May Bird and the Ever After (4 page)

“Remember when May forgot to lock the bathroom door on the bus trip, and it swung open?”

May shifted from foot to foot, looking at the ground to hide her flaming face. She gazed toward the adults' table helplessly, wanting to make sure her mom couldn't see. Luckily Mrs. Bird was still busy talking with the other grown-ups.

It was the three-legged race that saved her. The mayor of Hog Wallow announced that everyone was to line up across the lawn by the pink flag.

No sooner had he said it than, shouting and laughing, the children went tearing across the grass. Dazed, May dragged herself after them, her long skinny legs straggling. Races were her favorite. She was deadly fast.

But you needed a partner for a three-legged race. And everyone paired up without her.

“Mew? Meow? Meay?” Somber Kitty asked, appearing out of nowhere and rubbing against her shins.

“Cats can't race,” May said with a sigh. They watched the racers line up, and then the starting bell went off, and Claire and Maribeth pulled out in front. They were way slower than May would have been. But May would have traded her speed for a partner to race with.

She turned around and walked back to her bike, far away from the crowd, and plopped down next to it in the grass.

“I think if I could go somewhere else, I could be someone
else,” she whispered to her cat. She picked a puffy white dandelion out of the grass between her sandals and blew at the seeds.

Somber Kitty, who always seemed to know May had no one else to tell her feelings to, mewed in agreement, though he had no idea what she was saying.

“But that doesn't mean I want to move to New York,” she quickly added.

Then she slumped. She felt as heavy as a sack of beans. But then, a sack of beans never got embarrassed or did stupid balloon tricks in front of other sacks of beans or forgot to lock the bathroom door. Come to think of it, life was probably easy for all the beans of the world. Being a sack of them wouldn't be so bad.

May picked another dandelion and blew on it. “Maybe I'd rather be a sack of beans,” she told the fuzzy white floaters. Somber Kitty meowed disapprovingly.

“Don't worry, Kitty. I'm not going anywhere.”

Somber Kitty rolled himself into a ball and continued to stare at her. He didn't look so sure.

“Unless you know something I don't.”

At the edge of the grass, the trees watched her.

They
knew better.

Y
ou can drop me off here.”

Mrs. Bird looked at May, then at the dirt road ahead of them, then back at May, who sat with her back straight the way her mom always asked her to. Mrs. Bird ran her free hand through her wavy brown hair as she brought the car to a stop.

“You sure you don't want to just come home, pumpkin?”

May nodded.

“I wish you wouldn't spend so much time in the woods. I worry about snakes.”

May opened the car door, but felt her mom's hand on her back. She turned. “I love you, pumpkin,” Mrs. Bird said.

“You too.”

“Wait, May?”

May was halfway out of the car when she ducked back down to meet her mom's eyes. “You know I wouldn't trade you for anybody in the world, right?”

May smiled. Mrs. Bird seemed to breathe a sigh of relief before May went around to the back of the car to get her bike
and her backpack. Somber Kitty jumped out of the back too, just before May closed the door and the car pulled away.

“Thank gosh,” May said. She looked around the dilapidated and deserted main square of Briery Swamp. Except for being dry and dead, it looked like any other town in the state of West Virginia.

May Bird had always thought that if states were like people, West Virginia would be the shy relative of, say, Texas. Texas was big and bad and sprawled out flat, saying “Look at me, I'm Texas!” West Virginia was mysterious and it liked to keep to itself. It hid in the folds of mountains, resting in the cool shade. It was sweet, beautiful, and bashful. Its woods held its secrets, or at least it seemed that way to May.

Briery Swamp wasn't much of a town anymore. The houses that had once stood in a sociable gaggle at the town square had crumbled into crooked piles of bricks, overgrown with weeds. A possum, four snakes, and a hundred thousand three hundred and six earthworms had moved into what used to be the mayor's graceful mansion. The postmaster's old cottage was the centipedes' favorite place for hatching long crawly babies.

The only building in town that still looked like a building at all was the post office itself. It stood up from the weeds like a snaggle tooth, three of its walls mostly collapsed and pouring onto the grass like a waterfall.

May laid her bike on its side and stared around. There wasn't much to do except meander around the square with Somber Kitty and tell him made-up stories about the people who'd lived here, and why they'd moved away. Since there had been a drought in Briery Swamp for as long as she could remember,
her favorite theory was that the rain had retired to Florida, and all the people of Briery Swamp had followed it there.

“Meow,” Somber Kitty said, which May interpreted to mean “At least we have each other.” The pair spent an hour or more kicking rocks up and down the road, until Somber Kitty ran off into the woods chasing a moth. Then, for the millionth time, May ducked in through the hole in the old post office wall and began digging through the rocks for treasures. Once she'd found a stuffed skunk mounted on a plaque. She'd also found three old rubber stamps saying “First Class,” “Second Class,” and “Third Class.”

