In his normal voice, with a normal expression, he’d asked what the holdup was. Ava had scurried into the truck, heart thumping. Papa cranked the key, and the engine rumbled to life, its familiar thrum steadying Ava’s pulse.
Ava had glanced back at Darya as they drove off. Tiny pinpricks of light had blurred her vision, making Darya look hazy and far away.
Ava shut down Aunt Vera’s iPad, suddenly weary. If Ava knew without a trace of doubt that Emily existed, or that she’d existed once upon a time, she felt sure she’d find the strength to persevere. If only the universe would send her a sign! Couldn’t the universe just . . . send her a sign?!
A waitress jostled the table, tipping over the sugar dispenser.
“Oops, sorry, hon!” the waitress said. “I’ll pop right back with a rag.”
“No problem,” Ava said. Her voice sounded croaky. She cleared her throat and gave the waitress a smile. “I’ve got it.”
Ava righted the container and swept the spilled sugar into her hand. Some of the crystals remained, lodged into strokes gouged into the table.
Ava froze. She squeezed her eyes shut, opened them, and reread the message carved on the old, scarred table. The words were faint, aged by time and grease, but Ava had no trouble making them out: Klara & Emily, best friends forever.
Klara was Ava’s mother’s name.
I wish I knew all the answers.
—THE BIRD LADY
CHAPTER FIVE
Emily, Age Eight
It wasn’t until Emily was eight years old that she knew for sure she wasn’t like regular kids. She wondered if she might not be like regular grown-ups, either, except maybe Grandma Elnora. Only, that wasn’t a good thing. Emily knew this because of the lines that formed on her mother’s face when Emily said something that reminded her mom of Grandma Elnora. When that happened—and Emily had yet to figure out the rules for making it not happen—her mother would grab Emily’s chin and make Emily look at her.
“No ma’am,” her mother would say. “That is not how we behave.”
Those were the words her mother said in her “out loud” voice. The words she said in her “not out loud” voice were Please, no. Emily has an active imagination, that’s all. Please don’t let my baby have my mother’s curse!
A curse was a sickness, and Grandma Elnora, who visited on the first Sunday of every month, had that sickness. It wasn’t a tummy ache or the flu. It was . . . well, Emily didn’t know what it was, except that Grandma Elnora, like Emily, said things she wasn’t supposed to.
Like what happened a few weeks ago. Emily, Emily’s mom, and Grandma Elnora had gone for a walk. Emily’s brother, Nate, stayed home with their dad. Grandma Elnora glanced at Emily as they were heading out the door and said, “You’re going to trip if you wear those shoes, sweetness. You’ll trip and ruin your pretty dress.”
“Mother, please,” Emily’s mom said. To Emily, she said, “Your shoes are perfect. They make you look like a little lady.”
Emily looked down at her shiny black shoes. They were called Mary Janes, and they had a strap and a buckle. They pinched Emily’s toes.
During their walk, Emily did trip. She went sprawling onto the sidewalk, and she did ruin her pretty dress. She ripped the hem and got dirt on it, too.
“Mother!” snapped Emily’s mom. She was so mad she forgot to hug Emily and check on her bleeding knee.
“What?” Grandma Elnora said. “I didn’t make her trip, Rose. Emily, darling, did I make you trip?”
Emily shook her head, hot tears building up behind her eyes. She’d tripped all on her own. She had a scab for a week. She pulled it off before the skin underneath was ready, and she touched the moistness of it with the tip of her finger. Then she touched her finger to her tongue. Salty.
And another time:
Just last Sunday, Emily’s mother baked brownies when Grandma Elnora came over. While they were in the oven, Grandma Elnora said, “Rose, you need to take them out, or they’re going to burn.”
“Mother, I am quite capable of making brownies without your input,” Emily’s mom retorted from the sofa. That’s what she said with her out loud words. Inside her head, her mother wondered if she should check on them, just to be sure.
She didn’t.
