The Daisy Children

by Sofia Grant

  Stars were beginning to swarm in front of Katie’s eyeballs, and not in a fun way. She was exhausted, starving, perhaps hallucinating slightly. The scenery rolling by outside her window—fields dotted with wildflowers, white clouds scudding overhead—was almost garishly beautiful, the colors as lurid as a tinted photograph from the fifties.

  This was going to potentially get really awkward, if Scarlett thought she was inheriting everything. Unless . . .

  “Georgina said I was named in the will too,” Katie ventured, trying to ignore the awful possibility that had just popped into her head. That Margaret had left her, say, a moldy bureau; a few gaudy trinkets; a family Bible. Some token of disaffection, a final “fuck you” to the grandchild who’d never sought her out. Or maybe the snub would be meant for Georgina, for the daughter who’d made it her life’s goal to move as far away, in every way, as she could.

  “I mean, I was totally shocked, of course,” Katie said, a bit more forcefully. “I don’t expect anything. It’s exciting just to be part of, the um, the historic nature of—”

  “I bet she left you the cups,” Scarlett said reassuringly. “She told me once that she had always wanted to start you a collection. Or maybe the silver dimes. Do you know she had every year going all the way back to 1946?”

  “I thought . . .” The dream of wealth, an enormous payoff from a house that some Amazon exec would kill for, was beginning to recede rapidly, like a wave skittering back to sea. But Katie was getting ahead of herself. She didn’t know—neither of them did. Georgina said Margaret was flighty and unpredictable. Who knew what she might have done?

  A thought occurred to her—a thought that was desperate and mean and low: that perhaps she could offer to buy Scarlett out, explain that she could offer her cash now, perhaps with a loan from Liam’s family, so Scarlett could avoid the hassle of trying to list and sell the house. Then Katie could turn around and fix it up a little and flip it for far more. She could even give a percentage of the proceeds to Scarlett, who probably would have no idea of the value she was sitting on—who might feel like she’d gotten a perfectly fair deal.

  But no. Katie felt ashamed of even having the thought. Scarlett was vulnerable; Scarlett needed some help in looking after her own interests. Let the chips—or the clauses of the will—fall where they may; Katie would accept them with grace, and if the entire inheritance went to Scarlett, she would try to be happy for her cousin. Katie would prove to herself that Boston hadn’t changed her, hadn’t turned her into her mother, striving and voracious.

  “But who knows?” Scarlett said, grinning again. She tapped the steering wheel in time with the radio. “Maybe she left us each half! Wouldn’t that be fun? We could maybe open up a day care. That’s my dream,” she added. “To own my own child care center.”

  “Sure,” Katie said. Who was this impossibly cheerful creature who shared her DNA, no matter how distantly, as evidenced by the Nose? Who on earth dreamed of owning a day care?

  “Dang, I nearly missed our exit,” Scarlett said, swerving over two lanes and nearly clipping a decrepit old pickup half the size of hers. The startled driver gave a tiny wave—or maybe she was having a heart attack. “Can you believe we’re officially a two-stoplight town now, what with all the new development? Used to be there wasn’t nothing off this exit but the Methodist church and the old Esso. And now look.”

  This last was spoken with an indignant edge, and Katie quickly saw why. Coasting onto the two-lane road freshly gouged from the earth alongside the broken asphalt it had replaced, they passed a field so newly turned that slaughtered cornstalks protruded from the ruts, baby ears still suspended from the withering fronds. On the other side of the field, the foundation of an enormous edifice had been poured, its concrete surface pristine, earthmoving equipment huddled at the edges, shut down for the day.

  “It just simply kills me,” Scarlett sighed. “That used to be the prettiest little field—cowslip in the spring, and bluebonnets everywhere, and we had a fort over there once. All of it’s gone now. And for what? Do we really need a Walgreens when we got a perfectly good drugstore already?”

  “How awful,” Katie said. She could certainly use a Walgreens right about now, with its shelves full of feminine hygiene products and lovely bins of travel-size products. Shampoo and conditioner and those tiny containers of dental floss, towelettes in individual packets and little cubes of bath salts. And she’d buy the biggest bag of Lay’s potato chips in the store—her stomach growled at the thought. She sniffed discreetly at her underarms and decided that deodorant would be her first priority.

