Editor’s note: The Berkshire Edge has set out on a new adventure: we recruited eight published authors and they have created a serialized novel with a new chapter to appear every Sunday. Each installment of this novel will be written by a different author. Today, Jess Bennett picks up where Rachel Siegel left us in Chapter One and takes us who-knows-where.
November 2020
This was not okay.
Kit’s pale face glowed in the cold blue light of her laptop screen as she chewed anxiously on the drawstring of her Yale University hoodie. She leaned in closer to the browser window, eyes darting back and forth as her middle finger assaulted the trackpad, scrolling up and down the page. Any moment now, an error message would pop-up apologizing for a glitch in the code and would she please try again?
Any moment.
She hit the refresh button with unnecessary force, waiting for the page to reload and put her life—and her lineage—back in order. She leaned in closer to the screen. The colorful wheel spun, settled, and blinked away, exactly as it was programmed to do. The test results remained the same.
There was no glitch in her DNA.
Kit slumped back against her desk chair, nonplussed. Testing positive for COVID had sucked. Self-quarantining in her childhood bedroom? Boring as hell. Possibly failing Organic Chemistry … expensive? Embarrassing? One year ago, flunking a midterm would have launched her into a full-blown identity crisis.
But finding out her mother wasn’t her actual mother? Actual fucking identity crisis.
And not just for her and Henry and Charlie but for this New Sib. What was her name? Sara? Sasha? Was she sitting in front of her own MacBook somewhere in Brooklyn right now, about to click on an email notification from 23andMe with a truncated subject line: Congratulations! We’ve Matched Your DNA With—?
Kit wondered how she would fill in that blank now, if it were up to her. It was a toss-up between:
- Katherine R. from New Canaan, Conn.!
- A Failing Pre-Med Student!
- A Dysfunctional Family of Lying W.A.S.P.s!
She leaned forward and slammed her computer shut, letting the darkness of early winter take over the room. Just when she thought her world couldn’t have gotten any smaller, a course assignment and a tube of saliva had come along and blown it up.
Kit crossed over to her bed and pressed her ear to the wall. The muffled yells of a sports announcer told her Henry was in his room, watching a football game being played out in a stadium devoid of fans, oblivious to the truth bomb it was up to her to detonate responsibly—or not. She seized her phone from the nightstand, her thumbs on texting autopilot.
To say what?
Hey bro. So it looks like Beth’s not really our mom and FYI we’ve got a half-sister in NYC. Go pats!
Yeah, no.
All three of them were struggling being at home, but (up to now, at least) Kit thought Henry had it worse. At least she’d gotten to bask in the long-awaited glory of her Senior Year—homecoming, prom, graduation—before the Class of 2019 scattered off to illustrious liberal arts colleges across the country. She couldn’t know that in less than a year, they’d all be right back where they started; but at least they’d started something. Meanwhile, the Class of 2021 was currently scattered across 107 Zoom boxes, wondering if they’d even have a prom. And if they didn’t? There would be no do-overs.
She never thought she’d feel sorry for Mr. Golden-Boy-Captain-Of-The-Football-Team. Then again, she never suspected she was anything but Katherine “Kit” Reagan, first-born daughter of Elizabeth and Thomas Reagan II.
Ping.
As if throwing her a lifeline, Kit’s phone lit up with a text from Amy, her former roommate and best friend from Yale.
“u up? 😉 ”
Kit’s thumbs flew over the keyboard, then thought better of it. If ever there was a time to FaceTime, it was now.
“Oh haiiii!” Amy’s face grinned at her from the West Coast, where she was living out the pandemic—and her parents’ American Dream of having a doctor in the family—from their home in the Bay Area. A first-generation Chinese-American, she was on the pre-med track with Kit. Unlike Kit, she was not struggling with O Chem, but rather had fucked up the curve for the rest of the class. “How’s it going with the ‘rona?”
“Fine. Dude. I’m freaking out,” Kit said by way of greeting. “You remember me telling you I was doing one of those DNA ancestry kits for my Anthro class?” And she proceeded to tell Amy about the test results that 23andMe had just casually dropped in her inbox: the digital equivalent of chucking a Molotov cocktail into her bedroom and blowing up her picture-perfect Fairfield County life.
“And now I’m just sitting here like who-the-fuck-am-I-even?!,” she finished in a rush. Amy let out a low whistle.
“Holy shit. So what does this mean? You think you were like, adopted or something? What about Henry and Charlie? I have so many questions.”
“Tell me about it,” said Kit. “I mean, I remember my mom coming home from the hospital with them. I definitely remember her being pregnant with Henry. And like…we look like we’re related…”
Kit paused. It was true that the three of them had similar hair color, and everyone said Henry was the spitting image of his father. (Ha! She’d never think of “spitting image” the same way again.) But how alike were they, really?
A new insidious fear gripped her, fed by a growing flame of self-doubt. She’d just assumed Henry and Charlie’s genetic stories would mirror her own—but what if they didn’t? What if she was the only one who had this Other Mother? Unless they both took tests, she couldn’t know for sure if their results would be the same. And even if they did, she’d still be letting on that she knew something was off. If they were full siblings, their results would be more or less the same…
She felt a burning sensation start to prick the corner of her eyes. Double major in Anthropology! they said. It will be fun! they said. Well, at least she had this career path to fall back on when she failed out of pre-med. Surely, finding out that you’ve been barking up the wrong family tree your whole life was grounds for an automatic “A” in Familial Ancestry 101.
