The Secret Hum of a Daisy (16 page)

“It seems like you're trying to figure something out,” Jo said. She took off her beret and put the camera away. “In case I haven't told you, I am a master sleuth. I've read every single Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie novel in my parents' house. Of which there are many.”

“I'll keep that in mind.”

She sat down on the blanket and patted the place next to her. “Let me see that mummy.”

I reached in my pocket and handed it to her, then sat down and crisscrossed my legs.

“I should have told you before,” Jo said. She set the mummy down and laid out our food in a perfect square. Tiny triangles of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, a basket of strawberries, potato chips, and two thick wedges of chocolate cake. “Max has been sick. He's got something called acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a form of cancer. He's been in remission a little less than a year now.”

I didn't know what to say at first. “Remission is good, right?”

“Remission isn't cured,” she said, and then took a mouthful of chocolate cake. “Sorry if that was weird to tell you.”

But it wasn't weird.

She explained what it had been like, having Max so sick, losing his hair and having to take so many different pills. How she couldn't ever sleep very well thinking he wasn't safe in the night.

“The Other Side is closer to us at night, I think. Waiting there, just ready to pounce,” she said.

I nodded some more because I knew a thing or two about the Other Side and how it pounced in the middle of the night. It was nice to be sitting across from someone else in the world who understood, even though that understanding came from something sad. “Is that why you have short hair?” I said.

“I cut it off when Max lost his hair. So did my mom and dad,” she laughed. “We looked ridiculous!”

Eventually the sun found its way back to our blanket and warmed my hair and shoulders, and something inside me sprang loose. I could almost hear the metallic
plooong
as some invisible wire, some important cable holding certain things down, snapped free.

“My mother died in the river,” I said. “It was an accident.”

Jo touched my hand. “I know. I'm real sorry, Grace. I wish I could have known her.”

I tried to say more, but my throat closed over the rest of the words and wouldn't let them free.

“Can I ask you something?” Jo said after a while.

“Okay.”

“Why are you living in the shed out by the road?”

I shrugged. “I don't know. I'm mad, I guess. About lots of things. And I can hear the river in the house sometimes.”

“Well, I can't fix the mad. But I've got an extra pair of great earplugs. I used to wear them when I'd sleep with Max in the hospital.”

I almost laughed at how easy that was. I couldn't move the river or Grandma's house. But I could block the sounds if it got to be too much.

I looked around the park and breathed deeply, taking in early spring—the honey scent of flowers, the sweet-sour smell of cut grass, the wildness of growing things and how it all reminded me of little kids after they'd been cooped up too long.

“Can I ask
you
something?” I said.

“I guess it wouldn't be fair if I said no.”

“It's pretty and all. But why did you pick this place for your documentary?”

She smiled. “Before he got sick, Max and I would hide in the trees of the park and make up this whole world with our own rules, like the ability to make time stand still and laws against needles and green Jell-O. When he got sick, he just wanted to be in the trees. He said the cancer couldn't get worse if he was here.”

She looked up toward the sun and closed her eyes for a minute. “I've always known there were special areas in the park, like Billy's tree house or your mama's fountain. But mostly it was just this place where I'd come to play with my brother and listen to music on summer nights. Once he got sick, though, it turned into something else. I would come by myself and talk to the trees when no one was looking. It felt like they were, I don't know, listening. All I know was that I'd come into the park feeling like I'd never be happy again, and leave feeling there was a chance.

“You probably think I'm crazy,” she said.

“I've known crazier,” I said, and we both laughed.

I did understand. I felt that way myself at Mama's fountain. But maybe it was more than just the fountain. It was the whole place. This park was almost like a living version of Mama's birds, collecting feelings so people might breathe a little easier. I hoped Mama was in a place where she could breathe easy too.

I gave the fountain the once-over, scanning it from top to bottom, but still didn't know what I was looking for. As much as I liked Jo, and even though she'd just told me something really personal, I couldn't get myself to tell her about Mama and the signs. My own best friend didn't believe me. It was one thing to believe in the Other Side, it was something else entirely to say you had proof.

“I'm furious with him, you know?” Jo said. “For fighting with his friends and wanting an entombment party instead of a normal laser tag party, and with my mother for making everything yellow and still not being back to her normal self. Then I get mad at myself for being mad at them.”

I understood that too. How angry I was at Grandma and Mama. At myself.

We packed up the food and walked back toward the horses, who were calm and still, maybe even snoozing in the sunshine.

“Do you get tired of thinking about everything all the time, how things might turn out or not turn out?” I said.

“Really, really tired,” Jo said. “Come on, you ready to let these horses run?”

I wasn't, but I followed her lead and found myself as close to real flying as I'd ever been.

Building

a Memory

The sun went down
and Mrs. Brannigan busied herself filling the kitchen with garlic and onion smells. As Jo edited the footage on her laptop at the kitchen table, I snuck into the dim living room, where the Answer Jars sat on the shelves. I closed my eyes and asked, once and for all, if Mama really was trying to tell me something. Something important. When I was sure my question had floated around long enough, I reached into a green-tinted Kerr jar and pulled out a pink slip of paper. I held it close to my chest, took a deep breath, and read my message.
Three eggs,
it said.

