Little Blackbird

by Jennifer Moorman

  Table of Contents

  Mystic Water, 1954

  1 Waffles and Cane Syrup

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  A Novel

  Jennifer Moorman

  Little Blackbird is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locals is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by Jennifer Moorman

  www.jennifermoorman.com

  Cover Design by Julianne St. Clair

  www.juliannestclair.com

  First Edition

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise—except for the use of brief quotations in critical articles or book reviews—without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  For everyone who wanted

  to know more about Mystic Water

  and the enchanting people who call it home

  MYSTIC WATER, 1954

  KATE DRAGGED HER sandaled feet through fresh pine needles and leaves that still should have been a part of the canopy above her. Last night’s storm—in its desperate madness—had stripped the trees of their summer growth and coated the forest floor like a prickly, green blanket, stinking of sweet sap and dark earth. Kate’s mama said mid-summer storms blown in by east winds brought mischief and rebellion. Kate believed her because the oppressive summer heat had been replaced with a cool breeze, making it feel as though autumn crept in early and without permission, like the weather was up to something.

  Gentle breezes in July could never be trusted. July was anything but gentle; July was intense, sweltering, burning. July made people in Mystic Water want to live in the water like mermaids. A few dozen people would dive into Jordan Pond in July and not emerge until Labor Day.

  Normally, Kate loved summer vacation, the days that stretched out long and free. During the summer, she didn’t worry about whether or not her classmates liked her or if they would avoid her during group activities. She wouldn’t have to suffocate beneath their pity, wouldn’t have to hear anyone whisper the name Evan. It didn’t matter if she was the darkest face in the woods or if she was so skinny her sixteen-year-old body still resembled a boy’s. She could just be. And Kate chose to be outside as much as possible. Outside among the wildlife, Kate felt as though she belonged.

  But today the world around her seemed to be plotting for a surprise attack, tugging her into a false sense of security, cooling her with its whispery breeze, coaxing her to relax. But she couldn’t. Her fingers tingled, and she felt as unsettled as a canary in a coal mine. The periwinkle blue sky stretched like a bowl over the too-quiet forest.

  The silence reminded Kate of the caves upriver, but at least there she could hear echoes, the constant drip of water. Now she heard nothing but her own breath, which unnerved her so much she started humming one of her mama’s Cherokee songs.

  Where the trees thinned, a patch of mauve flower heads stretched their blooms above darker foliage, testing the afternoon sunlight. Eupatorium purpureum, Kate thought. And Joe-Pye Weed to everyone else. July was too early for blooming Joe-Pye Weed, but the plants swayed their blood-red stalks and deep pink buds in the wind. Monarch butterflies darted in and out of the flowers, acting just as surprised as Kate was to see the plants.

  Kate knelt in front of the blooms. The storm had not snatched the petals from their stalks. A butterfly fluttered above her, and she reached out her hand like a damsel in a storybook might to a prince asking for the honor of kissing her hand. The monarch butterfly landed on her knuckle, shivered against her skin.

  A dark veil dropped over Kate’s vision, and she lay in the grass. The butterfly flapped its wings above her, sending sighs of wind across her cheeks. Before the darkness overtook her, Kate breathed in the scents of burning rubber, sour breath, and men’s cologne.

  WHEN KATE WAS five years old, she experienced her first premonition. She’d woken up on the floor of her bedroom, drooling on the threadbare rug, arms and legs crumpled beneath her. Broken images of her parents, a man with blue eyes, and a gigantic truck with shattered headlights tried to form in her mind, but they burned away like fog in sunlight. She didn’t have another vision for five years.

  On her tenth birthday, Kate watched her older brother, Evan, swim through the gentle river rapids behind their house. He climbed onto a water-slicked rock and called her to him, laughing as the sunlight turned his skin to caramel. She shook her head, but Evan’s laugh could persuade a recluse to rejoin society, and she knew she couldn’t stay on the shore.

