I had heard the story a million times, but I let her tell it to me again, and I listened like it was the very first time, because I loved to hear my mother speak.
She told me about the birth. About how I’d been her only child for five hours. About how I’d waited patiently with her to meet my sister. About how the rains had started the first time I’d cried.
“What are you doing out here?” I asked when she had finished talking.
She rowed the boat out into the backyard, navigating the floods with a deft hand. Somewhere near where the flower beds used to be, she stopped rowing. She raised the paddle above her head and then plunged it into the water like a spear, so it stuck into the wet earth below.
“Hold this, will you?” she said.
I took hold of the oar. I could feel the current underneath the water and the boat struggling against it. I held on tighter.
“What are you doing?” I asked again.
“The moon is good again. See?”
My mother lifted something from underneath her shirt: a tiny bottle she wore on a chain around her neck. I watched as she uncorked the bottle, smelled it, held it overthe water and carefully poured it in.
The liquid inside was the color of sunshine. It smelled like leaves.
“What is that?” I asked.
“Your sister is hiding something,” my mother said.
“You know?”
She nodded. “I found that loose floorboard when you were both eight. She hid a slice of cake inside it. I followed a trail of ants.”
“The eggs are already cool,” I said. “They must be dead.”
My mother stood up and found her balance in the rocking boat. “Nearlydead,” she said, and dove into the water in an elegant little arc. Her body made just the tiniest ripple as it disappeared beneath the surface.
She was gone for long enough that I got nervous. I was just preparing myself for a rescue mission when she broke the surface again. She held something out to me, treading water with her free arm.
I took the thing from her.
It was a nest.
Impossibly dry, impossibly beautiful. I put it in my lap. It was made of intricately woven twigs and pieces of cloth and hay and white feathers. My mother held the boat tightly and then lifted herself up and over the side.
“I made that,” she said proudly.
“Mom—do you know what happened to Mary? Doyou know why she’s turning into...”
It was hard to say it out loud:a bird.
My mother’s face darkened. She shook her head.
“Is there any way to stop it?” I asked. “I sort of like her human.”
“It’s something she will have to learn how to control. Right now, she’s not in control at all. Right now, we’re lucky she doesn’t just float away.”
“Butwhy?” I asked. “What could have happened to her?”
“I don’t know,” she said, her face darkening. “Something bad.” She pulled the oar out of the ground and laid it across the boat. “You don’t know who she was with that night?”
“We were together at the Fowl Fair,” I said, thinking back. “And then she just kind of disappeared. Vira said—”
But I stopped, because I remembered what Vira had said that night, when I asked if she’d seen my sister:I think she was talking to Peter earlier. There wasn’t anything unusual about that; Peter had a tendency of always being underfoot, especially when Mary was involved. But why hadn’t I thought to ask him earlier, if he knew anything about where she had gone that night?
