Everybody's Son

by Thrity Umrigar

Life is about moving ahead, not looking back. That’s the American way. And that’s what I believe. I refuse to waste even ten minutes of my life looking back. So before you ask, no, I’ve never Googled my birth mom to find out her whereabouts. Because, frankly, I just don’t care.

He forced a heartiness into his voice that he did not feel. “Are you kidding me? They’ll love having you there.” He stroked her hair absently as they settled in to watch a Star Trek rerun. After a few minutes he rose to make them a bowl of popcorn. Everything seemed fine and back to normal, but for the first time, he felt at a remove from Carine. He sat back down on the couch and

put his arm around her, trying to get rid of this horrible new feeling. He thrust his right hand into his pants pocket, twirling the ring, feeling the cool inner softness of the metal. The future that had seemed so clear just a few hours ago now felt like an endless loop that went around and around and got nowhere.

“That’s funny,” she said, addressing the senator directly. “In my house, we discuss everything. No subjects are off limits. My immigrant father encourages debate.” She turned her head, looking at each one of them before she delivered the final insult. “That’s what he thinks it means to be an American.”

Why had Mom sounded so shrill and hysterical? Why had Pappy been so dismissive when he spoke about the Caribbean? Dad had been okay, but he certainly hadn’t defended Carine. Neither had Anton. In fact, the four of them had closed ranks against her.

It was Carine’s skin color, her blackness, that made her suspect, that made them feel there was an alien in their midst, a spy in their own country.

He felt as if she had unmasked him, laid bare the central conundrum of his life. For the rest of his life, her words would haunt him. He knew this with an immediate and fierce surety.

“So how is that Trotskyite friend of yours?” “She’s fine, Pappy.” He laughed. “She’s not a Trotskyite.” “Could’ve fooled me.” Pappy sighed. “Ah, the passion of youth. She’ll settle down.” Anton wasn’t so sure. The engagement ring rested at the bottom of his sock drawer. It seemed preposterous now, proposing marriage to Carine, when he was torn with so many doubts. Her passion, her indignation, which once seemed admirable to him, exotic, even, now felt tiresome. Sometimes he couldn’t tell if she was self-righteous or mentally unstable.

A few weeks later, they were celebrating the end of classes at India Palace when Carine casually referred to a high school friend as an Oreo. “Oreo? Wow, that’s pretty racist,” Anton said. “How so? It’s not a description of skin color, per se. It’s describing an attitude—a brother who thinks he’s white.” The flat casualness of her tone irked him, took him back to the night of her exquisite insult. “Do you know how often you do this, Carine, pigeonhole people? You do it all the time. Maybe there are some of us who are, like, you know, not obsessed with skin color.

Shit. My best friend is white. I don’t think Bradley even notices my skin color when he sees me.” “You know why? Because you’re so damn colorless, you’re a ghost. Invisible. And if that’s how you choose to go through this life, you shithead, go right ahead. You go right ahead with your post-racial this and your Kumbaya that. I’ll just call it what it is—an identity crisis.”

His love for his parents was always reinforced by his gratitude—they had been a rich, successful couple, they could’ve adopted any kid, but they’d chosen to rescue him. He would not destroy his relationship with his family because of this headstrong, impetuous black girl who constantly seemed to want to battle the world. And him. “Well? Black cat got your tongue?”

she said the only reason you don’t . . . that you’re not aware of my race is because I’m invisible. To you.” Brad frowned. “That’s insulting.” He looked at Anton, squinting in the sun. “Though I’m not sure which of us should be insulted. Both, I guess.”

His reasons for being with Carine were elemental, primal, beyond articulation. His reasons for wanting to break up with her were intellectual. And every day, the tug-of-war between head and heart was tearing him down just a bit more.

Something pure and real had happened to him when he’d read Walden at sixteen. He remembered it well, that selfish moment of self-discovery, of finding something that belonged only to him. Up to that point, everything in his life had been borrowed. His bedroom was borrowed from a dead boy, as were his parents. His best friend was inherited, seeing as how Brad’s dad and his dad were also the best of friends. The clothes on his back, the shoes on his feet, had been given to him. Whatever he was, whatever voice he

might have developed, whatever pitch he may have learned to sing in, had been lost, muted, stolen from him. In broad daylight, in the middle of the day, he had been pulled out of his home, out of his old life, and transplanted into a new one. Without even knowing it, he constantly battled a film of inauthenticity that clung to him. Black boy in a white school.

