CHAPTER THIRTEEN
They weren’t five minutes away, they were eight minutes away, and Carver felt every single second of those eight minutes.
Once they were back at the house, he dogged Chip’s heels as he went upstairs to toss Conway’s luggage in search of weed.
This took three additional minutes. Carver spent the duration standing in his sister’s doorway with his arms folded, thrumming with impatience.
The golden retriever emerged from their parents’ bedroom, wagging his tail, and nosed the back of Carver’s knees until he bent down to stroke his head.
“There we go,” Chip said, finally unearthing a large joint inside a Ziploc which had been tucked into Conway’s makeup bag.
“Okay, let’s go,” Carver said, stepping back out into the hall.
“Don’t be impatient,” Chip said. “You’ve waited your whole life to hear this, you can wait a little longer. And I need a lighter.”
His whole life. His whole life? Carver strode over to a credenza in the hallway which sat under an array of framed family portraits and upon which rested a large bowl of potpourri and a half-burned 21-ounce Diptyque candle.
He opened one of the drawers, grabbed the pack of matches his mother used to light the candle, returned to Chip and slapped it into his hand.
“Solid,” Chip said. “Let’s go up on the roof.”
Chip’s old room had roof access through its window; this fact plus Doug’s 24-foot ladder for cleaning the gutters had facilitated his sneakouts all through high school.
This part of the roof had a very gentle slope, so it wasn’t unnerving to sit on, although the asphalt luxury shingles weren’t comfortable.
As soon as Chip took his first drag, Carver said, “Tell me.”
“Hang on.”
“It’s nothing, isn’t it? You’re just fucking with me, you don’t have anything to tell me.”
“Holy shit, are you stupid?” Chip said, coughing. “I said I need to be high for this. How the fuck am I gonna be high yet? Jesus, you need this more than I do.” He handed it over. “Careful, it’s strong.”
“I didn’t even know Connie smoked weed,” Carver said, taking a hit.
“She’s not a stoner or anything,” Chip said. “Just something to take the edge off sometimes, I guess.”
Carver handed the joint back to Chip and observed him.
His voice wasn’t letting on that he was nervous, but his body language was.
His leg was bouncing, and he kept touching his hair and cracking his knuckles.
Carver was continually trying to imagine what Chip was going to tell him out of an anxious desire to steel himself for the blow, but his imagination didn’t know where to start.
The only scenario which occurred to him was sort of soap operatic and likely influenced by the story of Lillian’s dead, homicidal sister.
He imagined that he’d had a twin at birth, but when they were toddlers his twin had died in an accident that was his fault, and his parents had decided to hide this from him.
There were several holes in this theory — for instance, Chip was four when he was born and Carver didn’t think he would have been able to keep that secret this long — but it felt emotionally accurate somehow.
It would explain the guilt which gushed from no apparent source, his sense of being eternally on trial.
They smoked in silence for a few minutes, looking out over the rest of the neighborhood.
Carver was dimly aware of an ache in his old shoulder injury, probably from slamming into the Jeep earlier, but he was so used to ignoring discomfort in that shoulder that it was difficult for him to remain aware of it for more than a few seconds at a time.
Finally Chip exhaled, lacing his hands together and staring down at them.
“Alright,” he said, and let out a little laugh. “Alright. I’m as ready as I’ll ever be, I guess. Fuck.”
Carver’s heart was pounding. His palms grew sweaty, and he wiped them on his tux. “Okay,” he said.
Chip continued to look at his hands. “And now I don’t know how to say this.”
“Just say it.”
“Okay. Yeah. Uh… Dad is not your biological father. Mom cheated on him.”
Carver’s whole body went numb, and he grabbed some shingles for purchase.
“That’s not funny,” he said automatically.
It too much resembled the classic sibling joke: you’re adopted, you were an accident, Mom and Dad won you at the circus.
And it was Chip saying this, of all people.
It couldn’t be the truth. But Chip’s eyes were glistening with tears, and Chip only ever cried in front of him at funerals, and barely then.
“That’s not funny,” he repeated, just to have something to say.
Chip exhaled. “It’s not supposed to be.”
“That doesn’t even make any sense.”
Of course, it actually made a great deal of sense.