I know full well how to set a timer, Emily heard her say silently. I am an excellent baker. Her mother’s unspoken words were accompanied by a wave of emotion, which Emily also sensed. Emily’s mom didn’t want Grandma Elnora to “win.” She didn’t want Grandma Elnora to be right.
Emily’s mom checked her watch. She tapped her foot. She rose the moment the timer beeped, but it was too late. The unmistakable smell of burnt brownies wafted into the den, and Emily’s mom cried out and stamped her foot.
Grandma Elnora caught Emily’s gaze and lifted her eyebrows. I tell her and tell her, she said to Emily with silent words. Is it my fault if she doesn’t listen?
At school, Emily gathered more clues that told her she was different from others. In third grade, she heard a girl named Sophie silently wishing she had hair like Klara Kosrov’s. Klara was another girl in their class. Emily looked at Klara’s hair, which was long and straight and shiny. She looked at Sophie’s hair, which was blondish and cut very short.
“Klara’s hair is pretty,” Emily told Sophie. “But yours is, too.”
Sophie’s eyes widened. She felt embarrassed and ashamed—those were the emotions that washed over Emily—and she scurried away even as Emily cried, “No, wait! Come back!”
Something similar happened with her third-grade teacher, Mrs. Robinson. In February, Mrs. Robinson had started growing distracted during lesson time, losing her train of thought and standing at the chalkboard looking dazed. While Mrs. Robinson was grading papers, she worried about her father, who was in the hospital. Sometimes she pictured him in his hospital bed, which made Mrs. Robinson sad. Other times she imagined him in his garden, which made her sad in a different way. When Mrs. Robinson thought of her father in his garden, Emily saw what she saw: a stooped man with big ears and a kind face, scattering mulch around a bed of flowers.
Please let him get better, Mrs. Robinson thought. Please let this new medication work.
Emily made a get-well card for Mrs. Robinson’s father, drawing a bouquet of flowers exactly like the flowers in Mrs. Robinson’s father’s garden. Emily was good at art.
“For your father,” she explained when Mrs. Robinson drew in a sharp breath. She tried to hold on to her smile, but Mrs. Robinson’s expression made Emily scurry away, just as Emily, without meaning to, had made Sophie scurry away by complimenting Sophie’s hair.
From that point on, Mrs. Robinson treated Emily the way she might treat an unfamiliar dog, a creature that might or might not bite. Emily felt confused and . . . and scolded, although Mrs. Robinson didn’t scold Emily out loud.
One day, not long after Emily had given Mrs. Robinson the card, the third graders had recess in the gymnasium because it was raining outside. Pouring, really, the sky a dark, bruised color.
Emily spotted Mrs. Robinson talking to the other third-grade teacher by a stack of foam mats, and warning bells pealed in Emily’s head.
She strolled in a wide loop around the gym, making certain her path took her by the two teachers. She tried to be invisible, la la la, just walking around the gym. When Emily passed Mrs. Robinson and Mrs. Singh, they stopped talking. She continued several feet farther, then knelt and pretended to tie her shoe. The teachers returned to their conversation, their voices low.
“She told me the card was for my father,” Mrs. Robinson murmured. “It was sweet, I suppose. But how did she know my father was sick?”
“Did you mention it to the students?” Mrs. Singh asked.
“I didn’t.”
“Perhaps something slipped out,” Mrs. Singh suggested. “It happens, you know.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Mrs. Robinson fretted. “Of course you’re right. And I like Emily. She’s bright, creative, polite .
. .” She fingered the cross she wore around her neck. “But tell me this, Louise. Have you ever sensed something unnatural about her?”
Face burning, Emily straightened up and strode away.
She’d learned something, however. She’d been given an important piece of the puzzle. Mrs. Robinson didn’t understand how Emily knew about her father’s illness, because Mrs. Robinson hadn’t mentioned it out loud.
Emily thought back to the day with Sophie. Emily had complimented Sophie’s hair to make Sophie feel better, because Sophie had wished she had hair like Klara Kosrov’s instead. Only, like Mrs. Robinson, Sophie hadn’t said what she’d been thinking out loud.
