Zadie’s knees felt weak. Worried she might pass out, she staggered back from the cliff.Finn.She’d been given a chance to stop her. She’d been given more than one.And now…
The starlings overhead continued to cry, giving voice to her pain. Zadie gazed up into the shape-shifting cloud of birds and wished they would carry her far away from this place. Tears sprang to her eyes. The sky blurred.
Then as she was turning her back on the ocean, she heard a chime. A soft tinkling sound barely audible above the ocean’s roar. Some feet behind Zadie, Nora, leaning on her sister’s arm, was staring intently at a stand of trees to her right. The sound seemed to be coming from them.
“Do you hear that?” Zadie asked.
Jenna shook her head. “Hear what?”
“Music!” she called back and vanished into the knot of fir trees.
The sound grew louder as Zadie stumbled through the dark thicket. It reminded her of Ursula’s star song: seemingly random notes that together told a story. This one was about a woman looking for her missing sister. She feared the worst, this woman, because she was always fearing the worst. It was how she protected herself. But now that she’d thought the worst had come to pass, she had nothing left to lose.
Zadie broke through a curtain of low-hanging bows into a small clearing, the sight of which made her gasp. Branches and long grasses had been lashed together with vine to form a ten-foot-high asymmetrical dome. Woven through the gaps in the branches and draped in a crisscross pattern overhead were colorful strips of torn fabric—likely old bedsheets and curtains—and artfully daubed onto the walls with mud and clay were all of nature’s finest treasures: fragments of stone, shells, feathers, seedpods, and sea glassthat shimmered in the sunlight pouring in from the hole in the dome’s ceiling. From that hole hung a dozen or more wind chimes. Each one was playing a different melody, and yet together they created music so beautiful it rivaled any star in the sky.
It’s a nest,she thought, awestruck.
She almost didn’t notice it. From where she was standing, it just looked like a pile of grasses and leaves in the center of the nest, but as she drew closer, she saw one glossy black coil of hair peeking out from the debris.
“Finn!” When she reached her sister’s limp body, she flipped her over and found her eyes open but lifeless.
“Finn, it’s me.” Zadie’s voice shook. “Finn, wake up. I found Mom.” When her sister did not respond, Zadie gently squeezed her shoulders. “Finn, we did it. We found her.”
But Finn’s face was blank. She seemed to stare over her sister’s shoulder through the hole in the dome. Zadie could even see the murmuration above them reflected in her glassy eyes, like black ink was swirling inside them.
Jenna appeared by Zadie’s side and placed two fingers on Finn’s wrist. “I’ve got a pulse,” she said.
Overhead, the starlings’ cries surged like professional mourners hired for a funeral.She’s not dead!Zadie screamed inside her head.Not yet.
Zadie cupped her sister’s cheeks in her trembling hands. “Finn, I know you’re in there.”
The birds in her eyes continued to circle.
“Finn, I’m sorry. All that shit I said… I was wrong.” Zadie could feel hot tears welling in her eyes. “You didn’t leave me. How could you? You were a kid. I never should have put that on you.” It suddenly occurred to Zadie that Finn was now the same age she was when their mom had vanished. If Finn had been in her position, she never would have made the same mistake. She would have been better than that.
“But listen to me, okay?” One of Zadie’s tears landed on Finn’s cheek, and it looked for a moment like they were crying together.“You may not have left me then, but you can’t leave now. Not when I just got you back. Not when we just got Mom back.”
Nora had been watching her daughters from the entrance of the nest dispassionately, as one would watch the last act of a play without having seen the first four. She knew none of the characters, had no idea as to what was at stake. She just knew that she was supposed to be feeling something, something she couldn’t see from the audience.
Nora stepped forward. It was the first step she had taken on her own in four months. The women kneeling on the ground were too engrossed in the scene to see her coming. It wasn’t until she was practically hovering over them that they noticed.
“Nora?” The oldest of the three women jumped to her feet and offered her a hand. The younger woman, the one who had been crying, gazed up at her with round wet eyes like a child’s. And in that moment, she feltsomething.What exactly, she wasn’t sure.
Then her gaze landed on the woman lying on the ground. She was barely more than a child herself, a crown of curls splayed out on the green grass. There was something familiar about her. There was something familiar about all of them.
Nora lowered slowly to her knees. The sad woman said something to her, then threaded Nora’s fingers through the injured girl’s. They were holding hands now, her and this stranger. The sad woman cried and the starlings wailed and Nora wondered what it all meant. That is, until one word pierced through the noise: “Mom?”
Mom.Thesomethinginside her made a sound like birdsong.
At first Finn thought she was looking into a mirror, but when she brought her hand to her cheek and the reflection did not, the reality of what she was seeing began to dawn on her. “Mom?”
A glimmer of recognition crossed Nora’s face, followed by confusion. But Finn couldn’t contain herself. She pushed herself up to sitting and slung her arms around her mom’s neck. Nora’s body was stiff, unyielding.
“She doesn’t recognize us.” Zadie was kneeling next to her. Her eyes were puffy as if she’d just been crying. Finn turned back to their mother. The glimmer she’d seen a moment ago was gone. But despite the sinking feeling in her heart, she wasn’t ready to give up just yet. “Mom, it’s me, Finn.” She grabbed her sister’s hand and pulled her closer. “And this is Zadie. We’re your daughters.”
Nora’s eyes flicked back and forth between the two faces; then a wisp of a smile graced her mouth. “You’re here,” she said.
Finn and Zadie clamored into her arms, and Nora buried her face into Finn’s curls. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you two,” she said softly.