The Secret Hum of a Daisy

by Tracy Holczer

  When she was in the house and not in the garden, she played classical music all day, every day. Violins. Piano. Clarinet. Even in her room. It was soft but always there, like a hissing wind.

  I left my boots at the door, per Grandma’s standing orders, and climbed the stairs to Mama’s room to wait for Mrs. Greene and Lacey. The room was empty except for a twin bed, a nightstand, and a dresser. I sat on the bed and looked at the blank walls, the clean floor, and wondered again if this was how Mama had left it or if Grandma had stripped it down years ago, the way a yellow jacket will strip meat from a bone.

  Mama’s things were stacked neatly in the closet. A whole life’s worth of things. White baby shoes and pointe ballet slippers—all that time watching Lacey dance and Mama never mentioned she’d been a dancer too. There was a Girl Scout vest covered in patches, journals filled with sketches, and all sorts of other stuff that told stories I would never know. A porcelain angel with a broken wing. A small jade elephant. Lavender soap.

  The sound of a horse neighing came from outside. I jumped up, worrying one of the horses from next door had gotten into Grandma’s garden. I didn’t think Grandma would take kindly to a garden-munching horse since she worked so hard to keep things perfect. When I got to the window, though, I was surprised to see Grandma at the fence, patting the horse I’d seen my first day, the pretty whitish-gray one with the round belly. Grandma reached in her sweater pocket, pulled out a huge carrot, and fed it to her in chunks. She wiped at her cheeks, and her shoulders shook a little. I wondered if she was crying and tried not to feel bad for her since this whole sorry mess was her fault. She was the one who kicked out her own daughter when she needed a mother most.

  As I watched, a girl came to the fence with someone I took to be a small boy following close behind. The girl looked around my age, bundled in a pink jacket and matching scarf. I moved closer to the window to get a better look at the boy, whose entire face was covered in gauze bandages. He wore a Yankees baseball cap. The girl smiled as she talked to Grandma. The boy turned his head and seemed to look right at me. I stepped back from the window, wondering what was wrong with him. If maybe he was burned or had that weird allergy to light.

  After a few seconds passed, I looked again. The kids were leading the horse away from the fence. Grandma stood there, hands on her hips, looking up at me as though I’d seen something I shouldn’t have.

  • • •

  At twelve minutes after nine, the doorbell rang and I almost tripped as I ran down the stairs. I flung the door open and threw myself into Mrs. Greene’s cushy arms. She was dressed in one of her usual crazy-colored shirts and I noticed she’d cut off her long dreads. Lacey dug her head in under our wrapped arms, even though she was usually careful not to mess her hair, so that we became a giant blob of sadness.

  “I wanted a new look,” Mrs. Greene said, tapping at her tight curls. She had wanted to cut her hair for a long time and Mama had encouraged her, telling her that short hair would show off her beautiful face.

  “I like it,” I said.

  Grandma came down the hallway wiping her hands on a green-checked towel. She took in my zombification but didn’t say anything. If Mrs. Greene noticed, she didn’t let on either. A spark of panic lit in my belly that this might not work after all.

  “It’s nice to see you again, Mrs. Greene,” Grandma said.

  Mrs. Greene wrapped her in a cushy hug, too, and Grandma stiffened before patting her a few times on the back. There was no evidence of crying on Grandma’s face. Maybe she’d just gotten dirt in her eyes, or an eyelash. Maybe her shoulders had been trembling because she was cold.

  Grandma led us into the living room, where at some point she’d started a fire and put out some crackers, cheese, and an apple cut into pieces. She sat on the edge of a chair. I noticed that she’d changed out of her gardening clothes.

  “Well, this is just lovely, Mrs. Jessup,” Mrs. Greene said as she looked around the room. She was clearly telling a white lie because the walls were bare and needed a fresh coat of a livelier paint, and the shabby brown sofa sagged in the middle to the point that Mrs. Greene and Lacey were tilted toward each other like the walls of a teepee.

