See No Color (8 page)

She cupped my face in her hands. “Don't lie to me, Alexandra. I know you've been reading those letters,” she said.
Should have been more careful
, I thought. But the shame was all twisted with anger. Why did they make me think first of preserving their comfort? I tried not to, but I had to break her stare.

“Which ones did you read?” she asked.

I looked down. I wished I could just melt into the floor. I wanted to tell her it wasn't any of her business anyway, that those letters didn't belong to her. “I don't know. I just wanted to see…” The note of apology in my voice and the smell of burning soup turned my stomach.

“Look at me!” she said. “I
am
your mother, right?” Tears streamed down her cheeks and her gray eyes flashed. “We know what's best for you, your father and I.”

I was suddenly aware of Dad and Jason in the doorway. “Rachel,” Dad said. “What the hell …”

Mom dropped my face abruptly and pushed herself up off the floor to face him. “She found the letters, Terry,” she said.

Dad looked from me to Mom, incredulously.

“Yeah, that's right,” Mom said. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “The letters you told me there was no way she would ever find till she was ready!” she screamed. Then she turned back to me. “Well, does she look ready?”

I scrambled to my feet as three sets of eyes assessed me.

Mom whipped around, back toward Dad and Jason. “She's sixteen years old, Terrence! She's just a baby!” She covered her eyes with her hands. “And if that man gets a hold of her and starts telling her things she's not prepared to process … I've always known there is that biological connection that could pull her…”

That man.

Mom sank to the floor again, collapsing in sobs. Dad was at her side in one leap and rocking her in his arms. In the doorway, Jason's face was white. I took a step back but landed right up against the wall. I looked around.
I need to get out of here.

“Alex,” Dad said. “Come.” He was using the gentle tone he always used to calm Mom. I didn't want to come, but my legs somehow shuffled over to them.

Mom was still sobbing, although her small frame was no longer racked by them.
You made her like this.

“We did it for your own good,” said Dad, speaking over the mess of Mom's hair. “It's against the law, what he did, contacting you like that.” His voice was laced with anger. “It could be really damaging for someone as delicate as you to get information like that before you're ready.”

Someone as delicate as you.
I couldn't for the life of me understand who they were talking about. I was many things, but we all knew that delicate wasn't one of them.
They're playing this one a little too hard.
And yet, I knew they weren't playing at all.

Mom grabbed my hand. Her palm was cold and wet and small.

“There was a reason why they took you from him,” Dad was saying. “I know this is hard for you to hear, Alex, but you need to, because if you don't, you could really find yourself in trouble later. This man could be unstable. He could … take advantage of you if you let him.” He took my other hand, so that we were one, large, pulsating blob of flesh on the kitchen floor.

“We've talked about this … mostly in harmless terms, but we've still talked about … the reasons why people give their children, and in your case, their five-month-old baby, up for adoption. Who would do it, if they could avoid it?” Dad continued.

I nodded. There was always some part of me that wondered why my mother and father had given me up, but a bigger part of me didn't really want to know.

Dad sighed. “Your mother was right that we should have gotten rid of those letters a long time ago. I just kept them because I felt it was the right thing to do. Maybe when you were better prepared for what you might find … An adult, at least.”

With this, Mom let out an absolute howl and squeezed my hand so hard I thought it would break off.

What could possibly be so bad about him?

“I'm not going to contact him, okay?” I hated the person saying those words.
I need to get out of here.
I let go of Mom's hand and stood up. “I know enough now.”
I don't know anything.
I looked over at the tattered folder, and its contents, littered across the floor. “I know enough.”
You could really find yourself in trouble later.

Mom buried her face in Dad's shoulder, and he rubbed her back. “It's okay,” he told her softly. “It's okay now.”

It will never be okay.

I wanted her to burn the letters. I wanted to say that he meant nothing to me. How could I tell them that
they
were my parents—they had raised me, they had loved me all this time, that there was no one else in the world who had any right to me? But more than saying it, I wanted to feel it. And I didn't.

In the living room, the TV blared with the muffled cheers of fans. Someone must have hit a home run—there was no mistaking that particular sort of cheer. And just like that, the familiar daydream fought its way to the surface: I would hit a home run some day in the majors, I would make sure of it. I still wanted to do all the things that Dad hadn't had the chance to do because his career got cut short and he had to focus the rest of his time and energy on Jason and me.

“Come on,” Dad said, helping Mom up. He gestured to Jason, who looked like a statue in the doorway. Jason and I started walking toward the living room, Mom in tow. “Go get your sister,” said Dad. “We're having family time at the game. We got three more innings to watch.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

H
ot Milwaukee summer and the cool of popsicles at the price of perpetually sticky fingers and carpet. “Everything is sticky!” Mom says, throwing up her hands.

Interleague game with the Twins. Dad's September call up and strong spring were turning heads. He'd been starting at first base and was batting second.

Jason and I are sitting too close to the huge new TV Dad bought with his first “Major League money, Rachel! We're going to make it.” But Jason and I are more interested in the popsicles because Major League money hasn't replaced the minor league air conditioner that Mom is trying to get to blow something other than hot air.

Then the familiar crack, the one Jason and I already know like we know our names.

The camera pans to Dad, holding his glove open, anticipating the throw. The pitcher whips the ball toward him, but he's off balance from the sliding catch. Dad sees this, adjusts his position in a split second, and stretches down the first-base line, hoping to still bag the catch. Mike Perry is one hop from the base, running like a freight train, and determined to get on.

And then it happens. In some ways, it's still happening.

• • •

I know now that Dad's agent had made the most of his client's strong September the year before, turning it into a 1.5 million dollar one-year deal. And I also understand now that the Brewers saw a feel-good story in Terry Kirtridge—the thirty-one-year-old dad who'd never given up on his dream, not even after playing nearly a decade in the minors.

