Nikki on the Line

by Barbara Carroll Roberts

  “So what happened? Did you go to live with relatives or something?”

  “No. They were all into the same thing. Drug dealing and stuff.”

  “Who took care of you?”

  “My kindergarten teacher.” Booker pushed his hair back from his face. “We lived in this little town up in the mountains where everybody knew what everybody else was up to. So my teacher came over to my house to talk to my parents one day because I guess I wasn’t showing up at school much. When she got there, my parents were passed out in the living room and I was trying to cook dinner.” Booker smiled his half smile. “I wasn’t much good at making dinner when I was six.”

  “I’m not very good at making dinner now.”

  Booker laughed. “Yeah, me neither. So anyway, Mom, I mean my teacher—she was my teacher then, but she’s my mom now—called the cops and took me home with her.”

  “So that’s where you stayed?”

  “Yeah. My teacher and her husband got custody of me, then finally got to adopt me after a couple of years. And then they got worn out with people looking at us funny and asking them about ‘that drug-dealers’ kid,’ so they looked for jobs outside of that town and finally found some here.”

  “Wow,” I said, which under the circumstances was a pretty lame thing to say, but, you know, what wouldn’t be a lame thing to say?

  So then we stood there for another minute not saying anything, until finally I said, “I’m sorry that happened to you, Booker.”

  He looked down and frowned, kicked at his bike tire again. “Yeah, it wasn’t much fun.” Then he shrugged and looked back up. “Guess you can’t pick your parents, though, can you? So what’s your story?”

  I bounced my basketball a couple of times. After what Booker had told me, my story sounded… well, dumb. Not very important. But it was still so embarrassing. I mean, how was I supposed to say sperm donor in front of a boy? In front of anyone? “I, um…” I took a deep breath. “You can’t tell anyone, okay?”

  Booker laughed. “Who would I tell? I’ve only lived here a couple of weeks. I hardly know anybody.”

  “Okay.” I bounced my ball a few more times, then said as fast as I could, “My mom wanted to have kids but she wasn’t married so she went to a doctor and did this thing called artificial insemination with um, um, um… spermfromadonor.”

  “Really?”

  I nodded.

  “Wow, that’s really interesting.”

  “Interesting? Are you kidding me? It’s gross. It’s probably the most embarrassing thing in the entire world.”

  “Really? Well, yeah, okay, I guess I can see how it might be embarrassing. But still, it’s really interesting. I wonder how doctors figured out how to do that. I wonder how they keep the sperm alive and what kinds of tests they do to make sure it’s okay, and—”

  I stared at him. Did he really just say sperm? Like it was a normal thing to say? My cheeks burned.

  “You don’t think it’s interesting?” Booker said.

  I shook my head.

  “Oh, uh, sorry.” His cheeks suddenly got red, too. “I get kind of wound up about science stuff.” He rolled his bike back and forth. “I really like Mr. Bukowski, don’t you? He’s the best science teacher I’ve ever had. You like him?”

  I nodded.

  Booker looked at his watch. “Oh man, I gotta go. Gotta get my chores done.”

  He swung onto his bike, waved, and pedaled like crazy down the street.

  My Paper Dad

  I tried to keep shooting after Booker left, but I couldn’t focus. I kept thinking about how I’d feel if Mom were in prison. It made me have this kind of ache inside.

  So I gave up and went in to tackle my homework. I grabbed my backpack and headed into Mom’s “office,” which was actually supposed to be the dining room. We didn’t need a dining room, though. We needed a place for Mom’s books. She’d lined the walls with bookcases and arranged the books in perfect Library of Congress order, which I knew because Adria’s mom arranged their books by shape and color, and she and Mom had this running “argument,” poking fun at each other for arranging their books the “wrong” way.

  I sat down in front of the computer to type in my answers to some “free response” questions for history. It didn’t take long to knock them out, but then I had to print them, and there was no telling how long that would take, since Mom bought our printer when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

  I turned it on, giving it a friendly little pat for encouragement, and checked the paper tray. Empty. I pulled open the top desk drawer to look for paper. None there. None in the second drawer, either. None in the big file drawer… Wait—something caught my eye. My name on a folder.

