THE FIRST TIME I saw Sean, I had no idea that we would become brothers. I watched him wander through my parents’ living room, with its supply of child-lethal bric-a-brac, then gathered my courage and picked him up, just to be on the safe side. I was twenty-four and had no experience with toddlers. “See this?” I said, holding up a little brass Buddha. “This is a wise man with some kind of sharp pointy crown on, so be careful.”
“Yes,” said Sean, taking it in his hands. He was one and a half, not timid or shy, just limited to a small pool of words.
“And this is Hanuman, king of the monkeys.”
“Yes,” he said again, taking that statue, too.
Thirty years later, I recognize how fragile was the chain of circumstances that brought us together, how one slight alteration would have left us strangers. My mother worked for child welfare as an attorney prosecuting abuse and neglect cases; some months earlier, she had been assigned a case involving one of Sean’s brothers, who had gone to the hospital with a broken arm of the kind that usually comes from parental yanking, and who had then gone back later with a third-degree burn from an iron. The four boys had been farmed out to different homes, and for the older three, those homes had become permanent. Only Sean was left. He suffered from persistent nightmares that forced him awake, screaming; a series of well-intentioned but sleep-deprived people had ultimately declined to take him on permanently. The one immediately before us had reached the end of her endurance and decided she needed a break—right away. Sean was with us, I was told, for just a few days, on an emergency basis.
To be honest, I can’t remember how deeply his story penetrated my self-absorption. My big obsession back then was trying to figure out how to write a novel in the interstices of the kind of absurd part-time jobs (door-to-door furniture salesman, tour guide) that only the hapless recent college grad can stumble into. I had no particular sensitivity toward little kids and no desire for a new sibling. I already had two: David and Perrin were both away at college. We were exceptionally close, members of an exclusive club devoted to deciphering our eccentric parents and complex family history. We tended to be inward looking, wary of the outside world.
While Sean watched some cartoons on TV, I sat with my parents at the dining room table. “So you’ve got him for the weekend?” I asked, looking at the diaper bag, that strange, padded piece of luggage.
“The week, probably,” said my mother.
“Could stretch longer,” said my father.
A nervous silence. My parents looked exhausted already: two people in their middle fifties who had lived hard lives and were not in the best physical or emotional condition. My father reached for his bottle of antidepressants and swallowed one thoughtfully, as if in preparation for the challenges ahead. But beneath the air of quiet terror there was some other feeling, something steely and certain. They looked like gamblers who had stumbled on a not completely certain but nevertheless highly probable thing: the jackpot that might very well make their lives good again.
I was alarmed. My parents were decidedly high maintenance. Now that David and Perrin were away, I got all the calls for help: my mother needed a lift somewhere, needed me to wait in the apartment so a repairman could get in, needed me to convince my father not to do something disastrous (usually involving money). For his part, my father needed me to help him to the doctor when his back went out, or to file papers at court so he didn’t miss a deadline—or just needed company when the melancholy of daily life became too much. Both of them wanted me to listen and untangle their many complicated and vociferous disputes with each other, involving spending, housecleaning, mistakes, and slights sometimes a quarter century old. I would drop everything and rush over to their place from my apartment in Brooklyn, an hour away.
The last few years had been especially hard on my father. Once a prominent criminal defense attorney, the sort you would see interviewed on the local news about some big case or other, he had been reduced to taking whatever floated his way. He now worked out of a tiny home office off the living room, with a desk covered in dirty laundry and fancy Italian shoes—he loved shoes—and a phone he never answered; he met with his clients in the McDonald’s across the street.
All this worked in Sean’s favor. Common sense, caution, a respect for order, solid finances, and a full night’s sleep—all the things that had stopped previous families from adopting—were not my parents’ concerns. What they wanted was love, the kind of love that would propel them through their midlife confusion. Sean came that weekend and never went back; my parents filed for adoption. They lasted through a year of his nightmares and frustration tantrums until the sheer constancy of their attention quieted the fear inside him. They took meticulous care of his asthma, and it, too, began to improve; there were fewer and fewer late-night trips to the emergency room. He started to talk more, and then it became a flood. The silent little boy was now a nonstop commentator on the world around him, smart, observant, and relentlessly opinionated. I started to notice phrases reminiscent of my parents: “Who knew?” he would say, an all-purpose exclamation of surprise and satisfaction whenever an unexpected treat came his way. “Who knew?”
My mother and father seemed to relish this second chance at parenthood. Always tottering on the edge of exhaustion, overloaded with plastic grocery bags, they nevertheless looked grounded, certain of their place in the world. I remember my father pushing Sean around the neighborhood in a stroller as if he were chauffeuring a celebrity. I remember my mother at home in her nightgown cradling Sean in her arms and cooing with deep satisfaction.
