Mama looked startled, and then guilty. Her eyes darted from side to side.
“You do!” Darya cried. “And you said, ‘Sure, honey, give it your best shot.’ I was five years old!”
“I’m fairly certain I didn’t say, ‘Sure, honey, give it your best shot,’” Mama said.
Darya shook her head. “You left, and I thought it was my fault. Then you came back, and . . . you made me buy cigarettes! So guess what? I don’t have to listen to you!” She scrambled off her bed and ran for the door.
“Darya, wait!” Mama wailed. She followed Darya out of the room. “I know I messed up. I came back because I messed up. Darya!”
Darya’s bare feet drummed the stairs. She heard Mama behind her, but she was younger and faster and more agile. She swung herself around the round wooden knob on the corner of the stair railing and dashed down the hall, through the mudroom, and out the back door, which banged shut behind her.
Was Mama still chasing after her? Darya’s blood was pounding so loudly in her head that she didn’t know. There could have been a wolf on her heels and she might not have known, or the flapping wings of a giant owl, or a lion or tiger or bear.
In front of her was Papa’s workshop, but even in her panic, she was smart enough to veer to the left. No way was she leading Mama straight to Papa’s door. She ran half a mile before slowing to a jog, then a walk, and then dropping down and collapsing against the trunk of an oak tree. Her breaths were ragged. Her feet felt tender, and when she examined them, the welling of small cuts and gashes made her wince.
Someone cleared her throat.
“Who’s there?” Darya said. She peered around the tree trunk.
“Such a drama queen,” the Bird Lady scolded.
“No,” Darya moaned. “No, no, no, no, no.”
She blinked hard, but when she checked again, the Bird Lady was still there. She sported a sombrero with small felt balls dangling from the rim. Also, a pantsuit made of stretchy yarn pot holders stitched together. Also, white go-go boots.
Darya rather liked the go-go boots, actually. Then she remembered how much everything sucked and returned to scorning them.
“What do you want?” she said.
“To help you,” the Bird Lady said.
“Oh? By whipping up some chips and guac?”
The Bird Lady gave her a look, and Darya huffed. The sweat she’d worked up was cooling. She shivered in her tank top.
“Would you rather mope and stew for a week—or a month or a year—before figuring out how to move forward?” the Bird Lady said. “If so, that’s your choice. But what if the world moves on without you?”
“Then the world moves on without me.” Darya scowled. “What say do I have over anything, anyway?”
“Perhaps not much, perhaps enough,” the Bird Lady acknowledged.
Darya rolled her eyes.
“Listen, pet. The world doesn’t always make sense, but you can still love it.”
“Oh, wow. You should write bumper stickers. Have you ever thought of that?”
The Bird Lady waited.
Darya groaned and pulled her feet toward her so that she was sitting crisscross applesauce. She tucked her toes into the warm folds of her knees. “Fine. How can I love the world even when it doesn’t make sense?”
“By loving one of its beings,” answered the Bird Lady.
“Oh, well, sure. That. What happens when one of those ‘beings’ doesn’t love you back? What if there used to be love, but . . . it left?”
She heard the Bird Lady sigh. Then she heard scooching noises, fabric on soil. The Bird Lady settled in beside her, the warmth of her body not unwelcome. She said, “Stitch it back up.”
“Huh?”
“The broken thread. Stitch it back up.”
“I don’t understand.”
“We humans are part of the universe,” the Bird Lady said. “Don’t you see that? We might sometimes feel separated, but that’s an illusion. A broken thread. So, stitch it back up.”
Darya closed her eyes and leaned the back of her head against the oak tree.
“There is a poet,” the Bird Lady said. “His name is Rumi. Would you like to know what he said?”
Not if it’s in the form of a poem, Darya thought.
The Bird Lady waited.
“Sure,” Darya said. “Whatever.”
“‘Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.’” The Bird Lady patted Darya’s knee.
“Terrific,” Darya said. “What does it mean?”
“Oh, dear one,” the Bird Lady said. Her head touched Darya’s, and Darya wondered if she would wake up tomorrow and find a sparrow in her hair.
“Transformation is a wondrous thing, but it’s not always pleasant for the person who’s transforming.”
“You make it sound like I’m a butterfly trying to burst out of my cocoon,” Darya said.
“Who said you’re the butterfly?”
“I’m not? Then who is?”
The Bird Lady squeezed Darya’s knee, then patted it and struggled to her feet. Her voice seemed to come from far away, and her words were like mushy fruit. “Just remember one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Just because you don’t have wings, that doesn’t mean you can’t fly.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
With December came the first snowfall, and Darya wondered if it could be a new beginning.
“It snowed, it snowed!” Ava caroled, barreling into Darya’s room and launching herself onto Darya’s bed.
“Too early,” Darya groaned. She tried to burrow back into her dream—something about a field of poppies and dozens of fluttering butterflies—but Ava pulled Darya’s forearm from her eyes.
“Get up! Come see! It’s beautiful!” She scrambled behind Darya and pushed her, leaning back on her palms and driving her heels into Darya’s bottom.
