Beneath the Night Tree

by Nicole Baart

  “Froufrou?” Mrs. Walker chortled. “Yeah, you’re not exactly the fancy-Nancy type, are you?”

  “Less sparkle,” I instructed Liv. “And no flowers or ribbons.”

  “Now she develops an opinion,” Liv teased. But I could sense her irritation.

  I paraded out in three more gowns, adding a new imperative with each: no sequins, no ruffles, and nothing strapless. Even after wearing the strapless dress for five minutes I was irritated by the constant need to pull it up. Liv guaranteed that it wasn’t going to fall down, but I wasn’t about to chance it.

  My sixth and final dress was something I had pulled off the rack at the last minute. Liv tried to talk me out of it, and I wondered why until I caught a glimpse of the tag and realized it was about half the price of the other gowns I’d been trying on. Grandma had assured me years ago that my wedding would never be a problem—she had been saving up since I was sixteen years old. But I still wanted to try to be frugal, and the simple empire waist of the dress appealed to me. Best of all, the fabric was actually touchable, soft. It reminded me a bit of the dress that Janice wore when she married my father. Of course, their marriage hadn’t lasted, so maybe it was macabre for me to be drawn to the unpretentious throwback. But the skirt was like water in my hands, and I knew that the square neckline and straps would flatter my figure. Other than the hint of hand-stitched lace on the straps and at the waistline, the dress was unadorned.

  “What is this fabric?” I asked Liv, reveling in the flowing shimmer.

  “Crepe over a layer of sparkle organza,” she said. “You shouldn’t touch it so much. The oils in your hands will discolor the fabric.”

  I folded my hands in front of me and walked out of the dressing room ahead of Liv so she could carry the chapel-length train.

  “Ooh!” Grandma cried the moment she saw me. “I love this one, Julia. It’s so you.”

  Mrs. Walker agreed, and for the first time since we arrived at the French Door, I actually started enjoying myself. The gown was gorgeous, and just wearing it made me seem pretty too. No, not just pretty. Beautiful. Liv had been wrong. I didn’t want to be a princess; I wanted to be me. Normal Julia, but amplified somehow, as if for once I could be seen as I was meant to be.

  “What do you think, Mrs. Vermeer?” I asked, twirling so she could get the full effect of the classic, elegant dress.

  “You don’t have to call me Mrs. Vermeer,” she protested, shaking her head so that the pearls of her drop earrings gleamed in the bright lights. “I’m going to be your mother-in-law. Call me Diane.”

  “Okay.” I smiled. “Diane. Do you like the dress?”

  She tilted her head and studied me with a shrewd eye. I had hoped she’d be as enthusiastic as Grandma and Mrs. Walker, but Diane wasn’t about to give me an easy thumbs-up. Running her fingernail against the curve of her lower lip, she finally nodded a little and said, “It’s pretty, but I don’t think that it would be Michael’s choice.”

  My heart sank. I hadn’t even given Michael a second thought. Wouldn’t he be pleased with whatever I chose? When we had talked the night before, he assured me that I could show up in a flour sack and he’d still happily say, “I do.” Maybe I had misread him. Maybe he was only pretending not to care.

  “Which one do you think Michael would like?”

  “Oh, I don’t think—I know which one he’d like.” Diane laughed. “He’s been a groomsman in all four of his brothers’ weddings, and when you’re immersed in all the planning and hoopla, you learn pretty quickly what works for you and what doesn’t.”

  I had been to two of those weddings with Michael, and he had never commented on any of the nuptial details, much less the bride’s gown. I just assumed he felt the same way I did about it all: mildly indifferent. But if he secretly harbored some wedding dream, I needed to know. After all, I was the only person who could make that dream come true.

  “The strapless one?” I guessed, remembering one of Michael’s sisters-in-law’s gowns.

  “No.” Diane smiled. “The first one. The princess one.”

  The Sugar Plum Fairy one, I thought. But it didn’t matter if I felt like a marshmallow in the dress. I gave Diane a slight nod of thanks, then turned back to the mirror. Taking a long look at the gown I was wearing, I forced a smile and balled the supple cloth in my hands. I crinkled the folds of crepe and organza, loving the feel of the fabric one last time and intentionally ignoring Liv’s muted gasp.

