Carver was astonished by this for no particular reason. He wanted more and more. “How old was he when he died?”
“Thirty-three.”
“Did he know about me?”
Nora paused in the middle of pulling the plastic wings off a Band-Aid. She looked him in the eye with a great melancholy and said, “Yes.”
“Did he meet —” Carver began to say, but now Doug was coming back, and they both were quiet.
His father waited with the soft ice pack while Nora bandaged the most skinned parts of his palms, then Carver took the ice pack and pressed it against the back of his right hand. He felt instant relief.
“Let’s go sit back down,” Doug said.
He led them as a group to the couch. Carver’s parents sat down on either side of him, and his father began to clean out the wound on his knee.
“By the way,” Carver murmured as he watched him work, “pretty negligent to not tell me I have an immediate family history of fatal cancer —”
“I know, I know,” Nora exclaimed. “We’ve discussed this, over and over. But it’s not a particularly hereditary cancer, and it’s usually very treatable. Plus we do harp on all of you to do self exams and go to the doctor. And you know, you’re the only one of the three who actually goes?”
“You always have been very diligent about that,” Doug said, smoothing a large Band-Aid over his knee. “I don’t think this is going to stay on for long.”
Carver tucked his legs underneath him and looked between them. “Alright, tell me the whole story,” he said.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Doug and Nora did what they hadn’t done since Carver was a little kid with the flu: they simultaneously gave him their undivided attention and did exactly as he asked without complaint.
Nora did most of the talking. She told him they found out about his paternity the same way Chip had, based on his blood type. She’d volunteered with the Red Cross as a teenager and knew the basics; when they gave Carver the heel prick test and then informed her that he was type O like she was, she realized what had happened.
“You have to understand how miraculously unlikely it was for this man to be able to father a child,” she said. A terrible miracle, a black swan event.
Nora proceeded like a lawyer. Not wanting to alarm Doug needlessly, she told her affair partner to come give a sample so she could paternity test Carver against him. He was a match. At this point, she confessed everything to Doug.
“That was the worst day of my life,” she said, and Carver glanced at Doug, who was maintaining eye contact with the coffee table. “And I’m very grateful to your father for how he handled it. He said his name was on your birth certificate, so you were his, and he’s always said that.”
Doug nodded.
Nora told Carver that his biological father was named Isaac Levin, and he was a friend to both her and Doug. She repeated that he was a doctor and training to be a surgeon, as if she didn’t want Doug to know they’d been privately discussing this in the hall. He was a runner like Carver, though he ran marathons and not triathlons, and in fact didn’t know how to swim. He was tall, she said, and apologetically added that he got his height from her, or more aptly from her father Archer, who was 5’7.
“Do you have a picture of him?” Carver said, glancing between them.
Doug, who’d been staring into space, cleared his throat. “I’ll see if there’s one in the study,” he said, and walked out.
Nora watched him go, then said, “He’ll be gone a while. He doesn’t like to discuss Isaac.”
“I wouldn’t either,” Carver said.
Nora nodded, then looked down at her hands in her lap, examining her fingernails. “It was harder because they were friends, and it was very difficult on your father when he died. He could never bring himself to forgive him, even at the end. He refused to visit him in hospice. Isaac asked for him several times. He wanted so badly to apologize before he died. But your father wouldn’t give him that. I think he regrets it. Just the finality of it.”
“Yeah.”
“He was Jewish,” Nora said, glancing at him. “Isaac.”
“I kind of wondered from the name.” Carver absorbed this for a moment. “Does that make me Jewish?”
“No, that comes through the mother. You’re Lutheran.”
“But ethnically?”
