My mother. I shuddered with gratitude that my parents were gone and I needn’t explain away yet another deviation in my life from their expected order of things. Leaving that and all other thoughts, I immersed myself in the audiobook.
After another hour, I stopped for gas and coffee, and to stretch my legs. Rural Michigan early on this Sunday morning featured small towns and farmland in the wide spaces between cities, all sleeping under blankets of snow. Where others might see boredom, I found comfort and peace.
Back on the road, I could no longer keep the confrontation that lay ahead out of my thoughts. I had the phone number and address of the Phelan/Reiss household. If I drove straight through—and, buoyed by a large coffee and an Egg McMuffin, I planned to do just that—I would arrive by noon. And then what? I had no plan other than to show up at the house and ring the doorbell. In another hour it would be civilized to phone, to warn Fiona that I was coming . . . but would I? Would I give her the chance to put me off, or to not be there? I didn’t think so.
What would I say to her? What did I really want from her? Acknowledgment that the choice she’d made twenty-six years earlier was now going to hurtle her family and mine into chaos? I gripped the steering wheel. Yes. Help in talking to Julia and Steven about their relationship? Definitely. An apology for her actions? This one stopped me. She had lied—a huge lie, but would I have done differently? In the cold light of a winter morning, speeding down the nearly deserted expressway, I had to wonder whether in her shoes, I might have been tempted to do exactly what she’d done.
Memory carried me back to the time, nearly thirty years earlier, when I’d undergone an exploratory surgery that confirmed my infertility. The surgeon had come into the recovery room with Steven, the two of them obviously having already conferred. I tried to stay on the conscious side of the anesthesia that still bathed me in a cloud of cotton, but I heard loud and clear the surgeon’s words: “Your fallopian tubes are badly scarred. You will never conceive children normally.”
The months that followed were laser focused on acquiring family in different ways. We applied for adoption, scheduled surgery and in vitro fertilization, and then, as each of these presented barriers of time and failure, considered surrogacy. And I’d asked Steven to take that option off the table after a single attempt.
Meanwhile, Fiona had found herself pregnant and couldn’t live with the arrangement either. She made a choice. Would I have chosen differently? Having now adopted two children and finally borne a child myself, would I release a child I’d carried for nine months for a substantial sum of money to help a family have a baby? While I couldn’t summon the last measure of grace to really put myself in Fiona Phelan’s place, the pit in my stomach told me that she did have a place, and it was one I’d have to reckon with.
I had crossed the Ohio State line now, and weak sun lit the way south on Route 68 to the middle of Ohio, past churches surrounded by small huddles of cars and trucks and fallow fields without the snow blankets of those to the north.
I stopped two towns short of my destination to freshen up. What had Marie Elena said about one of the tarot cards? We’re required to pause and consider, to think and be patient, but not to overthink and therefore fail to act. She’d also told me not to be afraid to call on my spiritual guides for help. Come on, guides. Let’s do this.
Yellow Springs, Ohio, had the quaint but lively air of a small college town. Stately, century-old homes provided an overall impression of grace, while wildly painted storefronts lent character and the alternative flair for which the town was known.
A café already seemed busy with Sunday breakfast, and an inviting bookshop and galleries lined the town’s main street. GPS showed my destination lay less than two miles away. The urge to stop, turn around, and leave welled up, but my guides and I continued. I found myself driving through a well-kept neighborhood, past the high school, and then, abruptly, back into farmland. I arrived at my destination in short order, the foot of a gravel driveway announced by chimes from my car’s navigation system.
I drove slowly past it. It led back at least one hundred yards to a home set sideways in a stand of trees and surrounded by gardens on a sizable expanse of property.
A quarter of a mile down the road, I turned my car around. When I could see the face of the house, I stopped.
