The Backward Season

by Lauren Myracle

  Emily was growing older. Her dad no longer knew her as well as he used to.

  “How cute,” her mother said, peering over Emily’s shoulder. “Is there anything else? A card?”

  Emily upended the box, and a card slid out. On the front was a potato wearing a party hat. Beneath the potato were the words, “This is the day you’ve been waiting for . . .”—and inside the card—“. . . since you were a tot! Congratulations! You’re officially a teenager!”

  Ah, Emily thought, getting the pun. No longer a tater tot. Melancholy washed over her, pale and familiar.

  Happy birthday, kiddo, her father had written in his slanted penmanship. Blaine and I wish we could celebrate with you. Remember, our doors are always open. Say the word and I’ll arrange a plane ticket. Same for Nate. Say hi to him for us. We miss you both.

  Blaine, the stepmother Emily had never met.

  Have a great day, and may all your wishes come true, said the last bit. Love, Dad.

  Emily’s mother held out her hand. “May I?”

  Emily shut the card. “He said happy birthday, that’s all.” She turned to Nate. “And to tell you hi.”

  “He’ll call this evening, I suppose,” Emily’s mom said. “Remember to tell him about your school fees for this semester. He needs to pay half. It’s his responsibility.”

  “He sent the check in January,” said Emily.

  Her mom huffed. “Oh, did he? That man.” She tapped her lips, then rolled her eyes elaborately. “That’s right. He sent it in one of those legal-sized envelopes, all business, not even a note asking how we’re doing. One little note—is that too much to ask?”

  Emily and Nate exchanged a quick glance. They talked on the phone with their father once a month. He did ask how they were doing.

  “All right, back to the day,” her mother said, all sudden efficiency. “I know we’d planned to visit your grandmother at the care center this afternoon, but one of the aides called and told me she’s having one of her tired spells. Just wants to sleep and watch her soap operas.” Her mom’s eyes slid away. She’d received no such call, and Emily knew it. “We’ll go see her next weekend. It’s not as if she’ll know the difference.”

  Emily escaped to her bedroom with her card and unicorn pillow. She loved her odd grandmom Elnora, who would most certainly realize they failed to visit her on Emily’s thirteenth birthday. Thirteenth birthdays were a big deal in Willow Hill, such a big deal that Emily knew that’s why her mom had canceled the visit. Her mom didn’t want Grandmom Elnora talking to Emily about her favorite topic: magic.

  Not for the first time, or the hundredth, Emily vowed that if she ever had a child, she would be a different sort of mother from her own. She would try and see her child with clear eyes. To be the right sort of mother for the child she was given, whatever kind of child she or he was.

  Emily had a vision so powerful it knocked the breath out of her: she was in a pool of water, staring up through murky water. First, she experienced the vision as if it were actually happening, as if she were in her body, watching the water close over her as she was swallowed by the depths. Then she saw her body from above, as if she were looking down at herself. She saw her dark eyes widen and her pale face sink deeper and deeper.

  She came out of it with a jolt, dizzy and nauseated. Sweat beaded on her forehead. She sucked in sweet clean air.

  What had just happened?

  She’d had moments of déjà vu before, half memories that slipped out of her grasp like silverfish. But this . . .

  She’d remembered herself drowning, although there’d been no thrashing or gasping for air. She hadn’t fought the submersion. She’d just sunk.

  At once, she felt horribly itchy. Twitchy, like spiders were crawling down her back. Like someone had walked over her grave.

  “Get it together,” she muttered under her breath. This was her birthday. She refused to spend it moping around, so she grabbed her art pad and her new pencils and headed to City Park Lake.

  Outside, a breeze blew strands of hair into her face. She pulled an elastic off her wrist, gathered her hair into a bunch and pulled it through the elastic. She twisted the elastic and did the same thing again, repeating the pattern until she was left with a tight ponytail. The process satisfied her, familiar and routine.

  Halfway to the park, she saw two girls roller-skating along the sidewalk, arms wobbling as they fought to keep their balance. They were probably nine or ten, and she thought one of them looked like Elena Kosrov, Klara Kosrov’s little sister. Klara and Emily shared a birthday, which meant that Klara’d turned thirteen today, too. All through elementary school, Emily and Klara had brought treats for the other kids on the same day. Klara’s had always been better, because they were homemade.

