See No Color (3 page)

Low-hanging branches whipped around us in the pre-dawn air. Dead leaves crunched under our feet.

“It's okay,” I told Dad, my feet light and my legs strong against the trail. “You know, conservation of energy. Physics class stuff. Nothing owns energy. You just use it and then pass it on.”

Dad laughed, in between labored breaths. He was working hard but the laugh was easy. Natural. Normal.

I laughed and thought for a split second that I could feel within the new step I was taking now, each of the steps I had taken running on this path with Dad years before. It gave me strength and the conviction that I was doing something meaningful and much larger than myself. If I looked closely, I could almost see the step I had taken almost ten years ago, running my very first mile with Dad by my side, egging me on the whole time, even when I told him I thought my lungs were about to burst. He had simply reached over and squeezed my elbow very gently, and said, “It's okay. You're okay.”

And sure enough, I was. I remembered that I got control of my breathing and finished just in front of him. And then I was also eleven on this trail, an avalanche of mud in the middle of a rainy October morning completely taking off my shoe, and then a sharp twig just beneath it slicing open the side of my foot in the next step. How I howled! It seemed like Dad didn't even break stride—he just turned around and scooped me up, ran me all the way home and to the emergency room.
Muuuudddddd
! He would scream playfully whenever we would encounter it now and start gesturing like a crazy man. I would just shake my head and pretend to ignore him, until he poked me enough times that I couldn't help it and started laughing.

“This. Damn. Knee,” he said, in between huge sucks of air. “I'm already becoming an old man over here. Every day, a new part of me goes to pieces.”

“Becoming?” I asked.

He kicked some dirt onto my calf.

“Hey,” I said, “Is that the last resort of the elderly—cheating?”

Dad snorted. “No game going on here. We're just training. You can't cheat in training.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Aren't you the same coach who's always telling us we can't cut corners in training, 'cause it's
cheating
? Or was that your younger, more dedicated doppelganger?”

Instead of answering, he burst ahead of me without warning and started to sprint along the path. “I'll check in with you when
you're
forty-three and see if you can do this,” he said.

I grinned. “Race you to the top of the hill, old man,” I told him as the vista of the valley became visible. The small stand of birch trees at the top was bent over by wind, pulling us forward.

“You're on, Little Kirtridge,” said Dad, accelerating even faster. That was the name he had given me after my first game, when I had gotten on base twice and thrown two people out. Everyone was saying that I was “Terry Kirtridge, Jr.,” and he simply said, “No, she's just Little Kirtridge.”

I grinned and pumped my arms as hard as I could. My breath was like a metronome in my chest, and as my feet clawed into the ground, I could almost hear the rush of water behind me, its progress unstoppable.

CHAPTER FIVE

M
y little sister Kit leaned over an impossibly delicate-looking papier-mâché sculpture of a butterfly and pulled a paintbrush across its chest in a movement that seemed both calculated and completely spontaneous. The sharp orange of the paint clashed with the deep green landscape on the other side of the windows and made me feel suddenly awake. I was reading in the living room and had the perfect view of her latest project. This was where I liked to sit when she was in the middle of working because I could be on the edge of the activity while at the same time I could see everything if I wanted to.

“What's the other color going to be?” I asked. She had been confining herself to just two colors lately because she said that color was actually “a seduction”—that it could keep you from developing your other skills as an artist if you let it. Apparently, minimizing color composition was challenging her to express her eleven-year-old self through shape, media, use of perspective, and a host of other elements that my extremely practical sixteen-year-old self could not recall.

“You'll see,” she said, flashing me a mischievous grin.

I just snickered and returned to my book. You couldn't keep up with her, so why even try?

