Hard Cider

by Barbara Stark-Nemon

  “That sounds like a good idea,” I said slowly. “Was it helpful?” I’d begun to shiver in the frigid car.

  “Yeah, it really was.” Alex launched into a recap of the consult, and I listened, offering murmured sounds of attention. Prepared to advise him, I found instead that I could affirm with conviction the well-articulated plan Alex and the attorney had already worked out. He would write a will, organize his finances to prepare for the possibility of child support, and work out possible legal proceedings for a menu of custody arrangement options. While Alex’s voice expressed no pleasure, neither did it contain the rancor of so many of his earlier reports.

  For the second time, I grasped onto the slimmest ray of hope that Alex’s life wouldn’t be derailed by this unplanned circumstance. “Sounds like you’re covering all the bases, Alex. You’re doing a good job here,” I said quietly.

  I waited for a dismissive response, but none came.

  “Thanks, Momma.”

  “Love you, sweetie.” Before the tears could freeze on my face, I started the car and made my way to the hotel.

  In the years Andrew had worked on Lake Erie, I’d grown to love quiet early morning drives through northern Ohio, with its sense of rock-solid, middle-America well-being. On this Monday morning, clear, cold, and snowless, the sun rose behind me, bringing barns, farmhouses, huddled storefronts, and the cars and trucks of early commuters into stark relief against empty fields—a true architecture of rural and smalltown life.

  I switched on the audiobook I’d started on the ride down, promising myself pure escape for the drive’s first hour. The Atomic Weight of Love worked equally well as a description of my state of mind and the title of the book. The themes of a woman reckoning over many years and eras how to balance her sense of commitment to others, her passion for her work, and the need to be nurtured in relationship were beautifully drawn throughout the novel. Whereas the protagonist in the book carried out these efforts in an introverted, isolated world, however, I recognized that my struggles happened in the hurly-burly of an active family life and many other involvements. Two hours flew by, as if I’d driven through an airless vacuum, until the weight of needing to frame what I would say to Steven intruded and I turned the audiobook off.

  Just after ten o’clock, I turned the Flex into our driveway in Ann Arbor. The familiar grey cedar shakes, white trim, and red door felt especially welcoming this morning. I sat gazing at the cluster of towering hemlocks and the copper beech tree gracing the front of the house as though they’d always been there. They hadn’t. We’d planted them all after the house fire, more than twenty years earlier. Memories of the agonizing days after the fire helped put Julia Reiss’s appearance into perspective. We’d gotten through worse.

  I carried my suitcase through the front door, smiling at the small pleasure of a New York Times sitting on the front porch. The advantages of urban living. Have to finish shoveling the walks and driveway.

  Before searching for Steven in his downstairs office, I switched on my fancy coffee machine. I’d not yet allowed myself this extravagance at the northern farmhouse. Armed with a fresh-brewed cup of French roast, I made my way down the stairs and past the leather couches and game-enabled TV that had been refuge to so many teenage boys until Seth finally went off to college. An exercise bicycle, rowing machine, and bench with free weights had edged out some space in front of the TV. Steven and I had truly cast a wide net when it came to the people we considered family. We’d gathered in many of our boys’ friends during all their growing-up years. Will we extend that net around yet another group of people? Or will it tear, leaving us all adrift?

  I found Steven leaning over his expansive, L-shaped desk, studying one of its multiple monitors. While he had an official office at the firm, in reality, the nerve center of his administrative functions and a good deal of his legal practice happened right here, where, at ten o’clock in the morning, he could sit as he did now, in flannel pajama pants and a T-shirt, a giant untouched mug of tea cold on his desk, his tall frame stooped forward, eyes fixed on one of the oversized screens.

  I watched him for a moment. Though I was only slightly off to the side of his visual field, he hadn’t heard or seen me come in. He never did.

  “Hi,” I said.

  He jumped upright. “Oh Jesus, you scared me. Hi.” He looked at his watch. “Boy, you’re early.”