  But she could wait just a little longer; soon she’d be alone in Margaret’s house. For one night, at least, she’d be free to comb through her grandmother’s possessions, look through her closets, page through her scrapbooks . . . and try to piece together her story from the artifacts.

  “I just need to run home and . . . and take care of a few things,” Scarlett was saying. “I’ll come back tonight if I can, but definitely tomorrow. For sure. And I’ll bring you a change of clothes. Do you mind sleeping in what you’re wearing, just for tonight?”

  “It’s fine.”

  As they drove, the freshly turned fields gave way to modest houses with wide yards. Red brick, white clapboard, pitched roofs; tubs of geraniums and wash hung on lines in backyards; cats perched on porch rails. Scarlett turned onto the main street, and a long-ago memory came back to Katie: there had been an ice cream shop with a sign shaped like a cone, and she’d begged her mother to stop and buy her a scoop of rainbow sherbet, but Georgina couldn’t get out of that town fast enough. She’d waved at two little boys eating their cones out front, and they’d stared solemnly at her.

  The teacup wrapped in paper towels, tossed into the backseat.

  The tight set of Georgina’s mouth, the lipstick wearing thin as she drove ten miles over the speed limit back to Dallas.

  Up ahead, a tall stone obelisk came into view, in front of the sprawling high school. As they neared, Katie could make out the figures of children and teachers carved from the granite at the top. “The dead children,” Katie said. “I remember driving by it with my mom.”

  Scarlett shuddered. “It’s so sad,” she said. “I mean, you grow up around here, it’s kind of just part of life when you’re little. You don’t realize until you get older what it all meant, you know, to the families and all.”

  “What exactly happened again?”

  “Well, that school, it’s just the high school now, it was built on the site of the old London school. Back in 1937 it was this big, new expensive school, only five years old—that was back during the oil boom, and there was all this oil money, and the school was all tricked out. Originally it was supposed to have steam heat, but with raw gas being free, they went with that instead, and—”

  “Raw gas?”

  “You know, natural gas. When you drill for oil, the gas comes up first. You know how a lot of times you see the orange glow on a rig, that’s the flare-off, but you can also install a residue line to carry it away, and they, the oil companies back then, basically let whoever wanted to tap into it because it wasn’t worth anything to them anyway.”

  “Wait, I don’t get it. They were giving away gas?”

  “Yeah. They only wanted the oil. So the people in town, a lot of them worked for the oil companies anyway, they’d just tap into the line and use it. It’s kind of like when you hook up to the neighbor’s cable, right? Except the oil companies knew about it and they didn’t care. So when they were finishing the school they figured they’d just do the same thing. And it worked for a few years, but what they didn’t know was there was a leak in the line, and it was slowly filling up the crawl space under the school.”

  “And no one noticed?”

  “Well, back then, natural gas had no smell to it. It was the New London explosion that gave people the idea to add the sulfur to it as a warning, but without it, no one knew it was building up down there. Kids were getting headac
hes and stuff and I guess a lot of them had complained, but nobody had thought to check down in the crawl space. Anyway, the day it happened, a shop teacher plugged in an electric sander and all it took was just this one little spark, and the entire school blew up. All that was standing in the main building afterward was one wall.”

  “That’s—I can’t even imagine—how many children died?”

  “Almost three hundred. Plus teachers and visitors. At first they thought it was even more—some of the news accounts said as much as seven hundred. And they’ll never know the exact count because all the school records burned up. Plus they took the kids, the hurt ones, all over the place trying to get medical help—every hospital for miles around. And some people just took the bodies of their children home with them. It wasn’t like now. Obviously.” Scarlett’s voice had gone hoarse, and she glanced at Katie and quickly away. “Some of the migrant families? They just picked up and left. It was like they weren’t ever even there. The Mexican kids were allowed to go to the school, but that was almost worse, because no one wanted them there. They got beat up and made fun of. So it wasn’t like anyone was looking for them after the explosion.”

