Leaves Of Hope

“She was Thomas’s mother,” Jan said, answering the question before Beth could ask it. “After you were born, Nanny put two and two together. She wanted to be a part of your life, and I thought that was a good idea. She loved you so much.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Beth demanded. “Why didn’t she say something? It’s not fair that I never knew. I treated her like…like nothing! She was my babysitter, not my grandmother.”

Beth turned away again, consumed by sorrow and regret. As the truth dawned, she fought tears. “I came and went from her house nearly every day when I was little, and I never asked her any questions. I never looked at her photo albums or paid attention to the pictures on her walls. I didn’t even ask if she had children.”

“She had one. After Thomas left Tyler, Nanny sold the nursery and greenhouse that had been in her husband’s family for three generations. That gave her more than enough money to live on, and all she really wanted to do was dote on you.”

“But why didn’t someone tell me? That’s such a…It’s wrong! It’s just wrong!” Beth clenched her fists. “How did you find me here, Mother? I don’t want to talk to you right now. I need to be by myself.”

“I saw your car parked by the gate.” She pushed her hands into her jeans’ pockets. “You didn’t think I was going to let my daughter just run off like that, did you?”

“You let my father run off.”

“John Lowell was your father!” Jan exploded. “Listen, Beth, you had better show respect for the man who raised you. You owe him that.”

“Fine, then. You let my birth father leave. You didn’t even try to make him stay.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I don’t know anything. And why is that? Because you won’t tell me. It was your big secret. You and Dad. You even got Nanny to join in the deception.”

“We never deceived you, Beth. None of us. We just chose not to tell you something we felt you didn’t need to know. If it was wrong, it was a sin of omission and nothing more. We didn’t want to hurt you. Nanny agreed with your father and me. Her desire was to spend time with you. It never mattered to her if you knew she was your grandmother. She didn’t care that you weren’t so interested in her. That wasn’t important at all. What she wanted was to be with you, to dote on you and give you her time and her love. She had lost her husband, and her son was far away, and you were all she had left.”

Beth tried to absorb the significance of this new reality. The whole time she had been skipping in and out of Nanny’s house—selfishly focused on her own life—Nanny had been gazing at her with the loving, mournful eyes of a bereft grandmother.

“Maybe it wasn’t important to Nanny to tell the truth,” Beth said finally, “but it would have been helpful for me to know who she really was. I might have treated her better. Been nicer. Kinder. Less self-centered. Did that ever occur to any of you coconspirators?”

Jan clenched her jaw for a minute. “Beth, I don’t want to continue with all this hostility. Let’s get back to being mother and daughter, the way we were before.”

“We can’t ever be the way we were before, Mom. Don’t you see that?” Beth opened her purse and took out the stack of photocopies. “Your life may not have changed, but mine sure has. See this person? He wasn’t there, and now he is. I can’t erase him.”

“What are those?” Jan reached for the papers as she had the teapot, but Beth pulled them back. “Where did you get those pictures?”

“I got them from the library. Because I wondered what Thomas Wood looked like.”

“Why? What use is that? You shouldn’t have—”

“Seeing his picture helps me. Now I understand why I don’t have freckles and a pug nose.”

“Oh, for pity’s sake! That is just ridiculous. Your appearance is absolutely unessential to this issue!”

“Wrong, Mother. Now I know why I look the way I do. And I want to understand how he fits into who I am. Mom, I’m not going to stop searching until I’ve found out everything I can about him. Thomas Wood is part of me.”

Jan shook her head. “No, he isn’t. Genetically you’re connected, but that’s it. That’s all there is.”

“That’s a lot.”

“It is not! Freckles and pug noses are nothing. Come over here, and let me remind you who was really a part of you.”

Taking Beth’s arm, the older woman tried to pull her away from the graves of Nancy and Theodore Wood. “Don’t take me to Dad’s plot,” Beth warned, brushing off Jan’s hand. “I know who he was. I loved him, and I called his parents my grandma and grandpa. Now, I want you to tell me who these people were. Nanny and Teddy.”

“You knew Nanny better than I ever did, Beth. Why don’t you tell me who she was?”

Beth brushed some dirt from the top of Nanny’s marble head-stone, then she sank to the ground and crossed her legs. She spread the photographs of Thomas Wood on the grass before her. For a moment, she could hardly remember anything about the old woman who had looked after her when she was a young child. And then it came.

