“Maureen!”
The aunt is up awfully early for a Sunday.
I meander downstairs to the kitchen. Beatrice is standing with her mason jar of water and car keys.
“Where are you going?” I ask, picking up a piece of toast from the plate on the counter.
“I have to take you to Rutland.”
And then I remember. I have “visitation” with my mom on Sundays from nine in the morning until noon and after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
“I need to get dressed,” I tell her, dropping the toast.
When I come downstairs, Beatrice is already in her pickup truck, which is parked in the dirt driveway that runs alongside the house. I slide into the passenger seat.
“You ready?” she asks.
“Fine,” I say.
At first, “visitation” meant driving to the hospital. Then, after Mom was moved to a treatment house, she’d come over to Gram’s. Today, we pull up in front of a coffee place in Rutland.
“Want me to come in?” Beatrice asks.
“No.” I slam the door before she can object.
My mom’s alone at a table. As I walk inside, I make a quick assessment of the situation: Hair is brushed—good sign. Clothes look clean—excellent news. Bags under eyes—warning.
She sees me and waves, her foot jiggling. She stands and gives me a weak hug. It feels so good, tears sneak out the corners of my eyes. I pretend to wipe my nose on my sleeve and scrape them away.
“Beatrice’s house is nice,” Mom says. “I saw it once.”
“It’s nice.” It’s not home, the buzz whispers. I smile hard until it stops.
She releases me, sits. “You’re okay?”
“Yeah.” I sit in the other chair.
“I can’t believe Phil—” Mom stops. Her foot jiggles harder. “I’m so sorry about all this, Reens.” Her voice cracks—alarm bells.
“Don’t be sorry,” I say. I can’t let things fall apart in the first five minutes. She wipes her eyes—oh man, I can’t let her cry. “It was my fault,” I tell her. “I knew Phil and Gram were in the middle of something, but I had to go to the bathroom. It was just bad luck that Phil threw the plate at that exact second.”
Mom’s face has gone white. Her cheeks melt down, her mouth opens. “He hit you with a plate?”
Now I’ve done it. “No, really, Mom, it’s fine. The plate hit the wall. I was barely scratched.” I lift a hunk of hair behind my ear to show her where the shard of plate cut me. “See? It’s totally nothing.”
Her eyes stare past me out the window.
“Seriously, everything’s great.” I grab her hand.
Her eyes come back to me.
“They have cards here,” I say, pulling a deck from a shelf and splitting it to shuffle. “Want to play hearts?” It’s our game—we even have a special deck of cards . . . somewhere.
She lifts the corners of her mouth. “I left the magical sparkle cards back at the residence.”
She remembers—good sign, great sign. Our cards have glittery unicorns on them. “Bring them next time?”
Mom nods, and then her face sinks. “Next time,” she says, like it’s so far in the future, it may as well be never.
My cheeks start to vibrate; they’re working so hard to hold my smile. We play hearts for the rest of the time. I lose, and then she loses; we both take turns letting the other one win.
Beatrice is waiting for me out in the truck at noon. I open the door and climb in.
“How’d it go?” she asks.
“Fine.” I curl into the seat, pull my knees up against the seat belt.
She nods. As we pull onto the state highway, she asks, “You want to go see the school or wait until tomorrow?”
“I’ve been to Rutland Intermediate before.”
“Did the social worker not tell you? Well.” She wrings the steering wheel with her hands. “I guess it was late.”
I let go of my knees and my feet slide to the floor. “Tell me what?”
“I can’t drive you to Rutland every day. I’ve got work, and it’s just too far.” She says it like we’ve already had this fight, like she’s explained it to me a hundred times.
“I’m not going to my old school?” The buzz cranks up, creeps out.
She glances over at me, looking a lot less sure of herself than she sounded. “I’m sorry, Maureen. I wish I could—”
“It’s fine,” I snap, because the buzz has filled my whole body like a blizzard. I grip my jeans and dig my fingers down. This is not a big deal, I tell the buzz. It’s not like I had friends. It’s not like any of those kids mattered. It’s fine. It’s fine.
