Nightbird (2 page)

My mother smiled at the memory. I could see who she once was in the expression that crossed her face.

“I always liked Sally Ann,” she said as we drove away. “But I could never be honest with her now, and how can you have a friend if you can’t tell her the truth?”

I understood why my mother couldn’t have friends, and why my fate was the same. I couldn’t tell the truth
either, though sometimes I wanted to shout it out so much my mouth burned. I could feel the words I longed to say stinging me, as if I’d swallowed bees that were desperate to be free.
This is who I am.
That’s what I’d shout.
I may not have a life like you do, but I’m Twig Fowler, and I have things to say!

On most evenings and weekends we stayed at home and didn’t venture out. That was our life and our fate and it wouldn’t do any good to complain. I suppose you could call it the Fowler destiny. But I knew Sally Ann was right. It hadn’t always been this way. I’d seen the photographs and the scrapbooks in a closet up in the attic. My mother used to be different. In high school she was on the track team and in the theater club. She always seemed to be surrounded by friends, ice-skating or having hot chocolate at the Starline Diner. She raised money for Sidwell Hospital’s children’s center by organizing a Bake-a-thon, baking one hundred pies in a single week that were sold to the highest bidders.

When she finished high school she decided she wanted to see the world. She was brave back then, and independent. She kissed her parents good-bye and left town on a Greyhound bus. She was young and headstrong and she’d dreamed of being a chef. Not someone who cooked in the Starline Diner, which she did
on weekends all through high school. A real chef in a world-class restaurant. Pastries were always her specialty. She ran off to London and then to Paris, where she lived in tiny apartments and took cooking classes with the best chefs. She walked along foggy riverbanks to farmers’ markets where she bought pears that tasted like candy. At last she wound up in New York City. That was where she met my father. The most she would tell me was that a mutual acquaintance had thought they’d be perfect for each other, and as it turned out, they were. My father was waiting for her when her plane touched down, there to help her find her way in Manhattan. Before the taxi reached her new apartment, they’d fallen in love.

But they split up before my mother came back home for her parents’ funeral—my grandmother and grandfather had been in a car crash in the mountains during mudslide season. It happened in the Montgomery Woods, where the trees are so old and tall it seems dark even at noontime and there are several hairpin turns that make your stomach lurch when you drive around them. It was terribly sad to lose my grandparents, even though I was just a little girl. I can remember them in bits and pieces: a hug, a song, laughter, someone reading me a fairy tale about a girl who gets lost and finds her way
home through the forest by leaving bread crumbs or following the blue-black feathers of crows.

When we came to Sidwell I was in the backseat of the old station wagon, which barely made it to Massachusetts. I was only a small child, but I remember looking out the window and seeing Sidwell for the first time. My mother changed our names back to Fowler from whatever my father’s name was and she took over the farm. Every year she hires people traveling through town who need work. They pick apples and make the cider, but she does all the baking herself. If she’s ever invited to a party or a town event, she writes a note politely declining. Some people say we’re snobs because we once lived in New York and we expect life to race by with thrills like it does in Manhattan, and others say we think we’re too good for a little town where not much ever changes. Still others wonder what happened to the husband my mother found and lost in New York.

People in Sidwell can talk all they want. They don’t know the whole story. And if we’re smart, they never will.

When we came home from New York I wasn’t the only one in the backseat of the car.

That’s why we arrived after dark.

Though I’m shy, I know most people in Sidwell, at least by name, except for the new neighbors who were just moving into the house at the edge of our property. I’d heard about them, of course, at the General Store. I’d biked over to the store to deliver two boxes of strawberry cupcakes that were so sweet I had what seemed like an entire hive of bees trailing after me. There’s a group of men who have their coffee at the General Store before they head out to work. I secretly think of them as the Gossip Group. They’re carpenters and plumbers, and even the postman and the sheriff sometimes join in. They have opinions on everything and comments about everyone and they tell jokes about the monster they seem to think are funny:
What do you do with a green monster? Wait for it to ripen. How does a monster play football? He crosses the ghoul line.

When the talk turns serious, some of the men vow that one of these days there’s going to be a monster hunt and that will be the end of things disappearing in town. That sort of conversation always gives me the chills. Thankfully, most of the recent talk has been about whether the woods will be turned into a housing development—over a hundred acres owned by Hugh
Montgomery. People see even less of him than they do of us. The Montgomerys live in Boston and only come to Sidwell on holidays and weekends. They used to spend summers here, but now people say they’re more likely to go to Nantucket or France. Lately, there have been trucks up in the forest, early in the morning, when the hollows are misty. Soon enough folks figured out that the water and soil were being tested. That’s when people in town became suspicious about Montgomery’s intentions.

I had other things to think about, so I didn’t pay too much attention. The woods had always been there and I figured they always would be. I was more focused on the fact that new neighbors were moving into the property next to our orchard. That was big news to us. We’d never had neighbors before. Mourning Dove Cottage, deserted for ages, always had doves nesting nearby. You could hear them cooing when you walked up to the overgrown yard that was filled with brambles and thistles. The cottage had broken windows and a caving-in roof that was covered with moss. It was a grim and desolate place, and most folks avoided the area. It’s not just the Gossip Group fellows who say a witch lived there long ago. Everyone agrees that the Witch of Sidwell was a resident until she
had her heart broken. When she disappeared from our village, she left a curse behind.