Was it as simple as that? Were you only supposed to talk to people when the conversation was out loud?
She tested her theory, holding back from responding when people thought something but didn’t say it. One day Emily noticed a frail girl named Lucy crouched over her saddle oxfords, coloring in the black bits with black Magic Marker. Emily felt Lucy’s anxiety, and she saw what Lucy saw: other kids laughing and pointing, making fun of her for being too poor to buy new shoes. Emily wanted to tell Lucy that no one was thinking about her shoes at all, but she kept her mouth shut.
Likewise, Emily almost exclaimed over how awesome it was that Maggie Stanton’s parents gave Maggie a kitten for her birthday. A super-cute kitten, which Emily knew because Maggie couldn’t stop thinking about her. Black with white paws, like little white mittens. Emily smiled, wanting to tell Maggie that yes, Mittens was a great name for her kitten.
She stopped herself in time, just barely.
Emily messed up with a boy named John Blasingame, though. John had always been grumpy, standoffish, the kind of boy whose body language told other kids to stay away. One morning, Emily found out why. She stood behind him, waiting to use the pencil sharpener, and his gray thoughts scuttled over her.
John was scared of his dad. He kept seeing his dad’s hard eyes and drawn-back fist. Emily, seeing what he saw, felt a pang.
“If your dad’s hurting you, you should tell Mrs. Robinson,” she blurted.
John went pale. Fear flickered in his eyes. Then his skin grew red and mottled, and Emily’s stomach dropped.
“Leave me alone, weirdo,” he said.
From then on, she stayed as far away from John as she could.
All of those incidents, considered together, made her think her theory was right, though. She didn’t understand why—or why no one had bothered to teach her—but the rule seemed to be that she should speak only when spoken to. In other words, she shouldn’t speak when thoughtened to. Thoughten probably wasn’t a real word, but whatever.
Still, there had to be more to it than that. Emily’s mom, for example, didn’t like it when Emily knew things the way Grandma Elnora knew things, even if whatever it was didn’t come up in conversation.
Maybe it was impolite for a person to let on in any way, shape, or form that she or he knew what another person was thinking? Although again, if that were the case, why hadn’t her mom simply told her so, the way she told Emily to chew with her mouth closed and keep her dinner napkin in her lap?
An alarming idea occurred to Emily. What if certain people, like her mom and Mrs. Robinson and John Blasingame, didn’t have to “pretend” not to know what other people were thinking? What if certain people honestly couldn’t hear other people’s thoughts?
Was it possible?
Some people were good at basketball. Other people—like Emily—couldn’t make a basket to save their lives. From what Emily was stitching together, maybe the same was true when it came to reading people’s thoughts. Maybe Emily and Grandma Elnora had a talent for it, just by luck of the draw. Grandma Elnora also had the talent of seeing the future, like with the brownies and Emily’s ripped dress. Emily didn’t have that talent.
More bits and bobs came together. The dread in Emily’s stomach grew.
Because parents liked it when their kids won basketball games or got first prize in a spelling bee. Parents admired those sorts of talents. So did other grown-ups. So did kids.
Nobody admired Emily’s talent.
As a matter of fact, other than Grandma Elnora, no one understood Emily’s talent, or even seemed to think it was a talent. “Unnatural” was the word Mrs. Robinson had used. “Leave me alone, weirdo!” John Blasingame had spat.
“Dave, it is our responsibility to teach Emily to be normal,” she overheard her mom say to her dad one evening. “We have to encourage her to blend in. What about that don’t you understand?”
“Encourage her or force her?” her dad responded. “Emily is Emily. It is not our responsibility, or even our prerogative, to turn her into someone else.”
Emily didn’t know what “prerogative” meant, but a quick probe into her dad’s thoughts cleared it up. He was saying that he and her mom didn’t have the right to change her into someone she wasn’t. More than that, he was saying that he loved Emily just the way she was.
Her eyes stung. She loved him, too. So much.
“Don’t play dumb,” her mom told her dad. “Maybe Emily doesn’t realize how different she is, but other people certainly do—and one day she’s bound to find out. The world is cruel, Dave. Do you want our daughter to be a social pariah?”
