Everybody's Son

by Thrity Umrigar

As far as he knew, before Children’s Services had placed Anton with the Brent family, they had contacted his only available kin, a grandmother in Georgia. But the woman, legally blind and of little means, had been unable to take him in. What would that feel like, David wondered, being rejected by your only blood relative after spending seven harrowing days in a dangerously hot apartment while your mother was cavorting with her junkie friends?

Anton turned toward him. “I wanna go

home,” he said loudly. “To my home. To my mam.”

“Anton.” David lightly touched the boy’s shoulder. “Listen. I can imagine how hard this is. And I understand how scary it must feel. But all I’m asking is that you give us a chance, okay? Let’s just—”

it was the first time he’d ever touched black hair. How soft, how familiar, how organic it seemed, like wool on a lamb, this thing that they all feared so.

He caught himself immediately. Anton was not his son. Anton was someone else’s son, a borrowed gift he would soon return. His own son, his blood, his legal heir, was dead.

“But David. I’ll be gone soon. Soon as the judge lets my mam go home.” Before David could control his body, he stiffened. That’s how Anton saw himself, as a guest. It didn’t matter what he or Delores said or did or felt. He tasted the bile in his throat and felt a sudden bitter detachment from the boy sitting next to him.

“My mother, God bless her, always warned me against this sort of thing, y’know, adoption and such. Said you never knew what you were bringing home. Other people’s messes and all that.” David felt his temper flare but tamped it down immediately. This is just Smithie being Smithie, he reminded himself.

“David.” Delores took a step forward and touched him lightly on the arm. “Honey. He’s not our child. We’re just . . . his temporary custodians. We knew that going in. And you know how much he misses his mom.” “But—” “It doesn’t matter what she did. She’s his mom. Don’t you get that? It’s . . . it’s biology.” She was right. She was right. They would have to give him up soon.

And yes, he didn’t want a poor, uneducated black woman to be railroaded by a bunch of white guys with law degrees, to be cheated by a legal system that she and her ancestors had played no role in designing; or to be robbed of her own child by duplicitous means. He wanted Anton, yes, but not like this. Never like this.

There was a brief silence and then Connor said, “David. Let’s not do this. We don’t need to talk about this again. The only thing I ask is you don’t ever let slip to Anton that I prosecuted his mom.”

Anton nodded. After a few minutes, he turned away from David and looked out the closed window of the air-conditioned car. His right hand curled into a fist, and for a split second David thought he was going to attempt to smash the window. Instead, Anton tapped on it with his knuckles. Twice. Then he stared straight ahead. And David had the strangest feeling that Anton had just tested the boundaries of his freedom and found that it extended only as far as the plushness of this car. It wasn’t just Anton’s mom they had locked away, he realized. Anton, too,

was in a jail that he hadn’t chosen.

new feeling entered his body—shame. Something was wrong. This was why David and FM had spent so much time ruining his summer by making him do homework.

Anton felt the faintest sense of belonging. Still, he didn’t trust himself to speak, awed as he was by his companions’ verbal nimbleness, their choice of words.

YEARS LATER, WHEN he would remember nothing else about that first day in school, Anton would remember this tableau: Brad puts his arm around Anton’s shoulder as the final bell rings and they push open the glass doors and enter the school building, two confident nine-year-olds who have just conquered the soccer field.

After they left, David went to the advanced slope and skied alone for two hours. Skiing had always centered him, calmed him down, but today he felt a slow burn as he played over what had just transpired, how easily Anton had called it quits, how effortlessly Delores had enabled him. He had always been proud of Anton, of his strength and equanimity, but today, for the first time, he was embarrassed. The boy was a quitter. No wonder he was failing at school.

The true embarrassment, he wanted to say to her, was the mediocrity of Anton’s ambition.

“Guess befriending helpless waifs is a Stevens family tradition. One for which we Coleman boys are most grateful.”

What our country needs is not people like you and me running shit for another hundred years. What it needs is a meritocracy—and that means people like Anton, who come from nothing but become something.”

The children went off to dry themselves, and it was from this feeling of pleasure-pain that David spoke. “Man, if I were his mother, I’d give him up. If I saw the change in him, what progress he’s made, I’d never block his way. Only a selfish woman would do otherwise.” “What are you saying?” Connor asked.

Biology is destiny? Bullshit. To believe this would be to condemn Anton to the Dark Ages. The true crime, the true bigotry, was to condemn this bright, effervescent boy to the darkness of his mother’s home.

The boy’s grandmother had been unwilling to take him in. And he was supposed to believe in the sanctity of the biological family unit? The social workers, the family courts, the whole system was wrong, their assumptions faulty. He sat up in the plush armchair, his body jolted by a sudden thought: Perhaps, just perhaps, he had another birthday gift to give Anton. And it would be the best one yet.

“You’ve done gone and kidnapped my son.” But she smiled as she said it.

He hesitated, not wanting to leave a paper trail from this illicit meeting, but then he looked at her again, small and pitiful in the office chair, and he thought, Who will ever know? Who will ever believe her? And so he smiled and pushed the photographs back toward her. She chose the one of Anton on the ski slopes. “Baby boy,” she murmured, still clenching the picture. “I’m counting the days before I see you again.”