We drive back to Branford. The rumble of the road and the smooth voice of the lady on the radio quiets the noise inside. I let my eyes glaze over watching the green streak by the car window and try not to think about having to march into some strange country school tomorrow.
When we park at the house, the aunt pulls a couple of shopping bags out of the truck bed. “I stopped at Goodwill while you were at visitation.” She holds out the bags. “Thought you might need—”
“I don’t need anything,” I say, teeth gritted. “I have clothes at Gram’s, somewhere. I’ll get them when I go back there.” I’m sure my fall stuff didn’t get lost when I moved. At least I think I’m sure.
The aunt hugs the bags. “Your gram, she—well, the social worker—”
“Gram can’t find my clothes?” Typical Gram.
“It’s more complicated than that.” The aunt has gone pale and fidgety. “If they don’t fit, I can get another size.” She holds the bags out.
I cannot handle any more of this conversation. I grab the bags, go inside, head right up to my room, throw the bags into the closet, and flop on the bed. At least before, when I was at Gram’s, I could stay at the same school. I had my same clothes. Now, I’m in the middle of nowhere with a stranger and about to be tossed into sixth grade with a bunch more strangers while forced to wear strange clothes that are probably ten sizes too small. I can’t even cry because what’s crying going to do? I’m trapped in this house, in this life, in this everything.
I try to game out how I can possibly fill the hours until I get to sleep. What I wouldn’t give for a television . . .
I try to read, but my mind keeps sliding off the page. I stumble over the same paragraph three times, then give up and stare at the pictures.
I hear a whistle. It’s coming from the back of the house. Is the aunt whistling for me now? And then I hear a scratchy screech and see something flash past the window in Beatrice’s room.
I sneak across the landing, into her room, to the window. A big old oak blocks half my view. The aunt is standing by some shed wearing what looks like a fancy baseball mitt with tassels. Then I hear that screech again, loud, from somewhere in the oak. I have to get a better view.
I tiptoe downstairs and into the kitchen. The aunt whistles. I press my face to the glass slider that leads to the backyard. The yard’s scraggly grass is punctuated with wooden posts of various shapes and sizes. Around the back edge of the wide yard, near where the trees start and spread, are wooden sheds with what look like jail cells made out of narrow pipe stuck on the front. Where’s the screecher?
Beatrice whistles again and taps her glove. A shadow shifts on a tree branch and then lifts out into the light, soars, and crashes onto Beatrice’s baseball mitt.
When she said she kept birds, I did not imagine this crazy huge bird—bigger than a football—with wild amber eyes and a hooked beak. Red-brown feathers lie smooth on its head, but the longer, fluffier feathers on its chest are white patterned in slashes of red-brown. The bird’s long legs—half the bird’s body is made up of its legs—end in curved black talons that dig into the leather. Now I understand the glove.
I slide open the door without really thinking, drift across the lawn. “What is that?”
Beatrice startles. “I thought you were upstairs.” She straightens her shoulders, clears her throat. “This,” Beatrice says, “is Red.”
The bird looks right at me. The feathers on the back of its head lift into a crown. It opens its wings like a cartoon villain with a cape and flaps slowly, showing off.
It looks toward Beatrice and gives a little squeak of a call. Beatrice whips her arm and the bird flies away into a tree, and it’s like I’ve been given a gift, seeing this magic flight, a slow swoop and glide over the grass and then flap up to a branch.
“She’s a red-tailed hawk,” my aunt says, stepping toward me.
“Is she your pet?”
Beatrice snorts as if the word offends. “A hawk is nobody’s pet.”
She whistles, raises her left arm, and shakes the glove, in which I see there’s a dead mouse. The hawk comes soaring out of the shadows. The only warning of her approach is the tinkling of the tiny bells attached to her legs. She swoops up and lands neatly on the glove, light as a bubble, and skewers the mouse with her beak. She swallows the whole thing down, then turns her attention to the stranger in her yard.
Red looks at me, through me, inside me, like she knows everything about me. Like there’s no such thing as a secret.
She doesn’t look away.
“Do you like birds?” Beatrice asks.
The word bird seems too plain for Red. Imagine if, when Snow White or Cinderella whistled and sang, instead of twittering little nothing birds who folded ribbon and sewed skirts, she got this dragon of a bird, big enough to rip an evil queen’s heart out.
