The Secret Hum of a Daisy (17 page)

One and

the Same

Everything changed
three days later when I was doing homework at the breakfast table, staring out the window at the sun slanting through the trees, trying to work a math problem using the Pythagorean theorem, when Grandma's words came back to me.

She always hid something in her birds.

Which, of course, I knew. So why would the fountain be any different?

Grandma was busy at the sink, scrubbing something that probably didn't need to be scrubbed, when I almost shouted, “Did Mama hide something in the fountain?”

She turned around to look at me, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “That's a good question.”

I stood up fast, almost knocking the chair over. “Can you take me there?”

“Right now?” Grandma said.

“It's important.”

She gave me the once-over. “This wouldn't have anything to do with mischievous raccoons, would it?”

It was a fair question since the only thing separating me from a mischievous raccoon up until now was a coat of fur and a bushy tail. So I didn't get mad. “It's just something I have to do.”

With that, Grandma went into the mudroom and put on a sweater instead of her lumberman jacket and grabbed her big black purse.

As we pulled onto Ridge Road, Beauty stood near the fence line and nodded as though wishing me luck.

• • •

Grandma barely had the car stopped when I leaped out and started running, kicking up gravel as I went. I wasn't sure what I'd find, but deep down, I knew I was on the right track.

I studied the fountain from every angle, walking around people sprawled on the grass, looking for levers or empty spaces or anything that might be a hiding place. When I didn't see anything obvious, I read the Robert Frost quote on the plaque again.

Where the bird was before it flew,

Where the flower was before it grew,

Where bird and flower were one and the same.

“It was your mother's favorite poem. She told me it made her think about home.” Grandma walked up behind me, dabbing a handkerchief to her brow, just like the one she'd given me all those days ago at Mama's funeral. The sun was just above the tree line, about to fall into leafy shade. “She thought it was a secret, but I knew she put it there for your dad. He was fond of Robert Frost.”

“Mama always read it before we moved.”

Maybe the poem got her thinking about what home should feel like and so she'd know it once she got there. A thought niggled at me, though, like I was missing something important. I tried hard not to get mad at Mama all over again, telling myself she had no idea she'd be gone so soon, leaving me with a pile of unanswerable questions.

“Where do you think she might have put a hiding place?” Grandma said. She held a hand to her eyes, shading them from the sun. It was the first time I noticed she wore a wedding ring. A plain gold band.

“We can't get inside the metal. So that leaves the rocks. Maybe one of them is loose?”

Grandma started to poke at the rocks and mortar. She went in an orderly line starting at the top and working her way down. I scooted in beside her and did the same thing. A few people watched us from their chairs in the grass. Kids laughed in the distance, flying a parrot kite. A dog barked.

She picked weeds as we went and I did, too, watching her so I knew the difference between a regular old blade of grass and a weed.

“So you were a ballerina?”

Grandma nodded. “I danced in the San Francisco Ballet. But then I met your grandfather just before he shipped out to Vietnam in 1972 and it changed everything.”

“Vietnam! That's ancient history!” I said.

Grandma smiled. “He swept me clear off my pointe shoes, romancing me for two straight weeks before he shipped out. We wrote to each other over the next year and he swore if he made it out alive, he'd marry me.

“It wasn't until he actually showed up at my tiny apartment that I realized he was serious. It was the first and only crazy thing I've ever done in my life. But I just had this deep-down feeling that it was the right thing to do. I gave up dancing to be with your grandfather, and I have never looked back.”

I poked and she poked and I thought about love and how it makes you feel clicked open, like a key turned in a lock. Once you knew, you just knew.

“So why didn't you let Mama have that? She loved my dad.”

Grandma sat back on the grass and rubbed her forehead, leaving a smudge of dirt. “Sometimes being a mother makes you blind. You think you know what's best and refuse to see any other way.”

I tried not to get all worked up again, so I moved away from Grandma to give myself some room. I concentrated on the mineral smell of the fountain water and the crispy softness of a blade of grass. After a few deep breaths, I found a thin gap around a long, flat stone. “I found something!” I shouted. Grandma came over and crouched beside me.

The stone was easy to pull free from the deep opening. Once it was out, we both sat there looking into the darkness of the hole.

“I'll be darned,” she said.

I reached in and touched something flat and metal. I pulled out an old, tarnished number 4. I scoured the inside of the opening again, looking for more. Looking for something I might understand.

“What's that?”

I held the number flat on my hand, feeling wobbly all over. “I have no idea.”

• • •

Once we got back to Grandma's house and she went out to do her gardening, I laid everything out—all my treasure-hunting clues—on the coffee table next to my sofa-bed. Mama's unfinished bird, the postcard of Threads, the map and poem on the back of Mama's flyers, the spoon from the crane in the meadow, and the mysterious number 4.

