“Me?”
“But you can’t tell the others, especially your sisters.”
A sliver of sunlight cut through the shadows and dappled Mama’s features, making her look asymmetrical. It reminded Darya of that Picasso painting—Picasso? Or van Gogh?—in which a woman’s face appeared to have been split apart and reassembled, only not very neatly.
Mama’s smile flashed, half dark and half light. “We’re connected, you and I. We’re all connected, really—whether we want to be or not.”
“I guess so.”
“Oh, don’t guess. Know.”
Darya balled her hands into fists, which she hid in her lap.
“The threads of your life are woven into the fabric of mine, and vice versa,” Mama said. “That’s the way it is with families! You get that, right?” She leaned in and loaded each word with weight. “Nobody. Exists. Alone.”
Darya wet her lips. “I . . . yeah. I can see that.”
“When I think of Emily—and believe me, I think of Emily all the time—I try to imagine what she’d be like as an adult. As a woman. My age.”
But I don’t believe in Emily, Darya said silently. Or, I don’t want to. Can’t we change the subject?
“I will never forget her,” Mama said. Her gaze locked on Darya as if what she was telling her was the most important thing she’d told anyone, ever. “I will never leave Emily again. I can’t. And Emily will never leave me.”
Shards of sadness pierced Darya’s heart, because whatever the truth was—whatever Mama’s truth was, whatever Mama thought it was—it was eating her up. At the same time, Darya was frightened. The brightness of Mama’s eyes pinned her down, making her think of butterflies pinned to one of those awful display boards.
Dead butterflies. Dead Emily.
There were forces at work here bigger than anything Darya had conceived of before now. Worse, Darya wasn’t sure if the forces wanted a good outcome or a bad outcome, or if “good” and “bad” came into play at all.
Mama slapped her breastbone. She did it again. “There’s such a hole inside me! If I don’t fill it, I’ll die. I’ll die!”
“Mama. Shhh. It’s fine, everything’s fine.” Darya glanced around, but there was no one in sight. She had Mama all to herself, just as she’d wanted.
Mama inhaled sharply, then exhaled with just as much force. She closed her eyes and touched her fingertips to her eyebrows, and Darya thought of a little kid counting quietly in her head in an attempt to calm down. Three, two, one—one, two, three. What the heck is bothering me?
“You’re right,” Mama said. “I’m sorry. I get . . . worked up.” Four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, later I’ll have a bottle of wine.
Not that Mama drank wine, not to Darya’s knowledge.
Then again, Darya’s knowledge was pretty sparse.
What did Darya know about her mother?
Mama’s lips curved up. It wasn’t exactly a smile, but Darya did her best to mirror it back.
“The thing is . . .” Mama breathed in and out. She smiled again. “The thing is, I’ve figured it out.”
“Figured what out?”
“At first I thought Natasha, maybe, but no. That ship has already sailed.” She threw out her hands. “What can you do, right?”
“Hey, how about we go back to the motel?” Darya said. “If Natasha’s still there, we don’t want her to be stuck waiting for us.”
“Your sister’s not waiting for us. Your sister’s gone.”
Darya felt a coldness creep over her.
“Natasha’s Wishing Day is a thing of the past, but not yours,” Mama said.
“I don’t—”
“It’s so simple. Don’t you see?” She took Darya by the shoulders. “You have to wish Emily back.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
On the outside, Darya suspected that she looked the same as she had a moment before. But on the inside, everything had changed. It was as if . . . as if she’d turned in on herself. She’d fallen into a hole—not Mama’s hole, but her own—and she was still falling.
Things didn’t make sense.
There was nothing to grab hold of.
She’d heard of this sort of thing, how people floated free of their bodies when life became too much. “It was like I was looking down at myself,” a girl being interviewed on television might say after experiencing something horrible. She’d frown prettily, and the television reporter would knit her eyebrows and gesture for the girl to go on.
The girl would hesitate for a beat. She’d swallow, maybe, then say, “I could see what I was doing. I could hear the words coming out of my mouth! But I wasn’t there. I’d gone someplace safe until the awfulness was over.”
