Smack Dab in the Middle of Maybe

by Jo Watson Hackl

  When the smoke finally came, I gave it a steady breath.

  A flame spread.

  I cradled the fire, did a slow, careful shuffle to the fireplace, and fed it more twigs and branches.

  Slowly, it grew until it could stand on its own.

  The heat warmed my hands and flushed my face. I propped three more branches on top, crouched in close, and brought Charlene over to see it all.

  Me and Charlene, we sat and watched our fire. It swayed in orange, red, yellow, and blue flames, like some kind of rainbow you’d dream up in your head.

  Fire I’d started.

  Fire I’d grown with my own two hands.

  Sitting up in the tree house with Charlene, our stomachs full of peanut butter and bamboo shoots, it hit me—that gang of raccoons hadn’t beaten me. The woods had thrown a test at me, and I’d passed. I was winning at Woods Time.

  I could do this! I picked up the rock and turned it every which-a-way. I would figure it out. But no matter how long I stared, no matter how many different ways I turned the rock, I couldn’t make out any words. The carving was too faint.

  Grandma always said the best way to solve a puzzle is to get your mind on something else. I tried to think about Mama, the way she smelled, the way her fingers felt, running up and down my back when I couldn’t sleep. I pulled out Mama’s paper and sniffed. It didn’t exactly smell like Mama, but it was close—like violets and green things.

  Every year on the first half-warm day of spring, Mama pulled me outside to look for violets. She poured the stems and flowers into a stew of shredded-up newspapers and threw in some dried rose petals she’d been saving since summer. She plucked an eyelash off each of us and threw them in the pot, too. She added a hair from Daddy’s brush, lint from towel day, and whatever else struck her fancy. Mama didn’t take the pot off the heat until the pulp was soft as lasagna noodles and all melted together. Then we spread it on an old window screen.

  After the paper was dry, me and Mama would spend the whole day drawing still lifes of fruit and bird nests Mama set up for us.

  Mama spent hours sitting across the table from me, drawing, but she never showed me her pictures. She said it was bad luck for her. She kept an arm curled around the side of her paper. When she was done, she rolled up each picture and piled them on the top shelf of her closet.

  They disappeared when she did.

  What was in those pictures that she wouldn’t let me see?

  Half of me was hating Mama for hiding her pictures, and the other half was hating me for hating Mama.

  It wasn’t her fault. That was just Mama’s way. As soon as I proved the Bird Room was real, Mama wouldn’t need to go off looking for birds anymore because I would have found them.

  A little voice in my head said that maybe Mama wouldn’t even show up at the cemetery. But I just huddled Daddy’s jacket around me and tried to remember the rose-violet smell of Mama’s paper when it was fresh and warm.

  I dreamed about Mama’s paper, that paper laid out forever, one long, blank page waiting for me and Mama to draw all new things.

  * * *

  Mama’s paper was still unwinding in my head when the bird songs woke me up. It stayed with me all the way through my peanut butter breakfast, through building the fire back up, and through boiling my water.

  The last time me and Mama used her paper was at our picnic near the cemetery in Columbus. We spent the afternoon making rubbings of carved angels from the headstones.

  Then it hit me—I couldn’t see what those marks on the cemetery rock were saying, but maybe I could take a rubbing.

  I carried the rock to the creek and washed it off. I left it wet so Mama’s paper would stick. I sharpened my pencil and, starting from one side, scraped the lead across the paper on the stone.

  Shapes started showing—the lines of a feather.

  And below it, what could have been a line of writing. But the letters didn’t make sense.

  Is this in some kind of foreign language?

  The only thing I knew how to say in another language was pantalones rojos, and red pants weren’t going to help me now.

  Wait. The letters leaned to the left.

  But don’t most people slant their handwriting to the right?

  Mama’d told me once how Leonardo da Vinci used backward writing. Maybe that’s what this was.

  But the way to read backward writing is by looking at it in a mirror.

  And I sure didn’t have a mirror out here.

  Stupid woods.

  Then I recollected what Grandma always said. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

  Maybe I didn’t need a mirror. Maybe all I needed to do was look at it backward.

  But how?

  I had an idea. My writing used to go through to the other side of the notebook paper if I pressed my pencil down too hard. Maybe I could look at the writing from the other side.

  I went over those markings again and again with my pencil until they were thick and dark.

  I turned the paper to the other side, but I still couldn’t make out the words.

  A song started playing through my head, one of Grandma’s favorites: “Keep on the Sunny Side.”

  And that’s how I knew Grandma was still helping.

  I walked out to a clearing, turned over the paper, and held it up to the sun.

  The words appeared.

  Everything tingled inside me. I’d found another one of Mr. Bob’s clues!

  But what did it mean?

  Mama started calling me Cricket when I was a baby. She said crickets bring happiness, and that’s sure what I’d done, just by being born. Besides, she said, crickets are resourceful, and nobody else could make a staircase out of stuffed animals the way I did whenever I got the notion to climb out of my crib in the middle of the night.

  Now I’d need every bit of that resourcefulness if I was going to figure out how to look like a rabbit.

