That Saturday morning when I went out to do my chores it had already hit a hundred degrees even though it wasn’t eight o’clock yet, and big fat droplets of sweat rolled off me as I searched through the straw in the henhouse looking for eggs. Our best layer, Matilda, liked to hide them in new places every time, and more than once I’d missed some only to smash them flat by accident later on. Daddy was already out in the fields, trying to fix one of his irrigation sprinklers where it had stopped spraying right; he’d been awake and gone before I’d even gotten out of bed.
I’d snuck the Emily Dickinson book out with me, and after I’d finished collecting the eggs into my basket, I sat down beside the coop and let the pages flutter open. They landed on a poem called “Book”:
There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry—
I smiled. I didn’t know what frigates or coursers were, but somehow in this hot and awful week, Miss Emily’s book was just the thing that helped me fly away from the drought and the way the heat made me feel more dead than alive. The precise march of those words in the little blue book was like an equation, the way they all knew just where they belonged in the poem.
I’d just closed the book when Arden came into view from around the house, her face flushed red with the heat, her light brown hair in a pair of French braids already starting to come loose and frizzy at the edges.
“Mom sent me over to see if I could borrow some eggs,” she said as soon as she saw me. “About a million things are up with our hens and they didn’t give any this morning.”
“Sure. We’ve got plenty.” I stood up. “Come inside and I’ll see if we’ve got a carton you can borrow.”
The house fans were working overtime, all of them going so hard that the whole house sounded like it was pulsing. They were loud enough that it wasn’t till I got all the way in the door, Arden so close behind me I could feel her breath on my back, that I realized that Mylie was screaming in our bedroom—the kind of ear-bleeding scream that meant she was either hurt or really, really mad. Even with all the fits she’d been throwing lately, I hadn’t heard her screaming like this since she fell off the front porch and dislocated her elbow right at the beginning of spring.
Mama was perched like a bird on the edge of the couch in the living room, twisting her hands the same way she’d been doing when we watched the detective show on Thursday night. She’d chewed her bottom lip so hard it had turned red, the blood welling up bright and angry where her teeth had pulled off all the skin.
“Mama?” I asked, coming inside and setting my basket down on the floor. Arden stayed behind me, stuck in the doorway, so still she was hardly breathing. I stepped forward and snapped my fingers right in front of Mama’s face. “Mama! You gonna go get Mylie out of her crib?”
From the bedroom, Mylie’s screaming ratcheted up another few degrees. Mama didn’t answer. “Did Mylie get in trouble?” I asked. “You gonna be mad if I get her up? She sounds real upset, Mama.”
Mama still didn’t say anything, just looked at me with a little dip in her forehead and that red, red blood on her lip. I stared at her, feeling the sweat trickling ticklishly down my neck and into my collar.
“Mama?” I whispered, praying as hard as I’d ever prayed in my life that she’d wake up and pay attention to me. “Mama, you gonna go get Mylie up or should I?”
“Leave me be, Della,” Mama said, flexing her fingers out and then curling them back up again, her hands white as flour. “It’s safer for her. Too many bad things can happen to a little baby.”
There were tears shining bright in Mama’s eyes. “My poor baby. I gotta keep her safe, Della. I got to do what’s best for her.”
Her face was all twisted, like there was a war going on inside her mind between her regular self and the voice that told her that Mylie wasn’t safe. My skin went all fluttery, and it took everything I had not to yell or cry like a baby myself. I wished Daddy would come in, or that I even knew where he was to go find him, but he could be out there anywhere on the tractor and I’d never be able to run across two hundred acres of land to hunt him down.
I was all the help I was going to get.
I turned back to Arden. Her chocolate-brown eyes were big and round, her lips so pale she looked half sick herself.
“Do you . . . need any help?”
I shook my head. Letting Arden in there seemed almost worse than going in there myself.
“Don’t worry about the eggs,” Arden said, already stepping backward down the steps into the yard.
“Wait,” I said, darting a glance behind me at Mama and then lowering my voice to a whisper. My whole body buzzed with urgency, like I’d burn up with the crops out in the field if I couldn’t make Arden understand me. “Listen. Don’t tell your parents about this, okay? Don’t tell anyone.”
