Nightingale's Nest

by Nikki Loftin

  “Magical, strange and utterly lovely, while still deeply rooted in the sweat, dirt, and grief of one hot Texas summer. An extraordinary read—I had to tear myself away from it.” —Katherine Catmull, author of Summer and Bird

  “More than a modern fairytale retelling, in Nightingale’s Nest, Loftin constructs a story that tugs and tears at the reader’s heart while expertly weaving what remains into a nest as lovely and magical as Gayle’s birdsong.”

  —Bethany Hegedus, author of Truth with a Capital T and Between Us Baxters

  * * *

  “Nikki Loftin’s Nightingale’s Nest tugs at the mind and at the heart. Riveting from the beginning, it’s filled with characters that step out of the book and mysteries that will keep you turning the pages. All the while, remaining a poignant story about loss, love, loyalty and the importance of standing up for what’s right. This is a book you’ll long remember.”

  —Lynda Mullaly Hunt, author of One for the Murphys

  * * *

  “Nightingale’s Nest is a lovely, nuanced story as hopeful as it is heartbreaking. . . . Loftin’s eye for strange beauty in unexpected places often takes the reader’s breath away. It is a story that lingers, bittersweet but ultimately joyous, told by a boy wiser than his years about a girl who is more than she seems.”

  —Claire Legrand, author of The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls

  * * *

  “Nightingale’s Nest is a beautiful and lyrical blend of magical realism and timelessness, about a boy desperately trying to do what’s right and an extraordinary girl who changes his life forever. Loftin’s new novel will haunt your soul—and lift your heart.”

  —Kimberley Griffiths Little, author of The Healing Spell and When the Butterflies Came

  * * *

  “Nightingale’s Nest is a haunting, beautifully told story about the healing power of love, music, friendship, and forgiveness—with just a touch of magic. Nikki Loftin is a remarkable storyteller!”

  —Bobbie Pyron, author of The Dogs of Winter and A Dog’s Way Home

  * * *

  “The kind of book I wanted to read slowly. Bittersweet and lovely. Nightingale’s Nest sings a song of heartbreak and hope.”

  —Shelley Moore Thomas, author of The Seven Tales of Trinket

  * * *

  “Gorgeous and haunting, Nightingale’s Nest alights in our minds like a deeply-felt dream and does not leave. Loftin’s beautifully-rendered contemporary fairy tale looks at the cages we trap ourselves in and shows us how we can finally find our way out. The book reminds us—gently, lovingly—that we cannot always keep the things that are dearest to us, but the joy we got from them can always endure. This is a work of tremendous heart.”

  —Anne Ursu, author of Breadcrumbs

  * * *

  “Sweet, hopeful, and completely lovely, Nightingale’s Nest perfectly captures the challenges of growing up and dealing with loss. Get ready to have your heart touched.”

  —Shannon Messenger, author of Keeper of the Lost Cities

  A division of Penguin Young Readers Group

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  345 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  USA / Canada / UK / Ireland / Australia / New Zealand / India / South Africa / China

  Penguin.com

  A Penguin Random House Company

  Copyright © 2014 Nikki Loftin

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-60437-3

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For Lari

  Contents

  Reviews

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Acknowledgments

  About the author

  When I first heard Gayle, I couldn’t tell if she was a bird or a girl. All I knew for sure was that the music she made wasn’t like anything I’d heard before. It was magic.

  Even a kid like me could recognize that.

  I’d just come from clearing brush on the Emperor’s property. He wasn’t really an emperor, of course. His name was Mr. Azariah King, but he’d owned a chain of those almost-everything-for-a-dollar stores in our part of Texas for years, called Emperor’s Emporiums, so everybody called him the Emperor.

  Except for my dad. He hated the man. But not enough to turn down a steady ten-week job for the summer, even if it was almost a hundred degrees most days. Money was money, and our landlord wasn’t going to wait until a better job came along, Mom told us. Dad said he wasn’t as worried about rent as he was about getting our cable TV hooked up again; he hadn’t been able to catch a single baseball game since the end of May.

  So Dad, the Big John of Big John’s Tree and Brush Removal, had taken the job to work on the Emperor’s failing pecan trees, all 104 acres of them. As for me, I was only twelve, but I’d grown seven inches in nine months. Dad said I was old enough and strong enough to learn how to work with trees during summer vacation. And if I messed up, cut too deep into one of the Emperor’s pecans and killed it? He said that would serve the money-grubber right.

  I didn’t care if I killed a tree, either. I thought the world would be a better place if every tree in it was cut down.

