Henry
If he hadn’t read the paper that morning, which sometimes he didn’t, he might never have been the wiser. They’d had a long, long night; Piper was sleeping in after feeding their baby, Luke, three times in the wee hours—growth spurt.
And now Henry was on duty with the little man who in spite of keeping them up all night was bright and chipper and super into his oatmeal. The whole solid food thing was new—and it was everywhere—on Luke’s chubby cheeks, between his fingers, on the floor, on the high chair tray.
“Buddy,” said Henry. “You getting any of that in your mouth?”
Luke bounced happily, doughy legs kicking. “Ma. Ma.”
“Mommy’s sleeping. Let’s let her rest for a little while.”
Henry didn’t have to be in the office until ten; Piper could have another hour. Luke wielded his purple plastic spoon like a sword.
“Ah,” said Luke, which Henry took as an agreement. “Haha!”
A big gob of oatmeal went flying.
He wiped some from Luke’s mouth and felt the wild rush of love he often felt when looking at his son. The absolute awed devotion he’d felt the moment Luke had emerged—miraculously, impossibly—from Piper and into the delivery room. The bloody, squalling emergence of this perfect creature who was made from the love he had for his wife—it just blew him away. People had babies all the time. Why did no one ever talk about what a wild, over-the-top miracle the whole thing was?
He put Luke on the floor mat for tummy time and proceeded to read to him from the newspaper—sports, the weather, international news, the business section. He still liked the print edition, though it was probably easier to read it on his phone or iPad.
“Stocks are at an all-time high, little man. Good thing we already have the 529 going.”
Luke picked up his stuffed elephant and stuck it in his mouth, slobbering copiously, watching Henry intently. His curly dark hair was Henry’s. His eyes were Piper’s.
Henry reached out with a handy burp cloth to wipe at Luke’s mouth.
Henry didn’t know how to be a father. He had no role model. Wouldn’t have thought there was any such thing as a “father’s instinct” but Piper said he was a natural. And truly he just loved being with his child. He had the feeling that maybe 90 percent of it was just happily being there, doing your best. He doesn’t need anything but us, Piper had promised. All we have to do is keep him safe, love him, and do our best to make him a good human being, one that makes the world better, not worse.
The item was on the third page: Tech Entrepreneur Murdered in his South Beach Penthouse.
He might have glanced over it if not for the smiling face staring back at him, one that looked eerily familiar. He read on to himself about how the young man, just a year younger than Henry, was attacked so violently in his home that he was nearly decapitated. Surveillance footage was still being reviewed. Police had no suspects at the writing of the article.
He stared. The guy, with his dark hair and big eyes, slim build—they could be brothers. Henry’s heart started to thump.
“You let me sleep.” Piper padded in, bleary-eyed, and got down on the floor in front of the baby.
“You needed it,” Henry said, looking up at her. He folded the paper up.
“My little wild man,” she said to the baby. Luke smiled maniacally, kicked his legs. Wow, did babies ever love their mommas. Luke and Piper were inseparable. “You were partying all night.”
Luke grinned wildly, issued a shriek of joy, like he was the funniest guy in the world.
“Won’t you be late?” she said, sitting up and leaning in to Henry for a kiss.
“I’m going to head out now. I have to go to the data center to do updates anyway, not the office so I have some flexibility. Thought I’d let you catch up on a little sleep.”
He took the paper and she didn’t notice. Poor Piper wasn’t operating on all cylinders, totally in love, sleep deprived, and on full-time with Luke all day. He often came home to find her as he left her—hair up, wearing the same thing, a little dazed. He found it cute, her devotion, how she was all in with this new role. He’d relieve her in the evening so that she could work out, or take a shower, or just go for a walk. They’d eat as a family, put the baby down early, have a little couple time. There was an ease and a peace to their life that he cherished.
“I think we’ll go to Mom’s today,” she said. “She’s dying to show off Luke to her friends.”
“Good idea,” he said. “I’ll probably be late.”
“So maybe Luke and I will spend the night there?”
