“Sure, I get that,” Chloe said.
“Twenty-five, thirty years ago, it wasn’t all ‘I’m here, I’m queer, I don’t care what you think.’ It’s different now.”
“Maybe not as much as you think. Tell me more about how Gran felt.”
The man’s face saddened. “She had a hard time with it. People’d ask, hey Lisa, when’s Gillian settling down? She’d always say she hadn’t found the right guy yet, or she was working on her career, that kind of thing. But she was already living with Annette at that time. Lisa, she’d tell anyone who asked that they were just roomies, saving money by sharing accommodations.”
“I liked Annette,” Chloe said. “She was a good mom.”
“That still sounds strange to me,” he said. “When you’ve got two of ’em. How long’s it been? I lose track of time these days.”
“I was ten,” Chloe said.
“Wow.”
“Anyway, did there come a point when Gran accepted it?”
“I guess. She had to move with the times.”
“How did she handle it when Mom told you she was pregnant?”
Her grandfather let out a little hoot. “Boy, that was something. Turned her world upside down. But not for long. She figured your mom finally started playing for the right team. That she was sneaking out on Annette and having a real goddamn heterosexual affair. Be the first time she’d have approved of adultery, I’ll tell you. She had no idea for some time that there was—gotta watch how I say this—no kind of hanky-panky going on. That the whole thing happened in a doctor’s office.”
“A fertility clinic,” Chloe said.
“Yeah, right, one of them. We didn’t know much about those. A child needs a father, your grandmother kept saying. A mother and a father. Two mothers, that was just unnatural. When she found out it wasn’t an affair, she was disappointed.” The old man looked down, unable to look his granddaughter in the eye. “I won’t lie to you. I kind of felt the same way, at first. It took me a while to realize that as long as you were loved, that was the only thing that mattered.”
“Did you talk to my mom around that time? About the choice she’d made? About having a child that way?”
“You could ask her that yourself.”
“She doesn’t like to talk about it.”
He grinned slyly. “So I’m telling tales out of school?”
“Maybe a little.”
“Yeah, we talked. I was asking her, who’s the father? She said she didn’t know. I said, how can you not know who it is? And she says, she knew things about the father, just not who he actually was. Like, what he looked like, what he did, what his interests were. A whaddaya-call-it.”
“A profile?”
“Yeah, a profile.”
“And what did she say about the profile?”
The old man’s eyes rolled skyward. “Honestly can’t remember much.”
“Try,” Chloe said. “Anything she might have told you.”
“She hasn’t told you anything?”
“She says it doesn’t matter. It’s like he doesn’t exist, like he never existed. Like it was some kind of immaculate conception. If I can’t know him, she figures, what’s the point? He can be anyone you want him to be, she says. Imagine he’s Bill Gates or Robert De Niro. As if either of them donated sperm.”
Her grandfather winced.
“What?”
“It’s just … that word.”
Chloe tapped his knobby knee and smiled. “So you don’t remember anything she said about the donor?”
“Just that he was … what was the word? Suitable. That’s it. A suitable donor. Oh, and smart.”
“Smart?”
He nodded. “He was supposed to be very smart. That was in the profile. I guess maybe he had to give information about where he went to school, degrees, that kind of stuff.” He paused. “What time is it?”
“Uh, almost three. You getting tired, Grandpa?”
“A little.”
“I think we’re good for today.” Chloe tapped the screen. “I was about to wrap it up anyway. My shift starts at five and I’m gonna go home and change first.”
“I want to eat there one day. Where you work.”
Chloe laughed. “Dad, as bad as you think the food is here, it’s better than where I work. If I didn’t wait tables there, I’d never set foot in the place.”
Chloe removed the phone from its stand, collapsed the tripod, packed up her gear, and gave her grandfather a kiss on the head.
“See you this weekend,” she said.
“Okeydoke.”
“We can talk about other stuff. Like when you were in Vietnam. You must have a lot of stories from then.”
“Not many I want to talk about. But sure, we can do that.”
She slung her bag over her shoulder and went out into the hall. She was passing the nursing home reception desk when she heard her phone ping with an incoming email.
Chloe stopped, dug the phone out of her bag, pressed her thumb to the Home button, tapped on the mail app.
And stopped breathing.
It was an email from the WhatsMyStory people. The ones she’d sent her DNA to weeks ago for analysis. The ones who said if there was anyone out there she might be related to, who was willing to be contacted, they’d connect her.
The phone was trembling in her hand. She took a deep breath, steadied her thumb, and tapped the screen.
Three
Merritt Parkway, north of Norwalk, CT
Miles Cookson spotted the flashing lights in his rearview mirror before he heard the siren. He glanced at the dash, checked the speedometer. Ninety miles per hour. Okay, that was definitely above the speed limit, but in a Porsche Turbo, that was a notch above idling.
He had the Sirius tuned into the Beatles station, which was playing tracks from The White Album, and when “Back in the U.S.S.R.” came over the speakers, Miles tapped the volume control on the steering wheel until the music drowned out the sound of the roaring engine behind him, which was no small accomplishment considering a 3.8-liter turbocharged boxer-six engine, rated at 540 horsepower, was pushing him forward.
