Dicey’s Song

THE FOUR OF THEM stood in the hallway, Gram and Dicey, Preston, Dr. Epstein. Nobody knew what to say.

“I’m sorry,” Dr. Epstein said at last. His hands moved nervously, and Dicey bet he would have liked to light one of his little cigars. His eyes flickered away from theirs. “It’s for the best. Some of our cases linger on for years.”

Gram cut him off. “I appreciate all you’ve done,” she said briskly. “And you, as well,” she said to Preston.

“Now about the arrangements,” Dr. Epstein began.

“We’d like to take her back with us,” Gram said.

A frown crossed his face. “But I understood that she lived in Massachusetts. I understood when she was first identified. . . .” His voice tapered off, then ceased. “Ordinarily, Mrs. Tillerman, the charity cases are given over to medical research when. . . .”

Dicey felt the heat of Gram’s anger and saw, out of the corner of her eye, Gram’s chin lift.

“Yes?” Gram asked.

The doctor did not like this conversation.

“The expense,” he said. “The undertaker, shipping the coffin — down to Maryland, isn’t it? I don’t think you can pay for it — unless, of course, our records are mistaken.”

“How much would it be?” Gram asked.

“I don’t think it could cost you less than seven hundred dollars,” Dr. Epstein answered. His mouth pursed, as if he didn’t like to talk about money.

Dicey’s heart fell. Seven hundred dollars. They would never have that much money, not for something that wasn’t necessary. Then she noticed something: her heart was back in one piece. How had that happened? It wasn’t that she didn’t feel sad. She felt sad enough, and sad in a way she’d never felt before. Because now Momma was really gone for always. Dicey must have let go and never known it.

“Unless she were cremated,” Preston said. She spoke to the doctor, as if she were suggesting that to him. He shrugged. “If you were to have her cremated and carried her with you,” Preston said to Gram in her gentle voice.

“Not to mention burial expenses,” Dr. Epstein remarked.

“In Maryland, a cremated body can be buried wherever you want,” Gram announced. “Thank you,” she said to Preston. “I wonder if you can recommend an undertaker.”

“You’ll see to all this?” Dr. Epstein asked the nurse. She nodded, not speaking. He shook hands with Gram. He nodded to Dicey and strode importantly off down the hall.

Preston gave them the name of an undertaker. She didn’t say anything sympathetic, didn’t apologize, didn’t try to make them feel better. She just helped, as much as she could, telling them how to find the undertaker’s, telling them that the undertaker would come to pick up Momma and thanking them for coming to be with Momma.

When they stepped out onto the sidewalk, Gram halted. She opened her purse, took out her new gloves, and put them on her hands. She breathed in deeply. “The air stinks,” she remarked. They set off together.

The undertaker, who wore a dark suit and a solemn expression, received them in his office. He sat behind his desk and filled out forms while Gram gave him information. “I should tell you,” he said, “that Miss Preston called. She thought you would want to expedite the cremation. I have already dispatched a vehicle to pick up the deceased.”

“That’s right,” Gram said.

Dicey tried to think of Momma as the deceased and not as Momma. Gram reached out to take her hand and held onto it. Dicey held on back.

“What will the charge be,” Gram asked.

“There is a minimum charge of three hundred and fifty dollars. Then the urn, of course.”

Dicey looked up, surprised.

“In which to place the ashes,” he explained to her. “We have a good selection. If you will choose the one you want, you can return to pick her up at —” he looked at his wristwatch and consulted a paper on his desk ” — three o’clock.”

But when they studied the urns, Dicey couldn’t see any she wanted, not for Momma. Some were tall china ones with dark flowers on them. Some were cold metals, silver and brass. Some were plain white china and looked like vases. Dicey didn’t say anything, however. It wasn’t as if she could pay for any one of them. She stood back and waited.

“No,” Gram muttered to herself. “No and no and no.” She looked at Dicey and spoke grimly. “Not for Liza.”

“But if we’re supposed to let go,” Dicey said, because it was what she had been thinking to herself.

“I’m willing to let go,” Gram declared, “because I have to. But I am not going to lose my grip on — on what’s right.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Dicey pointed out.

“I don’t care. Haven’t you got any ideas, girl?”

