Child of My Heart (11 page)

“That helps.” As if she knew, and I knew, that Ana’s duties would fall to her tonight.

As tired as she was, and perhaps because she was tired, Flora cried when Daisy and I said goodbye. She didn’t cling, or even run after us, she was too exhausted for that. But she sat at the kitchen table in the terrycloth bib the cook had tied around her neck and simply sobbed. On the plate in front of her were the steaming baked potato, a few peas, some cut-up bits of poached chicken. She sat on a couple of phone books, but still her chin was only just above the food. She cried with her mouth open, the tears streaming down her cheeks. The cook sat at the table with her, wiping away the tears with her thumb. Under her fat elbow were Flora’s mother’s scarves, all but the turquoise-and-white one, just where she had left them.

Daisy and I backed out of the room, waving. The house behind us seemed empty. I took her hand as soon as we got outside.

The spattered canvas was still against the wall of the garage, and I thought about what he had said, about masterpieces unfinished. I told Daisy, as we walked to the Kaufmans’ to give Red Rover his evening walk, that maybe tonight we could sleep in the attic, in the two old beds. We could push one of the chairs over to the window, and maybe, I said, if we wake up and see the ghost Uncle Tommy always saw, we could ask him his name, and the name of the little boy in his lap.

“What do you think their story is, Daisy Mae?” I asked her. She thought awhile and then she said, “The ghost is the little boy’s father. And he was waiting by the window for him to come back. And then the little boy came back and sat on his father’s lap, in the chair.”

I nodded.

“Reasonable enough,” I told her.

“Now we just have to figure out where the little boy had been.”

“On a ship,” she said without hesitation.

“That finally returned.”

I laughed. The sun was lower now, and the grackles were going crazy in the trees, preparing for night. Somewhere from behind one of the high hedges we heard children’s voices calling, laughter and a shout. From somewhere else came the sound of a tennis ball. There was the lovely scent of fading summer afternoon in the air—maybe a hint of the unseen children’s suntan lotion. I began to sing, “And it finally returned, it finally returned, it came back from the sea. And from that day to this”—I glanced down at her and she looked up at me, expectantly.

“Fond hearts,” I said clearly, “are happy”—she seemed relieved: the air was too lovely for more bad words—“because the ship had finally returned.”

We heard Red Rover whining and yelping even before we reached the house. Clearly, he’d had a miserably lonely day, and I let him lick my face, and Daisy’s, to make it up to him.

We walked him back to the beach, and sure enough, Petey’s and Tony’s bicycles were still in the sand. Daisy and I picked them up and rested them against the garbage cans while Red Rover explored the shoreline, then we brought him back to his pen. A light was on in the Kaufmans’ front window, as was the side porch light, but this house, too, was empty. Dr. Kaufman had not returned from the city yet. I hoped he would remember to visit Red when he did.

Going back to the beach to fetch the boys’ bicycles, we ran into the
Richardsons
with their Scotties. Mrs. Richardson looked Daisy up and down as I introduced her, and I feared for a moment that she would actually say—the word was all over her mannish face—pitiful. Poor Daisy did indeed look like a waif. Her braid was coming undone and her sash was limp and there were streaks of dirt, baby June’s handprints, Red Rover’s paws, on the skirt of her white-and-yellow (and now, suddenly, under Mrs. Richardson’s all but monocled eye, outdated) hand me-down dress. And then the unpolished saddle shoes, merely two shades of gray, rather than black and white. I had the notion that the shoes alone had transformed her from the charming sprite she’d been this morning, walking the Scotties under the tall green trees, that those cheap pink things had some magic in them after all.

“And where in the city do you live?”

Mrs. Richardson asked her, and Daisy, mumbling, shy under her scrutiny, bowed her head and said, “
Two Hundred and Seventh Place
.”

Mrs. Richardson put her big face into mine.

“What did she say?” (The implication being, of course, that the child should really be taught to speak up.)

I smiled, pushing Daisy along.

“She lives on
Sutton Place
,” I said.

“Shall I come by for the dogs in the morning?”

Mrs. Richardson glanced at her husband, who had his pipe stem in his mouth.

“Yes, of course,” she said.

“Nice meeting you, Daisy,” and Daisy, even in the worn-out shoes and the dirty dress, did a splendid curtsy and said, “Nice meeting you, too.”

“Can you imagine living with that woman?” I asked her as we went on, and Daisy shook her head.

“Poor dogs,” she said.

We rode the wobbling bicycles back to the house, leaving them both in the Morans’ battered yard. My parents weren’t home yet, so I went into the kitchen and peeled some potatoes and put them on to boil. Daisy was sitting on the couch in the living room, looking at some magazines, but when I went in to join her, I saw that she was crying quietly, the tears just rolling out of her eyes. I pushed the magazines onto the floor and sat down beside her. I put my arm around her, drawing her close.

“What is it, Daisy Mae?” I asked, and she sniffed and said softly, “I miss my mother.”