  But then I looked past the sofa to the large stone fireplace, where a shiny white wood stove sat gleaming, and to the hardwood beams that went across the high ceilings. I noticed a pretty glass window above the doorway into the hall. The wooden floors were clean and polished. The house was okay, I supposed; it was just Grandma’s furniture and walls that needed a makeover.

  Grandma fidgeted with one of the blue cloth napkins she’d set out. “I imagine you want to visit with Grace, so I’ll just . . .”

  “Actually, I’d like to speak with you for a few minutes,” Mrs. Greene said. “Go on, Grace, show Lacey around outside.”

  I tried not to smile, thinking my plan might have worked. Why else would she want to talk to Grandma first?

  I pulled Lacey toward the door and caught our reflection in the hallway mirror. My ratted-out hair looked ridiculous against Lacey’s perfect ringlets. We were like before and after pictures.

  Just outside, I shoved on my worn boots, and then we walked down the trail arm in arm, Lacey careful to walk over patches of mud in her perfectly clean and new-looking boots.

  “Do you think my plan worked?” I said. I’d talked to Lacey every day, and we’d come up with lots of ideas for Plan B, just in case. First I was going to attack Grandma’s cleanliness by tracking mud into the house and mixing up her counter and dish sponges. Then I planned on never eating her food, and instead, if I ever got hungry again, sneaking stuff out of the pantry like peanut butter and Marshmallow Fluff. The next part of the plan was “misplacing” things like the can opener and toilet paper. Plus I’d be obnoxious all the time. Lacey thought it was brilliant.

  “I hope so,” Lacey said. She flipped my knotted hair. “Nice touch. Where are we going?”

  “Over there,” I said, pointing. “That’s the shed.”

  Lacey’s eyes opened wide as she took in the rusted metal roof covered in dead pine needles, the faded green sides and cracked glass window. She looked from the shed to me to the shed again. “Well, if that doesn’t make Mom want to take you home today, I don’t know what will.”

  But she didn’t sound so sure.

  • • •

  Lacey was pretty in all the ways I wasn’t. There were those perfect ringlets, plus she was the shade of brown most people worked for all summer. She complained, though, because it made her feel in between the white of her father and the black of her mother, like she didn’t know which side to land on. Not that her father hung around long enough to know what color she’d turn out. We had that in common. She liked to remind me that my father wasn’t a deadbeat like hers, and so it was different. But then I’d tell her that her father was still out there, so there was a chance she’d know him someday. We’d agree to disagree on who had it worse until it came up again.

  I was jealous of her long-legged, graceful ways after eight years in ballet, because I still managed to fall over my own dumb feet from time to time. When we’d hang out in her room, I’d make her lace up her pointe shoes so I could watch her dance and I’d clap and carry on, since that’s what Lacey needed. But more than the pirouettes, I liked the thunk, thunk, thunk sound the slippers made as she came down off her toes and waddled across the floor in fits of giggles. She had a great sense of style, too, but fretted that nothing ever looked right. I swear, she’d try on all the clothes she owned, every single morning, often leaving us the option of running all the way to school or being late. It annoyed me that her curls survived intact while mine would frizz somewhere along Whimley Road, so every once in a while I’d suggest that, for heaven’s sake, pick your clothes the night before! Until I realized no matter how great she looked, that wasn’t what she saw in the mirror, so I’d forgive her until the next time I got too annoyed to ke
ep it to myself.

  What I thought about most, though, when I thought about Lacey, was how she liked to write awful poems on purpose so we could laugh about how silly they were, or balance a spoon on her nose and sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” How she was certain I’d be a famous writer one day, and she would be a famous ballerina. Then we would perform together—her dancing, me reading my words—and people would pay us millions of dollars.

  No matter how many times I told her that I never intended to show all kinds of people my writing, she’d just give me a pfft and remind me that I had never intended to talk to Denny Thompson either, but I did.

  “That’s because you forced me,” I’d said.

  “Someone had to. Besides, it’s not like you’re getting married or anything.”