People watching from their own safe houses would murmur and make sympathetic sounds as they spooned mac and cheese into their mouths or swigged Coke from a red-and-white can that said Legend or Star or BFF.
Poor girl, they’d think.
Poor me, Darya thought.
Mama was still talking. She was still holding Darya’s shoulders, her fingers digging into the skin on either side of her shoulder blades.
Darya twisted away. “You’re hurting me!” she cried. “Stop!”
Mama released Darya. A dazed look clouded her eyes. After a moment, her features sharpened and her pupils refocused.
“So you understand what to do? That’s all that matters. It’s all sorted out, then!”
Darya’s head ached. She pushed herself up and got her feet to do what she needed them to do. Right foot, forward. Left foot, forward.
She heard scrabbling sounds as Mama darted to catch up.
“Are you going back to the motel?” she said. “Do you want some tea? Or how about a Fanta Grape? You used to love Fanta Grape. Do you still? You loved the bubbles and that horrible purple color. I’d serve it to you in a champagne flute, and you’d hold it up to the sunlight. ‘Fairy juice, Mama!’ you’d say. ‘It’s what the fairies drink, and I do too!’”
Mama laughed.
Darya wanted to swat her, and the impulse scared her. She’d never wanted to swat anyone in her life, not for real. Not with such a twisty-turvy coiled-up feeling rising so rapidly inside her.
“That wasn’t me, that was Ava,” she said shortly.
Mama faltered. “It was? Are you sure?”
No, Darya wasn’t sure. At age four, Ava was unlikely to have mused charmingly about fairies while sipping soda from a champagne flute. Darya doubted that she would have, either. Even though she was so smart! So clever! Reading when she was three, solving riddles when she was four!
And Natasha? Not a fairy-juice sort of girl.
“I’m sure,” she said curtly.
The sun, which had caressed her earlier in the day, beat mercilessly against her fair skin. More freckles! she thought. Lucky me!
“Darya, you’re acting strange,” Mama said.
“Am I? I’m sorry.”
“What’s wrong, sweetheart?”
Are you kidding me? Darya wanted to say. Are you fricking kidding me?! She pressed her lips together and walked faster, not toward Mama’s motel, but not home, either.
Someplace safe until the awfulness was over. But where was that, and when would the awfulness be over? Tears burned at her eyes, stinging with a confusion that had nowhere to land.
“You can’t bring back a dead person,” she said.
“Excuse me?” Mama said.
A lump grew in Darya’s throat. Stupid tears spilled out, and she swiped at them with the back of her hand.
“I said, excuse me?” Mama repeated. “You can’t bring back anyone. You’re absolutely right about that. But I didn’t ask you to, did I?”
Whirling around, Darya cried, “How can you say that? That’s exactly what you asked me to do!”
“A wish. Is not. You,” Mama said.
A breeze rose from nowhere, only it was stronger than a breeze. It whipped Darya’s red curls around her face.
“You can make the
wish,” Mama said. She jabbed her finger at Darya. “But the wish”—jab—“is”—jab—“the wish. Got it?”
“No, I don’t!”
“And who said anything about Emily being dead? Did I say Emily was dead? No, I did not.”
“Um, I’m pretty sure you did!”
Mama sighed, and Darya’s breath got stuck in her chest. Usually when someone sighed, it made the person appear smaller. Mama’s sigh made her grow larger.
“There are mysteries in this world,” Mama said. A muscle jumped in her jaw. “I told you that, Darya. I told you! And just because we can’t understand something, or explain it—”
“But Mama!” Darya said. “Okay, just . . . if. If Emily is, or was, or—no! Let me finish!”
Mama, who’d taken a step forward, lifted her palms as if in surrender. Her eyes flashed, but she stayed where she was.
“If Emily . . . used to be here, but now she isn’t . . .” Darya felt like she had yellow jackets buzzing around in her head. “Wouldn’t bringing her back change the whole past?”
The sun dipped behind gray clouds. Darya caught the metallic scent of soon-to-come rain.
