A Hawk in the Woods

by Carrie Laben

  Abby looked at the clock and it was fifteen minutes later. Did Martha even know she was doing that? Her excuse, when caught, was always that she did it without thinking, that in fact it took a lot of effort not to warp all the time in her vicinity when she was distressed or bored. And it was Martha, so maybe that was even true. She didn’t seem to do things on purpose usually.

  “Stop it,” Abby said anyway.

  Martha stomped on the brakes, but there was no one in the rear-view mirror. Still, it could have been a disaster, which pissed Abby off more.

  “Not the car. Stop folding.”

  “I wasn’t…” Martha hesitated, sighed. The numbers on the clock jumped down. “Sorry.”

  It seemed sincere enough.

  It surprised Abby how long Martha didn’t talk to her. She stayed in bed for two weeks, while the air filled with the smell of cut hay outside and the newt creek shrank to a series of shallow pools between damp rocks. Most of the time she seemed to be really asleep, not like Mom’s sulking, but even when her eyes were open she turned them away from Abby, the strands of her attention shrinking into a tight clump of just one desire: leave me alone. When Abby tried to tease out a strand and pull it towards herself, Martha curled up physically and dragged the covers over her head. When Mom saw them like that she snapped at Abby to leave your sister be, she’s sick.

  Abby might have been another five years figuring it out if Grandfather hadn’t gotten careless with his books. Maybe he’d always been careless, but being denied the chance to read them had been enough to make Abby decide that reading them was her goal for the rest of the summer. And it kept her out of her bedroom, away from Martha’s inexplicable accusing silence.

  It wasn’t that hard to map out the comings and goings of an old man. His morning occupation of the bathroom gave her at least half an hour all by itself. And he’d started sitting on the porch again in the afternoon. It was like he didn’t even consider, anymore, that she might do something he didn’t want her to—or like he didn’t think it mattered. Mom was the one she had to watch out for, the one who would come up to check on Martha and stick her head in the door and demand to know what Abby was reading and had she weeded the zucchini yet?

  Abby soon realized that it was a huge waste of time to bother with the books themselves. It took so long to decode them that she could get at best a few sentences a day. On the other hand, she knew Grandfather’s handwriting like her own, knew his habits of abbreviation and allusion, could usually see where he was going with a thought by the time the sentence reached its first verb. Maybe it was because great minds thought alike and maybe it was because she’d listened to him mutter to himself for so long. She was a fast reader, too, and she knew how to skip the boring parts.

  The first notebook she read was from when he first came to Alden, just after he’d married Grandma, and it mentioned some things that made her giggle—doing “the act” during certain phases of the moon, and so forth. After the first few mentions it got weird, though, and she started skimming. Not until three months later did she find the sentence about how his plan had worked and Grandma was crying all the time. It made her worry, somehow, even though she’d never liked Grandma much. All the crowing about what a genius he’d be if the plan worked made Grandfather sound like a cartoon villain on TV.

  She hoped that, like a cartoon villain on TV, he’d just explain the whole plan soon. She’d gone back and back over the first few pages of this notebook, and she knew it continued on from one before, one that wasn’t on the shelf. If everything was explained in that one, she had a long hunt ahead of her.

  The notebook entries got more sporadic for a while, those nine months… only a few entries here and there about how impossible it was to raise livestock when the animals panicked constantly and would do anything to get away from Grandfather’s touch. Apparently his father hadn’t had that problem, so it wasn’t just the powers that they hated. Hay and corn and soybeans couldn’t run away, though, and so he sold off the cows when Grandma was too far along to do all the milking and concentrated on field crops, and a few hogs for personal use. The ones that Martha claimed to hear.

  Then the baby was born, and there was a long, howling rant about how everything had gone wrong and what good was a girl? He’d have to try again.

  Then more phases of the moon, and a hopeful note that Grandma was pregnant again, but nine months later, silence, no baby. And again. And again.

