Hard Cider

by Barbara Stark-Nemon

  This cannot be happening. This girl . . . Steven’s? NO. Summon strength, Abbie. Come on, FEEL IT. Each pound of my foot on the sand brought up past traumas that stabbed at my heart like shards of glass. The years of infertility, the indignities of treatments, the failures of procedures, the struggles to adopt, the house fire, the agonies of nearly losing Alex. We’d met those challenges. Now it should be our time, my time to follow my dream. And now this??

  It became nearly impossible to breathe. The sun glared momentarily on the wave-textured water and the beach, as if illuminating Julia’s revelation with an icy clarity. I stopped, heaving in the air, and looked out to the lake for another living soul or sign to anchor me. We are a family. I built this family with Steven. Feeling love should be saving me right now . . . should be shielding me. Why isn’t this working?

  I resumed my run and a half-mile down the shore, I reached the staircase of the old beach cottage where we had started our life on the Leelanau Peninsula. I pounded up the 102 stairs that scaled the dune, frigid air clutching at my lungs. I turned to the lake once more—always my solace, my inspiration—but shades of grey suddenly shrouded it, listless waves licking the snow, ice barely formed along the shore.

  Thoughts continued to tumble in my head. We tried surrogacy with a woman in Ohio twenty-five years ago. She told us it didn’t work. I couldn’t handle trying it again. So we went another way, and ended up with the three children we loved and raised. Who is Julia Reiss to come out of nowhere with this speculation that Steven fathered her, intruding into my life and my family?

  I paced the top of the dune, disturbing the pristine blanket of snow, turning every word, every contact with Julia, over and over. She’s terrified . . . and also fascinated. Does she think she belongs to Steven—to us? I swept the snow from the sand under my feet, trying to quell the rage mounting in my chest.

  I had been able to make some comforting noises, to ask her where she wanted to take this information. She answered that she’d only confided in me—that she had been too confused and frightened to talk to anyone else. She said that she felt such relief to have been able to tell someone, but that she was sorry to burden me.

  Sorry! She’s sorry? Does she have any idea what this means?

  I had looked at her from a great remove, a skill I have learned so well over the years. I can look at someone, respond sympathetically, and be elsewhere in a deep freeze of emotion, willing myself to perform in the needed way until later,

  I kept pacing. What will I say to Steven? What will Julia say to him? My heart lay like a lodestone. I still couldn’t draw deep enough breaths.

  I stopped stock-still. Is there any chance at all that Steven knows? That he’s known about a child in Ohio all along? My legs collapsed and I sat on the sand and snow, grabbing my knees, rocking back and forth.

  No. Whatever else he is, he is honest. He doesn’t lie. He’s so sure of what is right and wrong, and he acts from that place.

  I stood up, beginning to shake with cold. In nearly thirty years of marriage, I’d never had occasion to question Steven in this way.

  I took a last look at the lake, willing myself to draw strength from its calm majesty. The cottage behind me slumbered in the winter grey but sheltered me from the wind, if only for a few moments. I would freeze if I didn’t start moving again.

  I stepped around the back of the cottage and slid down the hill to the driveway, where I high-stepped through drifts up to the road—which, mercifully, had been plowed. I began to jog back toward the farmhouse, method returning to my feet and my thoughts.

  I had promised Julia that I would speak with her again before I traveled downstate. Now I promised myself a day to think before I made any decisions about what to say. My feet rolled heel to toe over the light snow cover, the grippers stretched over my running shoes keeping me tethered to the road. What I needed now were emotional grippers. And a plan. Tell her what you’re going to tell her, tell her, tell her what you told her . . . This old formula for making sure someone gets a message had stood me in good stead all my working and family life. But what would the message be?

  Weak shafts of sun stretched to the earth between cloud banks as I traversed the road between the lake and the farm. Passing through the pillars that framed the drive, I tried to formulate my next steps. I would learn as much as I could about Julia Reiss and her parents. I would wait to query Steven. No overt challenge. I would tell no one else anything, just yet.