“Like, say Emily just popped back into existence,” she went on. “Wouldn’t that change the lives of every person who ever . . . came in contact with her? What if you didn’t marry Papa? What if you did, but on a different day, because Emily thought a spring wedding would be lovely or whatever?”
“We did have a spring wedding,” Mama said. “Do you know why? Because I knew that’s what Emily would have wanted.”
“But if it was different at all, there might not have been us,” Darya said, meaning herself and her sisters. “If today, or on my Wishing Day, or whenever, I wish for something that changes the past, and my wish comes true . . .”
Darya imagined a piece of cloth laid flat, but with a wrinkle at the far left side. If left alone, then fine. There’d be a piece of cloth with a wrinkle in it. But if the wrinkle was smoothed out, it would have to be pushed from the left side all the way to the right side, until poof! With the flutter of air, the fabric would lie flat. Only, it would lie flat in a whole new way.
Not that Darya believed in any of this.
Mainly.
But what if she did? Anyone who knew anything knew that messing with the past was asking for trouble. The fact that Mama didn’t seem to see that—or if she did, that she didn’t seem to care—made Darya feel very small and very sad.
“Sometimes things aren’t true, but should have been,” Mama said.
Darya gazed at Mama, attempting to discern some sort of meaning in her cryptic remark.
“I need you to do this for me,” Mama said. “I need you to help bring Emily back.”
Darya had assumed that with Mama back, things would be better. That Mama would make them better. That she’d step back into their lives, and the transition would be hard, but she’d do what mothers were supposed to do. She’d say to her daughters, “Here, let me fix this for you. Let me take this weight off your shoulders. Let me, let me, let me.”
But Mama’s return had made things worse, not better. Instead of happiness and hugs and warm apple pies, she’d brought new troubles to the Blok family. New secrets. Bad secrets.
A raindrop splashed onto Darya, then another. It started to drizzle, and through the blur of the raindrops, Darya appraised Mama once more.
Her hair was thick and shiny, and her eyes held hints of her long-ago warmth, and Darya did kind of like how Mama wore jeans and a flannel shirt and a swipe of red lipstick. She looked tough, if worn down. If she got lost in the forest, Darya suspected, she’d find her way out. In fact, hadn’t she done precisely that, even if the forest hadn’t been a literal forest?
Or maybe it had been. Who knew?
“I’m glad you’re back,” Darya told her. Hot tears spilled down her face, mixing with the cool rain. “I’m g-glad you’re all right.”
“Darya,” Mama warned.
“But Emily’s your problem, not mine. And I th-think you should talk to Papa. I think it’s really awful that you haven’t.”
She spun on her heel and fled.
“Darya!” Mama called after her. “Darya, baby, please!”
Darya’s sneakers slapped the ground. Her curls grew wet and heavy, clinging to her skin wherever they managed to latch on. Snot ran from her nose, and her chest heaved with sobs and the struggle to suck in air, and it was all Mama’s fault because Mama hadn’t saved Darya after all.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
(before)
Darya is wearing her favorite dress, the white one with tiny umbrellas floating down it like a million Mary Poppinses, just without Mary Poppins herself, or any other nanny.
Darya loves the movie of Mary Poppins. Natasha says there’s books about her too, that Darya should read the books instead of watching the movie over and over, because books are better than movies.
But Darya loves the movie.
She especially loves Mary Poppins’s friend, Bert, who is a chimney sweep. He talks funny and dances on rooftops, and Darya’s favorite bit is when he hops on top of the tallest chimney of all—which is a chimney and has a hole going straight down it, a long black deep hole—and scissors his legs right over that hole. Crisscross, crisscross, and at the same time flapping his arms and singing the “Step in Time” song, which is the happiest song in the world, probably.
And yet, he could fall. Every time, Darya thinks about that, although she knows he won’t.
Darya doesn’t think Willow Hill has nannies or chimney sweeps, but today her preschool class is pretending they do. Miss Annie taught them three songs from Mary Poppins, and today is their performance. They won’t be singing “Step in Time,” but they will sing the other chimney sweep song, which is called “Chim Chim Cher-ee.”
