Nightbird

by Alice Hoffman

  “They’re saying it will rain tonight,” James informed me when some blue jays flew by. “They know when to leave New England,” he would say of the geese calling as they passed overhead. “They’re headed to Florida. They’ll follow the coastline and stop in North Carolina.” My brother’s eyes would light up. “Imagine flying all that way? That’s freedom.”

  It was a miracle to live as birds do, except for one thing: Anyone seen in flight would surely be captured, perhaps even shot down like a crow flying above a cornfield. It’s always dangerous to be different, to appear as a monster in most people’s eyes, even from a distance. That was why our mother didn’t want James to be found out and why she had forbidden him to fly.

  No one in our town knew my brother existed. As far as they were concerned, Sophie Fowler had come back from New York City with one child, and that child was me. My mother always said all our secrecy was to protect James, but sometimes I wondered if protecting someone might also ruin his life.

  Because he could never go out, he had built a gym for himself so he could stay in shape. I’d bought most of the materials at the General Store, a little at a time, with money saved from both our allowances. It wasn’t as if we had much to spend it on anyway.

  “Hey, Twig,” one of the Gossip Group had called the last time I went to pick up some tools and rope. “What are you building? A tiger trap?”

  The men thought this was very funny. I paid for the rope and a hammer and nails and said nothing, but inside I was simmering. When they kept on teasing me, wondering if it was a bear I was after, or maybe an elephant, I blurted out, “I thought I’d catch the Sidwell Monster.”

  The men grew quiet, but from the looks on their faces I knew I had better be careful. The monster was no joke to them. I knew some of them thought there should be an official monster hunt now that the creature had grown bold enough to take the shirts right off people’s clotheslines and drink bottles of milk that had been delivered to the back entrance of the elementary school. I’d heard that some Sidwell citizens thought the monster was behind the graffiti on Mr. Stern’s store. I knew that wasn’t true. But the Gossip Group clearly thought otherwise.

  “Not a bad idea, Twig,” a man named Jack Bellows said. He was one of the carpenters working over at Mourning Dove Cottage. “Now that he’s stealing things, who knows what the monster will do next? Maybe he’ll start walking inside our front doors to take whatever suits him. Maybe we’ll open our eyes and there he’ll be, standing over our beds. What will we do then?”

  The men started to grumble about plans to hunt the monster this summer. I didn’t like what I was hearing. It sounded like a lot of fear and prejudice to me.

  “Actually I’m making a mega–jump rope,” I said. “I don’t believe in monsters.”

  That calmed things down. If a twelve-year-old girl wasn’t frightened then a group of grown men looked pretty silly to be so rattled by something no one had ever seen or heard.

  “Don’t jump so high you hit the moon,” Mr. Stern said as I was leaving.

  I smiled then. “I won’t.”

  I liked Mr. Stern. He always said the reason my mother’s pies and cakes were his store’s best sellers was because she was the best baker in New England, maybe even the best in the country.

  It took two months for my brother to build his gym, and when he was done it was worthy of a circus acrobat. He practiced for hours on the rings and the trapeze, walking on a wire so thin it seemed he was walking on air.

  “Hey, you,” he’d say when I came up the stairs.

  “Hey, you,” I’d say back with a grin.

  We were always on each other’s side, loyal at all times. I never said a word to my mother even though I knew that James sneaked out at night. It was after dark when the woods were most filled with magic, when there were fireflies and the mist was rising from the streams. Another secret of ours, one I’d never tell: He sometimes brought me with him. I think our mother would have flipped if she found out that I knew what it felt like to dart through raindrops, to follow herons over the flat water of the lake, to rise above the town of Sidwell when every window was dark and the bell at Town Hall chimed so far below us it sounded like a child’s toy.

  It had begun when I was five years old, right after my mother took me out of the play. I had always begged and pleaded with my brother, and when he saw how disappointed I was not to be the Witch of Sidwell, he finally gave in. I think he’d always wanted to share how beautiful and blue the earth appeared from above.

