Find You First

by Linwood Barclay

  “Okay,” she said. “Then what?”

  “Never mind,” Miles said. “Just get my brother’s DNA tested.”

  Four

  Providence, RI

  Chloe Swanson found her mother, Gillian, hunting for something in her Camry. She had the driver’s door, and the driver’s-side back door, open, and was on her knees, on the driveway, looking under the front seat.

  “Mom?” Chloe said.

  “It’s got to be here somewhere,” Gillian said. She pulled up the rear floor mat, ran her hand over the carpeting.

  “What are you looking for?” her daughter asked.

  “My goddamn Visa card. I used it to get out of that parking garage? You swipe it going in, then coming out, and—” She had her hand so far up beneath the driver’s seat that Chloe could see her fingers wiggling out from under the front.

  “And what?”

  “So I take the card out, and the gate goes up to let me out, and I want to take a second to put the card back in my wallet, but I’ve got some asshole behind me honking his horn for me to get going, so when I drive out I put the card on the passenger seat, and you know how you have to drive up the ramp out of that garage, like a winding staircase or a corkscrew or something, and when I get home the card’s not on the seat. It slipped. Why can’t they have parking attendants like they used to? Someone in an actual booth?”

  Chloe went around to the car and opened the front passenger door. “I’ll look on this side.”

  While they were both digging their fingers into crevices and under floor mats, unable to look directly at each other, Chloe said, “I’m going to be gone for a couple days.”

  “What?”

  “Taking a drive up to Massachusetts. Around Springfield somewhere.”

  Gillian was moving the driver’s seat forward and digging into the narrow space between it and the center console. “Well, I’ve found a straw and two quarters. You said a couple days?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You cleared it at work?”

  “My weekend’s Tuesday, Wednesday. So I’m going to drive up Tuesday morning, first thing.”

  “So what’s in Springfield?”

  “I’m going up there to meet someone.”

  Gillian raised her head, peered at Chloe between the two front seats. “To meet someone? Like, for the first time? Or someone you’ve met before?”

  “Someone I’ve never met before. Someone I met online.”

  Now Gillian extracted herself from the car and stood next to it, peering across the roof as Chloe did the same. She had something in her hand. A credit card.

  “I found it,” Chloe said. “It must have slid off the seat and was tucked down by the door.”

  She slid it across the roof, her mom slapping her hand on it before it slid down the slope of the rear window. If Chloe was expecting to be thanked, it did not happen.

  “Someone you met on the internet?” Chloe’s mother said. “Jesus, do you need your head read? The internet? Home of perverts, sickos, and predators?”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “Was it some sort of dating site? You don’t have enough guys hitting on you in the diner?”

  “Yeah, they’re a prime bunch, Mom. Thanks for thinking that’s the gene pool I need to choose from.”

  “So it was a dating site? You know people just lie about themselves online. You think you’re going to meet George Clooney and it turns out to be Danny DeVito.”

  “It’s not a dating site.” Chloe bit her lip, looked away briefly. When she turned her eyes back on her mother, she said, “You have to promise not to be mad.”

  “Mad about what?”

  “Your face. It looks like it’s getting ready to be mad.”

  Gillian struggled to compose herself. She placed her hands flat on the roof, then raised all her fingers for a second, a signal to proceed.

  “I sent away,” Chloe said slowly, reaching into her pocket for her phone, “for one of those tests.”

  Gillian’s face paled. “What … test?”

  “I bet you can guess.” She raised the phone, opened the camera, and set it to record video. “Jesus Christ, Chloe, you know—”

  “You promised.”

  Gillian struggled to calm herself. “You know how I feel about this. And for God’s sake stop recording this!”

  “I’m documenting,” Chloe said.

  “Stop it!”

  Chloe lowered the phone and picked up where she’d left off. “I have a right—”

  “What right? Show me where it’s written that—”

  Chloe exploded. “I have a right to know who I am!”

  Her mother took her hands off the roof and took a step back, as though blown by a gust of wind. When she spoke, her voice was little more than a whisper.

  “When did you—”

  “I had the test mailed to the nursing home, to Grandpa. I knew if it showed up here you’d freak out. Or if it arrived when I wasn’t here you’d just throw it out and never even tell me.”

  Gillian said nothing to that. She knew it was true.

  “I spit into this little tube and mailed it off. First they emailed and told me my heritage. Like, 30 percent Scottish, 20 percent something else. That kind of shit, which I didn’t care about all that much. And you could have them test you for like illnesses and stuff, but I figured at my age, who cares, right? But it also said, if there were others who’d taken the test who had a, like, partial DNA match, and they were willing to get in touch, they’d do that, you know?”

  Gillian was barely able to mouth the words. “You’ve found out who your father is. Chloe, not even I know that.”

  “No,” she said emphatically. “I didn’t find that out. I still have no fucking idea. So if that’s what you were worried about, you can rest easy.”

  Gillian’s look bordered on disappointment.

  “Holy shit,” Chloe said. “Part of you actually wanted to know.”

