Now he’ll see that just like I’ve always been with him for his whole life, I’ll still be by his side. He can finally say my name properly. I think I’m going to miss the way he called me Birdie, now that he can pronounce Beverly without a problem.
Grandy has been calling me Birdie. I thought it was because a Robin is a bird, but he’s been calling me by his sister’s nickname. Has he been confusing me with Beverly because of his dementia? It’s like I’m getting to know Grandy when he was a little boy, at the same time I’m seeing him as an old man. I wished I could give that little boy a hug and make him feel better. I kept reading.
Maybe now I’ll take classes to become an art teacher. I don’t have to work at Mom and Dad’s store forever. Maybe I could even make some money drawing portraits. I’ll have to work on my technique. I can never get the noses quite right. Yesterday I sat with Andy and showed him how to draw a tiger. I don’t know where it is now. I drew a picture of him yesterday but I can’t find that either. I think he hid it somewhere.
He is always hiding things away like a squirrel burying an acorn. Maybe that runs in the family, since I hide my diary away too. I have to keep hiding it because he would probably scribble on it or tear out the pages or put it somewhere else where I'd never find it again.
I remembered my imaginary friend showing me how to draw a tiger. And Beverly was just like me with the noses. It’s hard to get them just right. What if Beverly’s spirit was my imaginary friend who sat with me while I learned to draw? She taught me to look where the light is coming from to know where to draw shadows.
I've been looking everywhere and I can't find my recipe card for Andy’s favorite lemon cookies. I think I remembered it right. I made a batch and just finished icing them. I used two teaspoons of lemon juice in the icing and I think it came out right. The icing just needs to harden for a while.
I'm going to leave now so I can be back before Andy gets home. I just looked again at the robin's nest. I have some old velvet scraps that would be so soft in that nest. Too bad you can't give a robin a gift.
I turned the page but it was blank.
"Don't worry Beverly, this totally counts," I said out loud.
Chapter 18
I closed the diary. I've never touched anything so important before. It's like Beverly came back to life to talk to me. I feel like my family just got a little bigger. Holding her diary felt like I was holding her beating heart in my hands. She wrote those words on the last day of her life. I closed my eyes and held the journal up to my forehead, as if I was trying to absorb a little more of her spirit
I had finally heard Beverly's story from her own words. She didn't abandon her little brother at all. She wasn't depressed. And that creep didn’t push her off the cliff. She was looking forward to the rest of her life.
When her family got rid of her things after she died, no one thought to keep looking for a diary, because they never even knew it existed.
Grandy’s sister didn't abandon him at all. Now he could see for himself how much she loved him, and he'd know that she didn't leave him on purpose.
He must have started calling me Birdie because that's what he used to call Beverly when he was little. His mind is starting to leave him now, his memories are going to go away.
It's funny that she called him Squirrel because he hid things away all the time. She's actually the one who hid this treasure so well it's lucky I ever found it before everything in the attic could have been ruined by more rain coming in the broken window.
I looked through the edge of the broken window and saw the tree branch on the ground below. That must have been the same tree that Beverly was looking at, where she saw the eggs in the robin’s nest. I got chills. Beyond the broken tree branch I could see Grandy sitting in a lawn chair looking out at the lake.
It was time to go downstairs and show the diary to Grandy. I went through the kitchen and I walked out the back door.
I sat down on a chair next to him and I held out the diary.
"What's this?" he said.
"It's your sister Beverly's diary. It's been hidden away in the floorboards of your attic ever since the day she died," I said.
He looked at me, confused.
"That's Birdie's diary?" he said. “And it was right here in the attic here for all these years?"
He shook his head.
"I don't believe it," he said.
"It's true. Look. Read what she said, starting here," I said.
I opened the journal and I handed it to him. I pointed to the beginning of the last entry.
I watched a bird flying over the lake while Grandy read Beverly’s words. When he read the last entry and turned to the next blank page, he just closed the book and put it in his lap.
He looked off into the distance and shook his head. "So, I've been wrong for all these years, for my whole life, about what my sister did?" he said.
"Now we know for sure that Beverly didn't mean to leave you,” I said. "She didn't try to kill herself. She was thinking about the future. She was making plans the day she died. It must have been an accident when slipped and fallen off that cliff, but she didn't go up there to jump on purpose.”
He sniffed and cleared his throat.
"Thank you, Robin," he whispered. "This means the world to me. I know I never talked about it, but I always did wonder why. I couldn't understand why she would leave me. I thought maybe I wasn't important enough to her to stick around."
I scooted my chair a little closer to him. He hugged the journal to his chest with one hand and reached over with the other to hold my hand.
I held his hand a lot when I was little, like when we were crossing the street, or when he reached out to steady me when I was stepping off the boat. I thought about who had held his hand when he was little. Beverly probably held his hand whenever they crossed the street, too.
He looked out over the water.
