“It won’t go away if you don’t talk about it,” Ralph said, looking up from examining the crema on his expresso. “You’ve disappeared from yourself. You can’t say anything. You must reignite the burning heart at who you are.”
“I don’t know where to begin,” I looked across the round slice of pale wood ringed with cup marks at my old friend, examining the creases framing his sun-flecked brown eyes.
“At the beginning, of course,” he smiled at me, teeth stained with decades of coffee, “when you found out that you might be a dad.”
“Then I shouldn’t begin when I met his mother, but when I first got a text message on Nicholson St in Fitzroy one sunny Tuesday afternoon.”
I felt my Motorola Razr vibrate in the sling pinned against my back as I cycled down Brunswick St in Melbourne, lungs filled with the fresh air from the last ten minutes in the parklands by Park St. Fresh pasta sauce wafted on the air from the Italian on the corner. Crossing Kerr St, my sling vibrated again. I pulled into an empty carpark just outside Through the Looking Glass secondhand bookstore and flipped my Razr open. The two messages were from an unknown number from New Zealand.
“I hope you don’t mind, but I was talking to Jeremy, and he said you’d just been by his place. I asked him for your number because I need to talk to you.”
I clicked through to the next message.
“Sorry, this is Scarlett-Rose. I hope I didn’t surprise you. Text me back when you can.”
Straddling my silver Giant City with one foot on a pedal, I read the messages again. I thumbed Jeremy’s number and clicked out a text message on the number pad.
“Scarlett-Rose just texted me. What’s that about? I haven’t talked to her in a decade!”
Flipping the phone closed, I let my arm fall to my side. A mixed couple walked out of the Looking Glass, I made eye contact with the white hippy girl with dirty dreadlocks above a ratty thrifted layered dress, then the gothy guy in leather stovepipes and thick mascara. She smiled, he scowled, and his hand, ringed with silver skulls, reached for hers, and they turned down Brunswick, heading downtown.
I rode past them and made it another few blocks downtown when my sling buzzed again at the corner of Gertrude St, where the bare trees were dotted with little green buds. The sun in my face, I turned to flip the Razr open in my shade. It’s Jeremy.
“Yeah, I was talking to her right after you left yesterday.”
The phone buzzed again. I clicked to the next message.
“She wants to talk to you about something to do with her boy. Not sure why though.”
“K thanks,” I sent back to Jeremy.
I clicked back through to the +64 number. Scarlett-Rose. What’s this about, I think.
“Hey, Scarlett-Rose! What a surprise! Long time no talk. It’s been ten years! What’s up.”
As a sleek new tram trundled past, its trolley pole sparked against the nexus of wires at the junction of Brunswick and Gertrude. I hopped back on my Giant and kept riding into the city, angling across the gleaming slick tracks to chase the tram in the middle of the road.
“When was that?” Ralph asked, then took a sip of his soy latte, creamy strata like shale and limestone folded across eons ringing his glass.
“I was living in Melbourne in 2013, so it would have been about September, yeah. It was spring, I was excited that I could wear shorts to work.”
“I’m not surprised that Jeremy and Scarlett-Rose were close,” Ralph said. “You remember they were flatties on Brougham St when we were at Canty Uni?”
“With the big bay window love seats? Where Jeremy got his ear nailed to the door?” I laughed. “Yeah, I remember that place.”
“Yeah, makes sense that Jeremy would have told Scarlett that you’d been by. When did you meet her anyway?”
“Dunno, but I never met her in Christchurch. The first time I remember was up in Auckland. Must have been like 2004, coz I was studying my Masters at Auckland University.”
We both looked up as the cute waitress with auburn bangs walked past with a tray of avo smash eggs benny for the table next to us and Ralph looked after her longingly.
It was my turn to do the dishes, Karine had made an awesome lasagna, and Mike had made the side salad, with strawberries and drizzled artisanal olive oil from Stony Batter on Waiheke for the four of us in our flat on the third floor at 155 Karangahape Rd. I was scrubbing the crust off the pan when Johnny walked into the kitchen.
