4
There are many varieties of shock. This is something you don’t know until you’ve experienced a few of them. I’ve been on the other end of a phone call hearing the news that my parents were in a car crash and both might not live. I’ve sat in a doctor’s office being told that my baby boy had a rare and often fatal disease. I have felt the slam, the blade, the breathless falling—a physical sense of being shoved backward into an abyss. But this was something altogether different. An air of unreality settled like a cloak around me. I was stupid, disbelieving. The air became thick sludge. Nothing computed.
“Maybe they got it wrong.”
Michael just looked at me.
“Switched vials? Mislabeled the results?”
It was the thinnest of threads, but it was all I had. Human error. It seemed possible, in that moment, that all of this would turn out to be a big mistake, something that would become a crazy story I’d tell someday, after I’d recovered from this needless distress.
“Let me see if I can get someone on the phone,” Michael said.
He paused in the door to my office.
“You okay?”
“I’m fine.” My voice was reedy, stretched taut.
Alone in my office, I went back to ordinary things with a vengeance. I unplugged my phone charger from the wall and wrapped the wires neatly around it. I packed up my travel-size toiletries and checked them off the list. I looked up the San Francisco weather and folded an extra sweater into my bag.
Estimated number of generations to MRCA = 4.5
Susie and I were four and a half generations away from a most recent common ancestor. At first this didn’t seem like a lot of generations, but within a single ethnic group like Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews, by four and a half generations, just about everyone has an ancestor in common. Close relatives—parents, uncles, aunts, first, second, even third and fourth cousins—are pinpointed by DNA testing sites with a degree of precision. If two people share a father, the results would be resoundingly clear.
Susie and I were not related.
Somewhere within me, in a place as dangerous and electric as a live wire, I knew what this meant, if it was true. If it was true being something that I would repeat to myself again and again. If it was true being something that I might always cling to, in a disbelieving, childlike way, part of the thick sludge.
If it was true that Susie and I were not half sisters, my father was not my father.
That he was Susie’s father was without question. She looked like him. She had his eyes, and the shape of his face. She even sounded a bit like him, her cadences those of a born-and-bred, yeshiva-educated New Yorker. I, on the other hand, looked nothing like my father or like anyone in his family. I was pale-skinned, very blond, blue-eyed. All my life, I’d fielded and deflected comments about not looking Jewish, but I had no reason to question my biological connection to my dad. He was my dad. But now—in a minefield of doubt—there was no doubt in my mind about Susie’s paternity. Only about mine.
The more chaotic my thoughts became, the more precise my actions, as if carefully folded T-shirts and jeans might fix everything. I could hear Michael’s voice downstairs. Had he gotten someone on the phone at this hour? Where was Ancestry.com even located? I imagined a massive warehouse full of thousands of plastic vials.
I was trying to think it all through, but with a mind blunted as if by a sledgehammer blow. Vladimir Nabokov, in Speak, Memory, ponders the question of how to examine a deluded mind when one’s only resource is a deluded mind. I picked my way through the little I knew. First of all, that business about being 52 percent Eastern European Ashkenazi in the DNA analysis. That was ridiculous. Of course I was entirely Jewish—my parents were both Jewish. I had been raised Orthodox. I mean, I was very Jewish. I spoke fluent Hebrew until I was in high school. I had always countered the litany of questions about my ethnicity with a recital of my impeccable family history. That plastic vial must have been accidentally switched with that of some half-Jewish person, who was at this very moment confused about her own DNA.
My results had also listed a first cousin who was unfamiliar to me. There he was, a blue icon like one that might be found on the door to a men’s room, identified only by his initials. This—Michael will later tell me—set off loud, clanging warning bells for him.
But not for me. Obviously I knew all my first cousins. This only reinforced my certainty that there must be some mistake. I ran through the facts of my own identity again and again as if memorizing a poem, or factors of an equation.
By the time Michael came back upstairs, it was nearly midnight. We were leaving for the airport in four hours. I was freezing. He wrapped his arms around me, but not before I saw the look on his face. I registered that I had never seen him look at me that way before. Not when my mother died. Not when our boy was sick. I would describe it as something bordering on pity. It wasn’t so much my future that was being irrevocably altered by this discovery—it was my past. Michael had already known this, of course, well before he looked up the toll-free number on Ancestry’s website. He had known when he first saw the surprising breakdown of my ethnicity. When a cousin who was a stranger had appeared along with my results like an emissary from some foreign world.
“It’s not a mistake,” he said softly.
In the ensuing weeks, every person I tell about this night will say a version of the same thing: Must be a mix-up. It can’t be true. They will say it protectively. Indignantly. They will say it out of kindness. And they will be wrong. Millions of people have had their DNA tested by Ancestry.com, and no such mistake has ever been made.