The Secret Hum of a Daisy

by Tracy Holczer

  “You can do your homework first. Then you can check on Daisy. Spend the evening there if you like.”

  I climbed out of the truck and slammed the door. When I reached Jo, she took my arm and we walked into school together. I felt tightness climb the back of my throat, but swallowed over it, afraid if I said anything about Grandma, I’d start to cry.

  “I need to see Mrs. Turner for a second,” I said to Jo. “Go ahead, I’ll catch up.”

  I had to visit the pink crane in Mrs. Turner’s office.

  “You look like you could use another piece of toast,” Mrs. Turner said when she saw me. Her nails were bright red today, each tipped with a white flower.

  I picked up the small pink crane that still sat next to her pencil holder on the counter.

  “No one came back for it,” she said.

  My fingers itched to take it, to claim it for myself. The wanting was a physical pain, like a tummy ache, but all over.

  “My vote is for secret admirer,” I said, wanting to believe it. But I couldn’t. Mrs. Turner was right. There was nothing magic about a crane blowing into the office when everyone in the seventh grade had been folding them.

  Mrs. Turner touched the place on her chest above her heart. “Do you really think so?”

  I nodded, unable to speak.

  She plucked the crane out of my hand and replaced it with the chocolate-smeared banana toast.

  “Thank you, Grace,” Mrs. Turner said, every magical hair in place. “You made my day. Made my day, I tell you.”

  I rushed out of Mrs. Turner’s office and into the bathroom, where I locked myself in a stall and pulled my legs up, crying into my knees. Mr. Flinch was the reason there were cranes floating all over the place. Mama might have left that number 4 in her fountain years ago, or some stranger might have found the secret hiding place and left it for someone else. Either way, it was coincidence, and I started to feel like I was leaning over a cliff, trying to keep Mama from falling, our hands slipping. I closed my eyes and kept hold of her as hard as I could, but she was barely there, hanging on by her fingertips.

  • • •

  Later, in art, Mrs. Snickels laid out our self-portraits on a table at the back of the room with a piece of paper covering the pencil-sketch part, leaving the abstract showing. Each of them was numbered. Mrs. Snickels passed out clipboards and an alphabetical list of names. Whoever could match the most names to their correct abstract would get the Observation of the Month prize.

  Beth came to our table snugged in a bright red coat and purple scarf. She said to Jo in a huff, “I hear Beauty foaled over the weekend. You didn’t even call me back.”

  “Why would I call you?” Jo said.

  “Because you knew how much I wanted to be there.”

  “Maybe you should have thought of that before you stopped talking to me.”

  “I tried to apologize. Besides, you’re the one who stopped talking to me first.”

  Beth took off her jacket. Her T-shirt declared HUGS NOT DRUGS.

  Jo took off her jacket. Her T-shirt declared, in black Sharpie, I WENT TO BETH CRINKLE’S HOUSE AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS STUPID T-SHIRT.

  Beth stood there, stunned.

  Then she laughed.

  Then Jo laughed.

  And it was over, just like that.

  Beth pulled up an extra stool and they giggled quietly as the other kids in class filed by the table of self-portraits one by one. They gushed and talked about all the little things they’d missed over the last couple of weeks. I watched Beth and Jo finish each other’s sentences and how they each fluttered their hands the same way as they talked and was filled with anger and frustration. They’d been friends for life. I was brand-new. Jo had probably just been nice because I was momless and she was on the outs with her own friends. As soon as they kissed and made up, I’d get booted to the curb. It had happened before.

  Mrs. Snickels called us for our turn at the self-portrait table.

  “I always win these,” Jo informed me as she inspected, her nose two inches from each portrait. I moved away from her as Beth and Ginger nudged in between us.

  “It’s because you used to watch so much Scooby-Doo,” Beth said. “You’re a natural at solving mysteries. Remember that time . . .”

  I tuned them out, surprised at how many portraits I seemed to recognize. Jo had a strip of photo negative on hers. Archer had a drawing of a ladle. Beth Crinkle’s was the easiest of all; the entire abstract side was filled with tiny slogans.

  Someone came up behind me and whispered, “That one’s yours. The one with the figure eight.”

  Archer stood beside me, a bit red in the face. He met my eyes, though, and didn’t look away.

  “How did you know?” I whispered back.

  He traced a figure eight onto the top of my hand and shrugged with a smile.

  It wasn’t possible for him to turn redder without bursting something. He moved past me down the line of portraits and then took a seat. Stubbie nudged him in the shoulder and made smoochy noises. Mrs. Snickels walked over and feather-dusted Stubbie until he stopped.

  • • •

  I didn’t leave Mr. Flinch’s classroom when everyone else filed out for lunch. I wasn’t entirely sure why, aside from the fact that I didn’t much feel like sitting in the cafeteria while Jo and Beth and Ginger became a team again.

  “Do you have a question, Grace?” Mr. Flinch said as he went about adjusting the blinds against the sun. I wondered what he’d wear once the weather turned too warm for elbow-patch sweaters. He wore a plain tan one today.

  “Can you show me how to fold an origami crane?” I asked.

  “Of course!”

