Nightbird (6 page)

“Just the person I wanted to see,” she announced.

Since Julia had instantly been popular at school, I was surprised to hear this. Surely someone must have told her not to bother with Twig Fowler.

I looked a bit more closely at the paint on her face. Blue, the color of the graffiti. A wave of suspicion tugged at me.

“How’s your arm?” Julia asked.

I only had three signatures on my cast. I couldn’t
count the cat, Emily Brontë. Most people would have had every one of their friends sign and I was embarrassed not to have more names.

“People at school don’t really notice me,” I said. Meaning I wasn’t in the in-crowd and didn’t go to parties. I walked alone through the halls because I was a no one, so Julia and I might as well stop talking right now.

“People often don’t notice something they’ve seen all their lives. That’s what my mother says,” Julia told me, wiping at the blue paint on her face with a damp paper towel.

“That’s right.” Mrs. Hall nodded. “They walk right past the roses growing by their front door and go to a florist’s and pay good money for flowers that aren’t half as pretty.”

“I don’t really care what people think anymore,” Julia confided. “I make up my own mind.” She grinned. “I’m from Brooklyn.”

I decided to stay, just for a few minutes, long enough to have a slice of my mother’s strawberry rhubarb pie. We went into the kitchen, and after a single bite, Mrs. Hall said it was the best she’d ever tasted.

“If your mother sold her pies in Brooklyn she’d be a millionaire.” Julia took another big bite. “People would
be lined up around the block and pay whatever she asked. Everyone would be pie-crazy and they’d applaud her whenever she walked down the street.”

I couldn’t deny my mother was the best baker around. “Wait till you taste our Pink apple pie this fall.”

“It sounds heavenly.” Mrs. Hall cut herself a second slice. “I wonder if your mother would ever share her recipe.”

Just talking about my mother made me nervous to be in Mourning Dove Cottage. I’d broken my promise and had already been gone for nearly an hour. I was torn between wanting to stay and feeling I was being disloyal.

“She doesn’t usually give out her recipes. They’re kind of a family secret.”

“Let’s go upstairs,” Julia suggested. “You have to see what I’ve done to my room.”

I hesitated. It wasn’t just the blue paint on Julia’s face that concerned me. I imagined the witch stalking through these rooms, uttering curses, ruining the lives of everyone in our family.

“Race you!” Julia shouted. Like most runners, I took off once I heard a challenge. I forgot about my mother’s warnings and the curse and the witch, and I reached the landing before Julia did.

“You are fast!” she said.

“It’s not like I try. It’s just my long legs.”

Julia had been painting her room. The shade she’d chosen was a dark blue that reminded me of midnight. It was the opposite of the harsh electric-blue spray paint on the General Store and in the woods, as calm as the other blue was jarring. I felt a wave of relief.

“Let’s make this room perfect,” Julia suggested.

“Agreed.” I was more than ready to help.

We dragged a ladder into the center of the room. Julia’s plan was to stencil shimmery silver stars across the ceiling. She lent me a pair of sunglasses, then she put on some goggles, and we set to work, taking turns with a spray can of metallic paint. Again, I thought of the message I’d seen.
DON’T TAKE OUR HOME AWAY.

“Did you buy this paint in Brooklyn?”

“Nope,” Julia said. “In Sidwell. At Hoverman’s Hardware Store.”

The first star shone, as if it really had dropped through a hole in the roof to light up the room. Julia planned to paint on another star every day until she had entire constellations on her ceiling.

“Star light, star bright,” Julia sang when we were done. “I hope this is the best summer ever.”

I wished that, too, but I was afraid to say it aloud.
I had wished for a lot of things in the past: that James could have a life like other boys, that my father would come back, that I wouldn’t hear my mother cry late at night. As my brother often said, for anyone in the Fowler family, wishes were worthless.

There was an old-fashioned seat built in beneath the window in Julia’s room that overlooked our orchards. I’d always wanted to read while curled up in a window seat, and this one had blue pillows with a pattern of silver roses Agate had sewn. We made ourselves comfortable and compared the books we loved most. Our list included everything written by Edward Eager, of course, along with E. Nesbit and Ray Bradbury. I added
Wuthering Heights,
because of Mrs. Farrell. Even though I hadn’t read it yet, it was on my list of must-reads. Julia suggested Emily Dickinson’s poems, because she hadn’t lived so far from Sidwell. Even though Emily Dickinson was something of a hermit, locking herself away in her room, sneaking out to collect wildflowers all by herself, she seemed like the kind of person you’d want to be friends with if you’d lived long ago, too.

Julia and I talked so much it took a while before I realized it was nearly dark. Shadows had begun to sift through the trees like pools of ink.

I stood up so fast the pillows fell onto the floor. I
picked them up, apologized for my clumsiness, then said, “I have to go.” I felt like the White Rabbit in
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,
in a wild panic, afraid of what might happen if I was late, which, frankly, I already was.

“Why can’t you stay? You could have dinner and then I’ll walk you halfway home.”

“Absolutely not!” I sputtered without thinking. Julia looked stung and I could tell she was hurt. That was the last thing I wanted. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’d love to stay. But my mother wouldn’t allow it. She didn’t want me here in the first place.”

“Why doesn’t she like us? She doesn’t even know us.”

I explained as best I could. There had been a time when our families had been enemies and terrible things had been said and done. Hearts had been broken and fates led astray. I told her about the play at Town Hall and how once a year the youngest children at the summer camp told the story of Agnes Early, the Witch of Sidwell, and how they sang a song about how she put a curse on anyone who had harmed her, chanting three times that they wished the witch would disappear and never return.