“Hey Frank, I’ve got some easy work for you! Are you free Saturday?”
“Yeah, I don’t have any assignments due, what’s happening?”
“We’re doing a short film down on Hobson St outside St Matthew-in-the-City. All you got to do is stand around in your nicest clothes pretending you’re at a wedding. Two hundred bucks for a few hours work!”
“Oh, yeah?! Sweet as I’m there.”
The lasagna pan finally clean, I racked it, picked up a plate, and floated it on the soapy water. It took on water at one end and slid under like the Titanic.
I cracked my shirt neck, undoing the top button. It was too hot for the tie, I decided. I unspooled the knot, pulled it out and folded it, one of my Dad’s old ties. Silver slanted stripes with cream and gray, I put it into an inside pocket of my black blazer. Looking around at the other extras, I hitched my belt one hole looser so that my slacks would sit more comfortably on my hips.
Leaning against the warm stone of St Matthew, I looked around at the crowd standing outside, the crew setting up camera sight lines and tearing off silver gaffer tape to mark little crosses on the ground. I caught the eye of one of my flatmate’s friends, he grinned and came walking over to me. Yawning, he reached up to his head midstride and curled one of his twists, checking it was still tight.
“Frank! How’s it going?” Pedro called out as he came near. We slapped hands and pulled together into an embrace. “You look great!”
“Thanks, bro, you’re not bad either!” I said. It’s true, Pedro always looked beautiful, just this amount of swagger and effortless cool. Louche but with coiled energy potent beneath his skin, like he could run faster than Asafa at any moment if he wanted to.
“Hey, they’re saying something,” Pedro told me. We turned and looked at the field of extras lining the entrance and saw a short white Dustin Hoffman lookalike with buzzed gray hair and a clipboard standing self-importantly by the camera rig on the Hobson St footpath. Too far away to lipread, I just stood patiently. Dustin stopped talking and gestured at the crowd. Pedro turned to me, “he says we need to pair up, man to woman, or whatever, and pretend to make conversation.”
A woman with a heavy, full head of black hair cascading over a summery strapless blue dress hitched above her bosom walked over to me, carefully, like she wasn’t used to wearing heels, one knee slightly bruised. Stepping near me, she looked up, and her pale face shone like the full moon. Inky dark brown eyes smiled at me.
“Hi, I’m Scarlett-Rose! Want to be my partner?” she asked. “What’s your name?”
“Hi, umm, sorry I didn’t get your name. I’m deaf. Can you spell it?”
Scarlett didn’t seem nonplussed and instead spelled her name out. While I was reading the letters on her lips, Pedro slapped me on my back, and I saw his up nod from the corner of my eye as he walked into the crowd.
“Scarlett-Rose? Hi! My name’s Frank. Lets’ go!”
I took her hand as if she was my actual partner and guided her to a nice vantage point by the red carpet running from the street into St Matthews.
“But didn’t you tell me once that you met Scarlett-Rose when you were a child?” Ralph asked. His latte cup sat bereft before him. Holding my espresso cup, I looked at the grounds as if I could read my future in them.
“Yeah, that’s true. We met one summer by the Rangitata river. It was the annual fair at the end of summer in 1986, I remember it because the Challenger exploded when I was on the swings that past Monday. But I don’t actually remember meeting her, but she remembers it.”
The smell of the freshly cut grass high in my nose, I sneezed. I tried to rub away that high summer itch and failed. My face twisted as I looked to either side of me. In a line were all the children my age at the Rangitata. In front of us stretched the grassy street, two adults loosely holding a long rope about a hundred meters away. On either side were all the summer residents and fishers of the Rangitata. I finished rubbing my nose and saw that the race was about to begin, as old man Murdock raised the red flag!
As his arm dropped the flag, like we were at the Grand Prix, we were all off! Barefoot, we sprinted on the pads of our feet to the other end of the lawn. Michelle and Jamie edged ahead and just as they arrived at the rope, it fell to the ground and they ran over it, with Calypso and Nigel following shortly behind, and then I flew over and tumbled to the ground with everyone else, panting and gasping.
