The orchard already felt different when she pulled onto the drive. Like a person, even a little bit of time had changed it a little. It was the first day of September, and on cue the leaves had started to turn slightly brown; the peaches had all disappeared. It felt like the orchard was curling up on itself to wait for the winter, hoping to keep warm.
Murphy was sweaty and exhausted when she pulled up in front of the house in a cloud of driveway dust that had been churned up before her arrival. She parked her bike at the foot of the porch and hopped up, rapping on the door. Poopie answered.
“They’ve gone walking, Murphy,” she said, grinning. “Maybe there are still some berries left for pie.” Poopie was fondling her necklace and her grin was from ear to ear. “Why don’t you sit and wait?”
Murphy shook her head. “Why do you look like you ate the canary, Poopie?”
Poopie squinted at her. “Canary?”
“Why do you look so happy?”
Poopie laughed. “It’s a great day,” she answered, shaking her head. “You missed it. Balmeade come over and yelled and yelled about how people don’t keep their words. And something about squid that made no sense. But Walter kept saying he is keeping the orchard. First time that man ever surprised me in my life.” Poopie laughed, and her eyes danced.
“Are you serious?” Murphy grinned. In reply, Poopie hugged her and kissed her on the cheek.
Energy zinged from Murphy’s fingertips to her toenails. “Birdie knows?”
Poopie nodded. “She knows.”
“I’m gonna go look for them. Thanks.” Murphy skipped out onto the porch, and noticed on her way down the stairs that the statue of Saint Jude was gone.
As she walked down the rows of trees toward the lake, her heart thrummed. She couldn’t wait to see Birdie now. But she also had the urge to turn and run, like Birdie had run in Texas.
She heard them laughing before she saw them. They were jumping around playing Frisbee with a guy. For a moment Murphy thought it was Rex, and her breath caught. But then she realized it was someone who looked like Enrico. All three turned toward her at once.
“Hey,” she said, walking slow now up to where they were standing, hurting slightly that they were all here without her. And breathing easier because she was here now. She squinted at Enrico, feeling self-conscious. “Enrico?”
“Murphy.” Birdie leaned forward and hugged her tightly. “He chased me from Texas. Isn’t that sweet? And did you hear about the orchard? Did you hear we’re staying?”
Murphy blinked a few times, then smiled. If she hadn’t been so nervous, she would have jumped up and down, but she shoved her hands into the pockets of her cutoffs. “I’m so happy for you, Birdie.” She looked at Enrico. “Welcome back.”
“Thanks.” Enrico nodded, looking around like he recognized he was in the middle of a weird moment he didn’t belong in. “But actually, I have to go.”
After they all exchanged good-byes, Birdie walked him up toward his car, her dogs trailing behind them as Leeda and Murphy stood watching them. They disappeared into the trees, and then Leeda and Murphy had nothing to look at anymore except each other.
“That’s great about Birdie, right?” Murphy said awkwardly.
“Yeah.” Leeda smiled, but nervously.
They nodded and Murphy shoved her hands deeper into her pockets.
“You wanna go for a swim?”
Leeda looked over her shoulder at the lake, considering. “Yeah.”
They both stripped slowly and awkwardly to their undies and waded in, Murphy too unsure to dive. They swam around each other carefully, Murphy watching to make sure she didn’t swim too close to Leeda or too far away. Without Birdie, it all felt lopsided, and when Birdie returned, looking slightly crushed, they were still swimming circles around each other.
Birdie looked from one to the other, her brown eyes dancing. “You guys are idiots,” she finally said, sounding very much like Murphy. Murphy and Leeda looked at each other. Leeda smiled.
Then she dove under and grabbed Murphy’s ankles, yanking her under. When they both spluttered their way up, Leeda was laughing. Murphy dunked her back under the water, Murphy opened her eyes, and a stripe of afternoon sunlight lit up the particles and the tiny water bugs that spun and ducked and dove around them. She heard the splash of Birdie leaping into the water. They were, finally, complete.
