Leaves of Hope (17 page)

Beth and Miles had taken a jet from London to Calcutta. A propeller-driven plane flew them to Bagdogra airport, where a Wilson Teas car was waiting to take them the three-hour drive up to Darjeeling. At the wheel was the company’s Indian liaison rather than a chauffeur, which gave Miles the perfect opportunity to discuss business while Beth tried to collect her thoughts. The two men chatted about tea production, labor issues, the coming monsoon rains and the state of the world tea market. Beth listened for a while from the backseat until eventually she tuned them out and concentrated on the scenery.

But the view didn’t take her mind off her worries. She hadn’t heard from her mother since leaving the awful phone message. Though Beth knew she should have called again while still in London, she couldn’t bring herself to do it. The thought of Jan’s tearful, accusing voice on the other end of the line was just too much.

This was all a mistake. Even the discovery of the tea set and the note inside it had been in error. From that moment, nothing had gone right. Beth and her mother had shouted at each other and wept and apologized and tried to make everything just fine. But it wasn’t. Beth walked through each day feeling disoriented, as though she had inadvertently put on someone else’s skin one morning instead of her own. She had been so confident, so sure of herself. Now she wasn’t even positive who she was. Did genes and DNA even matter, after all? Was a person’s upbringing all that really counted?

Again, she felt sick at the thought of how her father would feel if he were alive. The betrayal. The disloyalty. And after all he had done for Beth.

“You’re looking a bit pale,” Miles said over his shoulder. “Feeling ill? Darjeeling sits at over 7,000 feet. Thinner air, you know. And the road is tortuous.”

“I’m all right.” She studied his eyes, filled with concern. How attractive he’d seemed to her when they were apart. And even now, just a casual glance from him sent a tingle up her spine. But how dumb. How immature. There were thousands of nice-looking men in New York. She shouldn’t have let one Brit with blue eyes send her spiraling.

“We’re almost there,” he told her. “Too bad we’ve got clouds today. We’re just at the start of the monsoon season, but if we’re lucky, we’ll have break in the mists and get a look at Kanchenjunga.”

Almost there.
Beth laced her fingers together and squeezed. She had no idea what to say when she met him. Thomas Wood. Why had that name taken hold of her and possessed her? She wasn’t a Wood. She was a Lowell, a proud Lowell.

“Is the Wilson Teas estate near town?” she was asking just as her cell phone warbled. “Oh, excuse me a moment…Hello? Beth Lowell speaking.”

“Beth, it’s your mother. I hope I didn’t wake you up. I’m not sure about the time difference.”

“Mom?” She looked at Miles. His eyes softened. He reached across the seat back and laid his hand over hers.

“Are you in India?” Jan asked.

“Yes. We’re on our way up the mountains toward Darjeeling.”

“Oh…so you haven’t…”

“Not yet.”

“Well, then.” There was a moment of silence. “I guess you’re safely back on the ground anyway. I hope your flight was good. Are the roads there fairly decent?”

Before her mother could babble on further, Beth blurted out what was on her heart. “Mom, listen, I’m sorry about that message I left on your machine. I should have told you in person what I was planning to do.”

“It’s all right. I guess nothing you do can surprise me now.”

Beth bristled, but she tried to keep her voice calm. “I realize this wasn’t how we left things when I visited there the last time. You told me how you felt, and I really did listen.”

“Yes, well, perhaps your mother’s opinion doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Of course it matters. Very much.” The car took a hairpin curve, and Beth thought for a moment she might be sick.

“You’re cutting in and out, honey, so I guess I’ll say goodbye. I hope everything goes all right for you there.”

“Mom, please don’t hang up yet. Just listen to me for a minute, okay? I didn’t want to disappoint you. That’s why I couldn’t bring myself to call earlier. I knew you’d be hurt, but I felt I had to make this journey. I needed to know.”

“Know what? You already know what Thomas looks like. You know where he lives and what he does. You know he’s married. What else is there?”

Could Beth actually say what had been hammering in her brain when she made her travel arrangements?
I need to know that my father is a Christian. I need to make sure he shares my faith. I have to be certain of his eternal destiny.
It sounded lame. Like a weak excuse for thoughtless behavior.

“You want to know what he’s like, don’t you?” her mother asked. “Well, I could have told you that. Thomas Wood is a selfish, egotistical man. He has his own goals, and he doesn’t care about anything else. Or anyone but himself.”