  “The first one,” I mimicked, repeating Diane’s proclamation. “I’ll take the first one. When do I need to come back for a fitting?”

  Second Chance

  “It’s not too late,” Grandma said.

  I peeked up from my paperwork and caught a glimpse of her frown before she snapped the newspaper to attention and disappeared once again behind the Home and Garden section.

  “Not too late for what?” I pretended I had no idea what she was talking about. Maybe she’d get the hint and go back to her recipes. Of course I knew she was referring to the dress—it featured as the main course in most of our conversations these days—but I was hoping she’d realize sooner or later that I wasn’t going to budge and drop that hot-button topic once and for all.

  I scribbled my signature on the bottom of our utility check and sat back to wait for Grandma’s response. Tried to prep the perfect comeback: “The dress is a gift to Michael. It’s just one small way I get to say, ‘I love you.’ . . .”

  But instead of starting in on the glittery cupcake that was to be my wedding gown, Grandma merely kept reading her paper.

  The wise thing to do was just to let it go and focus on the stack of bills and mail at my fingertips. But it hurt me that Grandma thought I was making a mistake by buying the dress Michael wanted instead of the one that was so obviously meant for me. It was just a dress, after all. Yards of material and thread and beadwork. I almost groaned at the thought of all those sequins and beads, but I swallowed my disappointment instead and said, “It’s only a dress, Grandma.”

  She laid the newspaper down carefully. “I know it’s just a dress. I wouldn’t care if you wore jeans and a T-shirt to your wedding. I just think it’s indicative of . . .”

  We were finally getting somewhere. “What? It’s indicative of what?”

  Grandma shook her head as if to clear it. “Nothing, honey. Besides, when I said, ‘It’s not too late,’ I wasn’t talking about your wedding gown.”

  “You weren’t?”

  “No.” She turned the page of her newspaper and lifted it, creating a wall of words between us. “I was talking about Daniel’s painting.”

  Naturally. Why deal with one problem when there were a host of issues to confront?

  I reached across the table for the rolled-up picture that Daniel had brought home in his backpack that afternoon. It was crinkled from drops of spilled water and smudged in places, but it was a clever rendering all the same. Of course, it was too early to tell if Daniel would have a gift for art, but if his kindergarten creations held any clue of what was to come, we had a little Picasso on our hands.

  Carefully spreading open the construction paper with my palms, I surveyed Daniel’s bright scene for the hundredth time. In the center of the page was a pool of ultramarine poster paint, a glob so thick I could have peeled off the entire chunk with my fingernails. At first glance, I had thought the round centerpiece was a trampoline, but upon closer inspection it hit me that the sea of blue was a body of water. A pond, to be exact. And there were five people scattered around it. A stocky, yellow-haired Daniel; Simon, who was a skinny, frowning figure that stood taller than Daniel’s rather plain-Jane interpretation of me; a gray-haired, skirted lady who was obviously Grandma; and a final, grinning man with sunburst hair to match my son’s.

  I didn’t have to ask who the fifth person was.

  When I first saw Parker smiling from the middle of Daniel’s painting, I wanted to scream. He was still a stranger to us, a relative unknown when we were surrounded by friend
s and family who had been our help and support for years. Why did Parker have to round out the painting? What did Daniel see in him?

  His daddy, I thought involuntarily. He sees his daddy.

  But that was impossible. It was ridiculous to imagine that something deep inside of Daniel resonated with the man who gave him nothing more than a set of chromosomes. Sperm donation does not a father make, I decided with a sense of finality. Besides, hadn’t Parker proved his instability? One little fight on the porch and he was gone. No phone call. No e-mail. No apology. And best of all, no Parker. We hadn’t seen him or heard from him in weeks.

  “It’s just a painting,” I told Grandma with a sigh. “Daniel drew it because of that day at the pond. Remember? He found a water bear. The painting is really about his water bear.”

  “If that’s true, why didn’t he paint a microscope? or a tardigrade?”