"You know, the funny thing about those cookies Birdie wrote about," Grandy said. "That's the only thing I remember about the day she disappeared. Those lemon cookies were my favorite. I don't think I've had any quite like that ever since. There was a tray of cookies on the kitchen table and no one was paying attention to me. The adults were in the living room talking. I kept going into the kitchen eating one after another. They tasted so good. Even though I didn't know yet that Birdie wasn't coming back, I knew she had baked them for me. I guess the cookies were the last gift I got from her."
He held up the journal and looked over at me.
"Until now," he said.
We sat there in the backyard near the dock together for a long time, not talking. I noticed the cool lake breeze, and I looked past the dock to the trees on the other side of the lake. The branches of the trees were swaying. The view across this lake was probably the same view that Beverly looked out at when she lived here.
If Dylan hadn’t found the artist’s case, maybe I wouldn’t have started having dreams about Beverly. I might never have known that there was a diary hidden away right in this house, right under the window that would probably leak the next time it rained.
I knew that things might not be the same with Grandy for very much longer, but maybe finding this journal will help heal some of the old wounds from Beverly’s death. I guess I finally found a good gift for him after all.
I heard the back door close. My mom came out and walked over toward us. "Hey, I’m back from the store. Do you guys feel like having some dinner?”
"Okel dokel," he said. Which is just so Grandy.
Chapter 19
Grandy didn't say much during dinner, but I noticed him looking out the window and smiling once in a while.
My mom read through the diary while Grandy and I ate. She leaned back in her chair.
“So Beverly just wanted to go and throw the ring away, but she must have slipped,” she said. "Robin, I can’t believe you found this. It's just like I always say, you never know where you're going to find hidden treasure."
I could h
ave told you she would say that.
"Oh yeah, that reminds me, I want to show you my art case," I said to Grandy.
I grabbed my mom's car keys off the counter and went to get the case out of the car. I came back in and my mom started washing the dishes. I put the art case on the table, and then I sat down across from Grandy. My mom came over drying her hands on a towel and stood behind him.
"Isn't that a nice old case, Dad?" my mom said. "Check out the robin's nest on it."
"I texted Robin when she found it that it’s just like the one my sister had," he said. "Did you find the secret hiding place?"
"You mean in the attic? Where I found the diary?" I asked.
He shook his head, and reached across the table and slid the art case close to him. His fingers were shaking a little, but that wasn't too unusual.
"No. Not in the attic. I'm gonna show you another secret hiding place," he said.
My mom and I looked at each other. I had a feeling he was going to be disappointed, and maybe I would be too. My stomach felt a little jumpy.
Grandy opened the lid of the case and then turned it around so that the back was facing him.
"I used to play with it when she wasn't looking. I used to love hiding stuff away," he said.
“Yeah, we heard something about that,” I laughed.
Grandy put his hands on each side of the bottom section and looked like he was pressing in on the sides. He grimaced.
"Do you need some help?" my mom said.
"Maybe just a butter knife?" he said.
I started to get up but my mom got to the drawer first and handed him a knife and sat down next to Grandy. I started filming him. He stuck the knife in a crack at the back of the case and ran it along the edge.
Then he started pulling out a small drawer. It came out about half an inch and got stuck.
"I didn't know there was a drawer in there!" I said. "Is anything in it?"
"Well, let's see if I can get it opened," Grandy said.
He wiggled the drawer to try to loosen it. He shoved the knife along the sides, then tried again. Then he pulled the drawer all the way out, with a loud squeak that made me flinch.
He looked into the drawer and pulled out a couple of small pieces of paper. One had a pretty good sketch of a little boy’s face. The other looked like a child’s drawing of a tiger. Then Grandy picked up an index card and handed it to me across the table. I looked at the card. It had a recipe handwritten on it in faded blue ink. At the top of the card it said "Lemon Cookies."
I stopped recording. I'm not sure that I was breathing. I reached for the diary, opened it and read Beverly’s words out loud: “I've been looking everywhere and I can't find my recipe card for Andy’s favorite lemon cookies."
"Wait a minute," my mom said. "Let me see the handwriting."
She looked at the recipe card.
"Oh my God,” she said. She put her hand on her heart.
“It’s the same handwriting. It even looks like the same pen. So this artist’s case doesn't just look like the one Beverly had, it actually is the same one?" she said. "And it just happened to show up at an antique show? And now we just happen to be able to prove it because Beverly wrote that she can't find her lemon cookie recipe? And that exact same recipe card has been in this art case hidden away in the attic for all these years?"
It was like my mom was explaining all this to herself. Then she turned to me.
"And this is a picture of Grandy that Beverly actually drew?” she said.
Beverly beat me to it. I had thought about drawing a picture of him as a kid, but that was one more thing I didn’t finish.
“This is insane! Tell me again how you actually found this case," she said.
"Dylan found it and showed it to me," I said. "He saw the robin’s nest painted on it and he thought I'd like it. We were just doing our scavenger hunt, and one of the things to find was something with our name on it, and he thought this was cool and it would count. I guess now it would count for something with a secret hiding place, too.”
