Someplace to Be Flying (49 page)

“So you don’t much like this sister of yours?”

“Oh, I love her-you can’t not. But I don’t understand her. I can’t figure out why she lets everybody tell her what to do … unless it’s because she’s one of them.” She gives me a sudden smile. “I never even knew there was a ‘them’ before and that makes me feel a whole lot better. I always thought there had to be something wrong with me.”

I’m trying to get a measure of her and it’s hard. She seems a lot like Nettie at the same age, only she’s running wild through a concrete forest instead of those old piney wood hills, and she’s full of more contradictions than her mother ever was. As innocent as she is streetwise. Independent, but she’s yearning to be looked after. Thoughtful, with a giddy undercurrent.

The more I think of it, maybe she doesn’t remind me so much of her mother as she does Maida and Zia. Lose the red hair and you could almost take her for a crow girl without having to work too hard at it. Has the temperament down pat.

“So do you live around here?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “I don’t live anywhere in particular, but I like it here.” She grins. “It suits me.”

“I can sec that.” I stand up. “Well, maybe I’ll see you around.”

“If you’re ever looking for me,” she says, “this is where I’ll usually be.”

I feel her watching me as I walk off. I get about a block away and she starts to follow, so the first time I’m out of her line of? sight, I shift back into my jackdaw skin and fly up to a perch on the closest telephone pole. She looks puzzled when she comes around the corner, checking up and down the street, but she doesn’t think to look up. Most people don’t. There’s a whole world going on up here above their normal sight lines, but it might as well be invisible.

I’m feeling pleased, looking down from my pole. Things worked out pretty good, I’m thinking. I made a connection, intrigued her a bit, let her know she’s not alone, she’s not some kind of freak, but didn’t open the door to her getting dependent on me. What I want to do is have her get comfortable around us, let us be a part of her life so that we can look out for her, but not get her to thinking we hold all the answers. And I particularly don’t want to get too close to her myself.

That’s not a mistake I’m about to make again.

It works out pretty well for awhile. We take turns checking in on her over the next few years-Margaret, Annie, Paul, the crow girls, Alberta, and some of the others that Nettie used to know from up around Hazard. We feel kind of proprietary about her, considering her history and all, but no one tells her about her real mother. They leave that up to me and it’s not something I figure she has to know. If she asked me straight out, I’d have to tell her, because I’m not about to start lying to my own child, but it doesn’t come up.

She doesn’t talk about her sister much, but you can tell Kerry’s on her mind a lot-why exactly, I don’t find out until years later, when Katy moves to Newford. I try to convince her that whether or not Kerry believes she exists makes no never mind, but it’s hard to be convincing when none of us can actually explain what she is. Maybe this idea she’s got about Kerry is true, but if it is, it’s a cruel trick fate’s gone and played on her. ‘Course fate hasn’t proved too kind to the Beans before this and life isn’t fair.

“Imagine if life was fair,” she says to me one time. “I think maybe that’d be worse.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Well, then we’d deserve all the awful things that happen to us, wouldn’t we? It’d mean that at some point in our lives-or maybe some life we had before this one-we were pretty creepy people.”

I never thought about it like that before. Seems odd to take comfort in life’s unfairness, but I start to feel the same way she does.

For a long time I think she’s going to stay on the West Coast, but then one day she gets the traveling bug and starts to wandering. She can’t change skin like we can, but she gets pretty adept at some of our other tricks-riding around the country for free and the like. Most of them she picks up from Margaret.

I never ask her what put the itch in her feet until she finally shows up in Newford and makes like she’s planning to settle down.

“I had to get away from her,” Katy explains.

“From who? Kerry?”

She nods and I see the hurt in her eyes. Then she asks me something that makes my heart want to break.

“Have you ever loved someone so much you don’t think you can live a moment without them, but at the same time you know that staying with them is maybe the worst thing you can do to them?”

It takes me a long time to get my voice.

“Yeah,” I finally manage to tell her. “It’s the hardest decision I ever made and the worst thing is, in the end, I made the wrong one. I had the best of intentions, but all I did was screw things up worse.”

“I don’t think it’s something you can work out,” she says. “It doesn’t matter if you stay or if you go, you’re still going to hurt them.”

“I can’t answer that for you,” I say.

“You don’t have to,” she tells me. “I know that’s how it is for me when it comes to Kerry. But I have to try staying out of her life. I don’t really feel like I have any choice.”

“There’s always a choice.”

She shakes her head. “I know for sure that my being in her life wasn’t ever any help to her at all.”

She takes to hanging around the school bus a lot, bringing me coffee or tea or a sweet pastry, casual, like she was just in the area. All she asks in return is for me to tell her stories. I figure she’s got too much affection for me, treats me like her best pal and father all rolled into one-an irony that doesn’t escape me. But it’s too late to do anything about how she feels now and the truth is, I don’t want to. Her company means the world to me and I’ll do whatever it takes to keep her happy and safe. It’s got nothing to do with the promise I made her mother and everything to do with a father’s love for his child.

Lord knows I cherish the time we have together. Not just for how good it is, but because one day it’s all going to come out … who her mother is, how it was between us, how hard Nettie died.

And then Katy’s going to hate me forever.

I won’t blame her. Whenever I think of what happened to Nettie, I hate myself.

