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
Since 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
“You 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?? Di
d 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.
“Not once in the weeks we been together do you ever talk about introducing me to anyone. Not once do you even talk about your family and friends to me. Now … I don’t know if this is about you being embarrassed of me or what, but I want to know what the problem is.”
My eyes were about to pop out of their sockets. I couldn’t help it; I started to laugh. “Me embarrassed of you?”
“What’s so goddamn funny?” he asked, staring me down. He was pissed.
“I’m sorry—I just … The thought of me being embarrassed of you is just so ridiculous that I just couldn’t even believe you could think that.”
“What am I supposed to think?” he asked, wiping the sweat from his brow.
I looked down the trail, at another couple jogging together—were Reggie and I a couple? They looked forty-ish and exhausted. Perhaps they had had this conversation years ago and had dealt with it so appropriately that they could now enjoy long runs together on Sunday morning without incident. But there was Reggie, in front of me, tired and sweaty. I had to answer him. I had to say something. “I didn’t want to bring this up, but it’s … my dad.” I bit my lower lip. Why was lying to him so easy? “He kind of freaks out about me and guys. I just … haven’t wanted to deal with it.”
Reggie studied me, deciding whether or not to believe me. Deciding whether or not I was worth his time. “Is that the truth, Alex?” he asked. He stepped closer. “Because sometimes I get the feeling that you’re not telling me the whole truth.”
I hiccupped and stepped away from him. He was black and my family was white; he wouldn’t want me if he saw how much of that whiteness—the speech, the walk, the attitude—had become ingrained in me. Just seeing me alone like this, without them to compare me to, he could really believe that I was “my own person,” as he often told me. But stacking me up against my family, he would come to quite a different conclusion.
“It’s the truth,” I said softly.
Reggie took a long sip from his water bottle and then sighed. He stared at a birch tree beside us, thinking. I hiccupped again, and finally he said, “Okay. We can work around that.”
I nodded, and then we started running again, in silence. But my mind was screaming in my skull: You’re just like him. A fucking liar.
• • •
“So why did they adopt you?” Reggie asked the next night as he stirred vegetables in a wok. His mom had worked nights since he was little, so Reggie was quite used to cooking himself dinner. And I had gotten quite used to lying to my parents every time I saw Reggie. I wondered if Jason noticed I was doing stuff with “friends” a lot more. “I don’t get it—they were able to have Jason and Kit.”
I swallowed the lump in my throat. “They couldn’t get pregnant, so they adopted me. Then, right after all the papers went through, my mom got pregnant with Jason. He was a minor miracle, apparently, like Kit.”
“For real?” Reggie asked, turning down the heat. “That’s some shit.”
I tapped my heels against the wooden stool I was perched on. “My mom used to say that she was always scared to meet with the people from the adoption agency right before they got me, because she was worried they wouldn’t give me to them if they knew she was pregnant.” It was weird saying all this stuff out loud. They were stories I had known since I was little, but I had never told them to anyone.
Reggie shook his head. “They’d do that? They’d give you to someone else?”
I shrugged. “Probably not. My mom is prone to exaggeration.” Reggie’s dog nudged my knee. I bent down to pet him, trying to think of something else to talk about. But Reggie beat me to it.
“Must be strange being the only black person in the family,” he said.
There it was again, that word black. But it sounded so different coming out of Reggie’s mouth than Dad’s. When he said it, it was like he meant we were part of one big family—and a strong one, too.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s … weird.” I felt a strange sense of loneliness wash over me.
Reggie pushed the vegetables onto the steaming rice in front of him. “This stuff’s ready. Want to help me bring it to the table?”
“Yeah,” I said, and walked toward him. I grabbed the plates, and suddenly his arms were around me and he was kissing my neck. His lips felt soft on my skin—not at all how I had imagined. The plates were wobbling in my hands. I put them down. He turned me around and kissed my chin, my nose, my forehead, and finally my lips.
“The fine Ms. Kirtridge,” he said, pulling away from me. “Been wanting to do that all day.”
Once again, I resisted the urge to laugh. “Really?” I asked, trying to savor the sensation of my first kiss. I wanted my lips to remember.
He looked at me incredulously. “You don’t know?”
I looked down at the floor.
Reggie ran his fingers down my right arm, making my hair stand up. This was the arm that fielded catches, that swung the bat with power and precision. “Fine is definitely the word. And smart, and a kick-ass ball player,” he said in my ear. “Naw, you ain’t like them other girls.”
I laughed and leaned into him, the first boy I had touched, the first black person who had wanted me. He held me in a hug like that for a few minutes, while our food got cold. I thought about my birth father then and wondered if he had held my mother this way, if they had talked about having me, or if it had just happened.
Reggie’s grandmom was at her weekly card game, but his mother came home not long after that, so things didn’t progress much beyond that kiss. But not because I wasn’t interested.
“Girl, you reaping the benefits of my home-training now,” Mrs. Carter said to me, as she picked up a sautéed vegetable from Reggie’s overflowing wok. “You know how many men I woulda shacked up with if they just knew how to cook some damn rice?”
She and Reggie cracked up. It was cool looking at each of them, seeing the obvious closeness and affection, the way they just “got” each other. And the language they used with each other made me feel a comfortable kind of warm, but also nervous, like I would soon be asked to participate in something I admired but could not produce. Black English, I was just begi
nning to see, often had that effect on me. It was beautiful, but so foreign, and a liability around black people. Once it began, I became filled with fear that it would reveal the whiteness that was not just on the outside.
“Ma, stop playin’,” said Reggie. “Dad knew how to cook rice, and some legendary barbecue, greens—the whole nine. But it still didn’t stop you from throwing his ass out on the doorstep.”
I could not imagine anyone in my family swearing at the dinner table, much less talking about a family breakup in this way. Under the table, I squeezed my fingers together and felt the usual hiccups forming in my windpipe.
Mrs. Carter snorted. “No, you right. You right,” she said, waving a half-eaten carrot slice at Reggie. “Niggers don’t know how to act right, they get they ass on the curb. No matter how good they greens is.”
My fork fell on the table, and the sound made me jump. If I was embarrassed at my reaction, I need not have worried because the two of them completely collapsed in laughter after this outburst, snorting and falling over each other on the table. I was the last thing on their minds. “I have to use the bathroom,” I said, almost whispered really, as I stood up.
They nodded, and Mrs. Carter pointed behind me. “Down the hall to the right, honey.”
I pushed out my seat too fast, and almost ran away from the table. The house was a modest ranch with what looked like two bedrooms. Reggie’s bedroom was about the size of the walk-in closet in my parents’ master bedroom, and his door was bent at an odd angle, and wouldn’t really shut. Since there was only one other room, Reggie’s mom and grandmom must have shared it. I grimaced a little, thinking of being a grown, professional, and self-possessed woman like his mother and having to share such a small, personal space with your mother. I wondered how they did it—not like they had much of a choice. With Reggie’s dad gone, his mom had to be the only breadwinner in the family. I was sure that this house in this run-down neighborhood was what they could afford. And it was funny because I would have been embarrassed of the peeling paint on the walls, the dirty vinyl flooring that obviously hadn’t been changed in years, the pockmarked and broken molding everywhere. But they didn’t seem to notice it, or maybe just didn’t care. This was a world apart from my house, where the whole house had to be cleaned, everything in its proper place and spotless before any “outsiders” (and for my parents this included friends and even extended family) could be let in.
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