Just as well Miles happened to see the flashing lights, because he’d have never heard the siren.
He had no doubt he could outrun the police, even if it was one of those supercharged cop cars. Didn’t matter how powerful an engine you put under the hood of some stock Ford or Chevy or one of those snappy new Dodge Charger models. Sure, they might have speed on the straightaway, but if Miles decided to take the next off-ramp, he’d be hitting the curve at sixty or seventy. One of those cruisers tried to take the ramp at that speed and it’d be flying through the air like a cop car in The Blues Brothers.
But Miles wasn’t about to lead anyone on a chase. He didn’t want to get anyone killed. Not an officer of the law, and not some innocent bystander pedaling along in a Prius. The smart and responsible thing to do was pull over and take his medicine.
So he took his foot off the gas, put on his blinker, and steered the car over to the shoulder, gravel kicking up noisily into the wheel wells. The police car pulled over behind him, lights flashing. The cop didn’t exit his vehicle right away. He was probably entering Miles’s plate into a computer, waiting to find out if it was a stolen car and whether the driver needed to be approached with more than the usual caution.
I’m harmless, Miles thought. I’m only a danger to myself.
He sat in the leather bucket seat, waiting patiently. Turned the ignition to off so that when the cop was approaching, he wouldn’t hear the purr of the engine and think Miles was going to make a break for it.
The cop got out of his car and walked purposefully up to the Porsche, stopping at the driver’s window. Miles had already powered it down.
“Good day, Officer,” he said.
“You have any idea how fast you were going?”
“I think you picked me up when I was doing about ninety,” Miles said.
“License and registratio
n,” the cop said.
Miles had already retrieved the registration from the small leather folder in the glove box. He’d set his wallet on the passenger seat after removing his license. He handed everything to the officer.
The cop looked at the two items and said, “Wait here.”
He walked back to his cruiser and got in.
Miles turned the radio back on. “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” came through the speakers. This had always been one of his favorites. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes, letting the music envelop him. The song was interrupted by a persistent whoosh of cars and trucks passing by on the highway.
The track was just finishing when Miles heard the police officer’s boots crunching on pebbles as he approached.
“Mr. Cookson,” the officer said gravely.
“Yes sir?”
“You need to slow down,” he said, handing him a ticket.
“Yes sir.”
Miles offered a respectful smile as the cop headed back to his car. Miles leaned over, opened the glove box again, and tucked the ticket in there with the other three he’d received since getting the bad news from his doctor a few days earlier.
Fuck it, he thought, slamming the glove box door shut.
Before long, he figured, they’d take his license away. But by then, he’d probably have to give up driving anyway. In fact, earlier that day, coming up on a red light, when he went to put his right foot on the brake, it had done this weird wobble, like his foot had a mind of its own. There’d only been a momentary hesitation in applying pressure to the pedal, but driving safely was all about response time, instant decisions. When a little girl ran into the street after a ball, you couldn’t send a message to your foot via snail mail to hit the fucking brake.
Scared him.
It was enough to convince him his driving days were limited.
Might as well get out on the road and drive like a son of a bitch while he could. Put the Porsche through its paces before he had to give it up. Hadn’t even had the car a year. Dropped nearly two hundred grand on it. Added every possible option he could.
You make a few mill a year, you gotta spend it on something.
Miles’s reckless, don’t-give-a-flying-fuck attitude had not been limited to driving. He’d been drinking to excess every night. Not that having a few drinks was living on the edge, but Miles had pretty much given up alcohol more than a decade ago. Went through the whole “body is a temple” bullshit. Drank eight glasses of water a day. Even followed Gwyneth Paltrow on Twitter, not that he agreed with even half of her life philosophy.
But in the last week, he’d renewed his friendship with Absolut Vodka. And he’d found that it went very well with Cheetos. Fucking Cheetos. He’d been through the McDonald’s drive-through twice, gorging on Big Macs and fries. He couldn’t believe how good this shit tasted. Took home Domino’s one night. Ate the whole goddamn pizza himself. Woke up at midnight with the worst heartburn of his entire life. Briefly wondered—and at some level hoped—it was a heart attack and things could be over now.
Driving too fast and eating crap weren’t the only risky things he’d been doing.
Two days earlier he’d gone skydiving. Not for the first time, but it was something he hadn’t done since his twenties. When it came to the moment when he was to pull the rip cord, he thought about whether to bother. What a perfect way to go out. Okay, sure, the doc said he could have quite a few years left, but what was the quality of that life going to be? Maybe this was the way to end things. One big splat and you’re done. Skip the part where someone has to help you go to the bathroom and wipe your ass. Skip the part where it takes an hour and a half to walk from the bedroom to the kitchen because your arms and legs are all fucking akimbo. Skip the part where it takes you five minutes to give the waiter your order because you can’t form the words and get them the fuck out of your mouth.
But he yanked on that rip cord. The parachute deployed. Miles drifted safely back to Earth.
Miles had spent much of the week playing the “Why Me?” movie in his mind. Why him? Why did he have to get this? What the hell had he done to offend the gods that he had to be saddled with this?
