Probably I should have expected this. I felt tears gather in the back of my throat, and I didn’t even know why. “But—but—you never said a word. How come you didn’t tell me?”
“Because you weren’t ready to know about her. I didn’t want to risk you running away again. I wanted you to have a chance to get yourself on solid ground, get your heart bolstered up first. There’s a fullness of time for things, Lily. You have to know when to prod and when to be quiet, when to let things take their course. That’s what I’ve been trying to do.”
It grew so quiet. How could I be mad at her? I had done the same thing. Held back what I knew, and my reasons were not the least bit noble like hers.
“May told me,” I said.
“May told you what?”
“I saw her making a trail of graham crackers and marshmallows for the roaches to follow. My father told me once that my mother used to do the same thing. I figured she’d learned it from May. So I asked her, ‘Did you ever know a Deborah Fontanel?’ and she said yes she did, that Deborah had stayed in the honey house.”
August shook her head. “Goodness, there’s so much to tell. You remember how I told you I worked as a housekeeper back in Richmond, before I got my teaching job? Well, that was in your mother’s house.”
My mother’s house. It seemed odd to think of her with a roof over her head. A person who lay on a bed, ate food at a table, took baths in a tub.
“You knew her when she was little?”
“I used to take care of her,” August said. “I ironed her dresses and packed her school lunch in a paper bag. She loved peanut butter. That’s all she wanted. Peanut butter Monday through Friday.”
I let out my breath, realizing I’d been holding it. “What else did she love?”
“She loved her dolls. She would hold little tea parties for them in the garden, and I would make these teeny-tiny sandwiches for their plates.” She paused, like she was remembering. “What she didn’t like was schoolwork. I had to stay after her all the time about it. Chase her around calling out spelling words. One time she climbed a tree, hiding up there so she wouldn’t have to memorize a poem by Robert Frost. I found her and climbed up there with the book and wouldn’t let her come down till she could say the whole thing by heart.”
Closing my eyes, I saw my mother perched beside August on a tree limb going through each line of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” which I myself had had to learn for English. I let my head drop, closed my eyes.
“Lily, before we talk any more about your mother, I want you to tell me how you came to be here. All right?”
I opened my eyes and nodded.
“You said your father was dead.”
I glanced down at her hand still on mine, afraid she might move it. “I made that up,” I said. “He’s not really dead.” He just deserves to be dead.
“Terrence Ray,” she said.
“You know my father, too?”
“No, I never met him, only heard about him from Deborah.”
“I call him T. Ray.”
“Not Daddy?”
“He’s not the Daddy type.”
“What do you mean?”
“He yells all the time.”
“At you?”
“At everything in the world. But that’s not the reason I left.”
“Then what was it, Lily?”
“T. Ray…he told me my mother…” The tears rushed up, and my words came out in high-pitched sounds I didn’t recognize. “He said she left me, that she left both of us and ran away.” A wall of glass broke in my chest, a wall I didn’t even know was there.
August slid up to the edge of her chair and opened her arms, the way she’d opened them to June that day they’d found May’s suicide letter. I leaned into them, felt them close around me. One thing is beautiful beyond my words to say it: August holding you.
I was pressed so close to her I felt her heart like a small throbbing pressure against my chest. Her hands rubbed my back. She didn’t say, Come on now, stop your crying, everything’s going to be okay, which is the automatic thing people say when they want you to shut up. She said, “It hurts, I know it does. Let it out. Just let it out.”
So I did. With my mouth pressed against her dress, it seemed like I drew up my whole lifeload of pain and hurled it into her breast, heaved it with the force of my mouth, and she didn’t flinch.
She was wet with my crying. Up around her collar the cotton of her dress was plastered to her skin. I could see her darkness shining through the wet places. She was like a sponge, absorbing what I couldn’t hold anymore.
Her hands felt warm on my back, and every time I paused to sniff and gasp for a little air, I heard her breathing. Steady and even. In and out. As my crying wound down, I let myself be rocked in her breathing.
Finally I pulled back and looked at her, dazed by the force of what had erupted. She ran her finger along the slope of my nose and smiled a sad kind of smile.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Don’t be sorry,” she said.
She went to her dresser and pulled a white handkerchief from the top drawer. It was folded, ironed, with “A.B.” monogrammed on the front in silvery threads. She dabbed softly at my face.
“I want you to know,” I said, “I didn’t believe T. Ray when he told me that. I know she never would’ve left me like that. I wanted to find out about her and prove how wrong he was.”
I watched her move her hand up under her glasses and pinch the place between her eyes. “And that’s what made you leave?”
I nodded. “Plus, Rosaleen and I got in trouble downtown, and I knew if I didn’t leave, T. Ray was gonna half kill me, and I was tired of being half killed.”
“What sort of trouble?”
I wished I didn’t have to go on. I looked at the floor.
“Are you talking about how Rosaleen got the bruises and the cut on her head?”
“All she wanted to do was register her name to vote.”
August squinted like she was trying to understand. “All right, now, you start at the beginning. Okay? Just take your time and tell me what happened.”
The best I could, I told her the miserable details, careful not to leave anything out: Rosaleen practicing writing her name, the three men taunting her, how she poured snuff juice on their shoes.