  Mr. Flinch went into his desk and brought out two fancy sheets of gold paper. He handed me one and kept the other. His fingers were long and graceful as he began. I followed him fold for fold.

  “I have a question about Sadako,” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s just that, what difference did any of it make? She worked so hard, and she just died anyway. She never got her wish.”

  He thought about that for a minute.

  “I think folding cranes was a way to hold on to herself, and to life. We all have to find a way to cope.”

  Death is a hard nut to crack, Mrs. Greene had said, and it scared me to think I’d made the whole thing up, the signs, that Mama was trying to tell me something. It was just some crazy idea to help me get through the grief of losing Mama. I thought of Max’s entombment party, Mrs. Brannigan and her Answer Jars, my friend Timmy and his imaginary friend Wrinkle, and a thousand paper cranes. How sometimes it took crazy to get to normal.

  Then I thought about how this whole thing started: with an unfinished crane in a toolbox that Grandma gave me.

  Grandma.

  We folded in silence until our cranes were done. He set his down on my desk and I set mine next to his.

  “How do you know when you’re ready to stop?” I said.

  “You just know.”

  30

  The Secret Hum

  of a Daisy

  Jo found me at my locker after school. “Where did you disappear to at lunch? I wanted you to tell everyone about Daisy being born. Plus they wanted to know how you came up with the name and I sort of thought that was private, so I didn’t tell.”

  “You were there when she was born. Why didn’t you tell them yourself?”

  “She’s your horse. Plus you would have told it better.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Are you mad about something?”

  I got busy shoving books and notebooks into my backpack. “No. Yes. I don’t know.”

  Jo put her hand on my arm. “What’s wrong?”

  I worked hard to push the words out. “Where will I fit now that you and Beth and Ginger are friends aga
in?”

  Jo shrugged. “Right here with us, I guess. You’re not all that special, you know.” But she said it with a smile.

  So I smiled too. “Thanks for not telling.”

  “Come on. And no pouting. Beth is coming and we don’t want to get her going with her slogans. Once she gets going, she doesn’t stop.”

  • • •

  It was sprinkling when Grandma picked me up from school.

  “Will you take me to the cemetery?” I asked. I figured it was time to check on Mama, to see my father’s grave. Maybe I would know what to think about everything once I was there with them. All together.

  Grandma only hesitated a beat. “Of course.”

  When she parked in the small cemetery lot, I thought of Mama’s funeral. How so much had changed in the six weeks since she died. I wondered what had happened to the girl who moved in all those days ago. If I would miss her.

  We stopped at Mama’s grave first. It had been perfectly maintained. Swept of leaves and weeds, flowers planted, dust brushed off her headstone. I thought about Grandma wearing her gardening uniform every morning when she dropped me off at school.

  “You’ve been coming here too,” I said.

  She nodded and then plucked a tiny weed that was growing up alongside Mama’s name. Grandpa’s headstone was right beside hers. The cemetery grass was lush and green.

  “I like to think they’re together somewhere,” Grandma said.

  I looked into the sky, the clouds thinning and pulling apart, reminding me of eating cotton candy. The drizzle was gone and the sun peeked out.

  “Do you believe in heaven?” I asked.

  “I do.”

  “Just like that?”

  She thought it over. “Yes.”

  “What does it look like?”

  “I don’t know. My idea of it changes.” Grandma took a small soft-bristled clean-up brush out of her purse and swept some dust off Grandpa’s headstone.

  “So there’s not a blueprint somewhere?”

  Grandma smiled. “Some people believe there’s a blueprint. But I like to think that God, or whoever is in charge, doesn’t dabble in blueprints.”

  I borrowed Grandma’s brush and cleaned off Mama’s headstone, tracing my finger along the crane I’d chosen, carved into the stone.

  “Do you get paid for having me live with you?”

  “Who told you that?” Grandma said, startled. She touched the cross at her neck.

  “Lacey.”

  She took a Safeway plastic grocery bag out of her black purse and tossed the weeds into it. “Lacey misses you. Wants you to come back.”

  “She does.”

  Grandma was quiet, maybe letting that idea sink in.

  “I get money every month from your mama’s social security. It’s not much, but it’s going into a bank account for your college education.”

  “So you’re not taking care of me for the money?”

  “I’d have taken you if I had to pay money.”

  That made me smile.

  After we’d spent some time with Mama, I asked Grandma to take me to my father’s grave. She walked me to a small area shaded by oaks, a white picket fence just a few feet away.

  “His parents are here. Margery had them all buried together.”

  A poem was engraved on the family headstone.

  A solitary bird, hollow it flew

  Through a haze of months marked by the moon

  Come to a meadow, shiny with dew

  Where hollow bones sang, and deep inside grew

  The secret hum of a daisy in June.

  “Your mama picked it. Scott was such a wonderful writer.”

  Of course. Daddy had written the poem, not Mama. I kneeled down and laid my cheek against the stone. My birthday was in June. Maybe I was the daisy, which would have made Mama the meadow and Daddy the solitary bird. We fit together like a puzzle.

