Leaves of Hope

by Catherine Palmer

  Beth lifted her head as the eager reference desk clerk returned with a sheaf of photocopied pictures of Thomas Wood from first grade through high school graduation. He handed them to her and waved away her offer of payment. “It was fun,” he said. “Like a quest. If you need any more help, my name’s Brian. Kids used to call me Brain. That bugged me in the old days, but now I don’t mind. It fits.”

  Beth stood and slid the sheets of paper into her purse. “Thanks, Brain.”

  He laughed. “You’re welcome. Enjoy your visit to good ol’ Tyler.”

  Giving him a thumbs-up, Beth left the library carrying information she had needed, and didn’t want, and could no longer live without. Why hadn’t her parents told her years ago? What was the point in keeping such a secret from their only daughter?

  As she slid into the seat of her rental car, Beth knew she had to make one more stop before she could leave town.

  An oak tree. Beth drove the wide turn around the cemetery as she looked at the trees and wondered which one of the many oaks now dropped its acorns on her father’s grave. She should have come more often. In the two years since John Lowell’s death, his daughter had visited his final resting place only twice. The first time had been at his burial service. And the second time, when Beth was back in Tyler for one of her quick visits, her mother had impulsively driven them to the cemetery after church.

  Unable to express how very much she did not want to see her father’s grave, Beth had wordlessly endured the endless minutes. She and her mother had left the car and stood in silence near the headstone that listed the dates of John Lowell’s birth and death but told nothing of who he had been and what he had meant to those whose lives he had touched. Beth had tried not to think of her father’s body lying deep in the earth, decaying and transforming into something fit for a horror movie. Instead, she had studied the sky through the oak leaves and thought about the family she was preparing to move to a nice house in Panama.

  John Lowell was not inside that casket, Beth had reminded herself at the time. She still believed that. Parking the rental car near the cemetery’s old iron gate, she walked toward the one grave she did know how to find. Beth’s beloved babysitter had brought her to the memorial park on regular occasions. While Nanny knelt and rearranged the silk flowers at her husband’s grave, Beth and her brothers had chased each other up and down the rows, hiding behind headstones and trees, throwing acorns or sweet gum balls at each other and generally behaving like little pests.

  There it was. Beth crossed a path and approached the small plot that she remembered Nanny tending so faithfully. Nanny now would be buried beside her husband, though the child she had babysat for so many years had never once visited her final resting place. Stopping at the spot, Beth gazed down at the bright green grass, neatly mown without a dandelion in sight. Then she looked up at the pair of matching headstones.

  Theodore Wood. Nancy Wood.

  As if a sudden wash of ice water had slid down her spine, Beth stiffened. Again she read the two names. Theodore Wood. Nancy Wood. But this was where Teddy had been buried…Nanny and Teddy. Two people without last names. Without pasts or futures. Without children, grandchildren, nieces or nephews. Nanny had just existed to babysit Beth and her brothers, hadn’t she? She had been an icon, never changing, never growing older, never acting any different than she always did.

  While Jan Lowell had taught English at John Tyler High School for twenty years, Nanny had looked after the three little Lowells. Every weekday morning when they were preschoolers, Beth, Bob and Bill had gotten out of the car at Nanny’s house and spent the day there. Their mom picked them up about four every afternoon. When they were old enough to start school themselves, they went to Nanny’s house in the afternoons for visits or on weekends to splash in Nanny’s big plastic pool and eat Popsicles from her freezer.

  Nancy Wood. Nanny.

  Could it be? Beth walked around the two stones, looking for some kind of clue. Might Nancy and Theodore Wood have been Thomas’s parents? But that would make Nanny Beth’s grand—

  “Hey, there.”

  Giving a start at the interruption, Beth swung around and saw her mother approaching down the path. Jan had left her car next to Beth’s near the cemetery gate. Wearing jeans, a knit shell top and bleached white sneakers she looked younger than she had said she felt. Younger even than Beth had thought the day before.

  “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 sho
uldn’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 headstone, 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.”

  “That does sound wonderful. I never heard of a rose that could stand much shade at all.”

  “This one can, and the fragrance is out of this world. It’s a Bourbon, so it’s got that heavy perfume, you know what I mean.” His dog was nosing around the Peace Rose Jan had just planted, and she hoped the scrawny little fuzz ball wouldn’t get any ideas about digging it back up before it had a chance to settle in properly. Jim gave the leash a tug. “Come here, Trixie. Leave Mrs. Lowell’s rose alone.”

  “Oh, it’s all right. Trixie’s no trouble,” Jan said, meaning the exact opposite. Why did her Southern upbringing make her say polite things that often stretched the truth? She shrugged. “And you might as well call me Jan. After all, I’m a full-timer now. Part of the neighborhood.”

  Jim gave her a big grin. “We’re all just tickled to death to have you here. You know, Jan. I was thinking about heading over to Tyler this afternoon to the nurseries. I want a Zepherine Drouhin to put at the other side of my front door. Kind of like an archway. They repeat bloom like crazy, so you really can’t beat them. Would you like to drive in with me and pick one up for yourself? I noticed you’ve got a patch of shade over by your side porch there, and a thornless rose might be just the thing.”

  “Oh, well…my goodness…” Jan tugged at the fingers of her gardening gloves as she tried to think how to get out of this. The last thing she wanted to do was be seen driving off to Tyler in Jim Blevins’s car. Tongues would wag. She ce
rtainly had no interest in the man beyond a neighborly chat. He was at least twenty years her senior, for one thing.

  Did Jim see her as a potential date? What a thought! Jan reached up and patted her hair, deciding immediately that she would never let it go gray, not even when she was ninety-two.

  But maybe she was overreacting. Maybe all he really wanted to do was shop for roses.

  “Thank you, Jim,” she finally fumbled out. “Actually, I went rose shopping last Saturday, and I’ve still got all these bushes to plant. Not to mention the annuals on my porch. But that’s a kind thought. I’ll remember the Zepherine Drouhin next time I’m in town.”

  “Sure thing! Not a problem.” He leaned over and patted Trixie’s round white head. “I’d be happy to help you put in your plants this afternoon. Wouldn’t we, Trix? We’ll help Miss Jan dig those rose holes, won’t we, girl?” Straightening, he jabbed a thumb over his shoulder at his own neat white house. “Tell you what. I’ll be back with my shovel right after lunch. Unless you’d care to come up to my house and have a bite to eat on the deck? The Zepherine Drouhin is just budding out, and you can decide if you like it. I’ve got tuna salad from yesterday.”

  “Well, that is so nice of you, but if you don’t mind, I’ll just stay here and keep on working. I do enjoy getting my hands in the dirt in springtime, don’t you?”

  “I certainly do. All righty, then—Trixie and I’ll be right back after lunch. C’mon, girl. Let’s go make us a sandwich, and then we can come back and help Miss Jan out with her planting.” He called back to her. “I always put some of the best bread-and-butter pickles you ever tasted in my tuna salad, Jan. I’ll bring you a jar. My wife canned them last summer just before she died. Here, Trix. Stay out of that ditch, now!”

  As he walked away, Jan blew out a breath that sent the damp hair on her forehead dancing. Great. Just what she did not want. If anything, she had moved to Lake Palestine in the sincere hope of being left alone. Her past few years in Tyler had been utter chaos and so stressful. First she had been torn between taking care of John and continuing to teach in order to keep their health insurance. Then she had been compelled to take off a month of school and devote her entire summer to tending to her increasingly helpless husband. His death had come as a sad relief, for she knew John had been ready to go. Such a terrible, aching, futile struggle…