Beneath the Night Tree Read online

  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

  Part 1

  Songbird

  Everything

  Dreams

  Wanderer

  Tightrope

  Little Gifts

  Words

  All This Time

  Origins

  Part 2

  Trust

  Crash Course

  Surprises

  Decisions

  Normal

  Second Chance

  A Matter of the Heart

  Part 3

  Different World

  Autobiographies

  The Night Tree

  Winter Solstice

  Tagalong

  Balance

  Falling Down

  Unbound

  Doxology

  Discussion Questions

  About the Author

  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.

  I touched the mop of his dark hair with my fingertips and thanked God that the child below me slept in peace. That he loved me.

  When I spun into the kitchen and switched on the coffeemaker, I couldn’t stop the prayer that rose, a balloon lifting beneath the cage that held my heart. Thank You, I breathed in the silence. For Daniel, for Simon, for my grandmother, who still slipped from bed not long after I turned on the shower to whisk pancake batter or fold blueberries into muffins for breakfast. Thank You for the four corners of our family and the way that we folded into each other like one of my grandma’s quilts. Edges coming together, softening.

  Most of all, I was grateful for the stillness of the predawn hush, for the short reprieve when everything was dark and new, emerging. It was in these moments as the day was still lifting its head that I could believe everything was exactly as it should be instead of the way it was.

  Not that life was horrible—far from it. But as the weeks and months circled on, I couldn’t deny that our ramshackle family was often more off than on. The whole thing reminded me of Daniel’s birthday present: a carved model train track. Though the sleek, red engine could pull a chain of cars around the twining loops for hours on end, there inevitably came a moment when a single wheel tripped off the track. Who knew what caused the quiet stumble? It was a magician’s trick, a sleight of hand—everything bustling along one minute and struggling the next. But the train kept going; the engine pulled on. It just dragged the coal cars behind it, clacking unevenly all the way.

  I felt just like that engine, hauling everything in my wake. Hauling everyone in my wake.

  When I pulled back the shower curtain, it became obvious that the DeSmit family train was already well on its way to derailment. There were worms in the bathtub, a dozen or more squirming in a mound of dirt so rich and black it made me think of cake. Devil’s food.

  I had specifically told Daniel not to put worms in the bathtub and had even given him an ice cream bucket in which to store his newest collection. My son needed to have his hearing checked again, I decided. But it was an exercise in futility. I knew that what plagued Daniel wasn’t a hearing problem; it was a listening problem.

  As I deposited handfuls of squirming earthworms into the bucket I rescued from the front porch, I felt the momentary bliss of my morning slackening its fragile hold. Hot on the heels of the stark reminder that Daniel was an angel only when he slept came a familiar twinge of worry for Simon, the boy who earned his wings in a thousand different ways. By the time I finally stepped into the mud-streaked shower and turned it on full blast, I could feel concern overflow my fists like worry stones too heavy to hold.

  Handsome as Simon was, and growing more mature by the day, he still wore loss like a chain around his neck, heavy and awkward, dragging his head down. He loved us, I knew that, but he missed her. And why shouldn’t he? Janice was a terrible mother to me, and yet I missed her every single day. I felt her absence in the shadowed corners of my heart, where longing echoed. It was a sound track of hurt—soft, but always there.

  And Janice had been a good mom to Simon. Or at least, as good as she could bring herself to be. No wonder he bore her ghost like an anchor.

  “Do you like it here?” I asked him once, in the beginning, when Janice’s departure could still be considered nothing more than an extended trip. I had wanted to ask him, Do you like us? but I couldn’t bring myself to say those exact words.

  All the same, Simon’s eyes sprang to mine, wide and startled. The question was innocent, but the look on his five-year-old face told me that the answer wasn’t quite so benign.

  “It’s okay,” I said then, reaching to ruffle his hair. “You don’t have to—”

  “I do,” he interrupted me, and his voice cracked with the emotion behind the words. “I like it here.”