  I covered my eyes with my hands and let Daniel’s painting swish back into a loose roll. “Fine,” I groaned. “It’s about Parker. What would you have me do?”

  “It’s not too late,” Grandma said again. “You can still call him.”

  “Why in the world would I do that?”

  “For Daniel.”

  There was nothing I could say to that. I was being selfish, but I didn’t want to hear it.

  Grandma continued softly, “Everyone deserves a second chance, Julia.”

  “He just blew his second chance.”

  “Then you give him a third and a fourth . . .”

  “I doubt he’d even talk to me,” I argued, hoping that if I turned the tables, she’d realize I’d already done all I could. Hoping she’d let me off the hook.

  “You could apologize.”

  “Apologize? For what?”

  My eyes were still pressed closed, my head cupped in my hands, but I heard the distinctive rustle as Grandma folded her newspaper and dropped it on the table. “Nothing, I guess.”

  The legs of her chair squeaked against the laminate; then her slippered feet padded past. She touched my back, but before I could raise my hand to cover hers, she was gone.

  “Good night,” I called.

  The only reply was the soft click of her bedroom door as it closed.

  “Call Parker,” I muttered to myself. “As if I don’t have enough on my mind. I’m planning a wedding, for goodness’ sake.”

  Rather than picking up the phone, I gathered my stack of mail and deposited it in the drawer where I kept items needing my attention. It’d still be around tomorrow, I decided, and now that Grandma had brought up Parker, I certainly wasn’t in the right frame of mind for balancing our budget and sorting through paperwork. It was times like these that I could be convinced an online shopping spree was infinitely more important than groceries.

  I would have gone for a walk, but the first snow of the season had begun to fall around noon, and though it was still technically autumn, winter was asserting its might. School had been let out early due to blizzardlike conditions, and I doubted if the boys would make it in tomorrow. At the very least they’d have a late start. I smiled. Just the thought of a snow day brought me back to my own childhood, to cold winter mornings huddled around the radio with my fingers crossed. There was nothing quite so sweet as hearing the words Mason Elementary and canceled in the same sentence.

  When I was little and had a snow day, Grandma always made doughnuts for a treat. All at once I wished I were a more conscientious mother. I should have watched the forecast and stocked up on snowed-in necessities like hot chocolate and mini marshmallows. I threw open the cupboards and refrigerator and scanned our shelves for the necessary ingredients. Maybe hot doughnuts sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon would soften the boys toward me. And if we didn’t have dough for biscuits, I could try chocolate chip cookies, cinnamon rolls, snickerdoodles, anything.

  In less than a minute I was able to account for enough ingredients to make all my imagined treats and more. Though the truth was, none of it would do me any good if the boys were stuck at home. I’d still have to make my way in to Value Foods. If school was canceled, Grandma would have to carry on the snow day traditions, not me.

  She was a better mother than me. A better grandmother than I someday would be. A better person all around.

  A string of unexpected thoughts wound themselves around my heart, binding my chest until it ached to breathe. I loved my grandmother more than my own life, but since Daniel was born, there had been times when I throbbed with an impossible jealousy toward her. Tonight, that envy felt like it would choke me.

  I didn’t want to think of my many shortcomings as a mother. Of Parker and second chances. Or even third chances. But Grandma had planted a seed in my mind with just a couple of words and the brush of her hand. And now that she was gone, her gentle reminders filled the room with an air of anticipation.

  Maybe she was right. She usually was. Maybe it wasn’t too late.

  There was homework waiting for me in my messenger bag, but I couldn’t bring myself to concentrate on the psychological particulars of childhood dysfunction. Nor could I stomach the thought of mindless TV. I hadn’t been to the library in months, and the only magazine we had at the farm was Better Homes and Gardens, an old issue I had paged through twice already. The only thing left for me to do was the one thing that Grandma probably hoped I’d do even more than she prayed I’d call Parker. I got out my Bible.

  With a storm raging both outside the windows and inside my heart, it hardly seemed like the opportune time to get my devotional life on track. But the house was quiet, and my mind was anything but. I needed something to distract me from the unsettling truth of Grandma’s words.

