Miss V. didn’t say one single, solitary word until I was done. She waited three full breaths before she opened her mouth.
Inside I felt…empty. Like a busted balloon. But also somehow…better.
I’d never told a soul anything bad about my mama. What would Miss V. think of me now that she knew about Mama, now that she knew I hadn’t stopped her from leaving?
“Bob wasn’t crazy.” Miss V. stood up from the table.
“I know he wasn’t crazy. I said people were calling my mama crazy. That’s why I need to show Mama the Bird Room.”
“Ace.” Her voice got soft. “I’ve heard about your mama. Maybe your mama’s not ready to see you yet. Maybe the room won’t change things. Maybe that room isn’t good for either one of us. Maybe it’s time to go back home to your aunt.”
“It’s my only chance!” My voice spiraled high. “Please.”
I had to think of something to get her to change her mind.
Behind me, Charlene started up her chirping.
My brain churned on empty.
“Be quiet, Charlene,” I hard-whispered.
Something else echoed in my head. Behold.
Behold your world.
The treasure!
Mama’s treasure was the answer to everything.
“What if I could get you some money?” I asked Miss V. “Enough to fix your roof and have some left over.” I told her about the treasure note.
“I don’t believe it,” she said. “The roof needs replacing. You know that. But that room is private. I’ve never shown it to anybody.” She stood up. “There probably isn’t any treasure, and who knows if…” A pained look flashed, gone as fast as it came. “I tell you what, Ace. I’ll give you until day after tomorrow. If you can come up with a treasure by then, we’ll split it, and you can show your mother the room.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” I said. “Can we go look at the room? Maybe we could find another clue.”
She shook her head. “I don’t want you getting your hopes up about any of this. I’m telling you, there isn’t any treasure. I clean this house top to bottom every Saturday. Bob left that room over thirty years ago. If there were even a hint of treasure, I would have found it by now. Besides, I’m too busy today to go chasing after something that doesn’t exist.”
“If I help, can I look at the room afterward if there’s time?”
Miss V. looked out the window. “We’ll see.”
My whole plan was hanging on a thin little spiderweb of hope, and here she was, stretching it near to breaking.
* * *
Percy bounded around the garden, pouncing at every rustle in the grass and running over every few minutes to wiggle his way between me and Miss V. for a right-sided ear rub from Miss V. and a left-sided ear rub from me. I’d spent the afternoon with Miss V., helping her plant and helping her hoe and asking that same question every few minutes: “Can’t we take a tiny peek inside the room?”
Each time, Miss V. just shook her head no. Every little while, though, I’d catch her looking at me with a puzzle on her face. Even Percy started cocking his head at me.
After forever, Miss V. went inside, motioned for me to follow, and headed toward the staircase. “Let’s take a look at this room you think is going to change things.”
She took the key out of her pocket, turned it in the lock, and pushed in the door.
The room sparkled in the sunlight.
Miss V. hiked up her skirt, folded herself cross-legged, and patted the floor beside her.
A silence settled over us.
It felt like sitting in church right after service was over, with holiness still spiking through the air.
I tried to take it all in, to see Mama’s room the way she’d seen it.
On the first wall, a fog rose from Miss V.’s garden. The rows were planted in sugar snap peas, the tendrils reaching up in little curls. The trees behind them glowed a bright-eyed green, precise veins on each leaf. Praying mantises dotted the low branches. Ducks perched on a tree, and tanagers sat on limbs and skimmed through the sky, flicking their wings in the sun. Every feather on their bodies was its own shade of red, and every layer showed in the black wings and tails. Wiggles and swiggles wove out from the tanagers, like there was so much personality inside those birds, they bent the air around them. Spring.
The second wall had three painted-over windows. Two more ducks perched on an oak branch. Squirrels scampered down the trunk. Crows glided overhead. Long rows of corn with beans winding up the stalks. The first row started out with no shadow at all. The shadows stretched longer the farther the rows went. Two cicadas made from brown and gray triangles clutched cornstalks near the right corner. Dots and dashes filled the sky nearby, reminding me of music notes. I could almost hear the cicada rhythm. Summer.
Fall was on the next wall, the wall with a window missing a little piece of paint. Glowing orange and red leaves colored the trees. Geese in V formation glided across the sky. The cornstalks hung limp and empty now, and pumpkin vines curved around the floorboards. A mockingbird stared out at me from a gold-leafed sugar maple tree. Seven branches up from the mockingbird, a tanager spread its inky wings to soak up the sunlight, a bit of green now mixed in with the red on its body.
Finally, winter. Bare-naked branches stretched up the wall to an empty sky. Tiny onion and radish plants pierced the garden dirt. Doves roosted low in a shrub down by the baseboard. The winter tanager huddled on a wide oak branch, tucking its wings in tight.
The ceiling was one giant sunflower, shining over us all.
I sat there and watched the light, the ordinary Pickens County sunlight I’d tried to keep from burning my eyes every single day of my life. It shined brightest from the one spot in the fall window without paint. A beam of light crawled across the wall and showed me something new everyplace it landed.
