The Other Child

I HAD ALREADY finished my studies when I found out about my father’s other child, the boy. I hadn’t known my father was dying, or that he had another family, though to say another seems strange—I had never thought of him and my mother and me as a family, nor had I ever heard anyone call us that, though I suppose that’s what we were. My father sent someone looking for me with a message to visit him at the hospital, and that’s where I met the boy and his mother; we shook hands and she tried to smile and to say polite things while I watched the three of them, looking at each of their faces in turn, starting with her, then the boy, who waited quietly at her side, and lastly my father in his bed, the blanket pulled up to his chin, his eyes wide and unblinking. I remember my glasses fogging again and again, and each time I took them off to clean them on my sweater the three people in front of me lost their distinction, blurred into the wallpaper and the bedspread.

Later the woman called me, before the telephone stopped working, and she told me where she and the boy lived and when the funeral would be, though I imagine she knew I wouldn’t go. I waited a few weeks and then went to her house. It was cold, leaves were whipping about and gathering in wet clumps on the curb. She came to the door almost as soon as I knocked.