Fathers, Brothers, and Sons

It was a letter that upended my world. Not one of the "Dear John" variety; that would have been less painful. Nor was it a "We Regret To Inform," but the sense of loss, while not as acute, was even more all-encompassing.

No, it wasn't a letter of the paper-and-ink kind at all. Instead, it was one of the many small sigils that make up those and many other missives, the second of the twenty-six characters that comprise the English alphabet.

The letter that irrevocably changed my life was a simple "B" where it did not belong: in a small field on a medical chart, the one that denoted the blood type of my fifteen year old son, Travis. His mother's blood type was "O." Mine is "A." High school biology was a long time ago, but I recalled enough to quietly ask the nurse in the emergency room whether I had remembered correctly. The pained look on her face told me that I had even before her words confirmed it.

Something so small, and yet it made me question everything.

What had brought Travis to the emergency room was a typical childhood accident: a skateboard trick gone wrong. Even as they were putting the cast on his arm, he was laughing and talking about how "epic" it would have been if he had landed the stunt. I just chuckled and advised him to be more careful, tousling his hair. I was proud of his bravery and athleticism, even if I didn't always understand its impetus.

That was our relationship in a nutshell. I loved him, and he loved me, I knew. But we were so different from each other. Not physically; until that errant character I barely glimpsed on the nurse's screen, I would never have doubted he was my biological son. He was tall like me, filling out into a stocky young man like I'd been. I had thought his dark brown eyes and hair were inherited from me, as well. But they weren't mine; they were my doppelgänger's. They were the features of the cuckoo that had left its egg in my nest.

I always thought that our differences, psychological and emotional, were due to his mother's influence. Allison had been impulsive-- even impetuous-- when we were younger. Our meeting in college had gone almost exactly against the planned events of the day. Her older brother, Jake, had introduced her to my older brother, Evan. They were best friends, both of them on the football team of our small college. Both juniors. Both star players with a chance at the big time after graduation.

Allison was a beautiful, delicate-featured, blonde and blue-eyed freshman that Jake was sure would be perfectly matched with Evan. She threw a monkeywrench into her brother's plans when she instead took to me, the studious and introverted younger brother.

Jake took it goodnaturedly, only wanting his sister's happiness. Evan did not; he had stolen more than one girl from me, and it was intolerable that Luke, his nerdy kid brother, would return the favor. Never mind that I hadn't tried to steal her; she had come to me on her own. It still rankled him, and my amusement at his irritation didn't help, either.

Why did she pick me? "Because you're you." It was as simple as that. She loved me for who I was, a sweet-natured, soft-spoken young man. I could be emotional, especially when surprised; my temper when my brother had stolen a girl from me the first time led to us getting into one of the few serious physical altercations we'd ever had. Evan's athleticism might have won the day, but my rage let me get my licks in, and he was careful not to gloat the next time. His ego combined with the fact that he was my parents' favorite, and therefore almost immune to consequences from them, meant there was a next time. Several next times, in fact.

Alli and I were well-suited to each other in so many ways. She was adventurous and outgoing, even if she often thought before she acted. I was a bit stodgy at times, making sure she kept her feet on the ground. I tried so many things in my college years that I never would have if it hadn't been for her.

I wasn't her first, but she was mine. Even if I hadn't been smitten before that, I certainly would have been afterwards. But that affection was mutual; as we laid together afterwards, Alli held me close and told me over and over again how much she loved me, and how she wanted us to never part.

I had wanted that too, then.

"Dad?"

I was shaken from my reverie by Travis's voice. "Sorry, buddy. What did you say?"

"Um... How mad was Mom?"

Still dazed by the revelation, it took a moment to understand what he was asking. "Oh, um, she was fine, Trav. She was mad at first, but when I told her what happened, that you were wearing your helmet and pads, and it was just bad luck, she calmed down. She's just glad you're okay."

Thank God I had talked to her before I saw that "B." I hadn't been the young man with the quick temper in quite some time, but I could feel his influence on me. I wasn't angry at Travis; what his mother had done wasn't his fault. But I was furious with her, and I don't know that I'd have been able to hide it at all if I could hear her voice.