Miss V.’s breath and mine were pulling in at the same time now, going slower the longer we sat there.
The setting sun shimmered on the shiny backs of a little family of ducks. We both let out a soft ooh.
Then I saw her. Miss V. was crying, quiet raindrop tears that slid into her cheek folds.
“What happened to Mr. Bob?” I asked.
She just swiped at her face and shook her head. Finally, she stood, her eyes still on those walls. “I knew I shouldn’t have come back in this room. Better not stay in here too long, Ace. Paint fumes might get to us.”
But any fool could tell you that paint had been dry for years. All I could smell was Miss V., the rust scent from something she’d been holding, and the rosemary water she must have used on her face.
I stayed put.
“Miss V., Mr. Bob said to follow the light. He said to start with the treasure in your house.” I pulled the note out of the knothole and showed her.
“Well, I’ll be….” Miss V. studied the wall. “But I still don’t think Bob had a treasure. I’m the one who took him in after he walked out of the woods, empty-pocketed and with a bad case of the nerves. He didn’t even trust me at first, and we grew up friends. It was all I could do to get him halfway calm. The only things that worked were getting him to help me with my puzzles and just leaving him alone. Letting him tromp around the woods, carving and painting and doing whatever else he wanted to do.”
I pointed at the words. “He said to start with the treasure in this house.”
Miss V. put the note back in the hole and gave it a little pat. “It’s all foolishness. That’s not the way Bob talked at all. He didn’t use words like ‘treasure.’ ”
Treasure. Treasure. I’d come across that word somewhere else in her house.
The answer had to be on Miss V.’s doily-covered bookcase.
Miss V.’s copy of Treasure Island had seen better days. Faded circle watermarks on the cover, smudges and stains speckling the page
edges. The binding was cracked, too.
Still, there was that word, right in the title. “Miss V., this has to be the treasure in your house that Mr. Bob meant in his note.”
She looked like she didn’t believe me.
A splinter of an idea pricked at my brain. “You said doing your puzzles helped calm Mr. Bob down.”
She gave a slow nod.
“Maybe there’s a puzzle in this book. A secret code. Like when somebody underlines letters or words.”
Miss V. hunted down a pencil and paper.
I flipped through the book. Nothing but print all the way to page 72. Then, on page 72, TURN TO P. 218.
Miss V. shook her head. “It wouldn’t be that easy. Keep going.”
Page 218: TURN TO P. 86.
Okay. Page 86: TURN TO P. 146.
I did. TURN TO P. 260.
Page 260: Steps outside was underlined.
Miss V. shook her head. “It’s a dead end, Ace.”
A dead end. If the treasure was hidden outside, how would we ever find it?
From her cage, Charlene chirped. Three long blasts. Yant, yant, YANT. From where I was standing, it sounded an awful lot like “Don’t give up.”
Miss V. stood. She was giving up.
I slammed the book on the couch.
The front cover slid to one side, and the pages fanned.
Spread out, the smudges and smears on the sides of the pages lined up in a crooked kind of way.
I eased the front cover over, just a smidgen.
A shape. I adjusted the pages. It was a tiny tanager in flight. To the side of it, letters—CONSTELLATION AT 5:30 IN MY ROOM AT THE MAGIC HOUR.
Another tanager! We had to be close.
Then I realized—there wasn’t a constellation in the Bird Room. There was nothing on that ceiling except a giant sunflower.
We were at another dead end.
So why was Miss V. standing over my shoulder and grinning for all get-out?
“We’ve missed the magic hour today, Ace. We can try tomorrow.” Miss V. squeezed the book back onto the shelf.
“What’s the magic hour?”
Miss V. pointed out the window. “It’s the hour just before the sun goes down, when everything glows golden. Bob’s favorite time. He loved to see what the light did to his paintings. Five-thirty at the magic hour is five-thirty p.m. He wanted us to see where the sun shines in his room then.”
I thought about the way that the paint on the fall window focused the light into a beam. It reminded me of the way I’d used sunlight to start my fire. “Follow the light.” I nodded. “So, what do we do now?”
“We do what needs doing. If there really is a treasure, we can’t do anything about finding it until tomorrow evening. And you need to find us a constellation.” She went to the kitchen and started pulling out pots to make dinner.
I trailed along behind her, chopping onions and celery like she told me to and finally breathing in the rich smell of her gumbo. But something bothered me. If the magic hour was the hour before the sun went down, how were we supposed to find a constellation?
Soon as dinner was over, I sat out on the porch, trying to ignore Percy howling like a coyote, and watched the moonlight shadows shift into one another. I searched the sky for constellations. Mama used to tell me that when she was little, the moon followed her. On my eighth birthday, Mama gave me her moon. She said it could be my pet, too. “Even if I’m not here,” Mama said, “you know my moon is watching over you.”
All of a sudden, I felt extra cold. When Mama said she’d give me the moon to watch over me, was she thinking about leaving, even back then? Was she like that mama bird, getting ready to fly off and leave me and the nest behind?
A thought popped into my head, and I couldn’t push it away: Aunt Belinda didn’t fly off. She woke up at the same time every day, got dressed first thing every morning, kept her kitchen clean, and put supper on the table every night.
