See No Color (5 page)

The only reason you say that race was not an issue is because you wish it was not. We all wish it was not. But it's a lie. I came from a country where race was not an issue; I did not think of myself as black and I only became black when I came to America.

I arched my back and stared up at the skylight. It was early evening, just before dusk, and the March sky was a cloudless blue, darkening slowly. I closed my eyes and let all the scenes from that day's game play across my eyelids: the shot out to center that should have been a home run but wasn't because I tracked it perfectly, jumped, and caught it; the line drive past second that I should have picked up fast; Jason's dismal at bats.

“Alex!”

I opened my eyes. The night was only a window above me; perhaps it didn't even exist on the other side.

“Alex!”

It sounded like Kit, but the water was so loud I couldn't tell for sure. I reached over and turned off the faucet. “I'm in here,” I said, which was our family's code for
Get lost
!

“Shh!” hissed the voice on the other side.

I rolled my eyes. “You're going to have to wait,” I said. “I can read to you later, but I just started soaking my—”

The door opened abruptly, and my wild-eyed sister appeared before me. She shut the door carefully behind her and stood there, clutching something in her right hand.

“What the hell?” I said, before I could help myself. I was sure I had locked the door. “Go bother Mom or something.” I tightened the suddenly too-small towel across my chest.

“Shh!” she said again.

I groaned, rubbing my forehead. “I'm just trying to soak my goddamn feet, and I want you
out
.
Now
.” I tried to make my voice as threatening as possible, but Kit just stepped closer.

“Here,” she said, thrusting a worn envelope toward me.

I peered at the gray paper incredulously. “What is that?”

She stared at me but did not move. “It's yours.”

I took in her faded overalls, her partially undone braids that almost hung to her shoulders. Who was this girl? Was she even still a girl, or had she grown up when I wasn't looking? I studied the envelope. It was addressed to me, but I didn't recognize the handwriting. There was no return address. I turned it over in my hands carefully, trying to weigh its import by its feel, its scent. It smelled old; that much was for sure.

“Where did you get this?” I asked her. She was my sister, but I didn't know what that meant anymore.

She pursed her lips and then crossed her arms on her chest. “It belongs to you, not to them,” she said. “They want you—well, both of us, really—to not know ourselves so that we'll think that we're them. But we're not them. We're
us
.”

I was getting more and more confused by the minute. “Look,” I said slowly. “I'm not sure what you're trying to do, but—” The envelope slipped out of my damp fingers.

“He's your father,” she blurted.
What if Alex's birth parents can teach her about black people, so maybe she wouldn't feel s
o …

I felt my breath catch in the pit of my stomach. In the warm, salty water, my toes wiggled. I looked above me, and the night seemed to expand into emptiness everywhere. I turned toward Kit. “What?” I could barely get the word out.

She pursed her lips again. “Read it. He sent it five years ago. When you were eleven. My age.”

I moved my legs out of the tub, onto the cold tile floor. I reached down and picked up the small, thin document again. This time, it felt delicate and tenuous between my fingers.

Kit opened the door and had almost slipped out again before I asked her where she had found it. “You know where,” she said quietly. And I saw the den, the books piled to the ceiling, the files and files neatly stacked in cabinets. The bathroom door closed. Kit was gone. And I was surprised to find that I wasn't even angry at her.

My feet, though, were still throbbing and blistered. Dead skin was coming off the side of my left foot from calluses. I shivered and tightened the towel around me. I turned the envelope over in my hands.

I knew this much already: I had been adopted from the state home when I was five months old. I weighed 15 pounds and was 26 inches long. Ninety-eighth percentile. When my mother first held me, she said that I squirmed out of her arms, uncomfortable with the proximity, the heat of touch.

There was an uneven tear at the top of the envelope, ripped diagonally downward. The envelope had been opened, and the letter it contained, folded into eight perfect squares, slid out easily. I unfolded the paper slowly, and when I began to read it, the wind was almost knocked out of me.

Dear Alexandra,

(Alexandra. They had given me the name because they said that it meant “Defender of man,” and also, “One who comes to save the warriors.” He and Mom would laugh, and say that even then, as a baby, they knew I would be fierce.)

I opened my mouth to say something, but no sound came out.
He sent it five years ago.

“I would like to meet you someday.”

“I just want to talk to you, even just once.”

“There was a lot of things that could have been better between your mother and I.”

I read the letter at least five more times in the antiseptic silence of the bathroom, while the bathtub faucet dripped behind me.

