It was spectacular.
Oh, Darya. I didn’t set out to write about Emily. Not like this. I’d go back and scratch out every sentence, except I promised myself I wouldn’t, not again. No more erasing.
Today is your Wishing Day! (If Papa remembered my instructions, that is. I left him a letter, too. I asked him to give this to you on your Wishing Day, but before you made your wishes. Did he?)
I suppose I wanted to give you all sorts of wisdom, but I’m a bit short of wisdom, I’m afraid. I can barely make one thought stick to the next these days. For heaven’s sake, I didn’t even tell you the proverb about gingers, did I?
Well, here it is: There never was a saint with red hair.
Are you blown away?
Didn’t think so. On the other hand, who wants to be a saint, anyway? If you’re human, you can’t be a saint. If you’re a saint, you’re not human. But forget saints. What I want to tell you about is magic.
There’s magic everywhere, I think, but in Willow Hill, magic shimmers in an eternal, invisible mist. Not everyone can sense it, and so not everyone believes in it. On the other hand, if you do sense it, you have no choice but to believe in it.
When you were three, you blew on a dandelion, and the dandelion fluff turned into a swirl of butterflies. Do you remember? You clapped and bounced and said, “Again! Again!” Now, I’d had my suspicions about you since you were a baby. You babbled to no one, but not the way other babies did. You’d gurgle a string of nonsense syllables, and then you’d pause and widen your eyes. Then you’d burst into peals of giggles and babble some more, as if you and whatever tree spirit or water sprite you were talking to were having the most delightful conversation.
But when you blew butterflies out of a dandelion, I knew for sure. Magic runs deep in your veins, Darya. I don’t know if it’s a blessing or a curse. Probably both.
I gripped your shoulders and gazed into your eyes and told you it had to be our secret. “You can’t tell anyone. Not Papa, not your sisters, not your aunts,” I said, but I came on too strong. I frightened you and made you think you’d done something bad. I made you doubt yourself.
Don’t, Darya. Don’t doubt yourself, especially today.
Make your wishes with care.
That’s really all I’ve got—except it would be cowardly of me to leave it at that. You don’t want my advice. You want to know why I left, don’t you?
I love you.
I will always love you.
And you might not believe me, but I didn’t leave because I wanted to. I left because I saw no other choice. Call it a lack of imagination, if you want. That always was a flaw of mine.
Emily, though. Emily had imagination. Emily saw fields of lavender where the rest of us saw weeds. She gave the world tangerine skies; I took those skies away.
Be careful what you wish for, darling Darya.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
—Mama
Darya let the pages fall to her lap. Her chest rose and fell, and a gushing wave of missingness crashed over her and tried so hard to wash her away. She gripped Mama’s letter so tightly that she crumpled it, and then she opened her fingers and choked out a sob.
She gathered the pages, smoothed them as best she could, and refolded them. She slid them back into the envelope and put the envelope into the top drawer of her bedside table.
No, that was no good. Someone had taken it before. She wasn’t going to let that happen again.
She tapped the corner of the envelope against her lip. In her closet, way back in the corner, was a shoebox. Inside the shoebox were all the riddles and picture puzzles Mama had given her, as well as any that Darya had drawn for Mama. She rifled through the scraps of paper, drawing several out for a closer examination.
Misunderstood. An easy one, but satisfying. And appropriate.
She studied it, then nodded. Big fish in a small pond.
She gave a small smile. It had been a long time since she’d thought about these puzzles. She enjoyed re-figuring them out.
She worked out several more, until she unexpectedly grew light-headed and had to stop. Something about the scraps bothered her, but as with so many things recently, she couldn’t put her finger on what.
Still, her box of riddles was where she kept all things Mama, so she tucked Mama’s letter among the scraps of paper. She put the lid on the box and placed the box back in her closet.
There. The shoebox was a vault for storing valuables, and there was a word puzzle that described those valuables perfectly:
I wish I knew how to love Klara better! Klara and our baby girls. I can’t . . . I don’t know how . . . without her, I don’t think I could survive. Oh, please don’t let her slip away!
—NATHANIEL BLOK, AGE TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
(before)
Darya plays on her big girl bed with the safety railing finally taken off. Mama is playing with her. It’s just the two of them, the way Darya likes best.
Mama piles up pillows on the mattress, a hundred of them or at least a dozen. She lifts Darya from under her armpits and plops her onto the tippity-toppiest pillow of them all.
“There!” she proclaims.
Darya wobbles. “I’m going to fall!” she cries.
“Not if you hold still. You’re a big girl, Darya. You can do this.”
Darya grows solemn, because if Mama says she can, she can. She will. When she stops worrying about falling, she takes in her new view of the world. She’s on top of the pillows. The pillows are on top of the bed. The floor holds the bed up, the house holds the floor up, and way way down, the ground holds up the house, which holds up the floor, the bed, the pillows, and high-as-a-princess Darya.
But what holds the world up? Darya wonders.
She asks Mama, who smiles and says that’s a big question for a little girl.
“Tell me,” Darya begs.
“Well, if you must know”—she lowers her voice as if they were spies—“it’s a turtle.”