“Nanny was funny,” Beth began. “She had little songs for everything. She made buttered popcorn every afternoon. Our favorite lunch was fish sticks. She gave us lollipops when we won games. Billy used to cheat at Candy Land, and I would catch him and cry. Nanny rocked me in her lap until I fell asleep. She called me Bethy. Bethy-Wethy.”

Closing her eyes, Beth fought tears as she sang the funny little song Nanny had adapted just for her. “My Bethy lies over the ocean, my Bethy lies over the sea. My Bethy lies over the ocean…oh bring back my Bethy to me.”

Jan joined in softly. “Bring back…bring back…oh, bring back my Bethy to me.”

But Beth wasn’t ready to be brought back to her mother—her sense of betrayal was still too strong.

Chapter Five

Just like that, Beth had gone away. As Jan dug a deep hole for the first of the climbing roses she had bought to plant beside the deck of her lake house, she recalled how stunned she had felt that morning at the cemetery. Tears streaming, her daughter had walked away from Nancy Wood’s grave, climbed into the rental car and driven off. Jan had phoned her repeatedly, but Beth refused to answer, letting her voice-mail system pick up the calls and never returning them. Two days later, an e-mail message appeared on Jan’s computer.

I’m back in New York. On my way to Botswana for three weeks starting Monday. Love, Beth.

That was the extent of her daughter’s communication. Jan had phoned the studio apartment in New York, but Beth didn’t return her call. E-mail messages received no reply.

It wasn’t as though she had purposely hurt her daughter, Jan reasoned as she pushed her fingers through the ball of roots beneath the rose’s graft. Loosening the dirt would give the roots room to breathe in their new home. Now that the whole situation with Thomas had unfortunately come to light, she was even making an effort to explain it to Beth. She had sent a pretty “I love you” card with a lovely poem inside, and she had written a lengthy message on the computer in an attempt to make things better and heal the breach between them.

Your birth father and I did care about each other, Jan had typed in finally—after deleting three previous efforts and revising the current one countless times. Thomas was a good man. He was intelligent and kind. But he and I had different goals. He longed to travel, while I planned to stay in Tyler. I never wanted to be far from my family, but Thomas had no desire to work in the Wood nursery business or live close to his mother. He cared about Nanny, and I know he wrote to her, but he did not come back to Tyler often. Even though Thomas and I were friends, we both knew we did not belong together as husband and wife. I hope you can find a way to be grateful that I married John Lowell, Beth. Your father and I were happy in a way that Thomas and I never could have been. In the long run, sweetheart, your childhood was better for this difficult decision, even though you may not believe it.

After much soul-searching, Jan had pressed the send button and released the letter to her daughter. Later, consumed with worry when Beth made no response, Jan had printed it out and read it at least fifty times, checking to make sure she had said exactly what she meant. She didn’t want to hurt Beth further, but she couldn’t condone this futile quest that seemed to have consumed her daughter. The memory of Thomas’s school photographs spread across his mother’s grave still filled Jan with a mixture of shock, grief and anger. Maybe the reminder that Beth’s happy home was a gift from her parents and her grandmother would help ease the hurt she felt over the secret they all had kept.

“Is that a Climbing Peace you’ve got there?”

As she patted dirt around the rosebush she had just planted, Jan recognized the voice of a neighbor who lived four houses down. Pasting on a smile she didn’t feel, she turned and waved to the widower. “It sure is, Jim. You can’t do better than a Peace if you want the perfect rose.”

“I couldn’t agree more.” Jim Blevins was walking his dog, a mixed-breed poodle-like creature that had a tendency to roll in nasty things. Jan noticed they were both overweight as they sauntered off the road and started up her drive.

“I’ve got two Peace Roses in my yard,” he said. “A climber and a regular bush rose. But you know what really has me intrigued? Zepherine Drouhin.”

“Gesundheit!” Jan exclaimed, throwing up her hands in mock surprise.

Jim laughed, his blue eyes disappearing into folds of soft skin. “It’s not a sneeze, it’s a rose. I hadn’t heard of the Zepherine Drouhin till last year. Found it at one of the nurseries and planted it next to my front door.”

“Did you like it?”

“Did I like it? The thing turned out to be a stunner. Climbed up nearly ten feet in the first year, if you can believe that. It puts out a dark pink rose, and the canes are almost thornless. Great if you’ve got grandkids around, you know. Of course, mine are nearly grown, but still, it’s a comfort not to have to worry about anyone snagging a sleeve as they go inside the house. Best part is, the Zepherine Drouhin tolerates a little shade, and I’ve got a pin oak near the drive that keeps the sun off the front of my house about half the day.”