Never Coming Back(28)

Sunshine looked from him to me and back again. “Ask your parents,” she said. “It’s a simple question.”

“No it’s not,” Brown and I said, exactly at the same time. Something passed between us, a flash of understanding. There is more to the story, was what the look he gave me said, even though neither of us knew what the more to the other’s story was.

Sunshine saw the look and tried to catch up. “Why not?”

Brown shrugged. So did I. Her eyes went from him to me. She knew she was missing out, but on what? Many people in that situation would withdraw. They would feel shunned and turn bristly, peeved at the silence. I sensed her wavering. Should she press on? Should she drop the matter and know that already an invisible wall was up that wasn’t going to come down from here on in? We were three days into our first year of college. I pulled my knees up to my chest and wrapped my arms around my legs. Something flickered across Sunshine’s face. She had made her decision.

“You guys are telepathically saying something important to each other right now. I can feel it. So fill me in. Both of you.”

I laughed. It was the kind of laugh that was about surprise. And relief. It was the no-bullshit-ness of her statement. In the three seconds that it took Sunshine to articulate what she saw happening between Brown and me—to decide that she would press on instead of retreat—I saw the kind of person she was. She would not take it personally, she would not feel left out, and she was intent on finding out the whole story. She wanted to know me, and she wanted to know Brown. She was not a surface person. From that moment on, I trusted her.

Brown must have trusted her too, because I still remember how he looked down at his knees—we were all sitting on a braided rug that I had bought for eight dollars at a garage sale—but he spoke.

“I’m a foundling.”

Foundling. Found. Ling. A beautiful and terrible word. A baby in a blanket, left on the steps. A baby in a basket, floating down the river. A baby with dark, unblinking eyes.

“A foundling?” Sunshine said, and the way she said it was just like the way it was scrolling across the bottom of my brain. “Like an orphan? That kind of foundling?”

“Yeah. I was found on the steps of the courthouse in Jefferson City, Missouri, when I was a baby. Maybe a day old. My foster parents ended up adopting me.”

“And they never found your”—I could tell she was about to say “real” but stopped herself—“birth parents?”

“No.”

We sat for a minute, absorbing. It was like the beginning of a fairy tale, except that this wasn’t the Middle Ages and foundling was a rare and seldom-used word. It was hard to imagine a baby left on the steps of a building. But there was Brown, Court Jefferson Brown, alive and breathing and sitting on a braided rug in a dorm room in New Hampshire.

“So you could be, like, anything?” Sunshine said.

“Or nothing.”

“Everyone’s something.”

“Yeah, but what? A mix of brown, I guess. Brownish.”

That was the moment when his nickname was born. Brown was brownish. His eyes were brown and almondish, his hair was dark and curly, his skin was golden brown. He was beautiful in that muscled way that some boys are. Most lose it by their late twenties, but Brown hadn’t. He was still beautiful at thirty-two, not that he seemed to know it, or had ever known it.

Then it was my turn.





* * *





“Okay, so your mom is French Basque and British. What about your dad?”

I remembered thinking that Sunshine must have a father who loved her with that easy kind of love you saw sometimes. The kind of love where, when she was little, he must have picked her up and put her on his shoulders and carried her around that way. Where he taught her how to play catch, tossing a tennis ball back and forth until she graduated to a mitt and a softball. Where he used to sing “You Are My Sunshine” to her, until she was known as Sunshine instead of Samantha. Where he went to all her recitals and games and cheered her on. Where he cried when he dropped her off at college. Kids who grew up that way called their fathers “Dad.”

“I don’t have a dad,” I said. “Some guy raped my mother at a party and I’m the result.”

I had not ever told anyone that. I had never said those words aloud. The words came out as if that was the way I thought of myself, a product of something bad, something evil. Some guy. Rape. Result. They were harsh words and they hung ugly in the air of the small room. Just the sound of them made me close my eyes, as if somehow that would make them less harsh. My mother at my age, at a party like the kind I was going to all the time, back in those days. It wasn’t something I could bear to think about, the thought of something that awful happening to her. But the minute I said the words and they were out there, and my new friends were absorbing them into themselves, something in me eased.

“It wasn’t just me either,” I said. “I had this twin sister, and she died when we were born. It’s a bad story.”

I wanted to apologize. It was a bad story. It took the light out of the conversation. When I opened my eyes Sunshine and Brown were both looking at me, sadness in their eyes.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“For what?”

“Being a downer.”