Are You Sitting Down? (28 page)

The inside of the desk was filled with pockets and cu
b
bies of all shapes and sizes.
Some were open like an old post office
from the past, and some had doors with little grooves in the wood, instead of knobs, for your fingers to open them.
As a child, I envisioned a grand hotel for my dolls or a henhouse for chickens that laid
magic
eggs, but Dad never allowed me to play inside the desk.
I was only allowed to bake in it with him in the room.

I could feel him standing over me now, scolding me, as I pried the doors open to look inside the little spaces.
Most were empty.
One was filled with blank envelopes, another with pens and pencils.
Canceled checks, old receipts, and bills marked paid all had their own pockets.
They were the tho
u
sands of pieces of paper that blandly rule
d
our lives but also h
e
ld it t
o
gether.
I remember
ed
seeing Dad almost pull his hair out when he couldn’t find a statement or
specific paper
he was looking for, although now it looked like he had always kept things in specific order.

At the bottom, there was a long slender drawer with no notch to open it.
It could have been a secret drawer I would have ignored had it not been open just a bit now.
I found a ruler in with the pencils and wedged it into the crack to open the drawer all the way.
Inside, there was a single brown legal size file with a name written on it in large black block-style letters
:
HANNAH.
Something, or someone, told me not to pick up that file, but when ha
d
I ever listened?

I picked up the file and opened it.
A small Polaroid photo fell out and landed on the desktop.
It was of an infant child and almost looked like a photo taken in a hospital when the ne
w
born was just a few days old.
I did not remember this picture being taken, but I knew the baby in the photo was me.

The other contents of the file were a thin stack of papers held together by a paper clip.
Removing it revealed a clean white imprint of the clip underneath, indicating just how much the papers had yellowed over time.
I sifted through small print lines of legalities and agreement terms, anxious for any key words jumping out at me which would immediately tell me what this document was.
And there was just
such a
word.
One word.

Adoption.

I learned that Hannah’s parents were both deceased.
It seem
ed
they were victims of a brutal murder.
When no rel
a
tives came forward to claim the baby, Hannah was turned over to a Catholic
orphanage
in
Savannah
,
Georgia
.
Frank and Lorraine White adopted her three days later.
Baby Hannah’s last name was missing from any of the documentation, but there was a photocopy of a birth certificate showing her name was now Clare Marie White.
The lines for the mother and f
a
ther were filled in with Frank and
Lorraine
’s name.

My birth parents had been
completely
erased, and in some way I felt my identity had been too.
I wanted to feel thankful to have a home and to be with this family, and be glad that I was not raised by nuns among other bratty orphans.
I should
have
fel
t
that way.
Yet, a part of me kept wondering about my real parents and who I might have turned out to be
had I known them
.
Many believe that God has a predetermined plan for our lives, and before I was even born, I was destined to be right where I am.
But rather than accept that, my free will thinking wanted to know how things might have been different if my birth parents had lived.

Looking back on my life, I couldn’t have asked for better parents than the Whites.
I always had a playmate in the house with m
y four older siblings
, and they were always watching out for me.
I went to a good school and made friends.
But I still thought about where Hannah might have been raised, where she would have gone to school, and what type of family she might have had.
I still felt cheated when the
reality
of it sa
nk
in, although there was no way to know how my life might have been.
I returned the papers to the drawer
, walked out of dad’s office,
and returned to my life as a White, never saying a word to anyone about my discovery and
also
wishing I’d never found it.
Sometimes we yearn for the truth that we think is hidden from us.
It’s only when we find the truth we’ve been looking for that we often wish we didn’t know after all, and then we see why it was kept from us in the first place.

Today, as I s
a
t here
o
n the floor across from Sebastian with our niece and nephew and my child around us, I look
ed
into Sebastian’s eyes and
contemplate
d
if he kn
ew
who I really
was
.
The others would have to
have
kn
own
since I
was
the youngest of them and Mom would not have been pregnant again after Sebastian.
Why
wa
s th
is
the one secret of th
e
family everyone manage
d
to keep so well?

I’ve been tempted to take Jake and leave
.
We
could
di
s
appear in my car and head west cross country, but what’s out there for me?
I c
ould
n’t imagine starting over again as som
e
one new.
There
was
no birth family to search for, and who’s to say they
would have
know
n
who I
was
anyway.
If I did find them, maybe their answers to my questions
we
re not ones I need
ed
to hear.
And so I stay
ed
here, pretending I never di
s
covered those adoption papers
last year
.
I may not
have
be
en
kin to this
family
by blood, but at least I ha
d
a family to call my own.

I would
definitely have
fel
t
alone in this world without them.