Of course, they couldn’t stop being feckless, either—and, to be fair, their schedules were now so complex that even the most organized would have been overwhelmed. I still got the emergency calls, but instead of having to take care of my parents, I now had to take care of the little boy my parents were supposed to be taking care of. I complained, of course, sputtering over the phone about how important my time was, blaming them for preventing me from becoming a writer, but I never hung up on them. The truth was that the hours I spent with Sean were among the most genuine, human moments in a life that had become confusing and a little bit lonely. When I first took up fiction, I was under the impression that you composed a novel by pulling out a piece of paper and writing down whatever occurred to you, just as it popped into your head. But it didn’t seem to work that way. After a couple of years of trying, the silence of the empty page had become frightening.
Taking care of Sean was something of a mystery too, but at least it felt alive. I had no idea how to entertain him at first, and my parents gave me no pointers. I took him to the park and experienced the strange slowdown of kid time, something I would relearn many years later after my own children were born: those long, lyrical moments in which you do somersaults on the grass or play excruciatingly cute games of peekaboo, only to check your watch and find that exactly two minutes have gone by, and the rest of the afternoon still stretches ahead.
Once, I cheated and took him to the movies, a grown-up movie, no less, as there were no kids’ films playing nearby. It was safe enough—a romantic comedy with Tom Selleck, no violence, no sex—but looking back, I marvel at how I could have rationalized that move. Desperation, of course. I sank into the padded seat with utter relief, and the movie, at which I would normally have sneered, was bliss, simply because it did not involve pouring wet playground sand into a broken dump truck. I followed its every plot turn with such deep gratitude that I remember it all to this day. Sean was quiet enough for me to pretend that he might be content, though when I finally looked over I found him standing in his seat, facing the back of the theater, as if the show were supposed to materialize there. I realized then that he had never been to the movies before. “No, you watch the screen,” I said, pointing. “The screen, over there.”
“Why?” he asked.
“So you can see the movie.” I watched him turn to dutifully stare at the giant image of Tom Selleck, and I saw the sad folly of what I was doing: his needs would have to come first because he was a little kid. It was that simple. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s get some candy. We’ll go to the park.”
Even as a rather callow twenty-four-year-old, still hanging on to a long list of adolescent grievances, I started to gain some grudging appreciation for my parents: if nothing else, they had staying power.
HAVE I MENTIONED THAT out in the larger world, Sean is considered black and the rest of us white? That we are brothers stuck on opposite sides of that strange classification system known as race?
Two and a half years after joining the family, when Sean was four, he seemed to realize for the first time that his skin was a different color from ours. I remember a confusing episode in a Chinese restaurant over the holidays, when Perrin and David were both back from college. It’s possible that the sudden re-expansion of the family had left him feeling a little lost; in all probability, he wasn’t getting much attention at dinner that night, sitting in a chair next to Perrin, his head barely above the table, as the adults yelled over each other in the crowded room and the dishes came and went. Suddenly, he blurted out, “Everyone has white skin except me!”
The conversation around the table stopped. “What did you say?” asked my mother.
“Everyone has white skin except me!”
The woman I was dating at the time was Japanese. “I don’t have white skin,” she said, holding out her arm. “See?”
“You’re not brown,” said Sean, sounding disgusted at this quibble.
“What’s wrong with brown?” asked Perrin.
“I hate brown!” He didn’t seem sad so much as frustrated and angry. His face quivered on the edge of tears.
We all began talking in a nervous rush, not so much to console him, I think, as to drown him out with our reassurances—reassurances meant for ourselves as well. “Brown is beautiful,” said my mother. “Like chocolate.”
“I wish I were brown,” said my father.
“Brown is my favorite color,” said David.
No one knew the magical words that would make this problem disappear, but then a moment later it was simply gone, as mysteriously as it came: Perrin took Sean on her lap and gave him a pile of sugar packets to play with; more food arrived for the adults; conversation resumed. But the nervousness remained, just below the surface.
Sean brought up his skin color a number of times that year. He wanted to look like everyone else in the family, wanted physical, visual proof that he belonged and could never be left out—a powerful hunger for a little boy who had already lost one family. All any of us could do was explain, over and over again, that looks don’t make a family, knowing that time would prove it.