Trying to keep up the charade, I changed the subject. "What do you feel like having for dinner tonight?"

He wasn't fooled, I don't think. Trav was so insightful. So empathetic, like his mother. Even with a broken arm, he was more concerned about me than himself. But he played along with a half-smile and said, "How about Thai?"

Travis was my only son; he was bookended in age by his older sister, Julie, at seventeen, and his younger, Megan, at eleven. As we sat at the dinner table that night, I looked between my three children and... Three? No, two, at most. I had raised him as my son, but did that make him my son? He was the son of my wife, but not mine. That made him my stepson, didn't it? He had a father, but I had no son.

Did I have daughters? Did I have any children at all?

They looked like me just as much as Travis did. And where Travis was now so much more like his mother, they had always been similar to me. I was the primary caregiver in a lot of ways, and therefore the biggest and most constant direct influence on all three kids. Alli had traveled for her work since the kids were young, first in sales and then as a mediator, and my job hours as a contract programmer were flexible. It just made sense for me to handle the bulk of the child rearing.

The fact that the girls were so much like me didn't come as a surprise. All the kids hand bonded with me when they were younger. We were inseparable. Megan, especially, was still that way, not yet pulling away as the tween years began. She was very much Daddy's girl. But even Julie never split from me the way that Travis did.

I didn't think much of it before, because that's what teenage boys do, right? They try to find the men they want to be by pushing against and away from their dads. But Travis hadn't even really done that. There was no rebellion; we just weren't close, and he was so different.

Travis had never been as interested in the things that I liked as the girls were. Videogames and programming and puzzles were a passion for the three of us, but they had never been more than a pastime to him, and they were barely even that now. That distance had now been cast into a new light, one that illuminated nothing but more questions.

Everything. Everything upended.

Alli was away for a week. I wondered if I would still be sane when she returned. I wondered how much more madness was still to come.

I laid in bed that night softly crying so the kids wouldn't hear. It was all too much. So many questions with only one certain answer: at some point in the past, my wife had fucked another man and let me raise his child. Who? Why? How could she hurt me like that? Was it still happening? Was I a father at all, or just a caretaker for another man's children? Did she love me? Had she ever loved me, or was it all some kind of cruel ruse?

I barely slept, and when I did, indistinct nightmare images haunted me. Taunted me, with my wife's infidelity and my foolishness. Their specifics were forgotten in the morning, but not the dread that I felt.

The kids were sent on their way to school, and I sat at my kitchen table, trying to think. It was too big. Too many different possibilities, all of them clashing together in my mind and drowning out any kind of logic I could apply with pure noise. Finally, a moment of clarity came as I remembered my training.

When a programmer can't figure out a problem and we have no one else to talk to, we're supposed to still discuss it out loud. The technique is sometimes called "rubber duck programming" from the typical prop that many of us use, but anything can work: an action figure, a stuffed animal, or, if nothing else is available, thin air. It was the act of talking about the problem that made us slow down and collect our thoughts. Explaining it to someone else, even an inanimate object, made us go through the issue in as logical an order as we could.

So, I talked to myself.

"Stop, Luke. Stop. It's a problem. Just another problem. Debug it. Break it into steps." After taking a deep breath, I began to do what I did best.

"What do I know, and know for sure?" I sighed. "That Travis isn't my son. He looks like me, but he's not. So what does that mean?"

After mulling that over for a few moments, I continued. "He looks like me, at least superficially. Is that useful?" Not really; I looked like a bog standard European mutt with brown hair and eyes. But then a spark ignited, albeit only a small one. "Brown hair and eyes. Dominant traits. His father didn't have blonde hair, and he didn't have blue or green eyes, since those are recessive traits." High school bio to the rescue again. I was looking for someone with brown hair and brown eyes.

"What else? Allison cheated on me at least once, roughly nine months before Travis's birth. Things weren't great between us back then, so maybe that was the only time? No. No. Focus on what you know for now, not supposition."