“The play ends when the witch is pushed off a cliff made of papier-mâché,” I told Julia. “Then everyone in town applauds.”

“That’s so rude!” Julia’s face flushed with anger. “I’ve never heard of anything so mean!”

I tried to make excuses for Sidwell. “She was a witch, after all.”

“It’s still horrible to wish the worst on anyone. I’m sure she had her reasons. Maybe people hurt her feelings, the same way I was hurt in Brooklyn. A single word can feel like a rock being thrown at you.”

I’d never thought of the witch’s situation that way before, and when I said so Julia was pleased. Thinking of Agnes Early simply as someone who’d been hurt made me feel less frightened of her. And I didn’t feel as nervous about the blue fangs I’d seen in town and in the woods. I was sure whoever was behind it had his reasons, just as the witch had.

“Let’s meet on the road tomorrow to walk to school,” I said. “Same time, same place.”

“Perfect plan.” Julia grinned.

I made my way downstairs, called out a good-bye to Mrs. Hall, and ran down the porch steps. I was feeling happy, like I was the most normal girl in Sidwell, or at least normal enough, and I didn’t have a care in the world. But as soon as I got outside a wave of fear shot through me. Out on the lawn Agate Hall was staring at the orchard. She looked lit up, her face dreamy, her
long arms wrapped around herself. It was chilly in the evenings and a mist threaded through the orchard. The moon was already rising. The stars appeared in a sky that was the exact color of Julia’s bedroom.

I had the sense that something out of the ordinary had happened. All of the trees looked silver in the light, and there was a rushing sound, as if the wind had risen, but in fact the air was still.

Agate turned to me. Her eyes were wide, her cheeks flushed. She looked the way people do when they’re just waking up from a dream.

“I saw him,” she said, her tone soft. “The one they talk about. He’s real.”

We were both shivering, but for different reasons. I was afraid, but Agate seemed enchanted. I looked at her and I knew that for the first time in all these years, despite the danger, despite the curse, my brother had allowed himself to be seen.

CHAPTER THREE

Y
OU WOULD THINK AFTER TWO HUNDRED years a curse would have less of a hold and finally begin to wear off, like ink fading on an old piece of paper. But that wasn’t the case.

In our family it had always been a tradition to remove the tiny wings on the day before a boy’s first birthday. A mixture of herbs was added to the baby’s milk, along with a dozen or more ingredients that were kept secret. Once the child drank this concoction, his wings would begin to disappear, shriveling little by little, inch by inch, until they fell off and feathers covered the floor.
But there was a price to pay to be like everyone else: From that time onward, the individual would be fragile, feverish and tired all the time, unable to play childhood games or even lift his arms over his head. The Fowler boys’ bones would break easily, and some were confined to their beds. Even when they were grown men, their spines would ache every time there was a storm. My own grandfather had trouble walking and always used a cane. I remember coming to visit and sitting out on the porch with him, watching flocks of blackbirds fly past, as if there were inky clouds above us.

“That’s freedom,” he said to me, and even though I was little more than a baby, I heard the longing in his voice.

The herbal cure only worked before the child’s first birthday. After that, the wings were set in place. The curse was unbreakable.

My mother was different from the rest of the Fowlers. Maybe because she had been out in the world and had witnessed how people lived their lives far from Sidwell, she refused the cure for my brother. She didn’t care that every boy in our family for nearly two hundred years had had his wings removed. The process was dangerous and painful and she wouldn’t stand for it.

She had her own methods when James was young. When we lived in New York City his wings were small
enough that she could bind them before we went out; then she’d slip on an oversized sweatshirt. In crowded Manhattan no one noticed a pretty young mother, a little girl with dark hair in a stroller, and a handsome, serious five-year-old who didn’t run off in the park as other boys did to play soccer or baseball, but instead stayed beside us, grounded, always well behaved, but set apart. He knew he was different even then.

I don’t remember my father very much. He disappeared from our lives before I was old enough to know him, but my brother says that he often took us to the swings in Central Park. He would whisper to James that anyone lucky enough to experience flight was special. James would close his eyes and take a deep breath. Up in the air he finally felt free.

“What was he like?” I used to ask when James and I were alone.

“Tall, quiet, someone you could trust to catch you if you were up in the air.”

But all I recalled was a shadow, and as the years passed, even the memory of that shadow seemed to be disappearing.

I was never quite sure what happened to my parents, or why they had separated. Every time I brought it up, my mother turned away.

One day I was thinking about my father while I was doing my homework in the history room at Town Hall. My class had been assigned to write about Sidwell’s founding in 1683, and I was doing research about the town’s first library. It had been situated in an old wooden cabin on the town green. The building still existed, but was currently used as a tourist center. People visiting Sidwell stopped here for maps and a list of sights they should see on their way to Lenox or Stockbridge. Recommended highlights were the Montgomery Woods, Last Lake, the Starline Diner, and the bell tower at Town Hall.

For some reason reading about the early days of Sidwell made me think about my family’s early days in New York. I puzzled over how little I knew of my own family history, and how I longed for something I’d never even known and would probably never have. I started crying, something I’d never done in public before. I was especially embarrassed because Miss Larch was entertaining an elderly gentleman who wore a tweed jacket and carried a silver-tipped cane. He gazed over at me and made a clucking sound. I could tell he felt bad for me. The fact that someone I didn’t even know pitied me made me feel worse.

Miss Larch whispered a few words to her companion and I heard him say,
Oh, yes, of course. Don’t mind me.

She brought over a freshly brewed cup of black orchid tea and sat across from me. The tea was especially fragrant. From that day on, it was my favorite. The scent reminded me of rainy days and libraries and a jumble of gardens where there were flowers in bloom.