“A policeman took us to jail,” I said, and I heard how strange the words sounded to my ears. I could only imagine how they sounded to August.
“Jail?” she said. Her bones seemed to soften a little in her body. “They put you in jail? What was the charge?”
“The policeman said Rosaleen assaulted the men, but I was there, and she was only protecting herself. That’s all.”
August’s jaw tightened, and her back went ramrod straight. “How long were you in there?”
“Me, I didn’t stay long. T. Ray came and got me out, but they wouldn’t let Rosaleen go, and then those men came back and beat her up.”
“Mother of God,” said August. The words hovered over us. I thought of Mary’s spirit, hidden everywhere. Her heart a red cup of fierceness tucked among ordinary things. Isn’t that what August had said? Here, everywhere, but hidden.
“Well, how did she finally get out?”
Some things you have to take a deep breath and just say. “I went to the hospital where they’d taken her to get stitches, and I—I sneaked her past the policeman.”
“Mother of God,” she said for the second time. She stood up and walked one loop around the room.
“I never would have done it, except T. Ray said the man who beat Rosaleen was the meanest hater of colored people anywhere, and it would be just like him to come back and kill her. I couldn’t leave her in there.”
It was scary, my secrets spilled out across the room, like a garbage truck had backed up and dumped its sorry contents across the floor for her to sort through. But that wasn’t what frightened me most. It was the way August leaned back in her chair and looked off toward th
e window with her gaze skimming the top of my head, looking at nothing but the sticky air, her thoughts a nerve-racking mystery.
A fever broke along my neck.
“I don’t mean to be a bad person,” I said, and stared at my hands, how they were folded together like hands in prayer. “I can’t seem to help it.”
You would think I was totally cried out, but tears beaded again along my lids. “I do all the wrong things. I tell lies, all the time. Not to you. Well, I have—but for good reasons. And I hate people. Not just T. Ray but lots of people. The girls at school, and they haven’t done anything to me except ignore me. I hate Willifred Marchant, the poet of Tiburon, and I don’t even know her. Sometimes I hate Rosaleen because she embarrasses me. And when I first came here, I hated June.”
A flood of silence now. It rose like water; I heard a roar in my head, rain in my ears.
Look at me. Put your hand back on mine. Say something.
By now my nose was running along with my eyes. I was sniffling, wiping my cheeks, unable to stop my mouth from spewing out every horrible thing I could drum up about myself, and once I was finished…well, if she could love me then, if she could say, Lily, you are still a special flower planted on the earth, then maybe I would be able to look in the mirrors in her parlor and see the river glistening in my eyes, flowing on despite the things that had died in it.
“But all of that, that’s nothing,” I said. I was on my feet needing to go someplace, but there was no place to go. We were on an island. A floating blue island in a pink house where I spilled out my guts and then hoped I wasn’t tossed out to sea to wait for my punishment.
“I—”
August was looking at me, waiting. I didn’t know if I could say it.
“It was my fault she died. I—I killed her.” I sobbed and dropped straight down onto my knees on the rug. It was the first time I’d ever said the words to another person, and the sound of them broke open my heart.
Probably one or two moments in your whole life you will hear a dark whispering spirit, a voice coming from the center of things. It will have blades for lips and will not stop until it speaks the one secret thing at the heart of it all. Kneeling on the floor, unable to stop shuddering, I heard it plainly. It said, You are unlovable, Lily Owens. Unlovable. Who could love you? Who in this world could ever love you?
I sank farther down, onto my heels, hardly aware of myself mumbling the words out loud. “I am unlovable.” When I looked up, I saw dust particles floating in the lamplight, August standing, looking down at me. I thought she might try to pull me to my feet, but instead she knelt beside me and brushed the hair back from my face.
“Oh, Lily,” she said. “Child.”
“I accidentally killed her,” I said, staring straight into her eyes.
“Listen to me now,” said August, tilting my chin to her face. “That’s a terrible, terrible thing for you to live with. But you’re not unlovable. Even if you did accidentally kill her, you are still the most dear, most lovable girl I know. Why, Rosaleen loves you. May loved you. It doesn’t take a wizard to see Zach loves you. And every one of the Daughters loves you. And June, despite her ways, loves you, too. It just took her a while longer because she resented your mother so much.”
“She resented my mother? But why?” I said, realizing that June must have known who I was all along, too.
“Oh, it’s complicated, just like June. She couldn’t get over me working as a maid in your mother’s house.” August gave her head a shake. “I know it wasn’t fair, but she took it out on Deborah, and then on you. But even June came around to loving you, didn’t she?”
“I guess,” I said.
“Mostly, though, I want you to know, I love you. Just like I loved your mother.”
August stood up, but I stayed where I was, holding her words inside me. “Give me your hand,” she said, reaching down. Getting to my feet, I felt dizzy around the edges, that feeling like you’ve stood up too fast.
All this love coming to me. I didn’t know what to do with it.
I wanted to say, I love you, too. I love you all. The feeling rose up in me like a column of wind, but when it got to my mouth, it had no voice, no words. Just a lot of air and longing.