Kids may stand at the edge of the lawn and listen to the doves, they may dare one another to go up to the porch, but they run away when one of those rare black Sidwell owls flies across the distance, and they never go inside. I made it onto the porch one time. I opened the front door, but I didn’t step over the threshold, and afterward I had nightmares for weeks.

Every August a play about the Witch of Sidwell is performed at Town Hall by the youngest group in the summer camp. When I was little, the drama teacher, Helen Meyers, wanted me to be the witch.

“I have a feeling you’ll be the best Agnes Early we’ve ever had,” she told me. “You have natural talent, and that doesn’t come along often.”

It was an honor to be given the starring role and I was proud to have been chosen. From the time I was tiny I longed to be an actress, and maybe even write plays when I got older. But my mother came down to rehearsals before I’d said my last line
—Do not pry into my business if you know what’s best for you and yours!

Upset, she took Mrs. Meyers aside. “My daughter is the witch?”

“She’s a natural,” Mrs. Meyers cheerfully announced.

“A natural witch?” My mother seemed confused and insulted.

“Not at all, my dear. A natural actress. Not many have true talent, but when they do, it’s usually the shy ones. They just bloom onstage.”

“I’m afraid my daughter won’t be able to continue on,” my mother told Mrs. Meyers.

I was so shocked I couldn’t say a word. All I could do was watch, speechless, as my mother informed the drama teacher that I would not be in the play, not even as a member of the chorus. I had a friend back then, my first and only one, a boy I shared my lunch with every day. We were both shy, I suppose, and we were both fast runners. What I remember is that he came to stand beside me on the day I left camp, and he held my hand, because I had already started to cry. I was only five, but I was so disappointed that when we got home, I sobbed until my eyes were rimmed red. My mother sat beside me and tried her best to console me but I turned away from her. I didn’t understand how she could be so mean. At that moment I thought of myself as a rose cut down before I could bloom.

That night my mother brought dinner to my room, homemade tomato soup and toast. There was a Pink peach berry pie, but I didn’t touch my dessert. I could tell that my mother had been crying, too. She said there was an unfortunate reason I couldn’t be in the play. We were not like other people in town. We knew well enough not to mock a witch. Then my mother whispered what a witch could do if you crossed her. She could enchant you, which is what she did to our family more than two hundred years ago. Because of this curse we were still paying the price. I could write my own plays and perform them up in the attic, making up stories, dressing in old clothes I’d found in a metal trunk. But I could not ridicule the Witch of Sidwell.

My mother had a look in her eye I’d come to know. When she made a decision, there was no going back. I could beg and plead, but once her mind was made up that was that.

We baked the Pink apple cupcakes to be served at the party after the play, but we did not attend the performance. Instead we sat on a park bench in the center of Sidwell as the dark fell across the sky. We could hear the bell above Town Hall as it chimed six. We could hear an echo as the audience applauded for the new witch once the play had begun.

I think that evening was the beginning of my feeling lonely, a feeling I carried folded up, a secret I could never tell. From then on, I didn’t cry when I was disappointed. I just stored up my hurts, as if they were a tower made of fallen stars, invisible to most people, but brightly burning inside of me.

It was late spring when the new people moved into Mourning Dove Cottage, the time of year when the orchard was abloom with a pink haze. For months there had been carpenters hammering and sawing as they worked away on the cottage, fixing shingles onto the roof, removing broken glass, and restoring the tumbledown porch. Some of the Gossip Group had been employed by the new owners of Mourning Dove, and they loved to tell people at the General Store how much they were charging the newcomers for their renovations. They were city people, outsiders, and so they paid top dollar for their rebuilt roof and a non-sagging porch. I thought this wasn’t very neighborly, and I could tell that Mr. Stern felt the same way.

“If you’re honest with someone he’ll be honest with you,” he told the men who gathered near his checkout counter, but I think I was the only one paying attention.

In this season I always collect flowering branches, enough to fill every one of our vases so the scent of apple blossoms will filter through our house, from the kitchen all the way to the attic. I spend hours curled up in my favorite tree, an old, twisted one that is thought to be the original apple tree planted in Sidwell. It’s knobby, with velvety black bark, but I think the branches are like arms. I read books and do my homework up here. I take naps under a bower of leaves. In my dreams men and women can fly and birds live in houses and sleep in beds. Sometimes the doves nest above me and I can hear the cooing of their fledglings as I doze peacefully.

I was up in my favorite tree the day I heard the moving van rumbling down the dirt road beyond our orchard, with a car following behind as our new neighbors headed toward their new home. Dust rose in little whirlwinds as the truck came closer, and from the car’s open window there was the sound of girls singing.

I sat still and squinted. It must be like this to be a bird looking down at the strange things people do. The newcomers had rooms full of oak furniture and silky rugs that shimmered with color. There were two parents who looked friendly as they bustled in and out of the house, and a shaggy collie dog they called Beau. The older of the two sisters was named Agate. She appeared to be about
sixteen, with blond hair that reached to her shoulders and a laugh I could hear all the way across the orchard. The other one, Julia, was my age. She raced about collecting boxes that had her name scrawled across them from where the movers had placed them on the grass. “Mine,” she’d call out as she lugged each newly discovered box up to the porch. At one point, she kicked off her shoes and did a little dance in the grass. She looked like someone who knew how to have fun, a lesson I needed to learn. I couldn’t help but think that if I were a different person, I would want her as a friend. But a friend might want to come to our house, and when I said that wasn’t possible, she might want to know why, and then I’d have to lie and I’d feel the stinging in my mouth that I always had when I didn’t tell the whole truth.