  That first time, I clung to him and closed my eyes. I had to stop myself from crying out when he leapt into the starry night sky, but when I opened my eyes I knew the secret my brother carried with him, the amazement of flying through clouds, skimming over the trees, making our way through the labyrinth of the forest, counting stars as the night glimmered around us.

  Sometimes whole flocks of birds followed in our wake. The dozens of abandoned baby birds James had raised recognized him, as if he was their brother as well as mine, an odd large bird with a human face who knew how to speak their language. James was currently caring for a baby owl that had injured its wing in a fall from its nest. The owl sat on his shoulder and ate bits of cereal from his fingers. James had named him Flash because his big yellow eyes seemed like a flashlight beam. Flash’s wing was still healing, so mostly he hopped around. He had a way of tilting his head that made it appear he understood every word you said to him.

  On one of our flights, James had shown me where the Sidwell owls could be found in the Montgomery Woods. I always go back there when I go on hikes. I hoot and call, and occasionally I’ll spy an owl peering down from a tree. Our owls are called saw-whet owls. They’re as small as robins, and they usually hide in the foliage when they spy people nearby, but my brother was different and the owls knew it. They trusted him and maybe because of that, they had begun to trust me.

  “They’re unique,” my brother had explained. “I’ve never seen owls like these in any reference books.” They were all black as crows. “Other saw-whets are brown. It must be a genetic mutation.”

  Some things could only be found in Sidwell, it seemed: Pink apples, black owls, and my brother, James.

  When I got home from the hospital, I held up my arm so James could see my cast. He was balanced on one of the large aerial rings he’d recently installed. He so excelled on the trapeze that the General Store didn’t have everything he needed, and I had ordered new equipment from circus-supply stores.

  James’s expression shifted when he saw I’d been injured. He dropped to the floor. “Did someone hurt you?” He was always fiercely protective. I’d told him about the way kids sometimes made fun of me, using my nickname against me. Skinny as a twig, tall as a twig, dumb as a twig. Nothing terribly original; still, it hurt. But that was a long time ago, back when I was in elementary school. Now everyone just ignored me. I wasn’t worth the time to be teased.

  “It’s not serious. And I did it to myself. I fell out of a tree.”

  “I should have been there. I could have caught you.”

  “Well, lucky for me, the Hall sisters were there.”

  James was instantly curious. “The new neighbors?”

  I nodded. “They sort of rescued me. Julia’s the one who’s my age. Agate is older. Almost your age. She has blond hair and she smells like jasmine and she only wears black.”

  I realized I’d said too much. I stopped blabbing about the Hall girls. I’d made James remember how lonely he was. He kept asking questions, wanting to hear more about them, especially Agate. What grade was she in, where did she come from, what did I say was the scent of the perfume she wore? He had a far-off look, so I didn’t tell him everything. I knew it would only make him feel worse. I skipped over how beautiful Agate was and stuck with stories about what a mess their yard was and how smart Beau was, because I knew James had wanted a dog forever. Still, he always came back to asking about Agate. Maybe he had a dream girl and maybe he thought she was that dream
come true.

  “I wish,” James began. Then he stopped. He didn’t have to say it aloud. I knew he wished he was like everyone else. A boy who could visit the girl next door and see for himself what she looked like. “Wishes are worthless,” my brother muttered as he turned away.

  I heard a bitterness that hadn’t been there before. Something was changing inside him. He’d had enough of following the rules. I could read it in his eyes, gray as a storm.

  James had a theory about caged birds, one he hoped to prove when he became a scientist someday. He believed that all birds that had their freedom taken from them eventually lost their voices. Once that happened, they could never again find their true song.