Mr. Black

After picking up the newspaper and cut
up
Christmas lights from Helen’s cleaning frenzy, I collapse
d
on the sofa to cha
n
nel surf.
Wholesome black and white holiday movies
we
re repeat
ed
on every channel.
I le
ft
the television on some version of Dicken’s
A Christmas Carol
which I may or may not have seen
before
.
I th
ought
I hear
d
the basement door open and Helen going down the stairs, but Helen never
went
in the basement.
The only thing down there
wa
s my train menagerie, something to tinker with when I
was at
home.
I
was
too tired from work to care where she
had
gone.
Although school
wa
s out
, I’
d
been responsible for cleaning the furnace and chec
k
ing the heating units in each room.

I became the janitor at the high school about a year after Justin graduated.
The position had been open when Justin was a sophomore, but he begged me not to apply for it because me working there would embarrass him.
I had been in accounting during much of my marriage, and landed another desk job with a local furniture company till Justin graduated.
When the janitor position came open again, I immediately jumped in line for it.
I was tired of crunching numbers, and the pay was the same.

Only one or two of the kids kn
e
w me from church
.
They nod
ded
at me like they would to anyone on the street, but never sp
o
k
e
.
To the others, I
was
just
a strange
man
mopping the hallways.
I
was
always in the
ir
way and they
we
re always in mine.
Some
would
smile and whisper
,
“E
xcuse me
,”
when stepping over my dust mop.
Others roll
ed
their eyes, blaming me when they walk
ed
into my dust pile because they
we
ren’t paying attention to where they
we
re going.

I g
o
t to work late nights when there
wa
s a dance or a ball game.
It
wa
s a good and legitimate excuse to be away from the house and away from Helen.
I ma
d
e a habit of taking my time so that I d
id
n’t get home until around
midnight
.
Helen ha
d
long since gone to bed by then, so I
always fell
asleep on the sofa watching television.

I
was
amazed at the number of used condoms I f
oun
d under the bleachers.
When sitting on the bleachers, if you try hard enough you can look down between the foot boards and see the floor underneath.
It’s dark, lit only by the light that comes through those small gaps, and littered with candy wra
p
pers, gum, popcorn kernels, and spilled drinks.
The bleachers
we
re nestled between two flights of stairs
. T
he gym
wa
s open and sunken into the main floor.
You c
ould
climb down the bleac
h
ers or look down over the gym from the cafeteria up above, or you c
ould
walk down the stairs to access the baske
t
ball court and the bottom of the bleachers.
There
we
re locker rooms at either end and, despite their putrid lingering smell of sour body odor, they tend
ed
to be popular places for kids to sneak off to as well.

Although the bleachers
we
re retractable and fold
ed
up into the wall for you to be able to clean underneath them
easier
, there
wa
s a door at either end
that led below them
next to the stairwell.
It
was
a safety precaution to retrieve keys or cell phones so that the unfortunate owner d
id
n’t have to wait till the end of the night for the bleachers to be retracted.
The doors should remain locked to prevent kids from playing underneath, or doing other things, but I intentionally le
ft
them unlocked on “active” nights.
Finding the refuse of sloppy teen love-making excite
d
me.
I wish I could have had this job much earlier in my life, and before prop
hylactics
were treated with spermicidal l
u
bricants.
Helen could have had another child.

I think another reason the kids all ignore
d
me
wa
s b
e
cause I
had
caught several of them during their trysts on game night or during the prom.
If I kept the bleacher doors locked that night, like a spy, I h
u
ng out in the crowd leaning against the rails up above to watch the game.
Young hand-holding couples loiter
ed
in the stairwell and wait
ed
for when no one
wa
s watching.
Di
s
covering the door
wa
s locked, the guy curse
d
the heavens.
The girl t
old
him to forget about it, but he
wa
s d
e
termined to get laid.
He
would
tell her to c’mon and
then
pul
l
her up the stairs.
They
’d
disappear into the hallway leading to the classrooms.
I g
a
ve them five or ten minutes to find a co
m
fortable spot.
The library
was
quite popular because it ha
d
sofas and overstuffed chairs, another door I purposely le
ft
unlocked sometimes.

Now, the principal
wa
s totally unaware of any of this happening because I never reported anyone.
I
’d
sneak off b
e
hind the
teens
and almost make a game of trying to find them.
Groans of ecstasy echoing down the hallway usually ma
d
e them easy
to
find.
I’d
sneak up on them, hoping to get a peak of a butt or a flash of a boob.
Then, I clear
ed
my throat and put on my deep booming scolding voice.

“What’s going on here?”

They
always
frantically
jump
ed
to their feet to put their clothes back on, if any garments ha
d
been taken
off
at
al
l
.
The boy
would
turn red in the face while zipping up his fly.
The girl
turned
angry, buttoning her blouse.
I
’d
offer to give them a break this time and not report them because they
we
re such “good kids,” although I ha
d
no idea if they
we
re well mannered or not.
A couple of the guys even bribed me with money b
e
fore walking back to the game.
I c
ould
always tell the bribers from the rest just by the nice expensive shoes they
wore
, and so, I let them speak first and take out their fine leather wallets.
Who knew that pretending to be a hall monitor could pay so well?