The One In My Heart

The thought was shocking—I couldn’t imagine growing up with anyone except Zelda.

“Your mother never thought she wouldn’t be granted full or at least joint custody of you. So your father had documented evidence that she was seeing me behind his back; that didn’t mean she was an unfit mother. She made it clear that she had every intention of marrying me and raising you on this farm. No judge was going to deny a girl a chance to grow up where there’s clean air, open space, a stretch of white picket fence, and even a small apple orchard—it doesn’t get any more wholesome, quintessentially American than that.

“But your father, he was…determined. He found out that apples and dairy cows weren’t the only things we grew here.”

My eyes popped. Mother’s Vermont Farmer cultivated marijuana? “Pot?”

“Pot. Shrooms. Opium poppies.”

My eyes bulged further. My former stepfather was a minor kingpin?

“Nothing on a serious scale, of course!” He laughed ruefully. “I was young and I was more curious than anything else. Unfortunately my curiosity extended to extracting sap from P. somniferum to make opium. I wanted to see whether it could be done—and your father had evidence that I managed it.

“You must understand, those were the days of Just Say No and very zealous drug-law enforcement. I’d have been looking at forfeiture of house and land and a huge fine, not to mention a mandatory jail sentence, if he were to turn the evidence over to the police. Your mother had no choice but to agree to give up custody, so that he wouldn’t do exactly that.

“She was one for holding a grudge, your mother. She was so pissed off at your father that for years she refused to exercise her visitation rights, because he had it mandated in the divorce documents that he had to be present when she saw you.”

I sighed inwardly. I’d always known there had been a sea of bad blood between my parents. But this was even worse than I’d imagined: It was all so ordinary, everyday spite that had somehow swollen to monumental proportions.

“And then she came to her senses one day and drove down. But when she came back and I asked her how it had gone, she kept shaking her head. Several days later she told me that she’d seen you in the park with your stepmother. And you were so happy that she felt completely unnecessary.

“But the real blow came when your stepmother contacted her and asked whether it was all right for her to bring you up for a visit. Your mother was so excited. We cleaned and painted and baked, and I just about gave a bath to every cow on the farm. But you never came. When your mother called, she got your father, who barked that there had never been any plan for you to visit her.”

I didn’t know about the phone call, but I did remember the plan. “He didn’t know. We were going to come when he was on a business trip to Europe. But then my stepmother had some health issues.”

It was Zelda’s first episode after she came into our lives. That entire autumn had been a dark time for all of us.

“We got a call from her the next spring,” said Doug. “She told us that she’d been sick and apologized for the bad timing of everything. But the main thrust was that you didn’t want to come up and see your mother anymore.”

I couldn’t remember what exactly had made me change my mind—it was so long ago. Had I feared that it had been my demands to see my mother that had led to Zelda’s episode? Or had it been a bargain I’d made with God—Keep Zelda safe and I won’t ask to see my mother again?

Doug rubbed his palm on his clean-shaven chin. “I kept telling her that she shouldn’t let any of that stop her. It didn’t matter what your father did, or what you said you did or didn’t want: It was up to her to make the effort and build a relationship. But she was convinced that she’d already failed. That your father, and your stepmother too, possibly, had poisoned you against her.”

“My father never talked about her at all.”

“The whole thing was screwed up, wasn’t it?” Doug sighed. “She thought the only way you two could have a relationship would be after you grew up. But she didn’t live long enough for it.”

The day after Bennett had retorted, What don’t I know about abandonment issues?, I’d had a flash of insight. His attempts to take over the family firm hadn’t been only about Moira. There had also been a deep anger against his parents—for leaving and never coming back.

I’d expected to deal with a similar anger. My mother had failed in many ways: She’d been too obdurate at the beginning and too much of a quitter at the end.

But there had been no malice in her failure, only a lot of fucked-upness.