Our father's favorite child

on DNA, doppelgängers, and I love exclamation points

It was December 1, 2020, and when the phone rang, we were eating dinner. The phone only ever seems to ring at the wrong time, or maybe it’s just that there’s almost no occasion when I actually want to talk on the phone. But my brother Adam’s name flashed on the screen, and we were overdue for a call, so I pushed back from the table and said hello.

“I have some exciting news,” Adam said. “We have a new brother.”

I think I grinned. I could hear Adam smiling through the phone, so my face did the same on instinct. But behind it, my brain swam through the words he’d just spoken — we have a new brother — scrambling to parse them, to figure out how our family arrangement could yield a sentence like that. Adam and I are half-siblings, twenty years apart. Adam has two full siblings, Lisa and David, born in 1958, 1956, and 1963, respectively. They are the children of our dad’s first marriage, and I, born in 1978, am the only child of his second marriage. As of that evening in December 2020, our dad had been dead for almost exactly 18 years. If he were alive, he would have been 91 years old. He must have had an affair: that was my first thought, and a wave of unease — no, something much smaller, more like a ripple — began to form at the back of my throat.

“What do you mean?” I squeaked, and that was when Adam laughed. I’ve never felt I knew Adam well, both because of our age difference and because we’ve never lived less than 1,600 miles apart, but I knew what kind of sound this was. Adam was happy.