  She’d twirled around the room singing some kind of crazy song about Denny and his cute earlobes and then flopped onto the bed, fanning herself. “Come on. Just say it. ‘I love Denny Thompson.’”

  “No,” I’d said, arms crossed. But later that night, I wrote it in tiny letters on a smidge of paper and showed it to her. Then we burned it in the fireplace.

  Lacey didn’t really care if I said things out loud, wrote them down, or kept them hidden. Being quiet was a part of me, and she liked it just as much as she liked my complimenting her, or my talent for making the perfect bowl of popcorn. Since she was the reason we did things like eat blue lollipops and stick out our tongues at old Mr. Villanueva next door, who’d laugh like he’d been tickled, or climb the tree in the backyard in protest of lima beans, I figured we were a good balance for each other.

  “You worry too much,” she’d always said, putting her finger right between my eyebrows where I had a permanent crease. Mama said I’d been born pensive, which I had to look up. It meant I was always thinking deeply. Which was true. I liked thinking things through. All the way through from start to finish. Sometimes I even wrote down all the possibilities in these little bubble maps like we learned to do with essays. Doing that made me feel safe from pesky surprises. I figured one of us had to be this way since Mama was always flying off. Since it was just the two of us, that left me.

  But along with Mama, Lacey made me see there was more to living than trying to feel safe all the time. Didn’t mean I could do it. But I’d tried to think less. To plan less. To just let myself be in the tree protesting lima beans and not thinking about all the ways I might fall out of the tree or how Mama might be upset.

  She was the first best friend I’d ever had. There’d never been anyone like her.

  • • •

  Lacey sat down on the flower-garden sofa and looked around. “I knew you were stubborn, Grace. But jeez.”

  “I’m not being stubborn.”

  “She said stubbornly,” Lacey said, smiling.

  I stoked the fire, dumped out water from the bucket, and gave her a humph. “It’s all part of Plan B.”

  “Don’t you get scared at night?” she said.

  “Nope,” I lied.

  Lacey picked at a thread on the sofa and, when she saw me watching, stopped. “I just don’t understand why you can’t work your plan from inside the house. You don’t have to make yourself miserable too.”

  “This is torture for Grandma,” I said. What I didn’t tell her was that I could hear the river from the house sometimes. The hills and valleys made the sound carry in funny ways, though, so I couldn’t hear it from the shed at all, even though I could see Grandma’s house through the trees.

  “I miss you,” Lacey said. “It takes me even longer to get dressed in the morning because you’re not there to tell me I look okay. I had three tardies in first period just last week.”

  “I’ll be there soon. Your mom knows I’m the only one who can talk sense to you when you’re in a snit. And it’s going to get worse now that we’re almost teenagers.” I smiled and poked her arm.

  There was a knock on the door and Mrs. Greene came in, the door scraping against the concrete floor. She took in the dish towel curtains I’d hung in the window and the sleeping bag on the flower-garden sofa. “It seems your grandma is not the one forcing you to live in a broken-down shed. That it is you, in fact, who refuses to come in the house.”

  “I might have exaggerated,” I said.

  “You flat-out lied, Grace. And what is with your hair? Is that makeup under your eyes?”

  She came at me with her thumbs and wiped away the eye shadow. Then she nudged herself right between me and Lacey. “We had a deal,” she said to me.

  “I’m trying.”

  “Trying to give your poor grandmother a stroke.”

  “I just want to come back to your house.”

  Mrs. Greene gave me a fierce hug. “We will always be here for you, but this is your home now.”

  I mumbled into her shirt, “You aren’t taking me with you.”

  She took me by the shoulders. “I would never leave you in a bad place. Can you believe that?”

  I looked into Mrs. Greene’s face, trying hard not to believe her. Trying hard to ignore all the days of living in her house, where she never once lied or took advantage or did anything untrustworthy. I’d watched her put change into donation cans and wrap blankets around homeless people and take in more strays—dogs, cats, people—than she should have. Including me and Mama. She reminded me of a thousand-year-old tree. Her roots went down and her arms went out and there was no knocking her over with anything less than a bulldozer.

