The Secret Hum of a Daisy

by Tracy Holczer

  Fingerly pickens?

  Where have you come from, O lint?

  What does it matter?

  Tastes like cake batter.

  Now’s a good time for a mint.

  Love (see that? LOVE),

  Lacey

  • • •

  When I woke up on Saturday morning, I got a fire going in the stove, set Mama’s quilt in front of it, said good morning to Beauty with a pat on the nose and a carrot for her belly, and then called Lacey. I didn’t understand why she hadn’t brought it up in her letters I’d gotten from her every single day this week. She’d apologized for missing my call over and over again, begged and pleaded for me to call her back and generally wrote about everything but Mama and the signs. Maybe it was the sort of thing you had to talk about in person. Anyway, I couldn’t wait to talk to her about the new things I’d found, like the poem and my dad, and where it all might lead. If anyone could help me figure it out, it would be Lacey.

  Grandma let me call from Grandpa’s office. I sat at the big desk, which smelled like furniture polish, brought the old green phone toward me, twisting the rubber cord around one finger, and dialed Mrs. Greene.

  “Finally,” Lacey said when she picked up the phone.

  “It was the threat of bad poetry that did it.”

  She laughed, but it was a held-back sort of laugh.

  We talked about dumb stuff. She couldn’t help but gossip about Denny and Marsha, even though she swore she’d never talk about him again. She talked about the upcoming dance and that she didn’t have a decent dress. How Mrs. Greene was all in a lather because she’d always made Lacey’s fancy dresses and now Lacey wanted one from the mall.

  By the time she took a breath, I was pretty sure she was avoiding the subject of Mama and the signs on purpose.

  “Did you get the letter I sent last week?” I said.

  “Yes,” she said, hesitant.

  “Well, I think I found the next clue in my treasure hunt,” I said. “I went to Threads and the lady there knew my father. She gave me these flyers that he’d collected and there was a poem on one of them and a map on another. I’m sure Mama must have written the poem, and the map has A Secret Meadow written on it. With daisies. Remember what Mama used to say about daisies?”

  It was quiet on the other end. “Lacey?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Well, what do you think?”

  “It’s just a little . . . out there.”

  The thought made me panic. “Maybe not. Maybe you get some kind of extra powers in heaven, or there’s a tiny part of you that gets left behind, or . . .”

  “Dying doesn’t make you a superhero.”

  “How do you know?” I said.

  “I guess I don’t. But if it were true, it would be a miracle. And miracles don’t happen to just anybody. They happen to, I don’t know, Olympic teams or something.”

  There wasn’t much to say after that. I listened to her go on for a while about what color dress she might get and was there anyone interesting here and was I still working on Plan B to get myself back home.

  I assured her that I was and we hung up. I closed my eyes and tried to quiet the thoughts rushing through my head, but they wouldn’t still, so I pretended I had my notebook and pencil and after a while my thoughts worked themselves into orderly lines.

  A whole school year.

  Start to finish.

  Long enough to know

  quirks,

  facial expressions

  and tones of voice,

  mine and hers.

  I had to get back

  while the faded lines of me

  were still there enough

  to trace

  back

  into place.

  I tried to put Lacey’s doubts out of my head as I went to have breakfast with Grandma. Jo was coming by in a couple of hours so we could start our official search for the Secret Meadow, and once I found more clues, there was no way Lacey could keep being such a skeptic.

  But the hunt wasn’t just about the clues and finding my way home. It was about this growing feeling that I’d be closer to Mama at Mrs. Greene’s since that was where she died, and that somehow, she might just be there on the porch waiting for me if only for one shimmering moment.

  • • •

  There were two mugs next to Grandma on the counter. One said LAKE ALMANOR and the other said DAD. I felt a small pang of guilt that I was trying so hard to get back to Mrs. Greene’s, but figured I could get to know Grandma from there. Decide how much of a chance she deserved.

  I took Lake Almanor. The mug had a drawing of a teardrop-shaped lake with pine trees dotting the sides and oversized fish swimming its depths. “Where’s that?” I said as I popped down a piece of bread in the toaster. I so much wanted to talk about Lacey and how bad I felt, that I almost said something to Grandma, but I caught myself.

  Grandma wiped down the counter where she’d spilled some water. “Up north. We fished and went birding there every summer. Stayed in these cute little cabins. Kokanee Lodge, it was called.”

  “Mama liked to fish?” I couldn’t picture it.

  “When she was a little girl. Once she turned eight, though, she refused to hook the worms and she and your grandpa turned to birding instead.”

  “Why didn’t you go with them?”

  “I’m not one for sitting and waiting for things to happen.” She touched the cross at her neck. “Besides, someone had to keep their feet on the ground while those two went flying off.”

  There was the smallest hint of irritation in her voice. It was exactly the way I’d felt about Mama sometimes. How she always left me thinking about the hard things, the boring things. The sturdy and practical things. I dug my toes into the hooked rug and changed the subject.

  “Why don’t you have any pictures out?” I said.

  “I put them in the attic years ago.”

  “Why?”

