But then I imagined Miss Amanda opening up her arms for one of those big mother-hugs like I hadn’t had since before the wrongness started taking up residence in my own mama’s brain again—and my feet froze, rooted to the dirt of the playhouse floor.
Somehow, the idea of that hug almost hurt worse than being out here all alone.
“No,” I said. “I’ll stay here awhile longer. Till my daddy comes.”
Arden sighed. “If you say so.”
The wind picked up as she disappeared around the corner of the playhouse, howling all around me, a voice so sad it filled my throat up with tears.
Chapter Twenty
That morning dragged on and on. By the time the sun was halfway up to the top of the sky, it was so hot I had to crawl out of the playhouse again and sit, miserable and stinking like sweat, in the shadow of the wall, eyeing the sparkle of Hummingbird Bay and wishing more than ever that I’d brought a swimsuit.
The sky above me was moody, with thick stacked-up gray clouds that blew across the sun like sailboats. The wind was whipping my hair around my face and the thunder that had been whispering when I went to sleep the night before was booming now, some of the claps so big I could feel them echo up through my skin—but there wasn’t a single drop of rain. The playhouse quivered and quaked where I leaned against it, trembling in the wind like it was afraid of what the storm might bring.
All those storm clouds did was hold the heat in over me like a blanket on a hot summer night, till it was too hot to do anything but just lie there, staring out at the bay and wishing it was chilly midwinter and I was home, with Daddy beating me at checkers and Mama singing a song to Mylie. Daddy always says Mama’s singing voice is so sweet it can call the birds down from the trees, and it’s true—once, a long time ago, I came outside to where Mama and Daddy were fertilizing the corn and saw the fields all covered with birds who’d flown down to hear Mama singing as she worked.
That was the Mama I missed. The singing Mama, the Mama who’d read every single book of Harry Potter to me when I was ten and done all the voices, too, the Mama who told the lamest knock-knock jokes I’d ever heard and then laughed so hard afterward that she cried.
I kept glancing over to where my own house sat in the distance, wondering when Daddy would come marching over and tell me it was time to get on home. Was Mama better? The same?
I couldn’t let myself wonder if she might be even worse.
I chewed on my lip, watching so hard my eyes started to water.
It was past time for church to have started, I was sure of it. Way past time for Daddy to have come. My whole body buzzed on high alert, my ears straining for any sound that might have been Daddy.
But the only sounds in all the world, it seemed, were the sounds of the bay and that rainless thunder, rumbling up all the way to my scalp.
When Daddy finally came, his outline smudged and blurring in the heat haze as he strode toward the playhouse, I nearly collapsed in relief. I stood up real fast and waved, a smile creeping up onto my face for the first time in days.
I could feel it deep in my bones, that relief, a quiet whisper that things were mending themselves back to just the way they ought to be.
That feeling lasted exactly as long as it took Daddy to get near enough for me to see his face. There was a story written there that I couldn’t read—something a little sad and a little anxious that made my fingernails curl in so that they dug into my palms.
“Sweetie,” he said when he got close enough I could hear him, but I couldn’t say anything back. My tongue had forgotten how to work, right along with my heart and my breathing. Every part of me was still, still as the bay on a glassy-calm day, so motionless I might have shattered with a touch.
“Della,” Daddy said with the kind of quiet grown-ups have when they’re about to give you bad news, “I need to tell you something.”
I would have swallowed, or chewed my lip, or pulled my gaze away from Daddy’s, but not one cell anywhere on my body would listen to me when I told them to move.
“Your mama got pretty bad this morning. I had to call an ambulance, honey. They just left a few minutes ago, to take her up to the hospital in Alberta.”
The world burned up around me. My head spun with the heat until all I could think was rain, rain, rain, over and over, my mind so crowded with wishing for rain that I couldn’t spare a single thought for Mama. In the hospital. The mental hospital. In Alberta. Taken over by the schizophrenia until she wasn’t anybody’s mama anymore.