  In the half decade since Grandma had given me her precious Bible, it had only become more dog-eared and overstuffed. I picked up her habit of collecting things, and the yellowing pages of Scripture were fat with letters, poems, church bulletins, and love notes—mostly from Daniel and Simon. It was hard to even find the chapter I was looking for, but more often than not I still stumbled across a treasure when I cracked the binding of that aging NIV.

  It was on my way to Jeremiah that the little slip of paper fell from the pages and fluttered to the kitchen floor. I bent to pick it up and turned the bookmark-size scrap over and over in my hands in the hope of recognizing it. But although I thought I had been through every fragment contained in Grandma’s Bible, this was new to me. It was a couple of penciled lines written in a strong, willowy hand that leaned slightly to the left as if blown by a breeze: Grandma’s beautiful script in the years before the palsy made her fingers tremble.

  I don’t want Julia to be happy.

  I don’t expect her life to be easy.

  I don’t insist that it be painless.

  But I do want her to be content.

  I want her to love and be loved.

  I want her to be holy.

  The first line was like the quick stab of a knife, a wound I hadn’t expected. I don’t want Julia to be happy. Why not? Didn’t I deserve happiness? Don’t we all?

  But even as I bristled in self-defense, my eyes scanned the rest of the words and I knew with a certain unflinching acceptance that my grandma’s hope for my life was saturated with love and truth—the sort of honesty that couldn’t be found in modern parenting tomes, where ease and happiness reigned paramount.

  Happiness is fleeting. My dad had said those words to me a hundred times in our years together. A thousand? I didn’t get it at the time; in fact, I thought my dad was a closet sadist for the enthusiasm with which he echoed ridiculous sayings like No pain, no gain. Adversity builds character. We acquire the strength of what we have overcome. Life was never about chasing butterflies for my dad. It was about swatting flies with a smile on his face.

  I smoothed open Grandma’s little proverb for my life and studied her wishes again. When had she written it? after Dad died? before? I could almost imagine her bent over the table where I now sat, weeping silent tears for her son and trying to arrange a life for the gra
nddaughter she never planned to parent. Most mothers made lists of rules: No talking back. No rudeness, put-downs, or insults. No skipping school, blowing curfew, or going out without permission. But my grandma made a life list. A scribbled prayer for more than just my behavior.

  A hope for my life.

  It was hard not to compare myself against her expectations, to wonder how I measured up. Grandma’s words almost rang prophetic, for my life had been neither easy nor painless. But was I the woman she wanted me to be? Was I content? Did I know how to love and be loved? Was I holy?

  Weighed down with wedding woes, brother battles, and the unresolved pain of Parker, I felt like a complete and utter failure. I had survived five years on my own. Five years as a single mother to two young boys who, for better or worse, were fiercely loved by a bruised and broken me. It didn’t feel like enough.

  I wish I could say that when I picked up the phone, my intentions were pure and my heart was ready for all that was to come. But mostly I did it out of duty, a sense of obligation to Daniel, and a desire to be the woman my grandmother wanted me to be. Calling Parker wouldn’t make me happy, and it probably wasn’t the holy thing to do, but for some reason it felt like the right thing to do.

  His number was saved on my cell phone, and I selected it and hit Send before I had the chance to change my mind. It wasn’t terribly late, but I wished for a fleeting moment that he had already silenced his cell for the night. I could hang up. Or maybe leave a message, something short and meaningless. At least I could ease my conscience by knowing that I had tried.

  He answered on the very first ring.

  “Parker here.”

  I gulped. “Hi. It’s Julia.”

  “I know. Your name came up on caller ID.”

  Resisting the urge to roll my eyes and hang up, I blurted out the first thing that came to mind. “How’s your puppy?”

  Parker laughed, but it was short and hollow-sounding. “She’s fine.”

  We were silent for what felt like ages, the only sound between us the faint buzz and hum of a poor connection. I couldn’t think of anything to say to him; I wondered why I had called at all, why I let myself be guilted into doing the one thing I dreaded most.