It would explain so much about everything.
What he meant was: we don’t come from that kind of family.
They were respectable people who did things the right way, and they were like this at the behest of their mother.
Nora was their guiding light, their sentinel of respectability.
When Nora was home they’d had family dinner in the dining room at 6 o’clock sharp, even if she had to pick up takeout on her way out of the city, even if she had to take work home with her and retreat to the office with it as soon as dinner was over.
When Nora was around you sat up straight and didn’t burp or scratch your balls or leave a sock on your bedroom floor.
So Nora would not, of course, have another man’s baby.
She would not make Carver be another man’s baby.
She wouldn’t do that to him. It really didn’t make sense.
It couldn’t be true. He looked like Doug in some small ways, didn’t he?
Carver and Conway resembled him much more, but didn’t he?
Yet he couldn’t think of a single detail that supported this.
No. No, they didn’t resemble each other physically and never had.
Carver suddenly had a swelling sense of panic about his father, as potent as if Doug had collapsed in front of him.
He had the irrational urge to call him and make sure he was okay.
He turned back toward the window, wanting to climb back into Chip’s room where he’d left his phone, but Chip grabbed him by the arm.
“You need to stay here and let me finish,” Chip said, his voice rough. “I can do this once, I can’t do this twice.”
Carver’s panic subsided, but now he didn’t know what to do. He wanted to rewind the clock five minutes and tell Chip not to tell him, not to bother, whatever it was he didn’t want to know. “What the fuck,” he cried out.
“I know,” Chip said. “Quiet down, you’re gonna wake up the neighbors.”
“No, this is bullshit. Who told you that?”
“No one told me. I figured it out.”
“How?”
“You have the wrong blood type.”
“I did what?”
“When Aaron was born,” Chip said, “the nurse was talking to me about his blood type, just making small talk. I’m AB, like Dad. I knew that about him, we did a blood drive together once. And I knew you were O.”
“Yeah. O positive.”
“Right. So is Maggie. And for you to be O, that means Mom has to be O. So this nurse said to me, an AB father and an O mother will basically never have an O child. It’s almost impossible.
And I said, my brother must be really unusual, because I’m AB and he’s O.
And she got this look on her face, like, oh shit.
Like she had fucked up. And she said, yeah, he must just be really unusual. ”
Carver dragged in a choppy breath. “Then maybe I am.”
“Well, no,” Chip said, with uncharacteristic patience. “I looked it up. It’s like, twelve people in India who are the exception. So I kept this to myself for months, I let it eat a hole in my gut, and then I brought it up to Conway —”
“Not me? You didn’t fucking bring it up to me?”
“How could I, dude? How was I supposed to do that?”
Carver tried to breathe in a steady, regular pattern. The thirteen or so drinks he’d had were on the verge of coming back up.
“She told me I had to ask Mom and Dad,” Chip said. “And I did. And they melted down, and they denied everything, but I pushed them, and pushed them, I didn’t let it go. And finally they came clean.”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Carver said, and dry heaved. It felt as though the world had cracked open and now everything was pouring into the crack, fast as a mudslide or avalanche.
“You need to puke?”
“No. Just finish the story. Jesus Christ.”
“Alright,” Chip said. He patted him on the shoulder again; it should have been comforting, but Carver could barely feel it. “Alright. What they told me is, uh, yeah, Mom had an affair with a friend of theirs when I was a kid. This was around the time that Dad was gone a lot for work.”
“Who? What friend?”
“They didn’t tell me his name, but I think I remember him,” Chip said. “I have this vague memory of a guy coming by, and watching movies with me and Mom. I never saw anything, but I felt like something was off. Or I’m thinking that in hindsight, I don’t know. But I remember a guy.”
“What did he look like?”
Chip shrugged. “I don’t remember. Dark hair, I think.”
“What else did they say?” Carver was suddenly seized by the need to know every last detail. “Like, what the fuck? Why wouldn’t she — I know she believes in abortion, what the fuck? This can’t be true, Chip, it doesn’t make any sense.”
Chip put a hand up. “First thing you need to know is, this guy is dead.”
“What guy?” Carver said, like an idiot.
“Your dad. Your biological dad.”
This landed like a blow. “What do you mean he’s dead?”