See No Color (9 page)

I turned the words over in my mind; I could not figure out what they meant. I turned to face him.

“Those other people gave you up years ago. Mom and Dad wanted you, and that's the end of it.” He took the jar of green beans from me, but his eyes were hard and held my gaze. “At least, that's how I see it.”

I hiccupped and desperately searched my mind for something to say and found nothing.

Jason turned toward me, so that I had to step back. “I don't know why you had to go and dig up those letters. You got Mom sad all the time, and Dad completely scattered.” He placed the beans in the center of the shelves.

I broke away from his face, which was not the same face that had run cones and thrown long toss in practice with me for years, and looked down at my right hand. It was burnt deep brown by the May sun—my throwing hand. The part of me that knew how to think better than my brain most the time. The part of me that mattered most. That hand held no answer for this.

“I wish you had never found them,” he said angrily.

“Why?” I said, finally finding my voice. “So you and Dad and Mom would feel better?”

Jason stepped back, and I felt like I could breathe again. “Alex, this isn't about anyone feeling better. It's about reality. I've never seen you as black and neither has Mom or Dad or Kit, okay?”

I had heard those same words come out of Mom and Dad's mouths so many times before, but hearing it from Jason for the first time made my knees shake. For some reason, a tidal wave was building in my stomach and crashing in my ears. It felt like my body was on the verge of exploding in on itself, of disappearing under the weight of all that people didn't think of me as. It was too much. I thrust my index finger in his face, and he looked scared of me, really scared, for the first time in years. It felt good to see him flinch. “You have no idea how I'm seen, got it?”

Before I was conscious of what I was doing, my throwing hand swung at him, making contact with his jaw. I yelped in pain as I heard my knuckles crack against bone. He recovered quickly, grabbed my wrists, and ran me back against the wall, pinning my arms against the brick wall. The wind knocked out of me, I felt my hand scrape against the sharp limestone. I tried to push back, managing to get my bleeding right arm away from the wall by a few inches, but it was useless—he really was stronger than me now. His arms strained against his T-shirt, and he was half-grinning as he began to twist my right arm. Yes, he was coming at me hard, and all I could manage at the moment was just to take it, to bite back the cry growing in my throat.
Come on. Come on!
my brain screamed, the same mantra I said when a ball was headed my way during a game and I needed that highest level of concentration. But there was no denying that I already
was
on that level, and all I could manage was to release the growling howl in the back of my throat, as a bolt of red energy ran up my arm. I didn't even recognize the sound as it came out of me.

Then it was like Jason woke up or something. His eyes opened wide, and he let go of me. I slid down the wall to the ground, still howling, but dully.

Even though my hand and arm throbbed, it felt good to lie on the dark, wet floor, to let the cool seep into my bones and calm them. I held onto my knees and tried to make myself as small as possible. Eventually, the pain dulled, and I found I could speak again. “I said I wouldn't touch those letters again,” I said quietly.

Jason had moved to the other side of the room by that time and was sitting on the stone steps, holding his head in his hands. He lifted it up for a moment and squinted at me. “What?”

I sat up and touched my fist with my left hand. It was swollen and bleeding lightly, but it was nothing serious. “I don't want to know what my birth father wrote,” I said. “Mom and Dad were right. I know I'm not ready.” I pushed myself up from the floor a bit unsteadily.
I would like to meet you someday. I am your father.

Jason came to my side and braced my side with his own weight. “I'm sorry. You know I didn't mean to do that.”

I nodded. “I know.” And I
did
know. I knew he was my brother, and I knew with a sudden stab of sadness that we would never be as close as we had been in the past. We headed toward the stairs, taking very slow, very tiny steps together.

“Don't tell Mom,” we both said at the same time. Then we laughed, a strained sort of laughter. We took the first step carefully, negotiating both weight and space. I told him that I had it after that one and made it up the steps just fine on my own. When we got to the top, we both had our usual pleasant looks plastered across our faces. No one would be able to tell that nothing was the same.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

S
ince Jason and I never spoke of the incident in the cellar again, it was almost like it hadn't even happened. Almost, but definitely not exactly. My throwing arm and hand had completely healed two weeks later, the body forgetting almost as fast as the mind, moving on to new concerns. Which was how I could find myself completely engrossed at Foot Locker not long after that in search of new cleats. My screw-ins were almost completely worn down, and in the game that week I'd failed to track down a fly ball because I'd slipped on my first step.

Buying the shoes on my own was in itself a small act of defiance—a crack in the Kirtridge family monolith that only one of us could notice. First, Dad was an absolute Nike man (he'd been close to a small endorsement deal when the collision happened). Second, buying equipment without his oversight was just not done.

But I knew how to read shoe reviews as well as he did and Nike cleats had always been a little too wide for me anyway.

I turned over a pair of Mizuno 9-Spikes in my hands. I knew now that Mizunos ran narrow and so I only needed to find a salesperson to see if they also came in my size and in red.

“Alex?” A voice said in back of me. In an instant, I recognized it. I felt my face color, and I whipped around.
Reggie
.

He was standing right there, a big grin on his face. His forehead was broader than I remembered; his eyes kinder.

“Yeah, yes,” I stammered. “Nice to see you again.”
Girl, you can play some ball.
It was late May now, two months since that at bat. One month since we had battled, plate to mound, and I had won. And two months since he had caught me lying about my family.

“How you doing?” he said.