  She looked stumped for a second, like she’d never thought to ask herself that question. “They were hard to look at,” she said.

  “Seems to me the empty walls would be worse,” I said.

  Grandma gave me a long look and then set her mug in the sink. “Come on,” she said. She walked out of the kitchen without waiting, her footsteps thumping down the hall and up the stairs. As I quickly buttered my toast, I heard a loud coiled snap come from the upstairs landing. The house creaked. Then silence.

  I munched my toast as I walked up the stairs. The ladder to the attic had been pulled down from the ceiling, but I couldn’t hear so much as a rustle of paper.

  Then I heard a heavy thud.

  A lightning bolt of panic. “Grandma?”

  Nothing.

  I took the rest of the creaky wooden steps two at a time and stood at the bottom of the attic ladder.

  “Grandma?”

  “Up here.” Grandma’s voice was thin, miles away.

  I grabbed hold of the ladder and climbed hand over hand. There were several unlit bulbs hanging along a wood beam in the center of the attic. Grandma slouched over some boxes in a pool of light from the attic dormer. Dust swirled around her head like a halo.

  I knocked my shins on boxes and crates trying to get across the room to crouch beside her.

  “What is it?” I said, afraid she might be having a heart attack or some other kind of attack and that I’d have to zoom back out to get to the phone.

  Her face was pained and she had one hand over her heart, panicking me even more. “They’re ruined,” she said.

  That’s when I noticed several pictures spread across the floor, splotched and destroyed by water. The boxes were a soggy mess. The roof must have been leaking for a while.

  She closed her eyes and sat perfectly still. I raised my hand toward her shoulder, then pulled i
t back.

  “They can’t all be gone,” I said, as much for myself as for her.

  Grandma opened her eyes. I looked for moisture, but they were bone-dry. Could be an old-person condition, I supposed. Could be that some old people dried out little by little until they blew away.

  “I need to get Mr. Brannigan to look at this roof.” Grandma pushed her hands against her knees for support as she tried to hoist herself to her feet. Her knees had other ideas. It took two more tries.

  I picked up a soggy box. She picked up another.

  We spent an hour going through the pictures at the breakfast table, silently, side by side, separating the ruined ones from the ones that made it. I felt my hard edges toward her soften as she brushed a tear away from her cheek from time to time. I must have been wrong about her drying out.

  “I’ve been there!” I said, grabbing a picture of Mama as a small girl sitting on a bench with a park behind her.

  Grandma took the picture and looked it over. “I designed that park. It’s in Sacramento.”

  “We went there all the time after we moved in with Mrs. Greene. Mama liked to walk the trails.”

  We sat there in the silence of what it might mean. And then I realized, really and fully realized, that I would never know. So many things, I would never know.

  I thought about how long it might take to have Jo help me find the meadow. How even though Auburn Valley was a small town, the meadow could be anywhere along the river. Or a creek, which I hadn’t thought of until I saw Grandma’s park. The longer it took me to follow the clues, the longer it would take me to get back to Mrs. Greene and Lacey.

  Even though I wasn’t ready to tell Grandma much of anything, I was desperate, so I took the flyer with the map out of my pocket and handed it to her.

  After looking it over for a few seconds, she said, “This is a map to your mama’s meadow. She and your grandpa swore it had some kind of magical power that called the birds. He said if they told people, they might come steal the magic, so they kept it secret.”

  “Can you take me?”

  “Get your coat,” Grandma said. And we were off.

  Just like that.

  17

  Wheel of

  Fortune

  As Grandma led me through the garden, Beauty came up to the fence and gave us a good-natured grunt.

  “I don’t have any carrots for you,” Grandma said, and Beauty grunted again.

  “I’ll bring some later!” I called.

  The garden led to a path I hadn’t seen on my one and only trip through these woods from that first day, which seemed so long ago. The path curved and then ran alongside the river, about ten feet above it, a wide, rocky slope in between. I realized I had one hand clenched into a fist as we walked. It helped, so I left it that way.

  We crossed a fast-running stream that came from above and flowed on down into the river, stepping from one enormous flat stone to the next.

  “Your grandpa laid these in so we could always get across.”

  “Tell me about him,” I said.

  Grandma thought for a minute, looking up into the leafy trees. “He smoked a pipe because he thought it made him look smart.” She smiled her crinkle-nosed smile. “He was a whiz with his hands, could fix anything you put in front of him. He was that way with puzzles too.” We reached a curve in the trail and she paused, looking down where the river rushed by. “He was never indoors if he could be outside. I used to think he liked to garden, but he had no eye for it, so after years of watching him pull perfectly good plants and leave the weeds, I realized he just liked to be useful. But he could name every tree in the forest. He always had a book in his hand and a smile on his face.” She shook her head. She went back to walking, turning to see if I was coming along. “Your mama was everything to him.”

  Like with Daddy, I’d made up stories about Grandpa too. From the one picture I’d seen, he didn’t seem like the kind of man who wore a suit to work and said things like “quarterly reports” or “credit application.” I liked to think that he was a writer, like me, or did something heroic like move cattle across the plains or build hearing aids. And now I found out my ideas of him were not all that wrong.

