Nightingale's Nest

by Nikki Loftin

  Gayle’s voice began to echo then. Except there were two echoes, singing harmonies to her melody, deeper and fuller—and they came from somewhere near the edge of the Emperor’s property.

  “Gayle?” I burst out. It wasn’t her voice at all for a second—her mouth was wide open, a baby bird hearing her mother’s return—and then she strained against me and began to sing, louder, and clearer, and sweeter than ever before.

  I heard the Emperor gasp as the birds all began to sing with her, as they began to fly in great whirling circles around us, a tornado of wing beats, heartbeats, and music.

  I squinted into the wind, my eyes closing involuntarily against the close rush of feathers. The birds flew so near to my face, it felt as if I were becoming down-covered.

  Down-covered—like Gayle felt in my grasp. I shifted my hands. It was true! She felt—softer. As soft as Raelynn’s hair, softer even. My fingers brushed Gayle’s neck. I could have sworn I felt feathers there.

  Feathers along her arms and sides, fluffy down on her face. I wished I could open my eyes enough to see what was happening.

  I pulled one hand away to cover my ears—the sound was so loud, it was deafening—and realized Gayle was being lifted out of my grip. No, not lifted, I realized, opening my eyes a crack.

  Flying.

  “Gayle!” I called, and strained to pull her back toward me . . . but she was gone, taken up into the vortex of song and softness, changed somehow.

  Or that’s what I thought.

  The birds landed on me, fell on me in a blanket of sound and softness. I must have passed out. When I came to, I was lying next to the Emperor on the ground, Gayle’s nest clutched to my chest.

  And Gayle was gone.

  They all asked me, later, what had happened. I couldn’t tell them. It wasn’t the sort of thing a kid like me could explain, or that they would believe. Honestly? I had a hard time believing it myself.

  It could all have been a dream. A hallucination.

  But I knew, deep down, it was magic. And it was more than magic.

  When Mom and Dad asked me, I tried to make something up they would understand. I told them Mr. King had thought he was having a heart attack, and I’d called the ambulance. “And then he got better, really suddenly,” I said. “Like he’d never been sick at all.”

  Of course, that wasn’t true. He’d been dying, almost gone, when she’d started to sing.

  And then, when the birds had flown away, he had been awake, and alive, and well. Healed, just like my arm. More than healed, maybe.

  Changed, somehow. Maybe . . . forgiven?

  He never spoke again, not that I or anyone in town heard. It was like the birds had taken his voice with them, up into the sky. And then, two weeks later, he died.

  They’d found him in his recording room, with the windows wide open, a smile on his cold face and his eyes shut like he’d fallen asleep. Mrs. Lester’s son, Paul the paramedic, had said he’d died naturally—but he thought it was still weird. The room had been full of feathers from all sorts of different kinds of birds, and thousands of sunflower-seed hulls and pieces of millet. Like he’d been feeding the birds inside for those two weeks, right in his house. When his lawyers read his will, everyone in town had gotten a surprise—the churches, the schools, and even my family.

  No one could explain that. A few people, Mrs. Cutlin included, said he must have gone crazy.

  “But why would he give us all that money?” Dad had asked. “You had to have done more than call the ambulance.” I’d shrugged, knowing that anything I came up with would not be enough of an answer. In my dad’s world, there was no such thing as magic. Unless you were talking about money.

  I hadn’t wanted to take the inheritance money at first. But then I thought, the Emperor was dead. And Gayle was safe from him, forever. If she’d stayed, I would have given it to her, if I could. But she’d . . . flown away. Or something.

  The money worked its own kind of magic. Mom and Dad were happy. We could stay in our house now; we could buy the things we needed. We weren’t rich, but we had enough for Dad to get physical therapy and for Mom to get counseling. Pastor Martin told me I’d done an admirable job of holding down the fort.

  “But if you don’t mind my asking, son,” he’d said after church one Sunday, “you really have no idea why the Emperor would leave that money to you?”

  “I guess he was just really thankful,” I said, every time they asked how this miracle of money had happened. What had I done?—they all wondered—and why didn’t I seem happy about it?

  How could I explain to them that I would have said no to the money, if it meant I could keep Gayle? That I would give every cent of it back to have her again.

  Everyone asked me about it—about that day. And not just about the Emperor. They asked about Gayle, too. The ambulance guys, the Cutlins, the police and the caseworker when they came. They spent hours that day, and for weeks afterward, looking for her.

  “She ran off,” I said. “She was singing . . . and then she just left. I couldn’t follow her; I had to stay with Mr. King. I don’t know where she went. I think she wanted to go home.”

  That was all true, and eventually the police stopped asking me about her. Her picture was everywhere for a while, on posters that said her name was Susan McGonigal. The picture must have been taken by the foster care agency at least a year before—someone had dressed her up in a ruffled shirt and brushed her hair. Gayle looked even younger and smaller in the picture, with sad, dark eyes and lips pulled tight. Someone put bigger, laminated posters outside the Emporium, and one at the post office, offering a reward and asking, HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL? But no one had.

