Chris One never came back. Neither did Chrises Two or Three after they made their escapes. Chris Four stuck around for over a month only to make its getaway when Finn pulled it out of the loft to show her friend, Kristen. Kristen made a noise that to human ears sounded like a squeal of delight, but to bird ears probably sounded like a hawk screech, because Chris was airborne before the last vowel left her mouth.
In an attempt to assuage her guilt, Finn fantasized that the birds had flown all the way to Hollywood to live closer to their eponym, Christopher Walken, but realistically, she knew they were probably just aimlessly flying around town, looking for food and hiding from cats. She thought about putting up flyers, but she didn’t think her foster parents would appreciate random strangers turning up at their door with stray birds. One stray kid was enough.
Finn plopped down on the grass next to Milly, who was scratching an itch by wriggling furiously on her back. When she finally flopped back onto her side, one of her ears was flipped inside out. Finn flipped it back, then looked toward the house, where her foster mother was having an animated discussion with the party planner on the back deck. Even from fifty yards away, Finn could hear every word. Kathy wasn’t shouting, exactly. Her voice just carried well, possiblytoowell, or as she liked to say,I’m not loud. Y’all just need to turn your hearing aids down!
“I guess we’re all set for tomorrow then, except…” Kathy paused. “I don’t know about the hay.”
The woman, an anxious-looking creature with dark circles under her eyes, frowned. “You want to cancel the hayride?”
“No. Just the hay.”
“I don’t follow.”
The hayride had been a favorite part of Finn’s trips to the zoological gardens as a kid. She and her mom would ride it four, sometimes five times in a row before heading over to the aviary to feed the birds. Finn must have shared this story with Kathy, because when it came time to plan her graduation party, she was the one who suggested the gardens. Finn didn’t have the heart to tell her that she’d outgrown hayrides and petting zoos and just about every other activity she’d booked for the weekend.
Kathy continued, “Don’t you think it’s kind of scratchy?”
“Yeah. It’s hay,” the planner answered flatly.
“It’s just… you know, it’s summer and folks will be wearing shorts, and I don’t want their legs to get all scratched up. What about folding chairs?”
“Folding chairs?”
Incredulous.Finn had learned the meaning of that word while studying for the SATs. She said it softly to herself as she watched the woman hurriedly scrawl something in her notebook. Kathy seemed oblivious to the woman’s frustration, which was evident to Finn from half a football field’s distance away.
This wasn’t the first party Kathy had hosted. She threw one for just about every major holiday. Finn could feel the memories of those days all around her: apple bobbing on Halloween, grilling on July Fourth, more apple bobbing on her birthday just because she liked apple bobbing. To be clear, none of these memories were hers. She wasn’t the one who ate a bad egg salad sandwich and got sick in the pool. That memory and many others had been left behind by Kathy’s friends, like a guest book of sorts that only Finn could read.
It started when Finn was eight years old. She was in her room,braiding a bracelet in front of the TV, when her field of vision began to shrink and the cartoon she’d been watching sounded muffled and distant. Terrified, Finn frantically grabbed for something to steady herself, but found that she had lost all sensation in her hands. As her own senses melted away, a new sound filled the void. Two voices. One male, one female. From their tone, they seemed to be arguing. About what, Finn wasn’t sure, but somehow, she was able to discern that the conversation she was hearing had happened in the past, well before her or Zadie or her mom ever stepped foot inside the house.
Moments later, her senses returned to normal, but Finn was left in a state of shock. She spent the next hour sitting on her favorite beanbag chair, afraid to move in case the feeling came back. It was Zadie who finally found her. “Finn? What are you doing?”
“Something weird happened.”
“Weird? How?”
She attempted to explain what she’d heard, keeping her voice low and her body still. “You know, um, when someone shouts in a cave? And you hear it a bunch of times?”
“An echo.”
“An echo, yeah,” she said, her voice tight. “It was like that.”
“What was like that?”
“The memory I had. It didn’t happen to me, but I remembered it.”
“Are you saying you can read other people’s minds?”
“No.”
“No?”
“I don’t think the memory is in their head anymore.”
“Where is it then?”
“Just… around.”
Zadie squinted, trying to understand. “So someone left their memory behind and you found it?”