  “Oh,” Katie said, horrified. “Are you . . . I mean, did your dad’s family . . .”

  “My dad?” Scarlett’s tone changed instantly. “No. I mean, not that I know of. The only person our family lost was Gomma’s sister.”

  “Her sister?” Katie asked, surprised. “Do you mean Margaret?”

  “Yeah. You didn’t know about that?” Another glance, this one incredulous.

  Katie craned her head around to see the twin granite columns of the cenotaph disappearing behind them. “I had no idea. My mom never said anything.”

  “Well, Gomma didn’t like to talk about it. And she said her mother—Caroline—when she got older she didn’t like to talk about it at all. I guess when Gomma was growing up they were in this club, the kids who were born right after the explosion . . . I mean, I know how weird it sounds, but a bunch of families had babies right away. To kind of replace the ones that died.”

  “Is that what Margaret was? A . . . replacement?”

  “Yes, she was born like nine months afterward. And these kids, these babies, I guess their moms stuck together. I mean, think about it—they had these brand-new babies, but the whole town was in mourning . . . the kids grew up together. But Gomma said she always felt like she was on display. You would have thought those kids would have been super close, but I think instead it was just . . . painful.”

  “My mom said that Margaret was, um, solitary.” What Georgina had actually said was that no one could stand to be around her mother, that Margaret was cold, and imperious, and basically a friendless bitch who brought on her own misery.

  “Yeah, she didn’t have an easy time of it, that’s for sure,” Scarlett said wistfully, and Katie felt guilty for believing her mother’s version. “Anyway, getting her to talk about it was like pulling teeth. I remember back a few years ago they wanted to interview her for this documentary they were doing and Gomma was all, just leave it be. She didn’t see the sense in stirring it all up again, sensationalizing it, I guess.”

  “But . . . her sister. I had no idea.” Why hadn’t Georgina ever mentioned this? “What was her name?”

  “Ruby. Ruby Pierson. She was eleven. Her name’s on the memorial. I can show you if you want.” Scarlett took a lazy turn onto a tree-lined street, her face shadowed and melancholy. “I saw a picture once, by accident. I’d gotten into Gomma’s dresser. She took that picture out of my hand and wouldn’t talk about it. I guess . . . I mean, it’s complicated because she never even knew her sister. I always thought maybe Caroline made Gomma feel like they’d loved Ruby best, like she’d never be good enough, like that’s maybe why it was such a sore subject.”

  “Did you ever meet Caroline?”

  “No, she actually died before I was born. And that side of the family was completely estranged from ours. Right up until one day Gomma came to my house and knocked on the door.” A smile returned to Scarlett’s face. “My mom didn’t even recognize her! She introduced herself and asked if she could babysit me sometimes, because I was only five or six and she knew my mom didn’t have any help.”

  That didn’t sound like the selfish, callous woman that Georgina had always painted her mother to be. “And . . . your mom said yes?”

  Scarlett laughed. “Oh hell yes. Mom was working two jobs—she was a file clerk during the week and she bartended on the weekend, so she was super grateful. And Gomma used to bring groceries over and take me shopping for school clothes and stuff. She used to put everything away before Mom came home so she wouldn’t find it until later. You know, so Mom wouldn’t have to feel like it was charity.”

  “Wow. This is all . . . I don’t even know.” Katie was going to have a conversation with her mother, that was for sure. She felt oddly gypped, deprived of both the story and the chance to know the people in it. It was her family history too, after all.

  Scarlett waved at an elderly woman with a walker as they cruised slowly down the street, passing old houses and gardens bursting with spring flowers. Most of the homes were modest, four-square construction with tidy porches and garages set back, but a few were grander. They approached the largest one as Katie tried to remember what her grandmother’s had looked like, but her impressions of the day were of squinting into the sun, two dogs chasing each other down the street, her mother’s hand gripping hers too hard. The smell of starch in her blouse and the shine of new shoes, her socks’ scratchy lace around her ankles.