He spent half a day composing a response to her email in his head. And then it came to him. The whole beauty of being broken up with someone was that you didn’t have to reply. Still, it wasn’t until he was on the plane at Logan airport with his parents the day after graduation that he relaxed. He would never see Carine again. And instead of nicking him like a blunt razor, the thought soothed him.

The usual kernel of loneliness lodged deep within whenever he was in a crowd had not surfaced tonight and he was grateful, wanting to enjoy the moment.

He smiled, looked away, and out of the blue, as happened every time he accomplished something—when he’d been named captain of the school lacrosse team, when he’d walked down the stage clutching his high school diploma, after he had finished law school—he thought of her. Where was she now? If she still lived in the state, she would’ve heard of him winning tonight, right? Right? Even if she lived on the streets, in the gutters, surely she would hear about her son, the fourth most powerful man in the state. But who was he kidding? She was most likely dead, or so out of her mind, or had so many other kids, that she probably had forgotten she ever had a son named Anton.

He kissed the top of Katherine’s head absently as he looked past her into the now-deserted Washington streets and thought, May eighteenth, 2014. I will remember this night for as long as I live. This is the most awful thing that has happened to me in my life so far. Because the person I love most in this world is sick and I am not by his side.

In fact, in all their years together, his father had made only one personal request: On the way home from the courthouse after signing the adoption papers, David had asked to be called Dad.

Here, in this hospital, nobody cared that his father was governor, a man with the power to withhold or double their state funding. Here he was simply a patient who had to be constantly reminded to press the heart-shaped red pillow to his chest when he rose from a chair and coaxed to take a few more bites of the reduced-sodium diet. In some ways, Anton was glad that his father was so out of it; he would’ve found unbearable the realization of how far he had fallen.

They smiled at each other, and then Anton took the elevator down to the cafeteria, replaying the earlier conversation with his father. The fact that David had recalled the name of the book was the sign of a mind that was functioning well. But it had unnerved him to hear David saying that Carine had been right, and the manner in which he’d said it, as if he were apologizing to her across the years. It made Anton feel as if he had wronged her, too.

Anton was too cerebral, too flinty, and knowing this about himself was not enough to make him change.

For the almost three years that he lived with the Colemans before his adoption, he had held some part of himself aloof. It hadn’t been easy—David and Delores had been attentive, loving, kind, thoughtful, caring. Never once had he felt unsafe with them, never once had they disappeared for a week and left him to fend for himself. There were so many times when he almost slipped and called David Dad, so many times he saw the hopeful light leap up in David’s eyes only to be snuffed out a second later. Anton had been ashamed of himself then, had known he was being unkind, but he had never wavered. He had been saving himself for his reunion with her. His mom.

the media got hold of the news, there would be a lot of explaining to do. At the very least, it would remind white voters that despite the Coleman name, he was adopted, the illegitimate son of a junkie. It was the weirdest thing—despite his complexion, his kinky hair, poll after poll showed that voters in his state didn’t think of him as black, per se. They knew he was biracial, of course—but it was as if Pappy and Dad cast a shadow so deep, it hid his blackness.

Georgia was no more his home than Rome was. But this is where your ancestors are from, the voice rose again, and again he snuffed it out. What’re you going to do next? Chew tobacco? Eat watermelon? This was the Deep South, a red state with terrible politics, and he was no more from it than Pappy was.

He sank to his knees, the green bathroom tile cool against his body. He was everybody’s son, but he belonged to no one. The three parents in his life had each betrayed him in his or her own way, and he had no idea how to weigh one betrayal against the other. Who had the better claim on him? Did he belong to any of these damaged people? He had no idea. Who would he be when he opened this cheap wooden door and walked back out into that small living room? He

This is the time to focus on the future, not on the past.” Anton shook his head. The last statement was so typically David. But then the image of the woman in the yellow cottage rose before his eyes, and he felt a deep reluctance at the thought of pivoting to the future. Not so fast.

He had been hero-worshipping the wrong parent, it turned out. The true steel was in the tiny girl-like woman who had battled drug addiction, poverty, false sentencing, abduction of her son, and God knew how many other injustices in order to arrive at the moment when her grown son had called her a liar.

“And you lied to me. You lied. You told me she’d given me up. You lied.” “And for that I’m sorry. But I had no choice. You have to believe me.”

“I mean, it’s very sad what happened, but that didn’t . . .” “Anton, I’m warning you . . .” “. . . that didn’t give you the right to . . .” “Goddammit, you little prick. Stop,” David roared in his ear. “What do you want from me? I’ve given you every fucking thing I’ve ever had. I’m about to give you the goddamn governorship of the fucking state on a silver platter. And you dare talk to me like this?”

