A key had been sitting on the desk. There was only one thing in the room that had a lock. Why he unlocked the drawer, he wasn’t sure. How he’d known what would be inside wasn’t clear to him. There had been one folder, lying flat at the metal bottom. It was unmarked. Scott had picked it up and opened it. Inside were a few documents from the Family Service adoption agency in Tucson, Arizona.
They had never shown him these papers, though he’d searched for them for years. Although he’d asked details about his birth mother, where she was from, what she was like, nothing was ever explained. He’d had a whole two years of his life elsewhere, and it was infuriating that he didn’t remember a single thing about it. His mother told Scott when he was very young that she didn’t really know whom he’d come from, only that they had stepped in, they had adopted him. His parents told him that his mommy was white and his daddy was black—which was special—but after Scott brought up that a friend at school had whispered that Scott’s great-grandfather banned black children from Swithin, all talk about his birth parents ceased. His mother veered away from the topic whenever it came up; his father made vague hand motions and told Scott that it wasn’t worth dwelling on things like that.
Scott did dwell. How could he not? How was he supposed to swallow this and just be one of them when he knew he wasn’t? They were doing this on purpose, he figured, hiding it from him for precisely the reasons only Charles had had the balls to suggest, because he was different, and being different wasn’t good. Fine, he’d thought. Let them really see how different he was. He’d show them all.
The adoption papers in the filing cabinet didn’t say much. There were prints of his hands and feet, a record of his birth weight and length and date. Names were blacked out, but there was the adoption agency’s address and phone number. It was in Tucson, Arizona. He had been born at the University Medical Center on Campbell Avenue.
It had been as good a time as any to leave. He barely remembered that drive across the country, a frantic, scattered four days of highways and sad, generic motels, maxing out his credit card, throwing his cell phone, which kept ringing, out the window at one point, watching it disappear in the side mirror. When he got to Tucson, he checked into the cheapest hotel he could find, bought a map, found his way to the adoption agency, and explained who he was. The woman working there, an overweight lady in her thirties who spoke in broken, accented English, said that his adoption file had been closed—there was no way he could find out any more information about the people who had given him up.
“I’m sorry,” she said, giving him a watery smile.
“But I drove across the country for this,” Scott protested.
“I’m sorry” was all she replied, in honeyed tones.
He turned away, stepping out into the impenetrable heat. Tucson, Arizona. Never did he imagine he was from somewhere like here. Detroit, maybe. South Central. Not that Tucson wasn’t tough, but it seemed slow, lazy, stupefied by the sun. He stared at the sun-baked stucco on the outside of the adoption agency building. Across the street, a leathery-skinned man was fiddling with the tire of his car. He tried to picture growing up here, living here, never knowing of his life in that big, spooky house with that great-grandfather he was in no way related to bearing down on him every time he walked up the stairs.
Over the next few days he went to the adoption agency again and again, begging for answers. The obsession with knowing metastasized in his head. It was the only way, he decided, that he would truly understand who he was. But it was always that same padded woman, always that same dim smile, always the same I’m sorry. Once, he threw a balled-up napkin at her, furious. Another time, he fought with the locked door to the agency’s bathroom until the person on the inside came out, hands raised in surrender, as if Scott was robbing him. It was an old man, a suspicious wet dribble on the front of his khaki pants. “I’m sorry,” the man said over and over. His eyes looked enormous behind his glasses. “It’s all yours. I’m sorry.” As the complex’s security guard escorted Scott out of the agency, telling him he was never allowed to set foot there again, Scott felt sticky with shame.