Fluke (17 page)

The man was
me
.
 
Or, I should say, he looked like me.
 
And, I don’t mean just a little bit.
 
If he were wearing a Perry’s Pizza Palace T-shirt and ball cap, I would have thought he was me;
 
 
that’s how strong the resemblance was.
 
I couldn’t pull my eyes from it.

You’re adopted? Why didn’t you tell me before?
Sara’s words from the Ferris wheel echoed through my head as I stared at the photo, in my own trance.
 
I rifled quickly, nervously, through the photos, searching for another photograph of this man.
 
Praying that it would reveal that maybe I was mistaken.

I found another.
 
It was the upside down framed picture, from the bottom of the box.
 
The man was standing next to a woman of about the same age, and he had his arm around her waist.
 
The picture was off kilter, and the couple was dangerously close to being scalped by whoever the photographer was. Possibly it was Sara, taking the first photograph of her young life.

You’re adopted? Why didn’t you tell me before?
I broke my eyes away from the photo, and leaned back against the wall.
 
Confusion didn’t even come close to describing the way I was feeling; it was far
beyond that.
 
It was a grand slam out of the confusion ballpark.
 
I didn’t even know how or where to start putting it together in my mind.

Questions began firing through my mind in rapid succession:

Is this my real father…who else could it be, he looks just like me?

Is my biological father related to Sara?
 

Worse than that, is he Sara’s father also?

What does this make us?

I looked closely at the couple in the photograph once more, this time focusing on the woman.
 
I studied the shape of her nose and the color of her eyes.
 
I was certain it was Sara’s mother.
 
I breathed only the slightest sigh of relief when I concluded she looked nothing like me.

I tried to think about it rationally, but I couldn’t.
 
Maybe it’s a coincidence that you look like this man
, I tried to tell myself,
maybe he’s her step-dad
. I tried to cling to this, but it didn’t stick.
 
The only thing that did stick in my mind was the distinct, very real possibility that I had just seen a picture of my biological father and that he was the father of the woman I loved.
 
Best case scenario, my girlfriend subconsciously fell in love with the mirror image of her own father.
 
Sara’s father.

I replaced everything in our closet as closely as I could to what it looked like before I went through it.
 
My nerves were shot, though, and I knew I couldn’t have covered every detail of how the shoeboxes and the pictures within them were organized.
 
I couldn’t even remember coming into the closet anymore.
 
My memory for the morning started with that first photograph, and it continued with the many questions of what I needed to do now, if anything.

****

Later that afternoon, I found myself sitting on the deck at one of the many restaurants along the beach, a place called PJ’s.
 
It was my favorite place to get good seafood, and there was always plenty of lovely women in skimpy bikinis walking along the beach below, which added to the ambiance.
 
I hadn’t been to PJ’s since I met Sara, and after what I had discovered in the closet that morning, I decided to find a nice place to think and to fill my stomach with some oysters and Red Stripe beers in the process.

You look so much like him,
I thought, remembering the first night with Sara.

Yes, I did look so much like him.
 
That much was obvious from the pictures tucked away neatly in a shoebox.
 
The question was: who was the
him
in question?

I contemplated this again while dabbing horseradish sauce on my sixth and last Gulf oyster.
 
I stared at the slimy gray blob, jiggling under the tiny white fork I used to spread the white sauce.
 
They certainly weren’t pretty, but they were one of my favorite snacks.

“Not all good food has to be pretty,” I told Sean when he asked me how I could “eat cold phlegm.”

This led to a brief, totally inane rant from me about how humans and oysters were eerily similar.

“Take me, for instance,” I explained.
 
“I have a hard exterior that people will attempt to
shuck
to get inside of me.
 
I also have a slimy blob inside of me, my heart. And, who knows? Maybe there’s a pearl somewhere inside of me.”

“There’s no pearl in you, Fluke.
 
Only a load of shit,” he replied.

A reggae band played quietly on a small stage near the entrance to the deck, and about a half dozen people sat at the circular bar in the deck’s center.
 
It was a warm day, with only a few fluffy white clouds (
Snoopy clouds
, Sara called them) in the sky, and the beach was crawling with people.
 
I sat at a table by the edge of the deck with my legs resting on another chair, my shorts pulled up in an effort to get a little sun on my legs. The scantily clad waitress came to my table and cleared away my oyster remnants, and I asked for
another Red Stripe.
 
I stared at her tan legs as she walked off and thought about, of course, Sara.

I had attempted to ask her about her family a week after we met and seemed to encounter some resistance on her part.
 
She hadn’t seemed eager to talk about her family life too much, which I took to mean that she, like the majority of American kids, had it rough.

Sara told me only that her mother suffered from Alzheimer’s disease and lived in a home in Texas, and she hadn’t seen nor spoken to her father in fifteen years.

I sensed the reluctance on her part, so I didn’t pressure her for information at the time.
 
