Smack Dab in the Middle of Maybe

by Jo Watson Hackl

  “We’re all just tore up about it,” said Belinda Faye Overland, the missing girl’s aunt. When asked about the possibility that Cricket might have run away, Ms. Overland said, “Cricket was very happy here. We took her in and treated her like a princess. She had everything she could ever want.” When pressed for anything else out of the ordinary the day that Cricket disappeared, Ms. Overland reported that the delicious red velvet cake she’d just baked and sat outside her kitchen window to cool had disappeared, too. “I suspect foul play,” she said.

  Ms. Overland is working with her church on a bake sale to raise a reward for information leading to the safe return of Cricket. Concerned citizens are asked to send donations in care of the Deerfield Baptist Church. Pastor Dudley Limerick and his wife, Mary Beth, have led the congregation in raising more than $600.

  “I just hope that we can get our girl back safe and sound,” said Ms. Overland. In addition to helping to coordinate fund-raising efforts, Ms. Overland has begun spending evenings at the fire station to help cheer the team on.

  Miss V. looked at me hard. “You’ve got the whole town worried.”

  My heart slumped clear down to my gut.

  “I’ll call the sheriff. He’ll carry you back to town.”

  “You’re turning me in?”

  “You belong back with your family.”

  I was close enough to Mama to feel her coming, and I’d just found a tanager clue. Now here I was, about to lose everything. I opened my mouth to tell Miss V. I didn’t have a family anymore, to tell her about Mama, to tell her about the headstone, to tell her about the tanager.

  She thrust out her palm like a stop sign.

  “If you knew why I left, you wouldn’t send me back.”

  Her face showed that she didn’t believe me.

  “I’ve never heard of anybody who could heal a snakebite the way you did. Can’t I stay here just a little bit longer and heal up all the way? Just two more days. Then I’ll leave the next morning. I’ll go back, I promise.”

  Miss V. let out a powerful sigh. “Lord knows I’m a sucker for a runaway. Sometimes resting up can help you sort things out. But do you really think two days will change things for you?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I tried to sound like someone she could trust.

  Her jaw tightened and eased, tightened and eased.

  After forever, her eyes met mine again. “You can stay two more days, but you stay out of my business, and I’ll stay out of yours. No snooping around.”

  “Yes, ma’am!”

  The kitchen door swung shut behind her.

  I’d done it. I’d bought myself a little time. But why is Miss V. so worried about me snooping?

  My eyes went straight to that staircase. That was the only place I hadn’t looked. Exactly what was up there that Miss V. didn’t want me to see?

  We sat at Miss V.’s dining room table eating her fried fish, hush puppies, coleslaw, and homemade tartar sauce, me trying not to look antsy to look up those stairs.

  All I could think about was Worthy #2.

  Soon as we finished cleaning up, the rain started. The moon was bright when it peeked through the clouds, and thick slashes of raindrops showed through the windows.

  The electricity flickered off.

  Miss V. lit two kerosene lanterns and carried one to the living room. She didn’t say anything, and neither did I. She opened the piano, did something I couldn’t see with the tanager thing, and played a slow, quiet waltz. Percy howled along outside.

  This had to be my chance. I pretended to fall asleep.

  After a few minutes, Miss V. turned the lantern down low, tucked the blanket higher on my shoulders, and padded off to bed with the second lantern.

  Her snores came quick.

  Turning my lantern higher, I cocked my head at Charlene. She lit on me with those eyes of hers.

  The rain would cover up any noise.

  I crept toward the stairs.

  The upstairs smelled of stirred-up dust with a sharp underbelly of Pine-Sol.

  The staircase led straight into two large, connected rooms.

  No paintings. No tanagers. Nothing but books and a beat-up suitcase.

  I tiptoed through the rooms.

  And stopped.

  Something was weird.

  Part of the upstairs was missing.