  Early dusk settled outside the kitchen window, putting to sleep the landscape and drawing me to the heat of the old kitchen stove. I cursed the slow internet service as I clicked through the screens on my laptop with their paucity of information about Julia Reiss. Her family obviously hadn’t bought into the exposure of their lives on social media.

  As Steven had learned from Julia, Aaron Reiss was indeed a woodworker. He didn’t have a website, but mentions of his shows appeared on gallery sites from around the Midwest, and he’d garnered a handful of awards. More and deeper research revealed that Julia’s mother, Fiona Phelan, worked as an administrator at Antioch College and had authored numerous essays and articles on the use of internship and other hands-on educational experiences in college curricula. The very Irish name might explain Julia’s black curls, porcelain skin, and deep blue eyes in a new way. Of course, Steven’s hair was dark and curly when he had a head full. Don’t go there, Abbie—not yet.

  Nothing I read gave me the information I really needed.

  I turned, in the fading light, to thoughts of how I could do the sleuthing from Steven’s end. Did he have any records from our days of considering surrogacy? Could I ask him? The ring of the telephone made me jump. Steven.

  “Hey, hi there.”

  “Hi . . . I just got home and wanted to check in. What’s going on up there?”

  What’s going ON? You tell me, Steven. Is there something you want to say about what happened in Ohio twenty-six years ago? For a bad moment I wanted to scream and cry into the phone. The moment passed.

  “I’m just trying to wrap things up here so I can come down, probably the day after tomorrow. How are you doing?”

  “I’m good. I just bumped into Jack Gunn. He was in court today with the Benches. They sentenced that kid to life in prison.”

  This news jolted me from thoughts of Julia. The Benches. The neighborhood family who’d lost a child to a violent crime. Their yearlong horror had moved another painful step. “Oh my God, finally. What an ordeal. I can’t believe it took this long. Maybe the Benches can move on.”

  “Jack said Harvey Bench seemed to perseverate during the whole hearing on the private investigator’s testimony, even though that came to light a year ago. He kept saying they never would have gotten the conviction without it.”

  “Maybe hiring the investigator made him feel like he had a hand in bringing justice to Laura’s death.”

  In the silence that followed, I guessed Steven’s thoughts were the same as mine—how the police investigation of the fire that took our house twenty-two years earlier had been ludicrous. If we hadn’t had three children under six, if I hadn’t been twelve weeks post a thirty-three-hour labor and a C-section, if we hadn’t been suddenly homeless and possession-less from the total loss of the fire, we might have gone the route of a private investigator to further attempt solving the crime. Instead, we took our lawyer’s advice and concentrated on rebuilding our home and our life.

  Steven had resumed talking and it took me a moment to get back to Harvey Bench. Losing a child. The enormity of it washed over me and suddenly dovetailed with all the shock and confusion of the last twenty-four hours.

  We were both quiet for a moment, and then Steven sighed and said, “I’m hungry. I’m going to forget about working out and go make myself some dinner.”

  “Okay. Do you have something to eat there?”

  “Yup, I’ve got some leftover fish, and some rice, and I’ll make a little salad. I’m good.”

  “Okay, well, I’ll be home
soon. Everything else all right?”

  “Everything is fine. Be careful driving home, okay?”

  “I will. Love you.”

  Steven made a loud smacking sound before hanging up. After thirty years, he was still incapable of “Love you too,” but that kissing sound worked.

  I sat for a long time, looking out the kitchen window, now reflecting the light from the room against the darkening snowscape of early evening. A private investigator. I didn’t know how to discover Julia Reiss’s true parentage, and I realized I didn’t want to know how. I wanted someone else to do it.

  Meanwhile, I would tell Julia that we had to move slowly. I wanted to keep the ripples she’d started in my family’s dynamic from becoming a tsunami. I needed to think.

  Uneasy, I moved across the kitchen to prepare my own meal and work out the delicate dance of what to say to Julia in a day’s time.

  Chapter 17

  “Hey Norm, it’s Abbie Stone,” I said into the phone. “I have a little research project. I’m looking for a private investigator, someone who can work in Ohio. Do you know of someone good? Or someone who will connect me with someone good?”

