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 don’t know if you got the other letters I sent, so I’m just gonna keep on writing.
I’m not good at writing letters, I’m actually not any good at writing, but I want to write to you. I know it’s not allowed, there are rules and everything, and that there are good reasons for the rules, but there are some things I just need to say.
I would like to meet you someday. I am your father. There was a lot of things that could have been better between your mother and I. I would have liked the chance to know you.
I seen the newspapers about your adopted father and your family. You all can really play baseball, I hear! I think that is wonderful. That is how I found you. You weren’t too hard to find actually, it was almost like you were waiting for me to find you. It is a small world.
Did you know I don’t even live too far away? Just in Detroit. Just a seven hour drive.
You and your parents don’t need to worry about me showing up at your house one day, though—I would never do that. I just want to talk to you, even just once. But if I have to wait until you’re grown, I can do that, too. It’s just that I have already waited a lot of years.
Please write if you have the chance.
Love, your father,
Keith
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.
Family and Child Services
Suite 326, 500 Main St.
Milwaukee, WI 53201
Mr. and Mrs. Terrence Kirtridge
15 Glendale
Milwaukee, WI 53204
February 17, 1999
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Kirtridge:
We are happy to inform you that your application to adopt a child with “special needs” through our agency has been formally accepted. We will do our utmost to place a child in your home as soon as possible.
In the meantime, if you have questions or concerns, please feel free to contact our office.
Sincerely,
Francis Hayes, ACSW
Director
ADOPTION FEES
Adoption fees will be based on our actual cost for providing the service as explained in the group meeting you attended. Actual cost of service per placement in 1997 was 3,000.00.
Fees will normally be paid within the calendar year that the child is placed.
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.
Dear Alexandra,
Did you get my other letter? How are you?
Dear Alexandra,
How has fall been treating you? The leaves are just starting to turn here. It is beautiful.
Dear Alexandra,
This will be my last letter to you in awhile. I think I sent enough. Hopefully some day, when you’re ready, we can see each other. I am thinking of you and wishing your family the best.
Love,
Keith
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?
Mom and Dad must have felt like I couldn’t handle that kind of information when I was so young. That must have been their reasoning for not showing me the letters. That’s nobody’s business but ours. I pulled my legs tighter to my chest so that I could barely feel their circulation. My throat tightened further. But they still should have told me. How could they have kept it from me?
I turned away from the filing cabinet and saw myself. The one break in the built-in bookshelves was for a floor-to-ceiling mirror. After a film session, Dad didn’t want us to have to go far to start applying corrections to our mechanics, so I’d spent hours in front of that mirror with a bat in my hand. I was a slightly open-stance hitter with fast hands and a swing that took a long, smooth cut through the zone. Maybe I wasn’t powerful, but I would make good contact. The mirror had shown me that thousands of times. Now, I saw a scared girl who may have been faking it on the field and in front of the plate the whole time. A girl who only got the long, hard hits, who caught all those rogue fly balls because she listened to her father, who was now a confirmed liar. And the worst part about this girl was that she was only realizing this now. Paddington’s thick, hot tongue licked my face clean. I hadn’t even heard him come into the room. He wagged his tail.
“Hi,” I said, and he wagged his tail more.
I scratched behind his ears, and he sat down lazily, eager to accommodate me. “Good boy,” I said, and then I pushed myself up, back onto my haunches. I gathered the letters together and stacked them up neatly in the folder, the way I had found them. If secrets were what this family kept, then I could keep my own. I stood up and dusted myself off. The folder should go back in the drab gray filing cabinet; no one except Kit needed to know I had seen it.
I spotted the family photo hanging on the downstairs wall and stood on tiptoe in order to inspect it. Jason was smiling brightly in the photo but a little too carefully, the checkered sweater vest Mom had picked out for him sagging over his trim adolescent torso. I stood beside him, a little bit behind him actually, my wild hair pulled back into a somewhat tame bun, a dowdy violet dress hiding most of me. I looked into my eyes, and they were carefree, without any hint that something was amiss. I was surprised to notice that I envied that girl, even though I didn’t want to be her now. To her right stood Kit, quietly clasping her hands, her mouth in a tight thin line, her eyes looking into the camera questioningly. Mom and Dad perched behind the three of us, Mom’s torso turned a bit to the right, and Dad’s facing the camera straight-on. Mom looked as happy as she always did, her right hand placed on Kit’s shoulder, probably at rest after stroking and fixing Kit’s long blonde hair. She could never do the same with my curls, which had a mind of their own, so by this time she hardly ever touched them anymore. Dad’s arms stretched wide around us all, and his face was just satisfied. That was the word that came to mind, and as it entered my consciousness and attached itself to Dad, so did a fierce anger that made me want to break the picture entirely. Instead I dug around in one of Dad’s desk drawers and found a Sharpie. I approached the photo gingerly this time, uncapping the marker and trying to imagine what my birth father might look like. When the marker touched the surface of the glass, I felt free for just a moment, drawing a figure slightly taller than Dad, standing right behind him. A shadow. I could see him, just barely, with curly hair, a mustache, and high, defined cheekbones. I stood back and stared for a moment. I could still wipe it away, but after a minute, I decided to leave the shadow there, for everyone to find it, and for no one, as well.
