The Secret Hum of a Daisy (19 page)

The Secret Hum

of a Daisy

Jo found me
at my locker after school. “Where did you disappear to at lunch? I wanted you to tell everyone about Daisy being born. Plus they wanted to know how you came up with the name and I sort of thought that was private, so I didn't tell.”

“You were there when she was born. Why didn't you tell them yourself?”

“She's your horse. Plus you would have told it better.”

“How do you know?”

“Are you mad about something?”

I got busy shoving books and notebooks into my backpack. “No. Yes. I don't know.”

Jo put her hand on my arm. “What's wrong?”

I worked hard to push the words out. “Where will I fit now that you and Beth and Ginger are friends again?”

Jo shrugged. “Right here with us, I guess. You're not all that special, you know.” But she said it with a smile.

So I smiled too. “Thanks for not telling.”

“Come on. And no pouting. Beth is coming and we don't want to get her going with her slogans. Once she gets going, she doesn't stop.”

• • •

It was sprinkling when Grandma picked me up from school.

“Will you take me to the cemetery?” I asked. I figured it was time to check on Mama, to see my father's grave. Maybe I would know what to think about everything once I was there with them. All together.

Grandma only hesitated a beat. “Of course.”

When she parked in the small cemetery lot, I thought of Mama's funeral. How so much had changed in the six weeks since she died. I wondered what had happened to the girl who moved in all those days ago. If I would miss her.

We stopped at Mama's grave first. It had been perfectly maintained. Swept of leaves and weeds, flowers planted, dust brushed off her headstone. I thought about Grandma wearing her gardening uniform every morning when she dropped me off at school.

“You've been coming here too,” I said.

She nodded and then plucked a tiny weed that was growing up alongside Mama's name. Grandpa's headstone was right beside hers. The cemetery grass was lush and green.

“I like to think they're together somewhere,” Grandma said.

I looked into the sky, the clouds thinning and pulling apart, reminding me of eating cotton candy. The drizzle was gone and the sun peeked out.

“Do you believe in heaven?” I asked.

“I do.”

“Just like that?”

She thought it over. “Yes.”

“What does it look like?”

“I don't know. My idea of it changes.” Grandma took a small soft-bristled clean-up brush out of her purse and swept some dust off Grandpa's headstone.

“So there's not a blueprint somewhere?”

Grandma smiled. “Some people believe there's a blueprint. But I like to think that God, or whoever is in charge, doesn't dabble in blueprints.”

I borrowed Grandma's brush and cleaned off Mama's headstone, tracing my finger along the crane I'd chosen, carved into the stone.

“Do you get paid for having me live with you?”

“Who told you that?” Grandma said, startled. She touched the cross at her neck.

“Lacey.”

She took a Safeway plastic grocery bag out of her black purse and tossed the weeds into it. “Lacey misses you. Wants you to come back.”

“She does.”

Grandma was quiet, maybe letting that idea sink in.

“I get money every month from your mama's social security. It's not much, but it's going into a bank account for your college education.”

“So you're not taking care of me for the money?”

“I'd have taken you if I had to
pay
money.”

That made me smile.

After we'd spent some time with Mama, I asked Grandma to take me to my father's grave. She walked me to a small area shaded by oaks, a white picket fence just a few feet away.

“His parents are here. Margery had them all buried together.”

A poem was engraved on the family headstone.

A solitary bird, hollow it flew

Through a haze of months marked by the moon

Come to a meadow, shiny with dew

Where hollow bones sang, and deep inside grew

The secret hum of a daisy in June.

“Your mama picked it. Scott was such a wonderful writer.”

Of course. Daddy had written the poem, not Mama. I kneeled down and laid my cheek against the stone. My birthday was in June. Maybe I was the daisy, which would have made Mama the meadow and Daddy the solitary bird. We fit together like a puzzle.

I turned to look at Grandma. Her hair was still loose, and it floated around her face and down her back. She got out her clean-up brush again and swept Daddy's family grave while I took the number 4 out of my pocket.

