by Liz Crowe
“Oh…oh…oh,” she keened, rocking back and forth in her seat while they waited in the endless traffic jam between her home and her baby girl.
* * * *
By the time they arrived and parked and made it through the maze of floors and departments to Liesl’s room in the pediatric wing, Elle’s entire body was jangling with stress, her mind awash with worry. All she wanted to see was her girl, to hold her and make sure she was all right. She skidded to a stop at the door indicated by the room number she’d been given by a nurse. Mrs. Henderson took a seat to wait while Elle stood and stared into the room, frozen in place by the harsh reality of what she saw.
Ross was in the bed, holding the sleeping girl who had an IV in one hand, oxygen tubes in her nose and all manner of beeping, noisy machines around her. Elle put a trembling hand to her lips, suddenly afraid to approach them. Liesl’s face was drawn. Her eye sockets seemed sunken. Her hair was a mess, no doubt full of tangles, half-covering Ross’s face.
His eyes were open, staring at the ceiling as he stroked the small arm resting on his chest. Tears filled Elle’s eyes again. She’d been at that fucking restaurant while her baby, her child, was…dying.
I’d let my stupid phone go dead? What kind of a mother am I?
A voice she’d not heard in her head for over three years filled it now, sending her stumbling back into the hall, hands over her ears. ‘You’re a useless slut. Nothing but a whore. No one wants you but me so you’d better get used to it. You didn’t deserve your own child, so I took him away.’
“Stop!” She leaned against the wall outside her daughter’s hospital room, reliving the voice of her tormenter, her captor, the man who’d abused her for years, pretending he was her ‘Dom’ and she his ‘sub’.
Ross had driven this man’s voice from her world. But now she’d failed him and their daughter. “Stop, please…” She slid to the floor, dizzy, exhausted, hungry and miserable. She heard someone crying, then realized it was her, as a couple of nurses helped her to her feet, got her some water and spoke to Mrs. Henderson.
“Elisa.” She sensed Ross’s voice deep in her soul when the sound hit her eardrums.
She lifted her face from the empty water bottle and met his gaze. His was flat, non-committal, but also non-judgmental. She rose and followed him into the hospital room. When Liesl spotted her, she started sobbing, calling and reaching out her arms for her. But instead of running to her as any normal, good mother would, Elle felt as if her feet were stuck in concrete. Ross gave her a light prod, but she turned to him, her face hot, her throat aching.
“I don’t deserve her.”
He frowned, took her hand and pulled her to him. His hug felt somewhat perfunctory, but it eased her. “Go to her, Elisa. You are her mother. No one is blaming you.”
She stared at him, recalling her initial concern for his mental well-being, knowing how his mind worked and that he’d probably blame himself.
“It’s not yours—”
He held up a hand, let go of her, turned her to face the bed and gave her a not terribly gentle shove. “Mama,” Liesl croaked, as if her throat was raw. “Mama. Mama!”
Something in her released its hold and she lurched forward, gathering Liesl up, holding her close, kissing her face over and over and muttering to her in German. By the time the girl had calmed, her hands clasped around Elle’s neck as she drifted back to sleep, Elle looked up to see that Ross had left the room. Her heart seemed to stutter in her chest. He was furious with her, with good reason. But he wasn’t blaming her—at least, not yet.
Liesl shifted and mumbled something. Her long-lashed eyes fluttered open. She unlatched her fingers from behind Elle’s neck and put cold palms on her mother’s cheeks. “Papa…”
“He’s just outside, my darling. Rest now.” But Liesl didn’t move, just pinned Elle with her version of the Hoffman-Nagel blend of blue eyes—somewhere between cornflower and sapphire.
“No, Muti…no.” Her voice was firm now. “No more mad at Vati!”
Elle sighed, looked up and met Ross’s gaze. She smiled. He didn’t, but opened his mouth to speak when a set of doctors appeared at his shoulder. Elle sat up straighter, keeping Liesl close.
“Mr. Hoffman? Mrs. Hoffman?”
