Nightbird (5 page)

“We were so hoping to see you and we did!” Julia said. “Things just kind of happen here in Sidwell, don’t they? Like magic.”

“Like it’s meant to be,” I agreed.

“Like it’s perfect,” Julia and I said at the very same time.

“You two are peas in a pod.” Agate grinned. “What is so funny about the word
perfect
?”

“Nothing.” Julia aimed a smile at me. She had on a red T-shirt with
I AM WHO I AM
printed in black letters, some faded jeans, and old-school black-and-white sneakers. I had on my favorite jeans and a white T-shirt my brother had ordered for my birthday.
Owls Rule
was in swirly type, and a silk-screened black owl decorated the front and back. We were practically dressed like twins except that her T-shirt was black and red and mine was
black and white. Agate, on the other hand, was surprisingly elegant, especially for a town like Sidwell. Her pale hair was drawn back with a velvet headband and she wore a black dress and ballet slippers. She certainly didn’t look like anyone else in our school. When Julia saw me gazing at her sister’s clothes, she told me Agate designed and sewed everything she wore.

“Someday she’ll be famous,” Julia confided. “And I’ll model all of her clothes. When I’m not busy being an artist.”

“Where did you live before this?” I asked the sisters, thinking the answer might be Paris or Rome.

“Brooklyn,” Agate said.

That explained how stylish she and Mrs. Hall were. They were New Yorkers, something I’d always sort of considered myself to be. I’d been born there, after all.

“Our father got a job at Sidwell Hospital. That’s why we’re here. He’s the chief of surgery,” Agate said proudly.

“That’s not why we’re here,” Julia added. “It’s because of me.”

“No it isn’t.” Agate gave her sister a little shove, but her expression was concerned.

“It’s true and you know it. I hated our old school. No one liked me.”

“Who could not like you?” I said.

Julia threw me a grateful look. “I’m bad at sports,” she admitted. “In my old school, that gave some people a good reason to treat me like an outcast. If there was ever a team, I was picked last, not that I blamed them. But they didn’t have to be so mean about it.”

“Mean people are meaningless,” Agate said. “I’ve told you that a hundred times.”

I was accustomed to people acting as if I didn’t exist, but I couldn’t believe anyone would purposely be cruel to Julia. She was so easy to like.

“That won’t happen here,” I said. Sidwell was a pretty friendly place. Too friendly, my mother always warned, for people like us.

As we walked to school I began to think that if Julia wanted a new start, she had better stay away from me. Everyone in Sidwell knew I wasn’t coming to their houses and they weren’t coming to mine. They were well aware I didn’t attend parties or dances or go to the Main Street Cinema with everyone else on Saturday afternoons, though I really was dying to see some of the movies I heard people talking about. By now my classmates had realized I was the person most likely to be ignored. I wasn’t just unpopular, I was nothing more than a glimmer of a girl people saw but never really noticed. “Oh, hi, Twig,” someone might say in a surprised sort of way if they came upon me, as if they had stumbled over the root of a tree or an old potted plant. Julia would definitely have better luck if she wasn’t seen with me. The truth was, I didn’t want her to find out what a nothing I was.

When we got to school, I announced I had a meeting with a teacher and took off running. I didn’t want to jinx Julia and Agate by their association with me. I called back, “Good luck!” and acted as if I didn’t hear Julia calling, “Wait up!”

I just kept going.

I caught sight of the Hall sisters several times during the day, always surrounded by a crush of people. I wasn’t surprised. Sidwell was such a small town that anyone new was immediately interesting, especially when they were as special as Agate or as funny and friendly as Julia. They had what they wanted on their very first day at school: a new life filled with friends. Exactly what I’d always wanted.

As usual, no one paid any attention to me. The only one who asked what had happened to my arm was my English teacher, Mrs. Farrell, who was such a huge fan
of
Wuthering Heights
she had a cat named Emily Brontë. Mrs. Farrell had always been nice to me, and I think she felt a little sorry for me because I was always alone. She signed my cast,
Get well soon to a great student! From Mrs. Farrell and Emily Brontë.

Thankfully it was my left arm that was banged up, so I managed with my schoolwork. I was happy for Agate and Julia that they were so instantly popular. I wouldn’t have wanted to ruin that. I stayed out of their way. It’s easy to keep to yourself if you hang back and always sit in the last row and slip around corners as if you were a ghost.