If Delores ever found out what he’d done, she

would leave him.

Alone in bed, he thought back on what had just happened, what he’d just said. It was true. Dee was the most important thing in his life. Between her and Anton, it wasn’t even close. But then something churned inside him. Why should he have to choose? Most men didn’t have to decide between their children and their wives. But Anton was not his blood. And therein lay the rub.

And there was the other thing. If Dee refused to keep Anton and the boy was returned to the foster system, what would stop Juanita Vesper from changing her mind and claiming him? And if that were to happen, how long before she told her son or someone else about that strange nocturnal meeting with Anton’s foster dad? Without meaning to, Dee was putting him in jeopardy. Hell, he could face criminal charges for what he’d done.

he’d orphaned Anton—letting

“Anton. Aren’t you even the least bit happy being with us?” he asked, hating the plaintive note in his voice, noticing the discomfort it produced in the child. You selfish bastard, he chided himself. Instead of consoling the kid, you’re demanding that he console you. He forced a smile on his lips. “Aw, shit. You don’t have to answer that, kiddo.”

And yes, David had played a role in nudging her toward that decision, but that was a

secret he would take to his grave.

this is punishment for what I did to that woman, then punish me. Me. Not that sweet, innocent boy. “David. Answer me. What should we do?”

He understood, he honestly did. And yet it was undeniable—the inexplicable shame that he felt, as if he’d just lost a secret contest that pitted him against a poor, uneducated black woman. Anton had chosen her. Of course he had. But Anton had run away to her—for what? Comfort? To beg her to take him back? Well, who could blame him? As Pappy always used to say, blood seeks blood; blood is thicker than water.

No, Pappy would’ve found it unforgivable, what he’d done to Juanita Vesper, David thought. And the strange thing was, he didn’t really care. He adored his father, admired him, but Pappy had never known what hell looked like, had never felt the lick of hellfire or stared into the void the way he and Delores had after James’s death. The son became older than the father during that time, David thought.

You took away James, and although I felt like clawing at the skin of the universe, I did nothing. Didn’t I? Didn’t I?

It was so subtle, the iron that entered Anton’s body and voice, that David thought he might have imagined it. “Yeah,” Anton said. “It’s okay with me.”

Nobody is going to hurt or harm you now. You understand? We’re gonna protect you the rest of your life.”

TWO DAYS LATER, he broke his vow to protect Anton against all harm.

He felt Anton relax in his arms. He looked up, willing the nurse to come so he could ask her for pain meds, but also taking in this moment, this dark, this silence, this warm body relaxing into his strong arms. I could kill for this boy, he thought, I could wage wars, burn down villages, protect him with my dying breath. After James, he had never expected to feel this fierce a love again, this love that hissed and roiled and rattled in his chest.

Individual destiny, they realized, mattered as much or as little as the rubble they were witnessing. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Look where their trust funds, their titans of industry fathers, their Bryn Mawr mothers, their patrician grandparents, their fine sensibilities, their honed intelligence, their legacy admissions, had brought them—to helplessly watching their country’s demise.

The next semester, he signed up for a literature class with Skip Gates and heard the term “the white gaze” for the first time. He had spent his boyhood and teenage years, he realized, mindful of that white gaze. What would it feel like, he wondered, to be free and direct the way Carine was? To not have to conduct yourself in a certain way at all times?

that you were unthreatening, to continually demonstrate that you were intelligent, articulate, and not an affirmative action charity case? Carine seemed to have no such hang-ups. She often wore her hair in dreadlocks and had an eclectic wardrobe, so she could go from African queen to college student in no time at all. She laughed uproariously when something was funny and did not when someone made a sexist or homophobic joke. No, nobody would ever accuse Carine of being a Tom.

What he felt with Carine wasn’t so much love as a homecoming, and he honestly didn’t think it was racial—though she was the first black girl he had ever dated—so much as chemical, protons and electrons coming together. I guess that’s why they call it chemistry, he thought, but now she had spotted him, and he took the last few steps toward her and kissed her briefly on the lips.

This was the world, he thought, and he had a place in it.

He knew his parents loved each other, but his dad had recently confessed to him that he wished he had dated a bit more before settling down. Except he hadn’t put it quite like that. He’d said something about wishing he had sowed some more wild oats, and Anton had cringed, put it down to the kind of yucky, cringe-making things parents said.

your family sounds so white.” “Veronica’s family is white.”

How come you never talk to me about your birth mom?” A hole opened up in his chest. She was going too far. He tried to control his temper, but when he spoke, his voice shook with anger. “Because there is nothing to say about her. I have told you everything that you need to know. You know that I was adopted.”

“No. I don’t. She could be rotting in a crack house or rotting in her grave for all I care. That’s the honest answer. And if you can’t fucking deal with that, then, well, it’s too bad, Carine. I don’t have to explain myself to anybody. So you can take your judgmental tone and shove it.”