Pariah, another new word. From her mother, Emily gleaned that it meant an outcast, a person everybody hated.
Hated?
Her lungs constricted, but she stayed very still in the hallway, taking shallow breaths and digging her fingernails into her palms. If her parents knew she was listening, they’d stop talking about her. They might stop thinking about her, too. Or try to.
“I want our daughter to be proud of who she is,” her father replied. “Emily won’t be a pariah unless you make her see herself as one.”
“So this is my fault?” her mother said. “It’s wrong to want other people to look at us and see a normal, happy family?”
“Rose,” her dad said heavily. “Is there such a thing as a ‘normal, happy family’?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Our family is perfect just as we are,” her dad said. “Or we would be, if you’d lay off trying to change everybody.”
Emily slunk off, her face burning. Her mom wasn’t trying to change everybody. Just her.
She waited for her parents to go to bed, then slipped out of her room and went to her brother. Nate was ten and in the fifth grade. He was the best big brother ever. And, like her dad, Nate never treated her like she was weird.
“Hey, Nate, will you play a game with me?” she asked.
He propped himself up on his elbow and put aside his book. “It’s late,” he said. “We’re supposed to be asleep.”
“It won’t take long. Anyway, you weren’t sleeping. You were reading.”
He gave her a sideways smile. “Fine. What’s the game?”
She perched on the end of his twin-size bed. He scooted back and sat all the way up.
“I’m going to think about something really hard, and I want you to guess what it is,” she instructed. “Okay?”
She scrunched her forehead and thought about doughnuts. Doughnuts, doughnuts, doughnuts, because Nate loved doughnuts. She painted the most vivid mental picture she could of his favorite kind: a cake doughnut with maple frosting.
“Well?” she asked. “What was I thinking?”
“That . . . you need to use the bathroom?”
“No!” She wanted to throw something at him, but found nothing to throw. “I was thinking about doughnuts. Maple doughnuts.” She pushed her hand through her hair. “You think about something, and I’ll see if I can tell.”
Emily had developed a habit of tuning Nate’s thoughts out. She could do that if she tried. She followed the same practice with her mom and dad, although she made exceptions, obviously. It was pretty easy with Nate and her dad. Her mom’s thoughts, however, were often so strong that she couldn’t keep them out even when she wanted to.
Now, sitti
ng on Nate’s bed, she opened herself to his thoughts on purpose.
“You’re thinking about the library,” she said. “About that desk with walls you sit in, wearing those huge headphones.”
“It’s called a carrel,” Nate said. “I borrow the headphones and a tape player—”
“And listen to that music you like,” Emily finished. “Music played on an old-fashioned instrument. Not a guitar, not a mandolin . . .”
Nate started to answer, but Emily cut him off.
“Don’t tell me! Just think the word really hard.” She closed her eyes, then opened them and grinned. “Lute! You listen to lute music!”
Nate tugged at the neck of his pajama shirt, but didn’t contradict her.
“Do another,” Emily said.
After a moment, she exclaimed, “The field trip you went on to hear a string quartet!”
Nate nodded. He pulled his eyebrows together, and Emily concentrated.
“Mom and Dad,” she said. “You’re thinking about how . . .” She trailed off. He was thinking about how they’d been fighting more and more. He was also telling Emily that it wasn’t her fault. That he’d known for a long time that she was different. That he, like their dad, didn’t care.
“But why?” she said. “Why am I different?”
“You can read people’s minds,” he stated.
“You can’t?” she asked.
The way he looked at her made goose bumps scatter over her. “Emily, most people can’t.”
“Oh,” she said. She felt naked, though of course she had her pajamas on.
“You have a gift,” Nate said earnestly. “An extremely cool, extremely unusual gift. It’s called telepathy.”
“Telepathy,” Emily repeated.
“I researched it,” Nate said.
“Because of me?”
“I wasn’t sure it was real, but . . . well . . .”
The Backward Season Page 4