Instead of walking home on the road, where the Hall girls might catch up with me, I went through the Montgomery Woods. People said there were still bears in Sidwell, but I’d never run across one. I had spied raccoons and skunks and foxes, and I’d run across moles, which were shyer than I was, and boisterous turkeys. I must have looked like a twig to them, too, because they all ignored me.

Even though the Montgomerys had bought a huge section of the woods, aside from the old estate where
they vacationed sometimes, it was still wilderness all around, no different than it had been hundreds of years earlier. Streams of lemony-yellow sunlight drifted in between the branches. There were ferns and swamp cabbage growing in the boggy places, stretches of watery land that were so darkly green they looked black. I found some bushes with thin fairy branches filled with wild raspberries that had ripened early. I picked some to bring home to James, and kept them in my pockets on the way back. I made a loop-de-loop around the owl nesting grounds.

That was when I saw more graffiti. It was on a huge boulder that had probably been in the same place since the Ice Age. There was the same blue spray paint I’d noticed in town on the wall of the General Store, the same fangy teeth of a monster, and the same writing:
DON’T TAKE OUR HOME AWAY.

I ran the rest of the way, as fast as I could, which in my case is pretty fast. Raspberries fell from my pockets, but I didn’t care. I went through ferns and past the trout orchids and the wild pink roses that grow everywhere in Sidwell. Even though I knew there was no such thing as a monster, someone was definitely in the woods, someone who didn’t want to be seen and wanted people to stay out. I raced out of there so quickly I could have made the track team
at school if I joined things. I had the same shivery feeling I’d had when I saw the blue graffiti in town. Almost as if someone were scribbling a message to me.

I didn’t wait around to see if someone wanted to tell me something. And I didn’t stop until I could see the road.

My mother made a pie to thank the Halls for taking such good care of me when I broke my arm. She’d promised she would, and she was always true to her word.

“But how do I send it over there?” She frowned, but even then she was beautiful. “If I go, they might invite me in for coffee, or ask how many children I have. I don’t want to lie and I can’t tell the truth.” She sat down at the kitchen table, distraught, doing her best to puzzle out what to do next. It had been so long since she’d had anything to do with strangers that she’d forgotten how to act with people. She was flustered and nervous over one pie.

I tried to comfort her. “You could just say hello, thank you, and good-bye.”

My mother laughed, but shook her head. “I’d be opening the door to being neighborly. You know I can’t do that. One thing would lead to another, and before you
knew it they’d be inviting us over for dinner and wondering why we never invited them here.”

I couldn’t help it, I was curious about the Halls. I wondered if Julia would still be as friendly now that so many people had clustered around her at school. Maybe she’d already found someone better to be her friend. My heart sank at the thought, even though I might have brought it upon myself when I disappeared at school.

My mother wasn’t happy when I suggested that I could bring over the pie, but after I vowed I could run so fast I could slip the pie onto the porch, then take off at top speed, she agreed.

“Consider me a thief in reverse,” I said.

My mother came to put her arm around me. “You are my darling, thoughtful girl,” she said to me. “And you are definitely not a thief.”

But someone in Sidwell was. While I walked through the orchard I thought of all the things that had gone missing in town. I’d heard one of the school librarians tell Mrs. Farrell that a flashlight had been taken from her car one Sunday morning, and a carpenter outside the General Store told his buddy that a box of nails had been pinched from the back of his truck on Memorial Day. If I left the
pie on the Halls’ porch, would it still be there when they came out?

I found myself at Mourning Dove Cottage in no time. The driveway was filled with workmen’s trucks. It was pretty hectic and I was accustomed to getting in and out of places without being seen, so I tried to be as unassuming as possible. But as soon as I came through the trees Beau started barking like mad, then raced over to me. I laughed when the dog bumped against me, wanting me to pet him, even though I didn’t have a free hand. I almost dropped the pie, but managed to balance it before it could fall.

“Good catch!” Mrs. Hall called.

She was out in the garden, if you could call it that. It was a large area filled with brambles and weeds, surrounded by a tumbledown wooden fence. Mrs. Hall wore a straw hat and heavy gloves. She waved, then held up a mixing bowl. It was yellow ceramic, the kind I’d seen in the Sidwell history room at Town Hall. “I just unearthed this. Isn’t it lovely? Hardly a chip on it.”

