Beneath the Night Tree (10 page)

“Fine,” I whispered. “Two.”

We were silent for a moment, the only sound between us the measured exchange of our quiet breaths. As he breathed out, I breathed in. “Thank you,” I finally said. “For the flowers. They’re beautiful.”

“I love you,” Michael told me.

“Love you, too.”

I clicked the phone shut, laid it on my desk, and stared at it as if it contained Michael’s secret. He had an idea. . . . What in the world could he be planning?

But as much as I wanted to waste hours daydreaming about Michael, I simply didn’t have time to think about him. About us. Guilt at coming in to work late, and then spending my first five minutes on duty glued to the telephone, drove me into warp speed as I officially started my day. I was grateful that Mr. Durst came in at nine, and no one but Graham was around to suspect that I was doing anything other than work in my office.

Moving the flowers to a side table, I plunged into my daily workload. I reconciled the sales receipts from the day before in record time, filled the final holes in the new September schedule, and made a disciplinary phone call to a sales clerk who continually showed up five to ten minutes after the start of her shift. She was contrite, and I was in a gracious mood, so I didn’t give her the tongue-lashing she deserved. Instead, I asked about her daughter’s first day of high school, and we commiserated as lonely mothers of independent children. It was a brief moment of connection, and when I hung up, I felt confident that she wouldn’t be late again.

I took my lunch break with Graham and sent him to Subway with a twenty-dollar bill and instructions not to come back until he had purchased a feast worthy of his bon voyage party.

“It’s Subway.” Graham’s sloped eyebrow assured me that there was no such feast to be found at the sandwich mecca.

I shrugged. “Do what you can. I’ll uncork a bottle of our finest.”

Although Graham laughed when he realized that our finest consisted of a $2.99 bottle of nonalcoholic cold duck, he seemed willing enough to go along with my impromptu celebration. I poured it into mismatched mugs from my office and we settled ourselves on the picnic table outside. Napkins served as plates, Doritos a delectable side dish that perfectly complemented our matching meatball subs. Of course, the sandwiches weren’t quite matching. Mine was a six-inch; his was a footlong plus the other half of my truncated sub.

By the time we had laughed our way through the half-hour lunch break, I was in such an expansive mood that the loose ends of my life seemed less like frayed edges and more like bright ribbons. They were a bit tattered maybe, but cheerful too. Full of possibilities instead of dead ends. I was revived by the assurance that Michael had an idea, that he could somehow make everything work when only yesterday I was certain that our relationship had turned the final corner. It was like the sun had broken from behind a cloud, and though the light was thin and indistinct, it cast coins of color where shadows had crept.

I was in such a good mood that when I unpacked a box of startling new stock, I found myself laughing uncontrollably instead of groaning in disappointment. It was probably my first foolish purchase, though the seller had assured me that the postcards adequately captured the “pastoral beauty of our lovely Iowa.” If by “pastoral beauty” she meant barrels of pink piglets and a gigantic ear of corn in a rusty wagon, the postcards were a smashing success. But I had hoped for twilight landscapes and vistas of endless Midwestern horizons. On any other day, I would have been dismayed at the sight of an eighty-year-old farmer in gumboots with manure up to his armpits and a jaunty caption proclaiming,
Wish you were here!
Today, I found it funny. Endearing, even.

As I prepped them for a display near the checkout lanes, I ended up choosing one postcard of every design for myself. Little gifts for Michael. He would find them hilarious. Or he’d be embarrassed by our quaint, backwater state and insist we move somewhere more chic the day he graduated from med school. I grinned when I realized I had envisioned
us
moving.

My workday was over at four, and I was anxious to go home and find out how Daniel and Simon had fared their first day of school. I arranged my desk carefully, wondering how in the world I would get the flowers home without smashing them and plotting special things to do with my boys. I’d take Daniel exploring around the creek at the back of our property, and if we found a frog or—heaven help me—a snake, I’d put it in a jar and let him take it for show-and-tell. And I’d persuade Simon to take a walk with me. I’d explain to him that everything was going to be okay, that we absolutely were not moving to Iowa City right now, and that he had nothing at all to worry about. He’d believe me; I knew it.

I was just about to switch off my computer when I realized that there was one more person I could bless on this banner day.

My junk box was empty save for the one note that had caused me such heartache. In a few days the message would be erased from my account permanently, and I would never have to confront it again. It was a comforting thought, and I almost let myself shut down the computer without acting on my foolish impulse. Almost. But deep down I knew that whether or not the note existed in cyberspace, it would always exist in my heart, in a private place where I clung to those fathomless emotions that I couldn’t begin to explain or understand. A place where secrets and questions and what-ifs stirred with every inhalation.

I paused for a moment before clicking the message to life, then quickly hit Reply so I wouldn’t be forced to reread Parker’s words. There was no need to revisit his plea. I knew what he wanted to know.

Do I have a child?

I typed three letters before hitting Send.

Yes.

Words

I didn’t know that three letters would change my life.

Of course, I should have. Throughout my twenty-four years I had been forever altered by such trios.
Bye. Boy.
And someday soon, I hoped,
I do
. It was irresponsible of me to imagine that my small act of benevolence wouldn’t ripple forward like waves on a pond.
Yes
was a tiny pebble to throw, but it wrinkled the fabric of my days all the same, shaping my future in ways I couldn’t begin to fathom.

But I didn’t know that at the time. It took me a good week to realize that e-mailing Parker was quite possibly one of the most self-destructive things I could have ever done.