This surprised me a bit, and immediately I regretted having made fun of Aunt Peg, back at the Clarkes’ house this morning. Of course, of course, it seemed perfectly sensible now—crazed Aunt Peg was, after all, Daisy’s only mother.

“I miss my house,” she added.

I kissed the top of her head.

“You can go home whenever you want,” I said softly, into her hair, the sweet odor of her warm scalp. Although the very notion of it made me realize, perhaps for the first time in my life, that I would be lonely without her, here in my own house, where I had always been alone.

“I can take you home on the train tomorrow, or whenever you want. Just say the word.” But she quickly shook her head, and then turned to look at me earnestly.

“Oh, I don’t want to leave,” she said.

“I love it here. I could stay forever.”

Tears came into her eyes again.

“I just miss them,” she said.

I told her I understood.

“It’s hard when you’re used to people,” I said, and she nodded.

“You can miss them but not necessarily want to be with them.”

She nodded again.

“You sort of wish you could be two places at once. With them, because you love them and you’re used to them, but also away from them, so you can be just yourself.”

“That’s right,” Daisy said, leaning against me, her skinny elbow pressing into my thigh.

“You wish you could appear and disappear, like a little ghost. Be around them, but not be stuck with them.” She nodded again.

“It’s the mystery of families,” I said.

She rested her head on my shoulder. Her face was drawn and tired. I could hear the boiling potatoes drilling in their pot, and knew they should probably be turned down, but I didn’t want to leave Daisy to get up and do it. I told her to put her feet up, instead, to take a rest, and when she did, I said, thinking more of my mother’s love of the rose-colored slipcover than of all the nonsense we’d gone through today over the pink shoes, “You’d better take off your shoes.” Obediently, wearily, she leaned down and untied the worn-out saddle shoes, no argument here, of course, because the shoes, ordinary school shoes, contained no magic.

“And those sandy socks,” I said. With only the slightest, saddest nod, a mere remnant of her earlier hesitation, she slipped off each of the thin white socks and placed them into her shoes. She drew her feet up on the couch again, her knees pulled up into the generous skirt of my old Sunday dress, and put her head in my lap. On the wall next to the fireplace was the sketch Flora’s father had given me back in April, now carefully matted and framed. Framed in what my parents had called a museum-quality frame—“a small fortune”—they’d said. But the man in the frame shop had offered them one hundred dollars for the drawing, which pleased and surprised them no end. When they brought it home, they hung it up with great ceremony. Although they still thought the drawing itself looked “like nothing,” it was, nevertheless, the first real evidence of my success by association, the very reason they’d moved out here. I saw Daisy looking at the picture, her hands under her cheek, and I said, “Flora’s father drew that.”

She nodded.

“I thought so.”

“I don’t know what it’s supposed to be,” I said.

“He drew about fifty of them and gave one to me.” I moved my arm down the length of her little body, stroking her side.

“It’s a picture of something broken,” she said matter-of factly not as sleepy as she had been, revived, it seemed, by her own thoughts.

“Something you sort of expected to break, but you still wish it hadn’t.

You still think maybe it won’t.”

I moved the hem of the dress off her thin ankles. The sun was coming through the living-room window in that heavy red gold of near-dusk, but it did not hit the couch and so there was no glare to blind me and no real shadow to convince me I was mistaken in what I saw. I leaned over her a bit.

“Daisy,” I said.

And then I touched her shoulder and asked her to sit up again.

She seemed for a moment to hold her breath. I slipped off the couch and knelt down among the magazines. Gently, I took both of her feet into my hands. Across each instep, tracing, it seemed, the outline of her old saddle shoes, an unmistakable bruise—I licked my finger and rubbed it a bit, just to make sure—a black-and-blue crescent that reached nearly to her toes. I touched it softly, and then with some pressure, but she did not flinch.

“Does this hurt?” I said, and she shook her head sheepishly.

“Not really,” she said.

“What is it, then?” I whispered.

She shrugged, her two hands politely folded together in the lap of her skirt.

“Just a black-and-blue mark,” she said cautiously, raising her chin and turning her head away from me just a little.

“How did you get it? Your brothers?”

Now there were tears in her eyes again and her voice was very soft, nearly inaudible.

“No,” she whispered. She met my eye and nodded as if to admit that here, then, was the thing she had worked so hard to conceal.

“I don’t know how I got it,” she said.

“It was just there one day, a little while ago. I don’t know why.”

I looked at it more closely. It was a mottled bruise, yellowish in spots, in some spots almost black.

“Did you tell anyone?”

I asked her.

“Did you show your mother?”

Daisy shook her head again, and now her mouth was trembling.

“I was afraid they wouldn’t let me come,” she said softly.

“I was afraid they’d make me go to the doctor and then I wouldn’t be able to come.” A tear slipped over the brim of her eye and ran down her face and hit the pretty collar of her dirty dress.