Beth suddenly gripped Miles’s hand more tightly. She could almost hear the words her mother hadn’t spoken.
Thomas Wood is like you, Beth. The two of you are just the same.

“Oh, dear. Wait,” Jan said, a tremor in her words. “Just a second. I didn’t mean that. I didn’t intend to say that to you. I wanted to tell you…something else. Let me start over.”

Closing her eyes, Beth could almost see her mother’s face before her. But Jan wasn’t perkily spouting pithy quotations or snapping off retorts to put her daughter back in line. What did the woman look like now—this mother whose voice had traveled halfway around the globe to reach her daughter’s ear?

“Thomas was a good man,” Jan began, repeating the words she had written on the note her daughter found inside the teapot. “And he was…he was very dear to me. I felt terribly wounded when he left for Sri Lanka the second time. It seemed like he was choosing his career and his love of adventure over me…and you. But he didn’t know about you. So that’s not fair. I can’t hold him responsible for it. Oh, Beth, what can I say that will help you feel better? He was talented. He was brave. He was funny. He was passionate. He was very smart, too. One time he told me he thought he could learn to grow tea better than anyone else, and see? I bet he has.”

Beth tried to respond, but she found no words.

Her mother continued. “The thing I need to remind you, Beth, is that…you have to remember that Thomas didn’t know anything about your existence. I didn’t tell him I was pregnant before he left. I didn’t send him a letter when you were born, or contact him during the years while you were growing up. Thomas came back to Texas a couple of times to visit his family, but I never saw him, and I never let him know about you. His mother didn’t tell him, either. Nanny agreed to go along with my wishes, because I offered to let her see you as much as she wanted if she would keep the secret. And so she did, even though it hurt her not to be able to tell her son that he was a father. I know it did. But I didn’t care, you see, because I was selfish, too.”

“Now, Mom, please don’t—”

“No, let me finish, Beth. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.
I’m
the selfish one. And it’s all right that you’re in India. Truly, it is. I hope you have a good experience there…a good meeting…and I hope you like him. But he won’t be prepared, so I’ve been worrying that you might get hurt. Oh, Beth, sweetie, I don’t want you to be wounded over this. I’ve caused you enough pain, honey. I’m so sorry. I hope you can forgive me.”

Beth held her breath for a moment, hardly able to absorb the gush of words that had flowed from her mother’s mouth. She was holding Miles’s hand as though she were perched at the lip of a cliff, and one slight puff of breeze would send her off the edge.

“I’m sorry, too, Mom,” she said. “I’m sorry for hurting you.”

A sniffle echoed across the miles. “Well, I guess that’s how it is sometimes when people love each other.”

“I suppose so.”

“Just stay safe. And be good. And call me if you want to talk. And how is…how is Miles?”

Beth lifted her focus to the blue eyes that gazed back at her. “Miles is fine. He’s nice.”

Miles held out his free hand and gave Beth a little nod. “Let me have a word with dear ol’ Mum, will you please?” he murmured.

Without telling her mother, Beth handed him the cell phone. He put it to his ear. “Am I speaking to the mother of the charming Beth Lowell?” he asked. His mouth widened into a smile. “Excellent. Miles Wilson, here. Mrs. Lowell, do permit me to assure you that your daughter is in very good hands. I mean to keep her under lock and key and only let her out when I’m certain she is prepared to behave herself properly.”

At the sound of Miles’s mischievous tone and cocksure British accent, Beth felt her tension begin to melt. She sank into the seat.

“That is absolutely correct,” he said. “She’ll be staying in a company guesthouse with room for no more than one occupant. She’ll be fed a wholesome diet, and I shall see that she is taken out to tour the estate, receive her daily exercise and breathe the fresh air of the Himalayas. I promise you that I shall introduce her to our staff members—particularly our production manager—in the most discreet manner, and I shall ensure her welfare and contentment at every possible moment. You have my word that nothing dreadful will happen to your lovely daughter, and she will be returned to you as whole and happy as she ever was…perhaps even more so.”

A long breath deflated Beth’s lungs as Miles went on chatting with her mother. She rested her head on the seat back and gazed out the window again. As he spoke, a pearl-gray cloud suddenly dissolved, and a slice of golden sunlight lit the car, the road, the valley below and far, far up in the distance, the peak of a snow-covered mountain.

