Chapter 10: The Apples Came In August
The district attorney's office opened a formal review in May.
Grace called me on a Tuesday afternoon to tell me.
"Fraud and falsification of medical consent documentation," she said.
"They're looking at the forged signature, the clinic correspondence, and the surrogacy arrangement.
It could take time."
"I know," I said.
"Albright will try to negotiate," she said.
"He'll push for a civil settlement instead of crjminal exposure.
They may accept it."
"What does that mean for us?"
"For you and the children — nothing changes.
The custody ruling stands regardless.
This is about Daniel's exposure." She paused.
"I thought you should know it's moving."
"Thank you, Grace," I said.
I hung up and stood at the kitchen window.
Noah was in the garden, crouched over something in the grass.
A beetle, I thought, or a stone, or some other small thing that required his complete and solemn investigation.
Vanessa had her daughter in April.
She sent me a photograph — a small pink bundle with very dark hair and a wide, unfocused gaze.
She named her Rosie.
We had coffee twice since the hearing, she and I.
We didn't talk about Daniel very much.
We talked about what it was like to sleep in short windows and what Rosie was starting to do and what Lily had said at nursery school that week.
We talked like two people who had arrived in the same place from very different directions and were still deciding what to make of the view.
She was not my friend yet.
But she was not my enemy, either.
She was something we didn't have an exact word for — something made from a strange combination of injury and honesty and the particular respect that comes from having watched another person handle something hard with their hands open.
Ruth came to stay in July.
She arrived with her overnight bag and her pie knowledge and her complete willingness to sit on the floor and build towers with Noah until he knocked them down, which he did, repeatedly, with sincere satisfaction.
On an evening in August, the four of us picked apples from the tree at the back of the garden.
Lily stood on a step stool I held steady and pulled the apples down with both hands.
Noah carried them to the basket in small armloads, very carefully, one at a time.
Ruth stood at the kitchen door and told us which ones looked good and which ones to leave.
Later, there was pastry dough on the counter and flour on Lily's nose and Noah asleep on the sofa before we'd even got the pie in the oven.
I sat at the kitchen table while Ruth rolled out the second crust, and I thought about the invitation.
The eight words on the envelope.
Come and see what you could never give me.
I looked at the flour on the counter and the small boots by the door and the basket of apples from our tree.
I thought: he was right.
This was never something he could have given me.
Because I built it myself.
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Some things taken from us are returned in ways we never expected.
And some doors that close on us turn out not to have been the right ones.
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Have you ever had something painful lead you somewhere better than where you started?
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