Nightbird

by Alice Hoffman

Not long afterward the mayor came to our door. He was accompanied by Miss Larch, because she was the official town historian and was always interested in matters concerning Sidwell. Mr. Rose came as well. He had a broad grin on his face and I could tell he was there not as a journalist, but because of his interest in our family. James was there, too, and that was very exciting. He had moved out of the attic, and now had the bedroom next to mine.

  “No more hiding,” my mother had said. “We are who we are.”

  As it turned out, everyone in Sidwell agreed. A second vote had been taken at the town meeting after the Montgomery land development had been defeated, and once again the results were unanimous. It was decided that what had happened in Sidwell would remain in the Sidwell archives. What really transpired on the night of the fire would be kept secret, a story Sidwell residents would cherish and tell only to their daughters and sons. All of the T-shirts with images of the Sidwell Monster had been burned in a bonfire. The mayor had Miss Larch take a photograph of him shaking James’s hand for the files in the history room.

  Mr. Rose stayed on when the mayor left to drive Miss Larch home. We all had glasses of cold Pink apple lemonade. “I could not be more proud of you, James,” Mr. Rose said. He then grinned at me. “Or you, Twig.” He looked at my mother with a strong expression. “It’s about time I met my son and daughter properly.”

  I think I’d known the truth for some time. He had the same gray-green eyes as James, and the same tall awkwardness that I had. I hadn’t shut the door on him the first time he came to our house. I’d wanted to know him.

  I wanted to know him now.

  When he hugged me I understood what I’d been missing for so long because I wasn’t missing it anymore.

  We sat on the porch steps and my mother explained why we had left our father behind when we left New York. She hadn’t thought it was right to subject him to the sort of future we would have because of James’s wings, the secrets that would surround our lives. Just because he’d married into the Fowler family, he didn’t have to share our burden and keep secrets. Our father was such an honest man, after all, she didn’t want to put him in the position of having to lie every day. She also feared his honesty would make him slip and she just couldn’t risk James being found out. She convinced him in her letter that he would endanger James, and that was the last thing he wanted to do.

  Our father had respected her wishes, even though he’d been missing us all that time. Miss Larch had sent him photos of me that she’d taken at school events. She announced that she was our great-aunt, and that made sense. Thinking back on it, I remembered her at every concert and science fair. She’d always said, “Well, hello, Twig!” as if she were surprised to see me, but now I realized she’d been looking for me in order to keep my father posted, which she always did.

  Then Miss Larch had called him in the spring, worried, after hearing about the proposed monster hunt. She thought he should know what his family was up against when it dawned on her that perhaps our mother needed him more than she’d ever admit. That’s when he knew he couldn’t stay away any longer. That same day he applied for the job at the newspaper.

  “Now that we’re back together,” Mr. Rose said, “my suggestion is that we stay that way.”

  James grinned and shook our father’s hand. I think I might have cried, but only for a moment. I had realized that my name would now be Teresa Jane Rose, and frankly I couldn’t have been happier.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Night of the Red Moon

  ALL FOUR OF US CLIMBED OUT OUR WINDOWS at exactly the same time. It was the one night when the curse could be broken. If we failed, we would have to wait until the following year. By then the curse might be too strong and we’d never get rid of it. There wasn’t a single cloud, only handfuls of stars strewn across the darkness and, rising high above us, a huge full moon that seemed red as a rose.

  We sat at the corners where the four paths met, right in the middle of the garden we had worked so hard to create all summer long. The air was misty around us and the color and scent of living things surrounded us, black-green mint, tall, plumy grass, wild purple asters. Julia had kept the dried herbs in a leather pouch, and now she placed them into the mixing bowl Mrs. Hall had found in the tangled web of the old garden, back when it was nothing but weeds. We thought the bowl had once belonged to Agnes Early; at least, we hoped it had. When we used it, it seemed that Aggie was with us in some way, and was also on our side. Maybe any powers that she’d once had would help us somehow.