  I pulled the drawer all the way open and looked closer. The tab at the top of a folder said Nikki, Donor. I reached for it, but the second my fingers touched the folder, I pulled them back. And sat there, staring at the folder tab.

  Nikki, Donor? Was it really something about my father?

  Was I not supposed to see it?

  But… but I had to see it.

  I grabbed the folder, accidentally pulling up the one behind it, too. Its tab said Sam, Donor. So I grabbed both folders and ran upstairs to my bedroom, swinging the door shut behind me, even though, obviously, there was nobody else in the house.

  I sat down cross-legged on my bed, dropped Sam’s folder next to me, and slowly, slowly opened my folder.…

  And there he was.

  My father.

  Five or six sheets of paper, forms and typed pages, held together with an orange paper clip.

  I lifted the corners of a couple of pages, peeking at them, looking for a picture. But there wasn’t one. And no name. Just “Donor 3658.”

  I pulled off the paper clip and started reading.

  The first form was basic information:

  Height: 5′11"

  Weight: 175 lbs

  Hair Color: Dark Brown

  Eye Color: Brown.

  Wait, what? Mom had blue-gray eyes. I always thought my father must have had one green eye and one brown eye. But his were plain old brown? So where did I get mine?

  I scanned down the rest of the form. Blood type: A. Didn’t wear glasses. But nothing about whether or not he was left-handed.

  My eyes burned. I wanted to know what I got from my father, what I inherited from him, how we were connected. This wasn’t telling me anything important. I picked up the folder and banged it down against my legs. The papers jumped and spilled sideways.

  I looked up at Mia, and even though I knew she couldn’t really, truly talk to me, I still heard her tell me to calm down, take a deep breath, keep reading. Maybe I’d find a connection.

  A lump had come up in my throat and I swallowed hard, trying to push it down, squeezed my eyes shut for a moment, then gathered up the spilled pages.

  The next page turned out to be more interesting than blood types and glasses. It was titled “Education, Hobbies, and Activities.” It said my father majored in biology at the University of Virginia, then went to the University of Maryland and was “a PhD candidate” in something called “entomology.” Then it said he liked to run and he’d been on the track teams in high school and college, too, and that he also liked hiking and camping and kayaking.

  “My father likes outdoor stuff,” I said to Mia.

  Cool, she would have said if, you know, she could actually talk to me.

  I kept reading.

  My father also liked fly-fishing, whatever that was. He liked listening to jazz (boring) and reading biographies (really boring). And he could ride a unicycle and juggle.

  Ride a unicycle and juggle? I bet none of my friends’ dads could do that. Adria’s dad couldn’t. Or, well, I’d never seen him do it, and if you could ride a unicycle and juggle, wouldn’t you show all your kids’ friends? I bet Kate’s dad couldn’t do it, either.

  The next section was called “Staff Analysis,” and it said that everybody liked my dad. It said he had a “ready sm
ile, a pleasant manner, and a lively sense of humor.” It said he was “attractive, physically fit, and knowledgeable on many subjects.” It said he brought flowers to one of the staff members when he heard that her father died.

  I turned to the last page. It was titled “Donor’s Statement.” It said: “I’ve always considered myself to be a fortunate person. My father served in the US State Department, so I grew up in five different countries and learned to speak three languages. It was great to make friends in so many different places and learn about how people live in other parts of the world. I hate sitting still. That’s one of the reasons why I chose to study entomology. It keeps me outside, moving around a lot. I hope to have a family someday, but for now I’m glad to help other people create families of their own.”

  And that was it.

  My dad, in black and white.

  I pressed my fingertips against the page, tracing the words “a family someday… families of their own.” A real person wrote that. Not just some embarrassing sperm-donor freak. A person.

  My father.

  I scooped up the folder and pressed it against my chest, my eyes burning again, and lay over on my side, curling up, hugging the folder. Hugging it so hard my arms hurt.