He didn’t love that but yeah, that was good. It would give him a little time to dig into what he’d just found. Not that he should.
“Sure.”
“You can come, too,” she said.
“That’s okay. I’ll use the time to catch up on some stuff.”
“Don’t work too hard, loser.”
She kissed him long and deep. Even disheveled, a little pale, fatigued, she was still the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. Their life was good. He had a solid, high-paying job; they had Piper’s parents close so there was help with Luke. Piper missed teaching, but she wasn’t ready to leave the baby. Their house was comfortable and stylish. Maybe other people wanted more. But he just wanted this. It was enough.
“You okay?” she asked with a cock of her head.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m good.”
“So go bring home the bacon.”
He waited until he’d left their cul-de-sac before calling a number he hadn’t used in a while. All these years the number was still the same.
The old cop, retired now and not living too far from Henry, answered on the first ring.
“West.”
“Henry Parker.”
“Henry, wow. Great to hear from you.”
“How’s retirement treating you?”
“Eh, you know. I hung up a shingle. I’m not the golfing, cruise to the Bahamas, wine on the beach at sunset type turns out. Much to my wife’s dismay.”
Henry smiled. That tracked.
“I was wondering—have time for a beer and a burger?”
“Sure. When?”
“Tonight.”
There was silence, the shuffling of papers.
“What’s going on?”
“You know, I’m not sure.”
They set a time and place, and Henry headed to work, thinking about the murder in Miami, his half sister Cat with whom he had developed a complicated relationship, and the dark worries he’d pushed away until he couldn’t.
The Palm Pavilion was a beachfront restaurant famous for its grouper sandwich and live music at sunset. The pretty blue and white building sat on the end of a boardwalk looking out languidly at the Gulf of Mexico and the sugar white sands of Clearwater Beach. It was the perfect sunset spot if you could take the late afternoon heat. Diners were cooled by umbrellas and lightly misting fans in the hotter months. Tonight was on the temperate side, the blanket of humidity that would fall in a few weeks still blissfully absent.
Henry waited at a table in the far corner of the deck, taking in the salt air, the laughing gulls. It was a quiet Tuesday night, and the singer-slash-guitar player was favoring Neil Young and David Bowie covers instead of the usual Jimmy Buffett. Henry turned his sweating margarita glass, watching the door. He’d spent the day researching the things he had on his mind, and he was glad for the warm wash of the tequila.
Henry and Cat shared eighteen half siblings that he knew of. Seven of them were dead. Eight if you counted the Miami tech entrepreneur, though he couldn’t be sure about that yet.
He’d spent the day playing amateur detective, cross-referencing between the Origins site and the Donor Sibling Registry. He hadn’t been on either in ages, having given up the quest for finding more family connections.
Henry had accomplished nearly nothing at work as he dug into each of their lives by searching the internet, visiting social media pages, tracking their friends, reading obituaries. He’d gone down the rabbit hole, as Gemma liked to call it. His head was full of images of the people who were related to him by a stranger’s sperm. Their lives, their loves, their wants and dreams.
So many different types of people, all from the same man. A man who was still a mystery to Henry.
After a while, the detective walked through the door, looking tanned and svelte in a pair of khaki shorts, Hawaiian shirt, and Top-Siders, the Florida retiree uniform. His hair was snow-white now and he sported a wide mustache, neatly trimmed.
West spotted Henry and headed his way. When he took his seat, he ordered a beer from the blonde, hard-body, pink lip glossed waitress and looked out at the fading sunset. She brought back the bottle quickly, a tasty local ale from 3 Daughters Brewing.
“It’s always a sight, isn’t it?” said West. “Every sunset a different color show, a different mood, kind of a reflection of whatever you have going on any given day.”
Henry looked out at the pink sky, the dark blue water, the orange orb moving inexorably toward the horizon line. He didn’t have a ton of time for sunsets, in fact, he found the tourist fascination with the whole thing a little tiresome. Yeah, people, the sun sets. Every. Night.
“I didn’t have you pegged as a poet.”
A smile, a long draft of his beer. “Old age turns us all into poets. Or assholes. One or the other.”