But I didn't understand any of that when I was sitting too close to our new TV that day. I just knew Dad was hurt. When Perry crashed into Dad and knocked his shoulder out of joint and the ball out of his glove, my stomach and my popsicle dropped. Dad hit the ground in high definition, and I screamed and dug my fingernails into the flesh of my palms. Perry leaned over Dad and started talking to him. Dad didn't respond; he lay there, motionless. The Brewers' trainers ran out of the dugout and made their way toward first base.

The announcer said something about it being “a shame since the Brewers feel-good minor-league miracle was looking like he was headed for the DL.” All the while Dad lay motionless on the ground. We watched in strained silence as the trainers leaned over Dad. Even without a close-up, you could see he was in agony. In the end, they had to take him away on a stretcher.

There's a clip of the whole thing up on YouTube that I still watch from time to time. You can see in the slow-mo that Perry was bound to run into Dad one way or another, that Dad had placed himself in a precarious position with his left shoulder blocking the base. I don't think that Perry would think twice about knocking him down if Dad was in his way. He was a professional ball player, after all—still is today. But even though Dad called, and still calls, Perry every swear word in the book, I never once believed that Perry would intentionally give him a chronic, career-ending injury. Who would want to go down on record as the man who busted Terry Kirtridge's shoulder so bad that he was never the same again? Who would want to go to bed knowing that you had effectively stopped someone's career at thirty-one?

• • •

Although he recovered enough to play the next season, Dad's performance was less than impressive in spring training. It was pretty clear that he wouldn't see the major league roster any time soon. He was thirty-two and had never done anything but play baseball.

In late September, he was offered a position of first-base coach for the Brewers AA team, in Huntsville, Alabama. He mulled over it for a week before he was asked to coach the top boys' middle and high school baseball teams in the state. The positions were at Cherokee Middle School and West High School.

“It's an opportunity,” he said to Mom as he sat down at the kitchen table. “Look what I've done for our kids so far, just through coaching. I could do so much more with so many other kids.”

Jason and I peered at each other from around the corner. It was the first time we had ever heard him talk about coaching anyone but us. And since he had not shown the least bit of interest in resuming our training since his injury, I felt a twinge of jealousy at the thought of him coaching others.

“I think you should take it, Terry,” Mom said, shredding lettuce. “We could all use a change.”

What she meant was that the teams were in Madison, so we'd have to move. We would have to sell the house, leave our friends, leave school, and everything in Milwaukee.

My stomach churned at the thought, for all the things I would push away and all the new things I would take in. I lay in bed every night those last few weeks with my palm pressed against the wall, trying to remember its coolness, imprint it in my memory. Because I knew that soon enough, my room and the wall would become only thoughts to me, images, as intangible as Dad's leaping catches on the field were to him now.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“P
ickles,” I said, handing Jason a regular-sized mason jar. Jason grabbed it and set it up on the shelf carefully.

“Sweet or garlic?” Jason asked.

I checked the label on the side of the jar where Mom's perfect handwriting identified the correct item. “Garlic,” I said.

Canning was something my mother had grown up with, something she fell back on when she was stressed. When Mom and Dad's realtor found a house in Madison that had all the modern conveniences (and a yard big enough for a batting cage) but also the root cellar from the original farmhouse, Mom took it as a sign. The last of Dad's signing bonus more than covered the down payment.

For Jason and me, though, the cellar was a hated spring chore—taking inventory and organizing so Mom could begin to plan her purchases at Madison's overflowing farmer's markets.

Jason pushed a jar over to the left, raising a wave of dust from the rickety wood shelf.

I coughed. “Damn.” I waved my hand.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Doesn't anyone ever clean those?” I asked.

Jason snickered. “Yeah, and who's going to do it? You?” He reached over me and tried to grab another jar from the box.

“Hey,” I said, pushing him aside. “I got it.” The dust had settled now and I could breathe.

He stepped back. “Fine. Then let's hurry up and finish. I got things to do.” A rectangular shadow played across his face, making him look angry.

I shivered and turned back to the box. It was half empty. Once this chore was done, I could go back to my reading, and he could go back to studying old DVDs of his at bats from last season when he was a .301/.366/.550 hitter. I leaned down and picked up the next jar. It was large and full of bright pink globs that were blinding even in the partial light.

“Ugh,” said Jason, wrinkling his nose.

I turned it over in my palm. “It's beets,” I said. “I guess they're pickled.” I handed him the jar and he took it reluctantly.

“Won't catch me eating that anytime soon,” he said, placing it on the left side of the shelf. “Those things look disgusting.” He frowned and dusted off his hands.

I shrugged and picked up another jar of chili sauce. “Taste is different than look.”

Even with his back to me, I could feel him glaring. He had been surly lately. I mostly tried to stay out of his way because I knew we were both edgier and edgier with each game West High won. At that precise moment, we were exactly four games away from being the top-rated team when we entered the state tournament. While Jason had just heard that he had made the cut for the elite club team where we would play through the summer and fall, I was still waiting to hear. So, I really didn't see what he had to be surly about at all. Everyone said that the elite club team was a direct pipeline to the best college ball, and if you had the gift and grit, hopefully something even better, like the draft.

Jason took the chili sauce and shoved it to the right. The shelf sagged under the weight, but held. I grabbed a jar of green beans. There was nothing in the world as good as a freshly picked green bean, but if you couldn't get that, one from a jar that Mom had packed would do just fine. I closed my eyes for a second, remembering the sharp crunch of the bean skin in my mouth.

“You know, we're your real family,” Jason said.