Kitabı oku: «Leaves Of Hope», sayfa 4

Chapter Four

“I’m looking for yearbooks.” Beth leaned against the reference counter. “From John Tyler High School.”

The librarian was a nice-looking young man with dimples. “The Alcalde! Are you an alum?”

No one in New York would have asked such a personal question. In large cities the world over, Beth had discovered, people got down to business. Chitchat took too long, didn’t really matter, and you’d never see the person again, so why bother?

With a fair amount of chagrin, she recalled her first week in the Big Apple. She had walked into a perfume boutique, said hello to a saleswoman and—like a good Southern girl—she began with a comment about the weather and then moved on to discuss her own favorite fragrances, how she enjoyed floral scents because she was from a town in Texas where roses were grown for export, how she had just arrived in New York and was excited to have found a studio apartment she could afford and on and on. Finally, Beth had realized the woman was staring at her as though she had just landed from Jupiter. Not only had Beth breached the “no small talk” rule, but her Texas twang had no doubt branded her as someone who just fell off the turnip truck.

This wasn’t New York or London or Toronto, though, so Beth smiled back at the young librarian. “Yep, I graduated from JT a few years back. Go, Lions!”

He laughed. “I went to Robert E. Lee High. I’m working on my library science degree at UT-Tyler now. It’s a good school, but I’ll be glad when I’ve got my degree and can move away. Tyler.” He rolled his eyes. “My ancestors were some of the town’s first settlers, and we’ve been here ever since.”

Beth nodded. “Time to set forth into the world. I live in New York.”

“Really? Wow. I bet that’s different.”

“You can say that again.” Beth reflected for a moment on the number of old families still living in the area. “Did you ever hear of anyone named Wood around here?”

“Wood? Like Wood’s Nursery and Greenhouse? Wood’s Landscaping? Wood Tractor and Lawn Service? There are several businesses by that name.”

For some reason this shocked Beth. Of course she knew about the Wood family. The name was on any number of small enterprises around the city. She could have been living among her relatives all her life and not realized it.

Had they known about Beth? Was her heritage a Tyler secret? Did people elbow each other as she went by…? There’s Thomas Wood’s daughter, but don’t let on that you know….

“I’m looking for someone,” she told the young man. “His name is Thomas Wood. Or was. I think he might have passed away a while back. I’m pretty sure he would have graduated from John Tyler High in the early eighties.”

“All our copies of the Alcalde are down that row of reference books across from the soda machine. You can’t check the year-books out, but you can use our copier if you need certain pages. Dime a page.”

Beth thanked him and headed across the library. As she crossed the reading area, she glanced at an elderly man browsing the Dallas Morning News. Did he know? If she walked up to him and said, “I’m Thomas Wood’s daughter,” would he reply, “Oh, I know that. He left town, but your mother stayed here and married John Lowell.”

Why not? In a city of around ninety thousand, people ran into each other now and then. They joined things together—churches, PTAs, Lions and Rotary Clubs. They congregated at the Tyler Municipal Rose Garden or the Caldwell Zoo. They celebrated annually at the Azalea and Spring Flower Trail, the Festival on the Square and the Texas Rose Festival.

And they talked. They talked at grocery stores, on the sidewalks, in church, at the coin laundries, even in the library. How many had known about Beth’s lineage and said nothing to her—but plenty to each other?

The thought of people gossiping behind her back made her feel sick. And angry. She stepped between the tall bookcases and spotted the rows of yearbooks. But as she started to reach for one, she hesitated. Maybe she didn’t want to know what Thomas Wood had looked like. Maybe she ought to be like her mother and pretend he really hadn’t existed.

Thomas Wood had been a mistake, Jan seemed to be saying.

The pregnancy had been a mistake.

Did that make Beth a mistake?

A brief time in Jan Calhoun’s distant past had been nothing more than a blip in the comfortable straight line of her life. Just a small error that she and John Lowell had rectified with their careful, structured and secure marriage. Running her fingertips across the spines of the royal-blue-and-white yearbooks, Beth reflected on the man who had raised her from birth. Her daddy.