  The first room had eight windows—three on the back wall, two on the side wall, and three on the front wall. The second room had only four windows, three on the back wall and one on the side wall. The second room didn’t have any windows on the front wall. Plus, that room was narrower than the first.

  The second story of Miss V.’s house had six evenly spaced windows in front. I remembered that game me and Mama used to play, imagining how houses we passed would look on the inside. From what I saw here, the inside of Miss V.’s house didn’t match the outside.

  The second room should have eight windows, not four.

  Where were the other four windows?

  A wall went across the place where the other windows should have been. That wall was bare except for one faded photo of a tulip.

  The message from Mr. Bob flashed in my head. Some walls aren’t for everyone.

  I ran my hands over the wall, starting from the bottom and reaching as high as I could.

  I felt for anything out of place.

  Near the end of the wall, my fingers bumped into the tulip photo. I racked my brain. Had Mama said anything about a tulip?

  Nothing I could remember. I kept moving across the wall. My finger hit a crack. It ran right under the middle of the picture frame.

  I traced it—a door shape!

  My thumb bumped against a keyhole. I looked in, and my heartbeat sped up.

  Whatever was inside shined and shimmered. There must be moonlight coming from windows inside that room.

  Two ducks, painted on the wall, stared back at me.

  I stuck my finger in the keyhole and tried to pry it open.

  Locked.

  When I put my eye to the keyhole again, the light had shifted. The duck eyes were shadowed now. A tree with orange leaves glistened in the moonlight. A red bird with black feathers perched on a tree limb.

  Mama’s tanager!

  Quiet as I could, I tried the door again. The photo over the door rattled loose. Catching it, my fingers brushed something. Two somethings.

  I turned it over. A postcard painting of two ducks was taped to the back. Those ducks looked kin to the ducks I’d just seen inside the room.

  Then I felt the other thing, and for a second, I couldn’t draw a clear breath. A key was tied to a blue ribbon—a key about the size of the lock on Mama’s Bird Room.

  I turned the key in the lock and eased the door open.

  A soft heartbeat sound came from inside the narrow room.

  Four painted-over windows bounced the moonlight around among themselves.

  A black-capped chickadee, tail flicked up, perched on the branch of a pin oak. Curvy lines stretched out around the chickadee like question marks.

  A miniature pond rose from the baseboard and blended into the floor. A bass hovered, midjump, closing in on a dragonfly. The moonlight flickered across the fish and made its scales glisten.

  Freshly turned rows from Miss V.’s garden lined part of the walls. Honeysuckle vines hung from the bushes beside the garden.

  Each wall looked like it was painted in a different season from Miss V.’s garden—winter, spring, summer, fall. You could tell by the trees.

  Every little plant, every twig, every animal, had a rhythm.

  Sparrows, cardinals, warblers, woodpeckers, doves, and crows wove through the branches.

  The walls seemed to reach out and catch hold of me, whispering in my ear and singing.

  This was the mus
ic my mama had heard.

  Mama was right—the room did feel alive.

  Every wall but the summer one had tanagers—flying in the garden or perched in trees. They were bright red on the spring wall and just starting to turn green on the fall wall. On the winter wall a huge green tanager caught my eye.

  Just a minute. Something isn’t right. The tanager doesn’t belong on the winter wall.

  Tanagers have already migrated by winter. No tanager would be in Miss V.’s woods then.

  That clue—Some walls aren’t for everyone—flashed in my head and itched its way around.

  Maybe it wasn’t a dead end. Maybe it was trying to tell me something.

  But what?

  The winter tanager was bigger than the others. That had to mean something, right?

  Then I saw the knothole it was sitting on.

  Red rings were painted around it. The same exact color as Percy’s collar. Bull’s-eye red. Those rings looked like circles around a target.

  There had to be something in that hole. I poked in my finger.

  It touched a dusty, waxy string. I pulled.

  A yellow, rolled-up piece of paper crinkled out of the hole, tied together with the string.

