Smack Dab in the Middle of Maybe

by Jo Watson Hackl

  Someone had made all those things with a quick-lined rightness. Every detail that mattered stood out—the eyes, the fur, the fold of a leg, the shadow of a fern leaf. Spirals echoed out from the figures in an exclamation-mark kind of way.

  When I was out in those woods, the plants and animals seemed to me like separate things to eat or stay away from. I thought they were no more a part of each other than I was a part of them. But on those pages, those woods and plants and animals fit together in a rhythm.

  “Well, it isn’t cash money, but I can’t say I’m mad about it.” Miss V. ran her fingers along the edge of a painting of five green-headed ducks.

  She leaned back and I studied those papers. Some pictures weren’t much more than thin pencil strokes. But they showed more than I could ever say in a lifetime about a raccoon or a dragonfly or a duck. I’d never seen anybody make fine art out of just plain old woods things.

  I’d never thought that doing a painting of something you saw every day of your life could change the way you looked at it.

  I brought out Charlene to see it all.

  To Miss V.’s credit, she didn’t say one word about a cricket crawling all over those pictures.

  “Would you mind telling me about Mr. Bob? Why would he hide this?”

  Miss V. got us each some water from the sink and sat back down, careful to keep the glasses away from the pictures.

  “Bob was my best friend growing up. Until I was ten, my family lived on the coast, near his. We used to explore the woods together. He wanted to be a professional artist. He loved drawing and painting as much as I loved puzzles and riddles. Even after my family moved up here to take over Papa’s homeplace and keep the timber farm going, Bob still came to visit from time to time. Then, for no reason I could figure, he just stopped coming. Stopped writing, too.

  “After I got my degree, I took a job in Jackson, teaching literature at a junior college. Then Mama and Papa got sick, and I came back here to take care of them. I kept writing Bob, even though he never wrote back. Then one day, years later, not long after Mama and Papa died, I was out working in the garden like I knew what I was doing. I was trying to get up the gumption to carry on what they’d started, wondering if I should give up.”

  Miss V. took a sip and held it in her mouth before she swallowed.

  I had a sudden urge to wrap my arms around her. But Miss V. was drawn up too stiff in her seat.

  “So right out of the blue, Bob shows up, worn out and missing a shoe.”

  She touched a drawing of a luna moth. “Bob asked if he could rest here for a few days. Course I said yes. Told him he could stay as long as he wanted.” Miss V. eased back in her chair. “I put him in the upstairs bedroom. Every day, he’d set out with nothing but his carving knife, paper, and watercolors. And every day, he’d bring me back a piece of the woods, drawn on that paper. At night, he’d help me work on my puzzles and riddles. He started to love them almost as much as I did.”

  Miss V. shifted in her seat. “Come to find out, he’d just left a mental hospital. Before that, his art had started to get noticed, and he’d been asked to paint a mural in a library. But his art was different, and a lot of people didn’t understand it.”

  She looked at the wall behind me. “Sometimes different makes people uncomfortable.”

  I thought of all those looks at Mama in the grocery store.

  For the first time since I’d met her, Miss V.’s shoulders drooped. “They made Bob change his design. Another mural got canceled. Later, there was even a call to paint over some of his work.” She cut her eyes to the dark window. “Bob took it hard.”

  Some walls aren’t for everyone. Maybe Mr. Bob didn’t just mean the winter tanager. Maybe he meant his own murals. Maybe he meant himself, too.

  Everything else started sliding into place. Behold your world. Seek the beauty. Maybe sometimes you need to go through the uncomfortable to find your way to the beautiful. It takes some adjusting in the way you look at things to really see them. Sometimes you need to squint and sometimes you need to open your eyes wider and sometimes you need to look at things from the other side.

  “Maybe that’s why Mr. Bob made it so hard,” I said. “For someone to find his paintings, they’d have to study the room. They’d have to work through all his clues.”

  “I think you’re right, Ace.” Miss V. grinned. “And you solved it.”