Some older kids came over and pulled us up so the race for the next age group could be set up. Murdock’s kids among them. His daughter was tousled, straw in her hair, like she’d been in the haybales. Her brother lean and tanned like old leather in contrast to her milky paleness. As they were older than me I paid them no mind.
“You should write this all down!” Ralph said. He caught the eye of the cute waitress, and she reluctantly walked over, and took his order of some sparkling water for both of us.
“I’m serious, this is just crazy,” Ralph said.
“I don’t know, it was all so long ago now, I deleted all the text messages and emails, I don’t remember any of the details exactly anymore.”
“It’s autofiction, you can write it like it happened, like how you remember it, just change all the names and dates!”
“Autobiographical fiction is fiction, not biography. It’s not even a real term. Autofiction! Might as well say this is all true, and it all happened, just not exactly that way, but I really made it all up!”
“Come on, Frank.” Ralph admonished. “You’re always telling me that you like unreliable narrators like in Gene Wolfe’s the Book of the New Sun!”
“But I’m no Severian!” I said. “It’s still fiction!”
Auburn bangs returned with two tall glasses of water, beading with sweat already, the ice chinked sharply in my cochlear as she placed them down, and I read Ralph’s lips, “Thanks, Istafiah,” he said. Istafiah smiled wryly in response and returned to the café counter.
“So, what happened next?” Ralph asked.
A few days later, Scarlett-Rose texted me back.
I was up on the fourth floor at the Royal Australian College, doing some editing for the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, when my Razr skittled across the desk away from me. I reached over my keyboard and picked it up, checked the screen and saw the text was from New Zealand. I flipped the phone open.
“Hey, I’m sorry I took so long to reply, but this is difficult for me to ask. I want you to get a DNA test done. Is that okay?”
“It’s OK. What do you mean, a DNA test? You mean, for Hap?” I sent.
Her reply was swift, “Yes, I think you’re Hap’s father. I want to do the DNA test now.”
I flipped my phone shut and pushed it away from me. I guess I must have sighed heavily because my boss turned in his chair and caught my eye.
“Everything okay, Frank?” Lewis asked. He looked at my screen, as if it would be something to do with the document I was editing, something about best practices for prescribing antidepressants. He fiddled with his shirt cuffs and rolled them up one turn more as he waited for my response.
“It’s okay, boss. I just got a surprising text message. I think I might be a dad?!”
“Wow! That’s amazing, Frank! Congratulations! Wait, you never told me you were in a relationship?”
“Oh no, this happened a decade ago now, I don’t really want to go into it.”
“Maybe you should take the afternoon, where are you on that edit?”
“Maybe 30 minutes more, and it’s good to go back to the author.”
“Yeah, finish that and then go get yourself a drink!” Lewis said. He held my gaze as if to commiserate with me, eyes filled with questions that I knew he’d probably pry the answers out of me eventually over the water cooler.
I opened a new Internet Explorer tab and typed “postal DNA test kit” into Google.
“So, you did a postal DNA test to see if you were Hap’s dad,” Ralph asked. “Just stick some squabs in your mouth and good to go?”
“Yeah, more or less,” I replied and took a sip of my ice water. “Squabs are birds tho; did you mean swabs?”
Ralph laughed, “you could hear the difference?!”
The DNA test kit was waiting for me on my desk at work in a padded manila envelope when I came in one morning, sipping my Americano from the cart outside. Fortunately, there wasn’t any branding on the envelope. Thank God for discrete Australians! An oxymoron if there ever was one.
Later, at home, I opened the envelope and slid out a slim cardboard box. I remember thinking how azure the box was. Blue for a boy, I thought.
Inside were two swabs sealed in paper, and two paired sterile tubes, another manila padded envelope folded in half, and a sheet of instructions. I read the instructions slowly, as if to prolong the moment when I needed to take the DNA samples.