  I’d made myself call Norman Tripp first thing, before I had the chance to second-guess my decision or lose my nerve. Norman had been an attorney, taught criminal law, and occasionally helped us navigate our sons’ scrapes with the law. He was an old friend, and though he wasn’t exactly on speed dial, I knew I could rely on his expertise, his discretion, and his Rolodex.

  Norman offered to check on a PI and meet with me when I returned to Ann Arbor. I put the phone back in the charger and waited. In less than ten minutes he forwarded a contact to me. I heard the ping of the email arriving on my laptop and immediately googled Martin Pappas, whose office was located in Dayton, Ohio, and who had a website that took forever to load with our sluggish internet. When the site finally appeared, I saw the tag line When You Need to Know the Truth, which caused me to sit back and stare out at the snowy landscape.

  Did I need to know the truth? I dropped my head into my hands and kneaded my forehead. If only I could turn back the clock to a “before” setting—before I knew Julia Reiss. No, I’d been down that avenue before, yearning to go back in time, and it never worked, not even for a moment of grace. Grace lay in learning what I needed to know and finding a way to live with it. I found that Martin Pappas specialized in locating people, gathering evidence, and interviewing witnesses and suspects. He also provided “truth verification” with the use of a voice stress analyzer instrument. What did this mean? We weren’t talking about criminals here.

  Doubt seeped in and I went to the coffee pot to stall. The liquid courage I really wanted lived in the scotch bottle, but I wasn’t going down that road.

  I had to phone Julia and tell her something, though I wasn’t sure yet what to say, and I had to head downstate tomorrow. My resolve returned. The more truth I could excavate about this whole mess on my own, the better I could confront whatever came next.

  A new ping sounded at the laptop. I returned to my seat and saw Alex’s name. You still up north? Call me. I wondered if the momentary feeling of dread I got when I received a cryptic message from this child would ever be replaced by the simple pleasure at the contact that usually followed. At least if he was emailing me, he wasn’t likely in a police station or a hospital. Experience, however, had made me wary. I considered, as I paced across the kitchen and tapped his number into the phone, whether to ask him what he knew about private investigators. Alex had done his fair share of searching for hidden people during his time in the military and while he searched for his birth parents. Before I could decide whether to ask, Alex answered the phone.

  “Hi Momma.” His voice sounded guarded, absent the lazy greeting that usually signaled a catching-up conversation. He had something on his mind. I drew in a breath and braced myself.

  “Hey sweetie, what’s up?”

  As though he’d drawn it from me, Alex breathed out the sigh that wanted to escape my chest and my heart sank. Not now, Alex . . . not NOW.

  “Well, how would you like another grandchild?”

  I sat heavily. For the second time in as many weeks, the race of needle pricks climbed my arms and my heart began to pound.

  “What?” It came out a hoarse whisper.

  “You heard me. Remember that girl I told you about?” Alex’s words were like precision knives, cutting his sentences into staccato pulses of anger. “The one I liked and thought could be the real deal until she told me she wanted nothing to do with a country life?”

  “Haley?”

  “Haley. She just called me today and told me she’s pregnant. She told me she’s having the baby, and if I don’t want anything to do with it, that’s fine, but she’s having it.” Alex’s voice became thin and hard. “She told me the birth control failed. She didn’t even want to hear what I thought.”

  I couldn’t breathe, much less respond, and the silence sucked every thought that tried to form into a vortex of panic. Why is this happening? Is it true? Oh God, not after everything Alex’s been through!

  “Mom!” Alex commanded.

  “Jesus, Alex,” I whispered. That released a torrent of fury that only registered with me in small snatches.

  “I don’t want to have a child right now . . . Haley is moving to her parents’ town . . . She’ll keep her job in Des Moines and work from home . . .”

  “Alex. Alex, stop. Give me a minute here. Are you sure it’s yours?”

  The moment the words were out of my mouth, I regretted them. I’d spoken the first thought that registered as I tried to quell my panic.

  Alex stayed silent for the shortest moment, and then answered in a tight voice, “The timing is right, and she says she wasn’t with anyone else. When I asked her anything, she got all pissed off and told me she was prepared to have this child without any input from me, if that was what I wanted. So then I asked her if we should reconsider our relationship in light of the baby, and she said no!”

