See No Color

by Shannon Gibney

  “Alex! Alex!” a voice said anxiously in my ear. It was Hank Aaron, my true father. It was my birth father, Keith.

  “Is she all right?” said another voice.

  A hand on my face. Someone pouring water on my forehead.

  “Oh, God. Oh, God.” That was Jason. That was my brother. I opened my eyes.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  His eyes were deep with worry, his skin almost ghostly. He took my hand.

  “Are you all right?” said Dad. He was crouched down beside me. “Can you see okay?”

  I concentrated on the endless blades of grass that surrounded us. “I can see fine.” I sat up slowly and rubbed my head. “What happened?”

  “It looked like you fainted,” said Jason. “You just fell.”

  I frowned. I didn’t believe him. I pushed my palms into the grass and shoved myself up to my feet.

  “Whoa!” said Dad. “Stay put. They’re bringing a stretcher.”

  I laughed, already starting toward my glove, about a foot away in the grass. “I’m fine, Dad.”

  Dad and Jason exchanged glances.

  “Alex,” Dad said. “I—I’m sorry, but you’re done for the day.” There was no mistaking the regret in his voice. It made me angry.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  He sighed. He looked at the ground, then back up at me. “Alex, you fainted. You’re going to go drink some water, and then you’re done for the day.”

  I winced at the finality of his tone. There would be no amazing plays made today; I would end the game having barely played two minutes of it. I wouldn’t even appear on the score card. I picked up my mitt and began to walk silently back to the dugout. All the guys on the field clapped as I passed them. I wanted to flip them off.

  Walking beside me, Dad said, “You definitely need to rethink that whole diet you’re on. I think it’s doing you more harm than good.”

  • • •

  I lay in bed that night, dressed in tattered shorts and an old state champs T-shirt. Dad and I hadn’t spoken since I left the field. Jason had tried to strike up a conversation a couple times, but eventually he let me disappear, too.

  “It’s going to be okay, honey,” Mom had told me a few minutes after I got in bed. She rubbed my back like she always did when I was younger, to calm me. “I’m sure your dad has a plan.”

  Mom had patted me on the forehead, and then left me there in the darkness of my room, shadows looming large in corners, lights from the neighborhood bouncing off the walls. The rough sheets against my skin reassured me a little, let me know that I was still alive, that I was still here, barely.

  Our house was big, but it was old, with wooden floors and echoing plaster walls. If the house was quiet, I could often hear conversations—even hushed ones—in the living room. And the house was definitely quiet tonight.

  “You knew that this day would come,” I heard Mom say.

  I stepped out of bed, tiptoeing toward the doorway.

  “We just … We need to wait and see. She might still pull out of it,” Dad said.

  I disappeared into the dark hallway and crept toward the railing so I could hear better.

  “Terry … We just all need to be prepared. Because she might not.”

  My stomach sank.

  Dad’s voice rose. “I’ve always been prepared. Softball is always an option.”

  I put my hand over my mouth to stifle a gasp.

  “You just have to keep your ace in the hole as long as you can possibly play it.”

  “You turned your ace in a long time ago, and you’ve made other things work. You thought you could play forever, too.” Mom sighed. “She’s going through so much right now, I guess we really shouldn’t be surprised.”

  “You hold out as long as you can and then you have no choice. But Alex is different. She never gives in.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  No one talked about my fainting spell, but I saw them watching me more carefully now than ever before. If I tripped, there was always an arm to catch me. If I wiped the sweat off my brow, at least two people handed me water bottles. I tried to smile about it all, but what I really felt like doing was smacking all the hands, all the help, away.

  After practice two days after I fainted, I came out of the locker room wearing my warm-up gear, my sports bag slung over one shoulder, to find Dad huddled with Kyle, who played some right field and backed up Jason at first. Dad was waving his hands around, pointing alternately to Kyle and then to right, left, and center fields. Kyle kept on glancing at the field, looking back at Dad attentively, and then nodding. I couldn’t hear anything, but I knew exactly what he was telling him—your job as center fielder is to read the whole field, not just field the center. He had told me so many times. I turned around and walked around the corner, out of sight. Dad was doing the smart thing, I knew, by getting Kyle ready. There are teams that win and then there are individuals. But in my game, you have to be both.

  My disappearance from the starting nine was about to be permanent.

  • • •

  At least there was one thing that I was still good at—running distance; my hips hadn’t thrown that off. After I got through the pain of the first five or ten minutes and acclimated my body to what it felt like to work that hard, it was almost like I was in another world. Time slowed down, and everything around me blurred into one big backdrop. Even my thoughts slowed down. Breathe. Turn right. Breathe. Just a little further. My stomach tightened. Breathe. You can do this. I was strong while I was running because there was never anything else to conquer but the next step.

  Which was why I wasn’t so surprised to find myself in front of Reggie’s house one evening a couple of days after I’d seen Dad with Kyle. All I was doing was running; not thinking, just moving, but somehow I ended up at 5498 Juniper Lane. His house wasn’t close to mine—a little over six miles away, so in some part of my brain I must have been thinking about going there all along.

