Free Ten Thousand Saints by Eleanor Henderson Page A

on the workbench beside him. Reluctantly he exhales the smoke.
    Then something occurs to Jude. “The baby’s going to be my brother or sister, isn’t it?” He was just a baby when Prudence was born. He doesn’t remember his mother being pregnant.
    “Would you like a baby brother or sister? Would you like that?”
    “I guess,” Jude says, because his father sounds as though he needs cheering up. His eyes are glassy and wet, like they are when he tells scary stories about Vietnam, stories he’s stolen from friends who were there. Jude remembers one about an arm in a tree, waving.
    “Here’s the thing.” Jude’s father rubs his beard. “There are lots of things that can happen to babies. Sometimes—sometimes babies aren’t born at all. Sometimes when they do get born, they get raised by their parents, and sometimes they get raised by other people. For example, what’s the name of that program you and your sister watch, with the black kids?”
    “ Good Times ?” Jude is so glad to have a question he can answer he lets out a breath.
    “No, the one with the two boys and the white father.”
    “Oh, Diff’rent Strokes .”
    “ Diff’rent Strokes . So, for example, those children are being raised by someone other than their real parents. They’re adopted, right?”
    Jude nods.
    “So, as a matter of fact, we planned to wait, your mother and I, to tell you together, but your mother would wait forever if she could, and I don’t have that long, champ. I think you’re old enough to know.” He leans forward on his elbows, so Jude can see up into the dark spheres of his nostrils, and tells Jude that he’s adopted, too.
    Jude doesn’t make a sound. He presses the sleeping bag over his nose, breathing in his mother. He smells Cracker Jacks, midnight in the Donahoes’ driveway. For a moment he thinks, Mr. Donahoe’s my dad, but that doesn’t make any sense, but nothing else makes any sense, either.
    Where did he get this red hair? asked a friend of his mother’s once, pawing through it as though she’d never seen red hair before.
    Jude’s father places a palm on top of Jude’s head. His touch, neither hot nor cold, shouldn’t feel like anything, but it does. His dad isn’t his dad; he’s just a man. He tells Jude that his real mother was just a teenager, and that he was adopted from a hospital in New York City when he was ten days old. “You were as little as a rabbit. You could fit right here.” He puts one finger on his thigh and one finger on his knee. “It’s quite common, really. Aristotle was adopted. Lee Majors was adopted. Lots of people are, and you wouldn’t even know it.”
    Jude squints up into the bright lights. He thinks of Mrs. Donahoe’s belly button and the little lump of a person inside her. Inside his sleeping bag, he dips his finger into the warm hollow of his own navel. Later, at a less finite moment, he’ll come to imagine his nine months in utero with not only curiosity but nostalgia. He’ll understand what his father meant about marijuana—its deep, peaceful sleep; its small, fragile gift of forgetting. He’ll imagine that being high is something like being unborn, alive but not present, and when he’s savoring a mouthful of smoke, he’ll sometimes find himself swimming toward that drowsy, padded place—brainless, blind, curled in the pink womb of a stranger.
    Then the room goes black. The lamps blink once, then are gone. When Jude’s eyes adjust, they find the soft light in the doorway, nine candles that illuminate his mother’s stunned face. She is wearing her coat over her dress, and her unlaced snow boots, which have tripped over the extension cord. The cake looks homemade.
    In the house, the party is counting backward to one. Then it bursts into a roar.
    “How could you tell him?”
    Jude looks at his father sideways. He’s not sure which part she’s talking about. He wishes he could unknow all of it, just tilt his head and shake it out of his ear, like