  “Yeah.” I rounded the desk, put my coffee cup down, and, as Steven swiveled his chair toward me, leaned in for a kiss. I avoided his gaze as I drew away, grabbing my coffee and staring into its steam.

  “Abbie?”

  I still couldn’t bring myself to look at him.

  “Abbie, what’s going on? Why are you here? What aren’t you telling me?”

  I certainly had his attention now, and this man did know me.

  “Come upstairs with me.”

  “Abbie, you’re scaring me. Are the kids okay?”

  “The kids are fine. I’m fine. But I have an amazing story to tell you. Come on.” I pulled his hand, but he resisted.

  “Okay, but I have to finish this.”

  “Nope. You don’t. It can wait.” I could see on Steven’s face that he knew we were now out of any usual mode of interaction. He could get angry and short with me, or he could just go with the out-of-the-ordinary flow and not make it any harder.

  “All right, but this is weird,” he said.

  The spirit guides were with me.

  “Yes, it is,” I agreed, and led the way upstairs to the kitchen table. For nearly thirty years, we’d shared family information, from the important to the quotidian, while seated around this strong, enduring piece of maple butcher block, only slightly nicked by three boys’ punishing use.

  Steven warmed his tea in the microwave and sat at his usual place, nervous impatience tightening the expression around his deep brown eyes.

  “You remember Julia Reiss, the girl who showed us around the labyrinth at the Leytons’ last Thanksgiving, right?” I began.

  “Yes, of course,” Steven said. “What about her?” He looked at me as though I were a client taking my sweet time providing the information he needed to make a case.

  I held his gaze. “She came to see me about a month ago, after Thanksgiving, and after I’d gotten to know her a little at the knit store. She asked me a lot of questions about our family, and then she told me she’d discovered some troubling information about her mother. She didn’t know what to do with it.”

  “Abbie, what does this have to do with me?” Steven interrupted, agitation erupting.

  I took a breath and reached out to lay my hand on Steven’s. “Her mother is Fiona Phelan.”

  Steven’s eyes unfocused and seemed to search inside his head, but returned to mine in total confusion. “Who?”

  He doesn’t remember her name. He remembers faces, but not names. Always.

  “Fiona Phelan. In Yellow Springs, Ohio. The surrogate attempt.” I waited, watching. I moved my hand up to Steven’s forearm and felt the smallest jolt as realization spread through him like radiation. “Julia found a document with your name on it, along with evidence that her father was infertile. She did the math. She’d never been told any of this, and wanted to check it out before—”

  “Are you saying she thinks I’m her biological father?” Steven’s voice cut in, rising incredulously.

  “She doesn’t really know. But Steven, you are her biological father.” I choked the words out.

  “What are you talking about?” Steven stood abruptly, his chair knocking into the wall behind him.

  “Steven, sit down.”

  “Don’t tell me to sit down. Who says I’m her father?”

  “Sit DOWN. I know this is shocking, but I need you to listen to me and talk to me. We’ve got a lot to get through. Please.” My voice had gone steely, but I knew tears weren’t far behind.

  Steven sank into his chair and dropped his head into his hands, elbows propped on the table.

  “This all hap
pened just as everything hit the fan with Alex. She came to me, Steven. She was scared and a little desperate. I put her off until I could find out more.” I hesitated. What came next could be more disaster than I could cope with, but I knew I had to tell the truth, the whole truth. I gripped his arm.

  “I tested her DNA, Steven, without her knowing it. And . . . I tested yours too. It’s a match.”

  Tears welled over my cheeks and I bit my lip as Steven raised his head, his mouth agape.

  “What?” he said with a gasp.

  “Fiona Phelan got pregnant, Steven. She decided she couldn’t give up the baby. She raised Julia as her husband’s child. He tried to talk her out of it, but when she refused to change her mind, or to tell you, he agreed to raise Julia. They adopted another child. They’re a loving family. Julia suspects something but doesn’t know what I’ve discovered yet.”

  “How long have you known this?” Steven’s voice had gone wooden.

  “I tried to tell you when I got the DNA results Saturday night. It’s when your systems at the office crashed. I decided to go to Ohio and confront Fiona.”