  I paced in front of the house for a good three minutes, breathing heavily, trying to decide what to do. I was drenched in sweat, and my hair was frizzing like it always did when I pulled it back into a tight ponytail for a workout. It wasn’t exactly the look I wanted to present to Reggie. I bit off a hangnail. Still, I wanted to see him. He’d been busy with his job stocking products at Home Depot, and I’d been all baseball, so our relationship, whatever it was, had dwindled to texts in the last week.

  I stomped up the stairs to the door and willed myself to knock. I didn’t even have time to resent my decision when the door flew open and an elderly black woman half my size, half hunched over, and dressed in a bright pink dress and low white heels stood before me. She had short, waxy, straightened hair that didn’t entirely cover her head, and what looked like fake pearl earrings clipped on. This had to be Reggie’s grandma. I was just working on a smile when she asked if she could help me. I smelled meat cooking—pork, I guessed—and also fried potatoes. My stomach rumbled, and I felt air beginning to stick in my windpipe, the telltale signs of the hiccups that would follow. I blinked. The woman smiled. “You okay?” she asked. I tried to smile and nodded, but still no sound came out.

  “Grandmom, who’s that?” I heard from behind her. Then footsteps, then Reggie’s face—long, feminine eyelashes and baby cheeks. “Alex,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I coughed out. The last time we had spoken was a few days before. I’d had to get off the phone for dinner and told him I would call him back but never did. Just a few texts. Nothing special.

  “How’d…” He looked behind me, scanning for a car, I guess. “You bike?”

  I shook my head. “Ran.”

  “Right,” said Reggie, taking in my slightly matted hair and glistening arms and legs.

  Across the street, the kids were barking out orders to each other about some kind of tag game they were playing. A TV screen blared in the room to the right of where Reggie and his grandma stood. It sounded like American Idol.

  “I’m Reb
ecca,” the woman said suddenly, extending her hand. “Reggie’s grandmom. You must be his girl.”

  He mentioned me to his grandma, even? I felt my face grow hot.

  “Momma, who’s at the door?” Mrs. Carter called from the kitchen.

  “It’s just Alex, Ma,” Reggie called back.

  “Oh, Alex! Haven’t seen that girl in a minute. Tell her to come in and have some dinner with us.”

  I stepped backward, almost tipping on the edge of the step. “Oh no,” I said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. I just was over here and I thought…”

  “Girl, come on in and eat some food with us already. Everything’s getting cold,” said Reggie’s grandma. Then she leaned into me, screwing her face into a tight little ball.

  I tried to smile but could feel it wasn’t coming. “Oh no, I couldn’t…” I stammered. Even though I had eaten with Reggie plenty of times, and that one time with his mom, too, there was something about this old woman that made me uneasy. Her eyes were not large, but they were bright like Reggie’s and Mrs. Carter’s, and they looked much more penetrating. Like they had seen plenty in their time, and would have no problem seeing through me. She’ll see it, and know it. The whiteness.

  Reggie’s grandma frowned then, sensing my discomfort I think, and crossed her arms across her chest. “If you ain’t hungry, you should know better than to disturb folks at this hour. Plain as day that it’s dinnertime and folks is eating.” She turned around and started shuffling back to the kitchen, mumbling the whole time.

  I hiccupped, and before I knew it, tears came to my eyes. Back home, Dad and Mom and Jason and Kit were sitting down to dinner themselves. They would be wondering why my run was taking so long, and they would save me a plate. Even though they knew less about me every day, what they knew was still enough most of the time. And no one, none of them, would ever try to make me cry.

  “Sorry,” I said. Then I turned and ran down the stairs before Reggie or anyone else could see any of the tears fall. There was nothing I hated more than crying in public.

  But he ran after me. I heard him shout to his mom that he would be right back, and then the door slam behind him. “Alex!” he yelled, but my legs were moving again and I didn’t want them to stop. I brought my arms up and started pumping, and I felt like I was flying, like no one and nothing could stop me from just moving. And then he got a hold of my arm.

  “Alex, wait!” he said again, and I snapped back into him. “What…” he said, calmer now. “What’s going on?”

  I didn’t want to look up. I didn’t want him to see. I hiccupped. The kids across the street were finally beginning their tag game, screaming and laughing at each other.

  Reggie leaned down and tried to see my face, but I turned away.

  He sighed. “You’re not mad at my grandmom, are you? She’s just … on a different level than the rest of us. She’s too old to put up with being polite now. Truth be told, I hear she wasn’t that keen on the whole concept back in the day, anyway. But she didn’t mean anything by what she said to you, I hope you know. She really just wanted you to come in and break bread with us, you know?”

  There was a fly buzzing around my head and I wanted to smack it, but it was moving too fast.

  “Alex?” he asked, and I looked up, finally. His eyelashes were even longer up close. And there was this one line across his forehead that was getting deeper with each moment I didn’t respond. So I decided to say something—anything.

  “There is no way I can keep on playing baseball. And I don’t know what else to do.” The tears were blinding my vision, they were coming so fast. Reggie put his arm around me and squeezed my shoulders. I just wanted to leave, but at the same time, I couldn’t stop talking. “You’re the only person I even talk to who’s black, and I’m black. Don’t you think that’s a little fucked up?” I said, wiping away the tears with the back of my hand.

