Sixteen

I fled down the staircase and out the front door. Bobby followed. He caught up as I made my car beep with the key fob.

“Hey! You okay?” Bobby asked.

My breathing was a little ragged, but I managed, “Yeah. I’m fine.”

I opened the car door and started to slide onto the safety-inspected leather of the Volvo interior. Bobby grabbed my arm and said, “You don’t look fine. What was in that picture?”

“You know what was in that picture.”

“The whole house is full of pictures. How should I know?”

“It was full of pictures of my dad sharing happy memories with John Tucker. They were all pictures of him.”

“Yeah, but you were staring at the one on the stairs. What was going on in that picture?”

I gazed through the windshield and thought back to the picture, back to the paper party hat cone I had been wearing. It had R2D2 on it. How did I get a Star Wars party hat? I don’t remember any birthdays with any party hats. My mother thought those kinds of things were ridiculous.

“That picture was the proof.”

“Proof that John Tucker was your brother?”

“That’s the least of it.”

There are two kinds of software bugs: easy ones and hard ones. In the easy ones, you have all the data and you know how the software works. They are no more difficult than fixing a Sudoku puzzle with two 5s in the same row. You start at the bad number and work your way back to the source of the problem.

The hard ones hide their information. They present a bewildering series of seemingly random events, tied together by some common cause. You can’t step back through them, so the solution has to come to you in a flash. Then everything makes sense.

The picture on that wall was ostensibly a picture of me, blowing out candles and wishing for some two-year-old’s idea of Heaven. An ice cream cone, perhaps. But that wasn’t why Cathy Byrd had put the picture on her wall. All her pictures captured happy family turning points: a graduation, a football championship, an amusement park ride. Nestled among them was the moment when my father reached out and touched her hand. While my mother was fussing over a cup and I was blowing air at two candles, Cathy Byrd and my father were taking the first step toward creating my father’s second family. Someone had captured that moment. Cathy Byrd had framed it.

Bobby leaned on the Volvo. We looked at the big purple house that had once held a small family of three. Cathy, the mother; John, the son; and John, the father who often went back to Wellesley to visit his other family. His other son.

My father had walked up those steps after a short commute from the Pittsfield GDS and called out, “Honey, I’m home!” Did Cathy come to greet him at the door wearing a little apron, her hands wet from cooking? Did she kiss my father softly on the lips just before their son JT tore down the stairs and jumped into his arms? Did JT ask, “What did you bring me?” and did my father produce some small wonder he had picked up near my house in Wellesley? Did they go into the dining room and have a pleasant family dinner while Cathy told my dad about her day and made JT eat his carrots?

It was pretty to think of all this happening in the big purple house, because it never happened in mine, where my stomach would knot at the sound of my father’s car door. He’d open the door, hang his coat in the hallway, and hunch his shoulders at my mother’s first nagging recrimination about some forgotten household chore. The ritual fight would start five minutes later, every time, and I would hide in my bedroom sitting next to my imagined brother, a stuffed bear named Mr. Lumpy.

My lip trembled as a familiar burn took hold of my throat.

Bobby called out to a Pittsfield cop, “Hey! I’m taking Tucker out for a cup of coffee. We’ll be back in an hour or so.”

The cop nodded. I had already given them my statement four times and had even been fingerprinted so they could screen out my prints. Not that I’d touched anything in the house.

Bobby said, “C’mon, Tucker.”

My trance broke. I sniffled and said, “I don’t know where there’s a coffee shop out here.”

Bobby pointed at my Droid and said, “Are you kidding? That phone of yours must be able to find a Starbucks.”

We climbed into Bobby’s car and my Droid found a Starbucks about ten minutes away.

We never reached it.