The Secret Hum of a Daisy (10 page)

Happy

Detention

I didn't take
Lacey's calls over the next couple of days. It wasn't logical to be mad at her for having a sleepover, but there it was.

When I got to school on Wednesday morning, Jo was waiting by the front door. “Oh my gosh, Grace! You'll never guess what I found!”

She foisted a thin manila folder into my hands.

Before I could open it, she said, “Your mom built the fountain!”

“What fountain?”

“The one in the park!”

In the folder were a few newspaper clippings. The
Sacramento Bee.
The
Union.
The
Mountain Democrat.
They all said the same thing.

Anna Jessup, age 16, built the fountain that will mark the center point of the Bear River Park designed by her mother, Miranda Jessup, in Auburn Valley, California. Miss Jessup has entitled it “Wings.” An unveiling will take place on Saturday afternoon at ten o'clock in the morning, followed by a celebration at the Spoons Souperie on Main Street.

Jo was jumping up and down. “My parents had their first kiss at that fountain. So technically, I might not be here if it weren't for your mom! That almost makes us sisters!”

“Can you take me there?”

The smile fell off her face. “Right now?”

“Just tell me how to find it. I don't want you to get in trouble for ditching.” I could feel Mama so strong, her hand at my back. Maybe it was that easy. The meadow could be in the park.

Jo said very seriously, “I have never ditched school in my life. As soon as we don't show up in first period, they will call your grandma and my parents, who will probably ground us for life.”

“I have to do this,” I said.

She picked up her backpack and slung it over one shoulder. “I've waited my whole life for something like this to happen!”

• • •

Bear River Park was a quarter mile from school down a side street and up a small hill. According to Jo, it was twenty acres. It wasn't like a normal park, with a swing set and a tree and a bunch of grass. It was like an enchanted forest. There was a wide main path lined with gravel that branched off into narrower paths, which led to a series of nooks and crannies. There was a stone bench sitting in the heart of a stand of cedars, and tire swings hung from ancient trees. There were stone bridges over creeks and a huge expanse of grass, big enough to play softball, and a gazebo off to one side. People walked arm in arm, their dogs on leashes. I saw Lou and Mel's tree house with a hand-painted sign honoring Billy's service.

The bird sanctuary Sheriff Bergum had talked about was huge, at least an acre of trees with a pond in the middle, nesting boxes all around, and birds singing for all they were worth. Several of the trees had birdhouses of all different sizes and colors on every branch. There were birdbaths made with brightly colored mosaic tiles.

I felt a sense of calm just being here. It felt like a place where Mama would have come, where I could be close to her. She said she'd never leave me, that not even death could separate us, and I saw her there in the rustle of the leaves overhead, the trickling sound of water, the rainbow-colored birdhouses.

“Is there a meadow here? Near the river or a creek?” I said.

“A meadow?”

“Someplace big and flat, where wild daisies grow?”

The puzzled look on Jo's face gave me the answer.

“Just the gazebo with the flat grassy area. But no daisies. There's music in the park on Sundays all summer long. Mrs. Snickels was married in that gazebo.”

There were plaques beside each project:
SPONSORED BY THE QUILTING BEE, IN MEMORY OF SPARKS,
or
CLASS OF 1985.

Then we came to Mama's fountain.

Trees were cleared away to give room for the sun to shine down in better weather. The sculpture in the center of the fountain was a larger version of the birds I'd seen her put together a hundred gazillion times. The walls of the fountain were made of white granite, short enough to sit on. Piles of coins both shiny and dull rested on the bottom. A pipe, maybe eight feet long, came up through the center and pumped water onto a cascade of wings and rusted feathers, all cut from metal.

Mama's plaque read:

Where the bird was before it flew,

Where the flower was before it grew,

Where bird and flower were one and the same.

The lines were from one of Frost's poems, “In a Vale.” On the nights Mama ended her reading with that poem, I knew we'd be moving soon. It was a leaving sort of poem, or at least that was always what it felt like to me. I wondered why Mama had picked those lines for her fountain.

“I come here all the time when it gets warm and film the wildlife, which includes people,” Jo said. “It's my very favorite place to be, except on my horse. The flowers are just starting to come up now. But in the next couple of weeks, it will look like heaven.”