  “What happened to Mr. Bob?”

  “He’s gone now. He died too young. But he did become a famous artist. When he showed up here, though, he was just my old friend, still drawing, still painting. He was on his way back home to his family. He walked the whole way. A thousand miles.”

  I pictured all that walking Mama did, looking for the Bird Room. I pictured all those scarlet tanagers, migrating over a thousand miles. “Why do you think he decided to pay you a visit?” I asked.

  Miss V. leaned forward in her chair. “Bob had a bad case of the nerves by the time he got here. He was scratched up and bruised. He needed to heal up.”

  She traced her fingers across a drawing of morning glory vines. “I thought I could help him find more peace, but I couldn’t.” She rubbed at her neck. “I didn’t see the room until after Bob left. My great-great-great-grandfather built that room during the Civil War to hide his sons so they wouldn’t have to go fight. We always kept it closed off.

  “Bob painted that whole room in the time it took me to plant my spring garden. When he left, he put the key to that room behind the picture, and he left me a doogaloo, painted the same way that you said yours was. I thought he took his paintings with him.”

  Miss V. stretched back in her chair. “Bob could have marched right out the front door in the daylight with my blessing.” The edges of her mouth turned up. “But that wasn’t Bob’s way. No sirree. A week before he left, he made me promise not to touch that room. Said it was private. That looking at it would be the same as reading his diary. Then one night, Bob knotted four of my sheets together and slid out the second-floor window without even saying goodbye. He took a bar of soap and drew a flock of tanagers on the side of my house the whole way down. Wouldn’t you know it, each little bird was pointed south, just like where Bob was headed.”

  I closed my eyes, and I could just see that flock of birds floating down the side of the house.

  Miss V. tightened her jaw. “A few years later, the whole town up and cleared out. Left behind nothing but stumps and sidewalks. But I’d come to love this land. My family’d been here since before that town came. I wanted to stay here after.”

  Miss V. turned the glass in her hand. “Every so often, I’d get a painting or a letter in the mail. No return address, but I was glad to see Bob kept painting. In his letters, he said he liked to row his boat out to a little island. He’d stay out there by himself and paint for days. Said folks were calling him crazy for taking off like that.”

  She leaned back. “People said things about your friend Emily Dickinson, too.” Miss V. looked toward the living room shelves. “They said she was different, that she kept to herself. Some people even claimed she wore white all the time. But things people said can’t make her poems any less beautiful. You know her poems.” She jabbed at a paper with her first finger. “And you look at these paintings. You tell me who’s crazy and who’s not.”

  I ran my fingers along the smooth white petals of a gardenia Bob had painted. It was so perfect, I could almost smell it.

  Miss V. put her hand next to mine. “Bob just carried on the best he knew how. Maybe like your mother. You know, your daddy was my second cousin once removed. I know about your mother.”

  I jerked my hand away.

  You’re wrong. My mama wasn’t crawling out of windows, traipsing all over the country with a missing shoe.

  Miss V. patted my arm. “I’m not saying your mother is just like Bob. What I’m saying is, she p
robably did the best she could, the same way he did. Whatever those neighbors said about her, that isn’t who she is. Remember the line from that Walt Whitman poem, ‘I am large, I contain multitudes’?” Your mama’s more than what those neighbors think, and you know it. She’s a person like anyone else. She has her struggles and her strengths. Your mama loves you. Leaving you must have been the hardest thing she ever did. She must have had a mighty good reason to do it.”

  I pressed my fingers down into the painting, trying to feel how Mr. Bob must have felt when he made that flower. Anything but listen to Miss V. She didn’t know Mama. She didn’t know me.

  Miss V.’s voice got soft. “You can go ahead and show your mama that room.” She covered my hand.

  The heat of her hand melted into mine, natural as two spoons nesting together in a drawer. Her fingers were Percy-warm.

  She smoothed out a wrinkle in a picture with her other hand. “You don’t have to go, you know. You can stay here with me. Seeing how we’re family and all. I mean, if things don’t work out with your mother. Your mother might not be ready for things to work out. Not just yet.”