Arden went even paler, her face almost green. “But—”
“No,” I hissed, “you have to promise me, okay? Not anyone.”
Arden hesitated for a long minute, but then nodded.
“I’ll explain later. Another day,” I said, and let the screen door slam shut as Arden turned and ran back toward her own house.
I was still holding the Emily Dickinson book. My stomach roiled and rocked with a sick kind of guilt—if I’d just come in sooner, if I hadn’t snuck that little blue book outside and dawdled while I was doing my chores, could I have stopped things before they got this bad?
“Okay, Mama. I’m just gonna go get Mylie up now, right?” In the bedroom Mylie’s screaming had started hitching, like she was hiccuping so hard she couldn’t even cry properly anymore. I kind of thought I knew how she felt.
As soon as I opened my bedroom door the smell hit me, so bad I had to put my hand up over my nose as I walked over to the crib. Mylie’s pajama shorts were wet through, her diaper hanging so low off her bum it might as well not even be there, and there was a smear of brown on her leg.
“You have gotta be kidding me,” I said, opening up the wipe box and pulling out as many as I could hold. “Sorry, Mylie baby, I just gotta clean you up before I can get you out of there.” I wiped all over her legs and back. Mylie had stopped screaming but the hiccups were still coming, her whole body shuddering hard from all that crying. “Sorry, sweetheart.” I tried not to gag on the stinky-diaper smell. “You’re really messy this morning.” How long had Mama left her in here crying? Mylie had still been sleeping when I’d woken up and gone out to get the eggs, but from how upset she was, I guessed she’d been crying the whole time since.
When I’d got up as much of the mess as I could without taking her diaper off, I picked Mylie up under the arms and carried her over to the changing table, not letting her wet shorts touch any part of me. I pulled off her pajamas and changed her diaper as fast as I could, then dropped that mess of a diaper in the pail and picked Mylie up for real this time, wrapping my arms around her and hugging her as tight as I could. She was getting pretty big now, but still felt so little and sad, whimpering and shaking like she couldn’t remember how to be happy anymore.
“Shh,” I whispered, bouncing up and down on my heels a little like Mama used to do when Mylie was colicky as a newborn. “Hey, sweet baby, you’re gonna be just fine, I promise. I got you now. I got you.”
Slowly, Mylie’s shudders slowed down and her whimpering quieted. She reached up and put her arms around my neck, her hands and face all wet and goobery from sweat and tears and snot.
“You’re okay,” I said, rubbing her back with one of my hands. Her skin was still smooth as a newborn baby’s, softer than the down on a peach just off the tree.
“Stowy?” Mylie asked, her little voice wobbling.
I bit my lip, thinking of Miss Tabitha at church last week. If Daddy hadn’t been standing right there, would I have asked her?
“Stowy?”
“Sure, Mylie baby.” I set her back down on the changing table and found a watermelon-print sundress—one that had been mine when I was a baby. I pulled it over her head. “You know the O’Connells down south of Arden’s folks? This story’s about them. When Mrs. O’Connell was a little girl, her daddy died, and her whole heart filled up with black sadness, so much that it leaked out and made a dark cloud that followed her everywhere she went. Nothing anyone did could dissolve that black cloud—until her mama finally took her to the Quigleys.”
Mylie was quiet now, sitting still while I buttoned up her dress and used a wipe to clean all the mess off her face.
“The Bee Lady had a cup of tea made up before the O’Connells had even got inside the house, all sweetened up with a bright glittering gold honey that looked like yellow diamonds. As soon as Mrs. O’Connell took the first sip of that tea, the storm cloud she carried with her started to break up—and when she’d drained the cup dry, the sun was shining out of her brighter than out of the sky itself.”
“Wan’ Mama,” Mylie said after I’d finished the story.
Thinking of Mama brought that fluttery feeling back to my skin, and my hands started shaking, just a little bit, as I tossed the wipe I’d used on Mylie’s face into the garbage. This morning had been even worse than last week and the watermelon seeds. My mind kept replaying it over and over like it was a movie—Mama leaving Mylie to scream and scream and scream in her crib, telling me it was safer for her. Safer. How could Mama think that?