  Meanwhile, the baby—Mom—had to be getting bigger, though Grandfather didn’t write down anything about that. It wasn’t magic and it wasn’t anything to do with him so what did he care? Until, one day when she would have been six, Grandfather told her to snub a neighbor girl she’d been playing with and she’d batted back at his intentions like a kitten. It didn’t sound like it had worked for her—at least, the neighbor girl was never mentioned again—but Grandfather was amazed that a daughter could do that. It made Abby want to yell at him—not Grandfather out on the porch, that was impossible, but the person writing the words. It was the first time she’d realized you could fight with a book.

  Still, he was happy to give the credit to his own cleverness, his good genes and his phases of the moon. He started Mom studying. It was all just like Abby remembered from her own training—except that Grandfather was trying to teach Mom to fold time too.

  At first he tried all by himself, with the help of books, and then he threw up his hands in frustration and allowed that Grandma might have a role to play in this. But even Grandma couldn’t get Mom to fold time. Mom didn’t have that power. And neither did Grandfather. But Grandfather had wanted it for his belatedly beloved daughter.

  Abby had to put the notebook down, then, and go back to the astrology texts she’d been assigned, because it was almost lunchtime and Mom would be up soon. But it stuck in her head, how disappointed Grandfather’s words were when he realized Mom couldn’t fold.

  It didn’t make sense, she thought as she ate her grilled cheese sandwich and stared at Martha’s forehead across the table. Mom and Grandfather both acted like folding was boring at best, at worst a weakness and an excuse when Martha used it to avoid something unpleasant. How could Mom’s lack of ability to perform a stupid little stunt like that have upset Grandfather so much?

  She looked sideways at Grandfather, who had pried open his grilled cheese and was spreading more deviled ham inside. It wasn’t like she didn’t know he could lie, but the thought that he could have fooled her so long and so thoroughly made her angry. Now she looked like the stupid one for going along with him, making fun of Martha and Grandma.

  Grandfather’s awful sometimes. It shocked her, looking back, that it took that long for her to think it for the first time.

  Between this new information and the way it was getting hard to sleep in the same room as Martha when she wouldn’t even speak, Abby decided it was time to do something. She couldn’t just make this go away, not if Martha wouldn’t look at her.

  It was Martha’s turn to wash up from lunch—Mom’s concern didn’t go as far as letting her out of chores—but Abby got up as soon as she was done eating and started helping clear the plates. Martha looked at her, brief and cautious, and went to the sink. When Abby had all the plates and forks she took a spot alongside Martha, their gazes parallel, not a threat.

  It took several tries that got caught silent somewhere at the bottom of her throat before she actually managed to speak. “You’re mad at me,” she said as she scraped a lump of deviled ham off Grandfather’s plate to disappear beneath the soap. “Why?”

  “You’ll think I’m dumb.”

  “No I won’t.”

  “You already think I’m dumb.”

  “Then telling me won’t hurt.”

  Martha seemed to consider this as an insult for a moment, but then she spoke again.

  “I had… I think it was a nightmare. But it felt real. And in the nightmare I was trapped in the barn, and you wouldn’t help me.”

  Abby didn’t move, di
dn’t look over, didn’t squeeze the glass she was now rinsing so hard it squeaked, even managed to put a little teasing—but not too much, she was supposed to be apologizing—into her voice when she said, “You’re mad at me because of a dream?”

  Martha took the glass from her, and it did squeak, but that was because neither of them wanted to drop it and get Mom’s attention, not now. “It felt really real. And ever since I’ve just felt sick, and weak. And scared. Like it’ll happen again. You were right, Abby. You were right.” She let the glass sink into the soapy water and turned and hugged Abby tight, her face buried against her sister’s neck. “Something terrible is going to happen, and that’s why we didn’t go to Minnesota this summer.”

  As apologies went, it had worked out very well for Abby, but she couldn’t enjoy it. Her stomach was burning as though the grilled cheese was too much all of a sudden.