  I untied it and drew the lantern closer.

  The note was dated the same day as Mama’s birthday.

  March 6, 1984

  I’M HEADING HOME. THIS PLACE COULDN’T CHANGE ME. THERE’S SOME THINGS YOU JUST CAN’T CHANGE. BEHOLD YOUR WORLD. I’VE BURIED A TREASURE FOR WHOEVER CAN FOLLOW THE LIGHT TO FIND IT.

  Love,

  BOB

  A treasure! The surprise he had told Mama about.

  Below the words was a tiny trail of bird tracks down the page. So many, it looked like a whole bird convention.

  Those tracks brought to mind the blue thread I’d seen in the nest in our Christmas tree. But why?

  The lantern flickered, and I knew. The blue thread had looked like writing in the bird’s nest! I studied the note closer.

  That’s when I saw them—sideways letters in the tracks, spelling out these words:

  START WITH THE TREASURE IN THIS HOUSE

  Those words hadn’t even settled in my head before I heard another of those heartbeat sounds. I shined my light where it had come from—near the corner window.

  A raindrop dripped into a half-full bucket. The ceiling above it was missing big flakes of paint and plaster.

  The leak in the roof was tearing up this room!

  Outside, a coyote howled. Percy started barking. He was liable to wake up Miss V. I retied the note and jammed it back in the hole so she wouldn’t know I’d been up here.

  Back on the daybed, questions flew at me, fast as moths against window glass.

  Why would Miss V. hide that room?

  Who was that Bob person who’d painted the room?

  What about him couldn’t be changed?

  Why did he hide a treasure?

  And what inside this house was the treasure I should start with?

  When I woke up the next morning, even the light outside looked different. It was brighter and greener, and the air coming through Miss V.’s propped-open porch door smelled of every fresh new thing the rain had sprouted. I’d found Mama’s room. I’d been inside it, even. Aunt Belinda’s double-wide, with its dollar-store art hanging on the walls, seemed a million miles away. I’d stood where Mama’d stood. And I had another clue toward Mama’s surprise.

  I peeked around. No sign of Miss V. except for two ham biscuits she’d left for me on a napkin, next to the daybed.

  Me and Charlene, we got to looking for clues.

  We turned over every pillow, prodded into every crack in the baseboards, and felt for any more fake walls.

  I was just about to turn over the photograph of Mr. Bob to look on the back when the door opened.

  Miss V. handed me a copy of the Messenger, holding it by the corners, like she didn’t want to touch it.

  I was still front-page news.

  NO CLUES IN MISSING-GIRL CASE

  The search continues for Ariana “Cricket” Overland, who disappeared from the Deerfield community. No progress has been made.

  The disappearance is the latest in a string of misfortunes for the family. Cricket’s father died earlier this year. Her mother abandoned the family. Efforts to relocate her mother have been unsuccessful so far. According to two neighbors, her mother reportedly has a long history of mental issues and instability. Ms. Overland, Cricket’s aunt, vigorously denied that report, however, stating that “she’s no worse than anybody else walking around Pickens County. She’s just more colorful.”

  The story went on, but I couldn’t read any more.

  “We can talk about this later.” Miss V. took the paper. “I’ll be back soon.”

  The door slammed shut behind her.

  I tried to turn that article over in my head one little bit at a time, the way I’d seen a pond bird choke down a snake.

  A long history of mental issues and instability. Those neighbors were making Mama out to be crazy.

  Mama had her mood swings. Every now and then she’d get a bad case of the nerves.

  Me and Daddy knew that. It was our family business.

  Ours.

  She wasn’t crazy. She just needed to stay on her medicine. She wasn’t unstable, like some chemical about to explode.

  Who did those neighbors think they were?

  What did those neighbors know about a mama who smelled of Dove soap and jasmine water and covered my ceiling with midnight-blue-painted eggshell crates and tinfoil stars so I could make a wish every single night?

