Everyone has secrets, my mother used to say. Not a great thing to tell a daughter you want to grow up into a healthy person who can have healthy relationships with other healthy people. But Mom certainly had her reasons.
Four days after my father passed away, when I was eighteen, a stranger knocked on our door. My mother looked out the window and said, "Look, Stephanie! It's your father."
I'd heard the expression "crazy with grief," but Mom was perfectly sane. Of course, she was heartbroken about my dad. They'd loved each other very much. At least as far as I knew.
Maybe neither of us really believed that Dad was gone. He'd traveled a lot, so for a while after his heart attack on the golf course near our home in a pleasant suburb of Cincinnati, it seemed as if he might still be on a business trip. He'd been a pharmaceutical company exec who attended conferences and meetings all over the country.
Anyway, what my mother really meant was, "Look. It's your father when he was twenty-four. The year we got married."
I looked out the window.
The young man on our doorstep was the groom in my parents' wedding photo.
I'd never seen him before, yet I felt that I'd been looking at him every day of my life. Actually, I had. I'd lived with him in the framed photograph on the dusty upright piano.
The only difference was that the stranger was wearing jeans and a denim jacket instead of a white tuxedo, and his dark hair was stylishly cut instead of slicked back, Elvis-style, like my dad in the wedding photo.
My mother said, "Ask him in." He was so good looking I couldn't stop staring. My dad had been handsome before the traveling and excessive drinking and airport food caught up with him.
Mom told the young man, "Just stand there. Don't say a word." She grabbed her wedding photo off the piano and handed it to him. He stared at the photo. He seemed shocked. Then he laughed out loud. We all laughed.
He said, "I guess we can skip the DNA test."
His name was Chris. He lived in Madison, Wisconsin. My dad was his father. They used to see each other every six months; my dad rerouted his trips so he could come through Wisconsin and visit his other family: Chris's mom and Chris.
Chris had seen my dad's obituary in the online version of our local paper. It had shown up in his Google Alert, which made me think that he'd wanted (poor guy!) to keep tabs on my dad. His dad. His mother had died of heart failure, a year before. Of course, Chris wasn't mentioned in Dad's obituary, but we were. And we were listed—that is, my dad was listed—in the phone book.
The fact that this hot guy was my half brother took a while to sink in. I still kept expecting him to say that he was a distant cousin who happened to resemble my dad.
There was another weird detail I should add: At that point, I looked almost exactly like my mother when she was around my age. (I still resemble her, though less than I used to.) I looked like her in the wedding photo, and my newfound brother Chris looked like my—our—dad. And there we were, the happy bridal couple, straight off the top of the wedding cake, cloned and reanimated twenty years later. What can I say? It was hot.
I was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, but I was conscious of holding my body just like Mom in her wedding gown, my elbows tight against my sides and my hands curled at my chest, like chipmunk paws. When I made myself lower my arms and stand like a normal person, I saw Chris glance at my breasts.
Had my mother suspected the truth? Was that why she talked about everyone having secrets? I could never make myself ask, even—especially—after Chris entered our lives.
