Dicey's Song

by Cynthia Voigt

  The slow eyes moved between them and then up to the shelf Gram indicated. “I’m sorry to hear that,” the man said.

  Gram’s eyes snapped at him.

  “Your granddaughter was in yesterday,” he said. “Let me show you.”

  He brought down three boxes, each about the size of a loaf of bread. They chose one where the band of black walnut ran like a ribbon, as if it were tying down the top of the box. “How much do we owe you?” Gram asked.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “Young man!” Gram snapped. “We are not asking for charity.”

  “It’s OK, Gram,” Dicey said. At the same time, the bearded man put his hands around the box they had chosen. The cuts on his hands were like the grains of the different woods.

  “Yesterday, I thought to give her something,” he said to Gram. “I don’t know why — yes, I do know why, but I couldn’t put words to it. But not out of pity. I would like to give this box to you. I’m honored, you see. You do see that, don’t you? But I don’t know if you would take it as a gift.”

  Gram stared at the hands around the box. Then she said, “Yes, I’ll take it,” in a low voice. “I’ll take the gift and I’ll thank you for it,” she said, more briskly. Dicey could almost hear the creaking of Gram’s fingers as she let go of her pride.

  “Good,” the man said.

  They delivered the box to the undertaker, who told them to return at five. Then they had a late lunch and returned to the motel room to pack. They talked about ordinary things, about taking a train to Wilmington and a bus from there to Salisbury. Dicey changed into her brown dress and belted it at the waist. She and Gram weren’t exactly going to make a march, but she wanted to mark the formality of the occasion, taking Momma home. They talked about the presents Dicey had bought, of which Gram approved. Then Gram asked, “Wasn’t there change?”

  Dicey had more than forty dollars left in her coat pocket and she gave that to Gram. Gram opened her purse to put the money in her wallet.

  She looked across to Dicey sitting on the other bed. Gram’s face looked frightened. Dicey caught part of the feeling.

  “How are we going to pay him?” Gram asked. Her voice was whispery.

  “Pay who?”

  “That undertaker.” Gram’s hands fiddled around with the money in her wallet. Then her fingers explored her purse. “I never thought — about that expense. I thought about travel and room and meals and even the Christmas shopping. But not about the cost of an undertaker. How could I have been so stupid?”

  “We can return what I bought,” Dicey suggested. “We could, except the gloves, and I’ve got four dollars of my own money left.”

  Gram rustled desperately through her purse. Then she pulled out the envelope Mr. Lingerie had given her, looking at it as if she had forgotten what it was. She opened it and pulled out crisp money in fifty dollar bills. “Five hundred dollars,” she said softly. “Five hundred — he must have gone to the bank. He must have guessed. I ask you, Dicey, isn’t that something for him to do? How did he know?”

  Dicey wasn’t thinking about anything except that the color was coming back into Gram’s cheeks.

  “Did I look all that discombobulated when I left home?” Gram demanded.

  “No,” Dicey said. “You looked like you knew exactly what you were doing. I thought you did,” she complained.

  “Well, you were wrong,” Gram snapped. “But that’s all right now. Remind me to thank him.”

  Dicey snorted. Gram wouldn’t need any reminding.

  “We’d better call them, don’t you think?” Gram told Dicey. “To tell them. And when we’ll be back.”

  “Will they be home from school?”

  “I believe in getting things over with,” Gram said.

  So they called the house in Crisfield. Gram placed the call, placed it collect. She spoke to Mr. Lingerie first, brushing aside his sympathy but making a point to tell him that without his money she would have been in real difficulty. She told him that they were taking a train that got into Wilmington at eight in the morning, and they would take buses down from there. Gram expected to see everybody at home, after school, she said. As far as Dicey could tell, Mr. Lingerie was saying yes, ma’am and yes, ma’am on the other end of the phone. Then Gram handed the phone to Dicey.

  She told James first. “Momma died,” she said.