Out of the corner of my eye, I watched her walk to the sink, wash the paint off of the brush, and begin to mix a new topaz green color onto her palette. It was flat, not shiny, so it brought out the orange's quieter undertones. She began to paint topaz swirls all along the butterfly's torso with such dexterity that I began to get dizzy from watching her. Finally, she stepped back from the butterfly to inspect her work and make any adjustments needed, I assumed. Her long blond hair was flecked with orange, as was her shirt. I remembered that Mom had taken her on a special back-to-school shopping trip to get that blouse. “Just one fancy one, for nice occasions, please,” Mom had begged her. It was a light silk and should not have come anywhere near paint of any kind. But then Kit was never one for common sense.

She had grown into a strange girl, my sister. Everyone said that she would be beautiful, and she was, even at eleven, incredibly beautiful, but I could see it transforming into more of a wild, almost feral kind of beauty. Something you had to look hard to see because she didn't want you to see it at all.

“Nice choice,” I said, referring to the topaz. “Not what I would have thought of at all.”

She cocked her head to the side, frowning. “You think so? I'm not sure.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I like it.”

Kit walked around the butterfly, painting tiny topaz marks here and there. I knew there was some kind of pattern she was following—some kind of internal logic—but I could not see what it was. “What do you like about it?”

I laughed. She was playing with me or something. I picked up
Dreams from My Father
again, ready to resume reading. “Never mind.”

There was a long silence as she continued painting, and I immersed myself in my book. Our dog Paddington came over and lay down by my feet. I patted his head absently.

“You know, I do value your opinion, Alex,” Kit said.

I laughed again. “Okay, whatever.” Something was obviously going on in her mind, but I had no idea what it was, and I wasn't going to spend any of my own time trying to pry it out of her.

I heard her stomp her foot, and I put down the book again. I had read to Kit when she was younger—both books that I was reading and books she wanted me to read—and eventually I had even taught her to read. In much the same way Dad and I had our thing running by the creek, Kit and I had our reading. When you train as hard as we did, “recovery time” was a big part of the day. And fighting for more time with Xbox wasn't my thing, so walking with Kit a few blocks to the library at least once a week to stock up became our routine. We'd spend hours sitting near each other, me reading and Kit reading, or sometimes me reading aloud and Kit drawing. Or that was how it used to be. She still wanted to know what I was into at a particular moment, and had nodded her approval when I began Obama's memoir, but something wasn't right. Things refused to click into the old, easy rhythm.

“I'm serious,” Kit said. She was facing me directly, her big gray eyes full and intense. “I want to be a better sister.” She lowered her gaze for a moment. “I know it's not easy for you.”

I stared at her.

She looked impatient. “You know what I mean.”

I laughed. “No. As usual, Kit, I don't.”
Then why is your heart beating faster?
And then, the image of Dad and the envelope came back into my mind.

Kit's face twisted a little bit, like she was looking at me from far, far away—maybe from space or something.

Dad came in then to get a glass of water, effectively stopping our conversation. He groaned when he saw the butterfly on the table. “Kit, you need to clear all of this off. Now. You know you can't work in here.”

Kit whipped around to face him. “Well, where am I supposed to work?”

“Clear it off,” Dad said, in his
and that's final
voice. “Mom just got home. She's about to start on dinner.” He walked into the living room. “I don't want her to see any of this when she comes in.”

Kit didn't say anything but just curled her upper lip at me across the room.

Kit and Dad never seemed to understand each other. That was nothing new.

Dad had given Kit a bat the day she turned six. This was a tradition with Dad—we'd all gotten real bats for that birthday. But he went overboard with Kit. I remember him telling Mom that he knew the perfect bat for her. It was a discontinued model, but that didn't matter to him. He had spent weeks hunting it down, vying with buyers on eBay to get the best deal and bring it home to his youngest prodigy-in-the-making. It was an extra-lightweight MAKO XL2, with a legendary sweet spot. Jason and I, ten and eleven that year, were both jealous but tried to play it off. I remember Kit unwrapping it unceremoniously, the shiny silver paper falling to the ground, and Dad leaning forward eagerly in anticipation.

“What is this?” she asked, frowning.

Mom, Jason, and I glanced at each other anxiously.