  It took years for me to realize that the problem wasn’t Simon’s affection for this newfound family and home; it was his own fears about our affection for him. No matter how hard we tried to make him believe that he was a part of us, I knew he continued to battle the personal pain of wondering, deep down, if he was an outsider.

  And the problem was only exacerbated at Mason Elementary. Although I was quite sure that Simon was off-the-charts brilliant, the sort of student every teacher longed to shape and mold, he dreaded the start of a new school year. I knew it, even though he had never ventured to so much as whisper a word against his classmates.

  As far as I could tell, the kids were decent to him. Mason was a rural community, and the area boasted a substantial population of Latin American immigrants, many of them already second or third generation. The local schools were, at least in theory, diverse and welcoming. Simon seemed to fit right in. Sometimes, when people mistook him for Mexican, he didn’t even bother to correct them or point out his North African roots.

  But there were other things that set him apart. Like the fact that he was parentless—I knew the pain of that particular stigma all too well. Or that he lived with his half sister, whom most of Mason considered a child herself and only fourteen years his senior. An unwed mother on top of it all. And no one could forget that the woman Simon called Grandma shared no blood ties with him, or that the boy he named brother was in fact his half nephew. In a community where families were formed along staunchly traditional lines—cue the theme song from Leave It to Beaver—our home was a mismatched patchwork that was more than just an aberration from the norm. It was a source of almost-morbid fascination.

  I groaned and turned to face the stream pouring from our antiquated shower faucet. The water coursed over my forehead, pooled in my open mouth. It’ll be fine, I told myself for the thousandth time. We’ll be just fine.

  “Mom! I have to go pee!” Daniel’s fists on the bathroom door sent shock waves through the quiet worry that shaped my morning.

  Spitting out a mouthful of lukewarm water, I called, “Almost done! I’ll be out in a minute.”

  “A minute? That’s, like, forever. I can’t wait that long!”

  “Give me a break,” I muttered, turning off the faucet and throwing back the shower curtain. The brass hooks screeched against the metal rod in perfect harmony with my mood.

  Before hopping in the shower, I had laid my towel on the back of the toilet, and when I reached for it now, I realized th
at the old porcelain was beaded with sweat from the steamy room. I had forgotten to turn on the bathroom fan, and even the rose pink wallpaper of the tiny room was covered in rainbow-colored droplets. I stifled a sigh, forcing myself not to think about mold and mildew and rot. We were already battling enough of that in the cellar beneath the mudroom.

  “My towel’s wet,” I told Daniel through the door. “Could you grab me a clean one from the linen closet?”

  “No time!”

  Whipping the damp towel around me, I unlocked the bathroom door and threw it open. “A little patience would be nice,” I chided Daniel. But even though I was annoyed, I couldn’t resist reaching a hand to smooth the sleep-creased skin of his cheek.

  “Get out of the way!” he screeched, yanking me by the wrist. When he could wedge himself between the doorframe and my dripping form, Daniel threw his shoulder into my side and deposited me in the hallway that opened onto the kitchen. The door slammed at my back.

  “Good morning.” Grandma smiled from the counter.

  “Good is a relative term,” I told her.

  “The sun is shining.”

  I turned to look out the window over the sink. “So it is.”

  “You have a beautiful son.”

  Though I cocked an eyebrow at her, I felt my lips rise in assent.

  “But you are leaving a puddle on the floor.”

  When I looked down to assess the damage, rivulets of water from my drenched hair deepened the gathering pool at my feet. “Sorry. I got kicked out of the bathroom.”

  “I heard.” Grandma opened a drawer and extracted a flour-sack towel. “Here. It’s thin, but it’ll help.”

  I crossed the room and took the towel from her outstretched hand. Wrapping it turban-style around my hair, I gave her a wry grin. “I’d go upstairs and get dressed, but I left my clothes in the bathroom with Daniel.”

  “They’re going to be wet.” Grandma’s smile was apologetic. “When I got up, I could tell that you forgot to turn the fan on.”