Where the Watermelons Grow

by Cindy Baldwin

  I ate some more honey, watching the rain come down out the windows and trying not to think too much. Why on earth had I followed up the bad idea of running away with the even worse idea of doing it again? Would Miss Amanda ever forgive me? Did Daddy know what I’d done?

  Somehow, here in Miss Lorena’s car with the rain pattering down on the roof above me, the honey in my little jar seemed much less magical than it had when I’d been sitting in the Bee Lady’s kitchen. How in blazes was honey supposed to fix anything at all, when things were this broken?

  And, said a tiny voice in the back of my mind that I couldn’t shut up even though I didn’t want to listen, when I broke them in the first place?

  The sound of a tap on my window made me jump. Thomas stood outside it, his bronze skin shining with rainwater and a smile on his face. I rolled it down and he poked his head in.

  “Mama said you were waiting out here. Thought I’d come say hi. I heard a rumor you’d run away.”

  My cheeks burned red.

  “Anyway, I’m glad you’re back,” Thomas went on. “I meant what I said before about getting you to tutor me sometime. I still can’t make heads or tails of algebra. And somebody’s going to need to be around to help Mylie when she gets bigger, too. Skill with numbers is hard to come by. Plus, things around your place were a lot quieter with you gone. I thought your daddy was gonna up and forget how to talk.”

  I blushed even deeper, but couldn’t help my lips twitching up into a little smile, either.

  “Oh, and I’ve got something for you, too, Della. I nearly forgot.” Thomas put a little blue paperback book through the window and onto my lap. It was called The Graveyard Book, and on the front there was a strange-looking tombstone and a shiny gold medal.

  “It’s one of my favorites,” he said. “I read it a lot last year, after my daddy—well.” He shrugged. “It’s kind of different. It’s all about families, though, families that don’t always look regular. I figured you might need something like that yourself right now.”

  “Thanks,” I said, tracing the medal.

  “No problem. It’s yours as long as you want to keep it. See ya,” he said, waving as he ducked back out of the car, before he turned to jog down the driveway toward the house again.

  His minute-long visit had added something different to the jumble of feelings inside of me: swirling through the worry and the sadness and the knotting in my insides was a tiny springtime bloom, like the finger-long purple crocuses that popped up all around our front porch step in February, before the sun had even come back into the sky.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  I’d eaten a lot more of the honey by the time Miss Lorena came back, spooning it into my mouth with my finger and not even bothering to savor it anymore. My stomach was starting to feel strange, a little bit achy and a little bit floaty, and I still wasn’t any closer to knowing what to do about Mama.

  “The honey brings out the strength that’s already there,” Miss Tabitha had said when she’d handed it to me.

  But what if there wasn’t any strength in me to be brought out at all?

  “Okay,” said Miss Lorena, hopping back into the driver’s seat and then turning around to look at me, her dark eyes touched all through with gold. “Now, Miss Della, you fill me in.”

  All the crocus happiness that Thomas had carried with him earlier sucked out of me so fast it made me dizzy. I opened my mouth but couldn’t get any words past the thickness in my throat.

  “Oh, sweet girl,” said Miss Lorena, “you just take your time. We can sit in this old driveway as long as you need. What’s going on?”

  This time the tears came on slow but strong, until my whole body was shaking with sobs like the thunder that still echoed, far away where the sky dipped down to kiss the earth. Miss Lorena reached over and stroked my hair, her fingers like butterfly wings.

  “That’s right,” she murmured, so soft I could hardly hear it over my own crying. “You just get it all out, honey. You just get it all out.”

  Finally the sobs slackened and the tears quieted down. The hole inside me, though, felt bigger than ever, dark and gaping, so that it hurt to breathe in.

  “It’s my fault,” I blurted, scrubbing at my eyes with the back of my hand. I’d never said those words, not ever—not even to Arden. Not even whispered in the middle of the hard nights to Mylie where she slept in her crib. Somehow, it felt easier to say them to Miss Lorena, who was so new here; maybe if I said it to this kind stranger with her smile like June, she wouldn’t hate me as much as I knew my own parents would.