  The first thing I noticed that day was the birds. They had flown away, like they usually did, at the sound of Dad’s chain saw. But I saw that they had all flown in the same direction, and kept going over the Emperor’s tall wooden fence to the neighboring property. That property belonged to Mrs. Cutlin, a widowed lady with one jerk of a son about my age, although they always had some other kids hanging around—she fostered orphans. Not because she was the kind of person who cared about kids, or at least I didn’t think so. Dad and I had heard her yelling at her son for the past few weeks. When I’d asked Dad about it, he’d said, “Fostering a kid’s worth six hundred dollars a month. Whole town knows she needs the money.”

  Anyway, there was a tree there, a tall sycamore that grew close to the Emperor’s fence line, close enough that some of the branches reached over. I was hauling cut limbs to a place that looked about right for a burn pile, and that’s when I saw where the birds had gone.

  They were p
erched in the sycamore, hundreds of them. It looked like someone had taken a paintbrush to the thing, what with all the reds and blues—cardinals and scrub jays—in between the wide leaves. Dozens of sparrows sat along the lower branches, mixed in with black-capped chickadees, finches, wrens, and flycatchers. I even counted four painted buntings, with their rainbow coats, before I realized what was wrong.

  None of the birds were singing. They weren’t making a single sound.

  But something was. Or someone.

  I’d never heard a song like it before. I couldn’t imagine anyone in the world had.

  The notes were high and liquid, a honey-soft river of sound that seeped right through me. I stopped when I heard the first notes and just stood there, dropping cedar cuttings at my feet.

  The song sailed over the fence, like it was meant for me alone. No words to it. It was pure melody. I felt almost like my feet were lifting away from the ground, that the only thing holding me to earth was my own belief in gravity.

  The song went on, and I peered through my watering eyes at the branches. There was something there. Something bigger than a bird. A collection of stacked twigs and branches, bits of twine, and what seemed to be wire wrapped around it all, holding it together. A nest, it looked like. And the sound was coming from inside.

  I took a step toward it, and my foot hit a twig.

  The birds heard me first, and they all took flight, enormous confetti swirling into the sky.

  Then the music stopped, and I felt my heart constrict, like I’d lost something precious.

  I took another step, and another, until I could see through the leaves. That’s when I realized the singer was a person. A little girl. She was plain, with brown hair the same color as mine. But hers was ratted around her face like she’d never seen a brush, and she had dirt smeared across her cheeks and nose. Too thin, I thought, as she climbed over the edge of the bundled mess of sticks and out onto a branch to see me better. She was awfully close to the slender branches that I knew wouldn’t hold the weight of a kid, even a skinny little girl.

  I had to get her to come down before she hurt herself. But she looked as frightened of me as the birds had been. As if she might fly away like they had, if I spoke too suddenly.

  First, I’d have to get her to trust me.

  “Who are you?” I asked in my softest voice. “Was that you singing?” As she inched closer, I realized she must be about eight years old.

  The same age my sister, Raelynn, had been.

  My heart constricted a bit more. “That was you, right?”

  She nodded, her head bobbling like a heavy sunflower on a too-narrow stalk, and edged out a bit more on the branch. Her feet were bare, and dirty. Her toes were as thin as the rest of her, and kind of long—she used them to clutch the branch she was on just like a baby bird would.

  “It was beautiful,” I said, almost whispered. “The most beautiful thing I ever heard.”

  She blushed a little.

  “What’s your name?”

  She didn’t answer. She looked confused, like she wasn’t certain what I’d asked.

  Maybe she didn’t speak English, I thought. Or maybe she was touched, like my grandma used to say when she meant crazy. I tried again: “You got a name?”

  “Gayle,” she said, clearing her throat to repeat the word. Her speaking voice was unsteady, like she wasn’t used to talking. “I’m Gayle.”

  I recognized the roughness of too many tears cried in the sound of her words. It was the same way my own voice had been for a long time.

  Something had happened to her, something bad.

  I spoke a little louder and tried to smile. “I’m Little John.” I lifted my arms, flexed the muscles, and made a constipated/mad face like one of the Wrestling Federation guys on TV. I knew it made me look ridiculous, lips pulled back from my teeth, my eyes crossed. But I wanted her to laugh at me. “Little, on account of I’m so small and puny.”

  Laughter spilled down for a split second. “You’re not little.”

  “Sure I am,” I said. “It just looks like I’m big from up there. It’s a—what do you call it?—an optical illusion. Why don’t you come and see for yourself? Climb on down. Careful, though. That rotten tree isn’t sturdy enough for an enormous girl like you.”

  The laughter pealed out again, and I saw her reach out to the tree trunk and hug it, of all things. “It’s okay,” she whispered to the trunk. “You’re not rotten.” Like it was her friend, and I’d hurt its feelings. Her feet looked unsteady on the high branch, and the leaves all around her were shaking.