  I don’t know how long I lay like that. Maybe I fell asleep, I don’t know. All I know is that I heard voices—Mom and Sam—then a tap at my door, then Mom standing in my doorway, her gaze flicking from my face to the folders to my face again, and Sam launching onto my bed, hollering, “Nikki, guess what!” and Mom saying, “Sam, go look in the linen closet in my bathroom. I think you’ll find a new box of Legos on the second shelf,” which sent Sam rocketing out of my room.

  Mom sat down on the edge of my bed, smoothed my hair back from my face, and said, “Nikki, I’m so sorry you found this on your own.”

  I frowned up at her. “Why didn’t you show me?”

  She stroked my hair. “I was waiting for the right time.” Her voice caught. “I waited too long, didn’t I?”

  “Yeah, you did.”

  “Have you read the whole file?”

  I nodded again. “He sounds like a nice person.” My voice caught, too.

  Mom smiled a small smile. “That’s why I picked him.” She kicked off her hideous clogs. “I haven’t looked at that file in a long time. Can we look at it together?”

  I sat up and bunched up my pillows against the headboard. Mom swung her legs up on the bed, and we leaned back against the pillows with our knees bent, the folder open across our laps.

  Mom straightened the pages, then turned them slowly.

  I pointed at “entomology.” “What’s that?”

  “The study of insects,” Mom said.

  “Insects?”

  Mom nodded.

  “People study bugs? Eeeewwww.”

  Mom shrugged. “Different people like different things.”

  “Yeah, but bugs?”

  Mom laughed, pointing at the juggling and unicycle riding. “I’d forgotten about that.”

  “I wish there was a picture,” I said.

  “That would be nice, wouldn’t it? But donors are meant to be anonymous.”

  “I wish he had one brown eye and one green eye.”

  Mom patted my hand.

  “I wish I knew him.”

  Mom shifted, turning onto her hip so she could wrap her arms around me and pull me over against her, hugging me tight. We sat like that for a long time.

  “Mom?” I said at last.

  “Hmm?”

  “Do you think I could ever meet him?”

  She sighed and stroked her hand across my hair. “I don’t know, Nikki. Apparently there are registries and organizations to help people find donor parents. When you get older, you can try to find him if you want to.”

  “Why can’t I try to find him now?”

  Mom held me tighter. “Nikki,” she said, “I don’t know if you’re old enough to understand this, but when you go hunting for someone who intended to be anonymous, you have to be prepared to find someone who has no interest in knowing you. I think that would be a difficult thing to prepare yourself for at any age. But at thirteen, I think it would be impossible. Beyond impossible.”

  We sat like that for a long time again. We sat like that while I thought about how it would feel to walk up to a man with brown hair and brown eyes who had lived in five countries and could ride a unicycle and juggle, and say, Hi, I’m Nikki, your daughter. And how it would feel if he said, Not really, and walked away. And the more I thought about it, the more I decided Mom was right. It gave me that achy feeling inside again—the same feeling I got thinking about Mom in prison.

  “Mom,” I said at last, “why didn’t you want to get married and have a regular family?”

  She sat up a little more and pulled her arm out from behind me, like maybe it was going to sleep squished between my shoulders and the headboard. “I did want to get married,” she said. “But the man I wanted to marry didn’t want to marry me.”

  “Why not?”

  “That’s a very long story.” Mom stretched her legs out, tapping her feet together. “He was a lovely person. Wonderful, really. Smart, kind. But every time we talked about getting married and having a family, he said he wasn’t ready. After six years, I realized he’d never be ready. I was thirty-three by that time. I had a good job and I wanted to have children. I didn’t want to wait any longer.”

  She spread her hands and sort of shrugged. “Maybe it’s not the best way to have a family, but…” She closed her eyes, her mouth curving down in a sad arc, her worry line creasing her forehead.

  You know, it’s hard to see your mom looking sad. Even if she sometimes bugs you by wearing hideous clogs and getting lost in books and being clueless about basketball, even if you’re maybe a little bit mad at her for not showing you your father’s donor file before, it’s hard to see your mom looking really, really sad. So even if you still wish you had a family with a mom and a dad, you don’t say that.