  I’d near about died for a chance to see Mama, and here Miss V. was, fixing to jinx it. I scraped back from the table and tried to keep the mad out of my voice. “No thank you.”

  She pulled her mouth into a tight smile and took her glass to the sink. “It’s past bedtime. You’d better get some rest before you go meet your mother.”

  I stretched. All that digging had worked tiredness into every single muscle.

  Under the soft blankets on Miss V.’s daybed, I dreamed of gardenias. Big, luscious gardenias, the kind Mr. Bob might have drawn. In my dream, me and Mama gathered a basket full of blossoms and breathed in deep.

  The smell faded as soon as my eyes popped open.

  Bright sunlight filled the room.

  I was late for the one thing I’d been working toward since I set out from Thelma’s Cash ’n’ Carry.

  I didn’t even have to ask Charlene if she wanted to come meet Mama. She jumped right up and burrowed into the collar of Daddy’s jacket. Miss V. had sewn the top button back on, and I buttoned it tight to keep Charlene close. Percy, he just stayed on the porch, tail a-wagging. It was like he knew this was something me and Charlene needed to do by ourselves.

  Mama never was an early riser, and I prayed the whole way out to the sidewalk that she wouldn’t be one today. I wanted to get there first.

  Around me, the woods had changed. The sun lit on new white blooms everywhere. Even the dewdrops dotting my pant legs were the color of spring.

  Mama day was here!

  But a part of me felt like it’d come too fast. I got that forgot-to-study-for-a-math-test feeling deep down in my gut.

  Climbing the hill to the graveyard, I steered around an overgrown willow. I’d made Mama a walking stick out of willow last summer. After Grandma died, Mama took so many walks and stumbled around so much when she got back that I figured she could use a good walking stick. Daddy showed me how, and I carved her a cane with a sunflower on the handle.

  Mama admired that walking stick from every angle and set off on her walk that first day holding it high.

  Two weeks later, I found the stick poking out from behind a pizza box by the trash can. It was snapped in two pieces.

  I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to know.

  I’d probably picked out a weak branch. You never can tell where the fault line is with some wood.

  Still, doubt crept in on little roach feet. Maybe Mama wouldn’t show. Maybe I couldn’t get her to stay.

  Everything felt like one big stack of maybes. It was piled high and teetering, and I just hoped it wasn’t about to fall.

  As I stepped over the cemetery fence, I shaped my breath into a prayer. Let her come here. Make her stay. Let her come here. Make her stay.

  Then, just like that, there she was.

  Mama was crouching with her back to me, stroking a new pink-marble headstone covered in doves and lambs.

  Mama!

  I ran two steps forward.

  And stopped.

  Something was different. Mama’s long hair was gone. Her chopped-off hair stopped at her chin. And her head was turned. She was talking to somebody off to the side.

  A man stepped out from behind the tree.

  He wore a hat the color of a stinkbug, the kind no self-respecting cowboy would be caught dead in. “Excuse me, hon. I had to answer nature’s call. Least I got you here, right on schedule.” His voice was fake-cheery. He sounded like a radio announcer trying to sell car insurance.

  The man held out his hand, probably the one he’d just answered nature’s call with, and helped Mama up. He draped his arm around her shoulder.

  Around my mama.

  My insides lurched.

  I sprang out of the woods to push him off Mama.

  Mama saw me first. She shook her head like her brain couldn’t get ahold of what she was seeing.

  Then she broke out in that birthday-cake smile of hers. “Cricket! What are you doing here?” She spread her arms wide. “You get over here and hug my neck!”

  Mama stepped away from the man and swooped me right up. My lungs filled with her Dove-soap-and-jasmine smell. I could swim around in that smell forever and never come up for air. It was worth every single thing I’d gone through to get here.

  I let out the breath of stale air I’d been holding in since the day Mama left. She was back! Nothing else mattered. Everything was right.