Ross winced, which sent a shaft of pain straight to her heart. What was wrong with her? She could make this amazing man happy with a simple agreement on a date for a wedding. But the restaurant…it had been his idea. His angry words demanding that she actually choose—that she decide which she wanted more, their family or her restaurant, burned into her brain. She buried her face in Liesl’s tangle of blonde curls as she got hold of herself.
“I am Liesl’s father. That is her mother. When can we take her home?” Ross’s voice was low, doing its usual dance along her nerve endings as it had done since the very first time she’d heard it. But his words were short, sharp and final, stating the facts of the child’s parentage and nothing more. Elle knew what he meant by them, too. Tears burned her eyes as she lifted her face and listened.
The doctor cleared his throat, poked at his tablet a few times, then glanced at Ross. “Liesl’s severe allergic reaction to strawberries means she must stay overnight for observation.” He paused, touched the screen some more, then looked at Elle. “Once we do release her, she’ll need to make an appointment with a specialist who will conduct a phalanx of allergy tests.” His gaze flickered to the girl, then back to Elle’s. “It won’t be pleasant but they’re required in order to determine what else has to be eliminated from your daughter’s diet. I’m guessing eggs and possibly orange juice. Maybe more.”
Liesl began to whine at the thought of staying overnight. Elle shifted her onto the bed and stood, trying to understand why in the world her healthy little girl would now be hampered the rest of her life by a slew of food allergies. She’d breastfed until Liesl had been nearly two and once she’d started solid foods they’d given her some of everything, with zero reactions.
But the doctors were backing out of the room, on to their next crisis, no longer concerned with Elle’s worries, since Liesl had been made stable and was resting comfortably. Once they were alone in the room, she and Ross stared at each other a full twenty seconds without speaking. Elle wanted to tell him about her pregnancy but suddenly she wasn’t so sure it was a good idea. She’d nearly killed her own child with a basket of damn fruit. What made her think she should have another one and subject him to her inept bullshit?
“Ross,” she said, barely above a whisper.
At the sound of her voice, he seemed to crumple in on himself, to collapse in a way that she’d never seen him do. She ran to him and held on as he dropped to the floor, gasping for breath and grabbing on to her for dear life. Desperate and terrified, she kissed his hair, his forehead, his cheeks, which were suspiciously wet.
“Shh…My darling,” she said over and over, soothing and hanging onto him. “It’s all right. She’s all right. You saved her.”
Ross—her strong Teutonic Viking, her rock, her anchor, the man who had saved her from herself in so many ways she’d stopped counting them—sobbed as if his heart was breaking, like a little boy. No, more like a man confronted by the fact that he’d had to deal with his beloved daughter’s near-death alone, unable to reach her thanks to her inability to remember to charge her damn phone. He yanked himself away from her when Liesl called for him, swiping at his eyes and putting a huge smile on his face to reassure the girl, leaving Elle on the floor, her arms achingly empty, watching the two of them cuddle up on the bed without her.
Chapter Six
Two weeks later
Ross stared at the sample of the Kölsch he’d pulled from the vessel where he’d been resting it prior to serving. It had turned out better than he’d hoped, even though his reason for making it seemed so far in the past he barely recalled it. He’d taken a risk with it, given his typical adherence to the German purity law. He’d been disinclined to use adjuncts in his beers—it had been his
early conviction that if he couldn’t make something delicious, unique, balanced and drinkable using the only official ingredients required of water, malt, hops and yeast then he had no business calling himself a brewer.
But the last few breweries he’d worked at, including Fitzgerald in Grand Rapids and a couple he’d consulted recently here in Detroit were doing some wildly creative things with all manner of additional, non-German-approved ingredients and he’d been inspired by them to give it a try on his own. Using an obergäirge lagerbier like a Kölsch, which, by its very definition was a challenge to get right was a risk, but he considered himself well capable of perfecting the delicate blend of German dry hops, light malt bill and correctly softened water. Which he had, setting its longer top-fermentation process using cool temps as if it were a lager with all faith that it would be perfect.
