39. Callum
THIRTY-NINE
callum
NOW
We drove all day and despite the urgency I felt to get answers, there was also dread swirling around inside me.
The closer we got, the more keenly I felt it.
I’d convince myself that some things were better left buried in one hour and then in the next, I’d be practically climbing the walls, ready to get in front of my parents and demand answers from them.
“Did you want to stop for dinner first?” Damien asked me as we pulled into town.
When it became clear that I was too worked up to pay proper attention to the road, he’d solely taken over driving duties.
He’d been patient with me all day while I fiddled in the passenger seat, changing music stations on his satellite radio every second song.
Constantly shifting around like I had ants in my pants. The man had the patience of a saint.
“If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather get this over with.”
Damien reached across the seat and dropped a hand onto mine and gave it a squeeze.
“Thank you,” I blurted, moved by the gesture of comfort. “I couldn’t do this without you.” Without Damien, I’d probably still be at home, curled up in a ball of depressed anxiety. I’d spend the next six months in a deep state of denial before trying to fix anything.
It struck me like a bolt of lightning that this was the first time I felt like I had anyone on my side.
For years, it had been me against the world.
I’d stopped trying to lean on my parents years ago when it became clear that there was this wall between us.
I wasn’t sure when it went up or how to get around it, only that the wall looked a lot like Sam.
The hatred I had for him made my stomach twist. It was a good thing I’d said no to dinner because I was certain I couldn’t keep anything down. Damien turned down my old street and my guts twisted again.
“Breathe,” Damien told me, slowing the car as he approached the driveway. “Breathe, Callum. You can do this. Or not. We can just keep going.”
“No. No, we can’t. I need to talk to them.” Resolve settled me, at least to the point that I no longer felt like I was going to hurl.
Damien pulled into the driveway and killed the engine. “Whenever you’re ready.”
“I’ll never be ready, but I’m doing this anyway.” I got out of the car and was comforted when Damien followed me. He fell into step beside me and put his hand on my lower back. I knocked on the door, then stepped closer to him, seeking his warmth and comfort.
The door swung open and my dad stood there looking older, and grayer, and sadder than the last time I saw him.
“Cal?” He stepped back to let us inside and called out to my mom. “It’s Callum. And Damien.”
Dad shut the door, and Damien and I took our shoes off.
“This is a nice surprise,” Dad said. “We weren’t expecting you.”
“I know,” I said. My throat was tight and my eyes burned as I tried to keep it together. I didn’t realize how hard it would be to look him in the face and know that he wasn’t my dad.
“Can we talk?” I reached for Damien and linked my hand with his.
Dad’s gaze flicked to our joined hands, and it looked like he would have smiled but couldn’t remember how.
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?”
“You were ours.” Mom finally joined the conversation.
Her eyes were red-rimmed and they looked haunted and full of more pain than I’d ever seen.
“You were ours. When Alice got pregnant, we were all so happy. We all wanted you. We were going to raise you, all four of us. You were so wanted. So desperately wanted. Because she didn’t know if Mark was the father or not, she put your dad on the birth certificate.
She wanted a way to tie us all together.
It’s what saved us from having to fight for you when they died. ”
“And you just never thought I needed to know any of this?”
“We were going to tell you. So many times. It’s just…” Mom stopped talking and her face crumpled. Dad scooted closer and draped an arm around her. They looked older and more fragile than ever before, and I wondered what kind of toll keeping this secret had taken on them.
“How exactly do you explain something like this?” Dad said, rubbing Mom’s back as she tried to collect herself.
I sat with that for a minute and tried to imagine myself in their position… and I couldn’t. Maybe if I’d known my whole life that I wasn’t theirs, it might have been different. It might have been easier to explain had I known all along.
“But I’ve seen my birth certificate.” My eyebrows scrunched together and the world tilted a bit. Damien squeezed my hand, reminding me that I wasn’t alone in this.
“Because your father was on the birth certificate, and Alice was… gone… I was able to adopt you.”
“When did Sam find out that I wasn’t really yours?”
The silence was deafening. “You were a teenager. You and Sam. I can’t remember why he was in my office, but he was looking for something.” Dad ran a hand down his face. “He found the adoption papers. The inheritance.”
“Inheritance?”
“It wasn’t much, but it was enough to get you through college. It was all Alice and Mark had left and we saved it for you. Sam was upset.”
“Why didn’t you tell me after Sam found out?”
“He said you’d hate us. He thought that your father had some kind of affair, so we had to tell him the truth. Sam was… different after. Angrier. More jealous.”
“And you just… didn’t tell me.” The bottom dropped out of my stomach. “I need to go.”
They nodded. They just sat there and fucking nodded, like this was the outcome they expected all along and they’d resigned themselves to it. Were they even going to try and get me to stay? Were they sorry they lied?
“Why the DNA test?” It was Damien who asked. His grip on my hand tightened, anchoring me in place even though my body screamed at me to leave. “I mean, Sam already knew the truth. Why bother getting the DNA test at all?”
“Sam got sick. We all got tested to find out if we were compatible to donate stem cells. We needed to know for sure, in case Callum ever got sick.”
I nodded and managed to get to my feet, though I was certain I couldn’t feel my legs. “I need to leave.”
Damien held my hand and kept me upright.
He practically carried me to the car and deposited me in the passenger seat.
And the thing that struck me the hardest was that neither one of them asked me to stay.
They didn’t beg, or plead, or even follow me to the door.
They sat at the table and watched me go, and I didn’t know what to do with that knowledge.
“I know it won’t help, but I really need to get drunk.”
Damien reached over and put his hand on my leg. “I’ve got you.”
I closed my eyes and leaned against the headrest and pretended for a few minutes that this was all a bad dream. When the car came to a stop, I opened my eyes and realized that Damien had brought me to Ginny’s bar, where he’d run into me after the funeral.
“You seemed to like this place,” he said as he killed the engine. “And there’s a hotel across the street for when you’re done.”
The day had been absolute shit, but maybe it wasn’t all bad, I thought, as I practically launched myself across the front seat and kissed Damien full on the mouth.
He let out a surprised sound before he managed to kiss me back.
I tried to devour him, but he eased up and eventually managed to put some distance between us.
“Let’s put a pin in that.” He motioned to the bar. “Do you still want to get drunk?”
“You fucking bet I do. I think I deserve it after the shit show this day has been.”
He kissed me briefly. I could see the worry in his eyes, and the love, and the determination to look after me and make things better. “Then let’s go.”