  “What’s your fault, baby?”

  “It’s my fault that Mama’s sick.” I stared down at the carpeting on the floor of the car, kicked at a loose loop of polyester with my toe. “And it’s my fault she had to go to the hospital.”

  “How do you figure that, hmm?”

  “She was just fine until I came along. The schizophrenia didn’t come on until I was born. Dr. DuBose says it was triggered by the hormones and the stress. And—” I took a deep, shaky breath. “I ran away, didn’t I? I didn’t even stick around to help my own mama. If I had stayed . . . maybe she wouldn’t have gotten so bad.”

  “Oh, sweetheart.” Miss Lorena’s hand kept moving on the back of my head. I wanted to lean into it, wanted to let that feeling be all I paid attention to, but I couldn’t. “You listen to me, sweet Della. There is nothing you did that caused your mama’s problems, and nothing that you could have done to change it, you hear me? A thing like schizophrenia is bigger than you, bigger than me, bigger than your mama and daddy. It’s a sickness, just as real as anything like cancer, and it needs a doctor’s help just as much.

  “And one way or another, that sickness would have found your mama eventually, honey. You being born was one trigger, but if that hadn’t happened, something else would have. And the same with this weekend. Your mama’s been up against a lot this year, as I understand it. And that little sister of yours is a pistol. It’s not anything you did, or didn’t do, I promise.”

  “You really think so?”

  “I know so.”

  “I just . . . I just wanted her to be a normal mama. I just wanted to be a normal kid. Not all this”—I swallowed, squeezing my honey jar—“worrying.”

  “I know, honey. I know you do. And I’ll tell you straight, Della—probably, your mama is never going to be quite like other mothers out there. My guess is she’s always going to have to struggle with this, and that’ll be a struggle for you and your daddy and Mylie, too. Everybody’s got burdens, honey, and this is the burden that belongs to your family. But I also know that if your mama had to trade you and your sister in for being perfectly healthy, she wouldn’t do it.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Miss Lorena smiled. “Because I’m a mama, too.” She put her hand on her chest. “And once you have a child, it’s like a part of your heart is out there walking around in the world, and it’s the biggest blessing you could possibly imagine.”

  I put my own hand to my chest, feeling the way my heart tapped against my ribs, trying to picture what that might feel like.

  “There’s something else, too,” I added after a minute.

  “What’s that?”

  I squeezed my fingers into fists. Deep inside my heart, deeper even than the fear that Mama would never get better and that it was my fault she was sick in the first place, another fear was nestled, hard and sharp and thick.

  “If it happened to Mama . . . could it happen to me one day, too, do you think? Someday when I grow up and want to have babies?”

  “Oh, honey.” Miss Lorena was still as still, and when she spoke again, I could see that her eyes were shining and wet. “I guess none of us really know, do we? None of us ever know what seeds of pain are living inside us, waiting to sprout sometime in the future. You remember how I told you about Thomas’s daddy—how he had cancer in his family, how his own daddy died of it?”

  I nodded.

  “It’s somet
hing we talked about a lot, him and me, when we were dating. About how that cancer could be lurking inside him, ready to spring out and change all our lives forever. And then one day—it did.”

  “But—” I stopped, sniffling. “Wasn’t it hard, marrying him and knowing that might come for you someday?”

  “Sure it was. But that’s life. You just gotta take it a day at a time, honey. You might have to live with this fear inside you for a long time. And it might be hard. But you’ll make it through—I know you will. You’re tough, Miss Della Kelly. I could tell that the moment I met you.”

  I gave a watery little smile.

  “And one more thing I need you to know, Della. If things ever get too much to handle for you at your house, you know you’re always welcome to come on over and see me. And I know that Mrs. Hawthorne feels just the same way, and I bet plenty of other mamas in this town do, too.”

  “Thanks,” I whispered.