I cast my mind back; that had been a hectic time in our lives. Allison had struggled with postpartum depression for a while after Julie was born. That plus her travel and my stress and Julie being a light sleeper and a colicky little thing meant we were not at our best during that period.

Our sex lives certainly suffered. There were months during that first year after Julie was born where nothing happened in the bedroom, and others where we just got off as fast as we could. Biological needs were barely getting met, and emotional ones weren't doing much better.

All of that got worse when her brother got ill and Alli had to split time between her work, taking care of Jake, and our home. In fact, I had been certain, until that "B," that Travis had been conceived on a blessed weekend when the stars aligned and my parents were able to take care of Julie while Alli was in town for three days straight, when we were finally able to reconnect as a husband and wife should.

"Okay, so something in the week or two before or after that weekend. What? Anything you can think of that might help explain... oh, shit."

Evan left town.

It was a couple months after Travis was conceived. My brother never made it to the NFL, only ever making a semi-pro team. Then he got injured, and even that last piece of his dream was taken from him. His dead end job and the way he'd fucked up his love life made him an even more miserable SOB than he'd been before. It only got worse when he looked at his nerdy younger brother and saw him with a happy life, a job he enjoyed, and a loving family.

A sudden memory of his last visit to our house before he left chilled me. Alli had been there alone, and I came home just as he was leaving. The way he acted, which felt strange even at the time, now seemed sinister with the knowledge of my wife's infidelity: the awkward body language; the way he lit out almost as soon as I got home, like he didn't want to be around me, even as he was supposedly dropping by to say goodbye; and most of all, the strange look on his face when he thought I wasn't looking, a mixture of pity, smugness, and disdain.

Oh God. Had he gotten what he wanted all along? Had he finally humiliated me by taking her away? And not just her, but my son, too? Is that why he doted on Travis during family get-togethers while he all but ignored my daughters? I felt sick, and the room started to spin.

"No. Stop. Think it through. Fight the anger, and don't jump to conclusions. What do you know, not suspect? What other options are there?"

Trying to get back into the programmer's mindset, I looked at other possibilities. "Alli traveled all the time for work; a random stranger maybe?" I chewed on that for a bit. "Mmm, that doesn't sound like her, but she was so impulsive when we were younger. When did that really stop?" Fifteen years was a long time, but it was such a marked change in her behavior that it almost immediately came to me. "Travis's birth. She changed then. Or... no. Not after his birth. During her pregnancy with him.

So a fling while traveling, regretted afterwards? That would explain the explosive sex; but no, it wouldn't, because we were always good together before the kids. A coincidence? Maybe. Maybe not.

"Would Alli bang a random stranger?"

Said a second time, it made even less sense. It just didn't sound like her. She wasn't a virgin, but she also hadn't been promiscuous; Jake used to laugh about how hard it was for a guy to get a date with her. So probably not a random hookup.

"A co-worker?" I could think of at least two that would fit the bill, guys that looked enough like me that I could squint at Travis and see it. Couldn't remember their names, though. "Bob...? Robert! And... and Trent." I rolled that second name around in my mouth contemplatively. "Trent. Trent. Travis? She wouldn't, would she? Use the first couple of letters of her lover's name to form his son's name as a tribute? Or a joke on her stupid clueless cuck hubby?" Another deep breath to stop myself from going on a tangent. "Stop. Stop. Who else?"

I snapped my fingers. "Jake's doctor! What was his name? Dr... Bates? I think. Yeah. Yeah, Eric Bates. That's... fuck, that would make a lot of sense." The guy was irritatingly handsome, and I knew they got pretty friendly when she was taking care of Jake; the few times I was around him I was annoyed by their closeness. I didn't like the way he looked at her, and I liked even less the way she looked at him. Before, I wouldn't have thought of it as anything more than me being unaccountably jealous; now, I suspected more.

