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.”
“Well,” Sunshine said, and I could tell she was searching for words. “It’s not all bad. I mean, she got you out of the deal, right?”
Brown clapped his hands. “Yes! She did! And you’re awesome!” he said, in that way he had back then, when suddenly something struck him as full of happiness and he lit up with the joy of it and said words like awesome and fantastic and cool and they all ended with exclamation marks. ! ! ! In those moments Brown was like a trick birthday candle, the kind that relit themselves by magic even after you blew them out. He could still be that way. Just not as often.
It had been fourteen years since that night, when we were all eighteen and we used to go to parties together and drink spiked Kool-Aid out of plastic-bag-lined garbage cans with enormous straws poking out of them. We used to dance together at The Excuse, the three of us holding hands and hopping around the tiny dance floor. We used to go on long bike rides to celebrate the end of exams, bought tubes of cookie dough at the grocery store and baked them late at night in the disgusting basement dorm kitchen, backpacked part of the Appalachian Trail for a few weeks each summer with the goal of finishing the whole thing eventually, a goal that had not yet been reached.
A year or so after graduation we started going to the weddings of our college friends. We made toasts and clinked glasses and Sunshine had flings with groomsmen and Brown had flings with bridesmaids and I had flings with no one. We danced and drank and laughed and cheered. We got hotel rooms next to each other and in the mornings we got up and drank pots of coffee, cream for me, sugar for Sunshine, black for Brown.
We were all living in Boston and I was with them the night it finally dawned on them, and me, that they were in love with each other, and we laughed and laughed, in relief and surprise. I was “friend of honor” when they got married on that pretty hill by the orchard north of campus, the orchard where we had picked apples every fall of our four years together. My friend-of-honor toast was structured like Jeopardy!, our favorite game even back then: six categories and five sentences for each. It was long and complicated and everyone loved it and laughed, not because it was funny, even though it was, but because we were all so happy. They had figured it out, Sunshine and Brown, they had figured out something essential about themselves and about each other, which seemed to mean they had figured out something essential about this world, and that meant that the rest of us could too.
We didn’t know that cancer would come to Sunshine so young, that she would lose all those baby-making essentials, as she called them, and that within a few years the two of them would flee Boston for the mountains—right here in Old Forge, where we had all three spent that summer before our junior year working, the summer they had fallen in love with my Adirondacks—to live more deeply, as they told people when asked, because if it worked for Thoreau then maybe it would work for them too. We couldn’t have predicted that the day would come when I, who had not once considered moving back to the land from whence I sprang, would be living in a cabin a mile away from them, here in this tiny town perched on the edge of these old, old mountains.
That’s the thing, though. You think you can predict, but you can’t.
* * *