  It was a good thing we’d already picked the herbs. It was late in the season and the leaves were wilted from the heat and sunlight. Some of the plants were no longer flowering, including the roses, which had already bloomed and faded. But we were here, and the garden was here, and we had the best intentions, which always matters in magic. We wanted to make things right, the way they had been two hundred years ago before Lowell Fowler disappeared.

  It was time to end the curse the way it had begun.

  Agate’s hair had been singed in the fire and she’d cut it short, using a pair of nail scissors she borrowed from me. If anything she was even more lovely because now you could see her features more clearly. On this night she wore a white dress trimmed with blue ribbon, which she had sewn herself. She was gazing at James, who had a serious, thoughtful expression. He seemed wary and didn’t say much. He was with us, but he also seemed alone. I would have guessed he’d be overjoyed that the time to reverse the spell had come. If everything worked as it should, he would soon be free of his wings. I wondered if they would drop off feather by feather, or all at once. Would the process be painful, or would he feel much freer and lighter without the burden of his wings?

  We built a small fire out of twigs in the center of the circle. It burned orange and a bright blue and let off little crackling sounds. Just as Julia was about to place the mixing bowl atop the flames, she checked to make certain all of the ingredients had been added. Tansy, mint, lavender, feverfew. She checked once, and then twice, and then she turned pale. One ingredient was missing. No rose petals had been added and now there were none to be had. We didn’t realize that the blooms had faded, then had blown away in the storm. I felt as if we’d lost everything, all at once.

  “It’s my fault,” Julia said. “I should have checked.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t meant to happen,” James said. “The truth is, I’d miss flying. With wings or without, I lose either way. It’s selfish, I know; I just wish I could have it all.”

  That was when I remembered that I still had the envelope Collie had sent me. I carried it every day for luck, but I’d forgotten to open it. If there was any time I needed luck it was now. Inside were two rose petals. The ones that had fallen from the rosebush in Agnes Early’s garden. They’d fallen out of my pocket when I did a handstand near the Montgomerys’ gate. It did feel like Collie was still here with us. The petals had turned as dry as paper, but I didn’t think that would matter. As my father had told me when he’d first come to our door: A rose is a rose is a rose.

  Spells are funny things. My brother wanted his life on earth and his life in the air. I wondered if we halved the ingredients, we might have half the cure.

  “Maybe you can have what you wish for,” I said.

  The others looked at me, confused. For once I was the one who was sure of myself. I didn’t feel invisible or stupid and I wasn’t afraid to say what I thought. I was Teresa Rose, not Twig anymore. I could feel that something inside me had changed. Twig was a girl who spent her time alone and wore her loneliness as if it were armor. For the first time I had everything I wanted, including a family and friends.

  I held out the rose petals. “Agnes Early used two. We’ll change that. We’ll use one. Half the magic.”

  “What then?” James said, unconvinced. “I’ll have one wing?”

  “Trust me,” I said. It was the only chance that he might get everything he’d ever wanted, his heart’s desire, the air and the earth combined.


  “I trust you.” James went to stand in the north corner.

  Agate went to the south corner. Julia and I were at east and west.

  Julia peered at Agnes Early’s spell. “She said to say ‘Fly from me’ two times.”

  “Then we’ll say ‘Come back to me,’ ” I said, reversing the curse. “But only once.”

  “And we’ll mean it from our hearts,” Agate said.

  “And what will happen will happen,” James said, his eyes clear and green. “And I’ll accept whatever that is.”

  Julia placed the bowl onto the fire. A pale curl of smoke arose from the herbs as they heated up. I leaned over and added a single rose petal. The smoke turned red and then pink and then a pearly white. We held hands. I don’t know about the others but I, for one, closed my eyes.

  Come back to me.

  We said it together, as if we had one voice, and maybe we did at the moment.

  I heard the wind. It whirled around us. A few raindrops spattered the ground as the gusts blew past us. I kept my eyes closed. I could feel the magic everywhere, in the earth and the sky and in us. It felt like the past and the future braided together, as if our destiny was changing.