“Well, it's a
bat
, sweetie,” Dad had said, as if he was talking to a dumb animal, like a cow.

Kit met his intense gaze directly. “I know it's a bat. But I don't want a bat.”

Dad laughed. “Well, you don't want a bat
now
, but once you learn how to use it …”

“
You
want a bat,” she said. “You wanted
this
bat. So, have it.” Then she delicately lifted it up and presented it to him in both palms.

I was conscious that I was holding my breath. It had never occurred to me, before that moment, that it was possible to say no to my father about anything—but especially about baseball. I could not imagine what was going to happen. But Dad simply cocked his head to the side, the way a dog does when it hears a strange noise, or sees something it can't quite make sense of. He looked down at the bat, then back up again at Kit, then back at the bat. Then he gently pushed the bat back toward Kit's chest. “What are you … I got this for you, honey,” he said, almost pleadingly. “Especially for you. You have no idea how—”

Kit's resolve seemed to falter for a moment, and I saw a glimmer of fear in her eyes. Clearly, she did not want the bat, but she had also not thought all the way through this confrontation with Dad. He was, after all, the governing force in our family universe, which is why he always got what he wanted.

Before I could think, I heard myself say, “Hey, the bat's here now, so we can always come back and check it out anytime. I want you to open my present. I picked it out for you special.”

Mom shot me a look across the table. I had not picked it out for her special; in fact, I had forgotten about her birthday altogether, like I always did, so Mom had picked out a funny picture book about a llama she thought Kit would like. Had I been there, I would have told her that Kit and I had read it and the entire llama series last year, but I was not there. I reached over and handed Kit the poorly wrapped silver package that I had assembled exactly fifteen minutes before. “Go ahead, open it,” I said quickly, anticipating another rebuttal from Dad.

Kit grabbed the package and her chance at escape. “Ooo, cool,” she said, shaking it back and forth. “I wonder what it could be.” She and I laughed, but no one else did. Dad sat back in his chair and crossed his arms, a sour look spreading over his face. But he let it go, miraculously. “I love this book!” Kit exclaimed, ripping off the paper. Then she winked at me conspiratorially.

Dad tried many, many times after that to get her interested in the game. I think he even got her to hit the ball a few times. Still, she made her distaste for it so plain that it was better for everyone if she was not there while we played, trained, or discussed baseball. Which was most of the time. At first, I felt bad, like we were intentionally leaving her out. But then I realized that she really
wanted
to be left alone to do her own thing—that she was really happier that way. But I think that Dad never really forgave her for that first grand rejection. And the fact that she didn't care about that, either, was always stacked up between them, like a big box of broken trophies.

More and more these days, though, it seemed like the broken stuff was between Kit and me too.

CHAPTER SIX

S
himmery waves and blue air. Me floating just under the water, only my face up, breathing, breathing. I can hear me loud in my ears, and it makes me laugh. Paddington dives into the lake to get the old baseballs that Jason throws for him.
What a good dog
, Daddy says, ball-jawed boy swimming back. Mom on land, cooking tomatoes and meat and rice. Baby Kit beside her, digging shells from the ground. They change colors, crystal-like, with sunlight. She showed me yesterday when I was helping watch her. Because she is too little to watch herself. We put one to our ears and it did not say anything, although Mom told us it would. To us, it only said,
Whooooosh! Whooosh!

I want to stay at the lake cottage always, where it is shimmery and air open everywhere. I know Mom wants to, too. But we always have to go home at the end of the week. Because school will start again. And then the lake and cottage will be here alone.

I am trying to blow bubbles from my nose and the sun is pushing the sky down when she shakes my arm. At first I think I am drowning, like Mom told me to
be careful of
, that someone is dragging me under. It is not too deep here, but I forget that I have feet and legs, too, so I kick and squirm, and water comes into my eyes and nose. I am coughing and also sinking, but then the lady from the cottage next door pulls me up out of the heavy water, both of her arms grabbing my shoulders.