Nightbird (17 page)

That was when I remembered that I still had the envelope Collie had sent me. I carried it every day for luck, but I’d forgotten to open it. If there was any time I needed luck it was now. Inside were two rose petals. The ones that had fallen from the rosebush in Agnes Early’s garden. They’d fallen out of my pocket when I did a handstand near the Montgomerys’ gate. It did feel like Collie was still here with us. The petals had turned as dry as paper, but I didn’t think that would matter. As my father had told me when he’d first come to our door:
A rose is a rose is a rose.

Spells are funny things. My brother wanted his life on earth and his life in the air. I wondered if we halved the ingredients, we might have half the cure.

“Maybe you can have what you wish for,” I said.

The others looked at me, confused. For once I was the one who was sure of myself. I didn’t feel invisible or stupid and I wasn’t afraid to say what I thought. I was Teresa Rose, not Twig anymore. I could feel that something inside me had changed. Twig was a girl who spent her time alone and wore her loneliness as if it were armor. For the first time I had everything I wanted, including a family and friends.

I held out the rose petals. “Agnes Early used two. We’ll change that. We’ll use one. Half the magic.”

“What then?” James said, unconvinced. “I’ll have one wing?”

“Trust me,” I said. It was the only chance that he might get everything he’d ever wanted, his heart’s desire, the air and the earth combined.

“I trust you.” James went to stand in the north corner.

Agate went to the south corner. Julia and I were at east and west.

Julia peered at Agnes Early’s spell. “She said to say ‘Fly from me’ two times.”

“Then we’ll say ‘Come back to me,’ ” I said, reversing the curse. “But only once.”

“And we’ll mean it from our hearts,” Agate said.

“And what will happen will happen,” James said, his eyes clear and green. “And I’ll accept whatever that is.”

Julia placed the bowl onto the fire. A pale curl of smoke arose from the herbs as they heated up. I leaned over and added a single rose petal. The smoke turned red and then pink and then a pearly white. We held hands. I don’t know about the others but I, for one, closed my eyes.

Come back to me.

We said it together, as if we had one voice, and maybe we did at the moment.

I heard the wind. It whirled around us. A few
raindrops spattered the ground as the gusts blew past us. I kept my eyes closed. I could feel the magic everywhere, in the earth and the sky and in us. It felt like the past and the future braided together, as if our destiny was changing.

Yet when I opened my eyes, nothing had changed. There were still the four of us. Still Agnes Early’s garden. Still the Red Moon. Still wings on my brother’s back.

We were exhausted and confused. We’d tried everything and it appeared we had failed. Out of respect for the magic of the garden we didn’t complain or blame anything or anyone. There wasn’t anything left to do but say good night. I think Agate had tears in her eyes when we left each other. Maybe we all did.

James and I hurried home through the orchard. He could have flown, but instead he walked beside me. The trees were filled with leaves and tiny green apples that would turn pink in time.

James threw an arm around my shoulders. “You tried. That’s all you can do.”

“I wanted to do more than try.”

“You did. You showed me how much you care about me.”

I wanted to cry for real now, just sob so loudly all the nesting birds would fly away in a cloud. But I didn’t.
I was Teresa Jane Rose and I still had faith that every curse could be undone and that somehow there had been magic in the garden.

When I slept that night I dreamed of Agnes Early and of Lowell Fowler and of a moon that was red as a rose. I dreamed I walked through Sidwell in the dark and saw all of our neighbors sleeping, and despite everything that had happened I was glad to live in a town where anything could happen and magic was always a possibility.

In the morning there was the sound of shouting. I recognized James’s voice even in my dream.

I’d overslept and now I ran to my brother’s room. James was standing there, an amazed expression on his face. His arms were raised, and he was surrounded by a circle of blue-black feathers. They were falling down like the leaves from the trees in autumn.

“It’s happening,” James said, his voice hoarse.

His wings were folding in upon themselves, as if they had been made of paper. They dropped onto the floor and turned into dust. With one gust of wind through the open window the dust rose into a circle of ash and flew out the window. I felt the same shivery feeling I’d had in the garden, but this time I didn’t close my eyes.

And there was James. An ordinary boy.

My brother peered at his reflection in the mirror on the wall.

“I’m like anyone else,” he said.

I couldn’t tell if he was happy or sad.

“It was just half the cure,” I assured him. “You’ll have your wings again.”

“I doubt that.” He shook his head. “What’s gone is gone.”

He’d been who he was for so long, maybe he feared he wouldn’t know how to be ordinary. I’d felt the same way before this summer, and now I was a girl with friends and a family and hope.

“You’ll see,” I said. “You’ll have what you wished for.”

Outside the window, the birds James had raised and nursed back to health tapped at the glass. He had had friends, I realized, and a whole world shared with them, one he didn’t want to give up.

I found my mother in the kitchen and told her what had happened.

“We tried so hard to let him be like everyone else,” I said.

“But he’s not like everyone else,” my mother said. “He’s one of a kind. And that is nothing to be ashamed of.”

She telephoned our father, who came as soon as he could. It felt so good to be waiting for him on the front porch, and even better when he threw his arms around me and said, “We’ll make it right, Twig. You wait and see.”

He went inside and knocked on my brother’s door. “Just give me five minutes,” he called. He must have had just the right tone, because my brother let him in.

My mother and I waited in the kitchen. Finally, our father came to have a cup of coffee.