And he had dropped his head in acknowledgment, knowing she was right, unable to explain to her how people’s pain paralyzed him,

You were one when we left Ronan, and I vowed never to raise you here. Folks here have long memories. And wagging tongues. That’s why we got out in the first place. A mixed-race boy in a small town—forget it.” She smiled mirthlessly. “That was before I learned that the North was just a different kind of prison.”

I love you, too. It would’ve been so easy to say those words, to let them slip out of where they were gathering in his mouth. But he didn’t. Couldn’t. In some dim way, he understood that if he said those words, he would break, that the ice that was encasing his body, helping him hold his shit together, would crack and shatter, leaving in its wake that dark, vulnerable place where he couldn’t go. He had already had his entire known world turned upside down. This seemingly fragile, powerless woman standing in front of him, with her teary, beautiful face, her longing and her loneliness, her guilt and her shame, her weakness and her strength, her moon and her sky, held the power to destroy him. This much he knew.

No, it wasn’t fair that Juanita’s one terrible error in judgment should result in a lifetime of punishment, but hell, that happened all the time, didn’t it? Most people never got a shot at redemption. It was the way of the world, and what was Juanita Vesper’s claim to go against this?

Carine Biya, turned out to be a mere mortal who fell in love like the rest of us, who threw it all away and settled into this bourgeois suburban life?

A mom would never deliberately hurt her child, Anton.” He sat still, blinking back the tears that burned in his eyes. “You’re right. Turns out I misread the situation.”

He shrugged, meeting her eyes, resenting the pity he saw there, but forcing himself to not look away.

lone gull flew across the water. “The ocean looks lonely tonight,” Pappy had murmured, but Anton had thought: At least the waves have each other for company; the poor seagull is truly alone, and his heart had ached with a reciprocal loneliness.

week ago, he would’ve agreed with his friend, would have considered it the professional, responsible, adult thing to do. But now he knew the truth—there were no adults. There were just tall children stumbling around the world, walking pools of unfinished hopes, unmet needs, and seething desires. The unsuccessful ones ended up in asylums. The ones who learned to masquerade those needs became politicians.

“Are you still angry with her, Anton? Even after knowing what really happened? Do you think you’ll ever be able to forgive her? I know there’s nothing my kids could do that would make me disown them. But is the opposite not always true? Is it possible for you to walk away from her forever? Anton?”

To their big, luxurious mansion where the memory of a face that would remind him of himself would never again haunt him. Where the wild, dangerous anguish that had seized him just a few minutes ago would not have to be faced again, replaced as it would be by a cool, controlled demeanor.

And here he was in Carine’s sunroom, remembering it all, the herculean, otherworldly effort with which he had stopped crying that day and made the phone call.

felt something was missing, and it was only hours later that he knew what it was: the dream of unification with his mam that had lulled him to sleep for over two years. Once again he had felt his chest begin to heave, but this time he had stopped himself, pulled his own body back from drowning.

He waited as if he were a disinterested party, curious to see which direction the wind would carry the fire, as if the decision were someone else’s to make. As if the decision were someone else’s to make. There it was, in a nutshell. The laziness, the timidity, the caution.

A fine Harvard education and this was where he had ended up, a directionless, paunchy prince with no kingdom of his own. No wonder he was mindlessly rushing his way back to David.

Something moved inside Anton’s chest, and for a moment it felt physical—not painful, really, but a physical sensation, like an extra heartbeat. Then he recognized it. It was joy.

He exhaled, knowing he was about to drop another bombshell on her. “Driving back. To her. To my mam.” “I was hoping you’d say that,” Katherine said, and he slackened his grip on the steering wheel. He had been unaware that he had been gripping it that hard. “You were?” He felt his eyes fill with tears and was about to blink them back when he remembered what Carine had accused him of. He let them roll. “Of course. You need to spend time with her. Do you have any idea how long you’ll be away?”

because ultimately, ultimately, the pull of blood, the tug of—say it, say it—of blackness was too compelling. When Anton had turned his car around and begun driving toward Juanita Vesper’s house, he’d been heading toward everything David scorned and feared—the rural South and its untidy poverty, disorder, and squalor.

David made a sound so harsh, so bitter, that it took Anton’s breath away. “Guess I should’ve known,” he said. “Known what?” “Pappy used to say blood is thicker than water. It always wins, blood.” Anton felt a slow burn creeping onto his cheeks. “What does that even mean? You think I’m siding with my—my birth mom—because of blood? How convenient that must be for you, Dad. It lets you off the hook completely, doesn’t it?”