Free The Memory Palace by Mira Bartók Page A

over to our grandparents’ to play in their yard. In the garden, my sister reads while I pretend I’m a bee. I sip nectar from honeysuckles and fly around the yard. I pluck little plums, split them open, scoop out the pits, and pop them in my mouth. When I’m outside I can hear singing. It’s the wind but I hear music too—arias, the trembling of leaves, mourning doves and sparrows, melodies my mother plays on the piano. Everything else is background noise—the Vietnam War and race riots, all the sick people Aunt Toda wants me to heal, my mother’s night voices, her despair. Lately a book called
In Cold Blood
distresses her. She says things like, “You never know who’s going to try to kill you when you’re asleep.” Or, “There are men with guns who watch you at night,” which she will continue to say for years to come. I block out her voice and listen to the mockingbird and chickadee, the goldfinch up above.
    I spy a volunteer lily that has sprung up in the middle of the backyard. Light glows from the inside of the flower—maybe it’s the way the sun falls on it, maybe it’s magic, either way I am struck dumb byits radiance. Is there a fairy inside the bloom? Has it come to take me away, to leave another in my place? I tear the bloom apart to see where the light is coming from, to see what’s inside—sepal, anther, stigma, stamen. The flower smells sickly sweet; a lush river of seeds, sticky and pungent, clings to my hands. I press the petals to my face and cover my nose with pollen, then squish what’s left of the flower into my pocket.
    When Rachel and I return home after dinner, I run into my mother’s room to show her what I have found. She’s lying on her side, her face to the wall. There are tiny drops of blood on the sheet; one of her arms is covered in gauze. I tap her back with my little hand. I am always afraid she will die.
    “Mommy? Mommy?”
    “Leave me alone,” she says. “Let me sleep.”
    “Look, look what I found.”
    She slowly turns around, the color drained from her face. “What is it?”
    I pull the wilted flower from my pocket and place it in her hand. She sighs and lets the petals, now stained red, fall to the floor. “It said ‘hello’ to me,” I say. “The flower said hello.”

    When school starts up in September I enter the first grade. One day our teacher, Mrs. Atzberger, announces we are going to have show-and-tell. Mrs. Atzberger is big and loud and not at all like my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Bemis. She tells us to get out the special things we brought from home. Each child clutches a small treasure—a Barbie doll, a stuffed bear, a little red car, a portrait of Jesus, a Cleveland Indians baseball cap. I hold my prize in a brown paper bag. One by one the children talk about their things. When it’s my turn I stand petrified in front of the class, bag in hand. Mrs. Atzberger tells me to show-and-tell what I have brought. I can’t speak. I haven’t brought a toy, a bear, or a blue-eyed Jesus. I have made a grave mistake. “Open it,” the teacher barks. I slowly lift a small dead sparrow, decaying in its nest, and hold it out to show the class.
    Mrs. Atzberger’s face contorts in rage. “What is that?” she demands. “Throw it away!”
    I want to say to her and the other children that it’s a bird, and that it isn’t dead, it’s only sleeping, and that after I found it beneath a tree I put it on my windowsill by my bed so I could watch it change every day, and that the nest had soft green moss in it and little bits of colored string, and that the bird is magical, and how do they know that I can’t raise something from the dead? Who says I can’t save someone’s life?
    My mother is summoned to school to meet with my teacher but she never shows up. The event is forgotten. I’m a good student, quiet and dutiful, and when we have show-and-tell the next time I bring in one of my three toys, Pony, my beautiful plastic horse. My mother gets invitations to