BEFORE
Nora Wilder was supposed to be a bird. At least that’s what she thought when she looked at herself in the mirror and saw arms where wings should be. The closest she actually came to flying was when her younger daughter, Finn, slipped from her grasp and sprinted toward a busy street. Nora swooped down on the toddler, and Finn’s tiny body began to tremble in her arms. As her daughter anxiously kneaded her chest, Nora stroked her soft-spun curls and wished she didn’t have to scare her baby to keep her safe.
Although her wings were imaginary, Nora felt an almost continuous desire to stretch them, to unclench the knot in her back that tied them down and with one powerful flap, lift off into a cloudless sky. Their being imaginary also didn’t mean that her wings weren’t so blue they were almost black, the kind of blue you wade into and disappear. That’s what Nora saw when she walked out her front door for the last time: the tips of two ink-blue wings fanning her peripherals, one for each of the daughters she would leave behind.
Nora’s elder daughter, Zadie, must have been part bird because she knew how to squawk. When Zadie was a baby, Nora was convinced that she must have swallowed bagpipes filled with broken glass, because that was the sound that came out of her mouth every time she cried. It sometimes lasted for hours at a time, and Nora did everything she could think of to get her to stop. She wouldtry rocking her, feeding her, changing her. When all else failed, she’d play one of her favorite cassettes in hopes it would soothe her daughter to sleep.
It wouldn’t. Zadie would only wail harder. Nora would look at the phone on the wall and wish she had someone she could call, someone who’d rush over and recommend a kooky home remedy like rubbing smashed bananas on her baby’s chest while counting to one hundred. That wouldn’t work, either, but at least she’d have someone to talk to and hug when she started crying, too.
She was alone in a town she barely knew with a screaming baby who had terrible taste in music, but something outside of herself was telling her this was the place she was supposed to be.
One morning, after a sleepless night and four Tom Waits albums, Zadie was particularly ornery. “Hey! I don’t make fun ofyourmusic,” Nora joked feebly and stopped the tape.
Out of ideas, Nora crossed the room and opened a window to let in some fresh air. “Feel that breeze?” she said to the writhing, red-faced creature in her arms. “Isn’t it nice?” Zadie’s bleating abated a little and she cautiously cracked open a pair of eyelids that until now appeared to have been swollen shut. Nora tracked her child’s gaze to something in the walnut tree outside the window: a thrush. It puffed out its spotted chest, tilted its head back, and sang four lilting notes with a trill at the end, and just like that, Zadie’s crying stopped. Nora was so relieved she started laughing. “So you like birds, too, huh? Well, at least we havesomethingin common.”
That afternoon Nora bought a bird feeder at the hardware store, filled it with birdseed, and hung it on the tree outside Zadie’s bedroom window. When it was time to put her down for the night, Nora opened the window, and the room filled with the sounds of whippoorwills, mockingbirds, robins, and thrushes. Zadie’s eyes opened wide; then slowly they began to loll. As the birdsong turned to crickets, the arms that cradled Nora’s baby grew feathers the color of the night sky, and Nora sang a song about a little bird who was both very near and very far from home.
AFTER
ONETHOUGHTS ON SUN HATS
Zadie Wilder owned six sweaters, four pairs of leggings, and one extra-large beach towel. The reason she knew she had exactly six sweaters, four pairs of leggings, and one extra-large beach towel was that she was attempting to cram all of them inside an already bursting suitcase. She had to work fast. Her ex, Dustin, would be clocking out in a few minutes, and she hadn’t even packed any of her cassettes yet. Out of all her worldly possessions, her cassette collection was the one thing she couldn’t bear seeing smashed on the pavement below their—okay,histhird-story apartment window.
Dustin was never quite able to grasp why she cared so much about them. “They were my mom’s,” Zadie had said.
“Yeah, but didn’t your mom, like,leaveyou?” Callous, maybe, but not untrue. To this day, Zadie still wondered why Nora hadn’t taken any of her cassettes with her. Her mom’s ’97 RAV4 might have had a hole in the floor and sounded like a go-kart when it accelerated, but at least it had had a working tape deck. The day Zadie got her driver’s license, Nora had tossed her the keys and they drove around town for hours listening to the tapes Nora kept in the glove compartment. That’s how Zadie discovered Blondie, the Indigo Girls, and Prince. When Nora left two years later, she took the car, but Blondie and the rest of her musical idols stayed behind.It’s not like her,Zadie, still in shock, had thought at the time.She never goesanywhere without her music.In a way, it was more surprising than the disappearance itself.
Now it was Zadie’s turn to disappear. Dustin had asked that she “leave no trace” of ever having been in his apartment. As Zadie rinsed a lipstick smudge off one of his glass tumblers, she felt more like she was covering up a crime scene than surrendering the title of Dustin’s part-time live-in girlfriend. Soon she would go back to her own apartment, unpack her things, and decide how sad she really was about the breakup. Right now she didn’t feel much of anything, except maybe a little nauseous.
