The Fault in the Midsummer Night's Donor

Feldspar Dykes

Some men have hobbies—not sports, which are all about strength and camaraderie, nor interests like music or reading, but hobbies. Singular obsessions that offer no social currency, no practical benefit, just the quiet satisfaction of pursuit for its own sake. The kind of thing that makes women like Liz leave after three years because they can’t stand another dinner conversation about the Mohs hardness scale.

Take your mind off stress, the article said. Interact with the physical world. Get tactile—knead dough, grip a tennis racket, dig in the dirt. Engage your senses.

So I did. In the heat of the summer and with the weight of the world on my newsfeed, I decided I needed to get away from it all and followed the column’s advice.

Collecting my tools, I drove across the Golden Gate then traversed Marin county. By the time I reached the trailhead in Point Reyes, the morning fog had burned off, leaving the air thick and shimmering. A handful of hikers trudged past, heads down, earbuds in. Two men in athletic gear blew past without taking a second glance. I was alone amongst people who preferred to be alone.

The peninsula of Point Reyes juts into the Pacific like a broken nose that refuses to set. Geologically, it’s a piece of the Sierra Nevada, yanked north over millennia by the unstoppable grind of the San Andreas Fault. It’s also the closest place to San Francisco where you can find feldspar dykes—vertical seams of mineral-rich rock that forced its way up through fractures in the granite, hot magma that cooled into ribbons of white and pink. I’d studied maps for weeks, and plotted my route to a likely location.

After a hot sweaty climb, up ahead, there it was. A gash in the rock face, spilling milky feldspar down the slope. I scrambled up, my fingers grabbing handfuls of feldspar, triumphant. Like a metal detectorist finding an ancient coin, I had found my treasure.

I imagined turning to Liz—Look at this—before remembering she hadn’t answered my texts in months. The rocks sat heavily in my palm. I let them fall back to the dirt, keeping only a single perfect piece.

Mission over, I reluctantly headed home. I preferred to be outdoors. My apartment felt empty and every corner reminded me of Liz’s absence. It was clear. She didn’t envision a future with a man who talked endlessly about feldspar dykes and granite uplifts.

Down to Earth

Most days, I wore a green polo shirt and a forced smile, guiding tourists along Fisherman’s Wharf. At night, I did a shift at Patagonia. Financial necessity meant working long hours with barely time to eat and sleep before doing the whole thing again.

By now, it seemed my Master’s in Geology was as useful as a pocketful of popcorn. Why not work in the oil industry? Why about mining? friends asked. The truth was, I was too restless for corporate life, and too unfocused to complete a PhD and enter academia. When the student loans ran out, I’d sold the one thing I had in excess supply: sperm. That was my rock bottom. I couldn’t imagine doing it again for a PhD, , jerking off for every week for four years inside an anonymous medical clinic.

A thought nagged at me for weeks. What if one of them is out there?

A child, a human being, spiritually connected to me. It would fill my emptiness. Keep the existential dread at bay, the one that fills me every time I have a moment to think about life.

I asked Reddit: Is there a way a sperm donor can find their offspring?

A reply came quickly. Donor kids can find you at 18. You can’t find them.

Another user agreed, adding: Donors have no legal rights to locate their children.

The last sentence hurt. Why don’t fathers have rights?

The next day, I received a DM: Bro! The Heritage Clinic got hacked. Records at: http://darkarchive.onion/heritageclinic/2019-records

Meet Cute

Her name was Lily Anderson. Four years old. Living in Daly City. Her mother, Christine, wanted nothing to do with me. “Interesting to hear from you,” she wrote back in a curt email, “But we’re fine. Lily has two parents. Please respect our privacy.”

The following day, I took off work, drove down and parked my dented Corolla a block from their bungalow. My pulse raced as I approached 247 Oak Drive. A white picket fence guarded a lawn full of colorful plastic toys—a tricycle, a sandbox shaped like a turtle. Lily’s world. I shouldn’t be here, but the ache to see her, to know my daughter, pulled me on.

Five times I walked past, my pulse hammering. I felt dizzy. Ring the doorbell? Peek through a window? My hand squeezed my mobile, tempting to call Christine, but fear of embarrassment stopped me.

On the sixth pass, the front door flew open and a large man crossed the lawn in three strides. Broad shouldered, he had the build of a retired football player and a gaze that held mine like prey. My knees trembled. His wife must have sent him out to get rid of me. I should come up with an excuse.

