by Byrne, Leigh
I didn’t know how to comfort her, how to repair the damage that had been done. I was afraid I would only fail her again. But I didn’t want to be like the others who had ignored her for all those years and kept her hidden, pretending as if she didn’t exist.
I started paying more attention to the children around me, wondering if there might be others who were suffering in the same way I had. Whenever I saw a despondent expression in the eyes of a young girl on the street, I couldn’t help but think she might be concealing something, protecting someone she loved, as I had. Every time I passed a house that reminded me of the one I grew up in on Maplewood Drive, I wondered if it harbored secrets, if there could be a hopeless, little someone inside, crying out to deaf ears.
I knew I couldn’t go back in time and save the child I once was, but, I had the power to do the next best thing, and that was to try to help others like her. I decided when I graduated from high school, I would take the money Daddy had put aside for me, and enroll in Franklin Community College, near Nashville, in the associate’s degree program in social services.
“Do you think it’s what Daddy would have wanted me to do?” I asked Aunt Macy.
“It’s exactly what your daddy would’ve wanted.”
Confident I was headed in the right direction I smiled wide, and dug into my cake.
About two o’clock that afternoon, I was getting dressed to go to the movies with some friends when the phone rang.
“I’ll get it,” I hollered out to Aunt Macy. I was sure it was one of my friends calling to say she was running late.
“Hello,” I said into the phone.
“Happy birthday, Ladybug!” came a gleeful voice from the other end. It had been nearly seven months since I had last seen Mama at Daddy’s funeral, and I hadn’t spoken to her since.
“Thanks, Mama,” I said.
“I can’t believe you’re seventeen years old!” she rattled on. “It seems like only yesterday we were celebrating your eighth birthday! Do you remember the red dotted sun-suit I gave you that year?”
“Yeah, I remember, that’s why you started calling me Ladybug.”
“You know, Ladybug, I got you a little something for your birthday, and I made your favorite, German chocolate cake, and I was wondering if you and Macy might like to come over tonight and help me and the boys eat it.”
I didn’t even have to think about it. I would call my friends and tell them something more important came up. “Sure, if it’s okay with Aunt Macy.”
When we arrived at Mama’s house in Spring Hill, Jimmy D., now almost fifteen, and Ryan, six, met us at the door. It felt awkward being around Ryan, because I never had the chance to get to know him before I left home. But it didn’t take long for Jimmy D. and me to pick right back up where we had left off that morning at the kitchen table before everything changed.
We all sat in the living room, and ate our cake and ice cream, and talked about everyday subjects—normal family things, like Aunt Macy’s tomato plants and Jimmy D.’s new girlfriend. Everything was fine with Mama and me, as long as I acted like nothing bad had ever happened between us.
After we finished eating, I opened the present Mama had been exploding to give me since I walked through the door, a spaghetti-strap sundress—red with black polka dots.
“I couldn’t resist,” she said. Then she threw her head back and laughed in the same carefree way she had before her accident. In that instant I saw a snapshot of who she once was. It was but a fleeting image—I blinked and it was gone—but it was enough to let me know that behind the fog in her mind that protected her, my mama was still in there somewhere.
In the car on the way back home, I was bubbly with excitement, talking miles a minute, recounting the night and how much fun it had been.
“Don’t get your hopes up too high, missy,” Aunt Macy warned. And I knew she was right.
59
Two years went by quickly. Mama stayed busy with the boys and her new job as a nurse, and I threw myself into my schoolwork, but we tried to keep in touch as best we could. I called her whenever I got the chance, and once in a while, she even answered the phone. There was no pattern to when she contacted me. Sometimes I would hear from her every day for weeks in a row, and then there would be a stretch of time when weeks would pass in between her calls. But she made sure we got together on my eighteenth and nineteenth birthdays.
On the Memorial Day before I turned twenty, she called to ask if I would meet her at the cemetery in Spring Hill, where Daddy and Audrey were buried. “I’m not going to bring the boys this time,” she said on the phone. “I want it to be just us girls.”
I arrived at the cemetery first and waited until Mama drove up. As soon as she parked her car, she got out and ran to greet me. She had on a tailored navy pantsuit and pumps to match. She was letting her hair go back to its natural color. I noticed her strawberry blond waves were streaked with a little gray. “So good to see you, Ladybug!” she squealed. She still hadn’t brought herself to call me by my name. To her, I was Ladybug, the eight-year-old girl who’d never had anything bad happen to her.
We chatted for a while, catching up on each other’s lives, and then walked to the graves together. She cleared the debris from the gravesites, and I held the flowers she’d brought. For Audrey, we had her favorite red tulips, and for Daddy, fuzzy pink mimosa blooms. He always loved them. Every spring he would cut a few limbs from the tree in the backyard of our house on Maplewood and make a huge bouquet for the kitchen table.
Mama knelt beside Daddy’s headstone and brushed the dirt from the words Beloved Husband and Father. She did the same for Audrey’s, which read Angel Unaware.
“Your daddy would be so happy to know we’re here together, wouldn’t he?” she said, taking the tulips from me and placing them in the vase on Audrey’s grave.
“Yes, he would, Mama, very happy.”
Daddy had once told me that if I wanted to have a future with Mama I might have to let go of the past. I now knew what he had meant by that. Whether it was by her choosing, or her body’s way of protecting her, everything she’d done to me in the five years after her accident had simply vanished from her memory. I, however, had not been able to forget. But, I was slowly learning to pluck the flowers of my past from the weeds, and to place them in the window, where I could see them first.
Mama turned around and extended her hand. “Give me those mimosa branches, would you, Ladybug?”
She looked up at me with soft eyes that held no trace of the cruel woman she’d once been. But even so, in those eyes I saw only shadows of the person she was before her accident. And although I was suddenly saddened when I realized that the mother I’d idolized as a child may never fully return, I knew all was not lost. I still had this:
It’s a squint-eye sunny day in July, my eighth birthday. I tie together the ends of the dandelion necklace I just finished making and place it around Mama’s neck.
“For me?” she says, as if she doesn’t know.
“Yep,” I answer proudly. “I made it for you.”
“It’s stunning!” she says, all dramatic, like a movie star.
“I love you, Mama,” I say.
She smiles. “Love you more, Tuesday.”
