Stranger at the Door

“About your fling during the Vietnam War. About the total stranger who appeared at the door yesterday announcing himself as your son.”

“What in blazes are you talking about?”

With barely controlled fury, I repeat Mark Taylor’s claim. About his mother Diane and her gallant sacrifice in not telling Sam she was pregnant. About Mark’s stateside birth and his mother’s marriage to Rolf Taylor, whose name is on the birth certificate. “He’s a grown man now. He wants to meet you.”

Sam turns to granite before my eyes. “I have no knowledge of any baby. I won’t see him. He’s nothing to me.”

I am speechless, appalled by his cold indifference to his son and to my feelings. Finally I choke out, “Was she also nothing to you?”

“For God’s sake, Isabel!”

“Answer the question.”

“Do you think I’d have spent over forty-five years of my life with you if she meant more to me?”

“Well, you certainly spent a bit of time with her. Enough to impregnate her.”

“Christ, Izzy, I was lonely and scared.”

“Welcome to the waiting wives’ club. Do you think it was any picnic being at home and imagining the worst?”

His shoulders slump. “I don’t know what to say to you, except I’m sorry. I never wanted you to find out.”

“I can believe that. But you should have told me. Then I wouldn’t have had to open the door yesterday and get blindsided by Mark Taylor. Who, by the way looks just like you. He wants to meet you. Whether I like it or not, you owe him something.”

“Not now.” The grandfather clock sounds like a ticking bomb. “I can’t deal with this just like that.” He snaps his fingers to emphasize the point. “I need time. I have to go away.”

“You have to go away? What about me? Am I just supposed to keep the home fires burning, carry on as if my whole life hasn’t been turned upside down?”

“Izzy, please understand. I have to think.”

“You know what? I don’t care what you need right now. This is always the way you handle trouble. You run, Sam, you run. Like a coward.”

He takes me by the arms. “Please, I need time.”

I hear the coldness in my voice. “And I need an explanation.”

He raises his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “I know you do. Believe me, I’ve regretted the incident ever since. It was nothing. It was wartime and—”

“Save your excuses for another time—after you’ve had your precious time to think. And whatever happens, Sam, a son is not nothing. Remember that.”

I leave the room seething. History repeats itself. Sam crawls into his cave, and all I can do is wait and wonder how I could have been married, happily for the most part, to a man with such a devastating secret.

SAM DEPARTS THE NEXT morning for Montana where his air force buddy Mike has offered his vacation cabin on the Yellowstone River. The fiction is that Sam is on a fishing trip. The truth? He’s escaping.

The day after he leaves, our older daughter Jenny comes up from Colorado Springs where she lives with her contractor husband Don. Usually I look forward to her visits. Today, though, the effort to mask my feelings is almost more than I can handle.

“Since Daddy’s in Montana, I thought you might like company,” Jenny says from the kitchen where she’s making our lunch—tuna salad. “Besides, I’m kind of lonely myself, now that both girls are off at Colorado State.”

“Empty nest?” I query from the breakfast room where I’m setting the table.

She grins wistfully. “I always thought I’d be immune.”

“Impossible,” I assure her. “Not if you love your children.”

After making small talk during our meal, we retire to the family room, where she settles on the sofa with a book, our tiger cat Orville curled in her lap. I sit in my chair, knitting. Fifteen minutes pass before she lays down her novel. “Have you thought any more about Lisa’s and my suggestion that you write your memoirs?”

“I don’t know how I could find the hours.”

“Mother, you’re running out of excuses. Now that Daddy’s off fishing, you’ll have plenty of time to give it a try.”

My forty-five-year-old firstborn is every bit as stubborn now as she was as a toddler when, arms folded defiantly, she would stomp her foot and tell me “no.” She wore me down then, and nothing seems to have changed because I’m actually considering doing what she asks.

“My life isn’t that exciting.”

“Nonsense. Your history is interesting to us. We really don’t know that much about what you were like as a girl or about your early married years. It’ll be a legacy for your grandchildren.”

“I wouldn’t know where to start.”

Jenny fixes me with her brown eyes, so like mine. “At the beginning, of course.”

How can I tell her it isn’t the beginning I’m worried about. That part I can handle. But the rest? How honest can I be? Particularly in light of recent events. Our daughters will expect portraits of the parents they think they know.

Jenny reaches into her tote bag. “Here.” She thrusts a thick journal into my hands, then pulls out a package of my favorite ballpoint pens and plops it on the table. “Now you have no excuse. What have you got to hide? Just pick up a pen and jump in.”

What have you got to hide? My thoughts leap to Mark Taylor. Oh, my darling girl, life isn’t always as it appears. Dreams become distorted, we do things we never thought we would, and in the twinkling of an eye everything changes.

Jenny arches an eyebrow and waits for my answer.

I sigh. “You’re not letting me wiggle out of this, are you?”

Her mouth twitches in a mischievous smile. “I of the iron will? Of course, not.” She sobers. “Please, Mom.”

Picking up the journal, I thumb through the blank pages, wondering how I can possibly fill them. Wondering how to keep the truth from shattering my daughters’ illusions.

“What if you learn some things you’d rather not know?”

“Ooh…” My daughter shivers with delight. “Family skeletons? I can’t wait.”

“Don’t be too sure.”

“Do it for us, please, Mom?”

In my head I fast-forward a film of memories, the laughter and tears of a lifetime welling within me. I nod. “I’ll try.”

After Jenny leaves, I move to the window with its view of the mountains, now in early autumn adorned with skirts of golden aspen. So many years. So many subjects I’d sooner avoid. But I cannot write a fairy tale, especially not now, when the happily-ever-after is in doubt. Sitting in the armchair that has been my refuge for years, I pick up a pen and open the journal. Where to start?

Glancing around the room, my focus settles first on the man-size sofa and recliner, then on the stone fireplace and finally on the floor-to-ceiling bookcase. As if drawn by a magnet, my eyes light on the small figurine peering at me from the fourth shelf. The Buddha-shaped body is both grotesque and comical, but it is the impish, all-knowing smile that pierces my heart. The billiken.