  Only it wasn’t.

  Mama’s hug was off-center.

  When she let go, Mama leaned back at a slant.

  My mama’s belly was swole out. It was throwing her off balance.

  The man reached forward to help her, his eyes on her stomach the whole time.

  And I knew.

  Mama was carrying a baby.

  A baby that didn’t have one single thing to do with Daddy, and didn’t have one single thing to do with me.

  Mama clutched at my arm and patted her stomach. “You’re going to be a big sister, Cricket. And I’d like you to meet Brian.”

  The man stepped forward and held out his hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  I kept my hands stuck to my sides.

  A bright-red cardinal landed on the fence post and chit-chitted. Fast as he got there, he flew off, disappearing behind a thick tangle of briars.

  This was the same exact spot where I’d been with Mama last summer. The same exact spot I’d nearly died to get to. The same exact spot where Grandma was supposed to help me set things right.

  And now everything was wrong.

  Brian dropped his hand. “We, uh, hadn’t exactly planned on seeing you this trip.” He jammed a hand in his pocket. “But we did want to see you. As soon as we’re all settled, we wanted you to come stay with us.”

  Mama stroked my cheek with the back of her feathery fingers. “I’m living outside Memphis now. Brian and I are getting married. Brian has a great big house with a rose garden and a fishpond and a fountain. He put tanager sculptures all over the backyard, just for me. You’ll love it. You’ll see.”

  Mama started talking faster, using the voice she used with company. “I’m going to fix up a room for you, Cricket. Brian will buy you a sky-blue canopy bed and all the clothes you want. Brian keeps things real nice.” She patted the top of my head like I was three.

  I grabbed hold of her hand. “You don’t have to go back to Memphis, Mama. Our home is here.” Her hand felt too cold, and I rubbed her fingers against my cheek. “I found the Bird Room. You were right, Mama. It’s just the way you said. The light on the walls makes the paintings look alive. You weren’t crazy, Mama. That room is real. I even found the buried surprise—paintings like you’ve never seen before. I’ve been staying with a nice lady, kin to
Daddy, and that room is in her house. I can take you there right now.”

  Just for an instant, Mama’s face lit up. “The Bird Room.”

  But then her eyes looked past me, and she shook her head.

  “It wasn’t a painting, Cricket. That room really was alive. I saw that tanager flutter its wings.” Mama rubbed at the side of her neck. “I told you that.”

  Brian stood behind Mama and kneaded her shoulders. “You’ve been doing so good, honey. Let’s not get overexcited. It’s almost time for lunch.” He shot me a look.

  Who is he to tell me how to act around my own mama?

  Mama leaned back into his hands. “Now, should we buy slaw dogs or barbecue for lunch? You’re going to have to decide for us, Cricket.”

  I held Mama’s hand tight and lowered my voice into a fierce whisper. “That room is less than a mile from where we’re standing. I can take you there right this minute.” I pulled at her hand.

  She stayed put.

  I pulled harder. “Come on, Mama! Grandma would want you to see it.”

  Mama didn’t budge. Her eyebrows bunched together. She combed at her hair with her fingers.

  I leaned my full weight into her arm.

  She pulled the other way, and her hand slipped from mine.

  She steadied herself. “No, baby, it’s time to head back to Memphis. I’ve got the headstone aligned just right. It’s perfect. You’ll see. Brian wants to beat the traffic. Come with us. There’s a big backseat.”

  I thought about a cozy canopy bed in a room near Mama. I wanted to crawl up in that bed and feel Mama’s soft hands on my back.

  Charlene let out a soft yant, yant, and in that moment, I saw my mama the way Charlene probably did.

  It was like looking at a stranger.

  Red spots blotched up her neck from where she’d been rubbing at it. The hand not digging into her pocket was twitching, twitching, twitching, and about to pull a button off her jacket. She wasn’t looking me in the eye. Mama didn’t even want to see the Bird Room. Not even for me.

  My insides went just as cold and heavy as a slimy lump of yellow clay.