Figuring the Great Beyond must not have heard me correctly, I reached in and took another slip of paper. This one said,
Beach sand.

There was beach sand in my duffel. One of the few things I'd saved and brought with me from place to place. I thought about that long-ago day on the beach with Mama and wondered what it might have to do with anything.

“What are you doing?” Max stood on the steps, studying me.

“I'm not sure.” I put the notes back in the jar and sat down on the bottom step. “So, Jo told me why they don't want you to have your entombment party. Why didn't you tell me?”

“I wanted you to think I was normal.”

I laughed. Then he laughed too.

“Jo and your parents are pretty set against it.”

“Exactly.” Max sat down next to me and picked at the carpet.

The phone rang in the distance and then Mrs. Brannigan called, “Grace, your grandma asked you to come over now. Jo can walk you.”

“So what now?” I asked Max.

He raised and then dropped his knobby shoulders.

Exactly.

• • •

I thought about what Mrs. Greene had said about Grandma's trying, and what Jo had told me about her fretting over the decoration of Mama's room. I thought about Grandma's own confession to snooping through my things, trying to get a sense of who I was, maybe. What might be important to me.

Then I realized I wasn't sure myself sometimes.

But one thing I did know. I was cold out here in the shed. And now I had earplugs.

I took down my dish towel curtains and folded the rag rug. I tucked Mama's clothes, sheets, two frying pans, and the kitchen utensils into a box and carried it out to Daisy's trunk. Which was a ways off now that Grandma insisted Daisy be parked next to the front porch. She had parked Granny Smith behind her for good measure.

I packed the other box with Mama's quilt, our two photo albums, all my treasure-hunt clues, and my duffel. It made me think about moving to a new place, how Mama only ever let me tape stuff to the walls—magazine cutouts, artwork and stuff. We'd buy this special two-sided tape that wouldn't leave so much as a smidge on the paint. That's how it had always been with Mama. Taping things up in a way that was easy to take down.

The last thing I did was open my backpack and take out the tube that held my self-portrait. I laid it on the flower-garden sofa. Half a girl.

Try as I might to hold them off, pictures came: the silent whirling lights of the ambulance, Mama's matted hair, a policeman standing frozen on the bank of the river with helpless hands stuffed in his pockets.

I tried to get my mind to settle on good pictures of Mama instead, a purple scarf in her hair, digging in some small snatch of dirt to plant tomatoes, the smile on her face each morning when she saw me for the first time, the faraway look she had when she sat down with her birds. But they wouldn't stay. Jo galloped through my mind instead, and Grandma. Max and Beauty with her big belly. New pictures kept flashing and I couldn't get past them to stay with Mama.

Beach sand.
The words from Mrs. Brannigan's jar came to mind. I went into my duffel and took out the small plastic bag of sand and remembered our day at the beach. I saw my tiny white feet in the dark wet sand, Mama on a blanket just out of reach.

Build me a memory.

I'd taken pail after pail of the heavy, wet sand from where the waves fanned out on the shore and built a castle. While I was at it, I rubbed the sand on my arms and in my hair and on my feet so the memory would build into me too.

That sand crept into every crease, deep in my ears and on my scalp, and in the soft spaces between my toes. By the time the castle was done, I was coated up like a cinnamon doughnut. Mama fawned over my droopy castle and told me she wished we could live inside.

Then she took my hand and walked me toward the showers on the slatted wood boardwalk. When I saw where she was headed, I started to fight and kick and cry because I'd gotten it in my head that the memories for the day somehow lived in the sand, and if she washed it off, the day would be gone too. I wanted to bring it home with me, and so Mama took an empty Styrofoam cup and filled it with sand and we put it in the bag so I'd have it forever.

All that lived in the girl on the paper. I put my hand on the other side, on the blank side, feeling torn, wanting to put down my hopes for the future. But that would make it After.

I wasn't sure how much longer I could keep myself in Before.

• • •

I stood in front of Grandma's porch, rain gluing the hair to my face, waiting for some direction until I realized I didn't need it. This much I was sure of. I climbed the steps and let myself in the front door. Grandma sat in her sleepless-night chair, knitting something purple.

“Mama wouldn't want me living in a shed,” I announced.

She stopped knitting and looked up at me. “Well, it's about time. Let's get you settled in your mother's room.”

“Can I sleep on the sofa for now?”

Grandma only paused for a second before going to the closet in the hall and coming back with a pile of sheets and a quilt.

“Let me take that coat,” she said. “You're soaked through.”

“I'll do it.”

I laid Mama's coat on the hearth so it would dry quickly as Grandma made up the couch. I sat on the floor next to the wood stove, trying not to shake, noticing the smell of cleaning. Grandma wrapped a dry quilt around my shoulders and put a towel in my lap.