  In the past months, I’d wondered if that was happening to James. A sort of hopelessness had sifted down and had come between us. When I asked him to take me into the woods, he said he was too tired, yet I often heard him go out at night. It was clear he didn’t want my company anymore. We had always played board games after supper; now he said he’d rather be alone. He was withdrawing. I think it was getting harder for him to accept his fate.

  Like a bird in a cage, he grew silent.

  As my mother and I went about our lives we sometimes forgot he was there. When he was younger James would ask my mother when he could go to school like everyone else, when he could go into town, and of course the question that was on my mind as well: When would we see our father? James had stopped asking long ago, and now I was afraid he had given up. Every once in a while I went up to the attic to ask him to do a speeded-up Shakespearean speech. I begged and begged until he gave in. To be, or not to be, he began. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles. He spoke so fast the words slurred together, and before long we were both laughing. It was a relief to hear James laugh again, and even more of a relief to know after all this time of being caged, he still hadn’t lost his voice.

  I liked to walk to school because it gave me time to think. You might imagine I’d spent enough time by myself, but somehow in the woods it was different. I felt at home surrounded by the creatures that lived here. There were chipmunks and quail and scores of field mice. No outsiders, no monsters, only beauty all around me. I could climb onto a crag and look down at Sidwell. It was the perfect New England town, with a magic all its own. Sometimes it seemed that we were cut off from the rest of the world and time itself moved differently here. If enchantment could be found anywhere, it would surely be in the Berkshires, where the woods were so green and deep, and a mist rose from the streams that crisscrossed the meadows so that even those of us without wings felt as if we were walking through the clouds.

  I went through the woods until I could cut through to the end of Old Mountain Road. Then I walked along the asphalt with the sun beating down on my shoulders. Whenever I heard a car coming up behind me, I’d jump into the tall grass and wait for the driver to pass. I did so carefully, because once I’d almost stepped on three baby field mice waiting for their mother to return with their breakfast.

  On the Monday after I broke my arm there was a friendly beeping of a horn as I walked along. When I turned there was the Halls’ car. Mrs. Hall—I still couldn’t call her Caroline—and the girls waved. They looked much too fashionable for Sidwell, but all the same they were so warm and cheerful, as if their rescue after my fall had made us friends forever. As soon as I thought the word friends I grew dizzy. My heart thudded. I think I looked the way a deer by the side of the road does when it’s startled by the sudden appearance of human life.

  Julia rolled down her window. “Your chariot has arrived. Hop in.”

  I hesitated. I wanted to ride to school with the Hall girls. Maybe then I wouldn’t be such an outcast. Maybe I’d even call myself Teresa instead of Twig. But I knew my mother wouldn’t approve. No invitations were to be accepted, not of any sort. And most assuredly there was to be no contact with the witch’s family, not under any circumstances, not after what had happened to us two hundred years ago.

  “I think I need the exercise.” As if walking two miles to school were an Olympic feat. “Thanks anyway.”

  I walked on, more slowly than usual. My one chance of having a friend and I’d blown it. The car kept pace with me.

  “How’s your broken arm?” Julia called.

  “Still broken!”

  “Well, you look marvelous!” Agate chimed in.

  “Super-duper,” Mrs. Hall agreed from behind the steering wheel.

  “Perfect.” Julia grinned.

  Our joke cheered me up. I’d been embarrassed to go to school with my cast, thinking I looked like even more of a gawk than usual, but the Halls made me forget about that. The cast wasn’t really so bad. The car stopped and the doors swung open. Agate and Julia hugged their mother good-bye, then came running to join me.

  “We need the exercise, too,” Agate said. “We’re too lazy.”

  “We’re here to change our lives,” Julia added. “So we might as well start by walking.”

  We trotted along, arm in arm. At first I was afraid that my mother might drive past on her way to the grocery and spy me with the girls, but after a while I just stopped worrying. I wasn’t inside Mourning Dove Cottage, but on a public road, which was there for anyone to walk upon, even the Hall sisters, even me.

  “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.r />
  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.