“Perfect,” Miles said. “I shall make certain that she telephones you at least twice daily. Your daughter is willful, Mrs. Lowell, but what else can one expect from such an exquisite and unique creature?…right, then. Signing off.”

He gave the phone back to Beth and followed her eyes to the window. “Aha. Just as I’d planned. Here we are in Darjeeling—and Kanchenjunga has come out to greet us.”

J
an spread the letters across the table on her screened porch. Four blue envelopes, onionskin paper, strangely colorful stamps, her address in squared black-ink words. He had written only four times, and she had never replied. Why had she even bothered to keep them? Hidden at the bottom of her cedar jewelry box, they had lain untouched and almost forgotten.

Almost.

Today, she would start at the beginning. A bright red cardinal in the dogwood tree near the porch whistled as she reached for the first of the letters. Thomas had written it not long after arriving in Sri Lanka to begin his full-time job. Jan, who had been vomiting every morning, yelling at her family every afternoon, sobbing her eyes out most of each night, had barely been able to focus when her older brother brought the letter into her bedroom.

“It’s from Thomas,” he had announced, thrusting out the pale blue envelope with its red and navy stripes around the edges. “Pull yourself together, Jan. Everybody’s getting really sick of you.”

“Get out of my room!” she had screamed at him. “Just leave me alone. I hate you! I hate everything about this stupid family!”

As the door shut behind her brother, Jan had blinked through her tears at the letter in her hand. Now, all these years later, she again studied Thomas’s odd penmanship. Blunt and hard-edged and earthy, like him. She slid the letter from the envelope. The photograph fell out, just as it had the first time. Thomas stared into the camera, his long, wild, brown hair trimmed into a neat, grown man’s style. He wore a khaki-green uniform shirt with an embroidered logo on the breast pocket. Two tea leaves and a bud. Verdant fields of green plants stretched out behind him. He was smiling.

“Dear Jan,” he had written. She read the words again, imagining him writing them and remembering herself reading them.

Even now, after all this time, the words brought a lump to Jan’s throat. She had loved him, too. So much! So desperately! It had taken all her willpower not to pick up the phone and call Mr. Wood to ask him for Thomas’s money from the bank account. She would buy a ticket and fly off to Sri Lanka for the rest of the summer.

But she couldn’t do that, could she?

Laying her hand now on her softly rounded midriff that had borne three babies, Jan recalled so well that first insistent flutter—a reminder that her life was no longer her own. She shared it with the tiny heartbeat and miniature fishlike, alien creature that had appeared on the sonogram in her doctor’s office the week before Thomas’s letter arrived. A baby. His child.

“I wish you could get over it.” A girl didn’t just get over a baby growing inside her. Not unless she was willing to let some stranger tear that little beating heart out of her body. As much as Jan had hated her situation and regretted her carelessness, she wouldn’t do that.

“I need to figure out who I am and make my own way in life,” Thomas had written. “I want to be different. I have to change.”

Different? Well, Jan was already different. She would have to make her own way in life and figure out who she was. But she wasn’t selfish, like Thomas. Though the baby had made her sick, her whole family treated her like the black sheep sinner of the century and her friends never called to ask her to hang out with them anymore, Jan had remained stubbornly determined to have her baby. She was growing a life inside her. Somehow…somehow…she and the child both would survive.

Now, at forty-five, sitting out on her screened porch and listening to a cardinal sing for its mate, Jan let the tears fall. It had been hard, all of it. But she could sincerely thank God she hadn’t destroyed that unwanted, inopportune, little alien fish-baby who had made her heave over the toilet every morning. After all, that unrecognizable tadpole had been Beth. Her Beth! John’s Bethy-boo. Bobby and Billy’s big sister. “Beff,” the boys had called her. “Beff, tie my shoes…Beff, get me a cookie…I need a Band-Aid for my boo-boo, Beff.”

Jan folded the letter and slipped the photograph back inside it. She would give them to Beth when her daughter returned from India. Jan would read Thomas’s message out loud and explain how she had felt at the time. She would tell Beth everything she could remember about that awful year of losing a true love and welcoming a new life and becoming someone different.

She reached for the second letter. Inside this one, Thomas had enclosed a tea leaf. No doubt mailing a foreign country’s vegetation to the United States had been highly illegal. It was crisp and fragile now and had turned brown. But Jan recalled how she had held the green leaf up to the sunlight and marveled at the network of veins that transported life and flavor and nourishment. Her own body was functioning in much the same way, nurturing the baby who by that time had taken to performing somersaults in the middle of the night.