  “I—I won’t lie. I’ve wondered. But I’ve told you, and I’m telling you now, some things are not worth knowing. Some guy, going into a little room with a dirty magazine, putting a sample in a cup—that’s not a father. That’s not a parent. What—what if at some point in your life you had a blood transfusion? Like, if you were in an accident? And that blood saved you? Would you be hunting all over the world trying to find out whose blood it was?”

  “This is different and you know it,” Chloe said. “A blood donation hardly compares to a sperm donation.”

  “So, if it’s not your father that you’ve found …”

  “It’s like, a brother,” she said quietly. “A half brother. Someone conceived from the same sperm.”

  Gillian put her hand to her mouth.

  “Chloe,” she said.

  “He gave his contact info to WhatsMyStory and I got in touch. I emailed him first, and then we talked on the phone.” Chloe began to tear up. “There was something, in his voice … I don’t know how to describe it, but he sounded like me. I mean, not like me, but the way he pauses, thinks about what he’s going to say, it reminded me … of me.”

  Gillian looked stricken.

  “So I’m going to drive up and see him. I’m going to drive up to fucking Massachusetts and meet my brother. I don’t know how it’s going to go. Maybe it’ll be a disaster.”

  “Don’t,” Gillian whispered. “We’re good. You and I. We’re good. We don’t need other people. We don’t need more family. You don’t know anything about him. Just because he’s somehow related—”

  “He’s not somehow related, Mom. He’s a brother.” Chloe looked at her mom with sympathy. “I get why you’re afraid. It’s new. It’s scary. I’m scared. But I just … I just have to do this.”

  Gillian dug into her pocket for a tissue, dabbed the corner of her eye.

  “What’s his name?” she asked.

  “Todd,” Chloe said. “Todd Cox.”

  Five

  New Haven, CT

  As an adult, Miles had
always lived alone. Not only had he never married, he’d never had a live-in girlfriend. Sure, plenty of women had slept over through the years, but rarely more than two nights in a row. Miles didn’t encourage that kind of thing. Never give a woman the chance to get comfortable under this roof. He valued his privacy. He liked things just so. Living a solitary existence, at least on the home front, was not a problem.

  But since the diagnosis, something in him had changed. Not physically, but emotionally.

  He was lonely.

  Miles found himself having conversations, out loud, with himself, if only to hear someone’s voice. Not when the housekeeper was there, of course. No sense having her think he was losing his marbles.

  Unless he was.

  No, no, he wasn’t. Miles was sure of that. Whatever cognitive issues awaited him, they were not present yet. Maybe, he thought, it’d be better if they were. Perhaps he’d be less tormented than he was now.

  “What are you going to do about them?” he said aloud, standing in the kitchen, making himself another vodka and soda water. “What should you do about them?”

  He knocked back the drink. “It’s not my responsibility. It’s not my fault. There was no way I could have known. It’s fucking life, right? It’s all a throw of the dice.”

  What was different tonight was that this conversation with himself was escalating into an argument.

  “What do you mean you don’t have any fucking responsibility? If you didn’t know, that’d be one thing, but you do know. You did the right thing where your brother is concerned, testing his DNA, but you don’t give a fuck about the rest?”

  And then he threw his tumbler hard enough at the stainless steel door of his Sub-Zero fridge to put a dent into it. The glass shattered across the floor.

  Miles turned his back on the mess and headed for his bedroom, not bothering to turn off lights along the way, putting his hand on the hallway walls every few steps to maintain his balance. He stripped down to his boxers and collapsed onto the bed, atop the covers, rolling onto his back and staring, briefly, at the slowly rotating ceiling fan before he fell asleep.

  He’d been asleep for only a few minutes when he sensed someone in the room. Miles opened his eyes and felt his heart do a somersault. There was more than someone in the room.

  There was a crowd.

  Perhaps as many as twenty or thirty people. All standing around the bed, arms at their sides, staring down at him, rigid as statues. About a fifty-fifty split between men and women, and most of them appeared to be in their twenties. The faces were indistinct, as if Miles were viewing them through frosted glass.

  “Who the fuck are you?” Miles asked.

  One of them, a young woman, said, “You don’t know?”

  One of the men said, “Typical.”

  “If you really do care, do something,” another woman said. “If you don’t, then stop thinking about us.”

  Together, they raised their arms to the ceiling and waved them about frantically, as though they were those inflatable people one found out front of used car dealers. But then their waving arms morphed into flames, and their bodies began to burn.

  A chorus of screams erupted from their blurred mouths.

  Miles woke up.

  “Jesus,” he said.

  Miles was not the type of person to read much into nightmares. He did not make major life decisions based on the advice of ghostly figures from his subconscious. But those strange people in his dream had at least accomplished one thing. They’d given him a pounding headache. Of course, he could also be hungover.

  He pulled back the covers, got out of bed, and padded on bare feet into the kitchen. He ran some water into a glass, rummaged about in one of the cabinets for the container of Tylenol, and when he turned back around, there they were.

  Miles’s mother and father. Perched on stools on the other side of the kitchen island, watching him.

  He could tell it was them, even though large chunks of flesh were hanging from their faces. What skin hadn’t peeled away was peppered with granules of windshield glass. Their clothes were drenched in blood.