  Steven stared at me as though I had two heads.

  “I saw her yesterday,” I said. “She didn’t deny any of it. She and her husband—”

  “Wait a minute.” Steven rose from his chair again, this time pacing the floor around the large, open great room. I moved toward him but he held his hands up, shaking his head, his face gone pale and clammy. He was in shock.

  My own heart started pounding. Oh God, he’s going to have a heart attack.

  Abruptly he sat on the large upholstered ottoman in the center of the room. Hitting it rhythmically with his fist, he stared at the floor, then into the snow-covered garden through the glass doors. I sat on the couch in front of him, and at last he looked up at me, his expression shifting back and forth from torture to wonder.

  “I have a daughter?” he asked.

  Relief mixed with sorrow nearly choked me. “Yeah, I guess you do.” He’d said “I,” not “we.”

  Chapter 24

  James Aiken’s voicemail disturbed me. For one thing, I’d previously communicated arrangements only with Charlie, so I thought it strange that James would phone me out of the blue. And then, his tone sounded subdued. He’d simply asked me to return his call, giving a number with a downstate area code. Something sounded off.

  Two more messages from Julia followed his. After three exhausting days in Ann Arbor with Steven and the long ride north, I didn’t have it in me to phone either one of them, and put off returning calls until the next morning.

  I’d been gone less than a week, but it felt like a lifetime. I now lived in a new reality.

  Flipping the wall calendar to February seemed to signify a turn toward spring and provided a pulse of anticipation amidst the drudgery of unpacking and reentering my solitary life. No matter how deeply frozen the landscape out the kitchen window, the six o’clock sky still held light, and longer days were harbingers of the first garden and orchard work—work I looked forward to. In the clarity of morning, I would call James. Then I would arrange to see Julia. Tomorrow.

  Morning light broke into my sleep with the exuberance of bright sun on snow and water, as if the beams contained so many jewels. In the moments before the day’s obligations weighed in, I luxuriated in the stream of sunlight cast across the bed through the uncovered windows and the sparkling snowscape stretching down to the lake. A cross-country ski, before the snow lost its powdery ease, would be in order as a reward for the day’s work.

  A fire in the wood stove, a pot of coffee, and a list were no sooner in place than the phone rang.

  “James, I got back late last night to your messages. Is everything all right?” I grimaced, waiting him to tell me something I didn’t want to hear.

  “The news is better this morning, but I’m afraid Dad’s in the hospital. We thought it was a relapse of his blood disorder; now the doctors are saying it may only be an imbalance in his endocrine system that sometimes happens after the treatments he had. He’s going to have a slew of tests. I’ll know more tomorrow about whether he needs to be transferred downstate to Ann Arbor, but what he’s not going to do is prune trees any time soon, and that’s got him more than a little put out.”

  Welcome home, Abbie Rose. “Oh Jesus, James, I am really sorry to hear this. Man, I bet he’s cranky.” There are few people I could imagine less suited to lying in a hospital bed waiting for tests than Charles Aiken. “Is he actually feeling ill? Can I visit him? Do you need anything?” Slow down, Abbie. This may not be your vacuum to fill.

  “You’re right about the cranky part. And he’s feeling much better. He actually collapsed on Saturday. It’s a good thing Melissa was home. Her friends are helping her cover the kids so she can work and see Dad this week. And he wants you to visit all right—with the orchard map in tow. Seems like you’re the one he wants to quarterback the spring pruning. He’s rounding up help for you, and I wouldn’t put it past him to rig up some video feed so he can watch, but I had to promise to reach you just to keep him in that bed.” James’s laconic voice held a tinge of worry.

  “Is he going to be all right?” I realized the stupidity of that question. “Never mind, I’m sorry. One step at a time. Are you up here, or downstate?”

  “I stayed up until last night and then had to leave. I’m going to try to come back up later in the week. I know this is a lot to ask, Abbie, and we think we have at least a week or two before we have to start, but this is really about his peace of mind.”

