September 3
I am afraid for her. I have failed her.
September 4
A police officer brought her home today as I was having lunch. She was caught shoplifting at the Woolworth store. He said they will not press charges because of who her father is. Her father wants me to tell him everything but I just can not tell him this. She is worse than ever.
September 5
I know what she needs. She needs to go there. Talk to her mother. I was not a baby. She was. I have a memory. A connection. She does not. The cemetery is not enough.
September 9
On my last day I found her sleeping with her clothes on. The tower guard saw her in the yard at three o’clock in the morning. Her father carried her to her bed. When she woke up at noon, she picked a fight with me. She called me her maid. I thought she was going to hit me. She did not know our time would be over the next day. As she was screaming and crying, I told her to go to the place where it happened. To her mother. To her self. She was gone for a long time. When she returned, I took care of her. I stopped pretending. I put her to bed. I scratched her back. She liked it. She held my hand. She would not let go. I stayed all night. In the morning I moved the birthday gifts to her room. Then I left the apartment. I will not go back. I am gone. Gone from prison. Gone from her. Roxanne is driving the moving truck. We are two hundred miles from Two Mills. I already wish I was back in jail with her, but we must both move on. I pray we are ready. O Diary I will never see her again. Cammie. Cammie. No Miss. Just like you wanted.
She’s twelve. Ellie, my granddaughter. This is the moment I’ve been planning for fifty years. Since before I met her grandfather.
We stand on the Airy Street sidewalk, the ancient castle front looming before us. Her reaction is everything I’ve hoped for. Her eyes are wide, her mouth agape. She is staggered.
When she finds her voice, it is stumbling with wonder: “Ganny…I…I was afraid you made it all up. Like a bedtime story.” Her hand fumbles for mine, squeezes. “Is that the Tower of Death?”
“That’s it,” I tell her.
“The Salami Room?”
“At the top. Behind the skinny windows.”
She huddles into me. “Ganny.” She might be crying. But it’s over quickly and now she’s pulling me. “C’mon!”
We hurry up the walk and through the great door, under the sign that says TWO MILLS AVIARY AND NATURE CENTER.
She races through Reception—it’s a gift shop now—and up the stairs and into the old apartment. The massive bar-lock door is gone.
I huff up the stairs after her. The living room is now an office. A young man sits at a computer, ignoring us. Ellie races from room to room, calling, “What was this?”
Only the bathroom is still a bathroom. My voice certifies the past: Yes, they existed. “Kitchen!…Great-grandpa’s room!…My room!”
And now she’s bounding up the tower stairway. She yells back down: “It’s empty! The hangman’s noose is gone!”
I hear her bouncing about, squeaking, pretending to pour boiling tar over invading enemies.
“Ganny—I think I can see Camarillo!”
“Could be,” I call. “If you’re looking west.”
We’ve come from California. I haven’t been back here in half a century. The memories are flooding.
She flies back to me, red-faced and breathless. Until ten minutes ago it never occurred to me that she might not have believed every word I’ve said all these years.
Her eyes get wider, if that’s possible. They sweep the room. It’s hit her. She knows exactly where she is. She points: “The big sign—the banner—was it there?”
“YOU’RE A TEENAGER!”
She’s hopping in front of me. “And Ganny! Ganny! Puh-leeeze”—her hands are steepled in prayer—“tell me you really did it. You really did kick the Jailbirds out of your birthday party.”
I nod. “Every one of them.”
Her yip of joy draws a disapproving head turn from the young man at the computer. Of all my jailhouse stories, this has always been her favorite. She climbs onto a folding chair, which instantly becomes a stage. She jabs her finger at the door. She scowls. She growls. “Out! You! You! You! Out! All of you! Out!”
We crack up. My granddaughter is funny and popular and sweet-tempered. Every day I’m thankful she is not like I was.
She’s leading the way back downstairs when she suddenly stops, turns and blurts: “Pig snouts!”
She’s been hearing about scrapple all her life.
“It’s a breakfast thing,” I remind her. “Tomorrow morning.”
Then we’ll fly back to Camarillo. She’s got a Little League game the next day. She plays for the Blue Sox. Shortstop.
She tugs at the green ribbon tied around my wrist. “And then you’ll tell me about this.”
I’ve never told her about Eloda, at least not directly, not by name. I wanted her to be as old as I was at the time. She knows I’ve been saving something. She knows it has to do with the faded green ribbon I’ve worn since we left for the airport.
I nod. “All will be revealed.”
She claps—“Yay!”—and bounds down the stairs.
