Nightbird Page 6

  “Unlikely,” I said. “She doesn’t speak to strangers.”

  “I’m not that strange.” He grinned and I grinned back.

  For some reason I felt bad for Mr. Rose. Maybe because he was new to town and had no idea how unfriendly our family was. My mother was never going to talk to him. I heard a rustling in the hall. She had come to stand beside me. “Ian,” she said.

  I wondered if she’d met him when he’d come to town to visit Miss Larch all those years ago.

  “I was just telling Twig that I’d like to write an article about the orchard.”

  “An article?” I expected her to send him on his way. Instead she turned to me and said, “Why don’t you get some breakfast?” Then she went out to the porch, closing the door behind her.

  I peered through the old glass window. When you look through it, the whole world looks very far away, almost like something in a dream. For people who didn’t know each other well, my mother and Mr. Rose seemed to have a lot to say. I heard my name mentioned, which surprised me. Then I heard my mother say, “If you came to town for that, Ian, then you’ve made a mistake.”

  I must have rattled the door, because her attention shifted. When she turned to see me, she gave me a serious look that convinced me to go and get breakfast. I took out cereal and milk, but I had a funny feeling in my stomach, as if there had been an earthquake, and the ground was shifting under our feet, and everything we had ever known and been and done was about to change.

  I brought James’s breakfast up to the attic. Lately he hadn’t been eating much, so I brought his favorite things: a bowl of cornflakes, sourdough toast, and some of our mother’s homemade honey butter. The secret to the honey butter was that she added lavender, which made it so fragrant bees sometimes came in through the window to hover around the butter dish.

  Mr. Rose had driven away, and my mother had begun baking strawberry pies in one of the huge ovens in the summer kitchen. We could hear her singing while she baked. The attic window was open and the air smelled like piecrust and fruit. I was glad it was Saturday and I didn’t have to rush off to school. I told my brother about the graffiti, and how the artist was so smart he’d designed an image that looked like one thing right side up, and another thing altogether upside down. James looked interested, but not guilty. I could tell when he was hedging, and he wasn’t. “I can’t figure out who would do this,” I said. “The weird thing is, there’s no one who’s more interested in owls than you.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” James said. “There’s the ornithologist.”

  So that was what Dr. Shelton did. No wonder he was always in the woods.

  “You know him?”

  “I’ve seen him recording birdsongs. I’ve followed him a few times. He’s studying the saw-whet owls.”

  I couldn’t quite picture Dr. Shelton with a can of spray paint, even if he was on the side of the birds.

  After breakfast, James and I played Scrabble, our favorite game. I had the X, which made my turn difficult. There were only so many words I could think of that contained that letter. Ox, ax, mix, exit. None of them were worth very many points.

  “Have you been over to Mourning Dove?” my brother asked.

  “I can’t go over there on the weekends unless I have a good excuse.” I probably could have come up with one, but I was having second thoughts about my friendship with Julia. She didn’t really know me; how could she like me? She’d phoned twice, and both times I’d picked up the phone, then hung up. When my mother asked who had called, I told her it had been a wrong number, someone looking for a kennel for her dog. Maybe I just wanted to end the friendship before Julia did.

  James seemed to be having doubts of his own. “Agate probably thinks I was a hallucination. I’m sure she’s forgotten all about me.”

  I didn’t think so. I’d seen the look on her face. I didn’t know if people really could fall in love at first sight, but if it was possible, then she had.

  “I don’t know how much longer I can stay in this attic,” James muttered. “I just want the same chances other people have. Is that too much to ask?”

  We agreed that it wasn’t. We were really very normal people, despite the wings and the curse and the way we were so solitary. I wondered if all monsters were so ordinary in their day-to-day lives, and if I should just go to the General Store and all those other places that sold T-shirts with an image of the Sidwell Monster and explain that we ate breakfast the same as they did, and that my brother was the kindest person on earth and had nothing to do with the thefts or the graffiti. Or at least, I hoped he hadn’t.