It’s not like she was totally alone. If she got lonely, she could talk to the Ladybug. According to the various mommy blogs, Zadie’s baby was the size of a sweet pea, but she found the whole food-to-child analogy creepy. It made it sound like her baby was something to be harvested when ripe, then stuffed in a cornucopia on Thanksgiving with some gourds and ears of corn. So instead she decided to measure the size of her child against other living things. At six weeks, her baby was approximately a quarter of an inch long, the size of a ladybug. In two weeks, it would be the size of a honeybee. Eventually it would be big enough that she could start comparing it to cuter animals: a chipmunk, maybe, or a kitten, but for now she’d have to settle for ones with exoskeletons.
“You were kind of his idea, you know.” Zadie addressed her midsection as she placed the clean glass in the dish rack. Dustin had broached the subject of kids a few months earlier during a trip to the animal shelter. As they browsed crates of underexercised dogs, he said, “You know what would be even cooler than a dog?”
Zadie thought he was going to suggest they adopt a snake or an iguana, some gross bachelor-pad animal that would require keeping tubs of crickets in their freezer. She opened her mouth to protest when he blurted, “A kid!”
The next day, in true Dustin fashion, he forgot he had even made the suggestion. Then several months later, in an ironic twist of fate, Zadie found herself pregnant anyway—a fact that she had still notyet shared with anyone, including Dustin. She should have seen it coming, and not just because she had terrible luck, but because she could literallysee things coming.
She was seven years old when she first realized there was something different about her. That day she was “helping” her mom in the yard by detonating the piles of leaves that Nora had spent all morning raking. Through the leaves that tumbled in front of her, she saw Clarence, Finn’s father, smiling at her from atop a ladder that was leaning against the side of the house. He pulled a wet bundle of leaves out of the gutter, held them up for her to see, and made a stink face. Zadie took this as a challenge. She reached into one of her mom’s piles, held up her own bundle of leaves, then tossed them into the air like confetti. Clarence tried tossing his leaves, too, but they clumped together and landed on the driveway with a splat. Zadie giggled.
As Clarence turned his attention back to the task at hand, Zadie was struck by an uneasy sensation. To her seven-year-old brain, it was much like the feeling she experienced when she went too high on the swings and her stomach felt like it was floating. It was soon followed by a single scary thought:Clarence is going to fall like the leaves.Confused and frightened, she turned to her mom, who was in the middle of bagging the leaves she’d collected. Before Zadie could utter a word, she heard a crashing sound behind her. She whipped around and saw Clarence on the ground, clutching his left leg. It looked funny, like her dolls’ legs did after she’d turned them around the wrong way.
Then the screaming started. Zadie had never heard a grown man make a noise like that before. It was the scariest thing she had ever heard. Nora rushed over to him as Zadie fled into the house and up the stairs to her bedroom. She hid under the covers and cried until she heard the wail of the ambulance.
It had taken Zadie several days to work up the courage to tell her mom what had happened to her that day. By that time, Clarence was camped out on the couch and using a wire clothes hanger toscratch under his cast. Zadie made sure the door to the living room was closed before she said, “It’s my fault.”
“What’s your fault, hon?” Nora’s tone was gentle, understanding. Zadie artfully dodged her mother’s gaze as she shared the phrase that had entered her head moments before Clarence fell. That was the day she learned what a psychic was and that maybe she was one. It was also the day she decided that a psychic was something she’d rather not be.
Unfortunately for Zadie, she didn’t have much say in the matter. Like an outdoor cat, her premonitions came and went as they pleased, filling her head with strange and often cryptic phrases that she had no idea how to interpret. Thankfully, she never had visions. Her sight was her own. It was her mind that sometimes felt like it belonged to someone else.
If she felt one of these unwanted thoughts coming on, she’d stick her fingers in her ears, close her eyes, and hum a song. Sometimes that was enough to quiet her mind, at least for a while.
Her attitude shifted as she entered her teen years, however, and she taught herself how to harness her gift to her advantage. Her primary objective was no more complicated than that of other kids her age: to impress her friends. And it worked for the most part. When she won six free concert tickets from an unsuspecting DJ by predicting what song would come on the radio next, she invited the five cutest boys in her class to go with her. She got her first kiss that night.
But even as she cheated radio stations and dumped boys hours before they’d planned to dump her, she had one steadfast rule: never use her ability for anything of consequence. She preferred it that way. The last thing she wanted was to be that person in a disaster movie whom everyone thinks is crazy for predicting the apocalypse. Then when it turns out she was right all along, everyone looks to her to fix it. Zadie didn’t want that kind of responsibility. It was hard enough just getting to work on time every day without neighbors bugging you about when the rapture was coming.
Or at least that’s what she told herself to help her sleep at night.A half-baked practical argument was easier to stomach than the true reason she’d stopped using her gift completely: that one awful moment she’d spent a thousand wishes trying to undo.
Before her mind had time to go down that particular rabbit hole, Zadie heard a faintdingin the other room. Someone had texted her. Either it was a message from Dustin reminding her to remove “that slimy seed goo” (i.e., chia seed pudding) from his fridge, or it was her little sister, Finn. Her high school graduation party was tomorrow, and Zadie was dreading it. She would have to drive an hour each way from her apartment in Austin to the exurbs of San Antonio just to make awkward small talk with Finn’s foster family, the Andersons. They were nice enough, but Zadie got the distinct impression that they didn’t like her. She couldn’t blame them, really. For the entire first year Finn was living with them, Zadie, who was eighteen at the time, did whatever she could to get her sister back.