  “I figured that out,” he told her. His voice sounded thin. “It’s better this way, Dicey,” he said in that same thin voice. “I read about it, at the library. Almost nobody recovers, when they’re as far gone as Momma was.”

  “You didn’t tell me that,” Dicey said. “And I don’t think it’s better, no matter what you say.”

  “And it isn’t as if. . . . She really died last summer,” James told her.

  “That’s not true,” Dicey snapped, although she understood what he meant. The worst of the letting go had been the hope they’d still had, last summer.

  “Yes, it is,” James answered.

  Dicey stopped arguing with him. She heard Sammy wrestle the phone from James with an angry demand.

  “It’s not true, is it, Dicey?”

  “It’s true, Sammy,” she told him. “It’s really true. She didn’t want to.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I don’t know, how could I know?” Dicey admitted. “But I feel it. She didn’t mind, she never even opened her eyes.”

  “But, Dicey, I wanted her to get better,” Sammy said.

  “I know,” Dicey told him. “It’ll be all right, Sammy, it will. We’ll all be all right. Adopted means — somebody wants you to be her family.”

  “But I wanted Momma to be all right too,” Sammy wailed.

  “So did I,” Dicey said. “But she wasn’t.” She thought for a minute, trying to see Sammy holding onto the phone, in the living room; trying to see his face and into his brain. “You know what I’d do if I were at home?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “I’d go out to the barn and sand down on the boat. Is it warm enough to work in the barn? That wouldn’t make anything better, but it would make me feel better.”

  “I have to deliver papers.”

  “After the papers. Try it, Sammy. If you want to. Let me talk to Maybeth?”

  “Dicey?” Maybeth’s voice asked.

  “We’re going to be home tomorrow,” Dicey told her sister.

  “We’re all right,” Maybeth said. “Are you all right? Is Gram?”

  “Everybody’s all right,” Dicey said. “Except Momma.”

  “I know,” Maybeth said, her voice sad and musical. “I know.” She didn’t say anything more, so Dicey hung up.

  “I hate the telephone,” Dicey announced to Gram.

  “You need to have one,” Gram told her. “With children in the house. We’d better get going. We have to check out and go over to that undertaker’s. Have you kept the box out?”

  They had to wait, in a room so thick with the smell of flowers, so thick with slow heavy music, so thick with a soft carpet that soaked in any noises, that Dicey felt as if she was swimming underwater for too long. When the man came out to give back their box, Dicey reached out for it, and held it close against her chest. Gram paid the man silently.

  They took a cab to the train station, bought tickets and sat waiting on hard wooden benches. They boarded the train as soon as it pulled into the station. Dicey lifted the suitcase up onto a rack overhead. She sat down by the window and held the box on her lap. After a while, the train started on its way.

  It was snowing when they left Boston, in big flat flakes that shrouded the sky. The train rattled along.

  Gram got them some supper and brought it back to the seats in a cardboard tray. The sandwiches were wrapped up in thin plastic, and still they were dried out, but the sodas were all right. When they had finished, Gram looked out the window.

  “I can’t see a blessed thing,” she said. “I’m going to sleep.” She spread her coat out over her legs, like a
blanket. She leaned her head back and closed her eyes, but she continued talking. “It’s funny, if you think about it. This is the only time I’ve traveled out of Maryland, and I can’t see a thing.”

  “Gram,” Dicey said, her voice so loud Gram’s eyes popped open. “But you knew how to do everything.”

  “I knew how to do nothing,” Gram told her. “I just did everything. There’s a difference. You should know that.”

  “Cripes,” Dicey said, remembering how she had followed her grandmother around, not having to worry about anything. “That’s brave.”

  Gram closed her eyes again, and her sudden smile flashed across her tired face. She hadn’t slept at all last night, Dicey guessed.

  “Tillermans have that kind of courage,” she told Dicey. “We have brave spirits. It’s brave hearts we don’t have. Think about it, girl. Except your Momma, she had a brave heart, for trusting people, or loving them. For all the good it did her. I wish I knew.” Then Gram’s eyes flashed open again, and her face looked entirely awake:

  “I have some hope for you, too. You, and all of you. But why they use hearts for love, I don’t know.”