CITY OF CROWS

Jack’s crows are in for a murder

a murder is a gathering

some watch, some go a tittle further

some eat what the others bring

to Jack’s crows, Jack’s crows

where everybody’s from, and nobody goes

that’s where you’re gonna find Jack’s crows

—J
OHN
G
ORKA
,

FROM
J
ACK’S
C
ROWS

Newford, Tuesday afternoon, September 3

Tired from a morning’s fruitless search for Raven’s pot, Annie found herself a perch in between two gargoyles, high above the rose window of St. Paul’s Cathedral. It was an old thinking spot of hers that she’d claimed from the pigeons years ago. She shifted from her blue jay skin and sat with her back against the thick stone wall behind her, legs dangling into space. From her vantage point she could look past the sweep of the cathedral’s steps below, over the roofs of the buildings on Battersfield Road, across the river and all the way up the wooded slopes that backed the high-priced real estate of the Beaches.

It was a spectacular view, but today her gaze was turned inward, scanning landscapes of memory and conjecture.

There was something wrong about all of this.

It wasn’t that the pot had gone missing again. The upheavals it brought into their lives occurred with such regularity that Annie had decided a long time ago that the pot must have a mind of its own, that its periodic disappearances served some private agenda, one only the pot understood. They were related to the constant discrepancies in its appearance, she was sure, and just because she was the only one ready to assign sentience to it, it didn’t mean it wasn’t true.

So what was it after this time?

Chloë seemed to think that Rory’s friend Lily might have inadvertently come into possession of it-and the interest that the cuckoos, with their gift for finding things, had taken in Lily appeared to bear that out-but what would be the point? Whatever plans the pot might have for her, Lily couldn’t do anything with it. That required more than the thin trace of grackle blood running through her veins. And anyway, Annie had gotten no sense of the pot’s presence when she’d flown by Lily’s apartment after the meeting last night.

She’d tried talking to the crow girls about it, but they were as oblique as always. That wasn’t particularly unusual either. They pretended indifference to everything, more often than not, or offered up contradictory advice as they had last night at the gathering when the pair of them had come in and suggested they try to smell out the pot’s whereabouts. A fine idea, except the pot didn’t have a smell. It had an aura, but no odor.

Of course they were at least willing to pitch in. Chloë hadn’t come to the meeting, nor was she helping in the search. She claimed she couldn’t leave Lucius, but Annie suspected Chloë was simply becoming more and more agoraphobic. Another few years and she’d be as withdrawn as Lucius.

And that, for no good reason, reminded her of Paul, who’d been as outgoing as the crow girls, but sensible. A deep melancholy settled in her. She missed Paul terribly at times, more than the others did, she was sure, but then she’d been closer to him than anyone. Sometimes, if she closed her eyes and listened hard, she could still hear his piano.

She did so now, but all she heard was the sound of wings. Opening her eyes, she found that the crow girls had come spiraling down from the sky and joined her. They were perched on the backs of the gargoyles, one on either side of her, regarding her with serious expressions.

“Did you have any luck?” she asked.

But the girls didn’t seem at all interested in the missing pot.

“You’re looking veryvery sad,” Maida said.

Zia leaned forward so that her chin was resting on the broad brow of the gargoyle she was straddling. “Veryvery.”

“I was thinking about Paul,” Annie told them.

“We liked Paul,” Maida said.

“He was always nice to us.”

“And ever so wonderfully musical.”

Annie sighed. “I know. I used to leave my apartment door open so that I could listen to him practice. We always planned to do some recording together, but we never made the time and now it’s too late.”

“Too late,” Zia echoed.

“Those are two of the least fun words in the world,” Maida said.

“When they’re put together.”

Maida nodded. “And in that order.”

Annie had to agree. How many lingering regrets weren’t born from missed opportunities that could never be recalled?

“About the pot,” she said, trying to get the conversation back on a less depressing track, though chasing after that damned pot of Raven’s was hardly the most cheerful of occupations. “Have you heard any news?”

“Nothing interesting,” Zia said.

“Have you been swooping about, trying to sniff it out?” Maida asked.

Annie nodded. “But it doesn’t have any scent. You know that.” “I thought it was a good idea Ray had,” Maida said. “Ray’s the one who suggested that?” Both girls nodded.

“I don’t believe this,” Annie said. “Yesterday you were ready to stick a knife in him and now you’re having little chats?” “Oh, he’s all changed,” Maida told her.

“Mm-hmm,” Zia said. “He’s gone very corbæ now and ever so tasty looking.” She put a hand over her mouth and shot Maida a quick glance. “Or was that supposed to be a secret?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why’s he disguised as one of us?” Annie asked.

“Well,” Maida said, drawing out the word. “It could be because we’re all so very intriguing and he wants to be just like us.”

“But we think it’s so that he can follow Kerry around and maybe we won’t notice him.”

“But of course we did.”

“Because we’re very observant.”

“Of all the corbæ, we’re probably the most observant.”

Annie had to laugh. “But then you don’t know where the pot is either.”

“No,” Zia said. “But we’re not in such a hurry to find it.”

“Why not?”

Zia shrugged. “Because it’ll just get lost again. Don’t you find it all sort of boring?”

“Except it’s not really,” Maida said before Annie could reply. “Because even-time it gets stirred up, the world changes.”

“This is true.” Zia gave Annie a considering look. “Maybe we should be trying harder.”

“Chloë thinks that Lily has it,” Annie said, curious as to their reaction.

But of course that simply sent the crow girls off on a new tangent.

“Now Lily’s very interesting,” Maida said.

Zia nodded. “She has a new boyfriend.”

“A very nice boyfriend-all sort of gruff and tumbly.”

“But kind.”

“Oh, yes,” Zia said. “Veryvery kind.”

“And she has new enemies, too.”

“And
new friends.”

“Like the pair of you?” Annie asked.

Maida shook her head. “We only kind of know her. In a mostly peripheral sort of a way.”