William

Sara B. 08/06

He examined his hands.  His fingers were long and sinewy but there was a delicate look to them; Mom called them piano player hands.  The idea made him smile.  He may have the hands but four years of lessons proved he didn’t have the talent.  Still he wondered, whose hands did he have?

His eyes looked into the mirror and he appraised his features.  Deep red hair, nearly brown but not quite, it earned him the nickname Red.  Largish nose, but it was straight and he’d heard it described as Romanesque.  Deep blue eyes that never failed to impress the girls; those eyes had gotten him out of all kinds of mischief.  His chin seemed too rounded and not strong enough but it worked with his other parts.  The lips were the envy of all his male friends, since one of those stupid quizzes the girls are always sending around ‘accidentally’ came into their possession.  The girls all gave him their votes for most kissable lips.

The boy moved back so he could see most of his body.  He was long and lean, athletic but not bulky.  And he wasn’t too embarrassed to note, at least in the privacy of his room, he had a better than average package; way better.  But maybe that was his ego talking – oh no – it was damned good.  He couldn’t help the smug smile from breaking out.

Where had he gotten his looks and his body?  Did his genius intelligence come from his Mom or Dad?  Whose genes made him the fastest distance runner on his Junior High track team and one of the best young basketball players his coach had ever seen?  Why did he devour science books and journals like other kids read graphic novels?

He first learned that he was adopted just before his fifth birthday when he overheard his parents planning his party with his grandparents.  Papa Jack was, what his Dad called, crotchety.  He didn’t know what that meant but the old man could be mean and he never really seemed to like Will much.  That day, Papa Jack said something about them not knowing anything about ‘the kid’.  Somehow he knew HE was the kid.  At first he didn’t understand why his family wouldn’t know anything about him because, well, they were his family.  Then he heard his Mom mention adoption and all they needed to know was in the adoption papers and that they loved Will.

At that time he didn’t know what adoption meant but he looked it up in the dictionary.  Yes, at that young age he had already learned to read which he later learned actually scared his parents.

Being adopted never really bothered him all that much.  His parents never mentioned it beyond answering him the one time he asked about it.

He'd asked once why he'd been given up. All they said was that his birth mother had been left alone to raise him and, as much as she tried, she'd felt she couldn't provide what he needed. So she gave him up, in hopes that another family, this family, would give him that better life.  They claimed they didn’t know anything about his biological Dad.

Every so often he wondered who his birth parents were.  The thoughts were usually brought on by vague dreams of a tall dark haired man and a small redheaded woman.  He could never make out the details of their features.  In his dreams they were always together and seemed to live in a world of their own making.  The dream couple were always embroiled in the most improbable escapades that he didn’t even try to tell anyone about because he was afraid they’d put him away.  A man squeezing through a vent, another changing from a man to a giant bug and some creature that lived with his head buried into another man’s side but could disengage himself and roam free at times. 

Those were not the kinds of dreams you talked about.

Will knew that these figures were just phantoms of his mind but when he woke from the dreams the images seemed real.  The night before, his dream couple was talking and they called each other by name, Mulder and Scully.

The features of the boy in the mirror began to separate and morphed into a tall dark haired man and a small redheaded woman.  Unlike the figures of his dreams, their features became clear.  In his mind he heard a smooth alto say, “We love you, William;” followed by a deeper voice, “we’ll see you soon.”

A knock on his door startled him out of his reverie, it was his Dad.  “Get a move-on, Champ, bus won’t wait you know.”

“Coming, Dad.”  Will looked back to the mirror but the image was gone.  He smiled at his image.  He no longer wondered who he looked like; he knew.

End