  “Tell me,” said Miss Lorena, pulling her purse up from the floor onto her lap. “Last week when you brought me back Emily Dickinson’s poems. Did you do that because you thought you needed to be taking care of your mama and not reading?”

  I nodded, the memory of the day I’d been reading by the chicken coop rising up until I could hardly breathe.

  She reached into her bag and pulled out the little blue book, that smile creeping back onto her face. “I thought that might be it. I want you to have this, honey. Not just from the little library, either, but as a gift.”

  My hand reached out without me even telling it to, running a finger across the soft blue cover.

  “Go on, take it.”

  “You sure?”

  Miss Lorena nodded, pushing the book forward until it was in my hands instead of hers. I laid it on my lap on top of the book Thomas had brought me earlier. Seemed to me the Bradleys mostly knew how to talk through books.

  “Sometimes when things are bad for me, books get to be some of my best friends,” Miss Lorena said, smiling like she could read my thoughts. “Maybe this one can be yours. Now, I can take you back to Arden’s if you want, but while I was inside I spoke with Mrs. Hawthorne on the phone, and I’m thinking it might be even better if you let me take you to the hospital to see your parents. I know it would mean the world to your mama. It’ll be awhile before visiting hours start, but we can go up and find your daddy, get you some lunch.”

  “I’m scared,” I said, pulling the books to my chest and hugging them, like armor. “I don’t want to see her . . . like that.”

  “But it’s something you’re gonna have to do at some point, child. Might as well be now.”

  I nodded and swallowed again, lowering the books down to my lap and flipping through the pages of the POEMS, not saying anything else as Miss Lorena pulled her seat belt on and put the car into gear.

  As we got back on the highway, the tapping of the rain and the swooshing of the tires on the wet road was like a heartbeat, or the ocean, rushing in and out of my ears and making my own nervous heart beat a little slower. I read through a few of Emily Dickinson’s poems, still not understanding most of them but liking the way they sounded in my head, trying to think of anything except where we were going.

  A few pages in there was one that made me stop and read it through twice.

  Hope is the thing with feathers

  That perches in the soul,

  And sings the tune without the words,

  And never stops at all . . .

  I looked up from the book, at the rain-washed window and the gray sky outside. “What am I gonna say to Mama when I see her?” I whispered.

  Miss Lorena kept her eyes on the road, but her voice was as warm and sweet as the taste of the Bee Lady’s honey, as kind as if she’d wrapped her arms around me the way Miss Amanda had the night before. “Oh, sugar. You don’t have to say anything at all, if you don’t want to. You just being there will be like a gift to your mama. I promise you that.”

  “Okay,” I said, leaning against the door beside me, trying my hardest to feel that thing with feathers fluttering inside my soul.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Sometimes in the detective shows I watched with Daddy, they’d have a scene inside a hospital room—somebody lying in a bed with white sheets and a whole panel of buttons to make it move, surrounded by beeping machines and doctors who talked in some kind of doctor code.

  Mama’s hospital wasn’t anything like that.

  After Miss Lorena had dropped me off at Grandma and Grandpa’s in time to have lunch and catch a little nap on their guest bed—I’d been so tired I could hardly keep my eyes open by that point—Daddy had left Mylie with Grandma and Grandpa and brought me here, to the hospital. We’d checked in at the front desk and found the unit where Mama was staying, guarded by locked double doors so big and heavy that looking at them sent a crawling spider of a shiver down my spine.

  Those doors seemed to be saying, We’ve got her, and we aren’t letting her go anytime soon, and I felt the hot press of tears in the back of my throat again.

  There was a loud click when the doors unlocked to let us through. I slid my hand into Daddy’s, like I was Mylie’s age again, too afraid to walk through into that strange place without being able to feel another person’s pulse up against my own.

  We followed a nurse through the doorway and into a great big room with green walls and bookshelves and so much light pouring in from the windows that it was like the sun itself had decided to pay the hospital a visit. The rain had finished and the clouds outside had pulled apart to let the sun peek through and make a rainbow, a tiny little sky-gift that made me stand my shoulders up straighter.