I had suspected maybe Sara suffered from some underlying guilt about her mother living in a home 600 miles away from Hazel Beach, but, of course, I couldn’t be sure.
 
Sitting at PJ’s that day, it seemed like a very good idea to find out more about Sara’s family life.

I hadn’t been able to think about anything but the man in the pictures.
 
Who was this guy? He had a fatherly look in the picture, pushing Sara in the swing, smiling with pride at the girl next to him.
 
Smiling with my smile, seeing with my eyes.

I guessed that Sara was about five years old in the picture.
 
He looked about thirty years old, which would make him around fifty today, give or take a few years.

And he looked exactly like me.

Throughout my life, I had talked with several people that subscribed to the theory that for everyone in the world, there’s a double, someone who looks just like you.
 
I had always kind of laughed at this theory, as I had serious doubts that anyone could look exactly like me.
 
Besides, I was twenty-six years old, and had never seen a double for any of my friends or family, or anyone I had ever met, for that matter.

But you seem to have found yours, Adam-boy.
 
Now what?

The thought that I had stumbled across my biological father wouldn’t stop nagging me, eating away at my guts, too strong to ignore.
 
I tried to push the thought away, not even wanting to consider the implications that it carried.
 
It was too much, and besides, what were the odds? Infinitesimal, at best.

You beat the odds getting Sara.
 
In fact, Adam-boy, the odds of things going the way they’ve been going for you were probably infinitesimal not so long ago, weren’t they?

I nodded my head at my own thought and whispered, “Yeah, I suppose so.”

I sipped my Red Stripe and watched a couple walk down the beach, holding hands, laughing.
 
I saw pretty white teeth, I heard laughter, and I felt a hint of desire for Sara.

The thought came out of nowhere, before I could avoid it, a mental sucker punch:
You mean your sister?

My hands involuntarily went to my stomach, which flipped and flopped inside of me, and a small sound escaped my throat, something like a grunt, but without the force.
 
I felt the oysters churning upward a bit from my dancing stomach.

Could it be true? Could I really have come across this monumental, life-altering event in the cruelest and most horrifying fashion? I held my stomach tighter and squeezed my eyes shut behind my sunglasses as tight as I could.

It’s the biggest Fluke ever, Adam-boy.
 
The biggest, most hurtful Fluke you could ever have imagined.

My mind wouldn’t stop hurling visions out: Sara naked underneath me.
 
Sara talking dirty to me, telling me, “Fuck me.”
 
Sara licking sweat from my body.
 
Sara riding me to climax and then collapsing next to me.
 
These visions would have sent me into a frenzy five hours earlier and sent me seeking her out and taking her to bed.
 
Now they frightened me.

“Jesus Christ,” I said out loud, sitting straight up in the chair.
 
I ran my hands over my head, almost pulling out hairs with the pressure.
 
“Jesus Christ,” I repeated.

“Are you okay?” I looked to my left and saw the waitress standing next to me, tray in one hand, fresh Red Stripe in the other.
 
She smiled nervously.
 
I could picture her thoughts, her worrying about having a customer die on her shift, at her table.
 
Her just wanting to make ends meet, waiting tables.
 
Maybe she had a history degree hanging on her wall at home.
 
Jesus Christ
, I repeated, silently this time.

I forced a small smile on my own face and said, “Yeah, I’m okay.
 
I just have a little headache.”

She looked relieved and set my beer on the table.
 
“You have to watch it, drinking beer in the hot sun like that.
 
Do you want some water or something?”

“Thanks, but no, I’m okay.
 
In fact, can I go ahead and pay my tab? I need to get going. I’ll pay for this beer,” I said, pointing with a shaky finger at the full brown bottle in front of me, which was starting to sweat.
 
Beads of condensation ran down the sides of the bottle.
 
Sweat.

Like the sweat that ran down your sister when you fucked her
, came another sucker punch.
 
I grimaced at the waitress, who said, “Sure, I’ll be right back.” She didn’t look like she wanted to come back, though.
 
She looked like she just wanted me to leave.

And that’s what I wanted at that moment: to leave.
 
I wanted to go find Sara and ask her questions I had never asked her before.
 
I wanted to hear all about her family.
 
I wanted her to say that the man in the picture was a friend of the family.
 
I wanted to hear her say, “No, that’s not my father.” I hoped to hear her say that he was a friend, a janitor, a mailman, anything but her father.

This was too big, too much for me to comprehend.
 
I left my money on the table and walked out to my car, thinking of war and poverty and famine.
 
They were hard ideas to comprehend because they seemed too distant, too far away, too made-for-television to worry about.
 
It was the news I didn’t watch and the newspaper I didn’t read.

This, on the other hand, wasn’t far away.
 
It was close, too close, and it felt cloying to me, almost sucking the breath out of me as I started the car.
 
I had thoughts that made me alternately uncomfortable, nauseous, and scared.