But I didn’t do it, I put it all away in the cupboard, as if it could make the whole situation go away if it was all out of sight, out of mind.
We’re upstairs at Brazil Café that afternoon after the film shoot, the arched roof close over our heads.
I’m playing the widebody pinball machine, Bally’s Twilight Zone. You remember that one? I had the third highest score for a long time. OGA sitting third, below ZAC and WTZ.
Wizard was downstairs brewing our third coffees on Brazil’s famous homemade machine. The scent of rich dark roasts gave both of us contact jitters, and Scarlett laughed as I frantically hammered the magna flip to keep the ball from dropping back into the bumpers.
Scarlett-Rose touched my arm, and we looked into each other’s eyes. “I have something to tell you,” she said.
“What’s that?” I responded and made ready to pull the trigger to launch my third ball into the Twilight Zone.
“Did you ever live in Rangitata, or go there on holidays? Because I think I remember you from there when we were kids?”
I pulled the trigger and as I caressed the ball around the pinball deck, I told Scarlet, “Oh, yeah! My uncle Rob has a house down that way, and we went down there all the time, at least once every summer, weekends with the cousins. Fishing salmon. We were there a lot.” I bumped the machine to stop the ball running into the gutter and failed. I looked at Scarlett.
“Yeah, it was you!” she said. “We had the house two doors up from you. My family were good friends with your uncle. The Murdocks and Crawfords go way back!”
“Wait, your name is Scarlett-Rose Murdock?”
“Yeah! This is so funny, it’s like fate brought us together.” She clasped her hands around her coffee and sipped it. A little bit of foam on her top lip. As I gazed at it, she licked it away demurely.
“I don’t remember meeting you, though,” I said. “Not at all.”
“Well, you’re what, 25, 27? I’m two years older than you. Yeah, you wouldn’t have noticed me, but yeah, everyone knew about the deaf kid at Rangitata.”
The swab feels rough, like coarse sandpaper, as I scrape it on the inside of my cheek, rotating it and swirling up and down.
DNA on, DNA off, I think to myself.
I put the damp swab inside the sterile container and open the other swab. Holding it up, I try to compare it with the ear buds I use to clean the wax out of my ears, even though they don’t need to be cleaned to hear better anymore. At the micro level, the swab is definitely more like shark skin, the bud is like pillowy cotton in comparison. I repeat the process on the other cheek.
As I lick the manila envelope, I think to myself. What if it’s true? I am a father. And I’ve been a father for ten years and never knew, still don’t know. And my family doesn’t know they’ve missed out on ten years of my parents’ first chance to be grandparents?
At the red Australian Post mailbox on the corner, I hold the envelope for a few seconds before I let it drop inside. God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, I think.
Scarlett-Rose massages my ankle as I lay back on her bed. The room smells like charcoal and frangipani. Her clothes hang on a bar suspended from the ceiling with a rope. They’re all very muted colors, I can see the grunge layers waiting to be placed together, the textures patient, floating above a collection of black boots. Scarlett’s thumb digs into my tibialis posterior, and I feel the pain in my gut. She finds another sore spot, and something releases in my brain.
“How are you doing that?” I gasp.
I don’t know if Scarlett-Rose replies, because I can’t see her working away, but she changes the style of massage to a more relaxing, sensual movement, as if she is drawing my energy out from the soles of my feet. The pain I’d felt, pulled away out of me, and yes, I fell asleep.
“You fell asleep the first time you went to her house?!” Ralph laughed.
“I sure did. It was unreal, that may have been the first time I realized people could have that kind of physical, no, metaphysical effect on another person.”
I shook my head, “but yeah, that’s not why I was telling you about that time.”
“I want to have children,” Scarlett-Rose said. “But I don’t want the father to be around.” We’re sitting in her bedroom, having done each other, still sweating a little.
Somewhat surprised, I looked at Scarlett. She was regarding me intensely, like she was making sure that I’d understood her one hundred percent.