On a warm late August evening, after one of the most surprising summers of her life, Poopie Pedraza tucked her statue of Saint Jude into a box. Now that she believed in miracles, she wanted to share them. Poopie sent the box to a children’s cancer ward in Atlanta, but the box was taken home by a postal employee who had a number of personal problems, including an addiction to stealing mail.
Chapter Twenty-six
Birdie had forgotten what it felt like to stand on solid ground. Lying on the grass after they swam, the feeling flooded in on her all at once, and she laid her hands on the softness of her less-soft-than-it-used-to-be belly and felt herself breathe. She listened to the heartbeat of the orchard and felt Leeda’s and Murphy’s pulses where their ankles touched.
Honey Babe and Majestic had stopped competing for her attention for the moment. And they sat still when Birdie hoisted herself over onto her elbows and pulled out the Swiss army knife she had used to cut tufts of fur for Enrico, and cut some for Leeda and Murphy too. She shoved them into the pockets of their dry clothes, piled nearby. Murphy made a face and complained about the dogs, but Birdie knew Murphy liked them, and she just didn’t want to say.
When they all got hungry, they tromped up to the kitchen to munch on the last of the amaretto-peach salsa, which Poopie swore she would show them how to make. Then they sat on the porch, drying themselves in the breeze. Walter came by once, on his way out to his truck, and patted Birdie gently on the head, almost shyly, like she was a stranger, but someone he would be willing to get to know. That’s how Birdie saw it anyway. On a day like today, everything seemed goodwilled and perfect and right. Even when her mom called, and she ducked in to talk to her for a few minutes, and Cynthia guilted her again about her decision not to move in, Birdie hardly noticed it. She told her she’d see her tomorrow at Liddie’s Tea Room for lunch. Her mom, for the moment, seemed perfect too.
Leeda and Murphy kept saying that they were going to get going, that they had to get ready for school, and that they both had a ton of stuff they had to do. But nobody moved from the porch for an hour, and when they did, it was to walk down to the pecan grove and look for nuts, which they then threw at each other. Murphy and Birdie convinced Leeda to climb one of the trees, but the limb she hoisted herself onto splintered and broke, and Birdie—slapping her hand against her forehead, feeling stupid—suddenly remembered pecan wood was the most brittle wood there was. Leeda said she hated trees. But it was obviously one of those things Leeda said to cover up her embarrassment, even though she didn’t really seem all that embarrassed anymore. Birdie was wiser now. About them both.
The day, though days were supposed to be shortening, seemed to stretch longer than any other they’d had that summer. And Birdie kept expecting to see sunset, and then she’d look at Leeda’s watch, and it would only be two, or three, or four. She wondered if the day wouldn’t end at all because they all, including the orchard, were still holding on to it as tight as they could, unwilling to let it go.
They did headstands against the trees. They carved their initials into the magnolia by the cider house with Birdie’s Swiss army knife. They lay on their backs and talked about Enrico, but not Rex. They watched a random duck waddle by on his way to the lake. Birdie had a feeling that they all noticed the chill in the air, that the day seemed to be getting cooler, and that fall was just around the corner. But nobody said anything about it.
They ended up in the lake again in the late afternoon. Their feet took them there without them deciding.
As they swam and talked, dusk finally fell around them, so slowly that they barely realized it. At dark they end
ed up on the bank on their backs again, dripping onto the grass. The day had turned out like circles—turning back on itself, bringing them to the same spots over and over. And it almost made Birdie’s heart ache that time was passing. It was all too good to let go.
A gaggle of lightning bugs popped their lights on just above the grass. They seemed to be blinking in unison, over and over, lighting together on some secret signal that Birdie would never have been able to explain but that she understood.
“Look at those bugs,” she whispered, pointing it out to the other girls.
“I don’t see anything,” Leeda said, tugging at her wet hair.
“You’re a nature freak, Bird,” Murphy added, not even turning around.
Birdie sighed. She knew it meant something.
The day felt almost like any other day of the summer, like they’d rewound and summer was still ahead of them. But this time, from the start, there would be no question of whether they had each other or not.
This time, they would know.