“Your grandma spends so much time out here, clipping and planting and moving things from one place to another. You can tell how much she loves it here.”

Once again my feelings about Grandma were tripping over themselves and landing in a heap. I couldn't fit the Grandma I'd fixed in my mind with someone who could create a place like this.

“When does she come? She's always at home, with me.”

“She comes during the day while we're at school. My mom and other people in town come out to help from time to time. It's like everyone's backyard.”

Suddenly I understood why Grandma was always wearing her gardening uniform, why she brought her gardening tools into the truck when she drove me to school. She was on her way to tend the park.

Jo looked at the fountain. “She won't ever talk about it, though. She won't give me an interview for my documentary.”

“Some people aren't talkers,” I said.

“But she's the heart of the story.”

I sat on the edge of the fountain and touched the freezing-cold water, thinking about Grandma being the heart of something. A couple jogged by with their Chihuahua, his tiny legs barely keeping up. They both looked our way with a puzzled expression. It was a school day, after all.

“How well do you know her?” I said.

Jo sat next to me and wiped the bottom of one boot in the grass. She took her video camera out of her backpack and fidgeted with it. “I've known her my whole life.”

“What's she like?”

“Keeps to herself, mostly. Mom has me run over jams and cookies when she bakes or cans. Mrs. Jessup always asks me inside and makes me a cup of tea. She listens to me go on and on about stuff sometimes. She has good advice. I've always felt a little sorry for her, since she didn't seem to have any friends or family. I didn't know about you.”

“Of course you didn't. Why should she mention having a granddaughter?”

“I know you're mad. But do you know what she did just before you got here? She had me and Max help her box up your mom's room because she thought you'd want it for yourself. Then she brought over these decorating magazines and we looked through them for ideas. Once she realized she didn't even know your favorite color, we all decided it would be best if you got to decorate for yourself.”

On one of the days Grandma came to Mrs. Greene's before the funeral, a day I'd refused to come with her, she'd asked my favorite color. I thought it was such a stupid question at the time. Like out of all the questions in the universe, she picked that one?

The truth was, maybe I wanted to give Grandma a chance. And if I was clean honest with myself, there was some little crumb inside that had felt that way for a long time, her being my only other living family. But giving her a chance felt like a betrayal to Mama, and I didn't know how to change that inside myself. She'd only been gone twenty-six days.

Jo stood up and wiped the seat of her jeans. She pointed the camera toward the sky and turned it on, turning around in a slow circle. Then she turned it off. I looked up and saw how the tree tips formed a perfect circle of green with blue sky in the middle. It was an image I would have liked to write about in my notebook.

A perfect circle above my head

Leaves that cling to a blue-sky bed

“We should go back. We might just get the whole town looking for us if we don't,”Jo said as she put her camera away.

“Can I show you something first?” I took out the flyer with the map and pointed to the daisy meadow. “Do you know where that is?”

She turned the flyer this way and that. I noticed her fingernails were painted blue. “I don't. Where did you get it?”

“Found it in my mom's . . . room.”

“Well, there are only so many trails that lead down to the river, if that's what these curvy lines mean. We could start with the trails.”

“How many are there?”

“I don't know, seven, maybe eight? It's a small town.”

“Don't tell my grandma, okay? She might . . . worry. Or something.” The last thing I needed was Grandma asking a bunch of pesky questions I didn't want to answer.

“Cool. Our first secret. I'll come by on Saturday. How about after lunch?”

“Sounds good.”

I smiled, and Jo reached in her pocket. She brought out two shiny pennies and gave me one.

“Here's to finding your meadow.”

We stood next to the fountain and tossed our pennies. I wondered if there was a coin in there somewhere with Mama's wish. Or maybe Grandma's.

“Thanks for bringing me here,” I said.

“You belong here just as much as anyone. You probably don't feel that way yet. But you will.”

The sky didn't have answers, but it was a good place to look while I tried to find them inside myself.

• • •

Grandma and Mrs. Brannigan were sitting in Mr. Flinch's office when we got back to school during second period. We were in big trouble, but no one had called out the national guard or anything. They hadn't even bothered Sheriff Bergum since we were both missing and they figured we'd gone off together.

“What in the world were you thinking?” Mrs. Brannigan yelled. She had thrown a sweater over her pajamas. She still had her slippers on. Big fluffy pink slippers with glittery silver poufs on top. “With everything that's going on, you're going to ditch school and give me seven different kinds of heart attack?”

