Free Child of My Heart by Alice McDermott

against her bare heels, spitting up bits of gravel as she went. In the car, Flora was pinned to the upholstery by an elaborate harness made of her mother’s silk scarves, one across her waist, two tied bandolier style across her chest, and each secured to the black cloth seat by huge diaper pins. I said, “Hi, there, Flora Dora,” and she kicked her feet and pulled at the scarves across her chest and whined, but in a half-hearted way that made it clear her tears were subsiding.
    “You look like you’ve been kidnapped by Gypsies,” I said. She had been crying for quite some time. Her little face was swollen with it, her already unremarkable features further diminished by the crying she had done. I knelt beside her on the car seat, brushed some thin hair from her wet forehead, and, as I unpinned the scarves one at a time, began to tell her about Daisy, who was just behind me on the driveway. Still sniffling, Flora leaned forward to see her. Daisy came all the way from New York on the train, I told her, all by herself, and Daisy has six brothers, three big ones and three little ones, a matching set, and a sister named Bernadette, named after another little girl who once saw the Blessed Virgin Mary, the most beautiful woman anyone has ever seen, while she was out playing with her friends, in a grotto by a stream in another country far away, the same country where Paris is, and the Eiffel Tower. And now when sick people go to France and drink the water from that stream, they get better, and when old people drink it, they get young again, and when crying babies drink it in their bottles, they begin to smile, and all their tears turn into lovely jewels that their mothers pluck from their cheeks and put into rings and necklaces and bracelets, some even glue them to their shoes, the way Daisy’s mother did.
    The scarves—black and gold and white and turquoise blue—were beautiful and expensive and had the lovely, faded smell of perfume not recently applied. I folded each one as I unpinned it, and placed it on the ledge behind the back seat with the closed-up diaper pins. Then I lifted Flora out and put her on the driveway next to Daisy. Together, both girls bent to examine the pretty shoes. As I reached back in for the scarves and the pins, I heard Daisy say, “Jewels.”
    Flora’s mother was in the kitchen speaking French to the housekeeper, and when I handed her the scarves she shrugged and said, with a laugh,
    “There’s no other way to keep her from rolling down the windows,” and then put the scarves on top of the refrigerator. She asked me to give Flora some crackers and a cup of milk—she’d eaten nothing for breakfast, she said-and then she and the housekeeper both left the room. I’d had no chance to introduce Daisy, but Flora’s mother had hardly seemed to notice her. I poured both girls some milk and put a plate of digestive biscuits on the table between them. Flora took only a sip of the milk and then slipped off her chair and climbed into my lap and wearily put her head on my chest. She was wearing another shapeless white dress, her white baby shoes, and white socks trimmed with lace. Her bare legs were dimpled and chubby and rosy pink, and I saw that Daisy was studying them, too, perhaps recalling, as I was, her old father’s thin white skin.
    “Somebody wore herself out this morning,” I said, to Daisy and to Flora as well.
    “Crying’s hard work, isn’t it?” And both girls agreed.
    When her mother came into the kitchen again, she was wearing a beige dress and high heels and there was a white cardigan draped over her shoulders. Her dark hair was pulled back smoothly, giving more prominence, and power, to her long, determined nose. Her lipstick was freshly applied, more bright red.
    “Listen,” she said, her eyes just momentarily falling, indifferently, on Daisy, “I need to go up to the city, I don’t know how long I’ll be. You keep coming, as always. Ana will be here. And the cook. Keep