On September 1, though nobody knew it or ever would, the Darlington Orchard peaked at the most tree carvings per capita anywhere in the United States. As one peach tree unfurled the words MILLER ABBOTT LOVES JODEE MCGOWEN 4EVER for the thirtieth year in a row, and an oak bearing the names CYNTHIA AND WALTER inside a jagged heart went brown at the leaves and began to decay, churning itself back into the Georgia soil one letter at a time, a magnolia next to the cider house came to bear three sets of initials:
M.M.
L.C.S.
B.D.
For years after, it grew, and the scars of the wood deepened, and stretched out. Until the letters were no longer anything but puckered, jagged lines marking the time the tree had passed. Marking life.
Acknowledgments
This book would not exist without Dan Ehrenhaft, and it would be missing much of its heart had Sara Shandler not been there to provide it every step of the way. I’d like to express my admiration and gratitude to my agent Sarah Burnes, as well as to Les Morgenstein, Josh Bank, Kristin Marang, and Elise Howard. Much thanks to the kind people at Lane Packing Company and Dickey Farms—especially David Lane III, Betty Hotchkiss, Ryan Cleveland, and the Dickey family—for sharing their valuable time and their peaches. Appreciation to Mike Vermillion, and to Alexia James for her nurturing presence. Thanks always to my family.
Read on for an excerpt from
Jodi Lynn Anderson’s book Tiger Lily
Chapter One
Let me tell you something straight off. This is a love story, but not like any you’ve heard. The boy and the girl are far from innocent. Dear lives are lost. And good doesn’t win. In some places, there is something ultimately good about endings. In Neverland, that is not the case.
To understand what it’s like to be a faerie, tall as a walnut and genetically gifted with wings—who happened to witness such a series of events—you must first understand that all faeries are mute. Somewhere in our evolution, on our long crooked journey from amoeba to dragonfly to faerie, nature must have decided language wasn’t necessary for us to survive. It’s good in some ways, not to have a language. It makes you see things. You turn your attention, not to babbling about yourself, broadcasting each and every thought to everyone within earshot—as people often do—but to observing. That’s how faeries became so empathic. We’re so attuned to the beating of a heart, the varied thrum of a pulse, the zaps of the synapses of a brain, that we are almost inside others’ minds. Most faeries tune this out by only spending time with other faeries. They make settlements in tree stumps and barely venture out except to hunt mosquitoes. I get bored by that. I like to fly and keep an eye on things. That was how I saw it, from the beginning. Some would like to call it being nosy. That’s what my mother would say, at least.
That morning, I was on my way to see about some locusts. They’d invaded and eaten all the good parts of a faerie settlement near the river, and I had never seen a locust before. I was flying along on a curiosity mission when I passed the girls in a manioc field.
They were out cultivating the tubers—in the tribe, a woman’s job. All in their early teens: some of the girls were awkwardly growing but still thoroughly in their skin, with gangly limbs that expressed their most passing thoughts, while others were curvy, and carrying those curves like new tools they were learning. I recognized Tiger Lily instantly; I had seen her before. She stood out like a combination of a roving panther and a girl. She stalked instead of walked. Her body still held the invincibility of a child, when at her age it should have been giving way to fragile, flexible curves.
These were Sky Eaters, a tribe whose lives were always turned toward the river. They fished, and grew manioc in the clearing along its shore. A Sky Eater wandering far into the thick, unnavigable forest was like a faerie wandering into a hawk’s hunting territory. It happened only rarely. So when they heard the crashing through the trees, most of the girls screamed. Tiger Lily reached for her hatchet.
Stone came through first, splitting through the branches. The other boys rallied behind him. And Pine Sap, last and weakest of them all, brought up the rear. They were all breathless, shirtless, a muscular and well-organized group with weedy Pine Sap trailing at the back.
Stone gestured for the girls to come with them. “You’ll never believe it.”
