Beneath the Night Tree (34 page)

“A favor?” Parker crossed his arms over his chest and sat back, but he smiled at me when he said, “Name it.”

“If you can—I mean, if it’s not too much trouble and if you can make it work—”

“Julia,” he interrupted, “whatever it is, I’ve already said yes.”

I gathered a breath and released my request in one quick, unemotional outburst. “I need you to stay here tomorrow with Daniel. Maybe even tomorrow night. I need to go somewhere and I don’t know when I’ll be back.”

“Where are you going?” Parker asked calmly.

“Iowa City.”

Parker knew that Michael lived in Iowa City, but he didn’t ask me why I felt compelled to make a sudden, unplanned trip across the state. He merely dipped his head in accord. “No problem. Maybe I’ll just stay through Monday to give you a hand? I never take time off—it won’t be a problem at all.”

His offer surprised me, but I nodded.

“And tomorrow I can join Grandma and the boys at church. I’ve always wanted to go to your church.”

“If Daniel’s up for it,” I reminded him.

“Of course.”

We stared at each other for a few seconds until I couldn’t meet his gaze anymore and suddenly found my own fingers fascinating. As I fidgeted with my hands, I said, “Thanks. I really appreciate it.”

“No worries.”

“You’d do anything for Daniel, wouldn’t you?”

Parker didn’t answer right away, and I raised my eyes just enough to meet his. “Yes,” he finally agreed. “I would do anything for Daniel. But I’m doing this for you.”

* * *

Although it killed me to leave Daniel the day after his first major injury, I knew that I didn’t have a choice. Something had changed; my world had shifted. And I was heartsick to imagine the fallout.

Grandma gave me a knowing look when I descended the stairs on Sunday morning, and she didn’t seem the least bit surprised when I told her that I needed to make a last-minute road trip.

“We’ll take good care of Daniel, I promise,” she said.

I didn’t tell her why I was going. I didn’t have to. But I did want her blessing. “Am I doing the right thing?” I asked, holding her by the shoulders with just a little more force than necessary.

She smiled and put her hands on my wrists. “You know the answer to that question, Julia. You don’t have to ask me.”

It wasn’t what I wanted to hear, but it did give me the confidence to walk out the door. The time had come for me to make my own decisions, to stop relying on everyone else to guide me in the way that I already knew, deep down, was right. It was my path to walk, however hard it may be.

Daniel woke up soon after I was dressed and ready to go. He shouted from his rumpled bed, and Parker took the stairs two by two to rescue our son from his tangled sheets. I was startled when Parker entered the kitchen with Daniel in his arms. The transformation was incredible. Daniel seemed much better in the lemony light of morning: clear-eyed and smooth-faced as if the pain of the night before was nothing but a bad memory.

In a flash I remembered his toddler years, that magical time when he went to bed with a bruise and woke up with unblemished skin. Cuts healed overnight, bumps disappeared in hours. Childhood was nothing if not miraculous, and I marveled at the way his sweet body healed itself so effortlessly. Daniel was going to be just fine.

“Do you care if I leave for the day?” I asked him solemnly when he was seated at the kitchen table.

Daniel’s brow furrowed.

“Parker is going to stay.”

The shadow left his face as if blown by a sudden, mighty wind. “Sure, Mom! See you tomorrow!”

I had sort of hoped he would argue—that someone would try to make me stay—but nobody seemed to care much that I was leaving. Either that or they were all in support of my spontaneous road trip. After a round of hugs and kisses, and an awkward, one-armed embrace from Parker, I hit the road.

It felt strange to be driving away, to just leave my family in the care of the man whom only months ago I had loathed. No—I never loathed Parker. But I resented him. I distrusted him. And I believed I had every reason to.

That’s the extraordinary thing about people. They change.

I spent the six-hour drive to Iowa City in silence. Maybe I should have prayed or tried to arrange my thoughts so that when I saw Michael face-to-face, I would be prepared to say all that I had to. But my stillness wasn’t idle. I was listening. Waiting. Hoping that all the wishes and wondering I had sent heavenward would not come back to me empty. I thought I remembered hearing something like that in Scripture. It was in regard to the Word of God, but I had faith that maybe it could also apply to my outstretched hands. I believed that He would fill them.

When I stopped at a gas station on the outskirts of Iowa City, I finally took out my cell phone to call Michael.

He answered on the first ring, a smile in his voice. “Hey. Aren’t you supposed to be taking a Sunday afternoon snooze?”

“You know I don’t nap,” I said, trying to keep my voice light. “Actually, I have a surprise for you.”

“A surprise?”

Maybe it was the wrong word to use.
Surprise
insinuated fun things, happy things. “I’m here,” I blurted out before Michael could begin to imagine the exciting possibilities.

“What? What do you mean, Julia?”

“I mean I’m in Iowa City.”

“What?”

I couldn’t tell if his shock was pure delight or irritation at the absurdity of my last-minute, six-hour drive. “Yeah,” I said softly. “I’m
here
here.
Where you are
here.”

Michael waited a few seconds before he responded. “Honey, you haven’t made the trip to Iowa City in nearly a year. What in the world made you decide to come down now?”

I didn’t want to get into it over the phone, but I could tell that Michael was more than concerned about my unannounced visit. A spur-of-the-moment trip of this magnitude was totally out of character for me. His apprehension was warranted, and I had no desire to torture him.

“Can I see you?” I asked timidly.

“Of course you can. Come over to the apartment. You remember where it is, don’t you?”

But his apartment didn’t feel like neutral ground to me. It was too comfortable, too familiar, even though it had been a long time since I’d snuggled with Michael on his sagging love seat. I didn’t want to see him there and lose my nerve. Or remember that I was soon supposed to be the queen of that particular castle, however small it might be.