My eyes were so dry they felt like they’d got dust in them. Shouldn’t I be crying? Shouldn’t I be asking questions? Shouldn’t I be standing up and running up the highway as far as my legs could take me, running after that ambulance that was already driving Mama away from us?
“I’m so sorry, Della baby. I know this is what you were afraid of. I wish I’d had any other choice. She wouldn’t let Mylie eat, honey. She spent all morning keeping every bit of food or milk away, and I didn’t know till I’d come in from my chores. She kept shouting that she didn’t want anything to hurt Mylie, didn’t want anything to make her sick. When I tried to give your sister some breakfast, Mama scratched and hit and even tried to bite me.”
The hurting in Daddy’s voice was the worst thing I’d ever heard, so sharp it cut into me the way a shovel slices through dirt.
“I tried, Della. I tried to help her, but I just couldn’t.”
“Why’d she do it?” I asked finally, my voice reed-thin and trembling. A hot gust of wind wrapped itself around me, pelting my legs and arms with little grains of sand and dust, a hundred little fires on my skin.
“She didn’t mean to, honey, I promise. She just—” Daddy stopped, his face all crumpled into itself. “It’s her sickness. It puts wrong beliefs into her head, ones she can’t shake no matter how hard she tries. She believes that you and Mylie are in danger—from germs, from bad people, from just living life itself. She worried about you, being gone. Even when I told her you were at Arden’s, she worried.”
Daddy rubbed at his forehead. “I’ve got to head up to Alberta as soon as I can so that I can talk to the doctors who are gonna be admitting her. I’m taking Mylie up, too, and we’ll both stay at Grandma and Grandpa’s house tonight. The doctors will be spending today getting Mama settled down and comfortable, but she might be ready for visitors tomorrow or the next day. If you want, you can come stay at Grandma’s house, too, and go with me to visit Mama just as soon as we can.”
You had to be twelve to get a visitor’s pass to the unit they’d taken Mama to before, so in all those weeks when she’d been locked up in the hospital, I couldn’t see her. Still, I remembered the visiting hours as well as if they’d been tattooed on the back of my hand: three to five p.m., the times Daddy had left me with his parents every afternoon to go hold Mama’s hand and try to get her to remember who he was.
“Della?”
“No,” I said, the word whispering out of me to hang in the hazy air in front of us.
Twelve years old or no, I couldn’t do it.
Daddy nodded, like there was nothing wrong with me confessing I didn’t want to see my own mama. “If you’d rather stay here, Miss Amanda told me they’re happy to have you stay with them as long as you want.”
“No,” I said again.
“You gotta choose one, Della. You can’t keep on staying down here in the playhouse all by yourself. I need to know somebody’s looking out for you, even if you don’t come up to Alberta with me today.”
I thought of the noise and bustle at Arden’s house—the little girls screaming and chasing each other, Eli and Arden fighting, the baby crying. Maybe Mr. Ben would pull out his ukulele and sing “Clementine” and “Down by the Bay” to keep the little ones entertained. The Hawthornes didn’t have a TV, but it was always twice as loud and twice as fun there as at our house, even without one.
Being bored or lonely all by my own self seemed better than trying to hold myself together in all that happy
at the Hawthornes’ house.
“I just want to stay here,” I said. “Or go home.”
Daddy’s jaw tightened up impatiently. “That’s not even legal, honey. I can’t leave you here for a whole day and a night and another day without an adult to look after you.
“Besides,” he added as another gust of wind blew past us, rattling the plywood boards of the playhouse, “this shack is so unsafe Ben and I should never have let you girls build it. I can’t believe I let you talk me into leaving you to spend a night here at all. Now it’s time to buck up and come on over to Arden’s, or with me up to Alberta.”
“I don’t want to,” I said, not sure why the idea of being around people again made me want to cry more than knowing my own mama had just been picked up by an ambulance. Behind me, the playhouse creaked and swayed. “I just want to be by myself.”
Heat lightning crackled against the horizon, and the wind blew even stronger, pushing against the playhouse till you could see it leaning hard sideways.
