?”

“What?” The driver laughs. “You want cold? You come here! Canada cold! Most Canadians come here, they don’t want the cold!”

“Not this one,” Steven says. “It’s too hot for me.”

“Hot!” The driver laughs harder. “. . .