  Miles’s father was holding an empty vodka bottle in his hand, holding it up to the light to see whether there might still be a drop or two in it. “Hello, son,” he said.

  Miles’s mother looked at him and smiled. “If we had known,” she said, “we’d have told you.”

  Miles began to scream. And then he woke up, this time for real.

  The next morning, Miles asked Dorian to take a walk with him. Once outside the building, she said, “I don’t have the DNA test back yet.”

  “That’s not what I want to talk to you about.”

  “Okay.”

  “You know I don’t have that many people I can talk to,” he said. “Gilbert, yeah, he’s my brother, but there are issues there.”

  Again, Dorian said, “Okay.”

  “I want to know whether he’s got the disease because there’s a high probability. Fifty percent chance that it gets passed down. So if one of our parents had it, then there’s just as much chance he’s got it as I do.”

  “Yeah, I Googled it.”

  They’d reached a small park that bordered a creek. Miles steered them onto the grass and headed for a bench.

  “My brother’s not the only one I’ve been thinking about,” he said.

  They reached the bench and sat. Dorian studied her boss and nodded slowly. Miles could almost see the light bulb come on over her head.

  “You have a kid,” she said. “I mean, you’ve never mentioned it, but … did you just find out? Some girlfriend from years ago?”

  “Not like that,” Miles said. “And it’s not just one kid.”

  “You have a couple of kids,” Dorian said, unable to hold back a wry grin.

  “The thing is,” Miles said, “I have no idea how many there might be.”

  Dorian blinked. “Say again?”

  Miles laid it all out for her. That nearly twenty-four years ago, desperate for cash, he went to a fertility clinic.

  “It wasn’t like they paid a fortune for donations. A few hundred. But back then, when I was broke, that was a lot of money. And you had to meet all sorts of criteria. Couldn’t smoke, good lifestyle choices, college education. You couldn’t just walk in off the street, go into a cubicle and—”

  “I get the picture,” Dorian said. “So there could be a hundred little Mileses or Millies out there today?”

  Miles said he’d been told by the clinic that they wouldn’t use his sperm more than, say, a dozen times. But had they kept their word? Might there be more? And even if they’d kept that promise, someone might have had twins, or even triplets.

  Which was why Miles had no idea how many biological children of his might be out there.

  Miles told her about how that morning he’d been sitting at a red light, watching the pedestrians who crossed past the front of his car. A guy in his twenties wearing a Boston College sweatshirt, a backpack slung over his shoulder. What if he’s my son? A young woman jogged past, buds in her ears, listening to music while she did her run. What about her?

  It was not the kind of thing he’d thought much about before. It had barely crossed his mind over the last two decades that there could be people out there with half his genetic makeup.

  “But now I can’t stop thinking about them. And what, if anything, I owe them.”

  What if he were one of his biological children? Would he want to know there was a 50 percent chance that he might be carrying the gene that might be the end of him?

  Had he known what the future held for him, he’d never have gone to that fertility clinic. He’d have found another way to get the money for that new computer he’d needed.

  But hey, Miles said, everybody eventually gets something, right? Something’s got to kill you, sooner or later. It wasn’t his fault, was it? There was no way he could have known. Was there even a test at the time that could have told him he had Huntington’s?

  “Right,�
� Dorian said. “There’s no way you could know. There’s no way anyone could know. I mean, maybe now, maybe today, they could test someone who goes to a clinic like that. I don’t know. But not back then.”

  If he’d known, at the age of twenty, what awaited him, would he have lived his life differently? Would he have spent those two years backpacking around Europe, or would he have stayed home and gotten serious about his career sooner? For sure, he wouldn’t have spent much of his twenty-first year partying. Maybe, if he’d known the future, he’d have accelerated his efforts to reach the upper echelons of the tech world. Maybe he’d have made his first million from designing apps ten or twelve years ago instead of five.

  Or maybe he’d have figured, what’s the point? Why not spend the rest of his life traveling, drinking, and whoring?

  “The question is,” Dorian said, “if you could have known, would you have wanted to know?”

  “That’s the question,” Miles said.

  “Or maybe the question is, would you have at least wanted to be able to make that choice?” she asked.

  Miles had no immediate answer.

  “You know what app we should have invented?” he said finally. “One where I can go back in time and never go to that goddamn clinic.”

  “Look,” Dorian said, putting her hand on his, “you can’t change the past. You have to deal with the here and now. Get this other shit out of your system. Jumping out of planes, drinking too much. Then figure out what you want to do. Figure out what you’re capable of doing. The resources that you have.”

  “What I have,” Miles said, “is money.”

  Dorian said, “I’m … aware.”

  “I’ll never be able to spend it all,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Dorian said, smiling. “We should all have such problems.”

  He had a will. He wasn’t an idiot. His legal advisers insisted that someone with a successful tech company and a sizable personal portfolio had to plan for the unexpected. Even before his diagnosis he was willing to concede that one day he might step in front of a bus while looking at his phone. He’d chosen a few charities and foundations to leave his money to. Now, he’d probably want to rethink that, maybe leave a big chunk of his estate to Huntington’s research.