  At least I didn’t.

  I said, “It’s okay, Mom. I like our family the way it is.”

  Mom smiled. “I do, too, Nikki.”

  “And besides, if you’d married that guy, the guy you wanted to marry, then I would have gotten half my genes from him, and then I wouldn’t be me, would I?”

  “No, you wouldn’t.”

  “And if this guy was my actual dad,” I said, pointing at the folder, “if he was my real, in-person dad, not just my paper dad, we’d always be going hiking and camping and searching for bugs and stuff, and he’d probably make me be on a track team, and I wouldn’t get to play basketball.”

  “You might learn to juggle, though,” Mom said.

  “Or ride a unicycle.”

  We both laughed.

  “Hey, I just thought of something.” I shuffled back through the pages. “How tall did it say he is?”

  “It’s right here.” Mom pointed. “Five foot eleven.”

  “Oh.”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “Well, you know, I wish he was tall.”

  “Five foot eleven is fairly tall. Taller than average.”

  “It’s not six feet, though,” I said. “I know there’s only an inch difference, but six feet sounds a lot taller.”

  “I suppose,” Mom said.

  “How tall are you?”

  “Five foot five. That’s about average for US women, I think.”

  “I bet it’s not average for women who play basketball.”

  “Probably not. You could find out.”

  “How?”

  “Look at the rosters of the professional women’s teams,” Mom said. “I’m sure they list the height of each player. You could certainly measure the girls on your team and figure out the average height of eighth-grade basketball players.”

  I thought about that for a minute. They might think it was weird, but… “Maybe that could be my science project.” I told Mom about the genetics project, how I couldn’t do a family tr
ee, so I had to do a report and I wanted to do something about sports.

  I sat up straighter. “I could measure the girls on my team, then I could measure the girls in my science class to see how tall they are. Then I could compare them.”

  Mom nodded. “That would be interesting. I’m not sure if it relates directly to genetics, though.”

  “Oh, right.” I thought some more. “I know! What if I found out how tall their parents are, too? I could make graphs that show the girls’ heights and the parents’ heights, and compare the basketball families to the non-basketball families.”

  Mom smiled. “I think that’s an excellent idea.”

  Fortunately, when I told Mr. Bukowski my idea the next morning, he thought it was “an excellent idea,” too. Unfortunately, he also wanted me to research what scientists had discovered about the “heritability” of height.

  Oh boy, more homework.

  More Trouble

  Coach Duval thought my science project sounded like a good idea, too. He also said we couldn’t take time out of practice for me to measure the girls, so I should bring my tape measure to the first tournament and do my measuring between games. That sounded fine, except that the tournament wasn’t until the next weekend—not the weekend that was two days away—and my project was due on the Monday right after the tournament. And since the tournament was in Baltimore, which would take over an hour to drive to, and we had two games on Saturday and two on Sunday, that meant I’d only have Saturday and Sunday nights to make my graphs and complete my project.

  Fortunately Mr. Bukowski did give me class time to measure the girls in my science class, but he made me go out in the hallway because when I tried to measure the girls in the back of the classroom, each time a girl walked back there to get measured, all the other kids turned around to watch instead of doing their own work.

  There were only thirteen girls in the class, so you’d think it wouldn’t take long to measure them, but you’d be wrong about that.

  They all had to do a lot of giggling and goofing around, for one thing. Then Lindsey Welsh refused to take off her shoes because her toes were “too ugly,” until I pointed out that we were standing in the hallway by ourselves and no one else would see her toes and I promised not to tell anyone what her toes looked like. Then Mary Katherine Pentangeli made me measure her three times, insisting she was only five foot one, even though the tape measure clearly showed she was five foot two, because, as everyone knew, she liked Joey Martinez, the shortest guy in our class, so she wanted to be supershort, too. I had to tell her I wasn’t going to put girls’ names on my graphs, just their height, and I also had to promise not to tell anyone how tall she was.