a synopsis for a book not yet written

Synopsis of Tamsin’s Twin by Thos. Sabel

Didymus Bosch, middle school English and History teacher in mid to late forties, dutifully and moderately successful with a 50- year old Cape Cod style house in a passable working-class neighborhood, a marriage of 20 years, two children (details on the children), realizes something is profoundly missing from his life. This sense of the missing thing gnaws at him, a gnaw he first tries to ignore. He has had intimations of this feeling many times before and had vainly attempted to fill the void through a collection of unfinished projects, some of which filled the house and raised his wife’s ire. In preparing to teach a unit on World War II he chances upon an article concerning recently released experiments by Dr. Josef Mengele that had been held by the Soviets and now released to the public. These experiments dealt with the feasibility of testing the psychic communication between twins in the hopes of finding the perfect method of sending communications between the German High Command and its officers. Curiosity drove him further to the lab reports. As he read them, images of a twin sister kept invading his dreams, thoughts and intuitions. He tried to drive the images away but they would not go. When he spoke with his older siblings about his supposed sister they gave evasive answers. His mother became angry with him for asking about such nonsense.
Their answers failed to satisfy which drove him to the country church where he was baptized and he sees that beneath his name another name had been carefully scraped off and another written in its place. When there, one a very old parishioner called him “Tamsin” and then excused herself. The pastor explained that this man suffered from the early stages of Alzheimer’s and occasionally made strange, incoherent comments.
Convinced he must have a twin he began the process of creating what she might have looked like by using photos of himself and having them feminized through computer manipulation, with these he created a photo album of her life. Then he began writing her letters which he kept hidden in a box. To receive the answers his letters sought he then began writing her responses, using his left-hand (he is right-handed) and mailing them to himself. Through their correspondence he creates her life, her travels, her memories. He even goes so far as to write a brief autobiography of her (which appears as an appendix to the book) He attempts to keep this under wraps by having Tamsin’s letters mailed to his school. His wife believes he is having an affair and begins keeping a closer eye on him, watching for clues of phone calls, hacking into his email, managing his time very closely yet none of these reveal anything. When she finally discovers the truth by finding the letters and realizing he is the author of both, she is convinced his is crazy and demands counseling, etc. She contacts his family. They respond in a curious, off-handed manner, not in the way experience taught her to expect. Instead of being the friendly and forthright family she has known, they become evasive. The truth is that when the mother was carrying Didymus she dearly wanted twins, was told she bore twins, planned for twins including redoing the nursery for twins. When Didymus was the only child born she was devastated and went into a deep depression, rocking the empty cradle while ignoring crying Didymus. The twin’s name was to be Tamsin. She had a nervous breakdown leaving Didymus to his older sister’s care until the mother returned after a three-month hospital stay. This is what the family is ashamed of.
Back to Didymus’ wife. She demands he put all this away. He follows her wishes, puts the letters away (but doesn’t burn them as his wife orders him to) and life goes back to normal, at least for a year. Then he receives an actual letter from Tamsin, wondering why he hasn’t written, urging him to come to her and help her because her memory, which he has been restoring, is fading. The letter fails to say where she is and so he has to find her by tracing her life through her letters as clues to where she has been. The choice for Didymus is to chose between his wife and the life he has known, and his twin who never was, but is. This is the turning point in the book. If he remains with his wife what has been missing from is will always be missing with no hope of being found. If he goes to seek his twin, all that has been known will be lost for the sake of what may or may not be. He may well be insane. (what if his wife’s lover has sent this letter in order to get rid of him, for she has taken a lover because of Didymus’ strange behavior. Yes, the lover sends it to get rid of him. We still don’t know if Tamsin is real or a figment of all imagination.) His quest takes him through her life and discovers his twin who never was, but is, has been an artist in Brown County, Indiana, Montreal, danced with the Winnipeg Royal Ballet, part of the Gimli, MB, art colony, in Niagra, NY, ultimately made her way to Europe where she has been living as an expatriot for many years ending up in Gozo, Malta. Didymus finds her strolling along the beach . The immediately recognize each other but are unsure. He tells her of her life, as well as his. She takes the letters and autobiography from him and read them while he takes in the island. With his encouragement she flies to their old home to regain what never existed for her, but did. Didymus remains on Gozo, filled with what was missing and now a citizen of the world.