  Scarlett pulled to a stop in front of the imposing old two-story stucco house with a Juliet balcony and a stone arch over the door. If it hadn’t been so run-down it would have qualified as a mansion, but as it was, the stucco was broken and flaking and stained black near the ground, paint peeled from the trim and window frames, and a section of gutter had broken off and leaned against the house. The yard was full of weeds and crabgrass, and one of a pair of redbud trees had been hit by lightning and grew lopsided.

  “We’re here!” Scarlett said. “Do you remember it?”

  “I’m . . . I’m not sure. Maybe once I’m inside.”

  Scarlett’s smile slipped a little. “I know it’s gotten kind of run-down. I should have probably tried to help keep it up more. I mean, I tried to help clean whenever I came over, but . . . anyway, let’s get you inside.” But she didn’t get out of the truck immediately, gazing up at the house and biting her lip. “I haven’t come here since . . . you know. I’m glad you’re with me. I don’t think I could go in there alone.”

  Together, they stared at the house, cast in the purpling shadow of its much more modest neighbor, the sun slipping down behind the trees. Near the end of the block, kids played in a sprinkler arcing lazily back and forth onto a bright green lawn. The house had obviously once been the grandest on the street, a showplace. On either side were considerably newer houses, seventies-era boxes with ugly angled roofs, which made Katie think that this house had once anchored an enormous lot, maybe even the whole block, lording its stature over everyone in the neighborhood. But now it seemed to sag under its own defeat, as though it was only a matter of time before the timbers rotted and it collapsed in on itself. To say it had seen better days was putting a lot of faith in its history: cobwebs crusted every corner, an upstairs window was broken, the mailbox had been shot at several times, and the greatest insult of all had been worked by someone wielding a can of spray paint: a loopy purple design three feet high along the side of the house.

  Someone knocked on Scarlett’s window, and they both jumped.

  “Oh, hi, Mrs. Oglesby,” Scarlett said sheepishly as she rolled down the window. Humid air wafted into the cab of the truck and a short, redheaded woman peered past Scarlett at Katie.

  “Is this your cousin? Just look at her!” she exclaimed.

  “Hello,” Katie said politely. “I’m Katie Garrett. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

 
“You’re the one from Boston,” the woman said. “Well, I’ll let you girls get to visiting.”

  “Thanks, Mrs. Oglesby, we will,” Scarlett said. But when the woman was safely out of hearing, she sighed audibly. “Got to watch that one; she likes to look in the windows. All right. Guess we best get to it.”

  Scarlett lifted a corner of the ancient rubber welcome mat and picked up a key attached to a mini replica of a bottle of Big Red soda. The door took a little jiggling and coaxing, but eventually she got it open; the scent of decay and rosewater wafted out of the house. Inside, the twilight filtered through the ancient lace curtains onto a scene that suddenly came back to Katie. Until now, her memories consisted mostly of a vague impression of old, musty-smelling furniture and every surface covered with junk—but look, she remembered that tottering little round table with the curved legs; and that oil painting of a girl in a white dress with her hand on the back of a yellow dog. Even the afghans, folded on the back of the couch, sparked a memory; eleven-year-old Katie had run her fingers over the nubby crochet stitches, tracing the alternating bands of yellow and pink in the granny squares.

  And there was the rack of teacups from which Margaret had plucked the one she gave to Katie for her birthday. In fact, there was the empty hook on the end, anchoring the rows of delicate cups painted with blowsy cabbage roses and stiff-stemmed zinnias, delicate forget-me-nots and bowing lilies of the valley.

  Margaret had tapped each cup and ticked off the names of the flowers in a voice that sounded a bit like a threat. “Someday,” she’d added, “I’ll be dead and these will be yours.” Her hand had hovered over the cups until it came to rest on the one decorated with lilies of the valley, tiny dots of gold adorning the tiny frilled bell-shaped blossoms, while Georgina rolled her eyes and looked pointedly at her watch.

  “Gomma was a collector, all right,” Scarlett said, without a trace of irony. She handed Katie the key. “Here, you’ll want this. We usually always just leave it under the mat, but I guess we should probably make a copy now.”