  Emily paused to watch Elena and her friend. Emily used to love roller-skating, though she’d roller-skated solo. She was swept into a there-and-then-gone recollection of the exhilaration of zooming down a steep hill, sometimes going so fast she had to dive into the bushes bordering a driveway to bring herself to a stop.

  Elena and her friend laughed wildly, and their happiness lifted Emily’s spirits.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Ava

  “I always felt awkward as a girl,” the Bird Lady finally said. “Always out of place.”

  Wind stirred the wisteria vines dangling from the oak tree. The outside world was still there, Ava reminded herself. Her sisters, her aunts, Mama and Papa—they were doing whatever they were doing beyond the loamy expanse of the forest.

  The curtain of purple wisteria blooms seemed to separate the tree hollow from reality, yes.

  But it doesn’t really, Ava reassured herself.

  The Bird Lady leaned close. “I just . . . I never was able to understand how other people functioned in the world. I would laugh when others didn’t, for example. And things other people found funny, I didn’t understand. I always thought there must be a rule book I was missing.”

  “You were the odd girl out,” Ava said.

  The Bird Lady pointed at her. “Exactly, and an odd duck as well.” She tutted. “But I didn’t want to be an odd duck. Heavens, no. Girls in my grade, girls I’d gone to school with for years, they didn’t even know my name!”

  “What is your name?” asked Ava.

  “And so, as my Wishing Day approached—this was eons ago—I concluded that if I could simply see the world as others saw it, I could unlock the secret. Learn the rules. Be . . . well . . . normal. Popular.”

  The Bird Lady blinked. “And then my poor mother . . . Well, she died soon after my thirteenth birthday.” She checked to see if Ava was paying attention. “She died after my birthday, but before my Wishing Day. Before she died, she gave me one last bit of advice—she was a good mother, the best!—but I failed to heed it.”

  Ava was intrigued, but impatient. The Bird Lady’s speech felt rehearsed. Perhaps it was. If, as the Bird Lady said, there was a task that her sisters had started, and that Ava needed to finish, maybe the Bird Lady had put together a few words for the occasion.

  The Bird Lady dabbed at her eyes. “Mothers. Can’t live with them; can’t live without them. Am I right?”

  “No,” Ava said, her tone leaving no room for doubt. There was a middle road, and Ava planned on finding it. “So, what did you wish for, on your Wishing Day?”

  “Oh, well . . . things,” said the Bird Lady. She gave Ava a meaningful look.

  “Things?”

  “One thing, really. For my first wish, I wished for one specific thing. Do you want to know what it was?”

  “Um, yes. Please.”

  “Then ask!”

  “Seriously? I already did.”

  “You have to ask me specifically, about the one specific thing.”

  Ava felt as if she were in a mixed-up version of Rumpelstiltskin or some other upside-down fairy tale. “Ok-a-a-a-y. What was the one specific thing you wished for on your Wishing Day?”

  “Not like that. You have to ask . .
. better,” the Bird Lady said. She gave Ava another meaningful look. She waggled her eyebrows up and down.

  “Better how?”

  “Oh dear. You’re not the brightest lightbulb in the lightbulb shop, are you?”

  “You’re not the brightest . . . question asker!” Ava retorted.

  “We do the best with what we have,” the Bird Lady muttered to herself. She took a breath. “When you look through a window, what do you see?”

  “Whatever’s past the windowpane,” Ava said.

  “Yes! But, humans. Do humans have windows?”

  “In their houses, they do.”

  “Yes, I suppose. But do humans themselves have windows? Hmm?”

  Ava held her hands up. “No. Humans do not have windows.”

  “Oh, for pity’s sake. True, humans don’t have windows, not literally. But a poetic sort of person might say that a certain part of a human is similar to a window.”

  “A person’s eyes, then,” Ava said, mystified. “‘Eyes are the window to the soul.’ So?”

  “Yes! Good girl!” The Bird Lady clapped. “Now, ask again—what I wished for!”