Neither a traditional midwestern farmhouse nor a modern suburban home, the main portion of the house featured fieldstone and brick, with a large extension at the back. Maybe the rear portion housed Aaron Reiss’s wood shop, or maybe that was in one of the two additional outbuildings that sat farther back on the property.
I hadn’t pulled far enough to the side of the road; when a pickup truck whizzed by, perilously close, I had to move. I pulled onto the road and crept up to the driveway. Turning in slowly, I made my way toward the house, my resolve crackling like the stones under the Flex’s wheels. A winter-browned, grassy pullout to the left of the drive provided the last moment of sanctuary, and I stalled, looking out over the gardens and the fields beyond. Do it, Abbie Rose Stone. Just do it.
Fiona Phelan opened the heavy oak door with its inset leaded glass window. As the door swung away from me, I thought, Aaron Reiss probably made that door.
I recognized Fiona immediately from the pictures I’d seen of her. Snapshots fail to communicate the depth, the luminosity of a person’s looks. Fiona’s green eyes, her fair, freckled complexion, and short spiked hair radiated energy, balanced by a subdued expression that spoke of hard work and experience.
“Can I help you?” she asked, and I realized I’d been silently taking it all in for longer than was comfortable in the social contract of a stranger ringing someone’s doorbell.
“Are you Fiona?” I asked to give us both a moment.
“Yes,” she responded, her eyes already revealing the attempt to recognize, to make sense of my appearance.
“My name is Abbie Rose Stone. I live in Northport, Michigan, and I know your daughter, Julia. It appears that her biological father is my husband.” I’d crafted these words over the last hours, and I delivered them with as much calm as I could muster, my one concession to a mean-girl desire to throw this woman for a loop equal to the one she’d thrown me. Yet I found I took no pleasure in it.
“Ohh,” Fiona gasped, grabbing the door with both hands. Her eyes didn’t leave mine.
I quelled the instinct to rush to an apology, to soften the blow. I waited. Fiona continued to stare, and remain speechless, as a shiver visibly traveled down her entire body.
The time had come for my next practiced statements. “I know this is shocking, and I’m sorry to bring this to you out of the blue. Julia doesn’t know this, though she suspects, and my husband doesn’t know at all, but they need to.” Again, I waited. My own experience had taught me that people in shock need time to absorb information. I tried to keep that information simple. “For a lot of people’s sake, you and I need to talk about how to proceed with this. I assume your family is here. I saw the Winds Café on my way through town. Will you meet me there? Say in half an hour?”
Fiona’s stricken face had gone deathly pale, but intelligence and a small measure of self-possession returned to her eyes, which left my gaze and darted around the circumference of the cold space that held the two of us. Then she spoke in a quiet voice. “I’ll be there in half an hour.”
I needed the twenty minutes it took to drive back to the café and wait in line for a table to settle my jangled nerves and prepare for Fiona’s arrival. I looked longingly at the sign that said, “Brunch (n.) the socially acceptable excuse for day drinking,” but I settled for a double shot of espresso instead. The menu looked upscale organic, and I ordered a fruit plate with a muffin.
I felt anonymous amidst the animated diners around me, but it suddenly occurred to me that Fiona Phelan wouldn’t. People no doubt knew her around here. At least other conversations could mask ours, giving us some modicum of privacy, and I’d asked for a corner booth.
Jus
t as I began to consider whether Fiona would really show, she came through the door wearing a beautiful knit coat with matching scarf and hat. I couldn’t help but admire the handiwork. Our metal-studded waitress appeared instantly, and Fiona ordered coffee and a scone.
“How did you find me? How did you know?” she asked the moment she’d seated herself and shed the lovely sweater coat, revealing her jeans and another, finer-knit sweater.
Her sudden question surprised me with its pointed directness; I took a breath before answering. “Julia came to me a few weeks ago,” I said. “She discovered some paperwork about a prospective surrogate arrangement that led her to suspect her paternity. I believe she didn’t want to hurt you or your husband, but she wanted to know, and she decided to investigate.” If Fiona wanted to dispense with niceties and be direct, I could do direct.
