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.