  “For eyes that were windows to your soul?”

  “Don’t be obtuse!” the Bird Lady said. “I didn’t want people to see my soul. I had no interest in that. What I wanted was to see . . .” She rolled her hand, encouraging Ava to finish the thought.

  Ava felt as if she’d been thrust onto a game show without being told the rules. “Other people’s souls? By looking into their eyes?”

  The Bird Lady turned pink. “Close, so very close! Ask me one more time what I wished for, darling girl! And use a full sentence. Start with, ‘For your first wish, your impossible wish, did you wish for . . . ?’ And go on from there.”

  Ava didn’t like it, but she went along with it. “Fine. For your first wish, your impossible wish, did you wish that you could look into people’s eyes and”—she pushed through—“see their souls?”

  The Bird Lady seemed incapable of speech, but she grabbed Ava’s hands and squeezed them, nodding rapidly.

  “You wished to look into a person’s eyes and see her soul?” Ava repeated. “Why? And what would that even mean?”

  The Bird Lady cleared her throat. It took several attempts before she could answer. “Within a girl’s soul lives everything that makes her her. Her fears, her dreams, her secrets. What makes her happy. What makes her sad.”

  “So, basically, you wanted total omniscience,” Ava said.

  “I wanted it all, yes.”

  Ava’s skin crawled. “And how’d that work out for you?”

  Now the Bird Lady spoke rapidly, almost manically, about how the magic had played out. Her wish had come true, but not precisely as she’d anticipated. “Magic can be fluky,” she cautioned. “Remember that.”

  “You bet,” Ava said.

  First of all, the Bird Lady explained, the magic only worked with certain people. As in, the Bird Lady only saw the hopes and dreams of thirteen-year-old girls. Also, sometimes the Bird Lady interpreted things incorrectly. Other times, she looked into someone’s eyes and saw nothing.

  “What was your second wish, the wish you could make come true yourself?”

  The Bird Lady looked ruefully at her hands. “That I would admit to what I’d done, but only if someone specifically asked.”

  Ava snort-laughed. “As in, someone would have to say, ‘Hey, did you happen to wish for the ability to look into someone’s eyes and see their soul?’”

  The Bird Lady smiled and hitched her shoulders. Ave felt sucker punched. She felt embarrassed, and angry for feeling embarrassed, but she tried not to give the Bird Lady the satisfaction of showing it.

  “Actually, I bound my wish more tightly to myself than that,” the Bird Lady said. “If someone specifically asked, I would tell the truth. But I couldn’t tell the truth unless someone asked. Couldn’t, not wouldn’t. Do you understand the difference?”

  “I understand that you made a crazy wish,” Ava said.

  “I suppose I knew I was crossing a line, in a way,” the Bird Lady mused.

  In fits and starts, she told Ava what she’d told herself at the time: that yes, she made her first wish knowing that wasn’t how the magic was supposed to be used. But she convinced herself that her second wish made it okay. She wouldn’t lie about it, after all.

  “I’m older now, and hopefully wiser,” the Bird Lady said. “I accept accountability for my foolishness, but—those were the wishes I made.”

  “And your third wish?” Ava asked. “The deepest wish of your secret heart?”

  “I would prefer not to comment on that,” she said in a peculiar tone. Ava thought she saw her chin wobble, but it might have been a trick of the light.

  “So what happened?” Ava asked. “You made your impossible wish in order to become popular. Did it work?”

  “It did not. Even with my new ability . . .” She trickled off. “I suppose I was still too awkward. I blurted things out. I made everyone uncomfortable, more so than I had before. Oh, pet, those were sad times.”

  The Bird Lady reached over and patted Ava’s hand. Her skin was almost feathery. “My friends, or rather my peers, grew up, moved on, and settled into normal lives, while I fell more and more to the wayside. I took on an identity entirely without meaning to.” She snorted. “‘The town’s resident eccentric.’ Have you ever?”

  Ava smiled uneasily.

  “So, I decided to try a new tactic. Maybe if I helped other girls make their dreams come true, then girls would need me, admire me, like me.”