“And there’s another sister?” Amy pressed on.
“Half-sister,” Kit corrected. It seemed an important distinction, somehow. “On my mom’s side—whoever that is.”
“Wild. So what are you going to do? Are you going to message her? Or talk to your parents?”
“That’ll be a fun after-dinner conversation,” said Kit sarcastically. “‘Hey, Mom and Dad—or do I need to I start calling you Elizabeth and Tom now?’”
“Maybe you could pull off some CSI shit!” Amy said. Kit snorted. “No, listen! You could collect samples of Henry and Charlie’s DNA without their knowing. Get two more kits and send them in. Then you’ll know if it’s just you, or…” She didn’t have to finish the thought for Kit to catch her meaning.
“I don’t think those kits work with trace amounts of DNA,” said Kit. “I had to full-on spit into a tube. I could probably trick Henry into doing it, ‘cause he’s gross like that—but Charlie’s not a spitter.”
“…that’s what he said?”
“AMY!” But in spite of herself, and being trapped in her bedroom for the eighth straight day, and—oh yeah, not knowing who the hell she was anymore, Kit burst out laughing. If there was one thing Amy could be counted on to deliver, it was a perfectly timed dirty joke.
* * * * *
Ten days of minimal exposure to her family, coupled with the revelation that they might not be family at all, had Kit scrutinizing her parents and siblings when she rejoined them at the dinner table two nights later. Within minutes of being back in their company, she was surprised to find herself keeping score: tracking the number of times her mother and father said or did anything to uphold the family narrative that she now knew was a fabrication—at least as far as she was concerned.
Innocuous turns-of-phrases like, “Like father, like son,” or, “You get that from your mother,” rang loud with false pretenses that only she could hear. She mapped the freckles scattered across their noses, trying to find some genetic constellation written in their alabaster skins. She overanalyzed the way her mother (Kit didn’t know what else to call her, yet) held her fork in her right hand; noticed how Henry’s cowlick swept across his forehead, just like their father’s did; and saw herself reflected in Charlie when judging someone’s answer to a question. (They both arched their left eyebrows skeptically.)
Of course, none of these similarities or differences offered any empirical evidence that Kit was or was not part of the family. But she was confident she would find some tonight, tucked away neatly in a filing cabinet in her mother’s meticulously organized home office, as soon as they all went to bed. She and Amy had decided that a little detective work would make up for their lack of a forensics lab.
Buzz.
Kit gave a small start as her phone vibrated beneath her fingers. She chanced a glance at the screen, long enough to read Amy’s text:
update?
“Kit, no phones at the table, please.”
Damn, Kit thought. Not quick enough. When it came to her children, Elizabeth had an uncanny ability to hone in on distractions—whether they manifested in digital devices or simply as daydreams.
“Sorry, Mom.” The proper noun caught in Kit’s throat.
“Everything okay? You’ve been quiet tonight.”
“Still a little foggy from COVID, I guess,” Kit shrugged. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Charlie’s left eyebrow shoot up and was immediately annoyed.
Elizabeth surveyed her daughter critically over her glass of Bordeaux, giving Kit the acute sense that she was not going to get off so easily. She was an exacting woman who insisted on excellence in all things, including quality conversation. It was at her insistence that all three of them had joined the Debate Club, so they could not only hold their own in an argument, but hold a room in life. And of course, it was essential that they be impeccably dressed and well-groomed while doing it. For her daughter, she preferred Chanel.
“How did you do on your midterms?” Elizabeth pressed on.
“Fine, thanks.” Kit could feel her patience wearing thin. She poured herself some more sparkling water to give her hands something to do, and sipped it politely to buy herself some time. It would not be enough.
“Just fine?”
Fuck it, Kit thought. If engrossing conversation was what her mother wanted, that’s exactly what she was going to get. It might even save her the hassle of snooping through desk drawers later.
“They were illuminating,” she said vaguely.
“Really? How so?” “We had to write a term paper about our familial history for my biological anthropology class,” Kit went on.
“Fascinating,” said Elizabeth. “I expect not many people could trace their lineage all the way back to Charlemagne!” Kit felt an enormous satisfaction that her mother still did not see what she was walking into.
“Yes,” said Kit. She sat up a little straighter. Good posture was a key to delivering effective communication. “But my professor is also very interested in narrative anthropology, and how certain facts can get lost over time as humans pass down stories.”
“So, like telephone?” Henry chimed in.
“Essentially,” said Kit. “He believes most people don’t know where their people really came from, because the information’s been lost if you go back more than three generations.” She took another sip of water, allowing the effervescence to dance on her tongue while she pulled the lynchpin from the truth bomb. “So, to test his theory, he had everyone take a DNA test to see if our inherited stories matched our genetic history.”
The effect was immediate. Instead of lifting her wine glass elegantly to her pursed lips, Elizabeth fumbled with the stem. Bordeaux seeped across the starched white tablecloth. In the flurry of activity to administer club soda and sop up the mess, Kit calmly held her mother’s gaze.
“And?” said Charlie, who did not see that the spilled wine amounted to a sea change.
“And,” said Kit, “I’m not related to Charlemagne.”