  I turned to look at Grandma. Her hair was still loose, and it floated around her face and down her back. She got out her clean-up brush again and swept Daddy’s family grave while I took the number 4 out of my pocket.

  “It was you, wasn’t it? You set the clues.”

  I so wanted her to give me a puzzled look and tell me she didn’t know what I was talking about.

  “Your grandfather used to leave little treasure hunts for your mama when he’d go overnight on cabinet installs. I’d get her to follow it when Thomas was on his way back home. I didn’t know if she did treasure hunts with you or not, but I figured I’d give it a try.”

  I wanted to yell at her. To tell her that she tricked me and I’d never trust her. I had to sit down for a minute and let it all sink in. Right there in the wet grass.

  “Did anyone else know?”

  “They were all there if you needed them. Lou and Mel, Margery, Sheriff Bergum.”

  So there had been help along the way, just like there’d always been with Mama. I just didn’t know it.

  “What does the number four mean?”

  “Do you really want me to give you the answer?”

  I thought it over and sighed. “I suppose not.”

  Grandma shrugged. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “You’re the grandma; you should have known.” Even as I said it, I realized that sometimes people did what they could, not what they should, and I didn’t think that was reason enough to be mad.

  Whatever magic there’d been was gone. I felt it fly off, like Mama kept doing in my dreams.

  • • •

  After spending some time with Daisy, there was a lot to think about that night as I read through every last page in my father’s writing folder, so much of it reminding me of Robert Frost. Daddy didn’t shy away from the sadness in things the way Mama did, and that’s when I understood there were two kinds of beauty. One you recognized with your eye, like watching a new horse being born, and one you recognized with some deep place inside yourself that was hurting. Mama drifted toward the first, and Daddy the second, and together, they made me.

  After a while, I tinkered with Mama’s unfinished crane. When I couldn’t make any of the pieces work, I got up to pace, tired of my own deep-down hurting, the deep, hard scratching that wouldn’t stop.

  Writing would help me through it, just like it always had. And where I used to think that writing was like the little hole in a teakettle to let out steam, I figured it was more than that. I hoped the hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of words I wrote down would help me fill the empty place left by Mama and make me whole.

  I picked up Mrs. Snickels’s sketchbook and flipped to a blank page in the middle, trying to ignore my feeling that I was about to change everything by writing down something about After. But I couldn’t keep it locked up anymore.

  I took a pencil and let the words come. All those words about Mama and the night she died that I’d been stuffing down. When they were all out, I folded that piece of paper into a tight square and shoved it in my pocket.

  That was how I saved myself.

  31

  World

  Peace

  The dream was familiar. Though, this time, Mama wasn’t sitting on the slab of rock in the middle of the river. She sat cross-legged on the short, rocky beach, wings spread wide. The cranes were there on the bank, the way they had been the morning she died. She reached her hand out to me, but no matter how many steps I took, I couldn’t get to her.

  Eventually, she stood up and walked toward me. Taking my hand, she led me back to her rocky perch and we sat side by side, watching the pale yellow sun rise over the hills in the distance.

  The birds came then. All those metal birds she’d put together over the course of my life. Origami cranes too. They flew around her and off into the sky, the brightness of morning shining off their wings. I held on to Mama. Tight. Feeling
the coolness of her hand, memorizing it.

  And then she was gone, up and away, following her birds.

  I woke up, unsure of where I was. I stared at the ceiling, counting deep breaths, remembering I was at Jo’s. Sleeping on her dusty trundle. The baby monitor next to my head so we could hear Daisy. A compromise Mrs. Brannigan came up with when she caught Jo and me sneaking out in the middle of the night.

  After my breathing was under control, I noticed the door was ajar, a dim light coming through. Jo wasn’t in bed.

  I walked quietly down the hall toward the light coming from Max’s room and stood outside his usually closed-tight door, scared at what I’d find.

  I pushed the door open with one finger. Max stood to the side of his bed, and Jo was wrapping him with more bandages. They didn’t notice me.

  “That’s good,” Max whispered.

  “No way you’ll come unwrapped again,” Jo said.

  And then my eye was drawn upward toward his high ceiling, where hundreds of origami cranes hung down like twinkling stars. Jo and Max looked toward the door.

  “I’m sorry, Grace, we didn’t mean to wake you,” Jo said as she pulled the bandages tighter. Max looked straight at me.

  When Jo finished, Max climbed into bed. She sat down beside him, humming softly. After a minute, she got up and came toward the door.

  “Grace,” Max said.

  “It’s late,” Jo said.

  “Just for a minute.”

  “Oh, all right,” Jo said. “I’ll be downstairs.”

  I took Jo’s place on the edge of Max’s bed.

  “Jo doesn’t like to face things,” he said. “It’s better to face things. That’s what Mom says. Don’t try and make stuff up, and don’t ignore it. Face it.”

  He set a crane in my hand.

  I looked at the crane sitting there on my palm, like I had that first day of school, letting myself think of Mama, of sitting on the porch at Mrs. Greene’s and watching the cranes fly home.

  “Why did you leave them for me?”

  He shrugged his little mummy shoulders. “I left them for lots of people. I figured you all needed them more than I did.”