CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Scott wasn’t sure where he was when he woke up.
He lay there blinking in the darkness, aware of his right hand feeling around for something without understanding what he was feeling around for and why.
Then he heard banging on metal, three quick knocks on the van door.
Right, he was in the back of his van, sleeping on the camper mattress.
What he was feeling around for, instinctively, was his phone — to make use of the flashlight.
He found it and did so, then squeezed his eyes shut, momentarily blinded. Whoever was knocking did it three more times. “I’m coming,” he shouted almost unintelligibly, kicking away his comforter and blanket and sitting up.
When Scott heaved the sliding door open, he was freshly disoriented by the sight of Carver.
“Hi,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “What? Hi. Everything okay?”
“Yeah, everything’s fine,” Carver said. His voice sounded thick and scratchy like he’d been crying, but he was smiling. “Can you quit shining that in my eyes?”
“Sorry.” Scott leaned back into the van and stretched up to hit the big battery-powered push light on the ceiling. “Come in, it’s cold out there.” He was only wearing a tank top and boxers.
Carver stepped into the van, and Scott shut the door behind him. Carver settled on the mattress beside him and looked around, his hands tucked into the pockets of his hoodie.
“What happened to your knee?” Scott said, noticing a Band-Aid.
“Tripped in the parking lot,” Carver said. “Is this mattress always back here? Where do you put your stuff?”
Scott yawned. “I secure it against the wall normally, so it protects stuff if it slides around… and what it’s resting on is this, like, wood frame I built, with storage bins inside, so there’s stuff under it.
And I haven’t picked everything up from the country club yet, they told me I could come in tomorrow morning. ”
“If your guy can’t fix this thing, are you gonna have to get a van with the same exact dimensions so everything fits the same way?”
“I can’t even think about that right now.”
“Sorry,” Carver said, grinning. The more awake Scott became, the more Carver’s demeanor confused him. It was like he was sixteen and thirty-six at the same time: he looked as tired as he did puckish. He was disheveled but didn’t seem to care, for once.
“What’s going on?” Scott said. The details of the evening were coming back to him, now. “I saw you running away from your parents.”
“And you saw the holes in the wall, per my mom?” Carver said, still grinning. “Yeah, it’s been a weird night.” He smoothed his hair back. “Sorry for waking you up, by the way.”
“It’s all good, I wasn’t —”
“I can tell you were dead asleep.”
“Not dead. 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 considered Scott’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.”
“Yeah, but imagine they don’t like me.”
“Then they’re crazy too,” Scott said. Carver laughed. “I’m serious, the issue would not be with you.”
Carver shook his head, smiling, not looking at him. “You’re just saying that ‘cause you want to fuck me.”
Scott got a thrill in his gut and loins. “No, man, one’s got nothing to do with the other.” He took another moment to think. “How do you feel?”
“Right now, I don’t even know,” Carver said. “I don’t fucking know. It hasn’t totally sunk in yet. Like, it’s an explanation for a lot of things, but it’s not like it’s the one I wanted.”
“Yeah.”
Tears gathered in Carver’s eyes. He blinked them away fast, looking mortified. “I don’t know what I wanted, but it wasn’t this.”
“I get you,” said Scott, feeling a powerful surge of tenderness toward him that manifested as an ache in his chest and a stirring in his dick.
“It is vindicating, of course,” Carver said, then snorted again. “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you, I guess.”
“What were your parents gonna do if you ever did 23andMe, or something?”
“No idea. They were always telling us not to, though, and giving us lawyer justifications, like, don’t give the cops access to your DNA. I almost feel bad for them, they’ve been looking over their shoulders my entire life.”
“Yeah,” said Scott, who couldn’t quite find it in himself to sympathize with Doug and Nora.
“Did you ever do 23andMe?” Carver said. “Find out if you’re actually a Cherokee princess?”
Scott laughed. “I’ve thought about it. I have this fantasy of finding some long-lost half-siblings somewhere. But I’ve always been too nervous about what else I might find out.”
“Yeah, now I see why people worry about that kind of thing.”
“This is going to sound stupid, but in a way I’m jealous of you.”
“In what way?” Carver said, his eyebrows leaping.
“Just that I’ve always kind of hoped Kansas might turn out not to be my dad.”
“Why, is he a worse guy than I thought?”
“No, he’s just a loser,” Scott said, and Carver laughed. “I guess I shouldn’t be too hard on him, considering I’m sleeping in a broken-down van tonight.”
“You did that to yourself, though.”
“But isn’t that loser shit? Having options and picking the shitty one?”
“Why didn’t you go sleep inside?”
“Honestly, I just prefer it this way. I like sleeping in here, or outside, or whatever.” Scott ran his hand through his hair, pushing it back from his face. “I feel that way about a lot of shit. The option I like is the one everyone thinks is too hard or too shitty. Go figure.”
“Josie thought you were out here to punish yourself,” Carver said.
“For what?”
Carver rolled his eyes a little, like Scott was being dense. “Our adultery.”
“Oh, shit. Yeah. No, not at all. I mean, I was worried about you, I didn’t want to get you in a fight with your parents, but when I stopped by and saw your mom I got the feeling the strife wasn’t just about me.”
“No, you were just her son’s adulterous gay lover cruising by at the worst possible moment.”
Scott started laughing. “I did wonder why she, like, threw my shit at me.”
“Sorry about that.”
“It’s cool.”