My mom turned to Grandy.
“But I don't understand how it got to the antique fair. That's hundreds of miles away from here,” she said.
"After Birdie died, my family gave away all of her things,” Grandy said. “One day everything in her bedroom was gone. Nobody wanted to talk about her. Her stuff could have ended up anywhere.”
My mom put her hand on Grandy’s hand.
“I bet she’d be so happy right now to know that you found out the truth,” she said.
“Maybe she does know,” I said.
I remembered what Rosemary said about objects holding the energy of people who used to own them. Maybe when I got my hands on Beverly’s art case, her spirit was hanging around, nudging me in my dreams to find the diary.
Grandy clasped his hands behind his head and looked up at the ceiling.
“I’ll be darned,” he said.
We sat there at the table for a while without talking. My mom started looking at Beverly’s diary from the beginning. Grandy got up and went to the kitchen cabinet. He reached inside.
“Catch,” he said.
Then he tossed something to me. I caught it. It was a hard candy.
“It’s lemon,” he winked.
“Your favorite,” I smiled.
I unwrapped the candy and popped in in my mouth. I decided to send the video I took of Grandy showing us the hidden drawer to both Dylan and Amie.
“You won’t believe this,” I texted to them. “I found Beverly’s diary and now Grandy knows for sure that his sister never meant to leave him. It was an accident when she fell off that cliff. She left the house but she was planning to come right back after a hike. We also just realized that my art case actually belonged to Beverly too. It makes no sense but it’s true.”
“No way!” Amie wrote. “That’s the best gift he could ever get!”
“It’s like in Cinema Paradiso. He got a gift from someone who died a long time ago,” Dylan texted. “And it’s showing him what he never got a chance to see when he was a little kid.”
“Oh wow, you’re right.” I wrote. “No one knew that the diary was hidden in the attic the whole time. And just so you guys know, since the art case has a secret hiding place, I just found the last thing in the scavenger hunt. The final piece of the puzzle.”
“That definitely counts!” Amie wrote.
I took the phone and went outside. I noticed Norma’s purple irises next door. They keep blooming every year even though a new family moved in. This time looking at them didn’t make me feel like a failure. I just appreciated how they kept on surviving, even though they were a little bent over from the storm.
I walked to the end of the dock and sat down cross-legged. I looked out over the water.
Not only did the art case have a secret hiding place, but this whole house had a secret hiding place. Beverly was just keeping her diary private. She didn’t realize that she’d never come back to the house, or that Grandy would feel rejected for all these years, not knowing what really happened.
My phone buzzed. Dylan had sent a video. It started with the sound of an old-fashioned movie projector, and black-and-white footage of driving down the road, with the highway going by in the sideview mirror. The title came up. Retro Road Trip. Some music started playing. It sounded familiar.
Then the video showed clips showing rows of antique booths and the faces of some of the dealers and customers at the last fair. Then there I was stepping on my sunglasses, then sitting at the picnic table with Amie, then taking Amie’s picture from above the picnic table and showing it to her. Amie and me trying on hats and looking into the mirrors, then taking a couple of selfies. I guess Dylan did a lot more filming than I had noticed.
Amie doing her celebration dance when she found her name on the record album, then running away from the case of eyeballs. His camera shook when we were all laughing and running toward the raffle prize table.
There I was smiling a
t the whoosh of the Ferris wheel taking off, then looking out from the top. Amie waving to us from below. Me on the carnival swings holding Amie’s penguin with my hair flying around in the breeze.
Me drawing in my sketchbook. Amie poking the bonfire, then roasting a marshmallow.
I realized the background music Dylan used was from Cinema Paradiso. He put all of these clips together, just like at the end of the movie.
Then I saw the video clip I had just sent to him and Amie, of Grandy opening the hidden drawer in the art case. That was the last thing we needed to find in our scavenger hunt. He must have added that at the last minute. The video ended with the image of the robin’s nest painted on the art case. I smiled and bit my lip.
“That was amazing,” I texted to Dylan. “I think you have potential as a filmmaker.”
“Ha, thanks,” he wrote.
“But it’s a good thing I know you’re not a stalker,” I texted.
He wrote back. “Yeah, just kind of a fan.”
My phone buzzed with a text from Lauren.
"Freaking budget cuts. I'm fired even though they don't even pay me. I’m coming to the lake day after tomorrow,” she wrote.
I smiled. “Really? Okay, be prepared to bake some cookies for Grandy with me as soon as you get here,” I wrote. “I have a couple of things to show you.”
I put my phone down and lay down on the dock. I stretched out with my head at the edge and my hair hanging over. The ends of my hair dipped into the water and I could feel the waves pulling my hair back and forth while I looked up at the sky. The clouds looked like white feathers painted on the pink light of the sunset.
And I knew that, just like Beverly, and just like hidden treasure, the stars were already there just waiting to be seen.
Retro Road Trip Page 9