  Yet when I opened my eyes, nothing had changed. There were still the four of us. Still Agnes Early’s garden. Still the Red Moon. Still wings on my brother’s back.

  We were exhausted and confused. We’d tried everything and it appeared we had failed. Out of respect for the magic of the garden we didn’t complain or blame anything or anyone. There wasn’t anything left to do but say good night. I think Agate had tears in her eyes when we left each other. Maybe we all did.

  James and I hurried home through the orchard. He could have flown, but instead he walked beside me. The trees were filled with leaves and tiny green apples that would turn pink in time.

  James threw an arm around my shoulders. “You tried. That’s all you can do.”

  “I wanted to do more than try.”

  “You did. You showed me how much you care about me.”

  I wanted to cry for real now, just sob so loudly all the nesting birds would fly away in a cloud. But I didn’t. I was Teresa Jane Rose and I still had faith that every curse could be undone and that somehow there had been magic in the garden.

  When I slept that night I dreamed of Agnes Early and of Lowell Fowler and of a moon that was red as a rose. I dreamed I walked through Sidwell in the dark and saw all of our neighbors sleeping, and despite everything that had happened I was glad to live in a town where anything could happen and magic was always a possibility.

  In the morning there was the sound of shouting. I recognized James’s voice even in my dream.

  I’d overslept and now I ran to my brother’s room. James was standing there, an amazed expression on his face. His arms were raised, and he was surrounded by a circle of blue-black feathers. They were falling down like the leaves from the trees in autumn.

  “It’s happening,” James said, his voice hoarse.

  His wings were folding in upon themselves, as if they had been made of paper. They dropped onto the floor and turned into dust. With one gust of wind through the open window the dust rose into a circle of ash and flew out the window. I felt the same shivery feeling I’d had in the garden, but this time I didn’t close my eyes.

  And there was James. An ordinary boy.

  My brother peered at his reflection in the mirror on the wall.

  “I’m like anyone else,” he said.

  I couldn’t tell if he was happy or sad.

  “It was just half the cure,” I assured him. “You’ll have your wings again.”

  “I doubt that.” He shook his head. “What’s gone is gone.”

  He’d been who he was for so long, maybe he feared he wouldn’t know how to be ordinary. I’d felt the same way before this summer, and now I was a girl with friends and a family and hope.

  “You’ll see,” I said. “You’ll have what you wished for.”

  Outside the window, the birds James had raised and nursed back to health tapped at the glass. He had had friends, I realized, and a whole world shared with them, one he didn’t want to give up.

  I found my mother in the kitchen and told her what had happened.

  “We tried so hard to let him be like everyone else,” I said.

  “But he’s not like everyone else,” my mother said. “He’s one of a kind. And that is nothing to be ashamed of.”

  She telephoned our father, who came as soon as he could. It felt so good to be waiting for him on the front porch, and even better when he threw his arms around me and said, “We’ll make it right, Twig. You wait and see.”

  He went inside and knocked on my brother’s door. “Just give me five minutes,” he called. He must have had just the right tone, because my brother let him in.

  My mother and I waited in the kitchen. Finally, our father came to have a cup of coffee.

  “He’s thinking things over,” our dad said. “It’s part of growing up. As life goes on you lose some things and you gain some things. It’s true for everyone. James is just facing this all at once.”

  James thought things over for a long time. Then he came out to have dinner with us. My mother made a tomato corn pie for supper and a peach pie for dessert, with some of the apple cinnamon ice cream our dad had brought. I loved even thinking the word dad and I loved that he seemed to know us, even though we’d been separated for so long. And then my mother told us that for all these years they had been writing to each other, and that she’d gotten a post office box and kept all of his letters in a box tied with ribbon under her bed. For all these years she’d been sending him photographs and telling him about our lives, so in a way he really had known us even though we’d been apart. Maybe he hadn’t guessed my favorite flavor of ice cream. And maybe he also knew how much we had missed him.