  Kate put one foot into the water, but her vision tunneled, her legs collapsed, and she knocked herself out on the stones along the river. When Kate awoke, her clothes were soaked. The current had tugged her downstream until Evan pulled her onto the bank. Kate blinked up at her mama whose dark eyes were as large as walnuts and her lips were too taut and trembling; her sharp cheekbones angled and gleamed like polished obsidian. Evan hovered nearby; his grass-green eyes were overly bright, and the muscles in his neck strained against his skin.

  Once inside the house, her mama forced her to stay awake and sit at the kitchen table. She wrapped Kate in a wool blanket like a swaddled baby to help battle the October chill and the shivers Kate felt every time she thought of blue eyes and fingers linked with hers, of an upside-down car and silence on the interior. Kate tried to remember what happened, but her thoughts were muddy. She kept seeing a man with dark hair, laughing, picking daisies from the forest and then headlights shining through the fog straight into her eyes, blinding her, and her heartbeat exploded.

  Her mama sent her daddy and Evan to the store for traditional remedies, but Kate knew Evan had disobeyed. Kate felt her brother’s presence in the hallway, just out of her mama’s sight in the kitchen.

  Her mama brewed a steaming cup of lavender tea and told Kate the truth. “Little Blackbird,” her mama said, “you are cursed.”

  “What?” Kate had asked, lowering the cup of tea. Her fingers prickled, and she reached up to touch the purple bruise on her forehead.

  “My grandmother had premonitions. Her life was a tragedy because of it. You will see slivers of the future. Both your own and futures belonging to others. You cannot change them. You cannot interfere with what you see. That alone will drive you crazy.”

  Her mama walked to the suncatcher hanging above the kitchen window. She spun its string with her fingers, twirling the suncatcher round and round before letting go, and colorful flashes of light danced across the kitchen floor. “Sometimes you will see the future in broken pieces. It will be like trying to make complete pictures out of the shattered glass in a suncatcher. Impossible. Other times the future will be a clear path, but you cannot change it. You can only see and know, but never act.”

  Kate’s hands trembled on the mug. The words tragedy and broken hammered in her skull like a woodpecker on a mature pine. Her tongue tasted like dry earth and bitter leaves.

  Her mama walked to her and stood beside the table. Her steady, strong gaze locked onto Kate’s face. “No matter what you see, you cannot try and alter it. Interfering with the future is forbidden. There are no exceptions.”

  “What if I see something bad happening to someone else?”

  Her mama shook her head. “No exceptions. Changing the future could have terrible consequences.”

  “But what if I could help–”

  Her mama stamped her foot. “No exceptions. Now, drink your tea.”

  Kate glanced up and caught Evan’s eyes in his hiding p
lace just inside the shadowed hallway. His brow wrinkled and he frowned.

  “Can I control when these visions happen?”

  “No.” Her mama returned to the stove. “They will come whenever they want to, even at the most inconvenient times. But the tea will help.”

  Kate imagined having a vision in school and grimaced. “But I don’t want to be different. I want to fit in.”

  “Fit in with whom?” her mama asked.

  Kate shrugged and looked away from her mama’s knowing gaze. “Other kids? The kids in town?” Anyone.

  Evan waved at her from the hallway. When she looked at him, he mouthed, “You fit in with me.” Kate almost smiled.

  “Little Blackbird,” her mama asked, “why would you ever want to be like them?”

  She looked up at her mama, but she had already turned away shaking her head.

  After that, Kate had premonitions at least once a month, sometimes as often as once a week if she forgot to drink lavender tea daily. Her mama explained how the tea would slow the premonitions, perhaps even put them to sleep for a while. Kate fretted she would have an episode—as she’d named them—during school. Wasn’t it bad enough that she was already outwardly different with her too-black eyes, hair as dark as ravens, and skin the color of Georgia clay? Now her insides were jumbled, broken, and manic. Now she saw familiar faces in her visions—her schoolmate Sally’s blue eyes haunted and lost, her neighbor Adam skipping rocks across the river, her daddy’s tears on his fingers.