“It’s the kind the colonists used,” I told her. “Probably at least two hundred years old.”

I’d spent a good deal of time at the history room. Miss Larch was the librarian there. She always joked she was a hundred years old and therefore knew more
history than anyone in town. She had snow-white hair that was twisted up, and she usually wore a black dress with silver buttons and a long silver necklace with the keys to Town Hall hanging on the chain. Every time I went into the library, she would call out, “Why, if it isn’t Teresa Jane!” as if just seeing me made her happy. Miss Larch used to teach history at the high school before she retired to volunteer at Town Hall. “I taught your mother when she was a girl. I must say, she was an excellent student. Always reading. She loved novels and cookbooks.”

Miss Larch had invited me to tea several times. There was a hot plate set up on an old pine bureau, and she had some old blue-and-white china cups and silver spoons with mother-of-pearl handles. Miss Larch used a colonial teapot made of the same yellow ceramic Mrs. Hall found in her garden. There were also two dozen canisters of exotic teas I’d never heard of before: gunpowder, jasmine, yuzu, Marco Polo, cherry vanilla, black orchid. Teas that could chase away nightmares and those that could improve your memory and others that could make you laugh out loud with one sip. I always thanked Miss Larch but said I had to be on my way, even though I wished I could stay. That was who I was: Twig Fowler, who had to be going, who didn’t have a minute to talk, who froze as soon as it seemed someone might ask a personal question, who could only mumble
Thank you,
then race out the door.

But I couldn’t get away that easily when I was spotted in the Halls’ yard. We were neighbors. The least I could do was be polite.

“You know an awful lot about Sidwell.” Mrs. Hall came to greet me. “I’m impressed.”

I shrugged. “I grew up here.”

“So you did,” Mrs. Hall said. Then she noticed the pie tin. “How lovely! There’s nothing that can compare to real homemade pie.”

I could see where Julia had inherited her outgoing nature. Julia had told me that her mother was a speech pathologist who worked with children who stuttered or had difficulty saying certain sounds. It was hard to be standoffish with her, especially when she hugged me and told me she hoped my arm wasn’t hurting too badly. We were chatting so much I didn’t even notice that I had followed her into Mourning Dove Cottage. I knew I was entering the territory of my family’s enemy. I was on the verge of saying I had to go home, but when I walked through the door nothing terrible happened. I wasn’t
struck by lightning. I didn’t fall flat on my face. I had to admit the truth to myself: I wanted to stay.

There were carpenters and plumbers and painters at work tearing up the old pipes and the rotten wood. I recognized Mr. Hendrix, the plumber, who had recently fixed our stopped-up kitchen sink. Several of the workmen from town called, “Hey there, Twig.” I nodded a hello. I recognized some of them from the Gossip Group.

I could see that the interior of the house had been a wreck before the Halls had moved in. There were still cobwebs everywhere, and rings of water damage from winter storms had stained the ceilings and walls with odd splotches in the shapes of clouds and sheep. The floors, once coated with oxblood-red stain, had been refinished and were now a gleaming oak. The walls were gray and sooty with ash from ancient fires in the fireplace. They were lined with cracks, but cans of white paint were being opened. It would take quite a lot of work before the house looked livable again.

“This poor house,” Mrs. Hall said as we stood in the front hallway. The cottage did seem sad, as if it had a broken heart along with stained ceilings and cracked plaster. “Our family has simply ignored it for generations. But
we never sold it, and there must be a reason for that! I intend to bring it to life.”

“It doesn’t look very kept up,” I blurted. “Sorry, Mrs. Hall. I don’t mean to offend the house.”

“Call me Caroline,” Mrs. Hall reminded me. “And I don’t know if a building can be offended. I’m certainly not. All the same, I think we’re all going to love Mourning Dove Cottage. Why, I do already!”

She was so positive that I didn’t want to mention that the last inhabitant had been a witch. I was about to leave before I overstayed my welcome, or before my mother realized I’d been gone for too long, or before Julia could decide she didn’t want to be my friend. But before I could go, Julia came sprinting down the stairs, paint spattering her face.