Then, he’d gone and done it—broken the rules, the Reinheitsgebot, the German purity law of brewing. But as he gazed at the color he’d managed to create and took a sniff, then a small sip, letting the liquid rest on his tongue for a few seconds before moving it to the back of his mouth then down his throat, he knew that he’d likely be doing it again.
It was the absolute perfect shade of hazy pale straw, with a slight tint of pinkish orange, just as he’d hoped. While he’d wanted to use prickly pears to create this, he’d been hard pressed to find enough of the fruit to make it work. After spending hours at Eastern Market with Liesl at his side on a random Saturday, he’d settled on using guava. Since the batch was small and he’d been trying to retain a small shred of his purity rules, he’d purchased three bushel baskets of the fruits and spent hours peeling them and running them through a second-hand juicer he’d purchased. His fingers had been dyed pinkish red by the time he’d finished and stuffed the pulp into an infusion bag, figuring that since he’d not gotten that much juice out of the batch, he’d use as much of the fruit as he could.
He’d decided to let the beer ferment almost all the way before adding the bagged pulp and fresh juice directly to the nearly finished product. This was a bit of a risk, since that was when the lightly hopped beer was reaching its peak flavor and adding fermentable sugars in the form of the fruit’s juice and pulp could throw the whole thing off, mess up the final gravity—any number of things. But it hadn’t.
He knew that Elisa loved a well-brewed Kölsch. He also knew that she’d likely freak all the way out at the thought of him adding anything, much less some kind of South American fruit juice to what she considered to be the prefect, crisp, subtle blend of ingredients. But she had also developed a penchant for drinking shandies in the summer—a style he personally found revolting in its bastardized sweetness. When he’d decided to make his first pilot batch something in homage to his woman, they’d still been on speaking terms, of course. Which was not exactly how things were running now that the beer was ready to be enjoyed.
He held the clear glass up to the light, letting the pink and orange shades he’d managed to concoct reflect around the large room. He took another taste, a bigger one this time, so he could gauge the mouthfeel. It was a Kölsch all right—that light to medium body was spot on but it had the most perfect dash of bubbly dryness he could only attribute to the fruit’s effect on the hops that set it apart from the usual. He smacked his lips and smiled, in spite of his low-lying, ever-present anger and frustration with the state of his life at the moment. The fruit notes were fairly dramatic, which wasn’t surprising given the complexity of flavors found in a single bit of guava. And every last one of them—from Indian pear, to mango, to strawberry, even a bit of rich pineapple—were present in this gorgeous-looking brew.
He knocked back the rest of the sample he’d pulled, rolling it around in his mouth to make sure he could describe it properly. “Damn, I’m good,” he said to himself while preparing to transfer the final product into his sterilized seven-fifty milliliter stoppered bottles. He dropped into the zone of this final stage of brewing, his mind drifting, giving him a few minutes to ponder what a total asshole he’d been to Elisa the last couple of weeks since Liesl’s hospital stay.
That whole scene had changed his perspective on a lot things, that much was certain. He would never, in his entire life, forget the moment he’d realized that his baby girl couldn’t breathe and that he, Ross, her father, could do exactly nothing about it. Her beautiful face had turned red first, and she’d started coughing as he’d sipped beer and glared at the television, nursing his butt-hurt pride and pondering how much he both loved and hated Elisa Nagel at that moment.
When he’d finally noticed her, she was clawing at her neck and gagging, gasping, unable to speak. Thanking the good Lord in His Heaven for having an ex-schoolteacher down the hall, he’d snatched her up and run to the Hendersons’ door. The old lady had known exactly what to do, using some kind of a pre-packaged shot-like thing which at least had kept his daughter from dying in front of his eyes. But after a couple of minutes, during which he’d frantically called nine-one-one, forgetting his own address in his panic, her eyes had rolled back and her tiny body had started bucking and shaking in the grip of the first seizure he had ever seen anyone have.