She bought me graph paper for school even when she couldn’t scrape together enough cash to get those dark roots of hers dyed blond again.
After Uncle Quinn up and ran off with a neighbor woman, Aunt Belinda didn’t fall to pieces the way most folks reckoned she would. Not even after word got out about how he’d greased her finger while she was asleep and slipped off her wedding ring to sell, cash for gold. She just wrote thank-you notes for the casseroles, took to wearing boxing gloves to bed, slathered a smile on her lips every morning, and started selling Wanda’s Classy Lady beauty products on the side when her receptionist job didn’t pay all the bills. She covered up that Hot Stuff tattoo my uncle had talked her into, back before they had kids. She made those boys of hers tuck in their shirttails, and she marched them off to church every Sunday like she didn’t have a thing in the world to be ashamed of.
It was only at night, when I guess she thought nobody could hear her, that I heard the cry sounds coming from her room.
Which got me to wondering. Would I be better off with someone who toughed it out and stayed around—even if she was miserable—or was I better off with a mama who’d up and leave whenever she got the notion but would drive me all the way to Jackson just to show me paintings, a mama who liked my drawing best of all?
A cardinal chit-chitted from somewhere I couldn’t see. Why couldn’t Mama be like a cardinal and stick around all year?
Sitting out there on that cold wood porch, I wanted my mama back so bad, I didn’t care whether she wanted to be back or not.
One day till Mama. One day till Mama. I chanted it in my head. We had one night left to find a constellation, and what did Miss V. care about?
Shoveling chicken poop, that’s what.
Soon as breakfast was over, she motioned for me to follow her out to the garden. “Can’t find a constellation until tonight.”
“But shouldn’t we be looking…”
Miss V. just shook her head. “Have to keep the dirt healthy.” She went to work on something else.
I spent the morning shoveling stuff I didn’t want to touch or smell into the garden rows, Charlene keeping me company. Percy, he was having a big time rolling around in it all. He was as excited about that stirred-up chicken poop as Mama and I had been the last time it snowed. He flopped on his back, spread out his back legs, and wiggled around, making little chicken-poop angels.
Dirt is funny stuff. Daddy used to say that if you stick to suburbs and sidewalks your whole life, dirt all looks the same. But when good dirt means the difference between eating and going hungry, it starts to look right particular. Daddy told me about how after they moved out of this town into the country, his own daddy put him in charge of the dirt for their garden.
Daddy taught me how to turn coffee grounds and dried-up leaves into the kind of dark, crumbly dirt that could convince a vegetable garden to keep putting out produce through a dry spell. Come spring, Daddy would sift the dirt pile, add sand or ashes, and work it into the garden. He wouldn’t let me plant the first seed until the dirt had the right feel. Especially not Mama’s row of sunflowers. We had to plant that row last, and it had to be plumb perfect and raked smooth.
I knew not even dying could keep Daddy from taking note of the dirt.
Daddy always said that when his time came, he wanted to be buried near his kinfolks in the Big Ridge cemetery, not near a ghost town. But I don’t think he knew what was lying under all that Bermuda grass in that graveyard. I saw the clay the day before his funeral, when I was supposed to be standing next to Aunt Belinda in the receiving line inside the Fellowship Hall and letting everybody hug my neck.
Instead, I’d slunk out to the graveyard behind the church and kicked over every anthill I could find. How could Mama not even show up for her own husband’s visitation?
Then my eyes lit on that puke-colored clay.
The next day, the day
of Daddy’s funeral, they’d found Mama. She walked in late, but I ran to her soon as I saw her. She didn’t look herself, stiff and pale in a new black dress, like the starch was holding her up. We’d have time to talk later, I thought. She could explain everything. We just had to get through the service first.
When it was time to put Daddy’s coffin in the ground, I couldn’t stand the thought of Daddy in that slick, ugly clay. When the preacher called me up to throw a shovelful of dirt on his coffin, I bent down, unbuckled the black patent-leather purse Grandma had given me three Easters back, and filled my shovel with the best dirt from Mama’s flower row. The dirt was black and coarse as brownie crumbs, and I sprinkled it all up and down the head end of the coffin.
I don’t think one single soul saw what I did. Everybody else was too busy watching Mama, wondering right out loud, where I could hear it, where they’d found her. Aunt Belinda whispered to the preacher’s wife how they’d had to search high and low to find Mama and bring her back for the funeral, how they’d had to give her something to keep her calm, and how they were going to sit her down afterward and try to get her to act right and stay for good. For the record, Aunt Belinda isn’t any good at whispering.
Back in the chairs, Mama stretched out one scratchy long sleeve toward me, but she kept her body angled away.
I couldn’t stop shaking, not even when Aunt Belinda squeezed in next to me and jangled her bangle-covered arm all up and down my back.
Mama didn’t so much as look at me from the time the preacher told us all to sit down till the last song was over. She just clutched her closed hand against her stomach. And she didn’t say goodbye, either. One minute, she was standing there next to me, and the next she was missing again.
Smack Dab in the Middle of Maybe Page 9
