The Secret Hum of a Daisy

G. P. Putnam's Sons

Published by the Penguin Group

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Copyright © 2014 by Tracy Holczer.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Holczer, Tracy.

The secret hum of a daisy / Tracy Holczer.

pages cm

Summary: “After 12-year-old Grace's mother's sudden death, Grace is forced to
live with a grandmother she's never met. Then she discovers clues in a mysterious treasure hunt—one that will help her find her true home”—Provided by publisher.

[1. Moving, Household—Fiction. 2. Home—Fiction. 3. Grandmothers—Fiction.
4. Treasure hunt (Game)—Fiction. 5. Death—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.H6974Sec 2014

[Fic]—dc23

2013039962

ISBN 978-0-698-15861-0.

To Kate, Sara, and Maddy
for showing me what it's all about

Where the bird was before it flew,
Where the flower was before it grew,

Where bird and flower were one and the same.

—Robert Frost

Two Hundred

and Fifty-Six

Mississippis

All I had
to do was walk up to the coffin. That was all. I just had to get there and set the gardenia on the smooth brown wood. Grandma said gardenias were a proper funeral flower. As if there was such a thing.

But my mind kept turning to daisies. The wild ones I'd found and stuck into the cold white funeral wreaths. Mama would have liked that. She'd told me that daisies spoke in a kind of song, a secret humming that birds could feel in their hollow bones, drawing them close. She said I could feel it, too, if I tried, along the fine hairs of my arms and neck. That we all have a little bird in us somewhere.

But there wasn't any bird in me. I could never hear the daisies either. Or any other flower for that matter.

Listen, Grace.
Mama's voice seemed to drift near the stained glass windows where wet snow stuck and then slid down the colored panes.

Grandma told me it had been a cold winter and it wasn't over yet, even though it was April. One of the only facts she'd shared with me since we'd met the week before. Of course, it wasn't like I knew how much it snowed here or when, being from just about everywhere else. In all our wandering across the great state of California, Mama had never mentioned the Sierra Nevadas or her hometown, Auburn Valley.

Grandma took my hand in her damp one and squeezed. Hard. “Listen, now,” she said.

I pulled my hand out of hers with a juicy
plop
and wiped it down my skirt.

“. . . she was a loving mother,” said Pastor Dave, his voice turning from buzzing to words. More words like “free spirit,” “quick to laugh,” “full of life.” Grandma fidgeted in her seat. Other people fidgeted too. I wondered if they'd known Mama years ago.

Then Pastor Dave said God took her for his own reasons.

But it wasn't God; it was the river.

I closed my eyes and pushed those thoughts away. Thoughts about Mama's last night, what I might have done different. Thoughts about Mrs. Greene and Lacey and how they were more of a family to me than Grandma would ever be. I turned around to find them at the back of the church, still fuming at Grandma for not letting them sit here in the front row with us. But just the sight of Mrs. Greene, her quick nod of confidence, gave me the courage to do what I had to do.

Pastor Dave stopped talking when I stood up.

I stared down at my too-tight Mary Janes, skin puffing around the edges like marshmallow. Twelve was too old for those dumb shoes, but they were the only decent ones I owned. They squeaked as I stepped toward the giant sprays of sweet white flowers, eyeing the wild daisies I'd tucked in around the bottom.

There was a gasp. Or maybe it was my shoes.

Pastor Dave cleared his throat and picked up where he'd left off. Pews creaked, nylons hushed. I felt eyes on my back like a heat. I turned around to face those eyes, to look at Grandma, hard as the bench she sat on, daring her to stop me, but she was staring at Jesus in the stained glass window, her unused handkerchief held firmly in both long-fingered hands.

I picked the daisies out of the sprays. One by one by one. Heart thumping, I sat down on the red carpeted steps and made a daisy chain, weaving the stems in and out, in and out, reminding me of the number 8 and how Mama said we were like that, winding around and through each other, not sure where one picked up and the other left off. Pastor Dave must have given up on his speech because he stopped talking again, and after a short silence, the organist started “In the Garden,” which I recognized from one of Mrs. Greene's Elvis records. Everyone stood, a commotion of creaking wood and turning pages, like they were glad for some direction.

I set the daisy crown right on top of the closed coffin lid, where Mama's head rested underneath, and then walked past Grandma, past all those other people who were studying their hymnals, singing for dear life. Right past Mrs. Greene, who reached out her hand so that I could brush mine against it, palm to palm.

The singing quieted as the door shut behind me. I sat down on the cold concrete steps under the eaves and watched the slush come down. “One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi . . .” Drowning out the never-ending hymn.

Lacey followed and sat next to me, quiet. She took my hand in hers, our fingers intertwined like a chocolate-and-vanilla swirl. I leaned my head on her shoulder.

“Sisters forever,” she said.

I couldn't make a sound, so I just nodded.

It took Grandma two hundred and fifty-six Mississippis to come outside. I didn't care it took her so long, though. Because I had a mama who never would have let me get past ten. We knew how to save each other.