“What the—” Daddy started to say, his words snatched away by the gust, but he couldn’t finish.
With one loud groan and a couple of snap-snap-snaps that made my ears ring, the playhouse collapsed.
I coughed, my mouth and lungs full of the dust it had kicked up as it hit the ground. The back of my right leg had a big old scrape from where the plywood roof had caught my skin as it went down; I could feel warm blood trickling down to my ankle.
“See?” Daddy said, his face as pale as the downy white heron that lurked in the shadow of a tree by the water’s edge. He stepped forward in one big stride and wrapped me up in his arms. “You better thank the Lord you weren’t in that thing just now, Della.”
I wasn’t sure who was shaking more, me or him.
“You sure you don’t want to come with me?” he asked, and I could feel his breath on my wind-whipped hair.
Even now, not ever wanting Daddy’s hug to end and with my heart still jumping from the shock of the playhouse falling over, I couldn’t make my legs want to move. I shook my head.
“All right, then,” he said, sounding like he wished he could change my mind. “I’ll walk you on up to the Hawthornes’ before Mylie and I take off. You’d better get that leg of yours cleaned up.”
Chapter Twenty-One
After I’d said good-bye to Daddy, Miss Amanda hugged me close to her, not seeming to notice or care that I was as stiff as the trunk of the apple tree outside their kitchen window. It was all I could do not to squirm away. I loved Miss Amanda so much she might as well have been my second mother, but right now, her hugging me felt exactly how I’d been afraid it would last night. All it did was hammer into me that it wasn’t my own mama there with her arms around my shoulders.
“I’m so sorry, Della,” Miss Amanda whispered. Over her head, I could see Daddy disappearing in the direction of my house.
Once, when I was seven or eight, I’d had the flu so bad it felt like it would char me into a pile of ash. Mama had sat beside my bed all night long, switching out cool washcloths on my forehead and running her fingers through my hair, gentle as a whisper. Miss Amanda’s words felt like those fingers—featherlight and so full of kindness and love it almost hurt.
“Would you like to talk about it?” Miss Amanda asked. Behind her glasses, the fair skin around her eyes was crinkled up in concern.
I shook my head. What was there to say?
She held me for a long moment, even though I hadn’t reached my arms back around her. When she finally pulled away, her eyes were bright, like there might be the smallest sparkle of tears in them.
Arden hugged me, too, and I managed to hug her back, but not to get my tongue unstuck. All that long, hot day I stayed silent, listening to the thunder that rumbled along the edges of Maryville, watching as Mr. Ben drove his pickup through the field to load up the splintered plywood that had been the playhouse and take it to the dump. I stayed so small and quiet in Arden’s big and noisy family that I went pale and light, like fog. I choked down lunch and dinner, and when the sunset had flamed red against the front windows of the house and Miss Amanda told me and Arden that it was time to get ready for bed, I didn’t say a word.
There were already sheets on an extra mattress on the floor by Arden’s bed for me to sleep on. The little girls had gone to bed hours before, their heads pressed together as they slept on the other side of the bedroom now—sleeping was the only time Rena and Charlotte could go two minutes without fighting.
“I’m glad you’re here, Della,” Arden whispered after we’d both climbed into bed.
“You’re glad I’m here?” The first words I’d spoken all day long pulled out of me. Dry wind howled louder around Arden’s house, like it was looking for a way inside.
“I don’t mean it like that,” Arden said quickly. “I’m not glad your mama had to go to the hospital. I’m not glad for any of that. I’m just—”
“I hate it here. I wish I was home.” I curled my fingers around the edge of my sheet so hard I could feel the press of my nails through the fabric. “You don’t get it, Arden. You don’t get it at all. Your family is so perfect, and nothing bad ever happens to y’all.”
It was mean, I knew it. Still, right there in that dark bedroom, I was so mad I could feel it dripping all down my skin like a red blush, hot and painful. Outside, thunder boomed.