My hands shook even harder. “Dell?” Mylie asked, peering up at my face, her chin quivering like she was thinking about crying again.
I took a deep breath. “It’s all right, Mylie baby,” I said, trying to make my voice as calm as a mama on TV. “Guess I just need some breakfast, and you do, too.”
But it was more than being hungry that was causing those shakes, I knew. It was Mama. It was Mama, seeming deeper in her sickness than she had been for years.
Mama and Daddy met when they were both at college in Greenville, back when cell phones didn’t do email. Mama always said they fell for each other so fast and hard that they just knew they wanted a family together, so they had me.
Except right after I was born, things started going wrong with Mama. She’d hear people talking to her who weren’t there, or forget things that were pretty important, or not know to be sad at sad things and happy at happy ones. Eventually, she went to see a doctor and he told her she had a brain disease with a long name I can’t spell: schizophrenia. The doctor had said it came on because of a “hormonal trigger,” that somehow my birth had been the thing that tipped her into the sickness. He said she also had some other problems that made her always so anxious about germs and stuff.
That Greenville doctor gave her some medicines to try, and although one of them made her face twitchy and she sometimes still heard strange voices or mixed up sad and happy, she did okay until I was eight years old and her daddy—my grandpa Case—died. I’d always thought he was pretty old, but Mama said he was still young for a grandpa, and nobody expected him to have a heart attack. Nobody thought the doctors wouldn’t be able to fix his heart, either, but when they couldn’t, it hit Mama hard.
It hit all of us hard, but especially Mama.
I squeezed my eyes shut, holding on to Mylie and being glad she hadn’t been around back then. Mama had gotten real, real sick, till things got so bad she didn’t know who any of us were anymore and couldn’t tell things that were true from things that were only in her head. One day she’d taken too many pills, and Daddy had called Dr. DuBose, and Dr. DuBose had told Daddy he needed to get Mama to the hospital fast.
She didn’t come back for more than a month.
After that things got better, because Dr. DuBose had found a different medication that worked better than anything the first doctor had tried, a medication that helped Mama’s brain make sense of things the way they were. And for a long time everything had been great—almost like having a regular, healthy mama who never had to worry about spending months in the hospital or losing track of what was real and what wasn’t. The new medicine sometimes made her forget things, and every now and then she complained that it made her brain feel like it wasn’t as smart as it used to be.
But for a long while, things were good.
Until Mama had Mylie, and she started getting worse again. It had been slow at first, just little things that didn’t matter so much. Like how Mama hadn’t let Daddy get the air-conditioning fixed when it broke, or the way she’d sometimes have a hard time getting out of bed. Be patient, Daddy had told me every time I’d brought it up.
“It’s just like after you were born, Della,” he’d said. “Having a baby is hard on any woman, and even harder on somebody with your mama’s illness. We just have to hold on till things regulate in her body, honey. Your mama’s had this sickness a long time, and you and me and her, we’ve been through a lot together. We can get through this, too. It’s just going to take a little patience.”
But this wasn’t little. And I had a feeling it was going to take more than just patience to solve it.
Above my head the ceiling fan pumped and pumped, but it was still so hot in that room that it made my head feel dizzy and weak. I scooped Mylie up off the changing table and hugged her one more time.
“It’s okay, Mylie baby,” I whispered, giving her a big kiss on her soft little cheek. “It’s gonna be just fine. It’s not gonna be like it was last time, okay? I’ll make sure it isn’t.”
I took a deep breath, trying to fill up every inch of my lungs, feeling the humidity hanging in the air like it wanted to rain so bad but couldn’t. “I know something that can fix her. I’ve got a plan.”
“Pwan?” Mylie asked.
“Yes, you silly little parrot. I know you don’t even know what a plan is, but I’ve got one. Remember Grandpa’s leg,” I whispered to Mylie, hugging her tight. “Remember Mrs. O’Connell’s black cloud and all the other Bee Stories. I’ll talk to Miss Tabitha tomorrow at church. And then, Mylie, absolutely everything is going to be okay.”
It would be okay. It would have to be.
Because if Miss Tabitha’s honey didn’t heal Mama, I didn’t know if anything could.