  “But Mama didn’t want this place to be home or we would have come back. There was a good reason Mama stayed away.”

  “I’m sure she had reasons. But don’t you think you need to decide for yourself if they were good ones?”

  I pulled away and chewed my thumbnail.

  “Your grandmother tells me you haven’t been eating either,” Mrs. Greene said.

  There it was, the moment I’d been waiting for. She wouldn’t just leave me here to starve to death.

  “No. I haven’t been hungry.” I tried to look especially pathetic. “Grandma is a terrible cook.”

  Lacey nodded. “Look at her, Mom. She’s dropped five pounds at least. And she was skinny to begin with.”

  Mrs. Greene heaved a big sigh. “I hate doing this. But you don’t seem to be adjusting well, so we’re all going to take a break.”

  “What?” Lacey and I both said together.

  “Your grandma and I decided you and Lacey could talk on Saturdays, but not during the school week. We aren’t coming back to visit for a couple of months.”

  “But . . . !” I said, words failing. Lacey just looked down at her hands.

  “You have to give yourself a chance here. And hanging on to us isn’t the way to do it,” Mrs. Greene said.

  It felt like the last little thread connecting me to anything familiar and loved snapped and I was falling and falling down some bottomless hole. It was hard to catch my breath.

  It must have showed in my face, because Mrs. Greene said, “If you need help, Grace, you have to ask for it. I know you don’t want to talk about what happened, but—”

  “It’s fine. I’ll be fine.”

  Mrs. Greene didn’t push and instead tried talking to me about my first day of school tomorrow and how she believed in me. How much fun Lacey and I would have writing letters to each other since Grandma didn’t have a computer and wouldn’t get me an e-mail account anyway. Mrs. Greene wanted me to send her poems, and I didn’t tell her how I wasn’t going to be writing, that somehow not writing was going to keep Mama close. It was the kind of thing I could have told her Before, but instead, I just kept my arms crossed tight and my mouth closed. Lacey still stared at her hands.

  “Well, aren’t you two a pair. Come on, then.” Mrs. Greene stood up.

  She took my hands and helped me off the sofa. Then she kissed my forehead. I put my arms around her and held on t
ight, wondering how I’d ever let go. Lacey wedged herself in.

  “This isn’t forever, Grace. Just for a little while,” Mrs. Greene said.

  Lacey hugged me tight, and then I watched them drive away.

  6

  Twin

  Hearts

  In my dream, Mama sat on a wide, flat rock in the middle of the river. It was nightfall, and the deep green of the water moved in slow motion beneath her feet. There were two sandhill cranes, one on each side of her, like guardians. Mama stood and smiled, arms outstretched. I wasn’t surprised to see she matched the cranes with her own set of wings spread wide. My heart swelled at seeing her again. I had so much to tell her.

  I walked into the water, braving the cold and the pointy rocks.

  The cranes startled and flew off, frightened by my clumsy splashing. Then, as though they knew the way and she didn’t, Mama flapped her own great wings and flew off after them, giving one last sorrowful look over her shoulder, blond hair streaming behind in soft waves. I woke with the effort of trying to call her back.

  I didn’t have much time to gather myself before the crunch, crunch, crunch of gravel outside let me know Grandma was coming. I listened to see if her footsteps went toward the mailbox or the shed.

  Darn it.

  Grandma walked in wearing her usual oversized brown cardigan and overalls, plus knee pads covered in dirt from the garden. A bandana held back the hair from her forehead, all of it twisted into a tight bun at her neck. She stared me down with blue eyes, so much like mine and Mama’s, as she set a big red bag on the sofa. From the bag, she took out a pretty purple sweater, jeans, and brand-new Converse.

  “I picked up a few things the last time I was in Nevada City. I wasn’t sure what you’d need,” she said, matter-of-fact. “We can shop for more if you’d like.”

  “Do you think Mama didn’t provide for me? Is that what you’re saying?”