  “Can you help me pick out a word?” I said to Flash, who was sitting on my brother’s shoulder. The little owl soared to the table. It was clear that whatever had been wrong with his wing had healed. Maybe James wasn’t ready to let him go.

  Flash came to peck at the E, which, really, was no help at all. E was definitely not a word in any language, not even birdspeak. Or maybe it was. I started thinking about words that began with E. Excellent and elephant and ever.

  “You know you can’t win against me,” James teased.

  “Really?” I said with a grin. “Watch.” I put down extra, the X on a double-word-score space.

  As I added up my score, I told James there was a new editor at the Sidwell Herald who wanted to write an article about the orchard and who was Miss Larch’s nephew and seemed to know our mother, but James wasn’t paying attention anymore. His eyes were fixed on what was outside. When I went to the window, I saw why.

  No one ever came to our house and now we had our second visitor of the day. Agate was standing in the grass. I’d been avoiding the Halls and I’d kind of forgotten how beautiful she was. She looked like a fairy, as if she had appeared in our world by magic. Her pale hair was pulled back and she wore a black velvet jacket over her black dress. She was barefoot and she seemed out of breath, as if she’d been running.

  James looked at her, his changeable eyes a clear, deep green.

  Agate held something up in the air. At first I thought it was a copy of the Sidwell Herald that Mr. Rose had left behind. But it wasn’t the newspaper. She was waving a white piece of paper with a message for my brother.

  Midnight at Last Lake.

  My brother had a grin across his face.

  He looked like any other person whose wish had come true.

  At midnight, I wasn’t asleep. Old houses have noises all their own: mice in the walls, leaves hitting against the roof, footsteps on the attic floor. There was a cricket in my room, chirping away. Usually a cricket song was like a lullaby to me, but tonight it kept me awake. It was a starry night, and bright. There was a filigree of shadows on my wall from outside: tree branches, vines, and then James’s shadow passing by after he went out the window. I thought of how often birds tumbled from their nests, how branches broke, how storms were the worst at this time of year, when you least expected them, when the night seemed so deep and calm. I didn’t try to stop James. My heart lifted to know he was free, at least for a little while. Still, I worried. I knew my mother would be convinced that of all the people in the world, the last person James should be meeting at midnight was Agate Early Hall.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Summer That Wasn’t Like Other Summers

  SCHOOL LET OUT THE FOLLOWING WEEK. On the last day, after the books had been turned in and the lockers cleared out, I was walking home alone, wondering what I would do all summer. The weeks stretched out in front of me like blank pieces of paper, with the future unwritten. I heard someone shout my name. I turned to look behind me. Julia. It was impossible to run away, so I stood there, nervous, while she raced over.

  “Where’ve you been?” Julia was a little out of breath.

  “Nowhere,” I said blankly. “Here.”

  I just didn’t see how a friendship could work out, so what was the point? I had made the decision to stick with life as I knew it, which meant I was alone. But at least I wasn’t dumped or betrayed.


  I continued walking, and Julia did, too. It was a hot afternoon and there were bees buzzing in the fields.

  “In other words, you don’t want to be friends.” There was a catch in Julia’s voice. When I glanced at her I thought I saw a glimmer of tears in her eyes.

  “You don’t want to be friends with me,” I corrected her.

  “Who told you that? Because I never said that.”

  We were walking side by side, jumping into the grass whenever we heard a car behind us. It was hard having a conversation while we were either leaping around or striding along the hot blacktop.

  “No one told me. I just know what will happen. Eventually you’ll find other people you like better. They’ll tell you I’m a nobody and you’ll realize it was all a mistake, so it’s just faster and easier if we’re not friends from the beginning.”

  “Okay.” Julia nodded. “Fine.”

  My face felt hot. This had been my fear, that it would be this easy for her to drop me. And it would hurt this much. There were probably tears in my eyes now, too.