I slipped the number 4 in my pocket and each of the other pieces into the Kerr jar with the origami cranes. I tucked the jar behind the sofa and then picked up Robert Frost so I could look over “In a Vale.” Something about the poem had stayed with me.

When I got to the stanza that Mama had quoted on her plaque, I realized what it was. She'd left the first two lines off.

Before the last went, heavy with dew,

Back to the place from which she came—

Where the bird was before it flew,

Where the flower was before it grew,

Where bird and flower were one and the same.

Mama had read that poem so many times, I almost knew it by heart. Because I'd always been sad when she'd read it, thinking of the move to come, I'd never thought about it having another meaning.

Back to the place from which she came.

She'd recite the poem in the days before we'd leave, over and over again. Those words meant something to her, and while I always took them to mean leaving, now I wondered.

Had she been trying to come home all along?

Beginnings

Early Saturday morning,
after tossing and turning all night, I finally gave up on sleep, put on boots, and grabbed a flashlight. I left a note for Grandma and walked the trail, eventually finding the meadow, patches of white glowing in the early dusk.

Brand-new daisies.

I settled on the edge of the rocky beach. I couldn't keep away the crushing memories, though, so I tried to tell myself this wasn't really the same river since they had different names. It didn't even look or sound like the same river, and it wouldn't have power over me.

I said this to myself over and over until it turned into a wobbly sort of belief. When the sky finally brightened, I reached in my pocket for the picture of Mama and Daddy, held it by the edges, and walked the meadow in careful circles until I finally came to what looked like the place where they'd posed. It was where the crane now stood, under a taller pine.

The idea that Mama might have been trying to come home had been with me all night, so I went over what I knew. She'd started acting strange when she saw those sandhill cranes migrating home back in February. Quiet, moody, not her usual sunshiny self. Mrs. Greene's words came back to me.
When I tried to ask her why she was leaving, she said she couldn't talk about it, that she might lose her nerve.

I thought over our last few moves. Each one had gotten us closer and closer to Auburn Valley, with Mrs. Greene's being just an hour away.

So many clues and no answers. I felt like I was going crazy.

I walked over to the crane and rested my ear against the hollow body again. Mama had told me it wasn't the birds with hopes for the future but the ones with sorrows inside that sold more often. People were drawn to them at the local farmers' markets or tiny art festivals we'd sell them in. Those people held them close—their own sorrows scratching at them maybe, itching for a way out—until they'd reach in their pockets and pay whatever Mama was asking. Not that she ever asked for much.

But maybe it wasn't the sorrows people were drawn to, but the idea of letting them go.

“Grace!”

I was about stunned right out of my shoes to see Grandma at the edge of the meadow. She bent over, out of breath, putting one hand on each knee. “Thank goodness,” she gasped. “Come on, it's Beauty. She's having her baby.”

“Now?”

“Go on, run ahead. I'll be right behind you.”

I shoved the picture back into my pocket and took off at top speed down the trail, through Grandma's garden and the Brannigans' pasture.

Jo was standing just outside the barn door filming me coming toward her. She clicked off as I skidded to a stop, and took my hand.

“I'm so glad you made it in time!” Jo said quietly. She put a finger to her lips and led me to the doorway of the stall. “It'll be any time now.”

Beauty turned around a few times and then lay down in the hay, grunting and working to get her baby out while we all stood around the opening and sides of her stall, useless as stumps. Grandma came in the barn eventually and stood behind me. I could feel her there, just a wisp of air between us.

“Push, Beauty, push,” Jo whispered.

We all watched, breathless, as one leg worked its way out. Mr. Brannigan went into the stall and pulled on that leg until the next one came, the head down between the knees, all covered in a thick white film. Then he broke the film and cleared it away from the foal's face and nose.

With one last push, the baby was out. A girl. She was mostly white with a few gray splotches, like her mama, and she lay on her side, breathing heavy, as though she'd just run a long way.

“Grace, come here,” Mr. Brannigan said.

I walked slowly toward Beauty and the tiny horse that was all legs and knobby knees. Mr. Brannigan told me to kneel right beside the foal.

“Rub her face.” He handed me a towel. “That's right. Just like that. And rub your hands along her body and legs.”

“She's so warm,” I said.

“She needs to know you,” he said.

I looked at him, and then at Grandma. With a slight nod of her head, I suddenly realized this little baby thing, this tiny bit of a horse, was mine.

Mine.

I had to sit down for a second and take deep breaths to keep myself from falling all to pieces right there in front of everyone.