  I let myself imagine him. The white and brown stubble of his chin. How he would smell of pipe tobacco and pine. How he would have taken my hand and walked me through the trees, pointing to this one or that, giving their proper names, like maple or ash or sycamore.

  I felt a deep, burning anger at Mama. At her need to move from place to place and drag me with her. Then disloyalty slithered its squeezy fingers around my insides.

  Matching breaths to the beat of my footfalls helped the squeezy feeling pass, and eventually, we came to a green meadow where I could feel the warm weather hiding just around the corner. The meadow touched the edge of a large rocky beach, the river beyond. Then I had to take calming breaths all over again as the day Mama died tried to play itself out in my mind. I shook my head and turned away from the river. I had a job to do.

  There were no daisies that I could see, but I could tell this was the place where the picture of Mama and Daddy was taken. I’d stared at that picture for hours and I knew every little nook and cranny of it. The trees, although bigger, grew in the same formations. Although you couldn’t see the river in the photo, you could see the edge of the rocky beach and the hills beyond, their peaks coming together in the shape of a jagged heart.

  “She loved it here,” Grandma said.

  In the shade of the trees at the far end of the meadow was a metal sculpture. A crane. It was surrounded by a circle of white river rocks. It had long pipe legs and a ski-pole neck. The wings were made out of spoons, hundreds of them, layered like feathers.

  “There’s a crane reserve not far, down in Woodbridge,” Grandma said. “Once in a great while, a crane or two would rest here by the river during their migration. Your grandpa told her they were magic, and if you wished on a crane, it would always come true. She believed it for a long time.”

  There’d been two sandhill cranes perched on the bank as I sat with Mama the morning she died. So still in the dull morning light. I knew they were sandhills because Mama had pointed them out a few weeks before she’d died, telling me how they were migrating home. I remembered thinking we’d finally found ours.

  I walked up to the metal crane and brushed my hand along the spoons. I looked it over from beak to tail feathers, and down in the blown leaves, tucked up against the crane’s leg, was another spoon, like the ones used as feathers. I picked it up.

  “Your mama used to take those spoons from Lou and Mel. She put them in every one of her pieces. Lou took such pride in the fact that her spoons were such a big part of your mama’s art.”

  Maybe the next place to look for a clue was Spoons. I laid my ear against the crane’s belly. “Did Mama put something inside?”

  “I’m not sure. She built it in your grandfather’s workshop and wouldn’t let me see until it was time to haul it into the meadow. I always thought it was her penance, her way of saying she was sorry. Then I went ahead and sent her off anyway.”

  “But it wasn’t her fault.”

  “No, it wasn’t.”

  I walked to the edge of the meadow and watched the river, sinking down to my knees. I plucked a blade of long grass and stared at it, hard, willing myself not to cry.

  They’d told me Mama had fallen down and knocked her head before rolling into the water to drown. Just like that. Because I’d been so mad at her about wanting to leave, I didn’t let her climb into bed with me that night to read Robert Frost. So she went walking instead.

  “You found her,” Grandma said, coming up behind me.

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Grandma kneeled beside me and I wished for a pair of her gardening knee pads so my knees wouldn’t get wet
and muddy from the grass.

  Her hands were right there. Sitting on her lap. I wanted her to take mine and tell me everything would be okay. In this one moment, I might have believed her.

  But then the moment passed and I was stuck with the river again. It started to sprinkle.

  “Your mama never told you about what happened here, did she? What led to her bus trip to Texas.”

  I shook my head, not sure I wanted to know, at the same time not sure I wanted to keep myself from knowing certain things anymore. Because even though Mama had told me about Grandma and why she didn’t go home, I always knew there was something else. Some Deep Thing she kept hidden the same way I hid Grandma’s letters and my secret wish to stay in one place long enough to see the seasons turn.

  “No,” I said.

  Grandma stood up with her creaky knees and I stood up with her. “I was angry,” she said. “I had no right to it, but by the time I figured that out, your mama was long gone. I kept waiting to hear from her. I honestly thought she’d come home. And then the months stretched into years and I got angry all over again.”

  “Why were you angry to begin with?”

  Grandma didn’t seem to know what to say. “Because your mother lived and your grandfather died, I suppose. As horrible as that is.”

  It took me a minute to put things together. “She was in the car with Grandpa and my dad?”

  Grandma nodded. “They were running away. Your mama and Scott.” She picked at a callus on her palm. “There was a big snowstorm that day and things had been tense. When your mama went to bed early, your grandpa had a bad feeling about it. Sure enough, he checked and found her gone, a note saying they were leaving. I tried to tell your grandpa they couldn’t get anywhere in the storm, but he wasn’t having any of it. He took off and found them huddled under the awning at Lafollette’s. Margery had gotten them there. Somehow, Thomas must have talked them into coming home, and then the car went off the road.”

  Grandma cleared her throat. “Both your father and grandfather were killed instantly. Your mother didn’t have a scratch.”

  Those last words were shaped with blame.