Birds of

Sorrow

Mama
said
she started living the day I was born, and when I was little, I took that as the literal truth. It was only ever the two of us, so I figured the stork dropped us down as a pair. The very first picture in our family photo album was of her, sitting up straight in the white sheets of a hospital bed, looking down at my little pink face and curly brown hair like she couldn't quite figure out where I came from but she was happy just the same. No childhood pictures of her. None of her pregnant. Just her and me in that hospital bed, dropped down together from some kind of heaven.

When I got to school, of course, I saw that most people had all manner of relatives. I didn't have to change my theory much, though. I decided that me and Mama were alone because the other pieces of our family broke off somewhere on the way down, and if Mama kept moving us around like she did, we'd run into them somewhere.

By that time I was seven and had been telling anyone who asked about my theories on the stork and my lost family. But it wasn't until second grade, when I gave Christopher Wales a black eye for telling me I was bonkers, that Mama finally cleared things up.

She was working on a junk-art bird at the kitchenette table in our tiny apartment, her long blond hair held back with a clip. Where I always managed to hang out my tongue or squinch my eyes when I was concentrating, Mama's face was still and pretty. She'd been building junk-art birds, mostly cranes, since before I was born. Making those birds was a cross between pure love and a nervous habit, the way some might do crossword puzzles or needlepoint. She sold them in the restaurants where she worked or at small flea markets and coffee shops for a little extra money. I thought they were the most beautiful creatures I'd ever seen and always felt a twinge when they flew away to their forever home, wishing we'd find ours.

She patted the metal folding chair next to her and smiled at me, a closed-lipped smile that hid a crooked tooth. As she went back to work inserting the rivets that closed the small metal body of the bird, she tried to explain a little about how babies come and that I'd had a daddy and grandparents once. I didn't want to believe her. My Stork Theory had been with me so long, it was almost like a friend.

But curiosity about the rest of my family won out.

“Where are they?” I said.

“Your daddy and grandpa died before you were born.”

She stopped her riveting and swallowed a bunch of times, like their dying was caught in her throat. It stopped me, too, having to give up the idea of them so soon.

Mama toyed with the pile of spoons she always found a way to work into her birds. The late-afternoon sun shone its slanted light through the window, the winter dirt on the outside stealing some of its shine.

She went on to tell me they'd died together in a car accident, that my daddy had loved me every bit as much as she did. She walked to her dresser and brought out a small framed photo of her sitting in a patch of wild daisies next to a young man who had my high forehead and lopsided smile. His name was Scott. Then she picked up the slim volume of Robert Frost poetry she'd been reading to me every night since I was born.
A Boy's Will,
it was called.

“This is all I have left of him.” He didn't have a family, she said. They'd died in a house fire when he was sixteen.

“What about Grandma?” I said, hopeful.

Mama sighed. She told me they had always fought like cats and dogs, and that her being young and pregnant was just too much for Grandma. She wasn't one to face things, Mama said, and so Grandma sent Mama on a bus to live with another family in Texas, “until they could figure out what to do next.” Mama got off the bus in San Diego, California, and she'd been looking for the perfect home for us ever since.

It didn't occur to me right away that Grandma must be a horrible person, someone I wouldn't want to know. All I thought about was the idea that there was someone out there connected to me by blood. Someone we might belong to besides each other.

So I fired questions at Mama. Did you ever get along with Grandma? Where does she live? What did you and Grandma fight about? Do you think we'll ever see her? Why doesn't she come find us?

Mama took my face in her small hands and told me that thinking about where she came from was painful for her, even still. And I didn't want to be paining her, now, did I? “Because we take care of each other, right?” she said.

“But Grandma's still out there somewhere?”

“Yes.”

“Doesn't she want to know where we are?” I swallowed hard. “Or who I am?”

Mama pulled me into her lap and her yellow chair creaked under our weight. “You have to trust me, Grace. We don't need anyone else.”

So I believed her. Plus, I didn't want to add to her pains by bringing it up all the time. It seemed to me that Grandma must have been a pretty terrible mother to send her own daughter packing while she was so young and pregnant. That made her mean. Small-minded. I decided right then and there she wasn't worth a speck of love.

Mama set me back on my chair. Then she went to the same dresser where she kept the picture of my father and took out a black-and-white-checked notebook. She set it on top of the Robert Frost book.

“Here,” she said. “Sometimes it helps to write about things that make you sad.”

I eyed her skeptically. “You're just trying to trick me into writing practice.”

She laughed and the dark mood lifted.

“You caught me.”

But I figured it couldn't hurt. So I wrote down some wobbly seven-year-old words.

Fly away sad feelings.

• • •

Each of her birds held a sorrow or a wish—all her sleepless nights and worries, all her hopes for the future—formed into words and sketches tucked deep inside those birds and meant to fly away. Before that day, I didn't know what she might be worried about, what might have made her feel sorrowful. I only understood my own sorrows, the way they would settle into the empty spaces meant to be filled by other things—a father, a place to call home—and I didn't know how to scrape them out.

Mama offered to let me tuck my words into the bird she was working on. But I wanted to keep them. They were mine. I wrote down more words that day, and most days since.

That was how I saved myself.