Well, of course, Dicey did. She had an idea of a box made from many different kinds of wood. She had an idea of the warm brown tones, of the careful workmanship, of the patient sanding smooth. She had an idea of something made by those slow hands, those hands marked by the work they did. But she had no idea of what such a box would cost.

“I was in a store yesterday,” she said to Gram. She was going to say more, but Gram cut her off:

“Good. I’ll have to explain the delay. We should hurry, I expect.”

The wood store wasn’t empty when they got there, so they waited for the man to slowly serve his other customers. One of the people was buying goblets, another was trying to decide about the big train in the window. Dicey was glad the store was busy.

While they waited, she showed Gram the boxes she’d been talking about. “You’re right,” Gram said. “I’m glad you were with me. I’m so defeated, I might just have taken one of those horrible things.”

Dicey stared at Gram. Defeated? Well, she guessed she could understand that.

The man recognized Dicey and greeted Gram as if he recognized her, too.

“We are looking for a small box,” Gram said.

The slow eyes moved between them and then up to the shelf Gram indicated. “I’m sorry to hear that,” the man said.

Gram’s eyes snapped at him.

“Your granddaughter was in yesterday,” he said. “Let me show you.”

He brought down three boxes, each about the size of a loaf of bread. They chose one where the band of black walnut ran like a ribbon, as if it were tying down the top of the box. “How much do we owe you?” Gram asked.

“Nothing,” he said.

“Young man!” Gram snapped. “We are not asking for charity.”

“It’s OK, Gram,” Dicey said. At the same time, the bearded man put his hands around the box they had chosen. The cuts on his hands were like the grains of the different woods.

“Yesterday, I thought to give her something,” he said to Gram. “I don’t know why — yes, I do know why, but I couldn’t put words to it. But not out of pity. I would like to give this box to you. I’m honored, you see. You do see that, don’t you? But I don’t know if you would take it as a gift.”

Gram stared at the hands around the box. Then she said, “Yes, I’ll take it,” in a low voice. “I’ll take the gift and I’ll thank you for it,” she said, more briskly. Dicey could almost hear the creaking of Gram’s fingers as she let go of her pride.

“Good,” the man said.

They delivered the box to the undertaker, who told them to return at five. Then they had a late lunch and returned to the motel room to pack. They talked about ordinary things, about taking a train to Wilmington and a bus from there to Salisbury. Dicey changed into her brown dress and belted it at the waist. She and Gram weren’t exactly going to make a march, but she wanted to mark the formality of the occasion, taking Momma home. They talked about the presents Dicey had bought, of which Gram approved. Then Gram asked, “Wasn’t there change?”

Dicey had more than forty dollars left in her coat pocket and she gave that to Gram. Gram opened her purse to put the money in her wallet.

She looked across to Dicey sitting on the other bed. Gram’s face looked frightened. Dicey caught part of the feeling.

“How are we going to pay him?” Gram asked. Her voice was whispery.

“Pay who?”

“That undertaker.” Gram’s hands fiddled around with the money in her wallet. Then her fingers explored her purse. “I never thought — about that expense. I thought about travel and room and meals and even the Christmas shopping. But not about the cost of an undertaker. How could I have been so stupid?”

“We can return what I bought,” Dicey suggested. “We could, except the gloves, and I’ve got four dollars of my own money left.”

Gram rustled desperately through her purse. Then she pulled out the envelope Mr. Lingerle had given her, looking at it as if she had forgotten what it was. She opened it and pulled out crisp money in fifty dollar bills. “Five hundred dollars,” she said softly. “Five hundred — he must have gone to the bank. He must have guessed. I ask you, Dicey, isn’t that something for him to do? How did he know?”

Dicey wasn’t thinking about anything except that the color was coming back into Gram’s cheeks.

“Did I look all that discombobulated when I left home?” Gram demanded.

“No,” Dicey said. “You looked like you knew exactly what you were doing. I thought you did,” she complained.

“Well, you were wrong,” Gram snapped. “But that’s all right now. Remind me to thank him.”

Dicey snorted. Gram wouldn’t need any reminding.

“We’d better call them, don’t you think?” Gram told Dicey. “To tell them. And when we’ll be back.”

“Will they be home from school?”

“I believe in getting things over with,” Gram said.