  It wasn’t kindness, exactly, that made her hug Martha tighter and keep the knowledge that it hadn’t been a dream to herself. She just hadn’t decided what to do yet, and keeping secrets was always the best choice when in doubt.

  “It’ll be okay,” she whispered.

  Martha sensed the uncertainty in that sentence, or shared it. She pulled back and finally looked Abby in the face. “Will it?” Her eyes, red-rimmed and tearful, looked even more prominent than usual. Abby almost felt as though Martha wanted to be pushed, to be made to believe.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Martha drove without complaint into the evening, and Abby didn’t lose any more time, unless she counted time spent in an Arby’s drive-through as lost, which was more of a philosophical question. Even the continued misbehavior of the radio didn’t seem to get to Martha, although just to be on the safe side Abby stopped tweeting and struck up another round of chit-chat about her old job or Martha’s book club books or any damn thing whenever she spotted a hawk by the margins of the road.

  That was harder than it seemed because she was distracted. There was a Silver Alert for old James Bonetrager and it was not burning up the social media, at least not anywhere but the local Facebook group she only lurked in—but drifting around with a desultory #FindJimB hashtag that some wiseass had already made a whiskey joke about. Even that was better than her stupid bird tweet so she jumped on it and was getting periodic sips of attention in return. It bothered her a little though—the wards shouldn’t have given out that quickly with just the door open. True, Mom had been weak at the end, but still…

  So even though she knew she should take the driving over again before it got truly dark, she kept putting it off. She was tired, too, more tired than she had any right to be considering that she’d been sitting on her butt most of the day. That was another distraction, another worry, because she didn’t think it meant anything good for her health. And the bites and scratches from her adventure retrieving Grandfather itched more and more the harder she tried not to think about them. She wanted a hot shower, a soft bed, and to use a restroom without asking a bored clerk with a ponytail for a key. But they needed to make their distance today; the sooner they hit Minneopa, the sooner she’d feel better. She could have everything she wanted later, if she could just grit her teeth and scratch her thigh discreetly right now.

  She only knew she’d nodded off because she was so startled when her head smacked against the passenger-side window, waking her up. There was a horrible metallic scraping in her ears, and Martha was shrieking, and the entire car was jouncing like a cheap carnival ride for a moment before it stopped moving entirely. Abby had ridden on enough dirt roads to recognize the feeling of leaving pavement.

  “What the fuck!” She didn’t mean to yell, but she was as loud as Martha, still shrieking. It hurt her head. More.

  Martha sucked in a breath and held it for a moment, as though she was trying to craft words out of the scream that still wanted to escape. Then she started crying and lunged sideways, trying to hug Abby even though they were both still buckled in. Behind her sister’s head Abby could see branches pressed against the driver’s-side window.

  She patted Martha’s arm and massaged the edge of her thoughts until she was calmer, not pushing but only soothing. She so desperately did not want her to start screaming again. They were right-way up and the windshield wasn’t broken, but that was all the good news she could see from inside the car. She unfastened her seatbelt.

  Martha grabbed Abby’s shoulder as Abby started to pull the door handle. “Don’t. It’s probably still out there.”

  “What is?”

  “You didn’t see it?”

  “I was asleep.”

  “The giant bird, the one from the store. It flew down and started attacking the car.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Clumsy unsubtle little bastard.

  “I couldn’t see anything! I just couldn’t see!”

  “Martha, shh, it’s okay, I’m not mad at you.” Abby twisted, looking around the car for anything she could use as a weapon. There was the skull, but that wouldn’t give her much range. Shopping bags full of clothes were too light to be effective. Shopping bags full of books were probably too heavy to swing accurately, and the handles would break. She should have bought a goddamn gun, they were right at Wal-Mart, it would have been easy.

  Wait. The Moscato bottle. A little heavy, but if she used two hands and all the adrenaline that was pumping through her system, it might work. She pulled it from the narrow paper bag and hefted it. Okay. Not great, it hurt her wrists, but okay.