“Sure, I guess that’s your right,” I said. I was like, we’ve only met each other two weeks ago and you’re telling me this kind of intense thing now?
“Oh good, I just wanted to make sure you know,” Scarlett said. “Let’s shower and get brunch?”
“Jesus, bro!” Ralph exclaimed. “She said that?”
“Yeah. I guess I didn’t really think much of it at the time. But ten years later, it’s that kind of thing that bobs up to the surface.”
“Wow, it’s like she premediated the whole thing?”
“I dunno, Ralph. I don’t want to think like that.”
“Mistakes were made!” her email says. “I was young and going through it! You don’t remember what was going on with my parents!”
One day, I went around to her house on Summer St. I opened the latch gate and climbed the stairs to the porch. Scarlett-Rose usually left her curtains open, but they were closed. I knocked on the door.
After a while I knocked again. Odd, Scarlett’s usually home at this time, I think. Well, maybe she’s still asleep, because she didn’t reply to my text saying I was on my way. But then Kieran, Scarlett’s flatmate, answers the door. His hair’s a mess, I’ve definitely woken him up. He’s talking too fast for speechreading.
“Slow down bro, I can’t understand you.”
“Oh sorry, I was yelling to come in and then I realized it was probably you, Scarlett’s not here, she’s moved away.”
“What do you mean, she’s moved away?”
“Yeah, bro. She’s gone down south. I thought she would have told you.”
“Yeah, nah, she didn’t say anything to me. Actually, she hasn’t sent me a message for a few days now.”
“Damn? Really? That’s cold,” Kieran said. “She must have had a reason tho.”
Kieran shrugged at me, like, women, what can you do? I stared at him. I know it’s only been six weeks, but you know, you think you know people, and then they show you who they really are.
I should believe it now, but you know, part of me is still back there speechless on that verandah, like huh? I walked back up to Ponsonby Road and down to Santos.
Pereira was at the machine whipping out perfect flat whites one after another like a Brazilian machine. “Bro, you okay?” he asked.
“Yeah, just life is weird sometimes. It’s all good. Flat white please.”
“Sweet as bro, yeah be right with ya!”
“Lots of coffee in this story,” Ralph says. The ice is melting slowly in our empty glasses, and I see Istafiah glance over us with some annoyance. I can almost see her calculating the tip because we’ve been here a while taking up a table and only four coffees and two waters? Come on!
“You hungry? Let’s order some lunch maybe?” I ask Ralph. I see him try not to glance at his crush before replying, “hell yeah, I’m starving!” He makes eye contact with Istafiah and mouths “menu?” She goes for them.
“Yeah, funny thing about coffee, bro. I read this article the other day, about DNA and coffee. They said to not have coffee before doing the DNA tests, and you know, I have coffee first thing in the morning, and I also did DNA tests in the morning. So, I catch myself wondering whether the coffee could have tampered with the sample?”
“Huh, no way, really?” Ralph is leaning forward now, like his body is emoting what?
“Yeah, but then I asked a scientist friend about it, and he was like, yeah, but not like that. DNA will out. You can’t fuck with DNA. DNA is DNA.”
The inevitable text message comes, Scarlett-Rose acknowledges the receipt of the test and that she and Hap have done their own. We’re waiting for the results. It takes two weeks. That time seems indeterminable. We’re in some kind of Schrodinger’s box, this purgatory between knowing and not knowing. Father or not father.
I think of Darth Vader at the bottom of the air shaft in Empire Strikes Back, “Hap, I am your father.” “Noooooooooooo!”
The inevitable text message comes, Scarlett-Rose says that I am not Hap’s father. I tell her, “Well, Hap was born ten months after we were together, after all.”
“Maybe, I guess so,” Scarlett said.
DNA does not lie. I am not Hap’s father. It’s definite. One hundred percent I am not his father.