I must have looked completely bewildered because he went on. “It's Reggie,” he said. “Reggie Carter.”

I looked up at him sharply. “I know,” I said. “I remember you. The killer fastball. Not something I could forget too easily.”

He grinned and crossed his arms in front of him. His whole body lit up when he smiled—like he was a completely different person, almost. “Naw, I guess not,” he said. Little crinkles formed around his eyes.

I tried to smile.

“No one forgets you neither, do they, Ms. Kirtridge?” he said, peering at me carefully. “You and your brother and your father.”

I felt the semblance of a smile evaporate. He was testing me, maybe trying to see how far he could push me before I broke down and unraveled the fake story I had told him before.

“Yeah,” I said, putting the shoe back on the wall.
He's on to you. You unblack black girl.
I had already turned and was halfway out of the store when he caught up to me.

“Hey, can't I—can I walk you to your car?” He looked genuinely concerned, and I wondered if I had misread him.

I looked left and right. There was a short white lady shopping for soccer shorts with her impatient grade-school son. The sales girl was studying her nails behind the cash register. No one was watching, but I still felt naked and exposed. He was too near me and I could smell him, could almost recognize the soap he used, and it clouded my thoughts and even stifled my fear for an instant and I said, somehow, yes, and he smiled again and there was nothing else to do but fall in beside him as we walked through the mall and out to my car. By the time we got there, I felt a little grateful that I'd had to park so far from the entrance. True, I'd have to tough out another game in my old Nikes, but the monolith was even more cracked.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“Y
ou seem different,” Kit said, while we washed the dishes. It was my turn to clean the pots and pans for the week, but she had magically appeared beside me in the kitchen, brandishing a steel wool scrubber when I was halfway through.

I looked at her sideways. “Different like how?”

She laughed. “I don't know.
Different
. Happier.”

I felt my face color, and I focused on scraping charred bacon grease from the bottom of the frying pan.
There is no way I'm telling you. You don't have access to every-damn-thing.

“Happy is good, though,” she said, throwing some suds at my eye.

• • •

In truth, there wasn't much to tell that Kit would have cared about. Reggie and I had talked mainly about baseball during the five minutes it took to walk to my car and the ten minutes we spent sitting on my hood before I finally opened my door and got in. He seemed to sense I was most comfortable when things were between the foul lines.

I met Reggie again the next week to see a movie, and three days later, we met at his favorite Japanese restaurant for tempura, which I had never tried.

“That ain't right,” he said, when he found that out. “What do you eat at your house, anyway? Oh yeah, you elite baseball heads probably eat no fried foods at all, huh?”

I shrugged. “French fries sometimes.”

He snickered. “Shit. Your dad counts them too, I bet.”

I had mentioned almost nothing about my family to him and hoped to keep it that way. We had already tacitly agreed to just drop the incident at the pizzeria; it was like we both viewed it as an anomaly—a hole I had mistakenly fallen into when I wasn't looking.

“So what's he like, your dad?” he asked, dipping fried shrimp into sauce. “He's like a legend in this town. Must be weird.”

“Not really,” I said. “He's just like everybody else. There's nothing to tell.”

Reggie bit off half of the shrimp. “For real?” he asked, peering at me incredulously.

“Yup,” I said. I chewed on some rice and tried to look as nonchalant as possible. I couldn't really believe I was eating dinner with a
black person
. And not just any black person, but
a hot black guy who might be interested in me
. What he wanted from me, however, I could not fathom. I had a theory that it had less to do with me and more to do with Dad.

Reggie shook his head. “You're a strange bird, Alex Kirtridge,” he said. “Definitely not like anybody else.”

I scanned his face, to see if he was making fun of me. Mirth certainly played at the edges of his mouth, but there was nothing malicious or mean there. It was more like he got a kick out of me. I wondered what he would say to any of his black friends about me, if he ever talked with them about it. Would he tell them I was mixed and laugh with them about how my hair was too frizzy?? Did he compare the way I said “No,” to the way they said, “Hell naw,” and conclude it was because I was too white?

• • •

A few days later, Reggie and I ran in Bayard Park and then got breakfast at Bruegger's Bagels. Running was training for baseball, so technically this too was between the foul lines. These were the spaces where I always felt most comfortable, most in my own skin. But then Reggie asked when he could meet my family.

“My family?” I asked as we ran through a small stand of trees. Maybe it was Dad that he really wanted to get to know. That had happened to me before, but it had been years.

“Yeah, you know—your mom, dad, Jason and your sister,” said Reggie. “What's her name again?”

“Kit,” I said, pumping my arms harder.

“Yeah,” he said. “All of them. It would be great to meet them. My mom always says you don't really know a person till you meet their family.”

I could see a trickle of sweat slowly making its way down his forehead.

Reggie's mother, a paralegal at the district attorney's office, had taken us to lunch the week before. Not once during the entire conversation did she say anything that let me know why she thought Reggie was hanging out with me. Were we friends? Something more?

“Let me think about it,” I said. I hoped he would see I was uncomfortable with the idea and then just drop it. But that wasn't what happened at all.

We were half a mile from the end of the trail, but Reggie just stopped right there. “I don't feel like running anymore. Got things to do at home.” His tone was clipped and agitated.

He was about to turn around when I grabbed his arm. “Reg—what's wrong?” I could feel the angry bulge in his bicep.

When he faced me, his beautiful, kind eyes flashed with anger—something I'd never seen before.