“It was you, wasn't it? You set the clues.”

I so wanted her to give me a puzzled look and tell me she didn't know what I was talking about.

“Your grandfather used to leave little treasure hunts for your mama when he'd go overnight on cabinet installs. I'd get her to follow it when Thomas was on his way back home. I didn't know if she did treasure hunts with you or not, but I figured I'd give it a try.”

I wanted to yell at her. To tell her that she tricked me and I'd never trust her. I had to sit down for a minute and let it all sink in. Right there in the wet grass.

“Did anyone else know?”

“They were all there if you needed them. Lou and Mel, Margery, Sheriff Bergum.”

So there had been help along the way, just like there'd always been with Mama. I just didn't know it.

“What does the number four mean?”

“Do you really want me to give you the answer?”

I thought it over and sighed. “I suppose not.”

Grandma shrugged. “I didn't know what else to do.”

“You're the grandma; you should have known.” Even as I said it, I realized that sometimes people did what they could, not what they should, and I didn't think that was reason enough to be mad.

Whatever magic there'd been was gone. I felt it fly off, like Mama kept doing in my dreams.

• • •

After spending some time with Daisy, there was a lot to think about that night as I read through every last page in my father's writing folder, so much of it reminding me of Robert Frost. Daddy didn't shy away from the sadness in things the way Mama did, and that's when I understood there were two kinds of beauty. One you recognized with your eye, like watching a new horse being born, and one you recognized with some deep place inside yourself that was hurting. Mama drifted toward the first, and Daddy the second, and together, they made me.

After a while, I tinkered with Mama's unfinished crane. When I couldn't make any of the pieces work, I got up to pace, tired of my own deep-down hurting, the deep, hard scratching that wouldn't stop.

Writing would help me through it, just like it always had. And where I used to think that writing was like the little hole in a teakettle to let out steam, I figured it was more than that. I hoped the hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of words I wrote down would help me fill the empty place left by Mama and make me whole.

I picked up Mrs. Snickels's sketchbook and flipped to a blank page in the middle, trying to ignore my feeling that I was about to change everything by writing down something about After. But I couldn't keep it locked up anymore.

I took a pencil and let the words come. All those words about Mama and the night she died that I'd been stuffing down. When they were all out, I folded that piece of paper into a tight square and shoved it in my pocket.

That was how I saved myself.

World

Peace

The dream was familiar.
Though, this time, Mama wasn't sitting on the slab of rock in the middle of the river. She sat cross-legged on the short, rocky beach, wings spread wide. The cranes were there on the bank, the way they had been the morning she died. She reached her hand out to me, but no matter how many steps I took, I couldn't get to her.

Eventually, she stood up and walked toward me. Taking my hand, she led me back to her rocky perch and we sat side by side, watching the pale yellow sun rise over the hills in the distance.

The birds came then. All those metal birds she'd put together over the course of my life. Origami cranes too. They flew around her and off into the sky, the brightness of morning shining off their wings. I held on to Mama. Tight. Feeling the coolness of her hand, memorizing it.

And then she was gone, up and away, following her birds.

I woke up, unsure of where I was. I stared at the ceiling, counting deep breaths, remembering I was at Jo's. Sleeping on her dusty trundle. The baby monitor next to my head so we could hear Daisy. A compromise Mrs. Brannigan came up with when she caught Jo and me sneaking out in the middle of the night.

After my breathing was under control, I noticed the door was ajar, a dim light coming through. Jo wasn't in bed.

I walked quietly down the hall toward the light coming from Max's room and stood outside his usually closed-tight door, scared at what I'd find.

I pushed the door open with one finger. Max stood to the side of his bed, and Jo was wrapping him with more bandages. They didn't notice me.

“That's good,” Max whispered.

“No way you'll come unwrapped again,” Jo said.

And then my eye was drawn upward toward his high ceiling, where hundreds of origami cranes hung down like twinkling stars. Jo and Max looked toward the door.

“I'm sorry, Grace, we didn't mean to wake you,” Jo said as she pulled the bandages tighter. Max looked straight at me.