For seven days after my one-word response, life at the DeSmit farm settled into a predictable routine. The boys seemed to embrace school, Grandma flourished amid the daily peace and freedom in her quiet home, and I found myself enjoying the hours at Value Foods with a sort of contentedness that I hadn’t imagined possible in a dead-end grocery store job. The truth was, my staff felt more like a family, and our customers part of a close-knit community. Even the gray brick walls of the outdated interior seemed to take on a patina of silver, as if the store itself were a modest treasure—a place that deserved respect for both its generous service and its steadfast longevity.

As for Michael, although we hadn’t seen each other since his failed suggestion in the grove, our relationship defied common sense and deepened. His unexpected gift of flowers, our subsequent telephone conversation, and his startling, earnest apology launched us to a new level of intimacy that convinced me all over again that the man I had loved for five years would be the man I loved for fifty more. When we spoke on the phone, it was as lovers—we finished each other’s sentences, communicated through silence, cherished one another in spite of distance. It felt like we had recaptured the immediacy of our first months of dating, that almost-heartsick longing to know more, learn more, be more. But this was different. It
was
more.

Looking back from even the close proximity of mere days, I could see that one lone week in August as a respite, a small haven of peace before my world split open at the seams.
I did this to myself,
I thought when I opened my e-mail one day and found a reply from the father of my son.
I have no one to blame but me.

It shocked me to find Patrick Holt’s name among the notes from friends and family in my private in-box, but as I sat staring at the screen, I remembered that I had e-mailed him back. My online account would automatically assume he was a safe contact and reroute him to the inner sanctum of my carefully guarded and privacy-protected in-box. The thought leveled me. He had inched his way in.

“Okay,” I whispered to calm myself. “Of course he wrote back. What did you expect?”

I steeled myself, clicked on the recycled message title, and found one word hiding in the upper left-hand corner of the screen.

Yours?

My breath left me in a cough of anger and disbelief. What did he mean,
yours
? Did he presume ownership, as if Daniel could be
ours
after all these years of silence, detachment, impassivity? Or even
his
? Like he had any claim at all. Daniel was mine; it said so on the birth certificate—the line where I was supposed to fill in his father’s name was left painfully, conspicuously blank. Nothing could change that now.

But as I heaved in and out, glaring at the computer screen like it bore the blame for delivering such an indiscernible message, Parker’s carefully chosen question flickered as if caught in the mirrors of a kaleidoscope. All at once I understood. He hadn’t meant to question my claim on Daniel. He meant,
Is the child yours, or did you give it up for adoption?

But it didn’t matter what he had intended to say. It mattered how I felt about it.

Mine.
I typed avariciously, unaffected by the faint understanding that I had more or less turned my son into a pawn. And though I should have paused to consider the consequences, I clicked the Send button with an almost-vicious abandon.

A few days later there was another lone word in my in-box.

Healthy?

I sent back,
Perfect
.

The very next day he asked,
Girl?

For some reason I took great pleasure in typing the three letters of
son
. Daniel wasn’t merely some boy; he was my flesh and blood, my offspring, my son. It was a lot more than Parker had a right to say.

Although the back-and-forth exchange with my long-lost boyfriend was utterly serious, it felt like a game of sorts to me. He asked questions that only I could answer, and for a couple of days I relished the power of holding every card in my hand. What did he have to offer me? Nothing. And yet I believed with all my heart that if I simply stopped responding, he’d feel as if he had lost everything. I didn’t know what he wanted from me, what he wanted from Daniel, but each e-mail convinced me a little more that his interest was more than a passing curiosity.

Parker was silent for a while after he learned that he had fathered a son, and a part of me harbored the wild hope that that would be the end of it. I remembered all too well the grad school student who ran like a frightened child when I refused to abort his baby, and I couldn’t stop myself from wishing in some dark corner of my soul that the Parker I knew back then still existed. Maybe he’d run away again, and I could go back to life as normal. Marry Michael—eventually—and let Daniel’s biological father forever be some nameless bum who had taken advantage of an eighteen-year-old girl.

But it couldn’t be that simple.

One day it hit me that I knew what Parker’s next question would be. He was biding his time, working up the courage to ask me the most intimate detail yet. It was what I would ask if I were him, and suddenly I dreaded checking my e-mail for fear that today would be the day he mustered the nerve.

It was hard to believe that I had already let him in this far—I wavered between loathing myself for giving away information about my child like dime-store candies doled out one by one and feeling a sense of relief that the man who gave Daniel the slope of his nose had finally taken an interest in his amazing son. Daniel deserved to be known, to be adored. But I didn’t know if I wanted Parker to be the one to do the adoring.

By the time I received his e-mail, I was a mess of contradictions. For my own sake, I wanted to push Parker away. But for Daniel’s sake, I wanted to draw him close. Instead of reading Parker’s question, I pressed my hands over my eyes, trying to hide from the reality of the road I found myself on. It was uncharted, a bewildering, foreign land, and I was scared of what I would find around the next bend. There were so many uncertainties, so much at stake. Who was Patrick Holt? Did he want to be a part of Daniel’s life? Did I want him to be a part of Daniel’s life? Was it wrong of me to even contemplate preventing it?

I took a shuddering breath and peeled my fingers from my eyes like a little girl watching a scary movie. The question was there, exactly as I knew it would be.

Name?

Before I could doubt myself further, I thrust my hands to the keyboard and quickly typed,
Daniel Peter
.