Child of My Heart (16 page)
I heard Daisy calling me from the shower, and I called back that I’d be right there. I held up a finger to Petey and then went to the refrigerator and found some lettuce. I brought it out to him. I didn’t say that my father had given me the same instructions some years ago, and that I had spent the better part of a summer trying to catch a wild rabbit with just such a trap. I said, “Bugs Bunny is probably the only rabbit that really eats carrots (and Rags may well be the only dog). Lettuce might do better.”
He softened, thinking this over, wiping his nose on the back of his arm.
“Twilight’s the best time for rabbits, anyway,” I whispered.
“You’re not likely to catch one in the middle of the day.”
He sucked in some air.
“Yeah?” he said.
“And you’re not going to catch one while you’re watching,” I added.
“They can smell you if you’re nearby. They can smell you even when you’re asleep, Petey, even if you’re hidden under the bushes.”
He nodded, as if this might be a legitimate bit of impersonal information. Admitting nothing. I rubbed his head again.
“Good luck,” I said.
Daisy was sitting on my bed when I went back. She was wrapped in a towel and there was an opened package of new underwear and an opened package of ankle socks on the bed beside her. Her hair was wet and dark and Petey’s bruise was a dark brooch on her shoulder. Against my white bedspread her little feet seemed blackened. I took the jar of Noxzema from my dresser and before I smoothed any of it over her arms or her shoulders or her red nose, I covered her feet, gently, with the cool stuff. She sat back, against my pillows, watching me through half-closed eyes, something fond and sympathetic in her expression. And then I pulled on the new socks. She wanted to wear the red-checked sundress again, but I said I’d run upstairs and find her a cleaner outfit. I chose a pair of pink-and-white-striped pedal pushers and a white shirt with pink pockets and short sleeves that would cover her shoulder.
The chair was still in front of the attic window, catching the setting sunlight. It was a light that swarmed with dust motes, and I knew that if I stood there for just a minute, alone as I was, and willed my eyes to see, I could conjure Uncle Tommy’s sea captain ghost, or his little boy, or even Uncle Tommy himself, with his wink and his laugh.
When I got back to my room, it seemed Daisy had been doing her own bit of conjuring. She was still sitting on the bed, in her towel and her socks, but Judy and Janey were leaning across the mattress on either side of her and baby June was on the floor. Remarkably enough, all three of the Moran kids had been showered and changed, baby June even had a thin ribbon in her wet hair, and the entire rose-covered room smelled of their shampoo and their soap and the hours they had spent outside. A bit of sun had caught the cut-glass base of my bedside lamp and scattered itself across the floor, and baby June was playing with these pieces of light while the other three girls leaned over the mattress, studying Flora’s mother’s hat on the bed between them. It looked a bit more battered than it had this morning. I gave them my ribbon box and then went to take a shower myself, thinking only briefly—it was like a glance thrown over my shoulder—of how Ana’s plump body might compare with my own. I returned to the girls and dressed quickly. Then I climbed onto the bed with all four of them and one by one combed out their wet hair and braided each with a ribbon of their choosing. I was just doing my own, baby June and Janey still sitting between my legs and Judy and Daisy stretched out on either side of me, my ribbons scattered all over the floor and the white spread, when I heard my parents come in, calling for us. I called back to say we were in here, and when they came to the doorway in their dark clothes, my father’s usual expression of surprise and delight struck me, for the first time perhaps, as authentic.
We didn’t sleep in the attic that night. We stayed awake a long time, Daisy and I, to listen for Petey beneath the bushes.
But the Moran house was quiet, and I wondered if the police hadn’t finally found an effective way to keep them all subdued by sending in a full-time cop to be Mrs. Moran’s boyfriend. I held Daisy’s hand under the thin summer blanket and instead of reciting Hail Marys began a long list of “God blesses,” starting with my parents, who were talking quietly in the twin beds on the other side of the wall, then each of the Morans (plus the policeman), then Rags, wherever he might be tonight, and Red Rover and Dr. Kaufman, and then Angus and Rupert and the Richardsons, Moe, Larry, and Curly, and the Clarkes and the Swansons, and Flora, of course, and her mother and her father and Ana (why not?) and the fat cook, and then all the conductors on the Long Island Railroad—we could hear the whistle of the last train to Montauk (Daisy was not asleep yet, but I could tell by the way she laughed that she was heading that way) --and all the workers in every station I could remember between here and
Jamaica
. And Daisy’s father, who might well be among them if he was not already sound asleep in his own room under the sad brown eyes of the Sacred Heart. And Daisy’s mother beside him. And each of her brothers, and Bernadette, of course, lying in the dark, the tears in her ears making her dream about swimming in the ocean with Daisy, eyes wide open and hair floating, right by her side—no response from Daisy this time, only her soft breath-and Uncle Tommy in his apartment on the Upper West Side, all alone after more than fifty years of living, all alone, talking to ghosts, determined to be happy. And you, Daisy Mae, I whispered to put an end to it. I leaned over to kiss her cheek and then turned to sleep. And me, I might have added—God bless me—but I didn’t. No doubt it was because I had begun to suspect that God and I, as Uncle Tommy would have put it, weren’t seeing eye to eye.
Flora was back out on the porch again the next morning, another bottle of red juice tucked tightly between her teeth, and no sign of Ana anywhere, although the door to the master bedroom was closed. Both lights were on in his studio, but I didn’t go in again. I wasn’t exactly certain that I’d find him there. I told the girls I’d had enough of the beach and thought we might instead take a nature walk through the woods and look for salamanders and wildflowers, and then maybe, after lunch, walk to the shore.
Daisy said that would be fine, and Flora told me, pulling the bottle from her mouth, that her mommy was coming home tomorrow.
