Nightbird

by Alice Hoffman

  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. Hen
drix, 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.

  “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.