by Ray Daniel
With that, the fantasy of running away broke up. I’d never leave. After driving for two hours, I hit Exit 2, pulled off the Pike, and started north on Route 20—the same Route 20 that went past the Global Defense Systems plant where Dad had often worked.
The stretch of road that wends its way from the Mass Pike through Lenox and up into Pittsfield cuts through a swath of terrain called the Berkshires. The Berkshires are the place where people from the Hamptons go for summer vacation. The New York rich spend their summers hiking, antiquing, eating at expensive restaurants, and listening to the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood.
Driving through Lenox to meet John Tucker’s mother, I didn’t see the allure. Lenox looked like a long stretch of two-lane highway that had never developed the economic density to support a strip mall. Car dealers, motels, and fast food restaurants peppered the road in stretches where small third-growth trees hadn’t reclaimed the soil. The vacationer’s paradise must have been hidden from me, which was fine because I wasn’t vacationing.
I entered downtown Pittsfield and wondered how often my dad had made this drive. He worked at the Pittsfield plant two or three days a week for years. I drove past the Colonial Theater, with its three stone arches and iconic columns built into the façade. Had he attended cultural events? Had he visited the Berkshire Museum and marveled at the model stegosaurus on the front lawn, or had all of this just been backdrop for a commute from a motel to the GDS plant?
I approached the center of town. The GPS lady in my Droid told me to take a right at what remained of the town green. It was now a long paramecium of a traffic circle. Even so, Pittsfield’s stately grace suggested that it had been dropped through a wormhole from the ’50s. It had a bank that looked like a bank instead of a McDonald’s, its yellow stone and detailed architecture suggesting security instead of convenience. It had a stone church alongside the green, instead of the white wooden church that was traditional for New England.
The GPS lady took me to Copley Terrace, Cathy’s street. I followed her directions and stopped my car as Cathy’s big purple Victorian house came into view.
Two cars were parked in front of the house—one in the driveway and one on the street. The screen door on the porch swung closed, and I realized that someone had just driven up in the second car. Perhaps it was some sort of sick interventionistic ambush. Was Cathy gathering a circle of unknown relations who would sit me down and spring a new family tree on me? My heart accelerated as my stomach twisted. I didn’t need more family surprises.
I parked five houses away from the Victorian. I had imagined that this would be an unpleasantly intense lunch around a kitchen table. We would eat tuna fish sandwiches on white bread toast and Cathy would tell me the story of John Tucker, perhaps including the tale of how she’d met my father. Perhaps not. It would be a one-on-one revelation. But now someone else was invited to the party, and the scene got darker in my mind.
I saw two of them looming over me as I sat in a darkened living room on a soft couch. They were explaining some twisted fact of my birth that threw my identity into crisis, which perhaps included a genetic history of wasting diseases to boot. My heart started to thunk in my chest as I imagined the scene.
My hand grabbed the key in the ignition. I could either twist the key and run, or put the key in my pocket and face the truth. It lingered and I watched it, fascinated, as my hand decided that the key would go in my pocket. I would face the truth of my existence.
I got out of the car, locked it with a beep of the fob, and walked down the tree-lined street past white Victorian houses in various states of repair, toward the bright purple nexus of my history.
The car in front of the house, a Ford Taurus, clicked as it cooled. Its interior displayed the generic cleanliness of a rental. Who would rent a car to come visit Cathy? Did they even rent cars at Pittsfield’s airport? I turned up the walkway, past the autumn remnants of the black-eyed Susans lining the path. The stairs creaked under my weight. I stood on the porch, gazing at the doorbell in its golden metal dome on purple paint. I pulled open the screen door, and the large glass window in the pink front door shattered as gunfire blasted my eardrums.
I stumbled back on the porch, slammed my kidney into the banister post, and spun down the steps, sprawling through the flowerbed and across the lawn. Gunfire flashed and blasted away inside the house.
I lay on the grass, my brain vapor-locked into inaction. I was between whoever had that gun and the car parked in front of the house. I was an unarmed obstacle to escape. Two shots rang out from the back yard.
The shooter had already tried to kill me. I needed to move. Turning and running down the street seemed like a good way to get shot in the back. Lying on the lawn looked like a good way to get shot in the chest. I got my feet under me and scrambled to the side of the house away from the driveway, pushing and clambering my way through dense rhododendrons. I crept toward the back of the house and peeked around the corner into the back yard. A crumpled pile of clothes, hair, and blood lay on the grass.
A car started at the front of the house. I turned and pushed my way through the bushes to get a look at the shooter, but the rhododendrons defeated me. By the time I reached the front lawn, the Taurus was far down the street and making a turn on to Route 9. I hadn’t even gotten the license plate.
I crossed in front of the house, stepping through the flowerbeds on both sides of the path. I crunched up the gravel driveway, past an ancient Toyota Corolla, and into the back yard.
Cathy Byrd lay on the grass, two bullet holes in her back, blood seeping from her chest into the lawn. She had been running but hadn’t made it out of the yard. I knelt and leaned close, hoping to hear a breath from her parted lips. There was none. Her hair shifted in the breeze as her dead eyes stared at a beetle climbing a blade of cut grass.