So they called the house in Crisfield. Gram placed the call, placed it collect. She spoke to Mr. Lingerle first, brushing aside his sympathy but making a point to tell him that without his money she would have been in real difficulty. She told him that they were taking a train that got into Wilmington at eight in the morning, and they would take buses down from there. Gram expected to see everybody at home, after school, she said. As far as Dicey could tell, Mr. Lingerle was saying yes, ma’am and yes, ma’am on the other end of the phone. Then Gram handed the phone to Dicey.

She told James first. “Momma died,” she said.

“I figured that out,” he told her. His voice sounded thin. “It’s better this way, Dicey,” he said in that same thin voice. “I read about it, at the library. Almost nobody recovers, when they’re as far gone as Momma was.”

“You didn’t tell me that,” Dicey said. “And I don’t think it’s better, no matter what you say.”

“And it isn’t as if. . . . She really died last summer,” James told her.

“That’s not true,” Dicey snapped, although she understood what he meant. The worst of the letting go had been the hope they’d still had, last summer.

“Yes, it is,” James answered.

Dicey stopped arguing with him. She heard Sammy wrestle the phone from James with an angry demand.

“It’s not true, is it, Dicey?”

“It’s true, Sammy,” she told him. “It’s really true. She didn’t want to.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t know, how could I know?” Dicey admitted. “But I feel it. She didn’t mind, she never even opened her eyes.”

“But, Dicey, I wanted her to get better,” Sammy said.

“I know,” Dicey told him. “It’ll be all right, Sammy, it will. We’ll all be all right. Adopted means — somebody wants you to be her family.”

“But I wanted Momma to be all right too,” Sammy wailed.

“So did I,” Dicey said. “But she wasn’t.” She thought for a minute, trying to see Sammy holding onto the phone, in the living room; trying to see his face and into his brain. “You know what I’d do if I were at home?” she asked.

“What?”

“I’d go out to the barn and sand down on the boat. Is it warm enough to work in the barn? That wouldn’t make anything better, but it would make me feel better.”

“I have to deliver papers.”

“After the papers. Try it, Sammy. If you want to. Let me talk to Maybeth?”

“Dicey?” Maybeth’s voice asked.

“We’re going to be home tomorrow,” Dicey told her sister.

“We’re all right,” Maybeth said. “Are you all right? Is Gram?”

“Everybody’s all right,” Dicey said. “Except Momma.”

“I know,” Maybeth said, her voice sad and musical. “I know.” She didn’t say anything more, so Dicey hung up.

“I hate the telephone,” Dicey announced to Gram.

“You need to have one,” Gram told her. “With children in the house. We’d better get going. We have to check out and go over to that undertaker’s. Have you kept the box out?”

They had to wait, in a room so thick with the smell of flowers, so thick with slow heavy music, so thick with a soft carpet that soaked in any noises, that Dicey felt as if she was swimming underwater for too long. When the man came out to give back their box, Dicey reached out for it, and held it close against her chest. Gram paid the man silently.

They took a cab to the train station, bought tickets and sat waiting on hard wooden benches. They boarded the train as soon as it pulled into the station. Dicey lifted the suitcase up onto a rack overhead. She sat down by the window and held the box on her lap. After a while, the train started on its way.

It was snowing when they left Boston, in big flat flakes that shrouded the sky. The train rattled along.

Gram got them some supper and brought it back to the seats in a cardboard tray. The sandwiches were wrapped up in thin plastic, and still they were dried out, but the sodas were all right. When they had finished, Gram looked out the window.

“I can’t see a blessed thing,” she said. “I’m going to sleep.” She spread her coat out over her legs, like a blanket. She leaned her head back and closed her eyes, but she continued talking. “It’s funny, if you think about it. This is the only time I’ve traveled out of Maryland, and I can’t see a thing.”

“Gram,” Dicey said, her voice so loud Gram’s eyes popped open. “But you knew how to do everything.”

“I knew how to do nothing,” Gram told her. “I just did everything. There’s a difference. You should know that.”

“Cripes,” Dicey said, remembering how she had followed her grandmother around, not having to worry about anything. “That’s brave.”

Gram closed her eyes again, and her sudden smile flashed across her tired face. She hadn’t slept at all last night, Dicey guessed.