The girls followed the boys through the forest, and I grabbed a tassel of Tiger Lily’s tunic because I, too, was curious, and she ran faster than I wanted to fly. And then we cleared the last of the trees leading to the cliffs, and the way to the sea was open, and I heard a noise escape Tiger Lily’s lips, a little cry, and heard it on the other girls’ lips too as they arrived behind her. There upon the water was a large ship, a skeleton against the sky, collapsed and flailing into the rocks close to shore, broken apart and drowning. The scene was all deep blues and grays and whites and the wild waves lifting it all like deep gasping breaths.
Looking closer, I could see little pink people—tiny, falling and clinging. I knew right away they must be Englanders, a people we knew of from across the ocean.
“They’re dying,” one of the girls breathed—a reedy thing I knew to be named Moon Eye—gesturing with her thin arms.
Between the ship’s decks, the rocks soared. Pieces of it raced into the sea and disappeared. Little people dropped from it in droves.
Pine Sap elbowed Tiger Lily’s arm; he pointed, his finger snaking to trace a line farther in. One little rowboat moved toward shore like a water bug, but we could see that it was caught in the breakers.
It had only one occupant—a fragile figure, a lone man. He was making for the shore with all his might and getting nowhere. As we looked on, the waves buffeted him, until finally he was knocked from the boat, though he somehow managed to cling to its bow. He looked to be as good as dead. But seconds later, he hurled himself back on board.
The tiny boat looked fit to capsize, was half full of water already, and the man was not an adept seaman, constantly turning the boat broadwise when it should have been pointed vertically against the waves. Still, he rowed, and rowed, and despite everything, and to our utter surprise, the boat suddenly lurched its way out of the breakers and into the calm waters by the beach. He collapsed down and forward for a moment, as if he might be dead, and then began to row, calmly, toward the shore. Several people in our group let out their breaths. I did too, though no one would have heard me.
To me it seemed like he was trading one deadly place for another, and that drifting back out to sea was no less dangerous than walking into the island without knowing its dangers. The forest would eat him alive, even his bones.
The young people of the tribe were all looking at each other with a combination of exhilaration and fear, except for Tiger Lily, stony and unreadable, her eyes on the man below. Pine Sap grabbed her hand and pulled her back from the cliff’s edge; she had been standing so close the wind might have blown her over.
“They’ll be deciding what to do about him,” Stone said.
>
Because all Neverlanders knew what danger Englanders brought with them.
The children raced home to see what the village council would do. I stayed and watched the ship floundering in the waves for a while longer, then flew to catch up.
That was the beginning, or at least the beginning of the beginning, of the changes that were coming for Tiger Lily: the arrival of one little man on one little lifeboat. By that day, I had known of Tiger Lily for years. I also knew a little of her history: that Tik Tok, the shaman, had found her while he was out gathering wild lettuce for medicine, under a flower—either abandoned there or hidden from some peril by someone who didn’t survive to come back for her. He’d named her Tiger Lily, after the flower she was under, bundled her into his arms, and taken her home. When she’d grown old enough to seem like a real girl, he’d built her a house next to his down the path that led to the woods and moved her into it. He didn’t want her borrowing his dresses.
Tik Tok lived in a clay house he’d built himself—the most intricate in the village. It was my favorite home to sleep in when I was passing through, because it had the best nooks, and a faerie always likes to sleep in tight places for fear of predators. He’d seen the same constructions done in one of the other tribes on the island—the Bog Dwellers, who lived in the mud bogs among the old bones of prehistoric animals—and he’d dragged the whole rib cage of a beast home piece by piece to make the frame. With a craftsmanship possessed by no one else in any village, he’d fashioned shelves and windows, to create a dwelling that put the rest of the tribe’s simple houses to shame.
Now he was sitting by a warm fire inside, as the sun was setting and the night was growing cool, as it often did at the end of the dry season. He wore a long dress of raspberry-dyed leather—his favorite—and his hair braided down his back, a leather thong tied around his head with a peacock feather in back. His posture was straight and graceful as any woman’s. His eyes were closed in concentration, and his lips moved in a conversation with the invisible gods that, as shaman, he visited in trances. Out of breath, Tiger Lily moved into the room soundlessly and hovered, waiting for him to finish.
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