  Then Julia shocked me. “We’ll be soul sisters instead. That’s more than being friends. It means I won’t ever think being friends is a mistake and neither will you. It means you won’t guess what I’m thinking. Instead you’ll talk to me and I’ll talk to you, and we won’t keep things from each other.”

  I felt a surge of relief, but I said, “We don’t even have anything in common.”

  “Oh, like you’re tall, I’m short?” Julia grinned. “Important stuff like that? Is that what you mean?”

  I had to laugh. It sounded silly when she put it that way.

  “We actually have tons in common,” Julia went on. “We both love books, window seats, pie, dogs, and the last day of school!”

  That much was true. We were walking under the tall shady trees. At this time of year in Sidwell everything was green and lush. The summer stretching out in front of me was starting to seem pretty great. Having a friend made it feel as if summer would last twice as long and be at least three times as much fun.

  “And more importantly, we have a secret that binds us together,” Julia said solemnly. I looked at her and she nodded. “I saw James.”

  Julia knew about my brother.

  We went into the woods and found a quiet place where we could talk. At first I could hardly catch my breath. I didn’t know how it would feel to share my secret. I didn’t even know if I could share. The light coming in through the trees was yellow. There were wildflowers all around and ferns were unfolding. We’d gone pretty far, almost to the nesting place of the owls, which I could never seem to find without my brother. All the same, I had the feeling the owls were peering down at us. It was so quiet we felt we should speak in whispers, so we did. Once Julia began to talk, it was a huge relief to have someone know the truth.

  She told me that one night she’d heard Agate leave Mourning Dove when everyone else was in bed. She followed her out of the house, through the tall grass, into the woods. Soon she lost sight of her sister. In the dark, she felt lost and panicked. She’d heard there was a bottomless lake nearby, and was suddenly terrified that she’d fall into it, drown, and never be heard of again.

  Julia made her way through the brambles, getting more and more lost as she went on. At last she heard her sister’s voice, down at the shore of the lake. Agate was sitting there with my brother. Julia crouched down, hidden by a patch of thorny bushes. If she crashed back through the brambles they’d surely hear her and know she was spying. She said she felt spellbound. There were pools of moonlight in the grass and the lake looked black and was so still it seemed more like glass than like water. Agate and James were laughing and talking. Everything seemed so perfect, until James turned and Julia saw him for who he was. He seemed like he’d walked out of the pages of a fairy tale, a mythical creature who might carry her sister into the skies and never return.

  Julia rushed at him.

  “Leave my sister alone!”

  “We’re just sitting here,” James assured her. “Or we were.”

  Agate came between them. She looped her arms around Julia. “Please be on our side.” There were bright tears in her eyes. “We’ll have enough people who will be against us.”

  “So of course I am,” Julia told me as we sat whispering in the woods. “On their side, I mean.”

  And of course I was, too.

  Since we were now officially soul sisters, we vowed to keep their secret. Julia and I made a pact that we would do whatever we could to help James and Agate this summer. And that was how we sealed our friendship.

  With trust.

  After that, whenever I had free time and had finished my chores I sneaked away from the orchard. There was a heat wave, and the air was crackling as the temperature hovered around ninety-five. I usually met Julia at the shore of the bottomless lake she had blundered upon in the dark on the night she first saw James. The lake sat right between our properties. People called it Last Lake because it really was the last lake in Sidwell. All the others had dried up years ago during a heat wave that lasted all summer long, when there wasn’t a drop of rain. It was said that the fish in all those other lakes grew feet and walked across the meadows and ended up in Last Lake. There certainly were a lot of fish here. We lingered by the shore so we could see their silver and blue shadows flashing below the surface of the water. There were nearly as many frogs in the shallows, where lily pads floated. Some water lily flowers were white and some were yellow and some were the palest pink. Dragonflies darted above the water, their iridescent wings catching the glint of the sunlight.