“Tomorrow,” she repeated. She said it with great firmness, frowning as she spoke, and I recognized the word as something she had been told emphatically by someone, sternly perhaps. Mommy will be home tomorrow. Even hearing the word secondhand from a toddler, I had a sense it was a lie.
“Tomorrow,” I repeated.
“Tomorrow is tomorrow.” I touched her nose to erase that furrow between her brows. I wondered which of them had told her the lie, which of them had spoken to my Flora so harshly. Ana, I suspected.
“Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,” I said, and kissed her head.
“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day ...” I unhooked the strap from around Flora’s waist and helped her out of the stroller, pulling her up by her one free hand. Then I held my other hand out for Daisy and we walked down the steps together.
“And all our yesterdays,” I went on, Flora pulling at the bottle as she walked, her head thrown back and her elbow raised, like a trumpeter in some New Orleans funeral parade. Daisy kicking up the gravel with her pink shoes.
“And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.” We passed the door of his studio. I could tell by the sharp smell of the paint that he was indeed inside and “working.”
“Out, out, brief candle!” I called as we passed (and congratulated myself on my timing—he might have at least told Ana not to let me see Flora with a bottle).
“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.”
“What’s ‘struts’?” Daisy asked, and I showed her. And we strutted together, all three of us across the grass and onto the path through the woods. We wandered a bit, picking up sticks and rocks and trying unsuccessfully to catch the darting shadows of salamanders. When we got to the caretaker’s gate, I tried giving them both a ride, but the hinges were too old and the grass beneath the gate too high to make it much fun. We stopped for a while in the grass beside the road to make clover chains, and as we did I tried telling them the story of Macbeth.
But Flora wandered, and while Daisy let her eyes grow wide at the witches and the murder of the king and the appearance of Banquo’s ghost, she didn’t like the bit about Lady Macbeth scrubbing at the stain on her poor little hand and suddenly, as I spoke, leaned over to put her fingers to my lips. I held her wrist.
“It’s all right, Daisy Mae,” I whispered. I told her it was not something she would have to hear about again until high school.
Walking back through the woods, she said, “Why wouldn’t the stain come off her hand, even after she washed it a lot?”
I smiled at her. I had placed bluebells and buttercups into the pigtails I had made for her this morning, and one of the clover chains dipped down over her forehead.
“It was only her imagination,” I told her.
“It wasn’t really there. It was all in her mind.”
She thought about this for a while, walking with Flora, who still clutched the empty bottle in her hand.
“Everything’s in your mind,” she said. And I said no. I touched the bark of a tree, picked up a fallen branch.
“This is real,” I said.
“And this.” I touched her arm.
“You are.”
“But it’s all in my mind, too,” she said. She was wearing one of my tennis dresses today, a much better fit than the cheap ones bought by her mother. Her pink shoes were dusty from the gravel and the trail.
“If it wasn’t in my mind, how would I know about it?”
I tugged at her hair.
“You’re an old soul, Daisy Mae,” I said.
She thought about this for a second.
“Is that good?” she said.
“It’s what my mother says people always used to say about me.”
She smiled, clearly pleased. And then she said, “Yeah, but you remembered more. You remembered heaven from before you were even born.”
I laughed. I could see she was rehearsing the stories she would tell her brothers, and maybe even Bernadette, when she got home, if anyone would listen to her. Stories about me.
“You’re the one who seems to remember everything, little friend,” I said, and then added, “
She let out a pink, open-mouthed laugh.
“I don’t even know where that is,” she said, as if this made her hubris more delightful.
“I don’t even know why you told the Scotties’ mother that’s where I live.”
I lifted my hair off my neck, it was soft and thick from the humidity, and then ran my fingers through it, making it look a little wild, making Flora laugh. One of the clover chains I wore broke and floated to the ground.
“I was playing tricks with her mind,” I told Daisy, sweeping my wild hair back off my shoulders.
“Just like the witches with Macbeth.”
I picked up the broken chain and draped it over Flora’s head. She was already covered in them—bracelets and necklaces and three wreaths around her hair. In her free hand she clutched several sticks and a few orange and white pebbles and a long stalk of milkweed and one of Queen Anne’s lace.
“I don’t remember heaven, though,” Daisy said, after a while.
“Like you do.”
I scooped Flora up to lift her over a fallen tree trunk.
“It’s just like this,” I told her.
Had she been the child of a different father, I would have sent Flora through the door of his studio to show him how she looked draped in clover and dandelions and bits of milkweed and buttercups. But given the father she had, I knew I would be sending her in only as a lure to draw him out, only to see what was on his face when he looked at me.
We ate our lunch under the weeping-cherry trees again, and then brought Flora inside to read to her for a while in her shaded room. She was only half awake when I put her in her crib, but she stood up and started to whine each time Daisy and I attempted to leave. So we both stretched out on the pale carpet beside her bed, and soon enough both Flora and Daisy were breathing softly. I may have fallen asleep myself, because I heard Ana’s voice and saw her standing in the doorway, had a conversation with her even, all without opening my eyes.
When I did open them, no one was there and the house was quiet. I sat up. Daisy was beside me, her hands beneath her cheek, her head resting on one of Flora’s stuffed dogs, and her lips parted, moving with each breath. The clover chains were still on her head, the fading flowers still stuck into her hair, and I resisted the urge to shake her awake, just to see her green eyes. Instead, I put the back of my hand to her cheek and then to her forehead. She was warm, but comfortably so. It occurred to me that I was beginning to know the difference, the difference between the warmth of healthy blood beneath the skin and the odd heat of a fever. As a child, I had thought my mother’s ability to determine this with just the touch of her hand utterly magical, mysterious. Now I could do it, too. I stood, checked on Flora, who was also still in her full forest regalia, and then walked down the hall into the living room.