Pretty un-fucking-fair, that’s what it was. Sure, other people had problems and serious diseases and millions of them were living in poverty or fleeing drug cartels south of the border or dying of starvation and dehydration in Africa, but Miles didn’t give a rat’s ass about any of them. He didn’t care about rising oceans or climate change or how the world was eating too much beef which meant cattle were farting too much methane into the atmosphere. He didn’t care about the rise of right-wing extremism or that every country in the world seemed determined to vote into power the stupidest knuckle-dragging politicians they could find.
And yet, as much as he was focused on his own situation, his own future, something was nagging at him. A sense that this was not all about him.
There is one tiny piece of good news … You have no children. If you did, this would be devastating news for them.
“Are you going to tell me what this is about?”
Miles was at his desk, staring at his computer screen. Before him were the detailed proposals for several new apps his company had in development, but he wasn’t seeing any of it. He couldn’t focus. It wasn’t vision related. He couldn’t concentrate.
At first, he wasn’t even aware that his personal assistant, Dorian, was standing there.
“Hello?” said Dorian, who was holding a metal Coke can. “Is this what you wanted?”
He turned, looked at the can, and said, “You were careful not to touch the top?”
“Yes.”
“Put it in a plastic bag and seal it,” he said.
“You’re the boss, I get that, and lots of times I have to do things you want without knowing what it’s about, but this crosses a line.”
Dorian, thirty-eight, had been working alongside Miles for nearly a decade, and there’d rarely been secrets between them. Dorian, slightly built, barely 110 pounds, with short-cropped black hair, oversized, black-framed glasses, pulled off the androgynous look with style, always coming to work dressed in a black button-down collared shirt, black jeans, and black sneakers with white, rubber soles. Less politically correct visitors would often whisper a question to Miles, wanting to know whether his assistant was male or female. Invariably, he would answer, “Does it make a difference?”
In all the time she’d worked for him, Dorian had offered very little information about her private life, and Miles had learned not to ask.
Miles said, eyeing the Coke can, “It’s personal.”
“No shit,” Dorian said. “You ask me to stalk your brother, and grab something he’s touched, something that he’s put to his mouth, and bring it to you. You’re right, that’s very personal, and you’ve brought me into it. I can think of only one reason why you would want me to do that. You want a sample of his DNA. So I ask myself, why would you want that?”
“Dorian, just—”
“Maybe it’s that you don’t really think he’s your brother? Or maybe someone broke into your place and did a dump on your living room rug and you’re wondering if it was him?”
“Why would you even—”
“Just blue-skying.” Dorian shrugged, but then gave him a steely glare. “And while we’re on the topic of strange behavior, what’s been going on with you lately? Gone half the time, jumping out of planes, drinking. You think I don’t notice this stuff?”
Miles nodded slowly, aware that as he did so, his head was moving at an odd angle. Early signs of chorea. He could see the troubled look on Dorian’s face. It was hard to get anything past Dorian.
“You’re right about the DNA. I want you to send that to the lab we’ve worked with before. A rush job. I know they can do that if you throw enough money at them.”
Dorian nodded with some satisfaction. “And what should they be looking for?”
Miles swallowed. “Huntington’s.”
That wiped the smugness from her face. “Jesus,” Dorian said. “Your brother thinks he has Huntington’s? No, wait, if you’re doing this behind his back, you think he has Huntington’s? What the hell makes you think he has Huntington’s?”
Miles looked at her, waiting for her to put it together.
“Oh, fuck,” Dorian said, and dropped into one of the two Eames leather chairs on the other side of Miles’s desk. “How long have you known?”
“A week.”
“Oh, Miles. I’m so sorry. But why … wait, you haven’t told Gilbert yet.”
“No.”
“You’re waiting for his genetic test to come back. To find out if he has it.”
“Yes.”
“Is this ethical?”
“Probably not,” Miles said, “but I think it’s the right thing to do. Given that I’ve been diagnosed with it, there’s a very good chance he has it, as well. When I tell him about my diagnosis, it won’t be long before he thinks about the implications for himself. And for his daughter. I want to be able to tell him, then and there, whether he has anything to worry about.”
Dorian melted into the chair, overwhelmed. “Oh, man. I’m so sorry. It’s so … fucking unfair.” She shook her head slowly. “I’ll get the DNA test done. What else do you need?”
He ignored the question, going quiet for several seconds. “You know that group that came through here day before yesterday? From that new streaming service?”
“Yeah?”
“I got talking to one of them. Oscar, his name was. He was blind.”
“Yeah. Black guy, sunglasses.”
“He went blind, like, overnight. When he was only thirty. Detached retinas in both eyes. Very rare. So we got talking, and he said, if only he’d known it was coming. There were all these things he wanted to see someday. The Taj Mahal. The Great Wall. Victoria Falls.” Miles had to stop for a second. “His son.”
Dorian nodded. “I get it. You’re thinking of the things you want to do … while you can.”
Miles looked at Dorian reproachfully, as though she had missed his point entirely. “No, that’s not what I was thinking at all.”
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