  “Of course. Well, he may be overestimating my readiness, but we did a pretty good job together last spring.” The urge to engage in this challenge thrust up through the distress of the last week, and the out-of-kilter seesaw at my center came into balance, as if I’d been trying to pull down one side and a person at the other end had finally pushed up off the ground. I wanted to do something productive for my cider business, and this would be my opportunity. Another test.

  “I’ll give it my best whirl, James. How can I get the orchard plan?”

  James gave a sheepish chuckle. “It’s in your mailbox.”

  I couldn’t wait any longer for the reward of a workout ski in this brilliant morning. I’d mowed a trail through the overgrown orchard in the autumn and continued it to the conservancy land across the road. The path swung back to the road along the eastern shore of the point and then down the center to the house. In the heavy powder on the first loop, I felt muscles release their tension one by one as they warmed with the rhythm of two quick inhales and a forceful exhale, all timed to pole plants and lengthening strides. Snow-blanketed pines, woodland animal tracks, and riffled water in the distance where shore ice opened into the big lake all energized me with their serene beauty. Now I could think.

  As promised, Fiona Phelan had emailed me after she and Aaron had spoken to Julia. In fact, they’d driven the seven hours to talk to her in person, here in Northport. On the far stretch of my ski loop, I gazed in the direction of the Leytons’ farm, imagining what had transpired there only a few days ago. Fiona had restricted her report to three sentences, indicating that they’d explained the whole situation, apologized, answered Julia’s questions, and started to discuss whom to tell, and when. Julia had been “understandably upset,” and had asked her parents for some time to deal with the situation. Aaron and Fiona had returned to Ohio the following morning. Fiona thought Julia would want to see Steven, and me, sooner rather than later.

  Fiona thought Steven should decide when and how he wanted contact with her and Aaron. I bet she wants to leave it up to Steven. In all that had transpired, I’d hardly given thought to the future of Steven’s relationship with Fiona, and I was in no hurry to get in the middle of that interaction. What Fiona couldn’t know was that Steven’s priority would be Julia—now and always. He wouldn’t waste time on an unrecoverable past. He was not one to dwell on what couldn’t be changed. Lucky Fiona, and amen to the good side of Steven’s capacity to move
on to the next challenge, the next situation to fix.

  His initial shock at the sudden revelation, and his attendant giddiness, had since given way to a driving need for information. He wanted to know everything about Julia, about Fiona, about Aaron and their family. Next, he wanted to make arrangements to see them all, to tell our children, to bring the entire maelstrom into our life like tumbleweed in a windstorm.

  “Why don’t you come up north with me? We can see her together, in person,” I’d suggested. “Unless you think you’d rather see her by yourself.”

  Steven had looked at me in confusion. “Why would I want to see her by myself? She’s going to be part of our family, Abbie. She’s our daughter.”

  Now she’s ours. The first hints of panic squeezed my chest. “Steven, we don’t know exactly what she’s going to be. I’m sure she doesn’t either. We know that she’s your biological daughter, and that’s important information for both of you, but—”

  “Oh, so that’s where you’re going with this?” Steven interrupted. “She’s just my daughter, and I can go off and do this by myself?”

  “That is not what I mean, and do not go off on me right now.” My words caught in a sob I couldn’t control. “I’m just saying we need to take the time to figure out how all the pieces fit—one step at a time. And I’ve had as much as I can handle right now.”

  Steven had backed off, though his face had told me he thought I was behaving unreasonably. We’d waited until the next day to formulate a plan. He couldn’t leave work for at least a week, and we both thought the next contact with Julia should be in person, and soon. Reluctantly, I’d agreed to return to Northport and meet with Julia myself, with a follow-up when Steven arrived.

  The long ski, paired with a hot bath, had worked magic, and I felt revitalized and hungry. When I stood in front of the open refrigerator, I realized it lacked even the minimal requirements for my solitary existence after a week’s absence, so I headed to town.

  Cleared snow in small ridges lined driveways and the roads, indicating there hadn’t been much snowfall while I was gone. For a Tuesday, town seemed downright bustling, several cars in the grocery store parking lot and more at the hardware store, the bank, and the post office.