She drove out to Durham on a Saturday in early October. For most of its history, Durham had been a farming community, and the thin country roads she drove along were pocked by great old trees, faded red barns, and the occasional goat. The air smelled of woodsmoke and a nearby apple orchard.
Maureen Widerman-James answered the door to the modest house on Gorham Lane. She was a handsome woman with large round glasses that accentuated the calm but penetrating air of curiosity in her light brown eyes. Her chestnut hair was red at the roots and gray along the strands closest to her temples and forehead, and she had it in a messy ponytail. She wore a red-and-black work shirt untucked over black leggings and no shoes, and when she smiled, the smile took over her face in a flood of light.
“Rachel,” she said with the same mixture of relief and familiarity she’d used on the phone. It cemented the unsettling realization that she’d said Rachel’s name more than a few times over the decades. “Come in.”
She stepped aside and Rachel entered a home that looked like the home of two academics—bookcases in the foyer, consuming the walls in the living room, under a window in the kitchen; walls painted in vibrant colors, the paint chipped in places and never touched up; figurines and masks from Third World countries in various states of display; Haitian art on the walls. Rachel had been in scores of homes like this during her mother’s career. She knew what LPs would be on the built-in shelf in the living room, what magazines would dominate the basket in the bathroom, that the radio in the kitchen was tuned to NPR. She immediately felt at home here.
Maureen led her to a pair of pocket doors in the back of the house. She put her hands to the seam between them and looked over her shoulder. “Are you ready?”
“Who could be ready for this?” Rachel admitted with a desperate chuckle.
“You’ll be fine,” Maureen said warmly, but Rachel caught a sadness in her eyes as well. As much as they may have come to the beginning of one thing, they’d also reached the end of something else. Rachel wasn’t sure if that’s where the sadness stemmed from but she suspected it. Nothing would ever be the same in any of their lives.
He stood in the center of the room and turned as the doors opened. He was dressed not dissimilarly to his wife, though instead of leggings he wore gray jeans. His work shirt was also plaid and untucked, but his was blue and black, and worn unbuttoned over a white T-shirt. A few bohemian touches to him—a small silver loop in his left earlobe, three dark rope bracelets around his left wrist, a chunky watch with a fat black leather band on the other wrist. His bald head gleamed. His beard was trimmer than it was in the pictures she’d found online and he looked older, his eyes sunk a little farther back in their sockets, his face hanging a little lower. He was taller than she’d expected, but his shoulders were stooped at the points. He smiled as she reached him and it was the smile she remembered, the thing about him she’d remember not only to her grave but long after she was buried in it. That sudden, uncertain smile of a man who had, at some point in his life, been conditioned to ask for permission before he expressed joy.
He took her hands, his gaze searching her, drinking her, darting all over. “God,” he said, “look at you. Just look at you,” he whispered.
He pulled her to him with fumbling ferocity. Rachel returned the hug in kind. He was a heavy man now, around the middle and in the arms and back, but she hugged him so tight she could feel her bones make contact with his. She closed her eyes and heard the beat of his heart like a wave in the dark.
He still smells like coffee, she thought. No longer of corduroy. But coffee still. Coffee still.
“Daddy,” she whispered.
And he pushed her, ever so gently, away from his chest.
“Sit.” He waved Rachel vaguely toward a couch.
She shook her head, steeling herself for the latest shit sandwich. “I’ll stand.”
“Then we’ll drink.” He went to a bar cart and started fixing all three of them drinks. “She died when we were overseas, your mother. I did a sabbatical in France that year and didn’t learn of her death for years. It wasn’t as if we had any shared friends to tell me of her passing. I’m truly sorry for your loss.”
He looked directly at her and the depth of his compassion hit her like a fist.
For some reason, the only thing she could think to ask was “How did you meet?”
He’d met her mother, he explained, on the train back from Baltimore, where he’d gone for his own mother’s funeral in the spring of ’79. Elizabeth was heading east with her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins to her first teaching post at Mount Holyoke. Jeremy was in his third year as a part-time assistant professor at Buckley College, fifteen miles north. They were dating within a week, living together within a month.
He brought Rachel and Maureen a scotch and raised his own. They drank.
“It was your mother’s first year on the job in an extremely liberal region of a liberal state at the end of a liberal decade, so cohabitation without marriage was acceptable. Pregnancy without marriage might have even been more so; some looked on it as admirable, spitting in the face of the dominant paradigm and all that. However, if she’d simply been knocked up by a person unknown? That would have made her seem tawdry and pathetic, a foolish victim unable to rise above her class. At least that’s what she feared.”
Rachel noticed Maureen watching her carefully, half her scotch already gone.
Jeremy started rushing through his sentences, his words spilling and stumbling. “But it was one thing to, to, to sell the idea to the general populace, the people she worked with, et cetera. It was quite another thing to try to sell it at home. I mean, I’m not a math professor but I can still do math. And your mother’s was off by two months.”
Here it is. He just said it, Rachel thought, and took a big pull on her scotch, but I’m not hearing it somehow. I know what he’s saying but I don’t. I can’t. I just can’t.
“I would have been willing, even happy, to be part of selling the fiction, but I wasn’t willing to keep up the lie in our kitchen, in our bedroom, in the day to day of our lives. It was insidious.”
Rachel could feel her lips moving ever so slightly but no words left her mouth. The air in the room was thin, the walls contracted.
“I took a blood test,” Jeremy said.
“A blood test,” Rachel repeated slowly.
He nodded. “The most basic kind. It would never conclusively prove paternity but it would conclusively disprove it. You’re type B, yes?”
A numbness spread through her like she’d mainlined Novocain into her spinal cavity. She nodded.
“Elizabeth’s was A.” He drained his scotch. Put the glass down on the edge of the desk. “Mine is also A.”