“Mama.”
“Don’t you believe me?”
Darya thinks about the turtle that lives at preschool. His name is Harold. He sits in the glass aquarium and does nothing.
A turtle like Harold couldn’t hold up the world, which tells Darya that Mama is teasing.
Darya decides to tease her back. “Okay, then what holds the turtle up?”
Mama laughs, making Darya beam.
“Another turtle!” she’d said. “And another and another and another. It’s turtles all the way down!”
“No, it’s not!”
“You’re right. It’s Daryas all the way down.” She puts her finger on Darya’s nose and pushes her—fwoomph!—so that she lands on her back. Mama stacks the pillows on top of her.
“Don’t move,” she cautions. “Don’t move!”
When Mama is done, a hundred pillows, or at least five, are balanced on Darya’s tummy.
“There,” says Mama. “Now you’re the bottomest turtle, holding everything up. What’s it like? Do you feel like you’ve got the weight of the world on your shoulders?”
“No, on my tummy.”
Mama laughs. This makes Darya laugh. This makes the pillows fall, and Mama falls too. Tink, tink, tink, like dominoes, with Mama toppling gently and landing with her head on Darya where the pillows used to be.
“I caught you!” Darya exclaims, bolting upright. She keeps her legs straight so that she doesn’t dislodge Mama. “Mama, I caught you!”
“You did, you clever girl!”
Darya beams. She loves Mama all the time, but she loves her so so much when she’s in a sunshine mood.
“What if I . . . fall off a chair?” Mama asks, gazing with twinkling upside-down eyes at Darya. “Will you catch me then?”
“Yup.”
“What if I fall off a table?”
“Yup.”
“What if I fall off a mountain? And don’t say ‘yup,’ because I
would squish you, little girl!”
Mama rolls over and scrambles onto her knees and tickles Darya with crazy tickling fingers.
“I’ll catch you anyway!” Darya cries, laughing like she’ll never stop. She doesn’t want to stop, never not ever. “I’ll always catch you!”
“Always?” Mama presses, tickling harder.
“Always! Always!” She laughs and squirms all over the place. “And you can’t make me not. So there!”
Mama lifts her hands. Darya is still filled with giggle bubbles, but the relief is exquisite.
“I am the luckiest mama in the world,” Mama says.
Darya screeches when Mama pretends to come for her again. “And I’m the luckiest Darya.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
That night, after sinking into a gray and troubled sleep, Darya woke with a start. She’d had a nightmare filled with tumbling baby blocks decorated with etchings of birds and the ABCs in a fancy font. There’d been a ferocious wind, and the Bird Lady on a bicycle that turned into a broom, like the Wicked Witch of the West. Da dunh da dunh da dunh da. Da dunh da dunh da dunh da.
Then the Bird Lady transformed into Tally, who hovered by Darya’s bedroom window cackling and flaunting the letter from Mama. The wind had blown, and the bough had broken, and down had come baby, ABC blocks and all.
“It was a dream,” Darya said out loud.
But it was also a message. ABC blocks, Mama’s letter, Tally as a wicked witch. Only Tally wasn’t a wicked witch. She was just a girl who’d made a bad decision.
What did that say about Mama, who’d made a bad decision as well—and then some? Was Darya supposed to lump Mama and Tally together, both of them just girls who made really bad decisions?
Maybe, and maybe, one day, she could forgive them. If she decided to.
If, if, if! So many ifs! Pull on any one of them, and everything could unravel.
If Mama hadn’t erased Emily (a bad thing), then there would be no Darya. Maybe Mama and Papa would have still gotten married, and maybe they’d still have had three little girls. But no way would each second tick out in precisely the pattern needed to ensure that the middle child was Darya and not some random fake child. Dora or Daria or . . . Siobhan, for heaven’s sake.
Likewise, if Tally hadn’t stolen Mama’s letter (a bad thing), then Darya wouldn’t have run into the Bird Lady and gotten a hint about the Forgetting Spell. Not that the hint had gotten her anywhere.
But maybe, in this thorny world Darya lived in, “thinking outside the box” was the only way forward, about good and bad, right and wrong? About life, the universe, and everything?
Darya’s eyes widened, while everything else—her thoughts, her cells, the tiny hairs on the back of her neck—narrowed to a pinprick of white hot concentration.
Think outside the box.
Think outside the box.
The box! Of course! Not a metaphorical “let’s learn a lesson” box, but a real box. Her box. Her box of puzzles and riddles!
She scrambled out of bed, dashed to her closet, and pulled out the shoebox. She flung off the lid and sifted through the scraps of paper. Which one was the answer? Which one would set free her forgotten memories?
“I understand,” Darya whispered, barely giving breath to the words.
No, I don’t, she thought, tossing that one aside. I want to, but I’m not there yet.
She went through half a dozen more. Some were clever, some were a little dumb, although she reminded herself that she’d been little when she and Mama had solved these puzzles together.
Some made her smile, like the one that showed a soup tin, among other things.
Can you see I love you? she thought. I don’t know. Can I?
Others stumped her for several minutes. For example, a riddle scribbled onto a ripped-off piece of paper that said, “If I have it, I don’t share it. If I share it, I don’t have it. What is it?”