  I knew my mama wasn’t like other mamas. In a lot of ways, she was better. As for the rest, it wasn’t anything we couldn’t deal with.

  Still, that line from the article rattled around my head—long history of mental issues and instability.

  Were all those things I loved about Mama just signs of some craziness I should have had the good sense to spot? Mama would wake me up to have a midnight picnic in the yard. So what if sometimes she’d pin a blanket over the window to keep out the sun, take to bed, and draw her legs up tight against her chest?

  When Mama sang along with Hank Williams in the grocery store, the way she’d sing would make me want to howl right along with her. And it wasn’t just Hank Williams. There was opera, too—Madame Butterfly, The Nightingale, and Tosca, and anything else on World of Opera. Mama would catch my hand and pull me around the room, making me feel the music.

  There was the time Mama took me out of Sunday school to take pictures of a double rainbow. The time Mama drove me around all night long with the sunroof open because I couldn’t sleep. The time Mama spent a whole week making me a secret hideout using bamboo, twine, and two types of vines—morning glories, so I’d have flowers in the morning, and moonflowers, to bloom at night.

  Mama was just different, that’s all.

  But what about all the sharp looks in the grocery store? The looks at Mama. The looks at me.

  If my mama was crazy, just what exactly did that make me?

  The floorboards felt like they were shifting. Nothing felt solid. I grabbed hold of the wall.

  Is this what going crazy feels like?

  Was craziness flowing through my veins, steady as that copperhead’s poison?

  Out on Miss V.’s back porch, I snatched up her hatchet and hacked at those pine pieces. Whatever those neighbors thought, it didn’t bother me one little bit. I was going to find the treasure, and I was going to help Miss V. fix that roof to save Mama’s room. I’d do it all.

  “You sure you’re up to that?” Miss V. looked at me funny.

  I got mad all over again, just thinking of those looks in the grocery store.

  “I’m fine.” I split tha
t pine into splintery bits.

  Percy came over and sat, his head turning back and forth. He could have been watching a tennis match, following every little whack of my hatchet, his eyes on that flying wood. One went near him, and he snapped it out of the air, crunched it up, spit it out, and waited for more. I think Percy was just having fun, but it made me feel better to think of him being mad at that wood the way I was mad at those neighbors.

  Miss V. fetched herself another hatchet and settled in beside me, a scratched-up book next to her. Soon as Percy saw that book, he sat right down and tilted his ears forward. “By your second-favorite poet,” Miss V. announced. “Walt Whitman. We’ll pick up where we left off last time.” She commenced to reading.

  “Do I contradict myself?

  Very well then I contradict myself,

  (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

  I tried to tune it all out, to just whack away, to let my chopping sound drown out everything else.

  When the sun was bright overhead, Miss V. called me to the kitchen and fixed scrambled eggs and bacon for lunch. While the bacon was frying, she went upstairs to check the leak.

  We ate with our chairs facing the window. That warm egg smell made the kitchen so full, it took the place of conversation.

  I thought Miss V. was thinking about the roof. Instead, she scraped her plate clean, pushed back her chair, and held up a thin blue ribbon.

  The ribbon from outside the Bird Room.

  It dangled, accusing me.

  Miss V. had taken me in. She’d healed me. And I’d gone and done the one thing she told me not to. I’d snooped.

  My chin started to quiver.

  “I’m sorry. I…”

  “We had a deal.” Miss V. looked more sad than mad.

  So I told her. I told her about Mama leaving and Daddy dying and me taking to the woods and how Mama had seen the Bird Room, how she’d met Mr. Bob, about the doogaloo, about the other clues, how people started calling Mama crazy, and how all Mama wanted to do was find the Bird Room, to prove it was real, to see that room one more time. How Mama was coming back day after tomorrow. How the Bird Room could get her to stay. But I didn’t tell Miss V. about the last thing I’d said to Mama. Nobody needed to know that.