  I couldn’t swim because of my cast, but I could still call out “Polo” every time Julia called out “Marco” as she splashed around in the water. Afterward we would lie out on the wooden dock that my grandfather had used for fishing. We read our books out there, and wore water lilies in our hair, and we talked about the future, when we would share an apartment in New York City.

  And then on one perfectly perfect day I saw it again. On a rock beside Last Lake.

  The blue graffiti.

  Julia hadn’t shown up yet, so I turned and did a headstand and there it was again. The face of an owl.

  Julia and I were meeting at the dock so early in the morning there wasn’t another soul around. It was the best time of the day. Even the frogs were still asleep. A few sparrows rustled in the bushes and doves were cooing nearby when Julia arrived. She spied the blue paint right away.

  “What is that?”

  We sat on the dock and I told Julia everything, how the blue monster was an owl turned upside down, how a very smart old gentleman had said it might not be what it appeared to be, how upset people were that someone was stealing from houses and stores, leaving the mark of a monster all over town.

  “We have graffiti in Brooklyn and it’s no big deal. It’s part of New York. A lot of people think it’s art.”

  “Well, we don’t have it in Sidwell,” I said. “And this graffiti seems like it’s definitely a message, except I have no idea what it means.”

  “I’d guess someone’s playing a joke. Someone who’s seen too many scary movies and believes all that nonsense about the Sidwell Monster.”

  “If the thefts and graffiti don’t stop they’ll hunt down the monster. And if they find James, it’s all over. They’ll blame him for everything.”

  “We could protect him if we found the real culprit,” Julia suggested.

  It was a perfect idea. We immediately made a list of steps we should take:

  One: Check out the spray-paint section of the hardware store.

  Two: Talk to Dr. Shelton.

  Three (and this was a little scary, but maybe it was how things were done in Brooklyn because it was Julia’s idea): Meet the culprit.

  In the meantime, we would help Agate and James and act as go-betweens. They had begun to write to each other, like star-crossed lovers in an old book. Sometimes Julia gave me a letter from her sister to bring to James. Agate used old-fashio
ned notepaper, the kind I didn’t even think they made anymore, a creamy-white parchment. There was a gold bee imprinted on the back of the envelope. Other times I had a note from James for Julia to bring home to Agate. He used the lined paper and thin blue envelopes that I’d found in my mother’s desk. It turned out my mother had quite a lot of stationery and stamps, as if she was having a long correspondence with someone, not that I’d ever seen her writing to anyone, nor had she ever received any personal mail. It was all flyers and bills, and now the Sidwell Herald arrived every day.

  When I carried my brother’s messages for Agate, I could almost read what he wrote through the sealed envelopes, but not quite.

  Julia and I grinned at each other when we exchanged these love letters, but we also shivered, and not from dipping our toes in the ice-cold lake. We both had the feeling something could go terribly wrong. Wasn’t that what had happened to Agnes Early and my four-times-great-grandfather Lowell? First love that had been cursed?

  We planned to find out more about Agnes and Lowell and to catch the graffiti artist, but it was summer and we had so many other things to do, the kind of things you can only do when school is over and time stretches out before you. We rode our bikes everywhere and visited every ice cream stand in Sidwell—there were four—and decided on our favorite flavors. Julia’s was peppermint stick, and mine, of course, was apple cinnamon. On rainy afternoons, we sprawled out on the window seat in Julia’s room to read. I was in the middle of Andrew Lang’s Red Book of Fairy Tales and Julia had chosen the Violet Book. We found an old cookbook from 1900 in the pantry and on some days we took over the kitchen of Mourning Dove Cottage, making desserts that probably hadn’t been made in Sidwell in a hundred years: graham cracker muffins, banana trifle, orange meringue. We collected wildflowers and pressed them between sheets of waxed paper, and thought of the poet Emily Dickinson as we did so. We painted our nails in shades we chose because of their names: First Light (silvery pearl), Saturday Night (bright red), Picnic (minty green), Summer (a delicate blue that was the color of the sky in July was my personal favorite, even though anything blue made me think of the graffiti).