Beneath the Night Tree (7 page)

I had an e-mail account at the local tech school, an assigned address that delivered messages from my professors and student services. There were two items in my in-box: a “Welcome to the Fall Semester” newsletter that I deleted without reading and a course syllabus from my child psych professor. I scrolled through it halfheartedly, counting on picking up a hard copy my first day in class, but before I could click out of the message, something caught my eye.

Under the heading
Written Reports/Activities
, an item toward the end made me catch my breath.

Activity 5: Autobiography. Students are to write an autobiography of their first twelve years of life. This is a subjective report and should not be longer than 2,500 words. Topics to include are family interactions, relationships with siblings and parents, most memorable grade school year and why, peer connections, major life events, and overall memories of childhood.

I wondered if it was too late to drop the class. Wasn’t I supposed to be assessing other kids? I had no desire to perform an autopsy on my own late childhood. I shuddered and quickly closed the Internet tab so I didn’t have to see the other horrors that the class contained. Maybe I didn’t need child psych for my degree. Or maybe I could switch degrees. I was only one semester invested in a four-semester program. The credits might transfer.

My other e-mail address was personal. I had signed up for a Hotmail account in a high school computer class, and since I rarely used it and never seemed to deal with annoying spam, my user name and password hadn’t changed in nearly a decade. It still made me giggle to type my password—
camelmenthol16
, my choice of cigarettes and the age when I smoked them.
Little rebel,
I thought, my mind skipping to Simon and his upcoming teen years. What would I do when he came home smelling like smoke? I forced the thought from my mind and turned my attention to the screen in front of me.

There were a few more e-mails in this in-box. A forward from Michael. A note from a coworker wondering if she could have a couple shifts off next week. A reminder from the school that classes started at 8:15 on Monday morning. Another note from Michael, this one more personal. A quick
I love you. I miss you.

I clicked on the Junk tab just to clear out the extra baggage and glanced at the list of unknown senders with a trained eye. A couple of Nigerian moneymaking scams and some newsletters that I was sure I had never signed up for. I was just about to hit Delete All when a name that looked different from the rest seemed to jump off the screen. My cursor paused over the sender’s name and my fingers turned to stone above the keyboard.

Patrick Holt.

Was this some kind of joke? Had some spam engine managed to string together the two names that had changed my life forever? The subject line said simply,
Hello
. It wasn’t enough to assure me that this wasn’t some cruel mistake, but it wasn’t an off-putting offer for free Viagra either. Click on it? Or delete it?

It wasn’t really a question, for from the moment I saw his name, I knew without a doubt that I would click on the e-mail, even if it was undoubtedly a virus that would make my computer spontaneously combust. What was a little conflagration when the father of my child could have sent me an e-mail?

How long had it been since I’d seen Parker? I hardly knew him as Patrick, but his names, all of them, were like tattoos on my skin—forever, indelible. If I heard someone call out to a Patrick in the grocery store, it was hard not to turn and look. And when I’d considered giving Daniel up for adoption, Holt was one of the many agency names that popped up—and the only one that made my heart skip a beat. But no matter the titles his parents bequeathed him, Daniel’s dad would always be Parker to me—the insolent, arrogant grad student who left me without a single look over his shoulder.

“Is it you?” I muttered to the computer screen, squeezing my eyes shut as I clicked on the message. There was no audible pop, no indication that the mysterious Patrick Holt who found his way to my Junk folder had infiltrated my computer and fried the hard drive. I opened one eye and then the other. It wasn’t meaningless scrawl or a plea for funds or an advertisement for a drug I didn’t need or want.

It was a note.

Tightrope

“Julia! Honey, it’s breakfast time!”

Grandma’s voice floated up the stairs and penetrated the snarl of sheets that tangled around my head. I pushed myself up groggily and fumbled for the alarm clock that sat on the table beside my bed. Eight thirty? I never slept this late.

Twisting out of my sagging mattress, I flung the sheets off and grabbed the cotton robe that I kept hanging from a hook on my wall. I took the stairs two at a time, my heart pounding with . . . what? anxiety? guilt? shame at letting the rest of the house rise and shine without me? When I reached the kitchen, I was breathless and no doubt a sight to behold. I stopped in my tracks at the peaceful scene of everyone around the table and pulled the belt of my robe tighter with a self-conscious tug.

“Your hair is sticking up, Mom!” Daniel giggled at what I could only imagine was a bird’s nest of tousled waves.

My hair had been long for years, but when Daniel was two and insisted on twining it in his fingers as he fell asleep, I decided enough was enough. I asked my hairdresser for something cute and stylish, and she left me with a long bob that fell just past my chin and curled softly around my face. I loved it, but I never quite got used to the fact that I had to actually do something with it. Long hair I could ponytail or clip back and ignore. Short hair I had to style.

“Is it that bad?” I asked, running my fingers through my hair to muss it even more. “Are you embarrassed of me? Should I bring you to school like this on Monday?”

“No! Wear it to church like that!” Daniel shouted.

“Church?”

“Did you forget that it’s Sunday?” Grandma laughed. “That must have been one heavy sleep.”

All at once my night came flooding back. I had hardly slept at all. It felt like I had hardly breathed. Had my heart continued to beat through the witching hour? I didn’t remember much past 3 a.m.

I swallowed hard and tried to force a smile. “Just tired, I guess. And no, I won’t wear my hair like this to church. I’d better hop in the shower.”