Fifteen
The pictures were incontrovertible. They stood along the fireplace mantel, adorned the furniture, and hung from wall above the stairs that led to the second floor. Bobby Miller stood next to me as I struggled to comprehend them, to fit them into the life story I thought I had known.
Bobby pointed at a picture and said, “Here’s another one.”
It was a graduation picture. A younger version of John Tucker stood wearing a high school graduation gown. My dad stood next to him with his arm wrapped around John’s shoulder as his stubby fingers gripped the boy and pulled him in for a hug. John, for his part, held a diploma in his own stubby fingers and made a face that said that he had taken too many pictures that day. They were obviously father and son. No wonder they called the son JT. It avoided confusion.
I turned away from the picture but found no relief. There were more pictures. Dozens of pictures crammed onto every surface, covering every wall. My dad stood next to JT in a white communion suit. My dad and JT held a Pinewood Derby car and a trophy. My dad and JT cooked lobsters, my dad and JT launched a rocket, my dad and JT with a ham radio. My dad held an infant JT. The date stamped in the corner agreed with the date that had been on JT’s license. He had been almost three years younger than I. Still was, I suppose, though he wasn’t getting any older.
I worked my way around the house. Here were pictures of Cathy. Cathy in an apron, Cathy on Dad’s lap at a picnic, Cathy with JT in a swimming pool. Cathy, JT, and Dad laughing in surprise as they rode a fake log down a roller coaster. I had never seen so many informal pictures. All five pictures in my home had been formally posed and had rested in frames on an end table. We rarely had cameras at my family events. Each event came and went unrecorded.
I walked up the staircase, eyes flitting from picture to picture, my breath coming in shorter and shorter rasps, until I saw a picture that caused the whole story to fall together in my engineer’s mind. I remembered Cathy. It was a dim memory, and I wasn’t certain how much of it I was constructing on the fly from the picture in front of me, but I knew who Cathy was and why I remembered
her perfume.
This wasn’t a picture of JT. It was a picture of me at my second birthday party, probably taken by an aunt or uncle. I was sitting at the head of the table, ready to blow out the candles. My father was on my right, supplying advice and encouragement. My mother was sitting at the table halfway down, ignoring me, a frown on her face as she righted an empty paper cup that had tipped over.
Cathy Byrd, my babysitter, was hunkered down on my left, mirroring my father. Her eyes were wide and smiling and her mouth formed the exaggerated O that we make when we teach our children how to blow out candles. Her hand was on the back of my chair as she coached me. My father’s hand was on hers.
John Tucker was born ten months later.
Sixteen
I fled down the staircase and out the front door. Bobby followed. He caught up as I made my car beep with the key fob.
“Hey! You okay?” Bobby asked.
My breathing was a little ragged, but I managed, “Yeah. I’m fine.”
I opened the car door and started to slide onto the safety-inspected leather of the Volvo interior. Bobby grabbed my arm and said, “You don’t look fine. What was in that picture?”
“You know what was in that picture.”
“The whole house is full of pictures. How should I know?”
“It was full of pictures of my dad sharing happy memories with John Tucker. They were all pictures of him.”
“Yeah, but you were staring at the one on the stairs. What was going on in that picture?”
I gazed through the windshield and thought back to the picture, back to the paper party hat cone I had been wearing. It had R2D2 on it. How did I get a Star Wars party hat? I don’t remember any birthdays with any party hats. My mother thought those kinds of things were ridiculous.
“That picture was the proof.”
“Proof that John Tucker was your brother?”
“That’s the least of it.”
There are two kinds of software bugs: easy ones and hard ones. In the easy ones, you have all the data and you know how the software works. They are no more difficult than fixing a Sudoku puzzle with two 5s in the same row. You start at the bad number and work your way back to the source of the problem.
The hard ones hide their information. They present a bewildering series of seemingly random events, tied together by some common cause. You can’t step back through them, so the solution has to come to you in a flash. Then everything makes sense.
The picture on that wall was ostensibly a picture of me, blowing out candles and wishing for some two-year-old’s idea of Heaven. An ice cream cone, perhaps. But that wasn’t why Cathy Byrd had put the picture on her wall. All her pictures captured happy family turning points: a graduation, a football championship, an amusement park ride. Nestled among them was the moment when my father reached out and touched her hand. While my mother was fussing over a cup and I was blowing air at two candles, Cathy Byrd and my father were taking the first step toward creating my father’s second family. Someone had captured that moment. Cathy Byrd had framed it.
Bobby leaned on the Volvo. We looked at the big purple house that had once held a small family of three. Cathy, the mother; John, the son; and John, the father who often went back to Wellesley to visit his other family. His other son.
My father had walked up those steps after a short commute from the Pittsfield GDS and called out, “Honey, I’m home!” Did Cathy come to greet him at the door wearing a little apron, her hands wet from cooking? Did she kiss my father softly on the lips just before their son JT tore down the stairs and jumped into his arms? Did JT ask, “What did you bring me?” and did my father produce some small wonder he had picked up near my house in Wellesley? Did they go into the dining room and have a pleasant family dinner while Cathy told my dad about her day and made JT eat his carrots?
