“Hi, honey. School good? Practice?”
“Yep. I learned all the things.” I craned my neck to peer into the office and saw a mountain of empty Hershey’s Kisses wrappers on her desk. “Tough design?”
Her lips pursed. “He gets these ideas—” and byhe, she meant Dad “—and they look great, but I have to figure out a way to make them work. This morning he drops this brilliant design for a website we are already overdue on.” She sat on the armrest of the sofa and pulled out another Kiss from her pocket. “Triangles. In pure CSS.” She crumpled the wrapper in her fist. “I mean, right?”
I was supposed to be upset by triangles, but I didn’t know anything about coding, so I went with, “Triangles, those bastards.”
Her chin dropped to her chest. “Thank you.” Then it snapped back up. “And don’t swear.”
“Sorry.” I backed toward the stairs behind me, knowing I needed to hurry up if I wanted to be gone before Dad came home, which I did. “Can’t you just tell Dad that he’s asking for something you can’t do?”
“Oh, I can do it.” She opened another Kiss. “I might go insane trying to get the angles right, but I can do it.” Her eyes lost focus, and I knew that look well enough to know she was already imagining how she would succeed.
“Fine.” She stood up and set the empty wrappers on the corner of the coffee table. She slipped her earbuds back in and her voice rose to compensate for the deafening music she liked.“YOU AND DAD ARE ON YOUR OWN FOR DINNER. I’LL HAVE HIS TRIANGLES BY MORNING.”
I went upstairs just long enough to drop off my books and shower at lightning speed before dashing back downstairs into the kitchen. On the message board by the fridge, I wrote a note.
Dad,
Mom is working on the triangles (?) you wanted. I’m going to Jessalyn’s to work on homework. I’ll eat dinner out.
I started to writesorry, but my nostrils flared and I erased it, leaving only my name. I dropped the marker, letting it swing in a wide arc from its string, and left.
* * *
I got to the batting cages a good half hour before I was supposed to meet Chase, so after sitting for a few minutes in my car, I did something I hadn’t been able to bring myself to do at home.
I Googled my brother.
I checked every social media site I could think of. And there he was: Brandon McCormick III. I found pictures going back to middle school, where he looked so much like Selena, all long limbed and skinny. His awkward phase had been short. Between seventh and eighth grade, his skin had cleared up and he’d filled out. He looked the way I remembered him from a few days ago.
I read up on his hobbies (video games and swimming), the movies he liked (he was really into Asian films) and his favorite books (big fan of Robert Jordan).
I found out he’d broken his leg skiing when he was fourteen.
I found out he wanted to be an astronaut, and not like a little kid wants to be an astronaut. He was planning on joining the air force.
I found out that he and his dad—and Chase—went deep-sea fishing in Alaska every summer. There were pictures of the three of them on different boats, holding high their catches.
His dad looked like an average guy. Shorter than his son in recent photos, but with similar coloring. They weren’t so different that people would notice and wonder.
That was something I hadn’t had a chance to ask Brandon. I could see my dad so clearly in him. I hadn’t seen the man Brandon thought was his dad, but I thought Brandon could have wondered why the resemblance between him and his supposed father wasn’t stronger. Then again, what kid really did that? Seeing the man now, dissimilar from Brandon but not startlingly so, I could see how love might have blurred the differences between them. And if both Brandon and his dad had been truly ignorant of the affair—though I was less convinced about his dad—they might never have thought to scrutinize each other. I believed Brandon had been blindsided by my paternity claims, but I still didn’t know about his dad. Pictures online could tell me only so much.
Still, I kept looking. It was a compulsion.
I found out that Brandon still mourned the mother he never knew. He posted about her every year on her birthday and on his—April 18. He’d said he’d just turned eighteen; I hadn’t realized he’d meant literally the week before. He was only five months older than me. Selena would have been barely a year old when Dad was with his mom and then back with Mom not even half a year later. I lowered my phone and tasted bile.How could he have left her with one baby to go off and make another only to return and make me? What kind of man could do that?
I forced my eyes back to my phone, my only hope for answers in that moment. Brandon always shared the same photo—apparently, he had only one of the two of them together. It was in a hospital and he was lying on her chest wrapped in one of those newborn blankets with a tiny blue baby cap. She wasn’t really holding him—she clearly didn’t have the strength—but she was smiling at him. My stomach churned. Had Dad known about his son? Had they picked out his name together? Made plans to leave their spouses and start a new family? Had her death devastated him so much that he’d lied to his first family all these years, or was he as ignorant about Brandon as I’d been?
I couldn’t imagine Dad abandoning his son for someone else to raise, doing to his child what had been done to him, but I couldn’t have fathomed his cheating on Mom either, so my shattered faith in him wasn’t a litmus test for anything anymore. On top of that, I knew nothing about Brandon’s mom. Had she been in love with my dad? Happy to discover she was pregnant with his child? Or had she viewed the affair as a mistake and the paternity of her unborn child as something to conceal from both his father and her husband?
I banged my head against my headrest again and again. It was either that or cry. Maybe Dad knew, maybe not. Maybe the man who raised Brandon knew, maybe not. I had no idea what I was supposed to do. I no longer had any proof of Dad’s connection to Brandon. The DNA results were gone, the website didn’t even list the match since Brandon had revoked and removed his information, and it wasn’t likely that he’d be giving my one printed copy back, assuming he hadn’t destroyed it when he deleted his account. I had next to nothing to corroborate my claim, if I decided to make one. And that was a big if. The destruction that would rain down on my family, on Mom in particular… Tears pricked my eyes, blurring the face of my half brother as a newborn. He looked round and swollen like every other newborn. The resemblance to Dad didn’t show up until later. I blinked, noticing something else in the photo of Brandon with his mom—a man’s hand resting on the bedrail of the hospital bed. The rest of him was out of frame. I pinched the image larger, trying to see every possible detail of that hand. I scrolled back to the last fishing-trip photo, trying to make out any distinguishing marks on the hand of Brandon’s dad, but the sun was glaring and I couldn’t tell. Back to the hospital pic. My nose was practically brushing my phone screen. Whose was it? My dad’s or his? If he’d been there, then he knew, he—
I jumped as a figure approached my window. Chase.
I dropped my phone. The image was so zoomed in it wasn’t recognizable, but I didn’t want him asking about it either. Mentally, I was still thinking about the hand. It was a man’s hand, of indiscernible color, and it was strong, like say from playing baseball or years spent reeling in monstrous deep-sea fish. It could be either of them in that photo. But if it was Dad’s hand, if he’d been at her bedside when their son was born, bile or not, Mom had to know.
My best shot of finding out was standing right outside my window, smiling and happy to see me. I swallowed a wave of guilt and smiled back.