I can stop laying in bed at night thinking about how this boy is growing up in the world not knowing who his father is. Being denied his genetic history. If he’d been my son, he should know about things like our weak chests, the ancestral health traits passed down from father to son, the charisma of our family lineages, the hyperactivity, the attention deficits. He only has his matrilineal knowledge, does that make his inheritage incomplete, not knowing who his father is? Sometimes, I still think about the tragedy of it all.
“Did you ever meet him?” Ralph asks me over his Cesar salad.
“Yeah, I met him once. They came to Casterton. I first saw him on Mum’s rose lawn. He was in a little pram, and Scarlett was smiling at me proudly, like she was thinking, ‘Look at what I made! Not what we made, what I made!’ I remember thinking to myself, he looks like a little Murdock. He doesn’t look like me at all, and all the boys in our family definitely take after their fathers? And I remember doing the math, he must have been born ten months later. Yeah, no, I’m not Happy’s dad.”
“Ten months?” Ralph said. “Is that even possible? And he doesn’t look like you?”
“Yeah, I even saw some photos of him when he was like eleven years old, and he still looks like a Murdock. He’s stocky with short legs like his grandfather. And again, when he was like twenty, and he looks even more like his mother now. Everyone in my family agrees he doesn’t have any of our family’s physical characteristics. I even saw a photo of him with the other candidate for his father, they were on a couch, he was shirtless and doing that skin-to-skin bonding thing, and the other guy even looked a bit like me, too.”
“Short legs? He can’t be your son.” Ralph bends to look at my long legs folded under the table. Bemused, Ralph shakes his head and takes another bite of his salad.
By this point, whenever I see Scarlett-Rose Murdock’s name appear in my email, I cannot avoid a visceral response. Like, what the fuck does she want now? What kind of drama is she going to bring to me now? I shudder, but I have to know. I can’t just filter all her emails into my trash. What if there’s a new development? That’s how people keep you on the hook. They offer you just enough mystery, just enough half-explanation, that you just keep waiting for the penny to drop, for that last piece of the puzzle to fall into place to show you what the big picture is. But the penny never drops, the puzzle never ends.
Life is peaceful for many years. I’ve moved from Auckland to Melbourne, and then from Melbourne to Playa del Carmen. Hap becomes a distant memory. I only remember the drama when something reminds me out of the blue.
I’m working at my favorite café, Orange, in the French quarter when the notification pops up in the corner of my screen next to my half-drunk glass of orange juice. Yeah, I know. Gotta honor the name! But this name, this is Scarlett-Rose Murdock! How many years has it been now? Another decade?
I open the email. Scarlett-Rose tells me about how well Hap has been doing, about her recent moves around New Zealand, her training to become a nurse, and then she drops the clanger. The other candidate for being Hap’s father, the boyfriend that our mutual friend told me she was with a few months later, he’s also tested negative, and he’s also run off to work in the Australian mines, somewhere north of Perth. About as far away as he can get from Scarlett, I think to myself unkindly. But I’m carrying the can, I realize.
I email back, remind her of the ten months and the negative DNA test, it still can’t be me. Maybe there’s some third man out there, some soul who knows he is the father to a phantom child, but he doesn’t know, because he may be some random unmemorable one-night stand that Scarlett didn’t record in her journal.
Sure enough, thirty minutes later, another email comes back. She says that she carried my sperm in her womb for several weeks and it fertilized her. I am the father. I must be the father. She wants me to return to New Zealand and get it done with police witnesses. It’s going to cost a lot of money to do that, and I am quite enjoying my Caribbean life on the Mayan Riveria.
Eventually, I tell my Dad. He buys me a ticket home that day. After all, Hap could be his firstborn grandson!
We almost go for coffee on the way to the police station in Penrose where they’ll do the test. My Dad drives. I was glad for that because that means we can’t talk, which I would do if I was driving, because I can sneak looks for Dad’s replies, but I don’t want to do that when he’s driving, he’s still not used to Auckland traffic.
Dad asks if I want him to come in, but I say no, because this is hard enough without him being at my shoulder.