  The Bird Lady told Ava about a girl named Gemma who loved to sing. The Bird Lady’s gift allowed her to see Gemma’s dreams: She longed to be a famous singer when she grew up. So, on her Wishing Day, Gemma planned to wish that at the upcoming audition for the school musical, she would sing as well as Judy Garland.

  “Do you know who Judy Garland is?” the Bird Lady asked Ava. “She was Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz.”

  “My sisters and I watch that movie every Thanksgiving,” Ava said.

  “Well, I thought Gemma was aiming too low—”

  “Too low? Judy Garland is amazing!”

  “And so I convinced her to wish, at her audition, to have the voice of an angel.”

  The Bird Lady cut Ava a glance.

  Ava opened her mouth, then shut it. Maybe an angel would have a better voice than Judy Garland.

  “How did her audition go?”

  “Gemma sang with the voice of an angel,” the Bird Lady said, throwing her hands out as if to say, What else? “Unfortunately, as it turned out, humans can’t hear angels, so Gemma’s performance was a bit of a . . . let’s just say misfire. There she was, singing her heart out . . .”

  “And people heard nothing?” Ava said. She imagined a girl her age, singing and gesturing, her eyes shining. She imagined the other kids, whispering and giggling. The director of the musical, wearing an expression of pure confusion. “That poor girl!”

  “There was the loveliest smell of lilacs, though,” the Bird Lady said. “I just love lilacs, don’t you?”

  The Bird Lady told Ava another story, a story about a girl named Addie, who loved flowers. Her plants always died, however, so she was going to wish to be a good gardener. Instead, the Bird Lady urged her to wish for a green thumb.

  “Let me guess,” Ava said wryly.

  “Yes, she got a green thumb. Literally, a green thumb.” The Bird Lady tipped her head at Ava. “She got the gift of gardening, too, though.”

  There were other incidents like this—the Bird Lady didn’t share all the details—and she told Ava that at long last, she had started thinking that she needed to scale down her help.

  Ava suspected that the Bird Lady needed to stop offering “help” at all, but she kept her mouth shut.

  “And that’s where Klara comes in,” the Bird Lady said. “Your mother, that is.”

  “Yes. My mother.” Ava’s insides tightened.

&
nbsp; “Klara’s plan was to wish to be beautiful,” the Bird Lady said.

  “Beautiful?” Ava said, surprised. Her mother was beautiful. Was it because of her wish? “But you said earlier . . . I thought she wanted to be special!”

  “And she equated ‘beautiful’ with ‘special,’” the Bird Lady said. “Falsely, I might add. At any rate, when I looked into Klara’s soul, I saw that what she really wanted was to impress a certain boy.”

  Ava squeezed her hands into fists. Papa.

  “Beauty is fleeting, however—not to mention that Klara was a lovely girl already. So, I went to her on her Wishing Day. I went to her at twelve a.m., the moment her Wishing Day began. I threw pebbles on her window. She pushed it open. We talked, and I . . . I made a teeny-tiny suggestion, a suggestion that wouldn’t turn Klara green or leave her unable to utter a sound. Truly, just a simple little suggestion.”

  Ava’s guts clenched and released. For a moment, she feared she was going to throw up. “You told my mom to wish she’d won that contest thing instead of Emily?”

  The Bird Lady sighed. “I did.”

  “And you told her to make her wishes early instead of waiting for sunrise? Instead of waiting for Emily?!”

  “I did, and I’m very sorry. I wish I hadn’t, and obviously I’ll—”

  “Wait,” Ava said. “That means that you did this! The magic wasn’t punishing my mom. The magic was punishing you!”

  “There’s no need to blow things out of proportion. Things are going to work out in the end,” the Bird Lady wheedled. “After all, you’re here!”

  “But my mother! And Emily!”

  “By the time we set things straight, it’ll be as if none of it ever happened.” The Bird Lady pleaded with Ava with her eyes. “I helped Natasha and Darya, didn’t I? I got us this far.”

  Ava buzzed with angry adrenaline, but anger wouldn’t get her anywhere. Anyway, what the Bird Lady was suggesting, or almost-maybe-possibly suggesting, might be in line with what Ava already planned to do.