“We both need a little breather,” August said, and she plodded toward the kitchen.
August poured us glasses of ice water from the refrigerator. We took them to the back porch, where we sat in the porch swing, taking little gulps of coolness and listening to the chains creak. It’s surprising how soothing that sound can be. We hadn’t bothered to turn on the overhead light, and that was soothing, too—just sitting in the dark.
After a few minutes August said, “Here’s what I can’t figure out, Lily—how you knew to come here.”
I pulled the wooden picture of black Mary from my pocket and handed it to her. “It belonged to my mother,” I said. “I found it in the attic, the same time I found her photograph.”
“Oh, my Lord,” she said, her hand going up to the side of her mouth. “I gave this to your mother not long before she died.”
She set her water glass on the floor and walked across the porch. I didn’t know whether to keep talking, so I waited for her to say something, and when she didn’t, I went and stood beside her. She had her lips tight together and her eyes scanning the night. The picture was clutched in her hand, but her hand dangled by her side.
It took a full minute for her to pull it up so we could both stare at it.
“It has ‘Tiburon, S.C.’ written on the back of it,” I said.
August turned it over. “Deborah must have written that.” Something close to a smile passed over her face. “That would’ve been just like her. She had an album full of pictures, and she’d write on the back of every single one of them the place it was taken, even if it was her own house.” She handed me the picture. I stared at it, letting my finger move across the word “Tiburon.”
“Who would’ve thought?” August said.
We went and sat in the swing, where we rocked back and forth, making little pushes on the floor with our feet. She stared straight ahead. Her slip strap had fallen down to her elbow, and she didn’t even notice.
June always said that most people bit off more than they could chew, but August chewed more than she bit off. June loved to tease August about the way she pondered things, how one minute she was talking to you and the next she had slipped into a private world where she turned her thoughts over and over, digesting stuff most people would choke on. I wanted to say, Teach me how to do that. Teach me how to take all this in.
Thunder rumbled over the trees. I thought of my mother’s tea parties, tiny sandwiches for a doll’s mouth, and it washed me in sadness. Maybe because I would’ve loved so much to have attended something like that. Maybe because all the sandwiches would’ve been peanut butter, my mother’s favorite, and I wasn’t even that crazy about it. I wondered at the poem August had made her learn, whether it had stuck with her after she got married. Had she lain in her bed listening to T. Ray snore, reciting it while she fell asleep, wishing to God she could run away with Robert Frost?
I gave a sideways glance at August. I forced my mind back to that moment in her bedroom when I’d confessed the worst of human things. Upon hearing it, she’d said, I love you. Just like I loved your mother.
“All right then,” said August, like we’d never stopped talking. “The picture explains how you came to Tiburon, but how in the world did you find me?”
“That was easy,” I said. “We hadn’t been here any time before I spotted your Black Madonna Honey, and there was the same picture on it as my mother had. The Black Madonna of Breznichar of Bohemia.”
“You said that real nice,” August told me.
“I’ve been practicing.”
“Where did you see the honey?”
“I was in that Frogmore Stew General Store out on the edge of town. I asked this man in a bow tie where he got it. He’s the one who told me where you lived.”
r /> “That would be Mr. Grady.” She shook her head. “I swear, it makes me think you were meant to find us.”
I was meant to, I didn’t have a doubt about it. I just wish I knew where I was meant to end up. I looked down at our laps, how both of us had our hands laying palm side up on top of our thighs, like we were both waiting for something to drop in.
“So why don’t we talk some more about your mother?” she said.
I nodded. Every bone in my body was cracking with the need to talk about her.
“Anytime you need to stop and take another break, you just tell me.”
“All right,” I said. What was coming, I couldn’t imagine. Something that required breaks. Breaks for what? So I could dance for joy? So she could revive me after I fainted dead away? Or was the idea of breaks so I could let the bad news sink all the way in?
A dog started barking way off in the distance. August waited for it to stop, then said, “I started working for Deborah’s mother in 1931. Deborah was four years old. The cutest child, but always into something. I mean, a real handful. For one thing, she used to walk in her sleep. One night she walked outside and climbed a ladder the roofers had left leaning against the house. Her sleepwalking nearly drove her mother crazy.” She laughed.
“And your mother had an imaginary friend. You ever had one?” I shook my head. “She called hers Tica Tee. She would talk to her out loud like she was standing right there in front of us, and if I forgot to set a place for Tica Tee at the table, Deborah would throw a fit. Once in a while, though, I’d set a place and she’d say, ‘What are you doing? Tica Tee’s not here. She’s off starring in the movies.’ Your mother loved Shirley Temple.”
“Tica Tee,” I said, wanting to feel that on my tongue.
“That Tica Tee was something,” August said. “Whatever Deborah struggled with, Tica Tee could do it perfectly. Tica Tee made hundreds on her school papers, got gold stars in Sunday school, made her bed, cleaned her plate. People told your grandmother—Sarah was her name—that she ought to take Deborah to this doctor in Richmond who specialized in children with problems. But I told her, ‘Don’t worry about it. She’s just working things out in her own way. She’ll grow out of Tica Tee in time.’ And she did.”