I had always known everything I needed to know about myself. Baseball player. Center fielder. .311/.403/.561. Honor Roll. 3.97. But now what had seemed like me felt insubstantial compared to what slid out of that envelope. To have the story, whatever story it was, whatever pieces were left out, to have all that laid out in front of me like this in imperfect, awkward cursive, and then to call it my father's story—what was I supposed to do with that? Reading it was like reading the newspaper or reading a novel; it almost had nothing to do with me at all. Almost.

I stood up suddenly and whipped the door open.

“Kit!” I screamed. I was aware that my voice sounded frantic in my ears, but when I didn't get any response, I screamed again. But there was no answer, none at all. The house was dead.

Mom was still at work at the Cultural Center, and Dad was driving Jason to a study session with some friends.
Yes, this is your family. This is where you live. You have a right to storm around this house in a towel, your hair becoming more of a disaster by the second.
I strode out into the hallway, walked to her room, and knocked on the door, which she always kept locked. But she was nowhere. Apparently, she had left immediately after her task had been completed.

It doesn't matter.
I knew where she had found it, even if I didn't know how she had gotten a hold of it before me, or why. And I also knew there were other letters. I threw on my robe and ran to the den.

Glossy, grinning photographs of us kids watched me as I sped downstairs. I winced and stepped into the freezing cold, air-conditioned room filled with books on the history of baseball, books by baseball greats, books on various aspects of technique, and then the shelves and shelves of DVDs of Dad's games when he was at Clemson, in the minors, and finally with the Brewers. And there were hard drives with my games, Jason's games, West High's games. The bookshelves were actually built into the walls and stretched almost to the ceiling. When we bought the house, Dad had made remodeling the basement into his “den” his first priority, particularly building the shelves. He liked to be surrounded by the game and his own history with it.

What I was looking for would not be on those shelves. Instead, I found the dull gray file cabinet. An afterthought Dad had picked up when he realized there were things that couldn't go on display.

I shivered, holding my elbows in my hands. I knew what I was doing. I strode over to the file cabinet and began rifling through the hundreds of files inside it, with titles like “Mortgage papers 1999,” “Health files—KIT,” “Health files—JASON,” “Car title,” “Insurance policies,” and “Taxes.” My fingers couldn't move fast enough, touching each file's label for a second, then flying on, trying to find the one that had to be there, the one I had been avoiding all my life without even knowing it. “Alex—ADOPTION.” My fingers stopped finally, pulling out the thick yellowing folder and studying it carefully once it was in my hands.

It was frayed at the edges, like someone had accidentally spilled some water on it and the years had done the rest. Its title was scrawled in light pink marker, the letters elegantly separated in my mother's tall, distinctive print. I sat down, or fell down on the floor, the tiles biting into my tailbone. I sighed; the folder had been here all along. I took a deep breath and opened it. A faded letter lay on top.

The paper shook in my right hand, and I gripped my wrist with my left hand to steady it. I was a child with “special needs”? What the hell did that mean? Had I been walking around for all these years with some hidden malady that my parents hadn't bothered to tell me about? And then there was the fact that I cost three thousand dollars. It was not a small amount of money back then, but it was also not a particularly large one, if what you got for it was a child. Of course, I knew, way back in my brain, that some kind of transaction had resulted in me becoming part of my family, but to have it laid out so bluntly in front of me made my stomach turn. At the end of the day, I was something that could be bought and sold, like soap in the supermarket. Like a baseball player on a rookie deal. I was a child, but I was also a product.

There were at least twenty envelopes stacked behind the paper. I picked up the first one, which read “Ms. Alexandra Kirtridge” across the front and had a post date of August 10, 2010. The handwriting matched that on the letter that Kit had given me. The letter slid out as easily as the first one had, its words as labored and sincere. He had sent me letters for three years; one every other month. They were all in the folder. Each one said that he thought about me every day and that he hoped I was doing well. He had started writing when I was eleven and had finally given up, it appeared, when I was fourteen. Either he guessed that my parents were hiding the letters from me, or he figured I wasn't interested in meeting him.

A hot tear from my eye blurred the carefully written cursive in the letter, and I threw the last letter to the floor. I pulled my knees to my chest and began rocking back and forth. My chest felt like it was full of fluid. Mucus gathered in my mouth and mingled with tears saturating my lips and I debated whether or not to spit all of it out onto the elegantly tiled floor. Instead I swallowed and then felt a wave of nausea wash over me. At 3:15 every afternoon, it was either me or Dad who walked out of our brightly lit foyer, onto the stone walkway lined by sunflowers and tulips that Mom diligently tended, and down to the white metal mailbox to get the mail. If I got it, I would sift through it—carefully if I was just relaxing in the house, hurriedly if I had other things to do—my attention singularly focused on anything baseball-related. It was true that I didn't always inspect every piece meticulously. But how could I have missed twenty letters from my birth father, even over a period of years?