“How about we meet at a park?” I posed the question casually, but even I could hear the undertone of significance. “It’s such a beautiful day, and I’d love to stretch my legs after being cooped up in the car.”

“Sure,” Michael said after a second of hesitation. “There’s a park around the corner from my apartment complex. Take a right at the light and you’ll more or less run right into it. I’ll meet you there in . . . ?”

“Ten minutes?” I guessed. “I’m at the Cenex just off of I-80.”

“See you soon.”

We hung up without our customary good-byes and without a single mention of how eager we were to see each other. It was like he knew.

The park in question was small and wooded, the sort of place that bespoke a history we could only picture in black-and-white photos, snapshots of a time gone by. Michael was pacing a sidewalk near the street, and I parallel parked as close to him as I could get. My heart was thumping out a staccato beat against my rib cage, and I worried that my face was flushed with the sick fear that I felt. As I turned off the car and sat for a moment in my hot bucket seat, I fought an urge to throw open the door and fling myself into his arms. To forget all that I felt and believed about Michael. About us.

But I couldn’t do that.

Why had I never noticed Michael’s subtle indifference? the way he tried to reach out to Daniel and Simon on his own terms but wasn’t much bothered when they rebuffed his halfhearted advances? Why had I never detected the way Simon was quick to roll his eyes in Michael’s presence? or how Daniel busied himself with solitary pursuits instead of seeking out his future stepdad’s attention? I could remember a time when Daniel at least tried to win Michael’s favor by soliciting games of catch or hide-and-seek. But the more I had thought about it in the weeks after I told my fiancé about Parker, the more I realized that Michael had rarely taken the opportunity to play with the boys, and they adjusted their expectations to account for his lack of interest.

Then there was our inability to coordinate our lives—my reluctance to give up Mason, our farm, our comfortable little existence. And Michael’s attachment to his lifelong dream. I didn’t resent him for wanting to be a doctor. Quite the opposite. I was awed by his brilliance. I admired his ability to persist on a road that seemed so difficult. But the truth was, whether or not his imminent profession was estimable, he chose it over me. Over us.

And all of that was just the beginning. I was a factor too.

I knew now that I lusted after Michael. I relished the feel of his arms around me and his lips on my skin. He was perfect, a hero, something to be worshiped and adored. For years I had believed that I didn’t deserve him, and he had patiently and persistently tried to prove me wrong. He was a wonderful man. A generous, good, and thoughtful man. I loved him, just not the way I was supposed to. And I believed that Michael loved me. But there would always be parts of Julia DeSmit that he didn’t understand. Or worse, that he tried to ignore.

I gathered a shuddering breath and tried to steel myself for all that was ahead. But I was well past any pretense of bravery, and when I stepped from the car, I was already crying.

Michael crossed his arms over his chest and watched me come.

Each step toward him felt like it took an eternity. And as infinity seemed to stretch itself between us, I carefully uncoiled each strand of our relationship. It was five years of unraveling, five years of memories and hopes and wishes that should have culminated in every little girl’s dream: a masterpiece of white from wedding dress to sugared cake to the unlined pages of our yet-to-be-written future. The loops of our shared history pooled at my feet, and when I finally faced Michael, I was sobbing and bereft of a life I had spent hours and days and weeks planning for.

I was unbound.

Doxology

Three things happened in June that changed my life forever.

One thing did not. I did not marry Michael Vermeer.

When the date of our wedding came and passed, my heart suffered with the sort of throbbing, relentless grief that assured me my relationship with him was a wound that ran deep. It would leave a scar—and not one of those faint, near-invisible things. I would bear the mark of our ruined dreams, of the foolish youth that convinced me we were enough for each other just because neither of us had anyone else. How was I to know then that comfort did not equal love?

The morning after the canceled nuptials, I woke with a sense of finality. There was a somber edge to my acceptance of the U-turn my life had taken, but beneath the quiet acknowledgment of my own failed love, I could feel something else unfurling in the soil of my heart. It was little more than a seed, a freshly planted hope spreading a single, soft green root at my center. Testing. Wondering if I would reject or accept the promise that maybe there was more to come.

I didn’t just accept it. I welcomed it. Watered it and coaxed it to grow with songs that my soul was just learning to sing.

And when the first life-changing event happened in June, my little seedling burst out of the ground with a new sort of vigor and curled the tip of a single leaf toward the cloudless blue sky.

On a quiet Tuesday in the middle of June, Simon Eli became my son. A local lawyer took the case pro bono, and since Janice had been out of the picture for so long, it wasn’t much of a case at all. A lot of paperwork. A veritable mountain of paperwork. My name on so many documents that I contemplated getting a stamp of my signature made. But when we showed up for our court date on a sunny, early summer morning, the judge grinned at us like we were the highlight of his month and made us promise to love each other always. It was almost like a wedding.

We even had a little celebration when it was done. Grandma whipped up a from-scratch chocolate cake with homemade fudge frosting that curled in glossy swaths. There was sherbet punch and fresh strawberries that we’d bought from a pickup truck on the side of the road . . . and lots of laughter. It was gorgeous outside, so we ate on the porch, the sun slanting on the whitewashed boards and kissing our bare feet with afternoon light.

I could hardly take my eyes off Simon. He had transformed in the weeks since Daniel had fallen from the barn rafter. Or rather, since I had held him in the chicken coop and told him I wanted to be his mom. We didn’t talk about it much, but I knew that he wanted it too. And why wouldn’t he? I had whispered to him the words we long to hear above all else, even if we don’t always realize it:
I want you
. Of course, there are a million different ways to say it.
I love you. Will you marry me? You are mine.
But it all comes down to the same thing: belonging. I think that’s why when God invites us into His family with arms wide open, we aren’t just honorary children. We’re adopted. We belong.