  One good thing came of that, though. Mrs. Cutlin wasn’t allowed to foster any more kids, since she’d lost one. That made me smile every time I thought of her.

  Still, everyone knew there was more to the story. More I couldn’t tell. And the strange looks kept coming for weeks, months. There were parts of the tale I couldn’t even believe myself, and I’d been there when it all happened.

  Eventually people stopped asking, and I didn’t have to keep lying. It felt better. Not good, but better.

  It was just . . . even with Ernest around, I was lonely. The same kind of deep-down lonely I’d been a year before, right after Raelynn had died. Only this time, not a soul understood what had happened, so nobody knew to feel bad for me. Nobody baked any casseroles or sent a card. Sure, everything looked all right on the outside.

  The only broken part of my world was my heart.

  Finally, a few months later, a bird outside my window woke me up. It was a birdcall I’d heard only once in my life, and it hadn’t been a bird making it. It had been a little girl. I picked up the nest I’d made—the one I’d taken home and held on to, just in case—and went outside to the backyard, to sit on the stump of Raelynn’s tree and listen.

  But when I got there, Isabelle was already resting on it, listening to the same bird, that liquid river of sound in the night.

  “Did you hear that, Little John? Did it wake you up, too?” Isabelle asked when she saw me walking toward her. Her clothes were dark, and the moonlight was so bright, it made her round face seem like a smaller, girl-sized full moon, floating in my backyard. Was she alone? I peeked through the chain-link fence and saw Ernest, yawning. His hair stuck out all over, and I smiled.

  “Hey,” he called. “You got this?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You better get back to bed, get some rest. I’m going to teach you a serious lesson on how to drive Formula One tomorrow.”

  “You wish,” he said, but stifled another yawn and shuffled back into his house, knowing I’d take care of his wandering sister.

  Isabelle was staring into the sky, brows furrowed. Concentrating on the song. “What kind of bird do you think it is, Little John?”

  “It’s a nightingale,” I
said. I put the nest down on the ground.

  “I’ve never heard one before. Have you?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said, listening with her. “Once.”

  “Tell me,” she said. “Where’d you hear it?”

  “Well, it was once upon a time,” I said. “In a kingdom not all that far away—”

  “Little John!” Isabelle punched my arm. “Tell me the truth!”

  “I’m trying to,” I said, acting like her punch had really hurt. “Don’t beat me up!” I leaned against the stump, and Isabelle leaned on me. “It all happened when I was just a little boy. A nightingale came to town. But no one recognized her, because she was dressed like a little girl.”

  “A girl like me?”

  “Just like you. Except she had gotten lost from her mom and dad. They told her, ‘If you can’t find us, look for your special tree and build a nest. Then sing for all you’re worth, and we’ll find you.’”

  “Did she find her tree?”

  I laughed, once. “Yes.”

  “And build her nest?”

  I ran a hand over the top of my head. “Someone built one for her. But it was good enough.”

  “Is it that nest?” Isabelle peeked at the nest on the ground that gleamed with silver and gold ribbons in the moonlight.

  “Maybe,” I teased.

  “Did her parents ever find her?” Isabelle asked, and we stopped, as another nightingale, and another, joined in the song.

  The night became almost unbearably beautiful as the three voices wove in and out and around each other, cocooning us in sound.

  I wiped my face. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, they did.”

  We sat there for a long time, until the singing stopped, and the only sound was the rush of wind through the wide leaves of the neighbors’ trees—a sound I’d grown to love, somehow.

  Like the sky itself was taking a breath, getting ready to sing a song to anyone who would listen.

  Acknowledgments

  In 2009, I wrote a picture book manuscript called “The Treasure Nest.” Those four hundred words grew, changed form, and became Nightingale’s Nest with the care and support of many people.

  Thank you to the dear friends who helped me shape this nest in the early days: Shelli Cornelison, Rae Dollard, Bethany Hegedus, Cynthia Leitich Smith, Susanne Winnacker, and my agent, Suzie Townsend.

  I owe a great debt to two insightful and skilled editors, Laura Arnold and Gillian Levinson. Thank you both for your perceptive comments and gentle guidance.

  Throughout my life, I have been blessed with extraordinary teachers who built nests of knowledge, safety, and love for me, and later for my children. In gratitude and memory, I placed the names of many of them in these pages. If you see your name here, thank you forever for the gifts you gave in the classroom and beyond. I never forgot you, and I never will.

  And always, love and thanks to my boys, Drew and Cameron, and Dave, who is my tree.

  Nikki Loftin lives and writes just outside Austin, Texas, surrounded by dogs, chickens, and small, loud boys. She is also the author of The Sinister Sweetness of Splendid Academy, which Publishers Weekly called “mesmerizing” and Kirkus called “irresistible.” You can visit her online at www.nikkiloftin.com.

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