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Cat shrugged, looked down at her glass. He thought she wasn’t going to answer. But then, “She said something like ‘Your father. He’s a bad man and you don’t want to know him. Whatever piece of him is inside you—exorcise it.’”
“Exercise?”
“Likeexorcise—as in demons. She pushed past me but I followed her to her front door. I’m not embarrassed to say that I begged her to tell me more, even just his name. But she went inside and said if I came back she’d call the police.”
Cat stopped a second, took off her glasses again and wiped angrily at her eyes. He waited. Didn’t press. “So I hung around awhile,” she went on. “It was cold, about to snow. I thought maybe she’d see me waiting, feel sorry for me, come back out. But it got later, colder, and finally I left.”
“Okay, wow,” said Henry, not knowing what else to say.
“The next day, her Facebook account had been deleted. And she was no longer available for messaging on the Origins site.”
The sadness was gone from Cat’s face, a kind of closed-off hardness was left in its place.
“Maybe I could try to reach out,” Henry suggested.
Cat shook her head, looked down at her drink. “No.”
“Or my aunt Gemma, my mother’s sister. She has a way with people. They talk to her.” Gemma did; there was a warmth, a kind nonjudgment that encouraged people to open themselves to her. If anyone could get this woman to talk it was his aunt. He was about to press, but Cat raised a slender palm.
“Marta Bennet,” Cat started then stopped, took a long swallow of her drink. “She—um—she died.”
“Wait, what? How?”
“It appears she killed herself, like she jumped off the top of her building a couple days after I went to talk to her. Police said it might have been an accident.”
Henry didn’t know what to say, so he just looked down at his hands. He felt his heart beating in his throat.
“And she’s not the only one,” Cat went on.
Henry frowned at her. “Okay.”
“Five of our half siblings have died over the last five years. They started looking for answers about their origins, and at some point after that, they were gone.”
She pulled out a file from her sack, opened it and turned it around. It was thick with printouts from the internet. A couple died in a suspicious house fire. A young actor overdosed. Another dead by accidental strangulation—autoerotic asphyxia. Others. He recognized each name from the Origins results, from the Donor Sibling Registry.
Henry slicked back the second bourbon. But instead of calming him, it made him feel sick.
“So what does this mean?”
“It means that these folks started looking for answers and now they’re gone. All of these deaths are considered suspicious by the police. No evidence. No leads. The one thing they all have in common is that they took an Origins test and found out that their father was a sperm donor.”
“Our father.”
“That’s right.”
Henry’s stomach churned. He found himself rising and walking quickly to the bathroom. Once in the stall, he threw up copiously in the toilet. When he was done, he sat on the cold tile floor that was surprisingly and mercifully clean, and put his head on his knees. He wasn’t sure how much time passed. But during its span, he decided right then and there that he was done. Done with Origins, done with searching for siblings, for connections.
The door opened and Max walked in. His bulk filled the doorway. “You okay, man?”
Max offered a hand, but Henry waved him off.
“Yeah,” said Henry rising, embarrassed. He flushed the toilet but his vomit had splattered on the seats, the stall walls. “Yeah, I’m good. Thanks. Sorry for the mess. Let me help clean it up.”
The other man smiled, a patient turning up of the corners of his mouth. “Happens all the time. No worries.”
Henry walked out to return to Cat, to tell her he had to go. But when he got back to the booth, she was gone. She’d scribbled her number on a napkin.Sorry I upset you. Call me if you want to talk.
He took the napkin, shoved it in his pocket, but he had no intention of ever calling her. He was going to call in sick to work Monday, get on the next plane to Tampa, and beg Piper to take him back. He was going to walk away from his genealogical quest for the past and into the future with the only person he’d ever really loved. The mystery of his father, his dead half siblings? He’d leave it behind, another untold story in his past, one that mattered not at all.