  Every bit of our dinner together was delicious. In fact, I think it was the best meal I’d ever had. If we had been in Brooklyn, people would have lined up around the block to buy a single slice of my mother’s pie, but because we were in Sidwell, we just ate the whole thing ourselves.

  We sat at the table for a long time, telling stories, remembering the fire. The truth was we felt like a family. We had ups and downs, but we were all together.

  As the sun was sinking, we went out to the porch. Blackbirds flew over our house and disappeared into the orchard. It was the end of the summer, and we felt it in the air, like a cloak falling over us. There was a single star in the sky, brighter than any I’d spied before.

  “I believe that’s Venus,” our dad said. “You can see it much more clearly here in Sidwell than you can in New York City.”

  That was when it happened. Magic always sneaks up on you that way, when you least expect it, when the time is absolutely right.

  James doubled over and gasped. My mother stood up, ready to run to him, but my father held her back.

  “What’s meant to be will happen,” he told her. They looked at each other so deeply that I realized they’d been together in some way even though they’d been apart for so many years.

  We waited together. As darkness fell James’s wings grew back, as if they’d never disappeared. He closed his eyes tightly, expecting pain, but later he explained it seemed perfectly natural. It was just the way the petals of night-blooming jasmine, which close up during the day, unfold when the moon is in the sky.

  Just as I’d hoped. Half the cure. Half the curse. Half the magic.

  There he was, James Fowler Rose, my brother.

  “Absolutely perfect,” I said.

  This year my brother is at school, a senior. He walks Agate to school every day as Julia and I race out in front of them. But at night, he still has his own world. His wings appear as he stands on the roof and all the birds he’s ever saved wait for him and follow him into the woods.

  School is better than it ever was before. I can just be myself, and be as friendly as I want to be. There’s a whole group of girls wh
o are much nicer than I thought they were, and I imagine I’ll be going to the Sidwell cinema with them, but for now Julia and I are busy on the weekends. I’m rewriting the play about Agnes Early, with Mrs. Meyers’s approval. Julia and I act it out together, playing all the parts. Miss Larch is our audience. We visit her on Sunday afternoons and read bits and pieces to her, and she always applauds and tells us how much better than the original it is. After my father moved in with us on Old Mountain Road, I was afraid that Miss Larch might be lonely, but Dr. Shelton is renting her spare room. They have tea together every day and sometimes Julia and I join them. Black orchid is still my favorite.

  The witch is not bad anymore, not the way I’ve written her, only misunderstood, and very much in love. She doesn’t dress in black, but instead she wears a white dress trimmed with blue ribbons, which Agate has sewn. It is so beautiful all the little girls in town want to play the part of the witch and wear that dress. The way we’ve written it, in the second act, she ends the curse and wishes happiness for the citizens of Sidwell.

  I mailed the finished pages to Boston for Collie to read. He was my first friend, after all, and I value his opinion. He told me he thinks I won’t have a problem with my wish, and that someday we’ll sit in the audience of a Broadway theater together to watch a play I’ve written. Because I love Sidwell, I’m not rushing toward my future, but it’s nice to know that it’s out there, waiting for me.

  In front of Town Hall, there is a statue of the local hero who saved our town, a handsome boy of seventeen who wears a cloak that flows to the ground. Very often a small black owl sits on the statue’s shoulder, peering down at our town with bright yellow eyes. People say if he flashes his stare at you he’ll bring you luck. Tourists like to be photographed beside the statue, especially during the apple festival. They stop in at the tourist center to pick up maps and a copy of the Sidwell Herald. They come to walk in our woods, and buy our Pink apple cider, and have Pink apple pie at the Starline Diner. When they picnic on the town green near the statue of our hero, they don’t notice what local people know: Under the cloak there are feathers carved into the stone. Aside from that, our hero looks like an ordinary boy and in many ways, he is. Now if anyone sees him up above us on nights when there is a full moon, they simply wave and go about their business, grateful to live in a town like Sidwell, a place where the apples are always sweet and mysterious creatures are always welcome.