A long time went by as the foal moved and was still by turns, eventually thumping around in the hay as she tried to get her legs underneath her. I figured it takes a while to stand on your own for the very first time.

Then Beauty stood, talking in a soft nicker as she licked her new baby. Mr. Brannigan showed me how to take milk from Beauty on my fingers and put them in the foal's mouth. She nursed easily after that and Mr. Brannigan said that's all you can ask for in a new foal.

“What will you name her?” Grandma said.

“Daisy,” I said.

“Daisy, hmmmm,” Mr. Brannigan said. “That has a good, solid ring to it.”

“I like it,” Jo said. “Plus, she looks like a daisy.”

Grandma nodded as though that made perfect sense.

• • •

Because it was Saturday, Jo and I were allowed to stay up as late as we wanted to watch Beauty and Daisy. As long as we didn't interfere with nature taking its course and we did some homework.

“You can count on us, Daddy.” Jo gave him a salute.

We hunkered down in the hayloft, which looked in on Beauty's stall. We had all the survival supplies we'd need: beach chairs, a bag of potato chips, two sodas, and my tripod flashlight. I even brought my pad from Mrs. Snickels so I could sketch Daisy.

At dinnertime, Mrs. Brannigan brought out a feast of meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and green beans, with apple pie for dessert, including ice cream.

“Beth called. Again,” she said, brow furrowed.

Jo didn't say anything and Mrs. Brannigan shook her head as she left.

“Why don't you want to make up with your friends?” I said.

She shrugged. “They see Max is okay now, with all his hair grown back, and they don't get why I feel like the Other Side is just waiting for us to make one wrong move, change its mind, and take him. They say I'm morbid.”

“Is that why you don't want to give him his party?”

“Mom says we'd be tempting fate. Sort of like walking alone at night. Chances are you'll be okay. But there's always a chance you could be murdered by a serial killer. So why risk it?”

“So Max can't have his party because you're afraid of serial killers?” I said.

“Something like that.”

“I totally get it.”

An hour or so later, Mrs. Brannigan brought out sleeping bags, pillows, and blankets and helped us make a cozy fort for ourselves. She gave us each a forehead kiss and then took our paper plates and trash before climbing down the ladder.

“Max wants to say good night,” Mrs. Brannigan said from the stall floor before heading down the driveway toward the house.

“He's going to want to sleep out here with us,” Jo said to me. Her fears about the Other Side taking Max were written there all over her face.

“I don't mind if you don't,” I said.

“It's just that sometimes he comes and gets me in the night instead of bothering Mom. She's a little strange if she doesn't get all her sleep. One time, when Max was sick, Daddy opened the coat closet to get a jacket and found her just standing there. She said she was taking a break.”

We laughed, even though it really wasn't funny.

“I've got a million of them,” she said.

After we stopped laughing, we just sat there for a while, quiet. Beauty lay down and Daisy tucked in the hay beside her.

“Why did you pick the name Daisy?” Jo asked.

Maybe it was the peacefulness of the barn or the fact that I finally had something that truly belonged to me, or maybe it was Jo sharing her worries about Max and her friends, but my usual need to keep things to myself was gone for a second.

“Mama used to tell me this story. Well, it's not really a story, I guess, as much as an idea.”

Jo leaned forward, elbows on knees, and gave me her full attention.

“It's silly. Never mind. My mom just really loved daisies.”

“No way, Grace. You don't get off that easy.” She ticked off her fingers. “I told you that my brother does an almost constant impersonation of King Tut
before
you found out on your own, that we have the psychic ability to talk to God through our Answer Jars, and that my mother sometimes stands in the closet when she needs a break. You can tell me one silly thing.”

I put up my hands in surrender. “Okay, okay! She used to tell me that daisies spoke in a sort of song. A secret hum that birds could feel deep in their bones and it drew them close. There, I told you it was silly.”

Jo nodded her head, looking impressed. “That's good. Really good.”

And then for some reason we cracked up again. When we were done, we watched Daisy nurse for a while.

“So, I have something to ask you,” Jo said. “Is there any way you might get your grandma to give me an interview for the documentary?”

“I can try.”

Max appeared in the doorway carrying a sleeping bag and a pillow.

Jo sighed with exasperation. “Come on, Tut. Get on up here,” she said.

I think there's a moment in a long stream of moments when you first know someone, and you are finding your way around their quirks, kinks, and general person-ness, that they go from being a new person to a friend. When Jo snuggled her brother into the heavy down of his sleeping bag, then tucked a cowlick of hair into his mummy bandages, all while telling him he was a pain in the butt, I figured that was the moment.

Just like that.