It was pretty to think of all this happening in the big purple house, because it never happened in mine, where my stomach would knot at the sound of my father’s car door. He’d open the door, hang his coat in the hallway, and hunch his shoulders at my mother’s first nagging recrimination about some forgotten household chore. The ritual fight would start five minutes later, every time, and I would hide in my bedroom sitting next to my imagined brother, a stuffed bear named Mr. Lumpy.
My lip trembled as a familiar burn took hold of my throat.
Bobby called out to a Pittsfield cop, “Hey! I’m taking Tucker out for a cup of coffee. We’ll be back in an hour or so.”
The cop nodded. I had already given them my statement four times and had even been fingerprinted so they could screen out my prints. Not that I’d touched anything in the house.
Bobby said, “C’mon, Tucker.”
My trance broke. I sniffled and said, “I don’t know where there’s a coffee shop out here.”
Bobby pointed at my Droid and said, “Are you kidding? That phone of yours must be able to find a Starbucks.”
We climbed into Bobby’s car and my Droid found a Starbucks about ten minutes away.
We never reached it.
Seventeen
Bobby drove to the end of Cathy’s street. The Droid told us to take a right onto Route 9, away from the center of Pittsfield. A city center without a Starbucks? I knew there was a reason I’d never been to Pittsfield. Route 9 turned down a hill and presented a broad vista with a large industrial plant across the road. Train tracks ran alongside the road then behind a mammoth office building that featured a big black and red sign. The sign said Global Defense Systems, with the G, D, and S forming the GDS logo.
Bobby said, “That’s where I’ve got a meeting.”
“With who?”
“Whom.”
“Thank you, Dr. Grammatico. With whom are you meeting?”
“John Tucker’s boss.”
“Want me to come?”
“You up to it?”
“Sure.”
“You know, you might be useful for catching bullshit. You’re an engineer like John Tucker.”
“No, I’m not an engineer like John Tucker, or like my father for that matter. The stuff they designed flew through the air and blew shit up. My stuff just gives your computer a virus. If my dad were here, he’d explain the difference very clearly.”
“He didn’t approve of your life choice?”
“No. It almost ruined Thanksgiving. I said, ‘Dad, I’m going to be a software engineer,’ and all hell broke loose. You’d think I’d told him I was joining the Hare Krishnas. He called me an ingrate and a loafer. Said I was wasting an MIT education.”
“What did your mother say?”
“What she always said. ‘You should listen to your father.’ She was useless.” I looked at the smokestacks that marred the blue sky. “Thanks for bringing it up.”
Bobby pulled into the GDS driveway. “You sure you’re up for this? We can get coffee after.”
“I’ll be fine.”
Bobby stopped the car in front of a traffic barrier that lay across the driveway. The guard heaved himself out of the guard shack and approached the car.
“I’m here to see Paul Waters,” said Bobby. Security theater raised its head again as Bobby gave the guard his driver’s license. The guard looked at Bobby, looked at the license, handed it back, and opened the guard gate. We rolled through.
“What the hell was that about?” I asked.
“Security. You can never be too careful.”
“Security? He looked at your license and saw that it matched your face. What does that accomplish?”
“It gets him to open the gate,” said Bobby.
“But it didn’t do anything for security.”
“Not my problem.”
Bobby parked the car and we entered the lobby, asked for Paul Waters, and did the rigamarole with the front desk. Soon we were wearing unintelligible photocopies of our dri
ver’s license pictures and standing in Paul Waters’s office.
Paul Waters sat among towers of paper that spoke to a career that had stalled in the 1990s. It was clear that he had rocketed up the org chart for all of one rung, gotten stuck due to a lack of either will, smarts, or political savvy, and remained firmly in place. His office was an archeological treasure. IEEE Spectrum electrical engineering magazines were piled three feet high against the wall. One of the bottom editions had slipped out of the pile. The ancient headline read Ballistic Missile Defense. It’s back! My dad might have read that article.
Waters had the paunchy body of a man whose muscles had atrophied to the point where they could only support his minimal daily activities: sitting, walking to meetings, sitting, and drinking coffee. He had eschewed one flight of stairs for the elevator. I suspected strenuous activity, such as heading outside for a fire drill, would kill him.
His desk held model missiles, family photographs, and a white coffee mug, stained to an indelible brown. The mug said Paladin Missile System. I remembered my dad drinking coffee from a mug just like it.
Waters peered at me. “You said your name is Tucker? Is that your last name?”
“Yup.”
“JT and his dad, John Tucker, both worked for me. Are you any relation?”
My face turned hot, flushing red with unexpected shame. I considered the simple lie of denying any connection but couldn’t see how it would help solve this puzzle.
“Yes. John Tucker was my father. JT was my half brother.”
My shoulders relaxed. There it was. Spoken out loud. It was easier than I had imagined. It had not killed me. I sank against the vinyl of Waters’s guest chair, adjusting as the truth seeped through me.
Waters said, “Oh yes, you’re the son from John’s previous marriage.”