Now she thrust her hands into a pile of rubble against the back wall, sifting out the larger rocks from the smaller ones, hoping to find maybe another stamp, or an old letter. She was just digging in with one last thrust when her fingers lit on something that felt distinctly different from rubble. It felt like paper. May pinched with her thumb and forefinger and gently extracted it, watching a corner of molded white emerge from the pile. It slid out with a little scratch.

It
was
a letter. A huge find. May couldn't believe her luck.

“Meay?”

“Oh, you scared me,” May said, her heart racing as she met Somber Kitty's tilty green eyes. “Look at this.”

May held the letter up for the cat to see. “Somebody didn't get their mail.” She ran her tongue against the inside of her bottom lip, thinking. “Maybe it's some private stuff,” she whispered breathlessly to the cat, who had already gotten bored of the letter and started licking his black paws.

The envelope was clearly very old—yellowed with age. One
comer was folded back so that the stamp and postmark were visible. Though it was faded, May could just make out the date: June 11, 1951.

“I hope they weren't holding their breath,” May said with a small, curious smile. A slant of light found its way through the hole in the wall and striped her face, making her look like two halves of herself. Where the flap of the envelope ended in a point there was a faded stamp of a tree surrounded by snowflakes and, when May looked closer, the face of an old woman, peering through the leaves. May stared at the stamp for a long time, a knot of unease gathering beneath her ribs. It was one of the prettiest pictures she'd ever seen, but her gut didn't like it. She had to think for a minute to figure out why, but then she had it. The thing about it was that you couldn't tell if the person who'd drawn it had meant for the lady to be a nice, old woman, inviting you into the tree, or someone not so nice, waiting to pounce on you like . . . a tiger.

Letting out her breath, she turned the letter over, rubbed at the dust and mold covering the address, and froze. She blinked twice. She read the words in front of her three times, her eyes as wide as cereal bowls.

The envelope, in blue, loopy letters, read:

Miss May Ellen Bird
White Moss Manor
Briery Swamp, WV

“Meay?” May jolted, her eyes shooting to Somber Kitty, who'd snuck up beside her.

“Shh, Kitty.”

She patted the cat's head absently, then returned her gaze to the letter. She looked at the seal on the back, then turned it over again to look at the address.
Her address
. She felt like a firefly was lighting her up from the inside out. She stood up and looked around, then sat down again.

It had to be a different May Bird.

But then, there was her address.

May chewed on a finger, thinking hard.

The date had to be wrong. Nineteen fifty-one. May didn't even think her
mom
had been born then.

But if the date was wrong, and the letter was sent recently, then how did it end up buried under all the old bricks of the post office?

May turned the letter over again and again and again, trying to make sure she was really seeing it.

“Well, Kitty,” she whispered, “what do you think we should do?”

May bit her lip, then raised a pinky to her mouth and began nibbling just the tip. She lowered her fingers to the slit in the back of the envelope to open it, then changed her mind and stopped, then started again. Once she started, she ripped it open with lightning speed.

There was nothing strange about the letter itself, except what was written on it. It was a single sheet of yellowed paper, just like an old letter should be, mottled with blue swirls and waves where the paper had gotten wet, making the ink bleed and blur. May pulled it out gingerly, worried it might disintegrate. She unfolded it.

May let out a sigh of relief. That settled it. She didn't know Kari Kagaki or any North Farm. They had the wrong person. She sank back, feeling like a casserole dish full of Jell-O. She looked at the envelope and the picture again. It brought back that uneasy knot.

May's fingers stretched toward the map, and she looked at it sideways, trying to pretend that she wasn't looking at all. She immediately recognized a few things. There was the town square. There—the knot got worse—was White Moss Manor, and there were the woods. The map even showed a dark smudge, where the giant gathering of briers—the Endless Briers, May called them, because she'd never managed to cross them—wound their way thickly along the east side of May's woods.

And beyond them, there was a lake.

Almost as much as the letter itself, this couldn't be believed. There were no lakes in Briery Swamp. Not even a puddle. The squirrels and chipmunks, May had always supposed, went to the
next town over to get their water. If the lake had been there in 1951, it wasn't there now.

May crumpled up the letter and dropped it on the ground. But as soon as she stood up, she swept down and picked it up. Turning red, she flattened the letter out, folded it, and tucked it into her knapsack. She caught Somber Kitty looking at her thoughtfully.

“I don't want to litter,” she said, knowing there wasn't a thing in the world that would get her to go looking for that lake. But Somber Kitty didn't appear to be convinced. May sighed. “Really.”

The truth was, nobody had ever said they needed her.

“Mew,” was all she got in reply from someone who needed her very much. If a cat-to-English dictionary had been handy, and May had looked up “mew,” it would have translated into something like “curiosity killed the cat.”

May climbed onto her bike, held her knapsack down for the cat to crawl into, and together they headed home.