Miles began to scream. And then he woke up, this time for real.
The next morning, Miles asked Dorian to take a walk with him. Once outside the building, she said, “I don’t have the DNA test back yet.”
“That’s not what I want to talk to you about.”
“Okay.”
“You know I don’t have that many people I can talk to,” he said. “Gilbert, yeah, he’s my brother, but there are issues there.”
Again, Dorian said, “Okay.”
“I want to know whether he’s got the disease because there’s a high probability. Fifty percent chance that it gets passed down. So if one of our parents had it, then there’s just as much chance he’s got it as I do.”
“Yeah, I Googled it.”
They’d reached a small park that bordered a creek. Miles steered them onto the grass and headed for a bench.
“My brother’s not the only one I’ve been thinking about,” he said.
They reached the bench and sat. Dorian studied her boss and nodded slowly. Miles could almost see the light bulb come on over her head.
“You have a kid,” she said. “I mean, you’ve never mentioned it, but... did you just find out? Some girlfriend from years ago?”
“Not like that,” Miles said. “And it’s not just one kid.”
“You have a couple of kids,” Dorian said, unable to hold back a wry grin.
“The thing is,” Miles said, “I have no idea how many there might be.”
Dorian blinked. “Say again?”
Miles laid it all out for her. That nearly twenty-four years ago, desperate for cash, he went to a fertility clinic.
“It wasn’t like they paid a fortune for donations. A few hundred. But back then, when I was broke, that was a lot of money. And you had to meet all sorts of criteria. Couldn’t smoke, good lifestyle choices, college education. You couldn’t just walk in off the street, go into a cubicle and—”
“I get the picture,” Dorian said. “So there could be a hundred little Mileses or Millies out there today?”
Miles said he’d been told by the clinic that they wouldn’t use his sperm more than, say, a dozen times. But had they kept their word? Might there be more? And even if they’d kept that promise, someone might have had twins, or even triplets.
Which was why Miles had no idea how many biological children of his might be out there.
Miles told her about how that morning he’d been sitting at a red light, watching the pedestrians who crossed past the front of his car. A guy in his twenties wearing a Boston College sweatshirt, a backpack slung over his shoulder. What if he’s my son? A young woman jogged past, buds in her ears, listening to music while she did her run. What about her?
It was not the kind of thing he’d thought much about before. It had barely crossed his mind over the last two decades that there could be people out there with half his genetic makeup.
“But now I can’t stop thinking about them. And what, if anything, I owe them.”
What if he were one of his biological children? Would he want to know there was a 50 percent chance that he might be carrying the gene that might be the end of him?
Had he known what the future held for him, he’d never have gone to that fertility clinic. He’d have found another way to get the money for that new computer he’d needed.
But hey, Miles said, everybody eventually gets something, right? Something’s got to kill you, sooner or later. It wasn’t his fault, was it? There was no way he could have known. Was there even a test at the time that could have told him he had Huntington’s?
“Right,” Dorian said. “There’s no way you could know. There’s no way anyone could know. I mean, maybe now, maybe today, they could test someone who goes to a clinic like that. I don’t know. But not back then.”
If he’d known, at the age of twenty, what awaited him, would he have lived his life differently? Would he have spent those two years backpacking around Europe, or would he have stayed home and gotten serious about his career sooner? For sure, he wouldn’t have spent much of his twenty-first year partying. Maybe, if he’d known the future, he’d have accelerated his efforts to reach the upper echelons of the tech world. Maybe he’d have made his first million from designing apps ten or twelve years ago instead of five.
Or maybe he’d have figured, what’s the point? Why not spend the rest of his life traveling, drinking, and whoring?
“The question is,” Dorian said, “if you could have known, would you have wanted to know?”
“That’s the question,” Miles said.
“Or maybe the question is, would you have at least wanted to be able to make that choice?” she asked.
Miles had no immediate answer.
“You know what app we should have invented?” he said finally. “One where I can go back in time and never go to that goddamn clinic.”
“Look,” Dorian said, putting her hand on his, “you can’t change the past. You have to deal with the here and now. Get this other shit out of your system. Jumping out of planes, drinking too much. Then figure out what you want to do. Figure out what you’re capable of doing. The resources that you have.”
“What I have,” Miles said, “is money.”
Dorian said, “I’m... aware.”
“I’ll never be able to spend it all,” he said.
“Yeah,” Dorian said, smiling. “We should all have such problems.”
He had a will. He wasn’t an idiot. His legal advisers insisted that someone with a successful tech company and a sizable personal portfolio had to plan for the unexpected. Even before his diagnosis he was willing to concede that one day he might step in front of a bus while looking at his phone. He’d chosen a few charities and foundations to leave his money to. Now, he’d probably want to rethink that, maybe leave a big chunk of his estate to Huntington’s research.
But his current will left nothing of significance to any one individual.
There was no spouse. There’d been a couple of girlfriends at UConn, a couple of romances right after college, and he’d had a few meaningless flings in the past decade. But if Miles was honest with himself, he’d only ever had one real love: computers. There’d been some women who might have been happy to share a life with him despite all that, but he’d seen, firsthand, what a marriage could descend into. The only thing that had kept his parents together, at least until they’d driven into that bridge abutment, was their mutual hatred for each other. It was a kind of sick, twisted energy that kept them both alive. Miles had always wondered if his father had driven deliberately into the abutment, or if his mother had reached over and grabbed the wheel to make it happen.
How could you endure an upbringing like that and want it for yourself? Not Miles. His brother, Gilbert, had believed he could beat the odds, but the woman he’d found and committed himself to — the one Miles thought of as Cruella but whose actual name was Caroline — had as many issues as their mother, if not more. She was a controlling, narcissistic woman. She could put on a smile when she needed to, charm you from here to Cleveland, but the moment your back was turned, watch out.
And from everything Miles could tell, Gilbert’s daughter, Samantha, had come under the mother’s spell, or at least been cowed by her mood swings. Go along to get along, as they say. Maybe Gilbert put up with the daily tension and anxiety because he didn’t know it could be any other way. When you grew up in a dysfunctional family, you assumed all families were that way. You could walk out on the one you had and trade it for one that was even more fucked up. Miles guessed that was how Gilbert saw the world. As bad as it was, it could be worse.