Beneath the Night Tree
Read Beneath the Night Tree Online
Authors: Nicole Baart
Tags: #FICTION / Christian / General, #FICTION / General
Praise for Nicole Baart
After the Leaves Fall
“Baart writes compellingly about a young girl’s struggle with loss, love, identity, and faith. . . . Sparkling prose makes this new novel a welcome addition to inspirational fiction.”
Publishers Weekly
“Baart’s writing is evocative and beautiful. . . .”
Romantic Times
“[F]or readers who enjoy a sensitively written coming-of-age story about a captivating young woman, this book is well worth reading.”
CBA Retailers + Resources
“
After the Leaves Fall
is so emotionally gripping and true to life, readers will find it hard to put down and even harder to forget.”
Christianbookpreviews.com
“
After the Leaves Fall
gathers an array of powerful emotions and gently arranges them in all their vibrancy. Each page throbs with realism. . . .
After the Leaves Fall
is a novel that soars with significance.”
In the Library Reviews
Summer Snow
“Baart continues her saga of Julia DeSmit with the same careful prose and enjoyable storytelling she showed in her debut. . . . This is a treat for faith fiction readers and proves Baart is not just a one-hit wonder.”
Publishers Weekly
“Baart’s sequel to
After the Leaves Fall
is beautifully written. The prose will resonate with readers as the flawed characters speak to our humanity.”
Romantic Times
“The sequel to
After the Leaves Fall
, this novel overflows with raw emotion. The characters are incredibly true to life, and the poignant storyline . . . is equally realistic.”
CBA Retailers + Resources
“The unsurpassed beauty of Nicole’s writing creates an ethereal reading experience. . . . [T]his novel is ultimately a journey of hope, joy, and love that will resonate with me for a long time to come.”
TitleTrakk.com
The Moment Between
“Emotionally intense . . . Baart tells a poignant and gripping story.”
Publishers Weekly
“A taut, engrossing story about familial love and redemption.”
Booklist
“Tragic yet hinting at mercy and forgiveness, Baart’s well-crafted contemporary novel features engaging characters and will appeal to readers who have had to deal with difficult family relationships.”
Library Journal
“Baart’s latest offering resounds with emotional and spiritual insight.”
Romantic Times
“
The Moment Between
is a heart-wrenching story, beautifully rendered by an exciting new author who shows the courage it takes to step out of the moment of ‘what was’ and ‘is’ and grasp hold of ‘what can be’ through the hope and promise God offers. This is a novel that should not be missed.”
Francine Rivers,
New York Times
best-selling author
“Nicole Baart’s
The Moment Between
is an exquisite look at the angst- and love-filled relationship between sisters. This book is a treasure that should not be missed.”
Angela Hunt, best-selling author of
The Face
“Haunting and evocative,
The Moment Between
is a stunning literary work. Nicole Baart captures beauty and madness alike in the finely wrought net of her immaculate prose.”
Tosca Lee, author of
Demon: A Memoir
Visit Tyndale’s exciting Web site at www.tyndale.com.
Visit Nicole Baart’s Web site at www.nicolebaart.com.
TYNDALE
and Tyndale’s quill logo are registered trademarks of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
Beneath the Night Tree
Copyright © 2011 by Nicole Baart. All rights reserved.
Cover photograph of chairs copyright © by Vision of America/Joe Sohm/Getty Images. All rights reserved.
Cover photograph of pine branches copyright © by Gino Santa Maria/Veer. All rights reserved.
Author photo copyright © 2008 by Captivating Photography. All rights reserved.
Designed by Jessie McGrath
Edited by Sarah Mason
Published in association with the literary agency of Browne & Miller Literary Associates, LLC, 410 Michigan Avenue, Suite 460, Chicago, IL 60605.
Scripture taken from the Holy Bible,
New International Version
,
®
NIV
.
®
Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc.
™
Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com.
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Baart, Nicole.
Beneath the night tree / Nicole Baart.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-4143-2323-7 (pbk.)
1. Unmarried mothers—Fiction. 2. Grandmothers—Fiction. 3. Birthfathers—Fiction.
4. Families—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3602.A22B46 2011
813´.6—dc22 2010040217
To Nellie and Julia, my extraordinary grandmothers
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Many heartfelt thanks . . .
To my early readers and everyone who supported and encouraged me along the way. Your names are too numerous to mention, but you know who you are.
To the team at Tyndale for giving me the chance to write one more Julia book. What a wonderful journey it has been.
To Danielle Egan-Miller, my amazing agent. Thank you for working so tirelessly on my behalf.
To Todd Diakow. You know why.
To my family and friends. The books keep coming and yet your enthusiasm for what I do never seems to run dry. I would be lost without you.
To my readers and the remarkable people who have created a sense of belonging and kinship on my blog and beyond. Who knew community could exist even in the absence of face-to-face contact?
Always and forever, to my boys. Aaron, it just keeps getting better, doesn’t it? Isaac, Judah, and Matthias, I could not love you more. My sons, may you grow in grace.
Part 1
Songbird
Daniel hummed in his sleep. It was an unconscious song, a midnight lullaby, as familiar to me as the sigh of my own breath. I fell asleep at night listening to the cadence of his dreams, and when I woke in the morning, his quiet melody was a prelude to birdsong.
I opened my eyes in the darkness and strained to see an imprint of peach on the horizon beyond my open window. It was coming, but when I blinked at the black reflection in the glass, dawn was nothing more than a promise, and Daniel’s every exhalation seemed tuned to charm it into being. I pictured him in his bed, arm flung over the pillow and palm opened toward the sky as if God had set an orchestra before his still-chubby fingers. As if God had chosen my son to coax light into our little house.
Maybe He had.
If there was one thing I had learned in five years of being a single mom, it was that the Lord did exactly that: He used the small, the inconsequential, the forgotten to shame the wise. He worked in contradictions, in the unexpected. And I wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised if He hovered over my Daniel, drawing music from the curve of his parted lips with the gentle pull of divine fingers.
The thought made me smile, and for a moment I longed to tiptoe across the cool floorboards and be a part of it all, to slip into the tiny attic nook that was my son’s bedroom. I wanted to feel my way through the shadows, stretch out beside him, and kiss the sugar-sweet little-boy mouth that puckered like a perfect bow.
But I didn’t. Instead, I did what I did every day. I got up, grabbed the clothes that I had laid out the night before, and headed downstairs. If Daniel was singing, then I danced: avoiding the stair that creaked, twisting around the smooth-worn banister like a ballerina, waltzing to Simon’s room, where I peeked through the crack of the mostly closed door.
My ten-year-old half brother was on his stomach, bare back exposed to the unseasonable cool of an August morning. We had all the windows flung open, and the house whispered with a light breeze. It wasn’t cold, not really, but the sight of his skin made me stifle a shiver. I floated into Simon’s room, a part of his dreams, and laid a blanket across his shoulders like a blessing. Schoolboy shoulders, I noticed. Thin and angular, but broadening, hinting at the strong man he would soon become as if the clean line of his skin were bursting with promise. A tight bud about to unfurl. Sometimes I still couldn’t believe that she had left him here to blossom.