Ross shut his eyes, reflecting on the next few minutes that he’d held on to her, praying like he’d never prayed in his life, waiting for the medical help to arrive. And the rest of it was a sick, dizzying blur—the harrowing ambulance ride while the EMT guys had frantically given his baby mouth-to-mouth and pressed on her chest to keep her heart pumping, the hell of a busy downtown ER with its smells and noise and terror when he’d been forced to sit and wait while they’d saved Liesl’s life. Then, when Elisa had shown up, they’d seen the doctors and he’d lost his shit—no, it was all best left un-recalled, really.
His initial inability to reach her while he’d waited for the ambulance hadn’t registered with him—he’d been so focused on praying his child away from death. Later, he’d only thought about it in the most abstract sense, as if he couldn’t focus on it because to take his focus off Liesl would only lead to another disaster. He had internalized it all, like he’d always done, and still blamed himself for the whole thing. So when Elisa had her little nervous breakdown in the hall, he’d been only half-aware of where she’d gone in her head right then.
Now, of course, he understood. She’d explained it to him. And he got it. He did. He’d initiated her deprogramming from that bastard who’d hurt her physically and almost ruined her emotionally. He’d initiated the reunion between her and her first child—the son she’d had stolen from her by that same man who’d declared her ‘useless’, ‘unfit’, and worse. He knew damn well that she’d regress. But at that moment, he hadn’t fucking cared.
His own thick swirl of emotions had been too raw, too confusing for him to process, hence his embarrassing breakdown. And since then, he’d kept his distance as he attempted the process of understanding himself and her and their future together. He missed her—everything about her, but most especially her body, lips, fingers and tongue. But he had zero idea how to handle how he felt about her, about the damn restaurant that he knew had been his damn idea in the first place, about how he imagined their life together as a real family and a properly married couple.
Hence he’d been sleeping on the couch this last week, after spending the first week post-allergy terror sleeping on the floor next to Liesl’s bed. The upshot of this, since he’d been used to a steady diet of satisfying sex, even during the month they’d been falling apart in other ways—he was horny as hell yet stubbornly unwilling to reach out to the one person he wanted to help him alleviate it. In a fit of self-denial, he’d stopped jacking off—which was quite a feat since it meant he’d been walking around for the last ten or so days with an aching back, neck…and balls.
The grueling rounds of allergy tests had left Liesl as cranky as a nest of hornets, which didn’t help. Elle had taken a bunch of days off in a row from the restaurant to help with the doctor visits and their itchy, bitchy fallout. But she wandered aro
und like a ghost of her old self—thin, with huge dark circles under her eyes, and quiet. So, he’d left her alone. In short, they were one sorry-ass group of people under one roof.
As he finished filling the last bottle, the name of the beer appeared to him, so vivid he figured that it might have been visible to others in a cartoon Ross thought-bubble. He smiled to himself, somewhat grimly, and plastered plain white labels on the bottles before writing ‘Adjunct Lovers’ on each one in his neat, blocky lettering.
The next couple of hours spent cleaning and putting the bottles into the cooler he’d just had installed the week before were cathartic. He’d finally felt secure enough about Liesl’s physical condition to leave her with a sitter for a few hours and wasn’t ashamed to admit that he needed a break from her—and she from him, no doubt. Elisa was at the restaurant, as usual on a Saturday night, so he figured he’d spend some quality time on his second favorite activity.
He looked around his space, pleased with its level of tidiness. A glance up at the clock he’d placed on the old metal desk made him blink. He’d been here for over three hours, and he could barely remember an hour of it. It was as if he’d been moving in some kind of a dream-state or a weird, limbo fog. It sucked. His phone buzzed with a text from Austin, his oldest friend from brewing school and owner of Fitzgerald Brewing in Grand Rapids, where he and Elisa had met.
You need to come out, his friend had sent. Tomorrow. We’re going up for a guys’ weekend at Trent’s house. Make it happen.
I don’t know, he replied. I’m sort of afraid to go away that long right now.
I know. But she’ll be fine without you a few days. It will do you both some good.
Ross lowered himself into his favorite new furniture find—an old Eames-style chair he and Liesl had procured from the back of somebody’s garage sale in the past month and pondered the concept that his friend was referring to Elisa, while he meant Liesl.