was my babysitter, not my grandmother.”
Beth turned away again, consumed by sorrow and regret. As the truth dawned, she fought tears. “I came and went from her house nearly every day when I was little, and I never asked her any questions. I never looked at her photo albums or paid attention to the pictures on her walls. I didn’t even ask if she had children.”
“She had one. After Thomas left Tyler, Nanny sold the nursery and greenhouse that had been in her husband’s family for three generations. That gave her more than enough money to live on, and all she really wanted to do was dote on you.”
“But why didn’t someone tell me? That’s such a…It’s wrong! It’s just wrong!” Beth clenched her fists. “How did you find me here, Mother? I don’t want to talk to you right now. I need to be by myself.”
“I saw your car parked by the gate.” She pushed her hands into her jeans’ pockets. “You didn’t think I was going to let my daughter just run off like that, did you?”
“You let my father run off.”
“John Lowell was your father!” Jan exploded. “Listen, Beth, you had better show respect for the man who raised you. You owe him that.”
“Fine, then. You let my birth father leave. You didn’t even try to make him stay.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I don’t know anything. And why is that? Because you won’t tell me. It was your big secret. You and Dad. You even got Nanny to join in the deception.”
“We never deceived you, Beth. None of us. We just chose not to tell you something we felt you didn’t need to know. If it was wrong, it was a sin of omission and nothing more. We didn’t want to hurt you. Nanny agreed with your father and me. Her desire was to spend time with you. It never mattered to her if you knew she was your grandmother. She didn’t care that you weren’t so interested in her. That wasn’t important at all. What she wanted was to be with you, to dote on you and give you her time and her love. She had lost her husband, and her son was far away, and you were all she had left.”
Beth tried to absorb the significance of this new reality. The whole time she had been skipping in and out of Nanny’s house—selfishly focused on her own life—Nanny had been gazing at her with the loving, mournful eyes of a bereft grandmother.
“Maybe it wasn’t important to Nanny to tell the truth,” Beth said finally, “but it would have been helpful for me to know who she really was. I might have treated her better. Been nicer. Kinder. Less self-centered. Did that ever occur to any of you coconspirators?”
Jan clenched her jaw for a minute. “Beth, I don’t want to continue with all this hostility. Let’s get back to being mother and daughter, the way we were before.”
“We can’t ever be the way we were before, Mom. Don’t you see that?” Beth opened her purse and took out the stack of photocopies. “Your life may not have changed, but mine sure has. See this person? He wasn’t there, and now he is. I can’t erase him.”
“What are those?” Jan reached for the papers as she had the teapot, but Beth pulled them back. “Where did you get those pictures?”
“I got them from the library. Because I wondered what Thomas Wood looked like.”
“Why? What use is that? You shouldn’t have—”
“Seeing his picture helps me. Now I understand why I don’t have freckles and a pug nose.”
“Oh, for pity’s sake! That is just ridiculous. Your appearance is absolutely unessential to this issue!”
“Wrong, Mother. Now I know why I look the way I do. And I want to understand how he fits into who I am. Mom, I’m not going to stop searching until I’ve found out everything I can about him. Thomas Wood is part of me.”
Jan shook her head. “No, he isn’t. Genetically you’re connected, but that’s it. That’s all there is.”
“That’s a lot.”
“It is not! Freckles and pug noses are nothing. Come over here, and let me remind you who was really a part of you.”
Taking Beth’s arm, the older woman tried to pull her away from the graves of Nancy and Theodore Wood. “Don’t take me to Dad’s plot,” Beth warned, brushing off Jan’s hand. “I know who he was. I loved him, and I called his parents my grandma and grandpa. Now, I want you to tell me who these people were. Nanny and Teddy.”
“You knew Nanny better than I ever did, Beth. Why don’t you tell me who she was?”
Beth brushed some dirt from the top of Nanny’s marble head-stone, then she sank to the ground and crossed her legs. She spread the photographs of Thomas Wood on the grass before her. For a moment, she could hardly remember anything about the old woman who had looked after her when she was a young child. And then it came.
“Nanny was funny,” Beth began. “She had little songs for everything. She made buttered popcorn every afternoon. Our favorite lunch was fish sticks. She gave us lollipops when we won games. Billy used to cheat at Candy Land, and I would catch him and cry. Nanny rocked me in her lap until I fell asleep. She called me Bethy. Bethy-Wethy.”
Closing her eyes, Beth fought tears as she sang the funny little song Nanny had adapted just for her. “My Bethy lies over the ocean, my Bethy lies over the sea. My Bethy lies over the ocean…oh bring back my Bethy to me.”
Jan joined in softly. “Bring back…bring back…oh, bring back my Bethy to me.”
But Beth wasn’t ready to be brought back to her mother—her sense of betrayal was still too strong.
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