She sat back in her chair as though I’d struck her.
“To say this all came as a shock to me doesn’t quite cover it, and I’ll admit I didn’t want to rock the boat in my life until I knew something conclusive,” I said. “But DNA results prove that my husband is your daughter’s biological father, and the timing of her birth coincides with the one and only time we attempted surrogacy . . . apparently with you.” My voice had become more strident as I spoke, the words punching harder as they tumbled out. I had never known Fiona Phelan’s name. It wasn’t like me to have left all the arrangements to Steven. Perhaps that was a symptom of my malaise regarding the whole process. I closed my eyes and willed myself to a calmer delivery. “I just got the DNA results and didn’t want to tell Julia until I’d spoken to you. It’s not something I wanted to discuss on the telephone.”
Fiona’s red-rimmed eyes and pinched face broadcast the pain I’m sure also appeared on my own face. “And your husband?” she asked.
“He doesn’t know. I haven’t been able to speak to him yet, but I’m going to tell him tomorrow.” A lingering doubt, buried deep in the maelstrom of all that I’d learned, surfaced and burst out. “He doesn’t know about Julia, right?”
“No,” Fiona nearly whispered, and relief flooded through me even as a wave of nausea accompanied her tacit confirmation. Steven hadn’t withheld this information, but he did have a biological daughter. Fiona Phelan wasn’t going to deny it.
Why? I wanted to scream at her. How could you have done this? But I knew why. She hadn’t been capable of going through with the surrogacy for the very reason I hadn’t been capable of continuing to pursue it: I didn’t believe I could bear a child and willingly relinquish her. Some people could, for noble or ignoble reasons, but I couldn’t have. In this moment, right now, however, I needed to hear Fiona say it, to tell me why she’d done this to all of us, and she must have seen that in my face, because the next thing she said was, “I’m so sorry.”
I could see that was true, in the open, unfiltered pain in her eyes, and in the fear that rushed through her near-whispered words. “I meant to honor the arrangement. I really did. But then I couldn’t. It’s true I needed the money, and I really wanted to help your family have a child, but then, when I actually got pregnant, I just couldn’t do it.” She looked to me for help, but I had none to offer. I barely had the strength to listen.
“Aaron and I had been living together for a long time,” she went on. “We knew he was infertile. He tried to convince me to either end the pregnancy or go through with the surrogate arrangement, but eventually he saw that I couldn’t do either, and he understood.” Now Fiona’s voice became more urgent and tears welled in her green eyes. “I lied, and I acted in my own self-interest. It was wrong, and I knew it then, but I couldn’t . . .” She stopped. The look of desperation on her face reached through my anger, and my resistance to accepting the choice I knew I might have made myself.
“I’ve tried a million times to make myself talk to Julia,” Fiona said, rotating her empty coffee mug around and around in her cupped hands. “She has a right to know, but she loves Aaron, and he loves her, and I didn’t want anything to come between them. I didn’t want to derail her life. No one else knows, not my mother or my son. My son is adopted. He’s a complicated kid . . .”
I expelled the breath I didn’t know I’d been holding in a long sigh. I certainly knew about complicated kids. Fiona had recovered some equanimity, and something softer settled over her features as she looked up at me. She appeared to be finished talking for the moment. Expectation hung in the air.
How is it that life-changing decisions are set in the most commonplace of moments? I knew this feeling—the I’m-going-to-drop-my-defenses-and-put-myself-at-risk-to-help-a-situation-that-I-don’t-want-to-be-in feeling. And yet the thinning brunch crowd still buzzed at their tables, the weak winter light shone through the windows, the wait staff casually refilled coffee cups and set up empty tables. A man sat peacefully at another corner table, reading the Sunday New York Times, like I wanted to be doing in my own home.