“You lost?” he demanded.

“Actually…” I swallowed. “I think I am Lily’s biological father.” As a shield, I held out a donor document I received from the Heritage Clinic years ago.

To my shock, he grinned. “Figured you’d show up someday.” He held out his hand. “Greg, nice to meet you.” He looked me up from head to toe. “Come in and have a drink.” Half his size, I didn’t present a threat.

Greg led me into his living room, where I saw the woman who must be Christine. She didn’t appear to be as happy as Greg was to see me. Moms are protective.

I introduced myself, and added, “I was just in the neighborhood,” as an apology.

“Well then, let’s get this over with. Have a seat.” She seemed to be expecting me as well. “We’d like to thank you, because without you our wonderful daughter Lily would have never come to this earth. Are you looking for something out of this? We don’t have money.”

They had me all wrong. “I don’t have my own children, and my father passed away last year, so I was just curious.”

“Sorry to hear that, bud,” Greg said. “About your father.”

“Career? Hobbies?”

“I studied Geology in university.”

“That makes sense.” He gestured toward a jumble of rocks on a children’s table. “Lily, would you like to come out and show our visitor your rock collection?”

The most beautiful little girl I’ve ever seen stepped out. She had curly hair and huge brown eyes. “You like rocks?” she asked.

“I love rocks,” I replied. As little children tend to do, she gave me a tour of her fantasy world filled with doll houses and character toys while her parents watched proudly.

As Lily went on about about each toy, I heard Greg and Christine whispering to each other. I hesitated. Everyone on Reddit told me I needed to do something. “You have something on your lip.” I took a piece of sterile gauze from my pocket and wiped off the corner of Lily’s mouth.

After a while, we ran out of things to talk about, and I stood up to leave. I smiled at Lily, unsure of how to address her. I could figure that out later.

“Without you, we couldn’t have had Lily,” Christine said, “it was so nice to meet you.”

I wondered what I should say, but words failed me.

Greg had obviously been instructed to stay quiet, and they both nodded politely as I left.

A Shift in the Fault

I read and reread the instructions. The gauze must contain recently collected saliva holding cheek cells. I vigorously wiped the inside of my cheek. For Lily’s sample, there was no way to tell if it had enough. I mailed them both in together.

Two weeks later, after telling them there was something important I needed to discuss, I gave them the good news. For me, it was heartbreaking.

As we all sat at their kitchen table, I explained the negative test result, staying vague about how I had obtained Lily’s DNA. “So you don’t need to worry about me anymore,” I said, trying to hold back tears.

“You really didn’t need to do that DNA test,” Christine said. “Because I already had it done.”

My eyes darted back, wondering why she hadn’t told me earlier I wasn’t the father. Greg studied the table like he wished it would swallow him. Lily sat on the sofa, absorbed in watching cartoons on a tablet.

“So you knew I wasn’t the father?” I asked.

She nodded. “Sorry.”

Greg looked up expectantly. “So I am Lily’s father, after all?” He seemed lost in reflection. “But… we didn’t do it that month when you were going to the clinic.”

We all looked at Lily, the answer wired into her DNA, and then back and forth at each other.

Christine bit her lip. “It was the last week before the beginning of the next part of my life, a lifetime of childcare and being a mother. I had a midsummer’s night dream and…” Christine bit her lip. “I really shouldn’t say more.”

“Mommy,” Lily piped up, “what is midsummer’s night dream?” Her eyes were wide, innocent.

We all froze.

I remembered the item I had in my pocket and pulled it out. “Lily, on midsummer night evenings, rainbows reach down to the earth,” I told her softly. “And bring magic, and sometimes they leave it in special stones, like this one.” I handed her the feldspar tourmaline crystal, a rainbow sheen glinting from within. “It’s a Tiger Stone. For you.”

Lily took the stone, her eyes searching it with wonder. “Thank you!” She pocketed it and went back to her tablet.

From their faces, I sensed Christine’s tense guilt, and Greg’s quiet resignation. Then, the three adults in the room, all at the same time, decided to forget about midsummer night dreams. Christine to protect Lily. Greg, due to the basics of biology, if his beautiful daughter wasn’t his, by now, it didn’t really matter whose it was. Me, out of shame for almost wrecking a family that wasn’t mine, when I should’ve stayed in the hills, hunting for rocks and finding my own path to creating a family of my own. A mountain is more than rocks and the heart of a family is much more than DNA.