  The hurt in his voice cut to my heart. I’d heard it when this girl had left him weeks ago, and now the pain had cut deeper and mixed with the rage of a caged lion.

  “Oh, god, Alex, I can’t believe this is happening.” It was all I could start with, and I knew he understood that I couldn’t believe it was happening to him, but also to all of us. “Alex, you have every right to be upset right now, but you have to think hard and be careful here. There’s so much at stake. You’re going to figure this out. You’re going to figure out what the right thing to do is, but you can’t make any decisions while you’re so angry.”

  “What do you mean figure it out? What is there for me to figure out? I don’t have any choice because—”

  “Alex,” I cut in. “You have lots of choices to make here, but you can’t and shouldn’t until you get over this shock and can think. Have you told Dad?”

  “No. I thought he was up there with you.”

  “He’s been downstate for the last two weeks.”

  “Oh sorry, I haven’t been keeping track of your separate lives.” His sarcasm bit, but I ignored it.

  “He’ll be home tonight, and I’m driving down tomorrow. Call him.”

  Alex’s rant continued, until every angle of his shock and intolerable circumstance had been repeated and flayed open and his voice was hoarse. I soothed him and tried to find the words to build a scaffold against the panic and dissolution I felt in us both. When I thought I could, I asked, “When’s your next shift?”

  “Tomorrow at seven.”

  “Can you get a workout in? Get something good to eat and then get a good night’s sleep?”

  “I know what I’d rather do. Drive down to that—”

  “Alex, I mean it. Go for a run or go to the gym. Call me again if you need to. I’ll be here all evening. And let Dad know . . . Okay? Can you do that?”

  I heard the barest grunt. “We’ll see.”

  “I’ll call you later if I don’t hear from you, oka
y? It’s going to be okay, Alex. Somehow, this is going to be okay—”

  “Right, good-bye.” And he was gone.

  Chapter 18

  Ann Arbor during the university’s winter break felt almost ghostly in its quiet. The population decreased by thousands of vacationing students and faculty, and thousands more townies also spent the holidays elsewhere. I reveled in traffic-free streets, copious parking spots, and immediate seating in restaurants. No longer tied to our children’s or my own academic calendar, Steven and I often stayed put over the holidays and prowled the spots that were too crowded when the university throngs were in town.

  Seated comfortably in just such a spot, a popular coffee shop with exposed beams and a brick interior, I nursed a cappuccino and scanned the scattered patrons at other tables and in easy chairs. On the dot of our appointed meeting time, Norman Tripp sauntered through the doorway and headed my way.

  We’d known each other through many lives, our connection harking back to heady days of youth. Our close network of friends and spouses had confidently worked and played, fueled by enthusiasm and drugs and an expansive sense of optimism that we, along with the rest of our self-actualized generation, would open the world to the best of everything. We were so sure we knew what that would be, what things meant. I rarely saw Norman, but when I did, the bond was strong and deep.

  “Abbie Rose!” Norman’s eyes crinkled with just the touch of sardonic humor that I found so appealing and comforting about him. He didn’t take himself, or anyone else, too seriously. I rose and our long hug produced flushed grins in us both.

  “Nor-MAN,” I answered, and shook my head. The man simply didn’t age. Trim and fit, he had a bit more salt and pepper in his beard now, but he still looked entirely comfortable in his own skin and exuded the charm he’d always had.

  “Beautiful as always, Abbie Rose, a sight for sore eyes.”

  “Thanks so much for helping me with this,” I said. “The right man for the right job, I always say.”

  Norman’s face took on an alert expression. No small talk. No asking about each other’s families. We’d get to that later, perhaps. I had followed our initial phone conversation with a brief explanatory email that had indicated only my need to research a family issue. Norman had offered to meet, and I’d taken him up on it. In three days’ time I had an appointment with the investigator, Martin Pappas, in Ohio. Now, I wanted Norman’s help to work out my investigative strategy. He checked all the boxes of someone I could trust, who wouldn’t judge me, wouldn’t be shocked, and could think dispassionately and help me do the same. I’d been right to choose him for this role, but I was nervous, and his keen look signaled that I had to make the next move.