  “It’s where you feel things,” Dicey said, remembering, feeling. “But not valentine hearts.”

  Gram agreed and closed her eyes again. “Those bright red hearts, perfectly symmetrical. And those overweight cupids they put with them, for Valentines, babies with rolls of fat on their legs and chipmunk cheeks. I never could like a fat baby. My babies were skinny and hairy. When she was born, your Momma had a head of curly black hair — like a cocker spaniel. Can you imagine your Momma like that? Of course, it all fell out within the week, but can you imagine?”

  Dicey almost answered this, but she saw that Gram was asleep.

  The train made frequent stops, and Dicey watched to see the names of the places. She knew she should put her head back, close her eyes and try to sleep; she knew she couldn’t see anything much out of the windows, between the heavy snow and the speed of the train. But she shifted the box against her arm and peered out. Her seat swayed and jounced as the train rattled over the tracks.

  After every stop the conductor came by. He looked at the two ticket stubs tucked into a hook above Gram’s head. He glanced at Gram and then looked at Dicey. After two stops he finally asked her, “What is that box for?”

  Dicey couldn’t think of what to tell him.

  He began a kind of game, guessing what might be in it. Love letters from her boyfriend, he guessed, and a stamp collection, a pet mouse, her jewelry, something to eat, sea shells, buttons. Dicey got so she was half-waiting for him, and she was ready to shake her head at him, no. The snow lightened as they traveled south. Once, looking out the windows on the other side of the car, Dicey thought she saw water. She was sure she saw a black field that glimmered like water and stretched out like water.

  Dicey realized that the train was going the same way the children had, last summer.

  For some reason, this disturbed her. She climbed out of her seat, holding the box carefully. It wouldn’t pop open; she knew how tightly the lid fitted down. But still, she carried it gently. She found a bathroom at the end of the car and let herself in the door.

  This bathroom was smaller than a closet, and somehow it seemed to lurch more than her seat did. She went to the bathroom, flushed, and ran some water in the sink to splash over her face. She caught a glimpse of her face in the mirror, pale above the dark brown of the dress. Her eyes looked wary. She wondered why. Once the box, which she had set on a counter just about big enough to hold a purse, started to slide off. Dicey caught it in damp hands.

  Instead of going back to her seat, Dicey went through two cars to find the snack bar. There, she spent a long time looking at the menu. Finally she decided on another soda and a package of potato chips.

  To reach her money in the pocket of her dress, Dicey had to rest the box on the countertop. The man working there stared at it. “That’s a pretty thing,” he said. “What’s it for, school stuff?”

  “School stuff?” Dicey asked.

  “Pencils, erasers, paper clips?”

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh no.” She took up the little cardboard tray that held her purchases and fled.

  Dicey stumbled past people sleeping in their seats. Because both of her hands were holding something, she couldn’t grab at seat backs to keep her balance. She had never realized that trains were this hard to walk in.

  Back in her own car, she sat down in empty seats across from Gram. Her grandmother was sleeping soundly, even though her head rolled with the swaying of the train. Dicey opened the can of soda to pour half a glass. More than that might spill. She tore the top off the potato chips. She settled the box in her lap.

  She felt like she was running away again the way they had run away from Bridgeport, or even before that when Bridgeport was the place they were running to. To be awake in the deep dark of night; that might be what was causing the feeling. Then she could see, as if she held a map in her hand, the places the four of them had traveled over. The snow outside had faded away. Dicey watched out the window.

  The train rattled over the Connecticut River, where they had taken a boat to row. She didn’t know how she knew so surely that the broad black belt was that river. But she knew. She could remember how it felt to row across the black water and not know what waited on the opposite bank.

  Twenty minutes later, the train pulled into the big railroad station at New Haven. Dicey peered out the dirty window, but she was looking at the pictures her memory made. The train pulled out of the station and back into darkness.

