Zak and I had belonged to intersecting circles of friends throughout high school, and had over the years flirted in sarcasm and baseball jargon. He loved the Phillies; I’d assumed the Mets as my own cause, and whenever we found ourselves at a party together we bickered about which team was worse. We became friends in our own right in the final year of high school, and took to sitting in the back of Zak’s car, listening to sports radio and kissing.
In the summer before we’d gone off to college, Zak had often trekked across the parking lot to visit me, and we’d played Wiffle ball in the back of the store. Now we slipped through the automatic doors and passed by Sporting Goods to collect a bat.
“You still dating that guy at school?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s too bad.”
We found some space in the patio furniture aisle, and Zak put on a show of pitcher’s stretches. “I’m glad you’re around. This town gets smaller and weirder every time I come back.”
“It was always weird,” I said.
“My parents are going gray.”
“That’s your revelation? Your parents’ hair?”
“You’re the worst.” He threw the ball with more force than he should have, and I connected bat and ball with a satisfying thwack. The ball careened out of Outdoor Living and into Health and Beauty, taking out the deodorant display in a domino-style cataclysm. From behind the rubble an arthritic, red-vested woman threw us a look of contempt.
“SECURITYYYYY!” she roared, a sound incongruous with her tiny frame. A fat man with armpit stains emerged from the stockroom; I recognized him, but he didn’t know me, or didn’t care. He stared at the deodorant, then at us, and adjusted his flashlight belt holster.
After we’d been searched for evidence of shoplifting and ejected from the store, I walked Zak back to work.
“I know what you mean, about feeling strange being here.”
“I know you do,” he said, and kissed me on each cheek.
“How European of you,” I said. In truth he had startled me. I tried to think of some tipsy exchange in which I might have revealed something about my past, but was sure I hadn’t. Back behind the counter, Zak mixed me something caramel-flavored, and I sat for an hour paging through notes and glowering at my blank notebook, producing a single sentence before I gave up and went home.
—
That night Rahela appeared in my doorway in her pajamas. “Whatcha doing?”
“Homework. What are you doing?”
“I had to pee. Can’t you sleep?”
“People don’t sleep in college,” I said, which was not exactly a lie. “Go back to bed.”
Instead Rahela pulled back my comforter and wriggled her way in. “I heard you yelling last night.”
“It was just a bad dream. Sorry if I woke you up.”
“Tell me about the night I was born.”
“Where did that come from?”
“I’m just curious,” she said. “I mean, you’re the only one who knows.”
Rahela knew, in theory, that we’d been adopted, had been told enough to account for her earlier memories of my accent, for the fact that our sable eyes didn’t match Jack’s and Laura’s dark green and watery blue ones. She knew, empirically, but she didn’t feel it. For her, there was no one before our American parents, and the loss of these other people, the parents of technicality, was objectively sad but nothing more.
I thought of my father’s stories, the way he’d made my own birth sound so exciting. My parents had been in Tiska and had to drive two towns down, where there was a hospital: You were almost born cliffside—you just couldn’t wait to get out and go swimming!
“Once upon a time,” I said. “We lived in a little flat in the middle of a great big city.”
“What’s a flat?”
“Like an apartment.”
“A flat apartment?”
“Okay just listen.”
Rahela quieted.
“Our mom was going to have you very soon, but it was a cold winter and a blizzard hit the city. The snow was this high”—I swung my hand in the air to mark a meter’s height—“like up to your chin!”
“Up to your chin?”
“Yeah, I was nine years old. Our dad joked that if I walked on an unplowed road all that would be left of me would be the pom-pom on my hat.
“You waited until the middle of the night. Our godparents came running over from their apartment through the snow and dug out the car so Mom and Dad could get to the hospital. I had to stay in the house, and I was so mad about missing out that I cried like a baby. But then, just a few minutes after Mom and Dad had left, Dad came running back up into the apartment. It was so cold that he’d grown tiny icicles in his eyebrows!”
“What happened?”
“Everyone was screaming at each other. The car was stuck in the road!”
“Did you call an ambulance?”
“Dad didn’t think an ambulance would get there in time.”
“You just left Mom out in the snow?”