  I had to get her down. “Stop fooling around,” I tried again, wiping away the sweat that was running into my eyes. “It’s not safe up there. You’re too high.” I had an idea. “I’ll get you a piece of candy if you come down. Just do it now, all right?”

  She had to come down. If she waited any longer, I was going to have a heart attack.

  “Okay,” she said. But then she didn’t move. She just started humming under her breath, the same tune she’d been singing, but softer this time. It still brought tears to my eyes.

  At least I thought that’s what was happening. It must have been, because as I watched her, and listened to the music, the singing that got louder and louder, clearer and higher and purer, she got . . . fuzzy around the edges. Her outline was against the sun, I thought. That’s why she seemed to blur. It was awful hot; maybe it was just the flickering mirage of heat lines.

  I wiped my eyes again and squinted up at her. The more she sang, the more she seemed to shimmer against the sky, her edges feathering into the background blue.

  Her voice was loud now, so loud I couldn’t have stopped the sound even by plugging my ears. Through the melody, though, I heard something squeal and slam behind me, on the other side of the fence. A door.

  Someone else was listening.

  I turned and saw the Emperor, a hundred yards back, standing outside his back door, a deep purple velvety robe flapping around his bony legs. He was staring at the tree, mouth wide open, watching the girl. The sunlight glinted on his wrinkled, wet cheeks. I wondered, for a moment, at the sight of a grown man crying. But her voice . . . it was the kind that could bring anyone to tears, I figured.

  Cra-ack! I knew the sound of a branch cracking. I whirled back around.

  That’s when I realized the girl had to be touched. She hadn’t started to come down at all—she’d started to climb out on the branch, toward me. She was perching, hopping like a wren, further and further out on one of the limbs that wouldn’t hold her.

  I knew what was going to happen next. She was going to go out too far on the branch, and it would snap under her. She would fall, screaming, in a shower of small branches, leaves, and bark.

  It was the nightmare I had every night.

  I wouldn’t be there to catch her. I never made it to the base of the tree in time, my legs too small, too short, my hands reaching out at the ends of arms too weak to hold her anyway.

  And I would have to watch her snap like a bough herself, on the ground, the blood as red as a cardinal’s wing.

  It was the nightmare I’d lived once before.

  And the reason I had devoted my life to cutting down every tree in the world.

  Every last murderous tree.

  The girl screamed as she fell, and I raced to catch her, knowing I would be too late.

  There was no reason I should have caught her. The branches of the sycamore didn’t reach that far over the fence, not far enough that she could have fallen down on the Emperor’s side.

  She must have jumped, that was it. However it had happened, she landed in my arms, a good twelve feet away from the branch from which she’d fallen.

  I held her, trying to stop shaking. Trying to blink the grit and bark out of my eyes so they would stop watering. I felt my pounding heart leap through my chest,
where I had her cradled like a baby.

  I had caught her. Somehow, I had saved her.

  She put a small hand on my heart, right over the beating wall. Her dark brown eyes sparkled up at me, like she’d never been in any danger, like she hadn’t been scared one bit. “Sounds like you swallowed a drum,” she said. “Right here.”

  I tried to speak but couldn’t. I was still gasping for breath. My hands tightened around her, and I shuddered.

  “You,” I managed. “You little idiot.”

  I shook her then, shook her until I could hear her eyeballs rattle in their sockets, until she cried out. “You could have died, you know that? Died!”

  “I-I-I’m s-s-sorry,” she squeaked at last. “I knew you’d catch me. Didn’t you know you could catch me, Tree?”

  I stopped shaking her. “What did you call me?”

  “Tree,” she said, softer. “Just . . . you remind me of a tree.”

  I dropped her like a hot coal. She grunted when she hit the ground. It didn’t seem fair that even her grunt was musical, the low notes of a flute. “Don’t call me that. Don’t ever.”

  “Why not?” She stood up, dusting herself off. She wore tattered denim shorts, jeans that had been cut off and belted around the waist with an old blue shoelace to hold them up, and a T-shirt that might have been purple fifty washes ago. “You got eyes the same color as pecans. And you’re tan as bark. I love trees.”

  “Well, I hate them,” I said. “I’d rather be called—” I stopped, thinking of all the names my dad used when I didn’t move fast enough. I’d been called a lot of things, since I’d started helping him out with the business. But this name stung worse than all of those put together. “Just call me Little John.”

  “Okay,” she rasped out, her voice still rough. Her arms moved slower as she picked twigs out of her hair. They were the smallest arms I’d ever seen on a girl her age. Thin, and covered with fingerprint-sized bruises. Had I left those? No, I thought. Bruises like those took time to purple up.