She had loved him, too. But summer was passing, and she had stopped vomiting every morning. She still yelled at her family, but now that the baby was showing, they treated her better. Her mother cooked whatever Jan wanted. Her father kept asking if she was all right, did she need to sit down, was she feeling any funny twinges, could he help her with anything? Her brother stared at her every time he walked by the den where she was watching TV with her long bare legs stretched out on the ottoman and her stomach pooching up like a small hill under her T-shirt. That summer seemed to last forever.

And then the third letter came.

The cardinal flew past the screened porch as Jan now lifted the blue envelope and drew out the letter. The brilliant red bird had called and called, and finally his mate answered. They sang out, first one and then the other, fluttering closer and closer until they spotted each other.

Jan had gotten out paper and a pen a hundred times. She had started countless letters. But she always threw them away. How could she live in a place where time was backward? How could she marry Thomas without her father to walk her down the aisle and her mother to sit crying on the front pew of their church in Tyler? What would she ever do with herself in a small, midlevel employee’s house on a tea plantation in Sri Lanka? No matter how much she loved Thomas—and she still loved him to the very core of her being—she could never change that much. More important, she couldn’t bring a baby into the world and expect the child to live that kind of nomadic, insecure existence.

Jan had to smile now as she put the letter away, and she leaned back in her chair to gaze through the screen at the lake. How hard she had worked to protect her baby from the life Thomas Wood offered. And look what had happened! Beth grew up to be a globe-trotting nomad herself!

Not only did Thomas’s daughter love to travel, but even at this moment, she was headed straight toward a tea plantation in some foreign country where people spoke strange languages and ate strange foods and had strange customs. Beth had no qualms. No hesitation. Her only worry had been her mother’s reaction.

“Oh, what a tangled web we weave,

When first we practice to deceive!”

Jan shook her head at the truth in Sir Walter Scott’s verse as she opened the fourth and final letter. She had worked so hard to keep her big secret. She had spun her web and laid out each thread in perfect order. But what a tangled mess she had created.

“Jan,” the black ink stated matter-of-factly.

Her heart slamming against her ribs, Jan put the letter aside quickly and stacked the other three on top of it. Oh, the hurt and accusations! But Thomas was right in many ways. She
had
just wanted to stay in Tyler and have everything her way. While accusing Thomas of caring only for himself, she had managed to behave in the most self-centered manner imaginable.

How could she never have written the man even a single letter? Why hadn’t she given him at least one kernel of truth? Instead, she had allowed him to feel betrayed, cut off, abandoned, as she wove her web of deceit. She could argue that she had done everything in order to protect her baby. But that wasn’t completely true.

Jan thought about Beth, how much she loved her daughter and how poorly they communicated. But Beth’s life was turning out all right despite the conflicts with her mother. In fact, Jan had to acknowledge that somehow the little pigtailed girl who hated pink had become an amazing woman. Beth had chosen a job her mother would never have considered, a city her mother dreaded to set foot in and a young man who wasn’t even from America, much less Texas. Beth’s was a strange, unexpected life, but for the first time, Jan felt truly proud of her daughter. And the main reason had little to do with her choice of job or city or boyfriend. Jan was proud of Beth for herself. For her straight, square shoulders. For her determination. For her spirit.

Miles had called Beth willful. But whose will was she doing? Certainly not her mother’s. Probably not her boyfriend’s. And really…not even her own. The best thing about Beth Lowell had turned out to be her faith in God. She was trying to do God’s will, and somehow the truth of that simply astonished and humbled her mother.

“Satisfactory?” Miles asked as Beth walked around the guest bungalow situated in the central compound of Wilson Teas, Ltd.’s vast Darjeeling estate. The small house’s concrete floor coated in red wax supported nothing more substantial than a single bed and an unadorned wooden wardrobe. A woven brown rug covered part of the floor, a painting of a yellow orchid hung on the whitewashed wall and a door led to a small bathroom with a white ceramic toilet, sink and shower stall.

“It’s perfect,” she replied. She set her black leather travel bag on the red-and-brown batik coverlet that draped the bed. “Exactly what I need.”

“Not quite as opulent as Wilson House, but one has to think of the intangibles.”

“Oh?”

“While London has its charms, Darjeeling has the Himalayas just outside the window.” He pulled open the curtain, and a wide vista of towering, snow-covered peaks filled the glass pane.