Hello There, Do You Still Know Me?. Laurie B. Arnold
Medusa period.” Rosalie Claire smiled at the memory. “Not my best look.”
Thomas disagreed and said he thought Rosalie Claire looked as pretty as a rosebud.
I’d read about Medusa in my book of Greek mythology. Her hair had been turned into a mass of wriggling snakes after she got in trouble for marrying Poseidon, the God of the Sea. She spent the rest of her life being generally nasty and turning people into stone. The total opposite of Rosalie Claire.
“Madison! Check it out! You were such a cute baby!”
Huh?
Noah waved a greeting card in the air. “Your baby announcement!”
I snatched it from his hand and stared at the photo. My mom and dad beamed from the picture as they held me up to the camera. Written at the bottom were the words:
ANGELA BROWN AND DANNY MCGEE
ARE THRILLED TO INTRODUCE THEIR NEW DAUGHTER,
MADISON.
My mom must have sent it to Grandma Daisy after I was born.
“I’ve never seen a picture of my dad before.” I couldn’t take my eyes off the photo. It was a revelation. Mostly I resembled my mom with my stick-straight brown hair and pale freckled skin, but I saw that I had my dad’s broad nose and his bright blue eyes.
“What happened to him, anyway?” Noah asked.
“No idea. My mom always said she thought he died, although nobody knows for sure. He just disappeared. Right, Rosalie Claire?”
“I’m afraid so.” She sighed and her mouth pinched tight.
“He left when Madison was a baby,” said Violet, who knew me better than almost anyone.
“Kind of like my mom, except I was seven when she took off,” Noah said. “She sent an e-mail to my dad saying she’d moved to Chicago.”
I wondered what it would be like to get a note from my dad saying he’d been living in Chicago all along. Weird.
I could have stared at that photo all night, but we had work to do. We plowed through the rest of the stuff in the trunk. Not far from the bottom we found a heavy cardboard box. We set it on the floor and lifted the lid. Dozens of crystals and colorful rocks glistened under the lamplight.
“This could be it.” Violet’s eyes gleamed as bright as the crystals.
One by one, we picked out the stones and examined them until we came across a chunk of amber. It looked like a nugget of hardened golden honey.
“Score!” Violet lifted it up in victory.
“Oh my, let’s see!” Rosalie Claire set down the remedies book and Violet handed her the amber.
“Is it the magic piece?” I asked, realizing that in the blink of an eye my grandmother could be back to normal again.
Rosalie Claire sighed. “Sorry, it’s not. The one we need has a tiny frog trapped inside. In fact, my grandmother was never quite sure if it was the frog that was magic or the amber. I always thought it was the combination.”
“Wait a minute,” said Noah. “Since amber was liquid tree sap that hardened, couldn’t we just melt that piece down, press a dead frog into it, and let it harden again?”
Rosalie Claire shook her head. “If only that would work, Noah. Sadly, there’s no tricking magic.”
“And where in the heck would we find a magic frog anyway?” Violet asked.
Violet was right. There were about a bazillion gift shops in Jacó and I was pretty sure not one of them carried ancient dead magic frogs.
We were just about to give up hope when we found an old videotape at the bottom of the trunk. On it was a tattered sticker. “Daisy’s Special Remedies,” it said, handwritten in black Sharpie. I felt a tingly rush of hope.
“Maybe Grandma Daisy says something about curing rare jungle diseases.” I handed the tape to Rosalie Claire. Was this the thing my gut told me I needed to find?
“This could be the answer to our prayers.” Rosalie Claire kissed the black plastic case. “Now where’s our old tape player?”
Thomas retrieved it from the top shelf in the hall closet and hooked it up to the TV in the corner of the living room.
The image on the tape was scratchy from age. Even so, I could still make out the famous Grandma Daisy. I’d always imagined her being surrounded by silver sparkles of fairy dust, but when I saw her in action, I could tell that the sparkles lived right in her eyes, the same way they did in Rosalie Claire’s. My mom used to say you could tell a lot about a person just by looking into their eyes. She said it was a window to their soul. Grandma Daisy’s soul must have been filled with a galaxy’s worth of glittery magic.
On the tape, she sat at her kitchen table in the house next door to where my grandmother and I still lived in Truth or Consequences. It looked almost the same as when Rosalie Claire had lived there except for one big difference. Thumbtacked on the wall was a calendar, flipped to May 1994. The tape had been recorded nearly twenty years ago.
For an hour Grandma Daisy talked about remedies. She recommended herbs for fighting the flu, for curing stomach cramps, and getting rid of warts. She suggested magical crystals to treat headaches. She didn’t mention a single word about rare tropical diseases.
By the end of the tape, my heart felt as if it had been hit with a hammer. I’d been so sure that this was what I was supposed to find. Rosalie Claire must have sensed how I felt. She wrapped her arms around me and we touched forehead-to-forehead.
“We’ll think of something,” she whispered. “Don’t give up hope, Madison. I can feel in my bones that the universe will deliver something. I just don’t know what it is yet.”
I wished I felt as sure as she sounded.
Even though it wasn’t even eight thirty, we were all dog-tired. We told Rosalie Claire we were heading to bed. “Why don’t you kids get some fresh air and take the long way around through the garden? Being outside usually makes things better.”
I slipped my birth announcement into my pocket. Then I peeked in on Florida. She was muttering something in her sleep about accidentally buying a vicious warthog from a shopping show when she’d meant to order a diamond ring.
“We’ll figure something out,” I whispered, even though I knew she couldn’t hear me. “I promise.”
I headed outside into the night with Violet, Noah, and Leroy. A gigantic full moon lit up the garden. Rosalie Claire had been right. It felt good to be outside. It was still warm enough to be in shorts, but a slight breeze cooled my skin. We followed the trail behind the inn, being careful to whisper so we wouldn’t wake the guests as we passed their rooms. Only Riptide and Wingnut’s light was still on. We could hear the beeping sounds of computer games through their open window.
My brain buzzed a million miles a minute. Why hadn’t we found anything in that trunk when my gut said we would? Did we miss something in the videotape that contained the secret we needed?
I glanced up at the night sky just as a billowy cloud slid across the moon. Clouds always made me think about my mom. It may sound weird, but there’s part of her that lives up there in those clouds. When things get tough I talk to her and I’m pretty sure she’s listening. I concentrated hard, trying to remember the sound of her voice. A gust of wind swirled around my legs and I almost felt as if she were with me. I spoke to her in my head because I didn’t want my friends to think I was crazy. Mom, I lost you, I thought. I can’t lose Florida, too. Tell me what to do, OK? If only she’d appear by my side and guide me. I watched for a sign as the cloud danced in front of the moonlight.
That’s when it hit me. Maybe the video was the answer. Maybe, if we got the MegaPix 6000 back, I could teleport into it while the tape was playing, the same way I had into a real TV show. Then I could