Henry laughed at that. His father-in-law was getting old, too. He was no poet.
Henry took the morning’s newspaper article from his pocket and shifted it over to West, who picked it up, slipped a pair of readers from his shirt pocket and read.
“What’s this now?”
“So, a couple years ago I connected with my aunt Gemma, Alice’s sister. Remember?”
“Of course, nice lady. We’re in touch.”
“Yeah,” he said. “She helped me figure some things out. She’s into genealogy, our family’s history. She got me the Origins test.”
“I remember. As I recall it didn’t get you any closer to your father.”
“That’s right. But through a Facebook page, and the Donor Sibling Registry, I connected with some of my half siblings, other kids fathered by the same anonymous donor.”
He told the detective about Cat, about their conversation, how they kept in touch via email, the occasional call. He told West about the woman Cat had found up in the Bronx, Marta Bennet, how she’d died.
Then, he shifted a file out of the backpack he had at his feet. The manila folder contained articles about the donor siblings who had died. Eight, including the Miami entrepreneur, if he was indeed a donor sibling. He hadn’t turned up on Henry’s Origins page, and he wasn’t hooked up with the Donor Sibling Registry—which he only would if he’d taken a test, or been digging into his own ancestry. But the resemblance he bore to Henry—and to Cat—was striking.
West flipped through the articles, twisted at his mustache.
“What are you thinking?” asked West.
Henry shook his head, looked out at the beach. The bell rang and people cheered. The sun had dipped below the horizon. Supposedly when conditions were right, a green flash of light was sometimes visible right after the sun went down. Two optical phenomena combined—a mirage and the dispersion of sunlight. Henry had never seen it.
“It’s odd, right?” asked Henry. “All these people dead—suicide, murder, accident.”
“Statistically, it’s troubling, yes.”
The waitress came and took their order—Famous Palm Burgers and Island Fries for them both. If Piper had been there, he’d have ordered the grouper sandwich; she’d have gotten The Sunset Salad with salmon.
“And this guy,” he picked up the article from that morning’s paper. “He’s one of your half siblings?”
“I’m not sure. I hadn’t been on Origins or Donor Sibling Registry in a while. I logged back on today. I didn’t see him.”
The detective cocked his head at Henry. “Why did you stop logging on?”
“I went through the motions, met up with a couple of people. It was just—weird. I realized that it’s not just about blood, it’s about chemistry, too. And I wasn’t feeling it with anyone.”
Henry took a swig of his beer. He hadn’t really talked about this before. But he went on,
“So I decided that I needed to be here now. I have a son, a wife. We’re building something. The past—my past—Alice. It’s dark. It hurts. I have Gemma now. She’s a part of our life. We have Piper’s family. Not perfect, of course. But it’s enough.”
West considered him with a slow nod, looked down at the file.
“But here we are.”
Henry drained his beer as West flipped through the pages in the folder. Yes, here they were. He wanted to forget everything to do with his past, and yet—he dreamed about Cat, found himself Facebook stalking their half brother Dave in San Francisco, Todd in Georgia, Mira in Portland. Now this. Good old Dad got around—or at least his sperm did.
“Did you reach out to the half sister you’re in touch with. Cat?”
Henry shook his head. That was the other thing. His calls with her were getting weirder and weirder. Last time they talked, she hinted that she was getting closer to understanding who our father is. He pretended he had to go, promised to call back. But he never did. The truth was that she was a little scary. Intense. Sometimes angry, edgy. I guess it’s easy to walk away from this when you have a family.
“No,” he said. She was the natural person to ask about the tech entrepreneur. Something stopped him from calling her. “She’s... I don’t know. She’s pretty obsessed with this stuff. Maybe she’s unstable.”
This earned a squint from West. “Unstable how?”
He told the older man about how she called at all hours, sometimes rambling, sometimes morose, sometimes elated when she’d made a new connection.
“I don’t want to get her activated. She has some wild theories.”
“Such as?”
“She thinks there’s some kind of curse. Or, not really a curse but like something bad coded into our DNA.”