Darya slid off her bed and landed hard on the floor. “Ow,” she complained.
But she let Ava help her to her feet and drag her across the room. At the window, Ava stopped babbling. She stood by Darya, their shoulders touching. Everything was hushed. Everything was pure. The world was cloaked in dazzling promise.
Something swelled in Darya’s chest. Something big. She shooed Ava out, saying, “It is beautiful. Thanks for showing me. Now go away, please—and maybe ask Aunt Vera to make waffles?”
The moment Ava was gone, Darya got to work. She’d been thinking about this for almost two weeks now. What to do about Mama, and possibly Emily and Tally, too. She dragged her box of puzzles from her closet. She carefully removed Tally’s taped-together drawing. Then she spilled the scraps of paper with riddles and picture puzzles on them onto the carpet.
She once knew how to make origami birds. She suspected she still could.
She gathered other supplies as well. A story had sprung to her mind, and she wanted to capture it somehow. Not as a drawing, but something like a drawing.
She worked all morning, cutting and pasting and gluing. She arranged objects only to frown and rearrange them. At some point Ava must have brought her a waffle, and at some point Darya must have wolfed it down, because later she pushed her hair off her face and ended up with a smear of syrup across her cheek.
Huh, she thought, taking in the sticky plate a few feet away from her. Never in her life had she gotten so absorbed in something that she failed to notice a waffle making its way into her room, not to mention her stomach. Was this what it was like for Tally, when she got lost in her art?
Darya hoped she’d told Ava thank you, and that she’d asked Ava to tell Aunt Vera thanks as well.
Around noon, she scrapped everything she’d done and started over, and to her surprise, she didn’t beat herself up over it. Instead of getting frustrated, or giving up, she simply began again.
After she secured the last origami bird, she put the lid on the shoebox. She covered the edge of the lid with a ribbon and glued the ribbon in
place. She covered the rest of the shoebox with pale green tissue paper, hiding the Adidas slogan. She leaned back on her heels and nodded.
From the outside, it looked like a pretty box and nothing more.
But on the inside . . .
She wiggled onto her tummy and pressed her eye to the hole she’d cut into the side of the box. Paper birds swayed from a foil-lined sky, held in place with snippets of thread that were nearly invisible. A spray of tissue paper poppies stretched across a bed of Easter basket grass, each flower stained the color of berries from being held, one by one, to Darya’s berry red lips.
She’d fashioned a tree out of a wire hanger, which she’d covered in fake fur clipped from the hood and cuffs of an old jacket. Wedged within its branches was a cutout figure of a girl, safe from the blowing wind because there was no wind. Not inside the box.
Behind the tree stood two other paper doll girls, positioned to show that they were holding hands.
At the very back of the box, pressed into the corner, was a larger cutout. A Mama paper doll. Darya had considered leaving her face a blank slate. She almost did. Then she thought of Emily, and Tally, and—strangely—Papa.
Carefully, she’d folded Tally’s picture of her mother to show only Tally’s mother’s face, and this she secured into place above the other mother’s body.
Darya gazed into the box for several minutes. It wasn’t perfect, but it would do.
She told Aunt Vera that the box was a school project and that she had to take it to Tally’s house, because it was Tally’s job to do the finishing touches.
“What kind of project?” Aunt Vera asked. “It looks like a box to me.”
“Yeah, that’s why I’m taking it to Tally,” Darya fibbed. “She’ll make it better. Tally’s a really good artist.”
Aunt Vera sniffed. “Not as good as you, I’m sure.”
“No, she’s way better. Her art . . . it’s like her way of seeing the world, and then I see things in new ways, too. Like what the truth might be, you know?”
“I don’t, to be honest. But if you say so.”
“I do,” Darya said.
Soon, depending on what she found out from Mama, Darya would have a truth to give to Tally. It would most likely be a very small truth, a sliver that reinforced the not-knowing-ness that already existed.
But . . . maybe not.
She pieced together what she knew about Tally’s mom: She’d been a lonely teenager, no family to speak of, obsessed with orphans and children thrown out on their own. She’d grown into a young woman, and then a young woman with a child.
In the photograph Tally had redrawn, the little girl—Tally—had looked to be four or five, the same age Darya had been when Mama left. Tally’s mother, in the picture, had looked to be in her late twenties, the same age as Mama when Mama left.
And, Mama’s Emily had been an artist, just like Tally was an artist.
The pieces could fit. They didn’t not fit.
If it was the right fit—unlikely, but if—then the information Darya gave Tally would be a very large truth. It would change Tally’s world, and Darya’s too. Emily would have her family back. Tally would have three cousins.
The Tally piece of all this would come later, however. Today was about Mama. She’d looked up the address of Aunt Elena’s charming garage apartment, and as she walked there through the snow, she held her dreamscape carefully in front of her. Every so often, she paused and peeked through the eyehole for courage.
When she passed the tree where she’d last seen the Bird Lady, she stopped and called out, “Hey! Are you here?”
She sensed movement from within the woods, several yards from the trail. The Bird Lady emerged, swaddled in a puffy yellow coat that made her look like a dandelion. Her hat was white and fluffy, with a pom-pom on top. Her eyes were merry.
