Stranger at the Door. Laura Abbot

I don’t. I’ll tell him you came by, but now you’ll have to excuse me.” She moved to shut the door.

      Momentary dizziness swept over him and involuntarily the words spilled forth. “Wait! I just want to meet my father.”

      The woman stared, mouth agape, color leeching from her face. When she finally spoke, he could barely hear her. “Your father? What on earth are you talking about?”

      He took a half step forward, silently pleading for her help. “There’s no easy way to say this. I have reason to believe your husband is my father.” He hesitated, trying to keep the longing from his voice. “I, uh, want to meet him.”

      “There must be some mistake—”

      “No, ma’am, I don’t think so. Did your husband serve in the Vietnam War in 1968?”

      Mutely, she nodded, her hands locked on the door.

      Gently he continued. “He knew my mother there.”

      The woman raked her eyes over him as if assessing his resemblance to her husband. Time stood still. Only the cries of mountain jays broke the silence.

      At last, with tears pooling in her eyes, she whispered, “Come inside.”

      CHAPTER ONE

      I THOUGHT MARK TAYLOR would never leave. Now I’m pacing from room to room, disbelief lodged in my chest. Never once with Sam has there been a whisper of another woman. Yet in this young man’s tall, well-built frame, the way he tilts his head when listening and the matchless blue of his eyes, I see my husband. Everything in me screams denial, but the truth is hard to escape. Even if Sam was ignorant of the pregnancy, as Mark claims, did he think this chapter of his life could remain forever closed?

      Oddly, despite my anger and hurt, I found it impossible to ignore the entreaty in Mark Taylor’s voice or to doubt his sincerity. But I know Sam. A sudden confrontation between the two of them would never have worked. Even so, I resent having to be the one to break the news when he returns from Boulder where he’s helping our younger daughter Lisa paint her living room.

      I’ve taken Mark Taylor’s contact information and encouraged him to return to Savannah if Sam doesn’t phone him at his motel within a couple of days.

      Numb, I wander to the picture window overlooking the tarn, now turning steely under gathering clouds. All my certainties are evaporating like a shifting mountain mist. In their place, questions and accusations swirl.

      THE NEXT EVENING, I hardly let Sam hang up his jacket before turning on him. “You’ve been keeping quite the secret all these years. Did you ever plan to tell me or was I just supposed to drift along in ignorance?”

      His eyes widen with incomprehension. “Tell you what?”

      “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.”