“Tillermans have that kind of courage,” she told Dicey. “We have brave spirits. It’s brave hearts we don’t have. Think about it, girl. Except your Momma, she had a brave heart, for trusting people, or loving them. For all the good it did her. I wish I knew.” Then Gram’s eyes flashed open again, and her face looked entirely awake:

“I have some hope for you, too. You, and all of you. But why they use hearts for love, I don’t know.”

“It’s where you feel things,” Dicey said, remembering, feeling. “But not valentine hearts.”

Gram agreed and closed her eyes again. “Those bright red hearts, perfectly symmetrical. And those overweight cupids they put with them, for Valentines, babies with rolls of fat on their legs and chipmunk cheeks. I never could like a fat baby. My babies were skinny and hairy. When she was born, your Momma had a head of curly black hair — like a cocker spaniel. Can you imagine your Momma like that? Of course, it all fell out within the week, but can you imagine?”

Dicey almost answered this, but she saw that Gram was asleep.

The train made frequent stops, and Dicey watched to see the names of the places. She knew she should put her head back, close her eyes and try to sleep; she knew she couldn’t see anything much out of the windows, between the heavy snow and the speed of the train. But she shifted the box against her arm and peered out. Her seat swayed and jounced as the train rattled over the tracks.

After every stop the conductor came by. He looked at the two ticket stubs tucked into a hook above Gram’s head. He glanced at Gram and then looked at Dicey. After two stops he finally asked her, “What is that box for?”

Dicey couldn’t think of what to tell him.

He began a kind of game, guessing what might be in it. Love letters from her boyfriend, he guessed, and a stamp collection, a pet mouse, her jewelry, something to eat, sea shells, buttons. Dicey got so she was half-waiting for him, and she was ready to shake her head at him, no. The snow lightened as they traveled south. Once, looking out the windows on the other side of the car, Dicey thought she saw water. She was sure she saw a black field that glimmered like water and stretched out like water.

Dicey realized that the train was going the same way the children had, last summer.

For some reason, this disturbed her. She climbed out of her seat, holding the box carefully. It wouldn’t pop open; she knew how tightly the lid fitted down. But still, she carried it gently. She found a bathroom at the end of the car and let herself in the door.

This bathroom was smaller than a closet, and somehow it seemed to lurch more than her seat did. She went to the bathroom, flushed, and ran some water in the sink to splash over her face. She caught a glimpse of her face in the mirror, pale above the dark brown of the dress. Her eyes looked wary. She wondered why. Once the box, which she had set on a counter just about big enough to hold a purse, started to slide off. Dicey caught it in damp hands.

Instead of going back to her seat, Dicey went through two cars to find the snack bar. There, she spent a long time looking at the menu. Finally she decided on another soda and a package of potato chips.

To reach her money in the pocket of her dress, Dicey had to rest the box on the countertop. The man working there stared at it. “That’s a pretty thing,” he said. “What’s it for, school stuff?”

“School stuff?” Dicey asked.

“Pencils, erasers, paper clips?”

“Oh,” she said. “Oh no.” She took up the little cardboard tray that held her purchases and fled.

Dicey stumbled past people sleeping in their seats. Because both of her hands were holding something, she couldn’t grab at seat backs to keep her balance. She had never realized that trains were this hard to walk in.

Back in her own car, she sat down in empty seats across from Gram. Her grandmother was sleeping soundly, even though her head rolled with the swaying of the train. Dicey opened the can of soda to pour half a glass. More than that might spill. She tore the top off the potato chips. She settled the box in her lap.

She felt like she was running away again the way they had run away from Bridgeport, or even before that when Bridgeport was the place they were running to. To be awake in the deep dark of night; that might be what was causing the feeling. Then she could see, as if she held a map in her hand, the places the four of them had traveled over. The snow outside had faded away. Dicey watched out the window.

The train rattled over the Connecticut River, where they had taken a boat to row. She didn’t know how she knew so surely that the broad black belt was that river. But she knew. She could remember how it felt to row across the black water and not know what waited on the opposite bank.

Twenty minutes later, the train pulled into the big railroad station at New Haven. Dicey peered out the dirty window, but she was looking at the pictures her memory made. The train pulled out of the station and back into darkness.

The pictures her memory made had songs in them, clearer than the noise of the train. All the songs seemed to be blending together, into music as complicated as some of Maybeth’s piano pieces. But Dicey could pick them out, each one, each separate melody.

The people they had been last summer, the person she had been — Dicey guessed she’d never be afraid again, not the way she had been all summer. She had taken care of them all, sometimes well, sometimes badly. And they had covered the distances. For most of the summer, they had been unattached. Nobody knew who they were or what they were doing. It didn’t matter what they did, as long as they all stayed together. Dicey remembered that feeling, of having things pretty much her own way. And she remembered the feelings of danger. It was a little bit like being a wild animal, she thought to herself.

Dicey missed that wildness. She knew she would never have it again.

And she missed the sense of Dicey Tillerman against the whole world and doing all right.

But had anything really changed? Dicey looked across to her sleeping grandmother, and she thought about her job and school, about James, Maybeth and Sammy, about Mina and Jeff. She thought about the little boat she was preparing for next spring. She thought about Gram’s house, their house, about the fields folded around it and the Bay beyond. Whatever was outside the window flashed past so fast she couldn’t really see it.

She thought to herself, she had to let go of what had gone before too, didn’t she? The people of last summer. And who she had been.

Dicey felt as if she was standing in the wind and holding up her hands. She felt as if colored ribbons blew out of her hands and danced away on the wind. She felt as if, even if she wanted to, she couldn’t close her fingers around those ribbons.

Dicey knew that she was sitting very still on a train, moving across the night. She knew her hands were wrapped around the wooden box that held the ashes of her momma. But she felt as if a wind blew through her hands and took even Momma away.

What did that leave her with? The wind and her empty hands. The wind and Dicey.

As if Dicey were a sailboat and the sails were furled up now, the mainsail wrapped up around the boom, and she was sitting at anchor. It felt good to come to rest, the way it felt walking up to their house on a cold evening, seeing the yellow light at the kitchen window and knowing you would be warm inside while the darkness drew in around the house. But a boat at anchor wasn’t like a boat at sea.

Except, Dicey thought, a boat at anchor wasn’t planted there, like a tree. Furled sails were just waiting to be raised, when the sailor chose to head out again. And even trees and houses weren’t as planted as they seemed to be, and maybe nothing was.

How was Dicey supposed to understand?

Because if their friend Will kept his word and stopped by when his circus traveled north next spring, it wasn’t all letting go.

How was Dicey supposed to know what to do?

At that, Dicey closed her eyes and slept.

When she opened them, Gram was leaning over her. “You look better,” Dicey announced. The sun was trying to shine in through the dirty windows.

“You don’t. Use the bathroom now, we’re about to get there. I’ll hold the box,” Gram said.

Dicey shook her head. She went back to the bathroom, but there was a woman already waiting by the door. The woman looked at her without interest. Then she caught sight of the box. “Is it a present for someone?” she asked. “It would make a lovely planter.”

Before Dicey could speak, the woman sidled past an emerging man to slip into the bathroom.

Dicey put the box on the floor this time and rubbed cold water over her face. She polished her teeth with her finger. Then she had to go to the bathroom again. All the time her mind was turning over a question.

She was still stepping over Gram’s legs when she blurted it out: “You tell me to let go. But you told me to reach out, you told me to hold on. How can I do all those things together? Gram?”

Gram’s eyes took a minute to really see Dicey, as if she had been thinking about other things. “It’s nice to know you listen,” she answered.

“It would be nicer if you explained,” Dicey snapped.

“How can I explain?” Gram demanded. “How can I explain what I don’t know?”

“Then why did you say?”

“Because it’s what I learned,” Gram told her. She reached over to where Dicey’s hand was clenched on top of the box and wrapped her own hand around Dicey’s. “If it were simple I could explain. But you never know what’s the right thing to do. And even that’s not entirely true: sometimes I’ve known. But most of the time — oh, I don’t know, girl.”

“But you have to know,” Dicey said in a little voice.

Gram shook her head. “Don’t know why I should. Nobody else ever has. Except maybe your grandfather, and he was always wrong.”

Then Dicey smiled.

“And even he wasn’t always wrong,” Gram muttered. She tightened her hand around Dicey’s for a minute before withdrawing it. She laughed, briefly. “You couldn’t even count on him to be wrong. I might have learned to enjoy him, if I’d tried. I thought I was trying, but maybe I wasn’t. But I’ve let go of that grief and that anger.”

“Was that the right thing to do?” Dicey asked.

“How should I know?” Gram answered. “It feels right, and that’s about all I have to go by. Or any of us have. And we’d better get ourselves ready to get off this machine,” she concluded.

“But Gram.” Dicey stood beside Gram. Gram reached up to pull down their suitcase.

“What I mean, girl, is you keep trying. One thing after another. Sometimes just one, sometimes all three, but you have to keep trying. I don’t have to tell you that, do I?”

“I guess not,” Dicey said unhappily. Gram didn’t look any happier than Dicey felt. They stood in the little metal platform-room, where two cars joined, waiting for the train to slow down and then stop.

Dicey tried to think about Gram. Gram had let go of everyone, everyone had gone. Then she and James and Maybeth and Sammy had appeared. They had made her reach out and hold on. Or she made herself.

Not quite everyone had gone, Dicey realized, with a quick sideways glance at her grandmother’s profile. Because there was this one son, John. At least, he was still alive, probably. The idea grew in Dicey like a bubble, swelling out. John had gone away years ago, and — Gram had told Momma that somewhere there was a wedding announcement. If Dicey could find it. If Dicey could write to the address, and even if he wasn’t there somebody might forward it.

Dicey could guess what Gram would say about that idea. But, she thought, maybe Gram counted John as one of her mistakes, and maybe Dicey could do something about that. The place to begin looking was the attic. But they had given their word not to go up there.

Dicey chewed on her lip, thinking. There would be another way to start looking. She could think of it.

The train slowed down. They buttoned up their coats against the wind as the conductor came to open the door. Gram carried the suitcase, Dicey carried the box. “We’ll get right into a cab, I have no idea when buses run,” Gram said when Dicey joined her on the platform. “There’s a lunch counter at the bus station,” Dicey remembered.

But a small group of people hurtled down the platform toward them.

“We came to meet you!”Sammy called.

He threw himself at Dicey, and then burst away to throw himself at Gram. By that time, James and Maybeth came to stand close. Gram put down the suitcase and gave everyone a kiss on the cheek or forehead, depending on which was closest. She hugged each one of them tightly to her. James’s surprised eyes turned to Dicey, but she couldn’t begin to explain.

Mr. Lingerle drifted up. “I hope you don’t mind?”

“We’ll never fit all into your car,” Gram declared. But she was smiling.

“What’s that?” Sammy asked, reaching out for the box. “Is it for me?”

Dicey shook her head.

“We’ll explain later,” Gram said. “No questions. We haven’t eaten,” she said.

“I never rode on a plane,” Sammy said to Dicey. “Or a train either.”

Dicey sighed. What was she supposed to say to that? “Why aren’t you in school?” she asked.

“It’s Saturday,” Sammy said. “We had to get up really early.”

“Everything go all right?” Gram asked Mr. Lingerle.

“I think so,” he told her. “I may never be the same,” he added, with a little smile, “but that’s an improvement.”

“You think so?” Gram asked. “Well, you’d know best.”

“Mrs. Jackson asked if you would talk to her,” Maybeth said. She was walking between Dicey and Gram. James had taken the suitcase.

Gram’s chin went up. “First thing,” she said to Maybeth. “Don’t worry.”

“I think it’s for something good,” Maybeth told her.

Dicey looked around at all of them, and a lump formed in her throat. They were all here, and Momma too. Her hand tightened around the box. She didn’t know if she was sad or glad. She couldn’t sort out the sadness from the gladness.

Gram sat in the back seat, with Maybeth on her lap, because even Sammy had to admit he couldn’t sit still, even for the short drive to a McDonald’s. James was on one side of her, and Sammy on the other. Dicey sat in front.

“What is the box for?” James asked Dicey. “I’ve been trying to think.”

Gram’s eyes met Dicey’s. Dicey nodded her head, to say she thought it was all right to tell, but she didn’t think she could be the one to say it.

“For your momma,” Gram announced.

“But Momma’s dead,” Sammy protested.

“You had her cremated?” James asked.

“So she could come home with us,” Dicey told him. His face was stiff, but he nodded his head.

“But it’s too small!” Sammy cried, and burst into tears.

“Poor Momma,” Maybeth said.

Gram pulled Sammy’s head onto her crowded shoulder and let him cry there.