  “Okay,” I told Charlene over our peanut-butter-and-clover breakfast. “Rabbits are gray and small and twitchy. How can I look like a rabbit, and why would anybody want me to?”

  She twitched her antennae at me.

  “Nice try.” I smoothed her antennae back down. “But you’re not no rabbit.”

  I put her back in her box and started walking the sidewalks, looking for clues and food and trying to look like a rabbit, whatever that meant.

  But the thing about not having the book is, you wonder what you’re supposed to be doing. What you’d be doing if you knew better.

  It was like the homeschooling time with Mama all over again. Even I knew we were supposed to be keeping to some kind of schedule. After Daddy told me to keep an eye on Mama and headed offshore, it was all I could do to talk her into getting dressed before lunchtime. We’d start out aiming to cover adverbs or tectonic plates, and I’d end up getting put on “independent study” with a library book while Mama drew picture after picture, her free arm wrapped tight around each one.

  After all that walking, all morning long, all I managed to do was lose the bright-green top button off Daddy’s jacket and stir up a bunny who jumped away, fast as I saw him.

  I retraced my steps back to the tree house, but that button was gone. It felt like I’d lost a little piece of Daddy.

  Charlene started up chirping. At least I still had her. I gave her a little bit of peanut butter, but she still kept calling.

  When I got ready to set out again, Charlene hopped right up on my shoulder.

  “You want to come?”

  She turned those puppy-dog brown eyes of hers on me and let out a slow, soft chirp.

  Having Charlene out there with me, I felt like she was guiding me. When Charlene looked just the slightest bit to the left, I went with it.

  Turns out, Charlene was a genius at finding
food.

  Not so much with clues.

  Charlene steered me past what used to be a rose trellis, the vines all thorny and tangled, past the street with spread-out columns where the front offices used to be. When we came to a place where the weeds were pushed to the side, we saw faint prints in the dirt. Charlene stared at the trail. I followed and, just around a bend, saw whatever made those prints must have been eating from—a field of clover, dandelion greens, wild onion, and two hickory-nut trees. I gathered up as much as I could carry.

  * * *

  My brain had two sharp edges now, but only one of them was happy. The finding-food-and-keeping-warm part was ready to celebrate. Our fire was going strong, and my coat pockets were filled with hickory nuts and greens. But the other edge, the solving-the-puzzle part, was itchy and mad. We’d covered a lot of ground but hadn’t found anything shimmering.

  And I wasn’t even one step closer to figuring out how to look like a rabbit.

  I’d run out of ideas. I needed to get my mind on something else. Plus, I was starving.

  I needed to do something I at least halfway knew how to do.

  I remembered Mama teaching me how to make green-onion pancakes to fold around chopped-up pecans. Even if it lasted for just one second, I wanted the woods to smell like Mama’s kitchen. “Let’s make pancakes for lunch,” I told Charlene.

  I made a mash out of dandelion greens, wild onions, and a dab of peanut butter, spread it on the pan with some oil from the peanut butter for grease, and let my fire sizzle it up.

  I skimmed off the pancake with the point of my pocket knife and folded it around the hickory-nut pieces and peanut butter—more protein to help me make it the nine days till Mama.

  I shared the woods burrito with Charlene. “You’ve earned a big piece. If we hadn’t followed that animal trail you spotted, we never would have gotten all this food.”

  Charlene started chirping up a storm.

  That was it!

  Maybe the clue didn’t mean that I should make myself look like a rabbit. Maybe it meant that I should look at things the way a rabbit would.

  Rabbits stay close to the ground—like on that trail we’d followed. Maybe rabbits had even made the trail.

  And what had Daddy told me about rabbits?

  They burrow in the dirt. They keep their babies underground.

  Like a buried surprise.

  “The buried surprise Mr. Bob promised!” I hollered. “That’s what the clue means. All we need now is to find where the shimmering stops and dig there.”

  My mind started galloping.

  Where would I find something shimmering in a town where everything was crumbling apart?

  Grandma always said to unravel the knot from the loose end. Start from the beginning. Me and Charlene hurried to the sign at the edge of town, the sign that announced the start of Electric City.

  Block by block, we walked the woods, my hand shovel in my back pocket, looking for anything shimmery. Maybe there were some old windows. Would those count as shimmery?

  Nothing, not even close, all afternoon.

  Was this how Mama felt all those years—looking for the Bird Room but not finding it?

  The sun slanted its red warning-sign light at me. It was getting late. Still, I couldn’t give up yet. I passed Daddy’s old homeplace, the library site, the empty, sunk-in spot where the theater used to be.

  Charlene started twitching her antennae to the right.

  Then I saw them: quartz rocks lining each side of the sidewalk leading to the theater. The orange-red light glinted off each shiny, shimmery edge.

  Starting where the theater sidewalk ended, I got to digging, fast as I could.

  My shovel struck something hard—a metal lunch box, the old-timey kind.

  I let out a whoop. We’d solved it! We’d found the buried surprise!

  Inside, there was a heavy, square wooden box made out of two different kinds of wood—a dark wood on the bottom and a light wood on the top. A circle was carved into the top of the box, near the edge. A special kind of box for a special kind of surprise.