When Jo finished, Max climbed into bed. She sat down beside him, humming softly. After a minute, she got up and came toward the door.

“Grace,” Max said.

“It's late,” Jo said.

“Just for a minute.”

“Oh, all right,” Jo said. “I'll be downstairs.”

I took Jo's place on the edge of Max's bed.

“Jo doesn't like to face things,” he said. “It's better to face things. That's what Mom says. Don't try and make stuff up, and don't ignore it. Face it.”

He set a crane in my hand.

I looked at the crane sitting there on my palm, like I had that first day of school, letting myself think of Mama, of sitting on the porch at Mrs. Greene's and watching the cranes fly home.

“Why did you leave them for me?”

He shrugged his little mummy shoulders. “I left them for lots of people. I figured you all needed them more than I did.”

“My first day of school was better because of you,” I said.

Max smiled. Or, at least, I thought he did. His bandages moved up. “Why?”

“That was when I found the silver crane in the church bushes.”

“I didn't do that. I snuck one into Mr. Flinch's class. The one made from newspaper.”

“The little silver one. Looked like it was made out of a gum wrapper, only bigger?”

“Nope. Don't even remember one like that. I take them down from my ceiling one by one. Jo made them for me.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I'm sure,” Max said. And with that, he scootched under the covers and closed his eyes. He was breathing deep and steady in no time.

• • •

I figured the first-day-of-school crane must have been Grandma's doing as I went downstairs, and decided to ask her about it later. There was a dim night-light shaped like a horse plugged into the wall in the kitchen. Jo was busy fixing hot chocolate, her short hair sticking straight up on one side. I pulled out a chair and sat down, setting the baby monitor on the kitchen table.

“I knew about Sadako's cranes from Mr. Flinch's project. When Max was sick, it seemed like something I could do instead of just sit around waiting,” Jo said.

She poured the chocolate into two mugs and sat down across from me. “At first Max didn't respond to the treatments, but by the time I'd finished the thousand, he was getting better, so I couldn't stop, because then what would happen? There are two Hefty bags full out in the garage. Every day I have to fold a crane.”

“He needs that entombment party.”

“You know why we won't do that.”

I nodded. “I think he wants to be prepared. For everything.”

“I don't want him to be prepared. I want him to keep fighting.”

“He can do both.”

She pushed her chocolate away. “Is a party supposed to make it easier?”

“I don't think it's about easy or hard. It's about what Max needs to get through it for himself. You and Sadako have your cranes, and Max has his entombment party.”

And I had Mama's signs, even though I made them up. Jo was quiet. We all did weird things to get us through it. The trick seemed to be figuring out when to stop.

“Let's consult the jars,” Mrs. Brannigan said out of the shadows.

She walked over to the bookshelf in the living room and closed her eyes, running her hands through the air. She grabbed a misshapen pottery jar with a wide cork lid.

“Mom, this isn't the time to find out where your keys were last Tuesday or how to make grandma's rhubarb pie,” Jo said.

Mrs. Brannigan sat down next to Jo and set the jar on the table. “It's not always about what I pull out of the jar. It's about reminding myself that I've been lost before, and found a way through it.”

She pushed the jar toward me. “Let's see what you pull out.”

I looked at the jar for a long time thinking of my beach sand before reaching inside and closing my hand around what felt like the right one.

I carefully unfolded the paper and read, “‘Rasputin.'”

“See?” Jo said, but she was smiling.

She dug around in the jar and fished out a piece of yellow lined paper.
Albert Einstein,
it said.

“Maybe Grace is right about the party, Mom. Besides, it's what Einstein would want,” Jo said, and we tried to laugh quietly.

“How can I argue with Einstein?” Mrs. Brannigan said. She pulled out
Grilled Cheese, Six Months,
and
Mississippi.

In five minutes, we were giggling loud enough to bring Mr. Brannigan down the stairs, hair sticking up seven different ways. “Did you find the answer to world peace?”

World peace, I tell you.