And I think it has. If Sean and I don’t look alike, we certainly sound alike, much like our father, who grew up on the Lower East Side during the Great Depression and had a bit of borscht belt to him. Sean and I share the same love of dumb jokes, the same penchant for grandiose plan making, whether it’s about kayaking the Atlantic or biking the continent. I was at his adoption hearing, at his big tap dance performance, at all his school graduations. My wife and I signed him up for his first photography class, a small gift that bore extravagant fruit: photography became his college major and then his profession. He paid us back by taking the pictures at my first book party. He was at our wedding, at the hospital when our oldest child, Jonah, was born, at the bris. Fifteen years ago, we stood with Perrin and David beside our father’s coffin; now, when I go to New York, we all drive out to the cemetery together to visit Dad’s grave and walk among the headstones, telling jokes and laughing just as our father would have.
My worry in even mentioning race is that I might end up misrepresenting our experience by focusing on something that is irrelevant to the fabric of our daily lives as siblings. The problem, however, is that silence would be equally distorting. For if race is a purely social construct, a figment of the collective imagination, a thing out there, on the street, not in here, within the family, it can bounce around in highly unpredictable ways.
Soon after Sean arrived, I took him with me to spend the day with a bunch of people at a house in Fire Island. We made a splash. He was completely outgoing, interested in everyone, full of laughter. People passed him around from arm to arm, cooing over him. Someone said to me, “This is just the most wonderful thing you’re doing. You’ve rescued a child and given him a home. A little black boy.”
That felt odd. I hated the way it flattened out the interactions between complicated individuals and turned the whole thing into an act of charity. There was no recognizing us in that. We were basically instinctual people, neither political nor principled, and more than a little selfish. “Oh no, really, it’s the other way around. He’s here to rescue us,” I said.
“But you’ve changed a life.”
“No, he’s changed ours.” I meant it, though the more calculating part of me already realized that this, too, would be taken as an expression of modesty and simply get me more kudos—which is why I said it, of course.
Indeed, as these encounters multiplied, I got over my unease and started accepting the praise, then basking in it, then expecting it, even courting it, feeling miffed when it didn’t come my way. I started borrowing Sean from my parents whenever I had a social occasion where I wouldn’t know many people. He was perfect for backyard barbecues in Brooklyn, picnics in Central Park. With him in my arms I stood out: I was the guy with the cute little brown brother. I would carry him around the party, introducing him to all the women, and thus introducing myself in the most flattering, if contrived, light: Mr. Sensitivity, the urban saint, but also hip, because Sean was a hip little kid with his incredible smile and wonderful ringlets.
Of course, that wasn’t the only type of dynamic we had. Soon after the trip to Fire Island, we were riding downtown on a city bus when I noticed a middle-aged white woman across the aisle, watching us very closely. Sean’s asthma was acting up and he was coughing, a wet, ugly chest cough that always made me upset—I hated that he had to struggle for breath. “That’s a nasty cough,” said the woman.
“He’s got asthma,” I said, feeling obscurely accused of something, some sort of negligence—or maybe it was illegitimacy.
“He should see a doctor.”
“We have medicine for it.”
“Mmm,” she said, looking skeptical.
From that point on, I started noticing a pattern wherever we went: older white women peering to see if Sean’s coat was properly zipped, if I held his hand when we crossed the street, if I let him drink from the sippy cup he’d just dropped on the sidewalk. It took me a while to realize that they didn’t see the hip older brother. They assumed I was the father. And though I was twenty-five by then, I was the sort of baby-faced twenty-five that looked eighteen, and not particularly prosperous, either, in my repertoire of old jeans and T-shirts. Sean was still in the thrift shop clothes my parents had inherited with him, which contained an alarming number of Michael Jackson tank tops. Stuff from the bottom of the box at Goodwill. I can only imagine how these women filled in the blanks: teen parents, black and white, poor, hapless. A sort of interracial La bohème, with a coughing, wheezing child.
The somewhat pathetic truth is that I was secretly flattered and did nothing to dispel the impression. He had been with us almost a year, and I guess I felt a little possessive of Sean by that point, but there was more to it: fatherhood was grown-up, and nothing else about my life felt that way. I was working part-time as a Japanese-speaking tour guide, living with a roommate, and writing nothing worth keeping, but I walked a little straighter when I had him with me.
TOWARD THE END OF Sean’s first year with us, the legitimacy of our connection was challenged from outside. I got a call from my mother, who told me that an organization of African American social workers had weighed in on Sean’s adoption. Its interest wasn’t Sean’s case specifically, but the broader issue of adoption policy; it believed that African American kids should go to African American families, and it asked some cogent questions: How would black children raised in white homes understand their African American heritage? How would they learn how to navigate the difficulties of race in America without African American role models?
