“Notdead. I’m up now, it’s cool. What happened?”
Carver shook his head. There was a flush high up in his cheeks, and distance gathered in his eyes as he consideredScott’s question. “I found something out tonight, about my parents.”
Scott’s mind went to the abstract and obvious — their homophobia and its impact on him, for instance — but there was a note of wonder in Carver’s voice which pointed to the something being a concrete revelation, a key that turned a lock. He didn’t respond, just continued to give Carver his undivided attention.
Carver swallowed, then wet his lips with his tongue. The desire to kiss him arose briefly. “I have a different dad,” he said.
For a moment Scott didn’t understand.
“My mom had an affair,” he clarified.
“Oh!” Scott exclaimed, floored. “Holy fuck, are you serious?”
“Yeah. Chip told me, and my parents confirmed it.”
“Ho-oly shit.” Scott lay back against the mattress, staring up into the antiseptic glow of the round LED stuck to the van’s ceiling. As the news sunk in, it almost seemed to gather speed, making more and more sense as it went. So much about Carver’s life had become abruptly coherent. It was like the solving of a riddle. “Holy shit. Oh, man. Dude. Who is this guy?”
“A dead Jewish doctor,” Carver said.
“Dead?”
“Died when I was three.”
“Fuck. Shit. Carver…”
“Yeah.”
Scott sat up. “So what exactly happened? Go from when we split up on the golf course, how’d you get to that from there?”
Carver took him through the whole sordid tale. Scott was fast on his feet verbally, and normally when someone talked at him for this long he found plenty of junctures at which to inject a stream of his own thoughts, but now he felt no desire to. He was along for the ride, only making noises he couldn’t contain, like sympathetic exhalations and laughter and more “Holy shit”s.His heart lifted each time Carver mentioned telling his parents that he was gay and couldn’t see a way ahead for his marriage, but he did his best not to let that show on his face.
Scott watched Carver carefully, monitoring him for extremities of emotion, but he stayed very even. He talked in a measured tone almost the whole way, only choking up when he recounted his conversation with his father and his mother giving him a photo of her with Isaac. Scott asked if he could see that.
“It’s in my luggage, but I took a picture on my phone,” Carver said. He pulled it up, then handed his phone to Scott.
Scott studied the two faces in the photo. Carver took after Nora in a more obvious way, but Isaac was like the frame inside which Nora’s features hung. Carver’s fine-boned face was his mother’s, but his prominent cheekbones and strong eyebrows and dark wavy hair were his father’s.
There was something in Isaac’s gaze, too, that reminded him of Carver — something that made him look fundamentally serious even as he smiled.
Scott handed Carver his phone back. He’d zoomed in close on Isaac’s face, and Carver stared at the screen for a moment.
“Are you gonna get in touch with his family?” he said.
“Yeah,” Carver said. “I want to try.”
“Are you nervous?”
Carver shook his head. “Maybe I will be once I actually have to pull the trigger, but not now. No. I just feel like I don’t want to waste any more time.”
Scott sat there for a moment, quiet and thinking. “Your parents are pretty fucked up for this.”
“I know.” Carver snorted. “I guess that’s the main thing I’d be nervous about, if his family thinks I’m damaged goods because I got raised by crazy WASPs who tried to repress all this.”
“I don’t think they’ll blame you for that.”
“Not blame me, just associate me with it. You know. ‘It’s not his fault, but…’”
“I don’t know. You can’t know any of this shit ahead of time.”
