“I think whatever is happening to you is also happening to her. I need to find her before—” She didn’t need to finish her thought. Finn’s future was staring her in the face.
The starlings on the roof started chittering. Nora slowly flexed her fingers and took hold of Zadie’s arm. “She’s asking to get up,” Jenna said, hurrying around to Nora’s right side. “You take one arm, I’ll take the other.”
Zadie and Jenna pulled Nora to standing. “Where do you want to go, Nor?” Jenna asked her sister. Nora swayed in the direction ofthe conservatory door. “Come on,” Jenna said, nodding toward the hallway.
The three women inched down the hall of birds together. Nora’s steps were shambling, but she moved with purpose to the front door. “She wants to go outside.” Jenna opened the door and they stepped out into the fresh air.
The hundreds of starlings parked on the roof and lawn were making a terrible racket. “Does this happen a lot?” Zadie asked, still unnerved by the enormity of the flock.
Jenna scowled. “Unfortunately, yeah. These noisy little jerks showed up the same day Nora did and never left. Don’t ask me to explain it.” Zadie thought she caught a brief flash of amusement in her mother’s eyes, as if the birds were not some unexplained phenomenon but an elaborate prank she’d coordinated just to annoy her sister.
“Now what?” Zadie asked. Just as the words left her mouth, the sea of winged bodies began to take flight and Nora’s gaze lifted with them.
Jenna watched them go. “They’re heading toward the cliffs.”
“I can drive,” Zadie offered.
“Your car would never make it up those dirt roads.” Jenna pulled out her keys and nodded toward her pickup. “We’ll take mine.”
TWENTY-SIXNEST
Jenna drove while Zadie rode in the truck bed with her mom. “She likes being able to see the sky,” her aunt had explained as they helped Nora over the tailgate. The road was bumpy, so Zadie kept one arm firmly around her mother’s wiry shoulder as they watched the starlings fly overhead:flap-flap-flap-glide, flap-flap-flap-glide.The light caught their iridescent feathers and Zadie could see not only dark blues but violets and greens, too. It was like staring up into the belly of an abalone shell.
Zadie glanced at Nora out of the side of her eye. Maybe it was only because Nora couldn’t talk back, but she suddenly felt the urge to get something off her chest. “Remember that big fight we had the day before you left? The one at the festival?”
Nora blinked.
“No, of course you don’t. Well, I said some pretty mean stuff, stuff I shouldn’t have said.”
Zadie looked at Nora again to see if she was listening. If she was, it was undetectable.
“I called you a bad mom. Do you remember that?” Shame dampened her voice. “Then when you disappeared, I figured you’d decided that you thought we deserved better than you or something.”
The truck bounced over a bump in the road. Zadie instinctually tightened her grip on Nora’s shoulder.
“You were a good mom. I’m sorry it took so long for me to say it.” She paused. “There’s something else I have to tell you…”
Nora waited.
“I’m pregnant.”
Zadie thought she saw a Mona Lisa–esque smile play across her mom’s lips, but when she blinked, it was gone.
“You’re the first person I’ve told.” It was then that Zadie realized why she hadn’t told anyone else about her pregnancy, not even Finn. It was because she’d always pictured telling her mom first.
“Are you seeing this?” Jenna called back to her from the cab. Zadie turned around and saw that the starlings had gotten ahead of them and had converged into one dark mass that twisted and turned like shifting sand. “A murmuration,” Zadie said, awestruck. She’d seen one once before when she was young. Nora had pointed it out to her as they sat on the roof of their garage one summer eating Popsicles. She turned back to her mother. “Is this you?”
Nora neither confirmed nor denied Zadie’s claim, but she watched the birds intently.
“Can you get us over there?” Zadie called to her aunt.
“I can get us close.” Jenna punched the accelerator and the truck bounced over the rutted dirt road, tree branches slapping against the windshield. It wasn’t long before they burst out of the cover of the trees, and the road came to an abrupt end in a grassy plain. As Jenna slammed on the brakes, the murmuration swept dramatically over their heads, then hovered over a cliff that dropped off steeply toward the ocean.
“No…” Zadie gasped. Another cliff. Only this time she didn’t see Finn. Was she too late?
She leaped out of the truck and sprinted to the bluff’s edge, skidding to a stop just before tumbling over the side. “Finn!” she screamed into the waves, but her voice was swallowed up by the sea and thrown against the rocks fifty feet below.
Then her foot nudged something in the grass: the painted rock that Luna had given them. Zadie bent down and picked it up. Handshaking, she held it over the lip of the bluff. The gray protrusion they’d once thought of as a volcano looked identical in shape to the jagged rocks below and the painted smoke looked instead like sea spray.