CHAPTER TEN
Mom has her, deep in the belly. Tables and chairs and ends of things come at Mom. She is too round. Her whole body pink when she gets up or down. Always saying, Terry, can you bring me an old washcloth? Terry, can you make me a thick vanilla shake with melon and cantaloupe? Dad running in the house, up the stairs, in the kitchen, to the store. I like to go with him to get things for my little baby sister who is coming.
Alex, I have to get something for Mom, he says, bending so that he is small like me. I don’t have time to play with you right now. I want to play Tonka trucks. Either that or Big Wheels.
I pull on the ends of his moustache until he takes my hands. This is a game we play. But I can help, I say. I can wet the washcloths; I can carry the melon.
Jason begins to cry because Dad won’t play. He’s acting like such a baby.
Terry, I’m so hot … she says from the couch. She is wearing a wavy white dress, the sound of the same words every day at the same time. She does not change, except for getting bigger and louder. Even with my sister in her, she is empty, and we can’t make her full.
Dad looks at her and then at Jason and me, sweating. Since our family is being made, we are starting to grow into people, and Dad is always tired. But also smiling. He presses my hands harder and whispers in my ear. Little Kirtridge, he says, I almost forgot that I do need your help at the supermarket. I need you to pick out the roundest, sweetest cantaloupe for your mother.
I clap my hands together and jump up. Dad stands up, looking for his wallet so we can go. His arm muscles are strong and bursting from his T-shirt. Baseball has made him this way. When he reads to me, I touch his arms. His muscles are the hills and valleys of his body.
Jason can help, too, I say, turning to him and grabbing his cheeks. Then I kiss Jason, wet and hard on the lips, and say, I love you. Jason starts to smile and Dad says, Well, all right then. Jason would be so sad without me.
When we are in the car, on our way to Kroger’s, I whisper to Jason, You love me best of all. Best of anyone. I’m your sister.
He is four and loves his own jokes. I’m your sister, he says, hitting his chest.
I laugh. No, no. Me, I say, pointing to my chest. Sister.
Dad looks back at us, from the front seat. But you’ll be getting another sister soon, he says. In two months.
Jason and I stare at each
other. I grab his fingers and he screams.
Dad frowns. Jason!
I let go of his fingers, and Jason closes his mouth and smiles.
What’s her name, Dad? I ask.
Your mother and I are still deciding between Danielle and Katherine. What do you guys think?
I want to think hard, so I put my head in my hands like Dad when there is a big thought in it. Katherine, I say. Katherine is better.
Our car comes into the parking lot. You think so?
I nod. Yes, I say. If I have a sister, she should be called Katherine.
Dad laughs, a laugh I do not like. Why do you say that?
I lean to him. Dad. Will Katherine be coming from the same place I came from?
I hold the story in my mind, the one that Mom tells me sometimes before bed, the one that Dad tells me more. A woman is going to have a baby, but she is poor and she is sad and she has no money to take care of the baby. She doesn’t know how she will feed it, buy it clothes, take it to the doctor. The father is also poor and does not know how to take care of the baby. He and the woman don’t love each other, so they can’t get married, which the baby will need to be taken care of properly. So, the woman decides to find a home for the baby where the parents can take good care of it, where they will love it as much as she and the father do. The baby is born in the hospital, and after it is born, the woman gives it to the couple. This is what happened to you. It makes you special because it means that we really wanted you, that we picked you out ourselves because you were so special.
More special than Jason? No, not more special than Jason. Equally special. How can we be equally special if he just came out of you and you picked me out? He didn’t just come out of us, we made him out of love. We made him together. But you didn’t make me together. No, your birth mother and father made you together. But they didn’t make me out of love. They made me out of something else. They did make you out of love. But sometimes love doesn’t last. Why did you pick me then? I told you. Because you’re special.
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