“He’s thinking things over,” our dad said. “It’s part of growing up. As life goes on you lose some things and you gain some things. It’s true for everyone. James is just facing this all at once.”

James thought things over for a long time. Then he came out to have dinner with us. My mother made a tomato corn pie for supper and a peach pie for dessert, with some of the apple cinnamon ice cream our dad had brought. I loved even thinking the word
dad
and I loved that he seemed to know us, even though we’d been separated for so long. And then my mother told us that for all these years they had been writing to each other, and that she’d gotten a post office box and kept all of his letters in a box tied with ribbon under her bed. For all these years she’d been sending him photographs and telling him about our lives, so in a way he really had known us
even though we’d been apart. Maybe he hadn’t guessed my favorite flavor of ice cream. And maybe he also knew how much we had missed him.

Every bit of our dinner together was delicious. In fact, I think it was the best meal I’d ever had. If we had been in Brooklyn, people would have lined up around the block to buy a single slice of my mother’s pie, but because we were in Sidwell, we just ate the whole thing ourselves.

We sat at the table for a long time, telling stories, remembering the fire. The truth was we felt like a family. We had ups and downs, but we were all together.

As the sun was sinking, we went out to the porch. Blackbirds flew over our house and disappeared into the orchard. It was the end of the summer, and we felt it in the air, like a cloak falling over us. There was a single star in the sky, brighter than any I’d spied before.

“I believe that’s Venus,” our dad said. “You can see it much more clearly here in Sidwell than you can in New York City.”

That was when it happened. Magic always sneaks up on you that way, when you least expect it, when the time is absolutely right.

James doubled over and gasped. My mother stood up, ready to run to him, but my father held her back.

“What’s meant to be will happen,” he told her. They looked at each other so deeply that I realized they’d been together in some way even though they’d been apart for so many years.

We waited together. As darkness fell James’s wings grew back, as if they’d never disappeared. He closed his eyes tightly, expecting pain, but later he explained it seemed perfectly natural. It was just the way the petals of night-blooming jasmine, which close up during the day, unfold when the moon is in the sky.

Just as I’d hoped. Half the cure. Half the curse. Half the magic.

There he was, James Fowler Rose, my brother.

“Absolutely perfect,” I said.

This year my brother is at school, a senior. He walks Agate to school every day as Julia and I race out in front of them. But at night, he still has his own world. His wings appear as he stands on the roof and all the birds he’s ever saved wait for him and follow him into the woods.

School is better than it ever was before. I can just be myself, and be as friendly as I want to be. There’s a whole
group of girls who are much nicer than I thought they were, and I imagine I’ll be going to the Sidwell cinema with them, but for now Julia and I are busy on the weekends. I’m rewriting the play about Agnes Early, with Mrs. Meyers’s approval. Julia and I act it out together, playing all the parts. Miss Larch is our audience. We visit her on Sunday afternoons and read bits and pieces to her, and she always applauds and tells us how much better than the original it is. After my father moved in with us on Old Mountain Road, I was afraid that Miss Larch might be lonely, but Dr. Shelton is renting her spare room. They have tea together every day and sometimes Julia and I join them. Black orchid is still my favorite.

The witch is not bad anymore, not the way I’ve written her, only misunderstood, and very much in love. She doesn’t dress in black, but instead she wears a white dress trimmed with blue ribbons, which Agate has sewn. It is so beautiful all the little girls in town want to play the part of the witch and wear that dress. The way we’ve written it, in the second act, she ends the curse and wishes happiness for the citizens of Sidwell.

I mailed the finished pages to Boston for Collie to read. He was my first friend, after all, and I value his opinion. He told me he thinks I won’t have a problem with my wish, and that someday we’ll sit in the audience of a
Broadway theater together to watch a play I’ve written. Because I love Sidwell, I’m not rushing toward my future, but it’s nice to know that it’s out there, waiting for me.

In front of Town Hall, there is a statue of the local hero who saved our town, a handsome boy of seventeen who wears a cloak that flows to the ground. Very often a small black owl sits on the statue’s shoulder, peering down at our town with bright yellow eyes. People say if he flashes his stare at you he’ll bring you luck. Tourists like to be photographed beside the statue, especially during the apple festival. They stop in at the tourist center to pick up maps and a copy of the
Sidwell Herald.
They come to walk in our woods, and buy our Pink apple cider, and have Pink apple pie at the Starline Diner. When they picnic on the town green near the statue of our hero, they don’t notice what local people know: Under the cloak there are feathers carved into the stone. Aside from that, our hero looks like an ordinary boy and in many ways, he is. Now if anyone sees him up above us on nights when there is a full moon, they simply wave and go about their business, grateful to live in a town like Sidwell, a place where the apples are always sweet and mysterious creatures are always welcome.

The wonderful baker Mary Flanagan helped me to create a lovely pink apple pie with two different toppings, including a crumble-top variation. Best if shared with a friend. But isn’t everything?

P
ASTRY
I
NGREDIENTS

You can also use two premade 9-inch crusts bought at the market. Or see below for crumble-top variation.
*

F
ILLING
I
NGREDIENTS

M
AKING THE
P
ASTRY

Preheat oven to 375°F. Butter a nine-inch pie plate.

Sift flour into bowl. Mix in butter (with your fingers!), smooshing it into flour. Add sugar and mix. Add cold water a little at a time (you may not need it all). Mix until it forms a dough.

Wrap dough in plastic wrap and chill in fridge for 20 minutes.