The scar ran diagonally from the left side of his neck across one shoulder and down over the upper portion of his chest. It twisted around a shallow deformation near his ribs where the flesh did not lie symmetrically.
But the scar itself was not what made Eleanor grip the table.
Something beneath it shifted.
Slowly.
A small rise.
Then stillness.
Then another.
Not where Caleb's heart should have been.
Lower.
Farther to the left.
Eleanor's breath caught.
Caleb closed his eyes.
"I told you."
She stared.
The skin moved again.
Not violently.
Not grotesquely.
A subtle contraction.
Then release.
Caleb whispered, "My father called it the second heart."
Eleanor looked toward his face.
His eyes remained closed.
"When I was little, I thought everybody had one."
"What is it?"
"I don't know."
"You've never seen a doctor?"
"One."
"When?"
"Thirteen."
"What did he say?"
Caleb's jaw tightened.
"My father wouldn't let him finish."
Eleanor stared.
"Finish what?"
Caleb opened his eyes.
"He wanted to cut me open again."
Again.
Eleanor felt cold.
"What happened to you when you were thirteen?"
The blizzard struck the window.
Caleb looked toward the flames.
Then began.
He had been born in Missouri.
His mother did not survive the birth.
He never knew her beyond one tintype his father kept hidden in a Bible.
From infancy, Caleb had a deformity across the left shoulder and chest.
Something protruded beneath the skin.
It moved.
It pulsed.
Sometimes it caused fever.
Sometimes pain.
His father called it a birthmark when neighbors asked.
When Caleb was six, another child saw the movement while they swam.
By sunset, half the settlement knew.
A traveling preacher claimed the boy carried "another life."
A drunk claimed demon.
A midwife said twin.
Caleb's father stopped allowing him around other children.
At twelve, a traveling physician came through.
He examined Caleb.
Then sent letters.
A month later two men arrived with a wagon.
One said he represented a medical college.
The other represented something far less respectable.
A traveling exhibition.
They offered money.
Eleanor's stomach turned.
"For you?"
Caleb nodded.
"Your father?"
"Refused."
"What happened?"
"They came back."
This time with a surgeon.
Caleb's father agreed to an examination because the boy had begun suffering terrible chest pain.
The surgeon believed Caleb had been born with an incompletely developed conjoined twin attached inside and along the chest wall.
A parasitic twin.
Most of the external tissue had been removed during infancy by a local doctor who had died years later.
But vascular tissue remained.
Possibly cartilage.
Possibly malformed organ tissue.
The surgeon said another operation might reduce the pain.
Caleb's father agreed.
At first.
The surgery began inside their farmhouse.
There was no hospital nearby.
Caleb remembered whiskey.