I nodded repeatedly in his grip, and he hissed at me to get inside the house. I ran and didn’t look back.
Even now, decades later, if I stray too close to the woods, I seek out the bell. Even after Daddy died, and Tom and I added three thousand square feet to his house, painted it white and added a wraparound porch where I’d rocked each of my three daughters to sleep. Even after the girls grew up and started their own lives, and the glass from the greenhouse came down, the sign changing from “Bud’s Greenhouse” to “The Rose Peddler,” the bell remained. The contractor we hired to turn the greenhouse into a gardening shop had practically insisted it be removed. He declared the concept Daddy had implemented, of wiring the store phone to the bell so it would ring if a customer needed him while he was tending to his vegetable garden, was unnecessarily outdated. He suggested I have my business calls forwarded to my cell phone if someone was trying to reach me while I was watering the coneflowers and peonies that grew where Daddy’s green beans and tomatoes once flourished. I had given my husband a look. “The bell stays,” Tom had said to the contractor, with a wink. “My wife hates change.”
The two had exchanged knowing glances. I let them believe it.
It is not by chance that boxwoods stand as sentinels around the house, that roses and lilies fight for dominance in my formal garden, that hostas rest under four different willow trees, and that the front of the Peddler is flooded with coneflowers and daisies, yet I plant nothing remotely close to the tree line. The blot of red beneath the black shingles, on the verge of the trees, still holds sway.
I am a mother and grandmother, with my seventies on the near horizon. I should have let go of those fears long ago. But in all my life, I never entered the woods again. I may have been jarred that day Daddy hauled me out of the trees, but I know what that man in the wool suit had examined, then lifted from the ground of the clearing. I should have asked—and almost did, several times—but I never could find the courage to ask my father why the gravestone of a child was so deep into the woods.
TWO
AUGUST
The sound of Tom’s sleeping kept me awake. It wasn’t that he snores, or incoherently mumbles, or twitches under the covers. It was his even breathing, his bottom lip slightly jutted out, that made me want to shake him. Even if I had knocked over our dresser, he would just turn over. How can you sleep after what you told us—?
The first ring of the phone was like a jolt of black coffee. I quickly looked over at the clock. Almost midnight. My husband’s soft breathing continued, even when it rang a second time. Despite having to make the biggest decision of his life, a decision that will impact generations of our family, and getting an ice-cold silent treatment from me, he proved yet again that he is a champion sleeper. Nothing rattled him, not the cry of a newborn daughter, not our veteran tomcat Voodoo scratching at the door, and obviously not the phone ringing in the middle of the night.
I, however, practically leapt for the phone. Any call this late is most certainly Washington with some sort of crisis. Either that or something was wrong with the girls. I snatched the phone and hit the answer button.
“Mama.” Anne’s voice was so thin I could hear her straining for oxygen. “We can’t find William.”
Ten minutes later, Tom and I were hurrying across the damp grass and past the pergola, our flashlights dancing off the pine and oak that lined the perimeter of the yard. Tom reached his hand back for me to take. Instead, I paused at the edge of the woods.
“OK, let’s get this over with,” he folded his arms across this chest. “Let me have it before we go a step farther.”
“Let’s not talk about that now.”
“You don’t want me to accept it, do you?”
“Please, Tom.” I squinted, even though it was pitch black.
“William is probably curled up asleep on the dog’s bed; the one obvious place neither Anne nor Chris have looked yet. We need to talk about this, Lynn. This would change our entire lives—”
Not our lives. My life. Your life is in Washington. My life is here, with our family, my shop, my house, my garden, and my friends. I don’t want to leave any of that. I love my life. I don’t love your life.
I sighed. “I’m still in shock about it. But right now, I’m worried about William.”
I looked from the trees to the Rose Peddler on the other end of the property. Somewhere in the dark, at the pitch of the roof, the bell watched.
“I’m sure he’s fine,” Tom said. “But I know William is your favorite—”
“Stop that.”
“And he’s the one thing that could get you in these woods. We’ll find him, and then you and I can have a long debate over waffles and coffee in the morning.”
I was grateful when he took my arm. Together, we waded through the treacherous boundary of acorns the size of golf balls. I shined my flashlight on the soggy ground, forcing myself to keep walking despite my pounding heartbeat. I’m sorry, Daddy.
Tom held his arms up high to push back any branches. “Now, may I ask, why on earth would William be out here this late at night anyway during a thunderstorm?” he asked. “It poured hard after dinner for a minute”
“I told you, Chris let the older boys camp in the backyard when it looked like the weather might clear. William was upset he couldn’t be with them. Anne thinks he opened the back door.”
“How many times have I told them to install an alarm system?” he growled.
“Now, don’t start on that, you’ll only upset them more.”
He snapped some twigs away. “I should have had a path put in between the houses a long time ago.”
I would have never let you. It couldn’t be more than a ten-minute walk through the trees to Anne’s house, but no one, especially their boys, was allowed to use the forest as a short cut. Too much poison ivy and wild animals, I repeated to anyone who would listen. Even in the well-populated neighborhoods of west Nashville, swatches of dense forest were not uncommon. Tom occasionally kidded me about my fear of the forest, but stopped when he saw the shade in my glances.
“There, I see their flashlights.”
As soon as Anne saw us she rushed over, her face ruddy with tears, speaking in a pitch usually reserved for theater majors. “We can’t find him, Mom. We can’t find him.”
“Anne, are you sure you’ve checked the house thoroughly?” Tom asked wearily.
“Dad, I’m not overexaggerating!”
“He’s here somewhere.”
“He’s not, he’s not.” Anne covered her mouth, looking around frantically.
“Where’s Chris?” Tom asked.
“He headed off that way, there’s his flashlight,” Anne pointed. Tom nodded and walked in that direction.
“Explain to me again what happened,” I asked.
Anne stifled a sob. “I don’t know how William got out of the house, but he was so mad that he couldn’t camp with his brothers. Chris has been promising Brian and Greg that they could camp all summer, and after we got back from your house tonight and the phone showed the rain had stopped for a minute, Chris set up their tent. You know he grew up camping, and he said a little rain wasn’t going to hurt them. We explained to William that he wasn’t old enough yet, and he threw such a fit that I thought he’d cried himself to sleep on the couch. I left him there; you know how he likes to sleep on the downstairs couch. Then Greg came to get me and said William had somehow gotten outside and wanted to get in their tent.”
Anne cleared her throat. “Then there was something about them daring William to touch a tree in the forest, and if he did, they’d let him in, so he ran off. It started raining heavier, and when he didn’t come right back, Brian followed him in.”