The police were nice, kind. They swirled the swabs the same way as I’d done it a decade before. I waited for them to draw a blood sample, and when they didn’t. I asked. The cops said, “nah, DNA doesn’t lie. This swab will tell us everything we need to know.”
While I was in New Zealand, I get my Mexican temporary residency. DNA does not lie. I am here to rule myself out as Hap’s father. The process is super painless. All of a sudden, I am a residente temporal. I think about booking a ticket back “home” to Playa del Carmen, where I’ve left my new life. Stuck in my old life, I yearn for the heat, the constant sweating, the freedom from my past.
Like the day follows dawn, the email from the police comes, Scarlett and I are copied into the same email. She texts me straight away.
“No, I don’t believe it!”
In an email exchange some years later, Scarlett says that the police sabotaged the DNA test results to get back at my father, who is by this stage a highly respected and highly paid civil servant in the government. I tell Mum. She explodes, “she’s crazy! How can she even think that?! She’s gaslighting the whole family!”
“She just wishes you were the actual father. The real father must be such a deadbeat!”
Scarlett-Rose changes her email address four times over the years. Each time she emails to let me know that she’s been hacked, or she’s being harassed by some criminal organization in Canterbury, and this is her new email to stay connected just in case. I never email. Other times, it’s the police causing trouble for her. I don’t know what to believe anymore. Chaos magnets will attract chaos, this vortex moving blithely through peoples’ lives. I get told bits and pieces about Hap, how he likes skateboarding, how he saved up and got the UCS LEGO AT-AT. I thought to myself, hmmm, he’s a fan of the Imperial side. He doesn’t have my characteristics because I am all Rebel. I even play a game called Star Wars Commander, and only in the Rebel faction. Scarlett says he has my personality. I think to myself, six weeks. Our relationship was six weeks. She knows my personality after six weeks? Hap goes to Otago University, gets an architecture degree, and moves to Auckland.
Scarlett-Rose’s aunt dies, and Scarlett has to take care of her house. She finds some old letters describing an incident when her great-grandfather was swept out to sea, and my great-grandfather and a couple of neighbors rescued him in their dinghy. She promises to transcribe them and send them to me. I say, “just take some photos and email it!” She never does.
“See, this means our family lines are connected across the generations!”
I don’t reply to her email. I stopped replying to the emails some years before after I realized that responding to her emails set off a barrage of emails, probing for updates about my life, giving updates about Hap’s life, how he is living with his girlfriend now, working as an intern at a firm. Doing really well.
“He has grown into his personality,” Scarlett said. “He makes me think of you all the time.”
“Wow, that’s intense,” Ralph said. “All this has been going on for 25 years now. Does Scarlett-Rose think it’s because you’re deaf that it’s easy for her to get away with this?”
“I don’t know, bro,” I said. “I don’t know what she wants. Well, I guess she wants me to be Hap’s dad, and DNA is the only thing standing in her way.”
“Do you want to know the craziest thing about all of this?” I asked Ralph. We’re kicking back, still at the same table, Istafiah has gone off shift and left the café, and Ralph has his full focus on me now.
“Sure, hit me, I can’t even guess.”
“So, I was working on this article for some kind of cell biology journal. It was on telegony, the sire effect, and non-Mendelian inheritance mediated by spermatozoa.”
“The what, what?” Ralph said, clearly not even understanding a single word of all that.
“You don’t know what telegony is? It’s when an animal has sex with an animal after another animal has had sex with it.”
“Sloppy seconds!” Ralph laughed.
“Yeah, kind of. Well, it’s been discredited in humans, I think, but essentially, the product of the second union has the DNA of the first union, basically the first father overrides the DNA of the second father.”
“Oh, shit! Did you tell Scarlett-Rose?” Ralph asks.
“Yeah. Bad idea. She emailed me about some new bullshit that I don’t even remember anymore, and I said, ‘what if it’s telegony?’ And left it at that. Some time later, she emails me back, and says, ‘that’s exactly what happened!’ and I am just like, fuck, I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“I can believe it,” Ralph said.