“Okay. Like what?” West looked down at the file, picked up the top article. Drew, who committed suicide. “Like depression?”
West handed him the paper. Drew didn’t bear much resemblance to Henry or Cat. He was slim, blond with dark eyes. Even though he was smiling in the school photo, he looked sad and ghostly.
“Yeah,” said Henry. “Like something that makes you vulnerable. Like you’re prone to depression, so you drink too much. Because you drink too much, you get into a fatal car accident.”
West shrugged. “There are lots of things we don’t understand about genetics. But I have to believe that our choices mean more than our biology.”
Henry needed to believe that, too. Especially now that he was a father.
“I can make some calls if you want,” West said finally. “Talk to the investigating officers, see what they have to say.”
Henry felt a weight on his shoulders shift. Maybe that’s what he wanted, to share this with someone. He didn’t have the resources or the time to connect the dots between his dead half siblings.
But he couldn’t quite let go of it either.
“That would be great,” he said. “You don’t think—”
“What?”
“That she’s right. That there’s some inherited darkness.”
West leaned back, looked out at the beach, took a swallow of his beer.
“I think we don’t control what we get from our parents, and we don’t always choose what happens to us. But look at you, Henry. You could have gone a different way—but here you are, successful, married, with a baby, a nice home.”
It was Piper who saved him. He knew that. She loved him and that made him want to be a better person, the kind she deserved. He said as much.
“You chose the light. We choose, Henry. That’s what I believe. Leave this with me. I’ll do some digging and you forget about it, okay? If I think there’s something bigger here, I’ll come back to you.”
Henry considered it, then lifted his nearly empty glass, clicked it to West’s bottle. “Deal.”
Somehow over the years they had become friends.
A gull called, and a coast guard helicopter passed low overhead making everything rumble.
“It’s funny you called. I was about to reach out to Gemma.”
“Oh?”
“There’s this group. People who are using modern DNA testing to find answers to long-cold cases. They are taking crime scene DNA samples and submitting them to companies like Origins, looking for connections that lead them to identifying the sample even if there’s nothing in criminal databases. They’re not-for-profit, volunteers and retired law enforcement folks trying to find answers to old cases. They’re interested in Alice’s murder.”
Henry took this in as the waitress brought their food on colorful plastic plates. A group at the bar was watching a game; they issued a collective moan at a missed play. The singer was onto “The Man Who Sold the World,” sounding more like Kurt Cobain than Bowie, gravelly and sad.
“Gemma will be all over that,” said Henry. “She’s never given up on justice for Alice. But the evidence points to Tom Watson, right. And he’s dead.”
He didn’t mean it to sound flat, uncaring. Piper was concerned about the distance he seemed to have from Alice, what happened to her, suspected that he hadn’t dealt with it and had pushed for therapy prior to Luke’s birth. These days she could only think about the baby, so Henry was off the hook for the moment.
“Closure is always healing,” said West. “To have answers or something close.”
Henry had spent a lot of time thinking about Alice, discussing her case with Piper. Occam’s razor theory stated that in explaining a thing, no more assumptions should be made than are necessary. In other words, the simplest answer was probably the most likely. Alice stole money from her deceased employer. Tom came after it. He killed Alice, took the money, dumped her body. That was the story Henry told himself. It was a dark one; but at least it was an answer that made some kind of sense. Alice had always worried that someone was coming after them. That was probably why. She was guilty of theft, maybe worse.
“If the DNA sample we have stored from the crime scene brings up relatives of Tom Watson’s, we’ll be more certain of our theory,” West went on.
“You never gave up on her,” said Henry. “Thank you for that.”
“It’s one of those things, you know,” he said. “Sometimes you can’t let go. Something keeps you coming back.”
Henry could relate.
They ate a while in silence, the burger juicy and good, the fries hot and crispy. Henry shared pictures of Luke. West had a million shots of his many grandkids.
“This is what matters,” said West. “What we give to these little people. They’re the present and the future.”
“More poetry,” said Henry with a smile.
“Just the truth, son,” he said. “Just the truth.”