As much conflict as she now felt about the whole situation, she would never deny that John Lowell had been her true father. The family photo albums proved that. As an infant, she had spat processed carrots right in his face. He had held her tiny fingers when she was taking her first baby steps. He had pushed her on the swing in the backyard and taught her how to bait a fishhook, and he kissed her cheek when she graduated from high school. She had loved her daddy.

So why bother to look for a picture of a stranger whose DNA she happened to share? A guy who had impregnated his girlfriend and then walked away…a loser who had sowed his wild oats, never imagining a baby girl would grow from a night of furtive wrestling in the back seat of some car…a dead man whose brief life had meant nothing to his daughter…

Clenching her fists in the anguish of uncertainty, Beth read the dates stamped in gold letters on the volumes of the Alcalde. What was the point of looking for him? But then again…why shouldn’t she? How could it hurt?

She was reaching for a yearbook when her cell phone went off. Jumping at the unexpected sound in the cavernous library, she jerked the device from her purse and frowned at the caller ID. It was her mother. Beth silenced the phone and let her voice mail answer. No way was Jan Lowell going to butt into this decision.

Beth had been unable to sleep the night before, alternately furious with her mother, sad at the memory of her father’s recent suffering and death, curious about Thomas Wood. She had tried to piece things together, mentally walking back through the years and wondering if one thing or another had held more significance than she thought. It was a nightmare—only she had been awake through it all.

As the sun was coming up over the lake, she had packed her bags, thrown them into the rental car and driven back to Tyler. She cruised around town, looking at the Lowell family’s old house, remembering friends and events. She passed her brother’s home and considered knocking on his door to ask him if he knew she was just his half sister.

But Bill hadn’t been aware of anything, Beth realized. If he had, he would have blabbed years ago. So would Bob. Crazy little brothers. Neither one could resist telling on each other or on Beth. If they had known their sister had a different birth father, they would have told her.

Waiting for the public library to open that morning, Beth had eaten a doughnut at her family’s favorite restaurant just off the town square. Every Sunday after church, the whole Lowell crew had traipsed in, settled at their regular table and ordered the same meals they always did. Fried chicken for Dad, roast beef and gravy for Mom, pork steak for Bob, ribs for Bill. Good old Southern dishes.

Beth always ate spaghetti. Italian. She had been ready to taste the world even back then. Like Thomas Wood, who had left Tyler and never come back. Had her parents sensed a difference in her? Had it affected the way they treated her?

Unwilling to hesitate a moment longer, Beth grabbed an armload of yearbooks and carried them to a table. She sat down and flipped through the index at the back for the most likely year. In moments, she had found him. Thomas Wood.

And he was a dork! In his senior photo, he wore a wide tie and a too-small, pin-striped jacket, and his hair hung in strange, choppy lengths almost to his shoulders. He wasn’t smiling.

Beth stared at him, trying to see through the black-and-white photograph into the truth of who Thomas Wood had been. Dark eyes…like hers. Dark hair…like hers. Straight nose…like hers.

But there was a lot of him that looked nothing like his daughter—a pronounced Adam’s apple, a square jaw and those hands! Beth studied the one hand that the photographer had evidently posed so it showed Thomas’s class ring. Huge fingers stretched across the sleeve of his jacket. Big, rough hands roped with veins. Callused knuckles. Round white nails.

She lifted her own hand and studied her slender fingers and manicured nails, turning them one way and then another. No, she hadn’t gotten them from him, that was certain. But so many other things…

Bob and Bill had inherited a mix of their father’s sandy hair and their mother’s auburn curls. They both had freckles and a tendency to go soft in the middle. Their noses tilted up at the ends, like Jan’s. And their ears stuck out a little, like John’s. But big sister Beth had brown eyes and board-straight brown hair and olive skin.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” The reference desk clerk startled Beth as he pulled back a chair and sat down at the table. “Thomas Wood—well, there he is. Guess you struck oil after all. Get a load of that tie!”

Beth tried to smile. “Yeah, I found him. Thanks.”

“It’s possible we would have pictures of him going all the way back to kindergarten. You want me to look?”