I could see that they had a point; I just wanted them to make it using someone else’s adoption. My parents got worried. They were receiving regularly scheduled home visits from social workers as the adoption process continued. What if policy changed and the agency started recommending against transracial adoptions? “He’s half white,” said my father. “Why isn’t he considered white? I mean, why choose one half rather than the other?”
“Look at his skin,” my mother said.
“He looks like he got a tan at the beach.” That was pretty much true. Sean’s biological father was African American, but his biological mother was Caucasian. His biological half brothers all had Caucasian fathers and looked positively Nordic, with blond hair and blue eyes.
“You’re not being practical,” said my mother.
But my father was stuck on his point. “He’s not black or white. He’s a harlequin, black and white.”
“That’s idiotic.”
My parents, never much into preparation, made an effort to forestall any possible criticism. They started dressing Sean in a dashiki for big occasions such as Passover and Yom Kippur. We all made a halfhearted effort to celebrate Kwanzaa, right after Hanukkah, getting instructions from a book.
The adoption started to get a little messy for other reasons. Sean’s mother had abandoned the boys in the middle of their brother’s abuse case; she’d run away to Puerto Rico with a janitor from the homeless shelter they lived in, and my parents were worried that she would return to contest his adoption. If she did, there wouldn’t be a chance of winning; he would have to go back to her. My parents talked about this possibility at night, when Sean was asleep, during long, circular discussions. “She let the other three go,” said my father.
“She’s unpredictable,” said my mother.
“She won’t come back.”
“She might.”
She didn’t; what happened is that my mother’s agency realized that Sean had been tangentially connected to the abuse case my mother had prosecuted a couple of years back, involving his brother with the broken arm. The agency brought up the possibility of what it called “the appearance of impropriety.” What they were worried about was a tabloid headline something like “City Lawyer Steals Kid from Mom, Legally!” My mother was called in to talk to her boss, and then to her boss’s boss. She was passed over for a promotion that had once looked like a sure thing and then transferred out of the courts altogether, to a job doing paperwork. The inspector general’s office brought her up on a battery of charges, some of which were pretty far-flung—an effort to find something that would stick.
This new twist was especially frightening for my parents: now that my father was in what was delicately called “semiretirement,” my mother’s job was their primary support. But what really concerned them was the potential impact on the adoption. My father would get worked up into long, dramatic rants. “I’ll never hand him over,” he told me. “I’ll take him and go on the lam.”
“Does anyone even say lam anymore?” I asked, trying to lighten the mood.
“I’ll change my name and drive out west. They’ll never find us.”
“Isn’t that called kidnapping?”
“Who cares what it’s called.”
I don’t know if my father was afraid that his legal troubles would come out and affect the adoption; he never mentioned it. But I couldn’t help feeling that he had been looking for reasons to go on the lam for years before Sean arrived, anyway. He often fantasized about radical personal transformation: living on a sailboat, opening a bookstore in Vermont. And yet I also understood his sense of crisis. Sean had taken root inside our hearts; whatever the law said, there was no disentangling him now.
THE CHARGES AGAINST MY mother were eventually dropped; the adoption went through. Yet a sense of insecurity stayed with us for years afterward. Would Sean have been better off in an African American family? A younger family with more energetic parents and siblings closer in age? Part of this was a reaction to the bumpiness of the adoption process, part of it just a by-product of who we are: overly ruminative, insecure people. But there was something more, too: a sense of the willfulness of choosing a little boy still too young to choose you back. Sure, he seemed to love us, all right, but given the opportunity, would he have chosen us? This question, fundamentally unanswerable, was more an expression of anxiety than anything else. No one frets over the fact that biological children don’t choose their families. But irrational or not, it lingered.
Five or six years after the adoption went through, the entire family was in my parents’ Japanese station wagon, making a slow arc around the concrete island at the center of Times Square. Traffic was snarled and we crept along, only slowly becoming aware of a commotion on the center island. Someone was shouting through an old PA system, and though it was hard to make out every word, we could all understand enough to know that he was very, very angry. Jew was one of the few words that cut through the distortion.
An African American man stood on a portable stage, a microphone in his hand. He was dressed like the genie in Aladdin, in a turban, a sash, and the trademark puffy pants, and behind him stretched a line of other African American men dressed in the same style, looking determined and scary despite the harem pants. A banner read THE TWELVE TRIBES OF ISRAEL. “The Jews have stolen everything from us,” said the man with the microphone. “Not just our freedom but our identity. We are the true Israelites. Not them. Us!” He had a lot to say about Jewish bloodsuckers, slave masters, bankers, and pawnbrokers, but what got me was not the anti-Semitic rhetoric so much as the look on Sean’s face as he listened next to me: confused, guarded, bruised.