“I'm sorry, Mom,” Jo said, head down.

“It's my fault,” I said.

“Where did you go?” Grandma asked.

Jo looked at me for direction. Grandma sat so straight in her chair, and it finally clicked that she wasn't stiff; she just had good posture from being a ballerina.

“We went to the park,” I said softly.

They all let out a collective breath.

“What? Did you think we ran away to join the circus?” Jo said.

“Of course not,” Mr. Flinch said, tugging at the purple sleeves of his sweater. “However, we did call over to Lafollette's to make sure no one bought a bus ticket. Mrs. Miller informed me there was no way she'd ever sell a bus ticket to a child under eighteen without a parent or guardian present, and who did we think she was? So now, on top of everything else, I have to bring Mrs. Miller a batch of brownies to smooth her ruffled feathers.”

“A bus ticket? Why would we want a bus ticket?” Jo said.

The only idea these people had of me was that I might run away. Just like Mama did.

“I'm sorry to say that you will each have detention today,” Mr. Flinch said. “I'm sure I can find something supremely horrible for you to do. Perhaps we can decipher some
Othello.
”

Grandma stood up. “That's twice,” she said to me. “Don't do it again.”

Before I knew what to say, or how to feel, she opened the door to leave. But instead of slamming out, she turned around. “And you're going to help Mr. Flinch with those brownies. Then you're going to bring me some so I can have them with my tea. I could use some chocolate about now.”

So instead of deciphering
Othello,
which made me think of Ginger Peppers, Mr. Flinch had us help him make brownies in the cafeteria kitchen for detention. Jo tried to do some filming, but he said it defeated the purpose of detention to let her do something she loved. Some might think we were getting off easy by baking brownies, but Mr. Flinch taught as we baked. He made us do fractions while we measured, wouldn't let us taste the batter, and then, when the first batch didn't turn out exactly right, he made us start over. And we didn't get to eat any. Not a crumb.

When we were finally done, we put a plate together for Grandma and one for Mrs. Brannigan. Then Mr. Flinch took us to hand-deliver the remaining still-warm brownies to Mrs. Miller at Lafollette's, where she promptly gave me and Jo an earful about who did we think we were, giving her and everyone else a worry attack. She was tall, almost as tall as Mr. Flinch, and wide at the shoulders. She gave me a bear hug that squeezed the air out of my lungs, and then she gave one to Jo. Once we'd been sufficiently squeezed, we eyeballed the brownies. Mrs. Miller took a big bite and offered one to Mr. Flinch. Then she tucked the plastic back around the paper plate and put them away. “Happy detention, ladies.”

A Secret

Meadow

Dear Grace,

Okay. So this is the last regular letter I'm going to send. If you won't take my calls, I'm going to start sending you every terrible poem I write until you can't stand it anymore.

You're smiling right now, I can feel it.

So, I wasn't there when you needed me. I'm sure you feel pretty crappy about it. Otherwise, you'd be taking my calls by now. But you have to understand that I loved your mama too, and now my best friend is gone. I've been a wreck. I know you don't want to hear that because you've probably been a worse wreck, and you have a better reason for it. I've been such a mess, in fact, that Marsha Trett isn't making fun of me even though she loves that more than chocolate chip cookies. And we all know how much she loves those.

So Jill and Carrie felt sorry for me and told me I had two choices. 1) I could spend the night at Jill's house, where we wouldn't do anything monumental and we wouldn't watch any movies like
My Girl
or
Shiloh
or anything that might cause endless amounts of sobbing. We would make stupid faces at each other anytime the mood got the slightest bit blue. I'm talking summer-sky-almost-white blue. And anytime I got that hound-dog look on my face, they had permission to put an ice cube down the back of my shirt and hold it there. Or, 2) They would kill me.

I'm sad that I missed your call, but we would have been home in time if it wasn't for Mom's stupid bald tire blowing up on the freeway.

Don't even get me started on THAT.

Here's my latest poem so you see what you will be in for.

Lint

Tiny, hairy

Scant, yet scary.

Where have you come from, O lint?

Sticky like glue

Give me a clue!

Where have you come from, O lint?

Dogs or chickens?

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 it 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.