Actually, she wanted the librarian to go away. But Beth pushed the yearbooks in his direction. “Sure. See what you can find.”

“Thomas Edward Wood.” The young man flipped to the index in the back of a volume of the Alcalde. “Did you come all the way from New York to look him up? Because, in case you didn’t know, we can do research for you and communicate online. We’re glad to do that. Not all libraries have those kinds of reference services, but we do. And it’s free!”

“Great. I’ll remember that.” While the clerk went to do some more digging, Beth read the inscriptions under her birth father’s senior year photograph. Thomas Wood had not held a class office or worked on the yearbook staff or acted in a play. He hadn’t done much in sports, either. His freshman year, he had played junior varsity football. He had been on the basketball team—first JV and then varsity—all four years. And that was it. His future? The caption said he planned to attend Tyler Junior College and major in agriculture.

An ag major! He was a hick! Her father was a dork and a hick. A goofball with a tight sport coat and big hands and no more aspirations than to be a farmer.

Of course, being a farmer wasn’t exactly an easy life. Beth knew many of them couldn’t make a go of it. To take college classes showed Thomas Wood had some gumption. And he had chosen that beautiful antique tea set. Maybe there was something ambitious and romantic in him after all.

Beth read the quote he had chosen to have placed beneath his photograph. It was from Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a book she had never read but had heard was one of the most saccharine pieces of schmaltz of all time.

“There’s a reason to life! We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill. We can be free! We can learn to fly!”

Yeah, right. We can be free! Good motto, Thomas Wood. Get your girlfriend pregnant and then abandon her. If you had been a creature of excellence, intelligence and skill, you would have stuck around and done your duty. At least you could have paid child support.

The fact was…she hated him. There, she had acknowledged the truth. Beth stared at the picture of the teenager in the tight coat and wide tie. He was a dweeb, a dork, and she hated him. Good riddance, loser.

Shutting the book, she pushed back from the table. The desk clerk glanced up. “I found him for you in these,” he said. He pointed to a stack of yearbooks opened and placed one on top of the other. “Here, I’ll show you.”

Beth could hardly refuse to look after he’d done all that work. She leaned on her elbows as the young man pointed out his discoveries. “Eleventh grade,” he began, his stubby finger jabbing at the photograph of a skinny-faced, even longer-haired version of Thomas Wood. “Tenth grade, ninth. And then we go to grade school. He went to Douglas Elementary.”

“You’re very good.”

“Thanks. It’s my job.” Dimples deepening, he beamed as he handed her the Douglas Wildcats yearbooks one by one. “Right on down the line. He sure is a beanpole, isn’t he? Look at this one—he’s got a Band-Aid on his chin. Short hair in these younger versions. I guess that was the style back then. And here’s the last one—first grade. There you go. I don’t guess there was a yearbook for kindergarten in those days.”

Beth stared down at a toothless little boy who was looking back at her with big brown eyes. “He was my father,” she murmured. “This…person.”

“Your father? Thomas Wood?”

“My birth father. I was raised by a different man…my real father. He died two years ago.”

“They’re both dead? I’m sure sorry to hear that.”

Beth nodded as she slid the open yearbooks across one another, looking at the pictures once again. “I just found out. My mother…” She bit her lower lip. “I’m just blabbing. Forgive me.”

“No, it’s okay. Do you want me to make photocopies for you? I’ll do it for no charge.”

“That’s all right. I’m just—” She rubbed her eyes. “Okay, yes. Make copies, if you don’t mind. I’d appreciate that.”

“Sure.” He scooped up the yearbooks and headed for a back room.

Beth dropped her head onto the crook of her arm and fought tears. Why should she be sad? Thomas Wood had never been a part of her life. And now he was dead, so why cry? Maybe she was weeping for her daddy. For John Lowell who had carried the secret to his grave. She couldn’t be angry with him. He had given his whole adult life to her. His love, his time, his attention, his money.

What had possessed him to do that? Had he loved her mother so much that Beth became part of that passion? Or had he actually loved his adopted daughter, too? Had her father ever felt Beth really belonged to him? Or did her dark eyes and hair always remind him that another man had preceded him in Jan’s life?

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 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.