  “I’ll be right back. See if the car will start.”

  “Don’t leave me!”

  “Martha, I said I’ll be right back.”

  “Please, Abby. If it gets you…”

  Abby opened the door and Martha flinched away, crossing her arms over her face. No screech echoed from the sky, and no talons descended to rip at her as she swiveled around and got out, so she risked a look around. The road was deserted, woods on one side, lumpy brown fields on the other with the glow of last daylight over them. The car looked battered but not even a headlight was broken.

  “Okay,” she yelled up at the sky. “If you’re dumb enough to want this fight, come and get it.” Not the most original line… but then again, he wouldn’t know, would he? It would be new to him.

  Behind her, the engine started and the headlights came on. She startled but caught herself immediately. Don’t show weakness now. Don’t show weakness ever, but especially not now. It wasn’t great to be standing in what amounted to a spotlight in the growing dark, so she stepped out of the beams, closer to the woods.

  The first strike missed her because she was in motion, and she heard the rush of wings in time to lengthen her stride. She raised the bottle—it was heavier than it had seemed when she picked it up, somehow, and harder to grip, the neck too short, the glass slippery. Her first swing was a miss too, not even a feather clipped. The dark intent radiating off this bird was weaving, dancing, impossible to hold—the best she could do was rattle it a little, confuse it, bat the ends of the lines around and tangle them. The damn thing was tough.

  But she was tougher, and even confusion was useful. The bird rose a few feet, wavered on laboring wings as though torn between retreat and attack, and by the time it circled back around on her she had a solid shot lined up. She hardly had to swing—it all but knocked itself on the head, a sound like a broken potato chip followed by an unceremonious flop to the ground, a few twitches. A little blood trickled from one nostril.

  Martha hadn’t moved the car at all. Abby beckoned to her, though she couldn’t see her through the headlights. Then she stooped down and picked the dead hawk up by one wing, lifted it high enough that Martha would be able to see.

  After what felt like several minutes—at least long enough for her heart to slow down to only pounding—Martha opened the driver’s side door and got out, scanning the now-dark sky as she came despite the dead bird in Abby’s grasp.

  “Relax,” Abby told her. “He won’t be able to find another host this fast. Nothing
easy. Everything is asleep right now.” It occurred to her that this maybe wasn’t true, owls existed, and coyotes and bats, but he—it—whatever or whoever it was seemed stuck on hawks. Anyway she was trying to calm Martha down, not make herself paranoid.

  “The hawk in the Wal-Mart wasn’t.”

  “He didn’t find that hawk in the Wal-Mart. That would be too weird a coincidence.” It was an unpleasant thought, how long they’d been followed without noticing… from the point when Abby had gotten near the prison and heard that song for the first time, at least. “He’d probably been following you from the prison gates. Might even have been watching before. That’s all he has to do. It’s probably all he knows to do. Not like he has an attachment anywhere else.”

  “You think it’s one of them, then.”

  “Who else has a grudge out for you?”

  “It could be Mom.”

  “No. Mom’s dead and in the ground where she belongs.”

  Martha’s silence was full of doubt.

  “I made certain of it myself.”

  “They were supposed to be dead too.”

  “We got careless. We were young, we didn’t know.” It was a little unfair to say ‘we’ here, Martha couldn’t have done anything about it… but on the other hand, if they’d stayed buried it might all have worked out, and that part was definitely Martha’s fault.

  “But if it is one of them…” Martha reached Abby’s side, frowned, picked up the other wing so they were holding the corpse between them like the loose string of a tin-can telephone. “Where has he been all this time?”

  “Maybe he can fold time too.” Wouldn’t that be a kick in the ass for Grandfather, for the whole lot of them. “Or maybe he was satisfied as long as you were in jail.”

  Martha seemed to roll the idea around. “I wouldn’t have been.”

  “It’s not like you to be vengeful.”