Page 56 of Middlegame

“Roger!” There’s a blink, and the world is cast in startling color. Dodger’s in the backyard of her parents’ house in Palo Alto, sitting near the high, whitewashed fence between grass and gully. They must have rebuilt the fence after her . . . accident, making it higher, closing the gap she used to wiggle through. He recognizes the birdbath, and the climbing roses Heather Cheswich used to spend so much time tending. He always liked it when Dodger sat on the porch and looked at her mother’s roses, which had so many more colors than the ones in Boston.

(He didn’t know much about colorblindness back then, or that he couldn’t see the delicacies of shade in the roses in his own neighborhood; he just knew California was supersaturated, more brightly colored than any real place could possibly be, colored like a fairy tale, colored like the Up-and-Under.)

“Shouldn’t you be downstairs eating pie?” Dodger is stretched out on a plastic beach chair, dragged to the side of the backyard where her father—and the barbecue—aren’t. He can’t feel through her skin, but he knows the sun will be warm, and the air will be gentle, and he’s never missed California like he does right now. He never knew Cambridge could be so cold.

“Shit’s weird here,” he says—understatement of the night—and forces himself to smile, so she’ll hear it in his voice. He doesn’t want her to worry. “How’s your Thanksgiving going?”

“Oh, gangbusters. Mom made cranberry pie, which set itself on fire somehow, and Erin made roast root vegetables with garlic and rosemary, which didn’t set itself on fire, and Dad set the turkey on fire twice. He’s about to start barbecuing the corn, and . . . Roger? What’s wrong?”

Sometimes he forgets how sensitive their connection is to sound. He hadn’t even considered that his sharply indrawn breath might transmit, or that she might be able to tell it from a yawn. “Like I said, shit’s weird. Erin’s having Thanksgiving dinner with you guys?”

“I know, it’s bizarre, right? Her flight home got canceled due to weather, and I couldn’t leave her alone in the apartment to eat ramen and look gloomily out the window at old Bill. My folks think she’s pretty cool. She’s really useful in the kitchen, too. Not like me. My talents begin and end with pancakes, and that’s a job for tomorrow morning, not for tonight.”

“Has she said anything to you?”

“Anything like what?” Dodger sounds honestly curious, and honestly confused. For once, he’s the one whose world is falling apart, while hers is continuing on a normal keel.

For the first time, he understands why she didn’t tell him how unhappy she was, all those years and all that bloodshed ago. Being in someone’s head like this, it’s . . . intimate in a way nothing else in his life has ever been. Barging in on her and telling her how scared he was by the silence and stillness of his parents seems unfair, like an intrusion she didn’t ask for and can’t avoid. He wants to protect her. He wants to let her have her holiday. He can tell her later, with words spoken in the air and not in the space they make between them, about his concerns.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It does.” Dodger shifts in her chair. Across the lawn, her father waves. She waves back, smiling through her teeth as she hisses, “Remember what happened last time one of us decided to keep secrets? Now give. What’s going on?”

“I just . . . Erin?”

“Yeah, Erin. What’s going on with your parents?”

“I don’t know.” Quickly, he describes what happened at the dinner table. He wants to edit, to cast them in a better light. He doesn’t. Dodger appreciates facts, says math is impossible if you don’t know your starting figures. She won’t judge them based on a single meal. She’ll understand.

When he finishes, she’s quiet. Too quiet, for too long. He’s growing concerned when she says, “Their response to the idea of you and me dating was disproportionate.”

“What?”

“Everything else could be written off as an exaggerated reaction to a conversation they’ve been worried about for twenty years. My folks don’t like to talk about the adoption either. Not quite that viciously, but they get twitchy when I bring it up. I could make comforting noises and pretend everything about this was normal, except for that response. Your mother looked disgusted. You said I existed, you set a group of parameters that could apply to dozens of girls, you never said we were romantically involved, and yet she looked like she was going to throw up. That’s not a proportionate response. They know about me. They knew before you brought me up.”

“I don’t think . . .”

“Do the math,” she says, and it’s a kind statement, a gentle statement, especially for her, who considers math the only true underpinning of the universe: she’s trying, in her own sledgehammer way, to nudge him along. “Parents of adult adoptees are sometimes sensitive to the idea that their children might go looking for their biological parents; there’s no ‘right way’ to respond. You get helpful parents, parents who’ve been in secret correspondence with the bio parents for years, and you get parents who’ll lie to your face and say the bio parents are dead when they aren’t. Humans are complicated. Humans make decisions based on the data at hand. So yeah, it’s weird that they got twitchy, but if you’ve never tried to talk about it with them before, it’s not outside the numbers.”

“I guess.”

“It’s the rest of it.” Dodger sits up fully, draping her arms across her knees. “They shouldn’t have jumped straight from ‘there’s a girl’ to ‘are you dating her.’ If they did, they shouldn’t have been disgusted. Not unless they already knew there was a girl out there for you to find, a girl you shouldn’t be romantically involved with. It doesn’t add up.”

“What should I do? Should I go talk to them?”

“No. Wait for them to come and talk to you.” Dodger pauses. “And . . . be careful.”

“I will,” he promises, and opens his eyes. The feeling of isolation is immediate, stronger than the norm; usually, he and Dodger pop in and out of each other’s heads a few times a day, checking in, asking questions, and exiting again, as comfortable solo as they are together. Here and now, however, the fact of his singularity is almost upsetting, almost too profound to be real.

He slides off the bed, aware of the irony of feeling like the absence of telepathic connection across a continent is the unrealistic part of this evening. His parents are moving downstairs; he can hear their footsteps, hear the occasional spike of raised voices. They’re not quite arguing, but their conversation has definitely taken on a strained tone. He can’t make out words with his door closed. Under the circumstances, he’s not sure he wants to.

Carefully, he crosses to the closet. This time, when his questing fingers find the loose board, he pulls it up, revealing the treasures beneath. A few books that had been too grown-up for him, once upon a time; a dictionary of profanity purchased at the used bookstore down by Harvard Square, hiding it inside his coat and rushing home with it, red-faced and glancing around constantly, sure someone knew he was smuggling something he shouldn’t have into the house. Other boys his age hoarded dirty pictures and copies of Penthouse. He hid books about the origins of words he wasn’t supposed to know.

There is a layer of the more common detritus of boyhood. A bird’s nest, almost disintegrated with time. A rock-hard bar of Hershey’s chocolate. A few interesting rocks. Some shells, a bone—he doesn’t know what from—a slingshot, a handful of comic books. Ordinary things, from an ordinary childhood. A few of them seem old-fashioned now, but so what? He loved them once, enough to hide them here, where he wouldn’t need to worry about them being accidentally swept up and thrown away by an adult who didn’t understand their significance.

Under the spindrift remains of his childhood is a folder, yellowed with age, curling at the edges. Carefully, Roger works it loose and opens it. Inside are a few papers his younger self was particularly proud of—an essay about seeing the Red Sox win a game, a spelling worksheet where he had corrected the teacher—and a small pile of crayon drawings. The first, labeled ROGER M., AGE 4 in his already meticulous handwriting, shows a boy he assumes is meant to be him standing in a field, holding hands with a girl. They’re both smiling.

In the next picture, the girl is gone. It’s just the boy, standing in the same field, a frown on his face. Around him, over and over, Roger has written a single sentence: