One evening, Poppy came to me with the mirror from the hallway and asked me to look at her hair with her. We stood together in front of the glass, and she turned her head one way and then the other, and she pointed to the new curls at the back and said, look, they are coming back. I looked, and she was right. They were coming back, slow and stubborn and golden brown in the evening light, curling the way they always had. I put my hand on her shoulder and told her she was right, and she grinned at her own reflection, and for the first time since the night Veronica had cut her hair, she looked at herself in the mirror and saw a girl she liked.
Chapter 24
— Two Girls in the Garden
Elspeth called on a Friday morning and asked if she could bring Maisie to Asheville for the day. She said Maisie had been asking about Poppy, and she thought it might do them both good to play together in the garden, with the adults close by. I said yes right away, because Poppy had been asking about Maisie too, and because I trusted Elspeth to know what was right for both girls. We agreed on a time, and I told Poppy, and she spent the rest of the morning tidying her dolls and choosing which toys to bring outside, as if she were preparing for the most important visit of her life.
They arrived just after lunch. Elspeth came up the path holding Maisie's hand, and Maisie was wearing a yellow dress and carrying a small bag with a drawing book inside it. Poppy ran to meet them at the gate, and the two girls stood looking at each other for a moment, shy and curious, and then Poppy took Maisie's hand and led her straight into the garden, to the big tree, as if they had known each other for years instead of only a short time. Elspeth and I followed behind, and Dolores came out with a tray of lemonade and biscuits, and we settled ourselves on the garden chairs where we could see the girls clearly and hear them laughing.
The girls played under the tree first. Poppy showed Maisie the wooden dolls she kept in a basket by the back door, and Maisie showed Poppy the drawings in her book, pictures of a house and a garden and a dog she said she wished she had. They spread the drawings out on the grass and talked about them in the serious way six-year-olds talk about important things, pointing and nodding and asking questions. Then they decided to build a small house out of sticks and leaves at the foot of the tree, and they worked on it together for a long time, fetching sticks and arranging leaves for a roof, and arguing in a friendly way about where the door should go.
Dolores watched them from the chairs, and Elspeth watched them too, and I watched them most of all, because there was something about seeing two six-year-old girls playing safely in a garden that made the rest of the world feel further away. No one raised their voice. No one was frightened. The girls were simply playing, the way children should play, with adults close by and the sun warm on the grass and the whole afternoon stretching out in front of them. Poppy laughed when their stick house fell down, and Maisie laughed too, and then they built it again, stronger this time, with bigger sticks at the corners.
After a while, they moved to the flower beds, where Dolores had planted bright flowers in neat rows. Poppy showed Maisie how to smell the flowers without picking them, and Maisie showed Poppy how to count the petals on a daisy, one by one, in a careful whisper. They found a ladybird on a leaf, and they crouched down together to look at it, and Poppy said they should not touch it, because it was busy, and Maisie agreed, and they watched it walk across the leaf until it flew away. It was a small moment, and an ordinary one, and it was exactly the kind of moment I had wanted Poppy to have again, a moment that belonged only to her and to her friend, with no shadow in it at all.
We gave them lemonade and biscuits on a blanket under the tree, and they ate sitting cross-legged on the grass, with jam on their fingers and crumbs on their dresses, talking about their favourite stories. Poppy told Maisie about the storybook her mother had written, and Maisie told Poppy about a story her teacher had read at school, about a brave little boat. Elspeth smiled at me over their heads, and I smiled back, because we both understood what we were seeing. Two girls, born on the same night, who had lived such different lives, were sitting together in a garden, sharing biscuits and stories, and for that afternoon at least, the complicated things that had brought them here did not matter at all.
Before they left, the girls picked a few fallen leaves from under the tree and pressed them into Maisie's drawing book, to remember the day by. Poppy gave Maisie one of her ribbons, a yellow one, and Maisie tied it into her hair, and Poppy showed her how to do it properly, standing on tiptoe to reach. Elspeth thanked Dolores for the lemonade, and she thanked me for the afternoon, and she said we should do it again soon. I said we should, and I meant it. As they walked back down the path, Poppy stood at the gate waving until the car was out of sight, and then she came back to me and said, in a very satisfied voice, that Maisie was her friend now. I put my arm around her shoulders and said I was glad, because friends were a good thing, and gardens were a good place to make them.