“I need to ask you something, and I really hope you’ll give me a straight answer,” Darya said. “It has to do with the Forgetting Spell.”
“Ah yes, I remember.”
“Ha ha, very clever,” Darya said. She swallowed. “I wanted to forget about letting Mama get away. Right?”
The Bird Lady stepped closer. “You wanted to forget who you were. You almost succeeded.”
Darya shuddered. “Well . . . that’s creepy. But the spell—has it been lifted?”
The Bird Lady didn’t answer. She’d slipped back into the woods, moving so fluidly that all Darya saw was a golden blur.
“Hey! When will I see you again?”
No answer.
“Where do you sleep when it’s cold like this? Will you be warm enough?”
No answer.
“Fine, but listen. If you need anything, will you tell me? Please? Because . . . I can help!”
Darya heard the words come out of her mouth, and she knew them to be genuine. She marveled at the strangeness of it. The Darya from before her birthday was different from the Darya of last week, and Darya from last week was different from Darya today.
She wanted to remember them all. She also wanted to keep changing—and growing—until the end of her days.
When she rang the doorbell to her aunt’s apartment, it was Ava who let her in.
“Darya!” she exclaimed. “How did you know we’d be here?”
“I didn’t, but I thought you might.”
Ava’s face lit up, and she turned to the others, who were sitting around the table in a small, cozy kitchen. “Natasha, it’s Darya! Mama! It’s Darya!”
Mama pushed back her chair and stood up.
Tears sprang to Darya’s eyes, totally without her permission. She blinked them away and thrust out the box. “Here,” she said. “This is for you.”
Mama stepped forward and took it. Her lower lip trembled, until she pressed both lips together to control it. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, but you might not like it,” Darya said. “It’s not all sunshine and sparkles.”
“I wouldn’t expect it to be,” Mama said, and something loosened in Darya’s chest.
“Come sit down,” Aunt Elena said. Her cheeks were pink and her hair tumbled around her face. “Would you like some hot chocolate?”
“Yes . . . I think . . . but I have to say something first.”
Then Mama nodded. She still hadn’t peered into the box. She might not have spotted the eyehole, even.
Darya lifted her chin. “I wished to have nothing to do with you. That was the wish I could make come true myself, and I did.”
Mama didn’t interrupt.
“But it’s up to me whether I let it keep being true,” Darya went on, “and I don’t want to anymore.”
“What are you saying?” Ava said. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
Darya locked her gaze on Mama. “I’m saying . . . yes. I want you back in my life. On one condition.”
“What’s that, sweetie?”
“Don’t call me sweetie,” Darya said. “Wait—that’s not the condition. That’s just . . . don’t, please. I don’t even know you.”
“Darya,” Aunt Elena said.
“No, Elena, it’s fine,” Mama said. “What’s the condition?”
“That you tell Papa.”
The color drained from Mama’s face.
“That you tell everybody,” Darya said. Her heart hammered. “That you let us tell everybody. That you stop being a secret. That’s the condition.”
Mama’s eyes grew round and scared. She glanced at the door, and Darya thought, What have I done? She’s going to run.
Natasha stood up.
Aunt Elena stood up.
Ava, who was already standing, stepped closer. She said, “She’s right, Mama. We all want that.”
Mama’s chest rose and fell.
“So will you?” Darya said, and her voice did that quivery thing she hated.
Several long seconds passed.
“I’ll try,” Mama said.
She put the dreamscape box on the counter, but she didn’t
take Darya’s hands or hug her or force some grand moment. She simply held Darya’s gaze, nothing between them but possibility.
Tally.
Tally.
Tally.
—EMILY STRIKER, AGE THIRTY-FIVE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
SO many hugs and thank-yous to my editor, Claudia Gabel, and to her editor-buddy, Alex Arnold, who by the lucky winds of fate served as Claudia’s coconspirator. You ladies have taught me so much—and always with grace, kindness, and the clear shining generosity of brilliance. I am one lucky author. Thanks to Anica Rissi for having such fab ideas, and thanks as well to Katherine Tegen and all the players on her all-star team. Thanks for inviting me to play. It is a privilege.
Thanks to Bob, always, and special thanks to Emily Lockhart and Sarah Mlynowski for relentlessly cheering me on, whether on the topic of writing, beauty products, or overall life philosophies. Thanks, too, to Pamela Bantham, Jenny McLean, and Melyssa Mead for the laughs, the tears, the cocktails.
Thanks to Ruth and Tim White, Don and Sarah Lee Myracle, and my many sisters and brothers for being awesome.
Same for my kiddos. I love you!
And a bottomless well of gratitude, appreciation, and mushy love for my husband, Randy Bartels, who brings joy to my life every second of every day. You, Randy, are my magic.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo by Randy Bartels
LAUREN MYRACLE has written many books for tweens and teens, including the bestselling Winnie Years series and the Flower Power series. She lives with her family in Colorado, and she thinks life is the most magical adventure of all.
www.laurenmyracle.com
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
BOOKS BY LAUREN MYRACLE
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Thirteen Plus One