“Fold your sheets in the morning and set them in that cabinet over there. I don't want to look at a bed in my living room.”

As I dried my hair with the towel, Grandma sat on the edge of her rocking chair and watched me.

“The gardening tools you bring every morning in the truck when you drop me off at school, what do you need them for?”

“I spend a few hours every morning in the park, weeding, cutting things back.”

“Why didn't you tell me about Mama's fountain when I first got here?”

“I didn't feel much like sharing.”

I blinked. She was so honest. Even when it made her look bad. There was something about her honesty that was a comfort, even if the words made me feel prickly. “Tell me about the fountain,” I said.

“What do you want to know?”

I shrugged. “Whatever you can tell me.”

Grandma's knitting needles moved so fast, I'd never be able to follow. The fire inside the wood stove threw dancing shadows all over the room.

“She started making birds with your grandpa after a birding trip when she was eight. They'd seen a crane and Anna came home with this story about it being magic. She'd collected some things she'd found while they were out, an old aluminum can, bottle caps, twigs, and some feathers, and she snipped and glued until she had quite the work of art. A set of beautiful wings fixed to a piece of canvas. When she finished your grandfather went on to tell her that the crane wasn't just magic, but that the wings could carry her wishes and sorrows out into the world. So she wrote on a little piece of driftwood that she wished she could fly and attached it to her canvas.”

I thought of her wings in my dreams. How I wished I could fly too.

Grandma went on, “By the time she was ten, she worked with a soldering iron and a rivet gun so her birds would be more three-dimensional. But I think the whole reason she built them that way was so she could put her little slips of wishes and sorrows inside. She always hid something in her birds. Did she still do that?”

I nodded.

“Of course,” Grandma said. “Her work was beautiful. Thomas encouraged her creativity.”

She put her hands to her face and took a couple of deep and hitching breaths. I stared down at the tiny stitches on the edge of the quilt, not sure what to do. Finally, I got up and grabbed some tissues from the downstairs bathroom. Grandma took them from me, her callused hand giving mine a squeeze. I squeezed back.

Once she'd blown her nose, she picked up where she left off. “Your mama found a book on Central Park and just fell in love with it. The way everyone came together. How you could be alone, but still be with people. She felt her art would fit right in and so that was where the idea came from. To build something where Anna's art would fit right in. I've never been good with words . . .”

Grandma's hands slowed and she stretched the scarf she'd been knitting. She got up and laid it around my neck. “Is this long enough?”

“For me?”

“Of course for you.”

I wasn't sure what to say, it was so unexpected, so I nodded.

She unwrapped it from my neck and sat back down, finishing the last stitches. Then she pulled scissors from a small basket that sat beside her and snipped off the end of the yarn. She handed it to me.

“Thank you,” I said, and put it on, feeling cozy and warm.

She walked down the hall into Grandpa's office and came out with a pillowcase stuffed with something that wasn't a pillow. She set it on the floor in front of me and then sat in her rocking chair.

When I paused, she said, “It won't bite.”

I reached inside and pulled out the bundle of letters I'd written to Grandma. The ones I'd thrown across the shed before leaving for Mrs. Greene's. I reached in again and pulled out another bundle. More letters. I opened one.

Dear Grace,

I have a great recipe for cherry pie that your mama used to steal right out of the kitchen. That child would hide in the closet and eat half a pie if I wasn't careful. First you start with ice-cold water. The crust won't turn out right any other way . . .

I pulled out another and another.

Dear Grace,

I wish you could have sent me your grandparent's letter. I would have loved to answer all your questions about hats and furniture and if I lived where it snowed . . .

She'd answered them all. Twenty-seven letters. Even the angry ones. She must have done it while I was at Mrs. Greene's.

There was more in the pillowcase: a fluff of purple yarn, some knitting needles, and a book called
Knitting for Beginners.

“Thank you,” I said again, feeling the tears creeping up.

Grandma would never be Mama. But I was starting to think I could love her. Maybe in some future time when it wasn't snowing or raining, and the flowers had grown and then died. Maybe once the leaves turned and the wind started to blow, I might love her. A little.

I waited for the familiar feelings of betrayal and guilt to come knock my door down. But they didn't.

“Sometimes thinking can steal the magic right out of a thing,” Grandma said.

I smiled, surprised. “Mama used to say that.”

Grandma smiled back and it crinkled her nose. “Did she, now?”

I stared into the crackling fire for a little while wondering how much more of Grandma Mama had brought with her and never told me about, what else I might discover along the way.

“Hop in bed now, it's late. We'll talk more in the morning.”

I climbed between the crisp sheets with Jo's earplugs. She'd told me they had to warm up a bit in order to get soft enough to fit, so I held them tight in my hand. The river was a faint rustle, almost like wind.

I expected Grandma to hurry off to bed, but she stayed in the chair by the fire, knitting something new. As I lay on the sofa in the moonlight, I listened to the lonely sound of Grandma's rocking chair and let the rhythm of it soothe me for a while before putting in the earplugs and going to sleep.