“But we’re having cereal for breakfast,” Simon reminded me, pointing to the three boxes lined up on the table. Grandma was a staunch believer that breakfast should be hot, but on Sunday mornings when everyone was in a rush to get dressed and out the door, we were allowed bowls of our favorite cold cereal. Cheerios for Grandma and Simon, Cocoa Puffs for Daniel, and Alpha-Bits for me. I loved Alpha-Bits. But just the sight of the unmistakable blue box turned my stomach this morning.

“I’m not very hungry,” I assured him. “Maybe I’ll grab a bowl later.”

Grandma gave me a funny look, but she didn’t argue. “If you’re going to shower, you’d better hurry. We have to leave in just over half an hour.”

Technically, we could have squeezed an extra twenty minutes out of our morning routine and slipped into church as the opening hymn was playing. But Grandma liked to be early. She had a blueprint for Sabbath mornings, a carefully constructed pattern that she followed each and every Sunday. I wasn’t even 100 percent sure what activities filled her precious prechurch moments because when we arrived at Fellowship Community, I usually took the boys and sat right down. But whatever Grandma did, when she joined us in our regular aisle, she always radiated contentment as she passed me the stack of notes and newsletters from our mailbox.

I knew it was important to her that we left by 9:05. “I’ll shower fast,” I assured her and hurried to the bathroom. I was motivated by a deadline, but I was more worried about sticking around too long and giving Grandma the opportunity to realize that something was really wrong.

As I showered, dressed, and went through my regular morning motions, I couldn’t stop myself from replaying every word of Parker’s startling note. Though I wished I could forget his message entirely, I had memorized it in the long minutes that I sat staring at the computer screen. Now different phrases and words rose to haunt me. To taunt me.

Dear Julia,

I have thought about you every day for the past five and a half years. I don’t know what to say except, I’m sorry. I’m sure you’ve moved on from that night in the parking lot, but it haunts me. I believed that I could just forget everything and live my life without the distraction of you or what happened between us. I’m a grown-up now, a thirty-one-year-old chemical engineer at a successful biomedical corporation. You’d think I could leave the past behind, but I can’t.

Anyway, you have every right to hate me, and I understand if you do. I don’t expect anything from you. But if you still use this e-mail address, and if you can bring yourself to write back, will you answer one question for me?

Do I have a child?

Parker

By the time we left for church, I felt drugged, detached, like the first hour after Daniel was born, when exhaustion and hormones and shock and love all mingled together to make the entire experience feel out-of-body. I went through the motions with admirable composure, but I was sure that no one in my little family was much fooled. Grandma knew me as well as she knew herself, and Simon had always been perceptive. As for Daniel, we were connected; what else was there to say?

My son sat curled against me during church, his head beneath my arm and his fingers laced through mine as if he couldn’t quite get close enough. It was a rare experience—he normally squirmed, wiggled, and whispered his way through church, but it wasn’t hard for me to overlook his uncharacteristic behavior. I loved him snuggled close. Especially since I felt so unhinged. Daniel grounded me through songs that I didn’t sing and a long-winded sermon that I didn’t hear.

I have thought about you every day for the past five and a half years. . . . I’m sorry. . . . Do I have a child?

What did he expect me to say?
Me too. You should be. Yes.

What I wanted to say was:
You’re a jerk. A loser. A bum. You don’t deserve to know what happened to me or that you have a perfect, beautiful son. Your pathetic e-mail is too little, too late.

Or maybe I could just pretend that I never got his message. His words could be forever lost in cyberspace.

It was when the service was over and we were all turning to file out of the pews that I realized I couldn’t simply ignore Parker’s long-overdue plea. Daniel had finally unraveled himself from my arms, and he was several feet ahead of me, excited to find his friends in the fellowship hall behind our quaint sanctuary. Church services were still held in the old part of the building, a modest-size room with wooden floors and benches and stained glass windows that were lovely to the point of distraction. But a new addition had recently been tacked on to the antiquated chapel, a modern hall with a kitchen full of stainless steel and more than enough room for the under-ten set to run themselves into a froth.

Usually, the first words out of my mouth when the morning service was over were
No running, Daniel. You’re going to knock someone over.
But today I was distracted, and when he was nearly free of the benches and poised to race down the aisle, my five-year-old tossed a quick glance over his shoulder.

His chin was tilted away from me, and he looked up through faintly narrowed eyes. There was a smirk on his lips, a grin that he tried to hide because it was obvious that he was convinced he was about to get away with murder. It was that look, that mischievous I-have-the-world-by-the-tail expression that reminded me the most of Parker. Daniel was indisputably the spitting image of his father. He had been from the day he was born. But I was the only one who knew it.

Parker was a nonentity in our home. Once, just once, I had slipped and mentioned his name, but I couldn’t be sure that Grandma had caught it or that she even realized what I was saying. She never pressed me for information, and I never offered any. The father of my baby was a ghost, as nameless and anonymous as a stranger. Yet I lived with a piece of him every day.

Now what? Did he want to meet Daniel? be a part of our lives? After all this time he had no claim over me, over my son. And yet his very likeness stood before me, a gorgeous little boy with piercing blue eyes, features that were chiseled and distinct even at the age of five, and hair the color of wet sand.

I tried not to moan when Daniel spun away from me and took off toward the teeming fellowship hall, but I must have made some noise.

Grandma put her hand on my back. “You okay?” she whispered.

“Fine.”

Simon was on Grandma’s other side, and he gave a little grunt at my less-than-honest answer. I would have flashed him a warning look if Grandma hadn’t been between us.

“Something stuck in your throat, Simon?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

“No, I was just thinking that you were probably upset about your conversation with Michael.”

He couldn’t have shocked me more if he told me Janice was on her way home. My expression must have communicated every ounce of my distress because Grandma’s eyes filled with concern.