“I like her,” I say, reaching a hand out to touch the feathers, like scales . . .
Beatrice grabs my fingers in midair, wrenches my hand down. “Never touch a hawk’s face.”
Anger flashes up like fire. I jerk my hand back. “Fine,” I snap.
Like I need this bird. Like I need anything. Alone, alone . . .
I turn to go inside. The buzz is a strangling roar in my throat.
“Wait,” Beatrice yelps. “Maureen,” she says, voice calmer. “Let me show you. Please.”
I peek back over my shoulder.
“Like this,” she says, and rubs one finger on Red’s chest. “You try.”
The buzz whispers, Don’t. Dangerous. But Red—her feathers glow in the sunlight. I can’t resist.
I creep back, stretch my finger, and touch the soft feathers. It’s like she’s made of cloud.
“It’s almost passage bird season,” Beatrice says. “I’m planning on catching a passage red-tail. I’m going to need help feeding the birds and cleaning the mews.”
“The what?”
“These aviaries.” She points to the sheds. “They’re called mews. I hope to catch a hawk and I could use your help taking care of it. If you wanted to help.”
I look at this beautiful bird. “She’s trapped here?”
Beatrice shakes her head, relaxes her shoulders. “Red’s an imprinted bird. I bought her as a chick from a breeder for the falconry school. She’s never lived in the wild—never could, either.” She swings her arm and Red soars away into the top of a tall pine. “I do plan to catch a wild bird using a trap, but even that I don’t think of as trapping. The world is a tough place for a hawk. Humans have encroached on their forests with power lines and rat poison. And Nature herself was never easy on birds of prey. Most first-year birds won’t make it through the winter. So by catching a passage hawk and training it, and also keeping it fed and warm in these mews, I am taking something wild for myself, yes, but I’m also helping it survive a world that’s hard on the young and vulnerable.”
She whistles and Red swoops down from the branches, bells tinkling in her wake. It’s all a blur, as my eyes have teared over. It’s not like I don’t know about the world being hard.
Beatrice goes on. “I’ve trapped passage hawks for a number of years now. Seen every one through to the spring, watched them fly off into the rest of their lives. I like to think that at least for some of those birds, I made that possible for them.”
She slings her fist and Red flies off again, flapping deeper into the surrounding trees. “Falconry is not about trapping. Once a bird’s trained, they fly free on the hunt. If the bird wants, it can take off for the hills.”
“Why doesn’t she?” I ask, eyes searching the shadows for Red.
Beatrice glances at me. “Because falconry is about trust.” She whistles and Red emerges from the branches, wings wide, circling and then diving back to Beatrice’s glove. “Red knows I’m here to keep her safe and healthy. She trusts that I won’t put her in danger on a hunt and will rustle up enough prey to keep her happy.
“Like I said, a hawk’s not a pet. She’s a partner.”
A partner . . . And suddenly I’m soaring above the clouds on the wings of a dragon bird, my dragon bird . . .
Red squawks, and Beatrice feeds her another chunk of meat. “I could teach you.”
“Falconry?” I ask, sounding way more hopeful and excited than I would normally allow, seeing as she sprang it on me.
She nods, smiling like she knows she got me. “As a master falconer, I can train an apprentice.”
My eyes are practically popping out of my head.
“I can’t officially register you,” she goes on, establishing the limits of the fantasy. “You’re too young for the license. But we can do something unofficial.”
I nod, afraid to say anything because I’m not even thinking in words, but in exclamation points.
“You can touch her again,” she says, “if you want.” A smile flickers at the corners of her mouth. She turns Red’s rust-striped chest toward me.
This could all be a trick, some help-the-foster-kid plot, but then I lock eyes with Red and I decide it doesn’t matter. My fingertip touches the smooth outer feathers, the fluff of down beneath, then hits the breastbone.
Red squeaks and promptly poops on my sneaker.
Beatrice smirks. “We’re going to have to get you some boots.”
I don’t even care. My fingers are already reaching again, running along the ridges of Red’s feathers, imagining how it’s possible to soar on such wisps.