The smart thing would have been to respond with something right away, something about how crazy these people were, how they didn’t matter, how families can be black and white, Jewish and not-Jewish, how they can be anything they want to be as long as the people in them love each other. Instead, we all sat very still, trying to act as if nothing were happening while we willed the light to turn so we could escape.
It was Sean who finally spoke. “They’re not talking to me.”
Over the next couple of years, Sean took tap dancing lessons and tap danced in the living room as we sat on the couch, a wryly captive audience. He got a video camera and created movie trailers to nonexistent movies. We would line up chairs and eat popcorn as we watched them on the TV, discussing everything that happened off-screen. After a trip to Disney World, he developed a fear of flying, which he remedied by obsessively watching airplane documentaries on cable TV. When I came over, he would explain the intricacies of airspeed, engine thrust, lift, and the rigors of aerospace engineering. “The wings can bend thirty degrees in either direction, up or down,” he said, showing me with his arms. “That’s how strong they are.” Once, he walked in the door with our father; they had spent the afternoon at LaGuardia Airport, watching the planes take off. “Takeoff is the trickiest time,” Sean explained.
“Yes, but there’s something beautiful about watching them angle up into the sky,” said my father.
“Flying is safer than driving, and we drive every day,” said Sean. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
My father smiled. He was fragile and often afraid of what life seemed to require of him, but not in those moments.
From Sean, I learned that family is not defined by blood. It is not defined by race. It is not even defined by a shared voice or way of telling a story. Family is who you choose to love. The unfathomable complexity of those two terms, choose and love, starts to feel simple after a while, when you live them day by day.
THREE YEARS AFTER WE got stuck in Times Square with the Twelve Tribes of Israel, when Sean was ten, I moved in with Karen, the woman I would eventually marry. It was an experiment in those same two words, choose and love. Karen worked on her novel in the bedroom, I worked on mine in the living room, and on days when we were both stuck and frustrated, we would switch: I would write hers, and she would write mine. And yet in other moments, the act of sharing a life together still felt tentative, fragile. Where should that vase go in the living room? How best to wash and dry the dishes? What did it mean to say, Ours?
One day, Karen said, “I’ve been thinking that we should have Sean over.”
“You mean a sleepover?”
I remember him arriving at our house with his overnight stuff in his school bag, formal and shy and very pleased. We made dinner together, and talked, and soon it was time to go to bed. He slept on the couch. We tucked him in and watched him sleep, amazed at his presence in our home, the home we were constructing together. The next day, we walked him to school, full of the importance of our task: Sean has to be at PS3 by eight o’clock, sharp, he can’t be late. I remember walking up the steps with him, pulling open the big front door and catching a glimpse of the world inside, kids’ projects taped to the walls, a rich and complex world that was entirely unknown to us, his. “Bye,” he said.
“Wait, shouldn’t we go in with you?” I asked. “I mean, walk you to your classroom?”
“No,” he said simply, and sailed in.
The big door closed behind him, and Karen and I stood on the school steps, at a momentary loss. Was this okay? Were we forgetting something? How could he leave us like this? I think part of the confusion was how large the world was becoming, how many concentric rings it was proving to have: first Sean, then Karen. What might happen next?
Our oldest child, Jonah, was born in 1999, while we were living in an apartment in Tribeca, right beside the Hudson River. Sean was fifteen then, a big, burly teenager, already a head taller than anyone else in the family, but he held the baby with a natural, unselfconscious gentleness that I had never seen in a young man. And he was genuinely interested, too: as Jonah grew, Sean would come over and play with him for hours. Eventually we hired him to do a little babysitting in the apartment, so my wife and I could get some work done or just get some rest. He learned to feed, change, bathe, and burp, learned how to take away a breakable thing with one hand while offering a toy with the other, and in the process became such an important part of Jonah’s life that the mere sight of his uncle in the doorway would make our son start to laugh and clap.
In time, we got up our courage and sent them outside together: Jonah’s first foray into the world beyond the apartment without his parents. It felt momentous. I secured him in the snuggly that Sean wore on his front (have you ever seen a teenage boy comfortably wearing a snuggly?), double-checked the bottle, and then watched them disappear out the door. I remember the long wait at the window till they appeared on the street, ten stories below. I remember my wife leaning against me, watching, too. I remember them crossing the West Side Highway to the river and continuing on to the newly renovated pier, with its hot dog stand and benches. The pier was surprisingly narrow from the height of our apartment, surrounded on three sides by the muscular, glistening river, and on our side by the cityscape, with its tall buildings, its rushing cars. They were tiny figures out there, but I could see Sean’s arms wrapped around Jonah in the snuggly. My brother, carrying my son.