  The pictures her memory made had songs in them, clearer than the noise of the train. All the songs seemed to be blending together, into music as complicated as some of Maybeth’s piano pieces. But Dicey could pick them out, each one, each separate melody.

  The people they had been last summer, the person she had been — Dicey guessed she’d never be afraid again, not the way she had been all summer. She had taken care of them all, sometimes well, sometimes badly. And they had covered the distances. For most of the summer, they had been unattached. Nobody knew who they were or what they were doing. It didn’t matter what they did, as long as they all stayed together. Dicey remembered that feeling, of having things pretty much her own way. And she remembered the feelings of danger. It was a little bit like being a wild animal, she thought to herself.

  Dicey missed that wildness. She knew she would never have it again.

  And she missed the sense of Dicey Tillerman against the whole world and doing all right.

  But had anything really changed? Dicey looked across to her sleeping grandmother, and she thought about her job and school, about James, Maybeth and Sammy, about Mina and Jeff. She thought about the little boat she was preparing for next spring. She thought about Gram’s house, their house, about the fields folded around it and the Bay beyond. Whatever was outside the window flashed past so fast she couldn’t really see it.

  She thought to herself, she had to let go of what had gone before too, didn’t she? The people of last summer. And who she had been.

  Dicey felt as if she was standing in the wind and holding up her hands. She felt as if colored ribbons blew out of her hands and danced away on the wind. She felt as if, even if she wanted to, she couldn’t close her fingers around those ribbons.

  Dicey knew that she was sitting very still on a train, moving across the night. She knew her hands were wrapped around the wooden box that held the ashes of her momma. But she felt as if a wind blew through her hands and took even Momma away.

  What did that leave her with? The wind and her empty hands. The wind and Dicey.

  As if Dicey were a sailboat and the sails were furled up now, the mainsail wrapped up around the boom, and she was sitting at anchor. It felt good to come to rest, the way it felt walking up to their house on a cold evening, seeing the yellow light at the kitchen window and knowing you would be warm inside while the darkness drew in around the house. But a
boat at anchor wasn’t like a boat at sea.

  Except, Dicey thought, a boat at anchor wasn’t planted there, like a tree. Furled sails were just waiting to be raised, when the sailor chose to head out again. And even trees and houses weren’t as planted as they seemed to be, and maybe nothing was.

  How was Dicey supposed to understand?

  Because if their friend Will kept his word and stopped by when his circus traveled north next spring, it wasn’t all letting go.

  How was Dicey supposed to know what to do?

  At that, Dicey closed her eyes and slept.

  When she opened them, Gram was leaning over her. “You look better,” Dicey announced. The sun was trying to shine in through the dirty windows.

  “You don’t. Use the bathroom now, we’re about to get there. I’ll hold the box,” Gram said.

  Dicey shook her head. She went back to the bathroom, but there was a woman already waiting by the door. The woman looked at her without interest. Then she caught sight of the box. “Is it a present for someone?” she asked. “It would make a lovely planter.”

  Before Dicey could speak, the woman sidled past an emerging man to slip into the bathroom.

  Dicey put the box on the floor this time and rubbed cold water over her face. She polished her teeth with her finger. Then she had to go to the bathroom again. All the time her mind was turning over a question.

  She was still stepping over Gram’s legs when she blurted it out: “You tell me to let go. But you told me to reach out, you told me to hold on. How can I do all those things together? Gram?”

  Gram’s eyes took a minute to really see Dicey, as if she had been thinking about other things. “It’s nice to know you listen,” she answered.

  “It would be nicer if you explained,” Dicey snapped.

  “How can I explain?” Gram demanded. “How can I explain what I don’t know?”

  “Then why did you say?”

  “Because it’s what I learned,” Gram told her. She reached over to where Dicey’s hand was clenched on top of the box and wrapped her own hand around Dicey’s. “If it were simple I could explain. But you never know what’s the right thing to do. And even that’s not entirely true: sometimes I’ve known. But most of the time — oh, I don’t know, girl.”