“Yeah, I just gave her another scientific-sounding explanation like the three weeks my sperm waited for her egg.”
“That means she probably hooked up with the new guy right when she left, not later, right?” Ralph asked.
“Maybe, yeah, that’s a possibility, I guess. I’ll never know the full story and I don’t want to anymore.”
“Does Scarlett still contact you? It’s been 25 years now.”
“Yeah, she emailed me and said that her health isn’t that great, and Hap might reach out to me.”
“You’ve never talked to him directly?”
“Yeah, not even once. It’s not like I don’t have my real names on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. There are so many ways he could have contacted me. I don’t even think he knows my real name at this point.”
“Damn, holy shit!” Ralph exclaimed. “That’s fucked.”
“Yeah, but the most fucked thing? She’s harmed three families with this bullshit now. Hers, mine, and Hap’s girlfriend’s family.”
“Fucking unbelievable!” Ralph slapped me on the shoulder and pulled me into a hug. He pushed me to arm’s length and looked in my eyes.
“Don’t worry, bro. She’ll come right.”
“What did I ever do to deserve this? What did my family ever do?”
“I know, bro. Damn!”
“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!” Ralph imitates Al Pacino in The Godfather III.
“Yeah, Scarlett-Rose even warned me to not tell this story to anyone. Promise me, her email said, promise me that you wont talk to anyone about this. Yeah, I didn’t, and I still didn’t because you’re not just anyone, bro.”
“I love you, man,” Ralph said, “but you know that’s fucked. That’s what a sex abuser tells their victims! That’s some next-level controlling shit!”
“Yeah, she even went off at me about living in Mexico. Telling me that I’m just running away from history, from my child, and the longer I spend here chasing my foolish dreams, the longer he goes without a father. When I read that, I thought to myself, that was her choice from the beginning. She needs to sleep in the bed she made.”
“It’s fucked that Hap also has to sleep in it too,” Ralph shakes his head wearily. “Did you see her when you went to New Zealand after the borders reopened?”
“Of course not. She was emailing me asking me to come down to Christchurch. I mean, my family doesn’t even have a house down there anymore. It’s rented out. I wasn’t going to do it, but I did offer Hap to come up and we could do the DNA test again to once and for all actually close the book on this bullshit!”
“Wow, what happened with that?”
“Yeah, it never happened. I mean, I’ve spent must be 7,000 dollars on this saga. I wasn’t going to pay another few hundred dollars for him to come up and do this DNA thing, I mean, leave the kid alone. He doesn’t need his mother manipulating more bullshit into being.”
One time I fought with my father in Christchurch, we were upstairs, in the hallway. Dad was telling me, “You should get into renovating houses. You’re good at painting houses!” And somehow, the row got heated.
I told my father, “You’ve probably got a grandson you don’t know about!”
Dad was shocked to the core. His face paled, and he staggered and held himself up against the wall. I was immediately sorry and held him up, and he winced from the newly healed rib after his recent fall. I looked him in the eye and he could see I regretted it all.
“Yeah, he is probably not my son, he was born ten months after the relationship. It’s his mother who thinks I am the dad.”
“But did you ask for a DNA test?” my Dad asked.
“Yeah, she came to the house with Hap, and I asked her at that time, and she said no, she was certain he was the child of the other guy.”
“Well, that’s that, I guess,” Dad said. But I could see in his face he was still shaken.
“Did you ever see Scarlett-Rose since?” Ralph asked.
“Yeah, I drove past her once. She was walking on New Brighton Rd in Shirley. She was wearing her layered grunge uniform. Petticoat over a dark washed out black dress. Lace elbow gloves, that sort of thing. I thought about stopping. Telling her I was in town. But no, I thought better of it.”
“Wise, very wise,” Ralph agreed, “she’s just a bad actor, you don’t want that energy in your life.”
This week is Mental Health Awareness Week in New Zealand (23–29 September 2024). Go donate to the Mental Health Foundation at the button below!
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