  His brow furrowed.

  The words were pouring out; I didn’t know where they were coming from. “My parents can’t even admit that I’m black anyway. My dad’s like, ‘Oh, she’s just half black.’ Such a crock of shit.” I was walking faster by the minute, the intensity of my steps scaring the kids and adults who passed us onto the street or yard. We were already almost to the end of his block.

  “But aren’t you?” Reggie asked.

  I peered at him. He was asking for real. “Aren’t I what?”

  “Aren’t you half black?”

  I laughed. “Yeah. So?”

  He shrugged. “So, maybe it’s like he’s just stating it like it’s a fact or something. You know, because he doesn’t know what else to do.”

  I suddenly found myself shouting at him. “He’s my fucking father and he doesn’t know what to do with me?”

  Reggie held up his hands. “Whoa, whoa.”

  A middle-aged woman walking her poodle across the street glared at me. I bet she had known Reggie since he was three or something.

  Breathe in. Breathe out. I closed my eyes. “You don’t know what it’s like to wake up every morning and not know if your skin is really your skin. You don’t know how it feels to look like a whole group of people who you’ve never even fucking spoken to, much less feel a part of. You don’t go to West High, you don’t even hear half the stuff…” I was walking away from him, slowly, and the tears were falling again, hot on my cheeks, hot in my throat and mouth. I didn’t even try to brush them away this time. “Yes, I’m a white black girl, okay? Are you happy?” I squeezed my eyes closed, willing all of it, everything I had said and not said, everything that I wanted to be, to go away. This is all there is. I inhaled, slowly, and suddenly there were arms around me.

  He didn’t say anything; he just held me while I cried. It seemed like all the water I had in my body was coming out of my eyes—I cried for a good fifteen minutes. When I felt completely dry and almost empty inside, I wiped my face clean. He took my hand and led me back to his house, around the front to the back door, which he opened slowly and carefully, gesturing for me to come inside.

  I hesitated. “They’re not here,” he said, flipping on a hall light. “They go out and play Spades once a week. I bet they took dinner with them to share with their girls.”

  I followed him to his bedroom, where he sat me down on his bed, took off my shoes, and laid me down on top of the covers. Then he turned out the lights and stretched out beside me. I wanted to thank him, because I felt my brain finally slowing down, but I was suddenly too tired to speak.

  His hands rested on my side for at least an hour. We lay on our hips in an “S” shape, his chest pressing into my back. The clock ticked on, and someone’s radio was blasting out on the street. I exhaled deeply when he pushed his hand up under my shirt and onto the small of my back. I had been drifting in and out of sleep, surprised by how comfortable his body felt around me, how easy it was to be with him like this. It was cold in his house—his mother and grandmother liked to pump the air-conditioning in the summer, he said, especially since the heat was hard on his grandmother. So I needed his warmth to heat me.

  But when he put his palm on my skin, and then slowly stretched out his fingers, I felt another kind of heat growing in my stomach. He ran his fingers up and down my spine and I shivered.

  “You okay?” he whispered in my ear, and I nodded, closing my eyes.

  He kissed the nob on the back of my neck, which stuck out so far because I was so skinny. He kissed it so sweetly that I shivered again and turned over to face him.

  “What’s happening?” I asked.

  He looked at me and laughed.

  I studied his face to see if I noticed anything new there, anything I hadn’t seen before. The only thing I could find were the pores on his nose—I could see each one. I leaned over and kissed them.

  I listened to the house. The air conditioner was laboring in the next room and a branch tapped at the windowpane. Someone had finally turned the radio off outside. I couldn’t hear any other human sounds, except for us, which calm
ed me.

  He kissed me. This time on the lips. They felt warmer than the rest of him, and I leaned into him. We opened our lips. The heat came again, but this time it had pushed itself down further.

  He pressed his body against me, and I felt something stiff push into me. I wanted to laugh.

  He pulled back. “What’s funny?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  He looked at me incredulously.

  “I’m just…” I struggled for the right word. “Nervous.” I stroked his arm, and he leaned back on it.

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s cool.” He moved away from me a little, and I immediately felt cold all over again.

  I burrowed my head into his chest. “No, that’s not what I mean.”

  He stroked my head.

  I stared at him. He just looked like he was enjoying touching me, being here, that whatever happened was enough. That made me want to do more with him.

  “I want you to touch me,” I said.

  He smiled and leaned over to kiss the top of my head.

  I kissed him on the lips and then slowly pushed my tongue into his mouth. Before I knew what I was doing, my hands were pushing up his shirt. I heard myself moan and blushed. “You are so beautiful,” I whispered, and I meant it. His skin was so soft, and my fingertips tripped on the muscles of his torso. I suddenly knew that I had wanted to be with him like this from the moment that we first sat down at the pizzeria. That terrible conversation. Even then, I’d wanted this.

  Reggie’s hand was traveling back up my back, pushing my sports bra up, over my head.

  My breath caught.

  He brought his hand back down, further, into my running shorts. “Your ass is just tremendous,” he said.