  None of her visions made sense. Most of them frightened her. Sometimes she’d wake in the middle of the night and eat dried lavender by the handfuls just to stop seeing anything at all.

  Kate never had the same vision twice, and she never had premonitions that seemed to go in a sequence until three months after Evan turned eighteen. First, she saw a man with heavy eye lids wearing a ball cap, hands loosened on a faded leather steering wheel, headlights veered across solid yellow lines on a blacktop.

  Two weeks later, she blacked out while planting roses in the backyard and saw wheels spinning on a car crushed like an accordion with a blurry face seen through the shattered windows. Without his ball cap, the man’s bald head shined like a light bulb in the moonlight as he staggered away from a tractor trailer and across the road, blubbering sloppy, broken prayers.

  Then, a week later, Kate stumbled into her bedroom and collapsed like a Slinky. That night she saw the color of the car—thistle green—with the paint chipping in the shape of Texas above the front tire wheel. Kate had traced that outline a dozen times because it was Evan’s car. When she emerged from the vision, her face was wet with tears and she lay curled up on her bedroom floor, wrapping her arms around her knees, pulling them to her chest. You can’t change the future. You can’t interfere, she told herself over and over again.

  As silver moonlight turned her tears to glitter, she prayed that her vision wasn’t the future. She prayed Evan would be safe and not trapped inside his busted up car, but maybe nobody was listening to her prayers.

  WHEN KATE AWOKE in the forest, she blinked up at the cloudless July sky and pushed herself into a sitting position. Her heart pounded a heavy, uncomfortable rhythm against her ribcage. A memory of blue streaking across pavement and the stench of blood hung in the air for seconds before fading. Butterflies flitted around her cheeks, and she waved them away before standing on quivering legs. How had she been stupid enough to forget to drink her tea? She rubbed her fingers across her collarbone, trying to smooth away the ache in her chest. Her temples pulsed as though her heart had grown tired of its placement in her chest and risen to her skull instead.

  Kate wandered down to the river and removed her sandals. She stepped barefoot into the tepid water and followed the current toward her house. Her steps were sluggish, and she kept trying to grab hold of one thread of the vision. It seemed important to remember, and its misty images followed her home like a cloud of dust. What good were premonitions? Weren’t they meant to tell the seer something? And even if the visions did reveal a truth, Kate could only watch the world unfold around her. She couldn’t stop the future or alter someone’s steps. She was useless, dragging around a worthless, damaged ability.

  Halfway home, the squeal of tires and the crunch of metal caused birds to burst from the tall pines. Kate stopped. She watched the birds fly overhead, blocking out the sun in groups of twos and threes, creating pulsing shadows across her face. Evan’s name struck her heart like a lightning bolt. Without thinking, she dropped her sandals and ran in the direction of the sound.

  Kate crashed through the forest, imagining herself to be a deer escaping her predator. Why did she feel as though she was running toward the hunter? The wind whipped her hair behind her like a black, satin ribbon. Squirrels leapt from branch to branch, chittering questions.

  Kate smelled gasoline and slowed to a jog and then to a walk. Up the steep slope in front of her, a royal blue convertible lay on its side, crushed into the bank of trees. One pine tree had splintered and fallen down the slope.

  The acrid stench of burnt rubber filled her lungs. Her limbs tingled, and her stomach churned. When she closed her eyes, she imagined Evan behind a windshield that spiderwebbed, creating a thousand separate broken versions of his face. The cool breeze blew across her cheeks, and she exhaled.

  Kate used the new growth on the slope to pull herself up higher and higher. Her pulse throbbed in her neck, and she wiped her clammy hands on her shirt when she reached the top. Her bare feet ached, and she winced when she stepped onto the loose gravel scattered across the side of the road.