Shaking my head, I continued. "Don't get stuck on one possibility. Friends?" There were a few possibilities there: Jimmy Wiliams and Alan Taylor immediately sprung to mind, a pair of pussyhounds that had always shown too much interest in Alli. Our social life suffered during that first rough year with Julie, and we didn't hang out often then. Or mine did, at least; was Alli actually traveling all those times she told me she was? Was she going away for work? Was she actually going out of town to meet someone else? Was she--

"STOP!"

I was still drifting from what I knew to what I could guess. I had at least a half-dozen strong possibilities and at the rate I was going, I'd get to double digits quickly. This wasn't helping.

I needed more data. And I needed... yeah. I needed someone to talk to. Talking to myself was a useful stopgap, but I needed someone to actually bounce ideas around with. However, I didn't have anyone I could, at least not until I had ruled out some possibilities. With no idea who had done this-- besides my cheating bitch of a wife-- I didn't know who I could safely talk to without alerting her.

Asking Alli would be pointless; in the years since Travis's birth, she had been anything but impulsive. As a mediator, she'd leaned into her empathy for others and had combined it with a new self-control that meant that if she had any time to prepare at all-- and possibly even if she didn't, because she'd had more than a decade to think about how to deal with all this coming out-- anything she told me would be suspect.

At the same time, if I gave her too much room to work in, and if she chose to lie to me, I was pretty sure Allison could come up with something on the spot. She was always quick-witted. I needed to narrow down the possibilities as much as I could. The fewer avenues she had to dissemble or mislead, the better my chances of getting an honest answer out of her.

There was a part of me that wondered why I even cared. She had cheated on me at least once, and without a very good reason-- say, if it had been nonconsensual and she was too ashamed to tell me-- there was no hope of reconciliation. But I needed to know, at the very least, whether any of the kids were mine. I couldn't abandon them; they were innocent in all of this. I'd pay child support unless the father-- or, for fuck's sake, fathers-- could be identified. They weren't going to starve. But I wasn't going to raise them either, pretending to be their father if I wasn't.

That gave me the first good idea I'd had during all of this, the first real path to go down. If neither of the girls was mine, all of this was a moot point. And if they were all children of the same father, this affair had gone on for so long that I had to believe it was still ongoing. That would indicate... what? An ex-boyfriend, maybe, or something even stranger. Crueler. My brother's face popped back into my mind, but I pushed it aside.

I had the direction I needed to start with, and I knew exactly who could help me. An old friend of mine from college had gone into biotech instead of business dev, and he'd made a pretty penny offering his services to various companies.

Tate also was never really friends with Alli. There was no animosity there, but they just never clicked. And arguably even more useful, Tate was about as gay as the day is long. There was no way that he'd ever have fucked Alli, not with a dance club's worth of Molly and an IV of Viagra. I couldn't see him covering for anyone, either; his own husband had cheated on him, and he had absolutely no patience for adultery. Tate was the closest thing I had to a safe bet, and a quick phone call to him confirmed he could get me tests for all of the kids with a turnaround of less than a day.

I was too frustrated to work. There are people for whom burying themselves in their jobs can help them keep their mind off of problems elsewhere, but I've never been one of them. There was space for a single problem at a time in my head, and while I could sometimes switch to another one if the needs were pressing enough, it was difficult. And this problem? There was nothing that was going to get my mind off of it.

The good news was that I was only in the planning stages for my most recent contract. I could afford a little slack time for now, planning to make up for it later with long hours. Or maybe not. Slippage in software development isn't just factored in: it's almost expected. I knew more than one guy who came through some personal crisis and made up for it on the back of caffeine, rage, and deadline anxiety. Hell, I'd been one a few times. I guessed I would be again.

The bad news was that, even with the knowledge that this was the path forward, I still could find only limited comfort in that fact. It was all so awful, and my future so murky, that I couldn't even decide what the worst case scenario would be.

If none of them were my kids, I could walk away with little regret. I'd still try to keep in touch with them, and part of me would always love them, but I'd have no real allegiance. That might sound cold, but it was true. They would all be my stepchildren then, and how many stepdads stay in their stepkids' lives after finding out their mom has cheated on them for over a decade?