“You think I don’t know what it’s like to have a family that sticks out in this town like a sore thumb?” Arden asked, forgetting to whisper for a moment. Charlotte stirred and whimpered on the bed on the other side of the room.
“It’s not the same.”
“But it’s still hard!”
I was sure that any minute my skin would light on fire, burned up by the anger boiling my blood. My whisper voice was like a snake, sharp and hissing. “I can’t believe you’d even say that. You couldn’t possibly understand what my family is like, Arden Hawthorne.”
“I’m trying to understand! But it’s awfully hard to do that when you and your daddy are so darn proud you won’t even tell anyone else in the world what’s going on with your mama. Do you have any idea how hard it was for me to keep that secret for you? Do your grandma and grandpa Kelly even know?”
I didn’t answer.
“Didn’t think so,” Arden said.
After a long, long minute where neither one of us said anything at all, she turned around and pulled the sheet up around her shoulders, even though it was hotter in there than the air-conditioning could possibly fix.
There was a Bee Story that Mama had told to me, and that I’d told to Mylie, at least a dozen times. It was about two sisters who went everywhere together, as much a part of each other as the leaves were a part of the trees. Except one day they quarreled over something—and that argument got so big and so sharp that it took up more and more space between them, till they couldn’t even go near each other anymore. They’d gone on like that for years, until one day somebody had given them a jar of Quigley honey, and the honey had filled them both up with so much sweet happiness that they couldn’t even remember why they’d fought in the first place, and that big sharp thing between them poofed right out of existence.
I’d known Arden my whole entire life, and never once had any words come between us that felt as hard and hurtful as the few we’d just exchanged. Lying there on that mattress, I felt the fear of it creeping over me like the kudzu that twined over the trees beside the highway. If I didn’t have Arden, I’d be like one hand without the other, broken off and incomplete, only half of myself.
I lay awake for a long time, listening to the wind and the thunder take turns trying to be the loudest, howling around the house without a single drop of rain.
I woke early the next morning, when the sky outside was still gray-purple. The wind had gone away during the night and left the air around Arden’s house flat and lifeless, but the thunder was still out there, rumbling off at the corner of the world like a broken promise.
I slipped off my
mattress and out of Arden’s bedroom. I could hear Miss Amanda murmuring to baby Rowan in her own room, but all the lights were off and nobody else was about. It was strange, being here all by myself in the barely day hours. I’d slept over at Arden’s house before, of course, but it had never felt like this, like I was just a shadow at the edge of their lives, like my own home was a million miles away instead of just down the road.
I put on my shoes and went out the front door as quiet as I could. The western horizon was still dark, the first rays of sun only just starting to peek up over the house behind me. The air around me was hot and heavy with raindrops that couldn’t figure out how to fall.
I sat down on Arden’s front step, where the concrete was still cool against my legs.
Fifteen days. It had only been fifteen days since that night I’d come in to find Mama in the kitchen cutting out watermelon seeds like her salvation depended on it. It had been hardly more than two weeks since all those small signs, those little out-of-place things that had come out of Mama’s mouth since Mylie was born, had gotten impossible to ignore.
And in all that time, nothing I’d done had made a lick of difference.
A semitruck blew past on the highway, louder than the thunder, its own little windstorm roaring behind it—the only thing moving in that squashed-feeling morning.
I rubbed my face, just like Daddy did when he was feeling stressed, and let my head drop into my hands. The world pressed down on me, with the weight of the whole summer rolled up into one big crush.
Mama was sick, and nothing I or the doctors or anyone had done had fixed her. She’d gotten so bad she’d even lost sight of the fact that she wasn’t normal. She’d up and got rid of her pills—the one thing that had ever made her regular, made her real, in my whole life.
I hadn’t cried when Daddy had come to tell me the news yesterday morning. I hadn’t cried since then, either. Distantly, I wondered if something was wrong with me. Who didn’t cry when their own mama got taken up to the hospital in an ambulance?
Where the Watermelons Grow Page 12