“I really don’t want to go home,” she said earnestly.

“I was just missing my mother, but I don’t want to go home.” I moved back onto the couch and again took her into my arms.

Like a baby, she put her open mouth to my shoulder.

“I thought it was because of the shoes,” she said.

“My school shoes. I thought the pink ones would make it go away.

But I wore them all day. It’s not going away.” She moved a hand up to my face.

“I don’t want to go home already,” she said.

I held her for a while, stroking her arm, patting her back, hushing her, hushing her. I thought of the discoloration I had seen on her hip as she changed. The pale wash of her skin this morning, the heat of her scalp and her forehead when I leaned to kiss her. All the things Aunt Peg and Uncle Jack, in their busy, child-infested lives, could have missed, could have been missing for quite some time. Poor Daisy. Poor Daisy, we all said. Poor Daisy, the jolly family story went, poor Daisy doesn’t get much attention, what with her noisy brothers and fat, fragile Bernadette, and the house to keep orderly, the rules to enforce, the long, dangerous nights her father has to work (not to mention all the busy, closed-door nights he was at home). Poor Daisy’s a good little thing, the family story went: obedient, polite, wonderfully independent—getting herself her own bath, putting on her own pajamas, coming down for school in the morning all ready to go. She’s a quiet little thing, poor Daisy, but around here, she doesn’t have much chance to be anything else, does she? (This from Uncle Jack in his gun and holster, his dish of fruit salad with tiny marshmallows placed on the Formica table before him, and Aunt Peg hovering, touching his shoulder, his scarred cheek, all the children in bed but me. The kitchen window behind him sprayed with false snow.

“Poor Daisy,” he said, and swallowed a bright spoonful. Uncle Jack at one in the morning, in his own kitchen, finally returned.

“She’s a quiet little thing, but I guess we’ll keep her.”

I don’t know that I made any decision. I don’t know that I understood what the bruises might mean, or forebode, although I think Daisy and I both had a sense of something menacing about them, something making its way into her life, and mine. Something that had broken. Something you sort of expected to break. But still hope it won’t.

“One day isn’t very long,” I said to her, eventually, when she was ready to hear me.

“You never know. You haven’t really given those pink shoes much time.”

She sat up, her arms still around my neck, our faces just inches apart.

“You only put them on yesterday,” I said.

“They only got out here yesterday. They were perfectly ordinary shoes until then.” I heard my parents’ car pull into the driveway, the crunch of their tires on the gravel.

“We have to give them a chance, right? We have to wait and see.” I wiped my thumbs over her flushed cheeks, which were still wet with tears. There was the screech of the old car’s hand brake

Gently, I leaned across Daisy’s lap to pick up her socks.

“You know what they say about magic, and ghosts, and good luck, too,” I told her.

“They say first you have to believe, right?”

I unrolled the socks. They were warm and damp, still sandy. I shook them out elaborately, first one, then the other. I slapped them against the inside of my wrist. Then I brushed off Daisy’s discolored feet, running my fingers between her toes, tickling her a bit. I heard the car doors slam, my parents talking to each other as they made their way across the path between the garage and the porch, their voices ordinary and gentle, the same conversation they had begun on first waking.

“Point your toes like a ballerina, Daisy Mae,” I whispered.

And I slipped the socks over her feet, and then held them both, concealed in my hands, as my parents came through the screen door.

They might have been visitors from another, darker planet, my father in his rumpled navy suit, my mother in her skirt and stockings and heels, a newspaper, a briefcase, under their arms.

The smoky smell of the office and the car in their clothes.

“Well, here they are!” my father exclaimed, as if he was indeed surprised to see us. And my mother asked, “How did you girls get along today? Did you wear poor Daisy out? Are the potatoes on?”

I gave Daisy’s two feet a single shake, as if to seal our agreement, and then pulled her off the couch.

“Oh my gosh, the potatoes!” I said, pretending, just to welcome them home, that I didn’t always know what I was doing.

After dinner, Daisy and I went out to catch fireflies. She had put the pink shoes on again, giving them time, and they did indeed make her seem brighter. We sat together on the tree swing, facing each other, Daisy’s legs around my waist, our hands together on the thick rope, and when I had pumped us too high and I began to feel her tremble with each upward swing, I scraped my bare feet along the grass to slow us down a bit. We were sitting like that, in the darkness, only our back porch light and the light from the kitchen where my parents still sat, talking and smoking, reaching into the yard, when Petey and Tony came along, through the gate this time, although they were accustomed to merely hopping the fence.

“Have you seen Rags?” Petey asked softly as he approached, barely raising his head to look at us.

“Judy and Janey took him,” I said.

“Just before I walked Flora home.”

“Well, he’s gone again,” he said into the ground.

“They haven’t seen him.”

“I haven’t seen him, either,” I said. I continued to push the swing back and forth, slowly, the sound of the rope creaking against the high branch the only sound among us for a while.