  I went to open it. The light part seemed like it should be the lid, but there wasn’t a handle.

  I tried the lid. Stuck.

  Not even my pocketknife could pry it open.

  Maybe after all those years of being buried in the cold dirt, something had gummed it up. I headed back to the tree house, got the fire going good, and hugged the box in my lap, letting it warm up.

  I tried again to jimmy the lid loose.

  If anything, the heat just made it tighter.

  Should I smash the box with some rocks? But that might break whatever was inside.

  I was this close to Mama’s surprise, and the lid wouldn’t budge, not one single, tiny bit.

  “You try.” I showed Charlene the box.

  She jumped on it and started tapping her way across the top. She stumbled on the carved circle.

  I should have seen it before—in the middle of the circle was a shallow carving, a little upside-down balloon with its blowing end chopped off and the knot missing.

  Why would that Bob guy put a carving of a balloon on a box that didn’t open?

  That carving had to mean something.

  I closed my eyes and pretended Mama was right there beside me, pointing out things to notice.

  I’d seen something shaped like that before. I just needed to remember what.

  I thought about all those cartoons where a lightbulb goes on over somebody’s head when they figure something out. I wanted a lightbulb moment, too.

  And then, that’s exactly what I got.

  Because I remembered the lightbulb carved in the middle of my doogaloo.

  The doogaloo that looked to be exactly the size of that circle.

  I grabbed the coin off the clue shelf.

  Soon as I put it in the circle, something inside the box clicked.

  When I tried the box again, the top slid off.

  Inside, there was a piece of paper with a drawing of a tanager. The tanager reminded me of the tanager that used to be on my doogaloo.

  Just below the tanager, slanty words:

  SOME WALLS AREN’T FOR EVERYONE

  My whole body drooped. This wasn’t Mama’s surprise.

  And it was like that Bob person didn’t want anyone to solve the clue trail.

  Some walls aren’t for everyone. That line played in my head all night. But the second my eyes snapped open, I saw me and Charlene had bigger things to worry about.

  The clouded-up sky looked like eraser smudges on worn-out paper. White frost covered the leaves. Hundreds of spiderwebs hunkered just off the ground, in every low bush.

  Something had spooked all the spiders. Spooked them bad enough to make them cluster up close.

  No bird sounds. Just bare branches scraping in the wind.

  Icy air hit my skin.

  A storm was headed for our woods.

  I scurried down the ladder and threw more logs on the fire to keep it going.

  A crinkling sound came toward us.

  Then I felt the sleet.

  I snatched up as much dandelion and rye grass for me and Charlene as I could, grabbed the hot stones from the fire with the edge of Daddy’s jacket, and ran for the tree house.

  The ice beat up against the shutters.

  Charlene twitched her antennae at me, nervous-like. Had she ever been through a storm?

  She crawled deep inside my sleeve. Pulling my knees tight, I poured my breath in to her. It became a warm white cloud, something for Charlene to hold on to.

  Charlene was brave. She stayed steady, her antennae down, tapping my arm every so often.

  Breathe in. Breathe out.

  I tried to picture the rest of the world going about its busines
s. Keisha getting up in Mobile, wondering if her school would be closed. My cousins making sleet balls to throw at each other. Aunt Belinda setting out mugs for hot chocolate.

  Outside, the light turned blurry.

  A tree limb crashed.

  What if a limb knocks the tree house loose from the tree?

  Some walls aren’t for everyone. Maybe it wasn’t a clue.

  Maybe it was a warning.

  I didn’t belong in these woods.

  I stared at my clue shelf. How was I going to fill it now?

  Me and Charlene nibbled at the peanut butter and hickory nuts, trying to make them last.

  Why hadn’t I gathered more food?

  All the food I’d eaten in my life without really enjoying it, all the food I’d let go to waste, it paraded through my head, one bite after another. Mama’s homemade chicken and dumplings, deviled eggs, deviled ham, hamburgers from Briggs Five Points, Aunt Belinda’s Tater Tots casserole, cranberry sauce and turkey, tuna salad, s’mores, strawberry flapjacks, Frosted Flakes, and french fries. Even Grandma’s brussels sprouts.

  The cold got worse. I missed everything warm about my mama.

  Not even those times she went away could change that. Days of me not knowing where she was, not knowing how to answer Grandma’s questions. When she got back, Mama would just say, “Don’t worry, Cricket. Everything’s okay.”

  And then, with Mama back, it was.

  One day, Mama took me with her. She crumpled up my homeschool worksheet, grabbed a pack of Big Red gum, jangled her keys at me, and dropped a fresh gardenia bloom on my desk. “Gardenias are like happiness,” Mama said. “You get right up on it, and it doesn’t smell like much. But if you step back and let it spread around the room, then you’re on to something. Let’s step back. Let’s explore.”

  She drove all the way to Jackson without stopping once. We made a game of the trip, looking at all the houses, guessing who lived inside, how the rooms were laid out, what the people hung on their walls. It felt like magic passing by the Millsaps bell tower and being in that city with its tall buildings and murals and sculptures. It was so different from anything in Deerfield.