  Kate approached the overturned car, hesitant, blinking rapidly. The silver underbelly of the car faced her, and oil leaked onto the gravel road. She held her breath as she peered around the shiny, front bumper. Broken glass glittered on the road. There were no bodies in the car, beneath the car, or around the car. It was as though the driver had disappeared. Then she heard a muffled groan.

  Her gaze fell upon a smear of blood leading from the opposite side of the road into the weedy grass. A young man slumped against the trunk of a pine. Kate darted across the road before considering whether or not it was a bad idea. As soon as her feet hit the high grass on the other side, she recognized his bruised face. Geoffrey Hamilton, the eighteen-year-old son of the wealthiest man in Mystic Water and probably the state.

  How many times had she watched Geoffrey from across the schoolyard while he joked around with Evan? How many times had she wondered what it would be like to be a part of his world? She’d long ago memorized the way one corner of his mouth lifted into a smirk just before he laughed. She could recognize his gangly stride from across the baseball field. But she’d never been close enough to him to see the dusty shadow of stubble on his face.

  She dropped down beside him. His head sagged toward his right shoulder. A gash on his high forehead spilled blood into his thick eyebrows and dripped a crimson river down the crooked bridge of his nose. His curly brown hair was plastered to his head in sweaty, dark patches like swirls of mud.

  Kate reached out a hesitant hand and poked her finger into his shoulder. “Are you dead?” No answer. She pressed two fingers against the vein in his neck. A slow, steady beat pulsed against her fingertips. She remembered that someone had once pressed fingers to Evan’s neck, too, but the heart had already given out and the blood had stilled.

  Geoffrey lifted his head. His pale green eyes shone with tears. He blinked and tried to focus on her. “I dunno,” he slurred.

  Kate exhaled and pressed a hand to her chest. Specks of gold flecked his green eyes. Kate looked over her shoulder at the wrecked convertible. “How did you get over here?”

  “Where am I?” he asked. He tried to shift his weight to see around her, but he groaned and reached for his leg. He lost his balance and slid from the tree, collapsing onto his side.

  “Oh,” Kate gasped, reaching for him. “Are you okay?”

  He groaned again. Kate noticed the bend in his ankle was all
wrong. Broken? Geoffrey whimpered and rolled onto his back. Blood seeped through a rip in his striped button-down shirt. He shivered, and his eyelids fluttered closed. She leaned over him. Is he going into shock? What would her mama do? Kate slapped lightly at Geoffrey’s face.

  “Hey,” she said, “hey, Geoffrey. Wake up. Don’t leave me. Stay here. Focus.”

  He opened his eyes and exhaled.

  She leaned away and grimaced. He smelled like the alley behind the bar on the edge of town. Kate had been there only once when she’d gone with her daddy on a job to see if he could help redesign the interior layout. She’d made the mistake of sneaking out the bar’s backdoor and nearly suffocated beneath the stench of regret and fermented drink.

  Kate tapped his face again. “I need you to stay awake, and that would be simpler if you were sober.”

  Geoffrey reached one hand toward his head. Kate grabbed it and shook her head.

  “Your hands are disgusting. You’ll likely infect the wound if you touch it,” Kate said, thinking about how she was going to get help. This dead-end gravel road led to only two places—Look-Off Pointe and her home. Her daddy was working, and her mama was in town helping Mrs. Tyler deliver her fourth child.

  Geoffrey’s head lolled to the side, and his eyes focused on the car. “Oh, God,” he groaned.

  “Were you driving alone?”

  “No,” he said, “Ben was driving.”

  His oldest brother. The Hamilton son with the wild eyes and reckless spirit.

  Geoffrey tried to sit up, but Kate pressed her hand against his shoulder. “Stay down. He’s not here.”

  “I know.” He swallowed. Tears leaked down the sides of his face. “God, it hurts to think. Dad’s car. He’s going to kill us.”

  “You and your brother were driving around drinking?”

  His glassy gaze met hers. “God, I don’t need a lecture from Sacagawea.”