It’s not a happy song, but Darya likes it anyway. She likes making big eyes and using a whisper voice for the scary-ish part, which she practices while Miss Annie goes around smoothing the girls’ hair and telling the boys to be still.
“‘When there’s hardly no day nor hardly no night, there’s things half in shadow and halfway in light,’” she sings under her breath.
It gives her the shivers. Delicious shivers, and she knows Mama will feel the same way.
“They’re here! They’re taking their seats!” Miss Annie tells the children, meaning the parents and grandparents who have arrived for the show. “Now remember, eyes on me. Let’s show them how marvelous you are!”
The lights on the makeshift stage are bright and make Darya squint. Her tummy does a flip, and Mr. Evans starts up on the piano, and everyone sings “Chim Chim Cher-ee” just right, even Cyrus Conroy, who can’t be counted on not to giggle.
Next they sing “Feed the Birds,” which is beautiful and sad and has the word tuppence in it, which is fancy for two pennies. Darya’s stomach starts to settle down, and she looks for Mama and Papa in the rows of folding chairs, even though she’s not supposed to.
Finally, for their last act, they sing “A Spoonful of Sugar,” and this song has dance moves in it. Easy ones, but still Darya has to concentrate. She gets every step right, and she remembers to “be expressive,” which means pretending to be Jane (for the girls) or Michael (for the boys).
Jane and Michael are the children who need the nanny, because their parents don’t have time for them. In this song, they have to clean up the nursery, which in Willow Hill would just be the den or the TV room or just the kids’ own bedroom. Cleaning up the nursery is a chore, but Mary Poppins makes it fun, and Darya acts all of this out with her gestures and expressions.
She’s flushed with pride when the song ends and the audience claps and Miss Annie smiles and makes a go on motion, which means that yes, Darya and the others can scramble off the stage and run to find their parents.
She is swept up in a sea of grown-ups and fabric and strong perfume. She’s pushed into a metal chair, and pain shoots through her hip. Maybe she’ll have a bruise tomorrow. She l
ikes bruises.
But where are Mama and Papa? They promised they’d be here. They promised especially to be on time, because when they’re late, Darya gets a stomachache.
“Okay, Mama?” Darya had said this morning. She’d already eaten her oatmeal. It was the package kind, where each package makes one bowl and all Darya has to do is add hot water from the faucet. It wasn’t as good as Mama’s kind, but Mama was still in bed.
She’d shaken Mama’s shoulder, and Mama had groaned from under the covers.
“The program starts at ten o’clock, but parents can come at nine forty-five.” She’d shaken her again. “Just say ‘okay,’ okay?”
“Yes, yes, okay,” Mama had said, and she’d given Darya a sleepy kiss before telling her to break her leg, because that’s what mothers were supposed to say before their daughters sang and danced on a stage.
Papa had given her a hug from his workshop. He’d promised they’d be on time, too.
So where are they?
“Darya! You were wonderful!” Darya hears, and her insides slide all the way to her shoes even as she’s pulled tight into Aunt Elena’s embrace. “You were the cutest, yummiest, most fabulous spoonful of sugar ever. I am so proud of you!”
She doesn’t tell Aunt Elena that she wasn’t an actual spoonful of sugar.
She doesn’t listen to why Mama couldn’t make it, or why Papa had to stay with her.
She doesn’t eat the snack that Cyrus’s mom brought—a baggie of popcorn and a juice box for every kid in the class—and she doesn’t say thank you to Cyrus’s mom, either.
That afternoon, when she’s back at home because half-day preschool is over, she sits in a sunny spot on the floor of the den. She practices not being there, even though she is. She doesn’t turn to look when she hears Mama walk into the room. She doesn’t lift her head when she sees Mama’s bare feet in front of her. She tries to not even see Mama’s feet.
They’re blobs, she tells herself. Just floaty potato blobs. If she gazes past them, sort of, and lets her eyelids droop, they really and truly are.
Mama talks at her, with sorries and headaches and sometimes it’s just too hard, my sweet girl.