I’m going to let this woman off the hook. The realization settled over me like cotton candy: soft, sweet, and promising a sticky mess. The reasons tumbled over each other for attention. We were going to share a daughter in some form or other. My actions would influence whether this fundamental shift in two families would happen more or less painfully. The warrior way here would be to decline to engage in a fight. The two innocent people most affected, Steven and Julia, deserved a dignified process. The hard-won homeostasis of my own family’s bonds required every effort to preserve. Everyone’s interests were best served by this situation becoming cooperative and well choreographed—Abbie Rose Stone’s specialty. I suddenly felt old and tired.
I downed the last of my espresso. “So, where do we go from here?”
Gratitude filled Fiona’s eyes and spread across her lovely features like a warm spring breeze. Two women, two mothers, two wives would work together.
“I need to talk to Aaron, and we’ll talk to Julia.” This Fiona said with conviction. Then, more tentatively, she added, “And I want to know how I can help you. What do you need from me?”
Despite my best efforts, tears spilled onto my cheeks and irony replaced anger as the thought drifted out of my head, It’s a little late for that.
At 3:00 p.m., we rose from our table, the last patrons to leave as the café closed. Exhausted, I wanted nothing more than to check into my hotel and sleep for several days, though I knew I had to drive to Ann Arbor in the morning. Fiona pulled on her sweater, watching me as I donned my coat. Again, I read in her eyes a map of my own feelings. Could we trust each other? Would any of what we’d planned work? I couldn’t cement this collaboration with a hug, which came and went as a possibility, but Fiona reached and grasped my arm in parting. I didn’t envy her next hours, or look forward to my own, and for the hundredth time, I wished to awaken and have the last few weeks vanish as a disturbing dream, releasing the clutch in my stomach.
Chapter 24
Alone in the car, I considered whether to drive the four hours to Ann Arbor now and sleep in my own bed. Too tired, and too wrung out, I dialed Steven at home instead. He answered on the second ring.
“Hi,” he said, sounding surprised.
“Hey, how are you?”
“Okay, just paying bills. It’s been a crazy twenty-four hours here. Where are you?”
I realized he’d seen my cell phone number, and knew I wasn’t at the farmhouse. “I’m out. What happened with the computers?” I deflected.
“It turned out the breach was minimal and everything’s back up and running.”
“That’s good. What’s your schedule tomorrow? I’m actually coming home. Do you have to go in?”
“No, I’ll be here unless I get called in. I have my monthly meeting Tuesday, but I’m not in court again until Wednesday. What’s going on? Are you okay?”
Keep it together, Abbie Rose. “Yeah, I’m fine,” I answered. “I’ve got a lot of things to take care of, and I just need some time with you.” I heard the catch at my throat and knew that if he did, he wouldn’t jus
t let me go, so I rushed on, “I’m going to leave really early tomorrow, so I’m going to bed early tonight. I’ll see you around noon. Maybe we can go out for dinner or catch an early movie.” I knew there’d be no movie.
“All right,” he said, tentative. Blessedly, I heard the other phone line ring. “I’ve got another call, Abbie, I’ve got to go.”
“Okay, bye. See you tomorrow. Love you.” I dropped the phone into my lap, hands on the steering wheel, frozen in the emptiness on the backside of too much intensity. Hotel. Sleep. Instead, Alex’s ringtone insisted itself into my already overworked brain. Oh God, I can’t do an intense Alex call. But what if . . .
“Hey sweetie,” I said, working to keep exhaustion and misery out of my voice.
“Hey, Momma, how are you?”
Oh how I wish I could tell you. “I’m good. What’s happening?” Alex didn’t call without a reason, even if only his boredom on the drive to work.
“I had a meeting with a lawyer today. We talked about all the ways I need to prepare if this kid is really mine.”
The bizarre coincidence of this conversation about an unexpected child struck me like an ice ball. If only I could tell him everything right now. But I couldn’t, not until I’d talked to Steven.
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