—
I lead her through the women’s cellblock, which is now a show-and-tell theater for school groups, and on to the larger men’s cellblock. Ellie flits from one feature to another—Mimic a Bird Whistle, Pennsylvania Songbirds, three rescued, flightless eagles—but I am somewhere, somewhen else…more than sixty years ago and the guard is unlocking the door and I am racing down the cellblock to tell my father of my momentous discovery that my mother might still be alive as an angel in a place called Heaven…and I don’t understand why my elation has made my father so sad and makes him utter the devastating words that don’t at all mean what they say: “Sure, Cammie.” I am nine and many more years will pass and he will be gone before I find countering words of my own: Oh yes, Daddy, there are angels, and I do believe, because it was an angel who stayed with me that summer, an angel who saved my life a second time.
My granddaughter comes at me whistling, exactly like a meadowlark, she claims, and runs off. Ellie. And again I am so happy that my daughter, Anne, gave me naming rights to her only child.
When Ellie returns, she is wide-eyed and bursting and pulling my arm. “Ganny—you gotta come! You gotta!”
You gotta
Her words fall into my heart.
You gotta
You must
Thomas Browne’s final words. The unfinished sentence. The mysterious, tantalizing incompletion.
I am barely aware of Ellie dragging me through a warren of exhibits and out of the old cellblock, and now I hear the noise. Voices. Children. Happy.
We turn a corner and the noise is louder. Another corner and…butterflies! Butterflies fluttering and little kids squealing as butterflies land on arms and heads and fingers.
“It’s the Butterfly House!” Ellie announces triumphantly.
“It’s the old Quiet Room,” I say.
She boggles. “Where you sat with Boo Boo!”
I nod. It’s getting hard to speak. The bench we sat on, it’s still here, bolted to the concrete floor. The sky a second ceiling beyond the glass. Water still falls from a wheelbarrow. I smile at the shrieking kids. It’s anything but a Quiet Room now.
Some kids are quick learners. They stand still as statues and the butterflies come. Others run, chase. Stop! I want to tell them. Be still. They’ll come to you.
I am struck by the exuberance and wonder in this happy room. The butterflies, the children—everything is so…here. There is no five minutes ago. No yesterday. No tomorrow. Only, gloriously, now, and I see at last that I have wondered too long.
You must
Now
You must
I am doing as you say, Thomas Browne. I am leaving the memories to you, leaving them to you and leaping joyfully into the end of your sentence, which was never as empty as it seemed. For I know now what y
ou were about to say: Mind the butterflies. That was it, wasn’t it, Thomas Browne? Be still and mind the butterflies.
Ellie is smiling at me, and I’m aware that there is something extra in the smile, and her eyes are shifting from my face…ah…a butterfly, a big one, half the span of my hand, has landed on my shoulder. I crane my neck to see. Its color is the prettiest blue, with black trim and yellow dots.
“Ganny—” she whispers.
I hush her: “Shh.”
Time spins a Quiet Room around us: me, the butterfly, Ellie’s wonder-struck face.
Another blue beauty appears, a copy of the one on my shoulder. It flutters above us. Ellie, focused on me, doesn’t see it. I shift my eyes. “Look…”
She looks. She sees. “Oh, Ganny—”
“Shh. Be still.”
She can’t help herself. “Please…please…,” she squeaks. She moves her shoulder, as if to prepare, to invite.
“Be still…still…,” I whisper. “It will come to you.”
And it does.
THANK YOU
Ellen Adams entered my life as a reader. She became my friend. And then my inspiration. Like the narrator of this story, Ellen Adams did time in a prison: she was a real warden’s daughter. I’m afraid you won’t recognize much of your life in these pages, Ellen, but the simple fact is this: Without you, there would be no Cammie O’Reilly, no story. Soon we will meet again in Norristown and celebrate our book over zeps (hot peppers for me).
Others have earned heartfelt thank-yous as well: Rinky Batson, Becky Gilbert, Bob Hopple, Jeff James, Katie James, Leah James, Dottie Lieb, Kaye Lindauer, Pete Pennock, Glenn Ritter, Dave Wetzel; my wonderful literary agent, Bill Reiss; my copy editors, Karen Sherman, Marianne Cohen, and Artie Bennett; my story-whisperers, Nancy Hinkel and Nancy Siscoe; and my wife, first reader, and first friend, Eileen.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jerry Spinelli is the author of many books for young readers, including Stargirl; Love, Stargirl; Milkweed; Crash; Maniac Magee, winner of the Newbery Medal; Wringer, winner of a Newbery Honor; Eggs; Jake and Lily; and Knots in My Yo-yo String, his autobiography. His novels are recognized for their humor and poignancy, and his characters are often drawn from real-life experiences. Jerry lives in Pennsylvania with his wife, poet and author Eileen Spinelli. You can read more about Jerry and his books at JerrySpinelli.com.
Jerry Spinelli, The Warden's Daughter
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