Gillian said nothing to that. She knew it was true.
“I spit into this little tube and mailed it off. First they emailed and told me my heritage. Like, 30 percent Scottish, 20 percent something else. That kind of shit, which I didn’t care about all that much. And you could have them test you for like illnesses and stuff, but I figured at my age, who cares, right? But it also said, if there were others who’d taken the test who had a, like, partial DNA match, and they were willing to get in touch, they’d do that, you know?”
Gillian was barely able to mouth the words. “You’ve found out who your father is. Chloe, not even I know that.”
“No,” she said emphatically. “I didn’t find that out. I still have no fucking idea. So if that’s what you were worried about, you can rest easy.”
Gillian’s look bordered on disappointment.
“Holy shit,” Chloe said. “Part of you actually wanted to know.”
“I... I won’t lie. I’ve wondered. But I’ve told you, and I’m telling you now, some things are not worth knowing. Some guy, going into a little room with a dirty magazine, putting a sample in a cup — that’s not a father. That’s not a parent. What... what if at some point in your life you had a blood transfusion? Like, if you were in an accident? And that blood saved you? Would you be hunting all over the world trying to find out whose blood it was?”
“This is different and you know it,” Chloe said. “A blood donation hardly compares to a sperm donation.”
“So, if it’s not your father that you’ve found...”
“It’s like, a brother,” she said quietly. “A half brother. Someone conceived from the same sperm.”
Gillian put her hand to her mouth.
“Chloe,” she said.
“He gave his contact info to WhatsMyStory and I got in touch. I emailed him first, and then we talked on the phone.” Chloe began to tear up. “There was something, in his voice... I don’t know how to describe it, but he sounded like me. I mean, not like me, but the way he pauses, thinks about what he’s going to say, it reminded me... of me.”
Gillian looked stricken.
“So I’m going to drive up and see him. I’m going to drive up to fucking Massachusetts and meet my brother. I don’t know how it’s going to go. Maybe it’ll be a disaster.”
“Don’t,” Gillian whispered. “We’re good. You and I. We’re good. We don’t need other people. We don’t need more family. You don’t know anything about him. Just because he’s somehow related—”
“He’s not somehow related, Mom. He’s a brother.” Chloe looked at her mom with sympathy. “I get why you’re afraid. It’s new. It’s scary. I’m scared. But I just... I just have to do this.”
Gillian dug into her pocket for a tissue, dabbed the corner of her eye.
“What’s his name?” she asked.
“Todd,” Chloe said. “Todd Cox.”
Five
New Haven, CT
As an adult, Miles had always lived alone. Not only had he never married, he’d never had a live-in girlfriend. Sure, plenty of women had slept over through the years, but rarely more than two nights in a row. Miles didn’t encourage that kind of thing. Never give a woman the chance to get comfortable under this roof. He valued his privacy. He liked things just so. Living a solitary existence, at least on the home front, was not a problem.
But since the diagnosis, something in him had changed. Not physically, but emotionally.
He was lonely.
Miles found himself having conversations, out loud, with himself, if only to hear someone’s voice. Not when the housekeeper was there, of course. No sense having her think he was losing his marbles.
Unless he was.
No, no, he wasn’t. Miles was sure of that. Whatever cognitive issues awaited him, they were not present yet. Maybe, he thought, it’d be better if they were. Perhaps he’d be less tormented than he was now.
“What are you going to do about them?” he said aloud, standing in the kitchen, making himself another vodka and soda water. “What should you do about them?”
He knocked back the drink. “It’s not my responsibility. It’s not my fault. There was no way I could have known. It’s fucking life, right? It’s all a throw of the dice.”
What was different tonight was that this conversation with himself was escalating into an argument.
“What do you mean you don’t have any fucking responsibility? If you didn’t know, that’d be one thing, but you do know. You did the right thing where your brother is concerned, testing his DNA, but you don’t give a fuck about the rest?”
And then he threw his tumbler hard enough at the stainless steel door of his Sub-Zero fridge to put a dent into it. The glass shattered across the floor.
Miles turned his back on the mess and headed for his bedroom, not bothering to turn off lights along the way, putting his hand on the hallway walls every few steps to maintain his balance. He stripped down to his boxers and collapsed onto the bed, atop the covers, rolling onto his back and staring, briefly, at the slowly rotating ceiling fan before he fell asleep.
He’d been asleep for only a few minutes when he sensed someone in the room. Miles opened his eyes and felt his heart do a somersault. There was more than someone in the room.
There was a crowd.
Perhaps as many as twenty or thirty people. All standing around the bed, arms at their sides, staring down at him, rigid as statues. About a fifty-fifty split between men and women, and most of them appeared to be in their twenties. The faces were indistinct, as if Miles were viewing them through frosted glass.
“Who the fuck are you?” Miles asked.
One of them, a young woman, said, “You don’t know?”
One of the men said, “Typical.”
“If you really do care, do something,” another woman said. “If you don’t, then stop thinking about us.”
Together, they raised their arms to the ceiling and waved them about frantically, as though they were those inflatable people one found out front of used car dealers. But then their waving arms morphed into flames, and their bodies began to burn.
A chorus of screams erupted from their blurred mouths.
Miles woke up.
“Jesus,” he said.
Miles was not the type of person to read much into nightmares. He did not make major life decisions based on the advice of ghostly figures from his subconscious. But those strange people in his dream had at least accomplished one thing. They’d given him a pounding headache. Of course, he could also be hungover.
He pulled back the covers, got out of bed, and padded on bare feet into the kitchen. He ran some water into a glass, rummaged about in one of the cabinets for the container of Tylenol, and when he turned back around, there they were.
Miles’s mother and father. Perched on stools on the other side of the kitchen island, watching him.
He could tell it was them, even though large chunks of flesh were hanging from their faces. What skin hadn’t peeled away was peppered with granules of windshield glass. Their clothes were drenched in blood.
Miles’s father was holding an empty vodka bottle in his hand, holding it up to the light to see whether there might still be a drop or two in it. “Hello, son,” he said.
Miles’s mother looked at him and smiled. “If we had known,” she said, “we’d have told you.”