Then the solution came to her—a secret. The thing was, she was getting sick of secrets.
At last she upturned the box and dumped all the scraps onto the carpet. One scrap remained even when she shook it. Darya examined it more closely, running her thumbnail under the edge. It was glued in place so that it couldn’t come out.
It was an easy one:
Yeah, I know, she thought. I’m trying!
And, like a lock sliding home, it came to her, because sometimes—omigosh—a box is just a box. The answer had been there all the time!
She checked the outside edges of the shoebox. Nothing, just the word “Adidas.” She flipped the box over, and there it was. A scrap of paper glued to the cardboard that said, “When is a door not a door?”
“When is a door not a door?”
She knew this one. Everyone knew this one. When is a door not a door? When it’s ajar, of course.
With that, the door to Darya’s subconscious was knocked ajar, and a memory rushed in:
“Mama, where are you going?”
“Just . . . away, baby.”
“Why?”
“Because I have to.”
“When will you be back? Can I come too?”
“I don’t know, and no. Let go of my leg now. Mama’s got to leave.”
“No, I don’t want you to!”
“Darya, let go.”
“Mama, please!”
“Let go, Darya.”
There was urgency and the need to pee. Swirls of confusion. Everything was wrong, and Mama was going to leave—unless Darya stopped her.
Darya had to stop her.
“If I ask you a riddle—”
“I don’t have time for riddles, baby. I’m sorry.”
“You interrupted! If I ask you a riddle and you don’t get it, then will you stay?”
“Darya . . .”
“Please! Please!”
A sigh. “Fine. Go ahead, then.”
Hope, bursting in her lungs. Think! Think, think, think!
Then . . . yes!
“When is a door not a door?”
“Oh, Darya.” (So sad. Don’t use that sad voice. No!) “When it’s ajar. Now let me go, sweetheart.”
“Mama, no!”
Hands prying at hands. Clutching. Falling. Getting up and running.
“Mama! Mama!”
And then . . . g plus one, gone.
It’s Darya’s fault.
It will always be Darya’s fault.
Forever.
Grief brought her back. Grief and the taste of salt, as she sat on the floor by the upside-down shoebox, tears streaming down her cheeks.
She had been so certain that remembering what she’d forgotten would make things better, but it hadn’t.
How could she fix things?
She couldn’t. That was the answer she’d been hiding from, both horrible and true. She knew from the way it hit home, the way the right answers always did.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
She waited, trapped between remembering and forgetting, until the sun sent its watery yellow rays through her curtains.
A jar, she’d thought when she was little. How embarrassing. A door, a jar, a jar of fireflies. A jar of memories that had finally leaked out.
But the sun was up. Dawn had arrived. It was October thirtieth, which for everyone else meant the day before Halloween. For Darya, it was her Wishing Day at last.
She stood up, wiped her eyes, and slipped downstairs, where she pulled her jacket over her pajama top and shoved her feet into her boots, letting the legs of her PJ bottoms bunch up as they chose.
Make your wishes with care, Mama had warned in her letter, and Darya would.
As she hiked to the top of Willow Hill, she shivered at the thought of all that could go wrong. Still, she kept going. She was Darya Blok, and magic ran in her veins. She was not a quitter.
From the top of the hill, she surveyed the town. Was Mama asleep in the charming garage apartment she shared with Aunt Elena? Or was she awake, possibly thinking about Darya? A jolt of fear electr
ified her. Mama wasn’t here, was she? Lying in wait to force Darya to do as she bid?
A hasty scan of the clearing told her that no, Mama wasn’t here. Darya was alone, the wind whipping her hair. She felt like a warrior. She felt like a princess. She felt like a stupid teenage girl, wearing a nightshirt and an army jacket.
She approached the ancient willow tree. Its branches swayed and murmured. Darya ducked her head and pushed through the frost-covered fronds.
She laid her palm against the willow’s trunk and bright white energy buzzed around her, zapping her skin and tousling her hair. It’s like when I hold my breath, but not, she thought.
Darya sensed an invisible precipice—here there be wishes—and she stepped off willingly.
A Girl, Falling.
“Number one, my impossible wish,” Darya said. “I wish to know what happened—what really happened—to Emily.” She couldn’t and wouldn’t “wish Emily back.” Too dangerous. But the truth about Emily? Yes, please. Darya would like very much to solve that riddle, even though the chance of that happening seemed very small.
“For the wish I can make come true myself . . .” She hesitated, and the bark of the willow tree rippled under her fingers. She pressed her hand against the trunk and made her entire body tight and unyielding. “I wish to have nothing to do with Mama.”
Wind moaned in the willow’s long fronds. Darya held steady against it. She couldn’t save Mama when she was little, and she couldn’t save her now.
“And my third wish. The deepest wish of my secret heart.” Her voice wavered, because she didn’t know the deepest wish of her secret heart! If life was fair, then Tally would have this wish, because Tally would do the right thing and wish something good, something that had to do with her mother. Darya almost made that her wish, that Tally could have her heart’s desire, until a stab of resentment poisoned the impulse.