Page 82 of The Art of Drowning

Dad took us into the kitchen as Mom stepped in from outside. She had a glass of wine in one hand and a lighter in the other. She’d obviously started smoking again and by the look on Dad’s face, he wasn’t too happy about it.

I tried to care but couldn’t muster up a single emotion. She’d quit when I was a kid, and I remember how much better she smelled when I hugged her and how happy it made her that I wanted to hug her more often.

She pulled out a chair and sat down, and I wondered how sober she was. How much wine had she drunk? Was this their life now? Dad walking around looking like a ghost while Mom smoked and drank?

“Sit down, Callum,” Mom said. Her voice rasped out and I wondered how many times she’d stepped out back to have a smoke that day.

I sat down anyway. Not because she told me to, but because my knees wouldn’t hold me up anymore. I pulled the envelope out of my back pocket and set it in the middle of the table.

“Do you know what that is?” I asked them.

Dad was the one who reached for it. If he knew what was inside, he did a good job at pretending that he didn’t. His hands were steady enough as he unfolded the envelope and then retrieved the papers inside. They only started to shake when he unfolded the pages and had a look at what they were.

He went a sick shade of gray and passed the papers over to Mom, who glanced at them but wouldn’t touch them. She averted her gaze and I knew.

I knew then that it was true.

Horror was the only thing that kept me glued to my chair.

“Explain.” My voice came out sounding funny. A little high. A little tight. A little like I wasn’t breathing. My chest was on fire and then Damien’s voice cut through the fog.

“Breathe, Callum.”

Those were the first words all day that made any sense, and I sucked in a lungful of air.

“Explain,” I said again once I felt like I was in better control of myself.

“I don’t know where to start,” Dad said.

“Start with why you didn’t fucking tell me.”

Dad looked like he wanted to cry. Mom looked like she wanted to get blackout drunk and forget that she had any kids at all. She wouldn’t even look at me. She just sat there, with her shoulders rounded, clinging to her half-empty glass of wine. Her shoulders started to shake and a few tears escaped, but she said nothing.

“We thought we were doing the right thing.” Dad dragged a hand down his face. “Your mother and I,” he paused and looked at me like he expected a rebuke for using those words.

None came, because I wanted answers more than I wanted to argue over what they were allowed to call themselves.

“Your mother and I had these friends. We’d all met in college and we were really close. Probably too close, you know.”

“I don’t follow.”

Damien did, because he leaned closer to me. “I think he means they were swingers.”

“Oh. Oh, ew.” I wasn’t sure what I felt as the reality of that sank in.

Dad nodded. “We were close. The four of us. They lived down the street. We saw each other all the time. When Alice got pregnant, we didn’t know who the father was, and it didn’t matter. You belonged to the four of us.”

Alice. Alice wasn’t my mother’s name. Well, it was, I guessed. But not this mother. My biological mother. The one I’d only just found out about. My mother’s name was Alice.

I shoved that thought aside and urged my dad to continue.

“Alice had just had you and she was struggling with postpartum depression, and Mark wanted to take her out and cheer her up, so your mother and I agreed to babysit you.”

I already knew how this story ended. “They never came home, did they?”

Dad shook his head. “Drunk driver. Hit them as they were approaching the bridge. They went over and plunged into the water.”

“So you just… kept me and let me think I was yours?”