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removed the probe and its condom, casually tossed it in the trash and dropped the probe on a side table with a small thud.
    “Congratulations, you two! Let’s go to my office and talk about this good news,” Dr. M. said. “Meet me there when you’re ready.”
    Claude pulled the door shut behind him and Jake worried for a second that he’d said all his thoughts about him aloud.
    “Hurray!” Liz sang. “We’ll have our two children all at once! No more treatments! Hurray!”
    Jake took her hand and pulled her off the table, only then fully realizing the enormity of what they’d just seen. Two babies. At once.
    “Come on,” she said. “It’s so great. It’s good, at least, isn’t it?”
    He nodded, reached for her purse on the chair and watched her turn and rush out of the room.
Two babies at once.
He clutched her purse to his side.
    In his narrow, bright office that smelled of rubber, Dr. M. explained the risks they faced: early birth, infection, birth defects, death in utero. He spoke plainly, as if he were selling them windows. And for Liz, he continued, there were more risks. High blood pressure, gestational diabetes, hemorrhage, infection. She would need six more weeks of shots and would probably spend at least some of her third trimester on bed rest. After a brief silence and a long sigh, Liz asked him about traveling to Great Salt (“Fine, just don’t push yourself”) and vitamins, caffeine and exercise. “What about sex?” Jake blurted. They hadn’t had any since before she’d gotten pregnant. She’d been too tired, too nauseous, too preoccupied, too something virtually every night. “Is it okay?”
    “By all means, just not for three days.”
    Jake glanced at Liz, but her eyes were on her lap.
    He had told his family that she was pregnant, but he hadn’t told any of them about the twins yet—they would all be together soon enough, and he wanted to tell them in person. Jake and Liz had hoped for children since before he could remember, and he thought having them should feel more singular, more monumental than it did in the context of Brenda’s pregnancy. But now there was the matter of two, he thought as they drove home from the doctor’s office that day.Not that he was competitive, not that he wanted to outdo Daniel in any way, but as the middle child, he was aware that he was always—consciously or subconsciously—vying for the spotlight in his family. He’d read several books about birth order, and middle children finding themselves less special, less visible to their parents than the eldest and youngest.
Middle children grow up feeling squeezed, without the rights of the eldest or the privileges of the youngest children, and often seek to establish an identity separate from the family. While doing so helps them assert their individuality, it can also lead to feelings of exclusion and loneliness within the family.
He’d read a few passages aloud to Liz, perhaps to explain a few things about himself. She’d seemed interested at first but after a while had begun to fidget, perhaps because she was an only child and couldn’t relate to any of this. Or perhaps because she’d grown tired of listening to Jake constantly try to understand himself, something he couldn’t seem to stop doing despite his best efforts. At any rate, he had read somewhere that psychologists were giving birth order more credence in personality studies and that it could be used in certain cases as a predictor. He wondered now what it would mean to have two children born at the same time. Would there even be a real birth order? Who knew what would happen to such children, and how would this determine their identities? Would they be more competitive with each other?
    Jake and Liz had started trying in earnest to have children five years ago. The first night they’d tried was on the island. Liz had lined the windowsills of the bedroom with candles, and the smell of them—lavender, vanilla, lilac—made his nose