  “Della, baby, your mama may not seem quite like her normal self,” Daddy murmured, rubbing at his forehead with his free hand. He was tired and pale, with big dark circles under his eyes and the front part of his hair sticking up, like he hadn’t brushed it or looked in a mirror for days.

  I nodded, looking again at that little wisp of rainbow, at all the sunlight caught up in that room, holding my honey jar tight and wishing I’d eaten just a little bit more.

  The nurse stopped at a door right off the sunlight room. Next to the door was a whole wall of windows that showed a long, narrow place almost like a cafeteria, except that there was no food—little square tables surrounded with armless chairs covered in an abstract green-and-gray-patterned fabric.

  The room was empty.

  “Y’all go on and wait in here,” the nurse said, waving us inside. She had dusky skin and an accent you could wrap yourself up in, so that here sounded like it had three syllables. “Wherever you like. I’ll go get Suzanne.”

  Daddy and I sat at the closest table. I clenched my hands together so hard they hurt.

  After a minute, the door opened again, and Mama walked in.

  “Oh, Della, baby,” she said, tears squeezing out of her eyes and running down her cheeks, and somehow the warm sweetness of her words slid right inside me, wrapping my heart in their sound until I could feel the tickle of that thing with feathers perched in my soul.

  “I’m so glad to see you,” Mama went on, talking fast, like she was afraid she wouldn’t say everything she needed to in time. “I was so worried about you, honey, so worried that they were going to hurt you. I looked and looked for you but couldn’t find where they took you.”

  The flutter inside me stopped abruptly, like that little hope bird had been smothered. I squeezed my honey jar. “Nobody took me, Mama. I went to Arden’s by myself.”

  Mama was talking again before I even finished. “No, no, I know there’s people trying to hurt you, hurt Mylie, too. I couldn’t keep you safe, honey, so I had to do my best with Mylie.” Her tears were coming faster now; the nurse stepped forward, putting a hand on Mama’s shoulder. She had a silver ring with a big diamond that caught the light, sending little sparkles of color all around the room.

  Just like that rainbow outside the window.

  Your mama is never going to be quite like other
mothers out there, Miss Lorena had said earlier. I’d tried everything I knew, every idea I’d had and then some, and none of it had fixed Mama’s crazy.

  No, I thought, remembering how much Daddy hated it when I called Mama crazy, remembering how Mama had winced once when she’d heard a man at church refer to people like her that way.

  Not crazy. Sick.

  I swallowed. Before Miss Lorena had left Grandma and Grandpa’s, she’d given me another hug and whispered, You just remember what I told you, sugar. You just remember that you can always come to me if you need me. And as I’d watched the front door swing closed after her, I could have sworn I’d tasted the wild sweetness of the Bee Lady’s honey on my tongue again, like a tiny piece of sunlight washing all the way through my storm.

  But right now there was nothing, just the dry, sour taste of my own nervousness.

  The nurse was rubbing Mama’s shoulder back and forth. “Calm down, Suzanne honey,” she said in a low voice like the rocking of a boat on the sound. “Your babies are just fine. They got good people taking care of them, just like we taking care of you.” But Mama’s tears kept on coming, with her not even bothering to wipe them, just looking at me like she was drowning and I was the rope.

  I took a deep breath. “I love you, Mama,” I said, wishing the Bee Lady were there in the room with us so I could yell and cry and throw her honey jar back in her face. It hadn’t fixed Mama and it hadn’t fixed me, either; standing here listening to her saying awful things and not even realizing it was just as bad as ever. Miss Tabitha may have thought there was strength in me for that honey to find, but she was wrong.

  There was no fluttering thing with feathers in my chest now, just a hot burn of pain that went right through to my heart.

  “She’s doing better than she was when they brought her in yesterday,” the nurse said to Daddy and me, “but it’s gone take a day or two for the medications they gave her to really start doing their job. I’m sorry, but I think y’all had better go so we can get her something to help her calm down a bit.”