She nodded.
“You’d really be better off looking elsewhere. It’s not an area for tourists. The locals…they’re an odd bunch. Keep themselves to themselves. Don’t welcome outsiders. That kind of behavior, well, it makes it feel like there’s something to hide. Talk to your old man, maybe he can help.”
“He’s dead,” Nora said matter-of-factly.
“I see.” The old man patted his cheeks with a cloth napkin covered in embroidered jellyfish. “And he was from there?”
Nora nodded. “Yeah, he spent his whole life up here until heand our mom met.” She didn’t know why she was telling the man this. It was just wasting time. But there was something about his face, warm and well creased and worn red with a lifetime of exposure to the wind and sea, that made it feel worth a shot. “Martin Bird.”
Something flashed behind the man’s watery eyes before disappearing into the flecks of soft hazel. “Bird, you say? Hmm. Well, I grew up a few towns over from there. Never went to Virgo Bay myself, don’t really remember exactly where it is. I haven’t been back in a good long while and I don’t remember much these days. But I can get you to the area if you like.”
Nora looked at Charlie, her chest swelling with her longtime enemy: hope.
“That would be amazing.”
“You got a pen and paper?”
“Notes app,” said Charlie, holding up his phone.
“Fine, fine. But you really should know before you set off, Virgo Bay is not your average town.”
“What do you mean?” Nora asked.
The man sucked his teeth, his eyes drifting to the middle distance as he seemed to consider his words. Finally, he looked back at the twins. “You start with a left at that stop sign by the convenience store. If you see the bakery, you’ve gone too far.”
* * *
The road ahead seemed endless, carved into hillsides and nestled between evergreens along the wild coast. Nora kept her jaw clenched, Charlie’s case file still etched in her head. Car accident. That’s how he was slated to die. And though they’d left the highway, they would be in the car for another good few hoursbefore they reached the approximate area of Virgo Bay. And with the file changing seemingly arbitrarily, any road seemed like a risk. This drive couldn’t be over soon enough. But then what? Two strangers, who might not even still be there, would miraculously take them in? They’d stay off the roads forever so Charlie couldn’t be killed? It all seemed like a long shot, but it was the best they had.
Charlie let out a gurgle from where he slept in the passenger seat. Nora took a quick look over at him. The way his brow hung close to his eyes like hers did. The way his nose curved up like hers didn’t. The full lips that matched hers and the soft jawline that squished into his neck just slightly, while hers was taut. They were so different, and yet they were made of the same ingredients. She could see that, even when she didn’t want to. Her old life was gone. Her job lost, her apartment a compost heap of rotting houseplants and groceries she never had the chance to eat, but as she listened to the rhythmic breathing from her brother’s perpetually ever-so-slightly-plugged nose, she decided maybe that was okay right now. That maybe it was worth it.
The hours ticked by and the effects of the nap Nora had stolen at the motel began to dissipate. Her mind traveled back to the truck on the highway, the drowsy driver nearly bisecting her little car, and she gave her thigh a pinch.
“Do you know I spy?” Nora asked Jessica, eyeing the bird in the back seat through the rearview mirror.
“The first five digits of pi are three point one four one five,” squawked Jessica.
“I’ll take that as a no. Well, Charlie definitely wasn’t your first owner, was he? The only pie he knows is served with ice cream. Where did you come from?”
“Shit, shit,” squawked Jessica.
“Now that’s more like Charlie. Can you give me something more than that?” Nora caught herself and sighed. “Am I actually having a conversation with a bird?” She decided she was. There wasn’t much else to keep her awake. “Hmm. Are you from a pet store or something? Who left you with my brother? I mean, leaving Charlie in charge of anything is never a good idea. So it can’t have been someone who knows him well, unless it was a prank. It’s weird though, right? To just leave someone a bird? Do you remember their name or anything about them or when you last saw them or—”
Jessica suddenly let out a blood-curdling shriek, as if someone were hacking her to death right there in her cage. Charlie, suddenly awake, shrieked with her in alarm just as a rabbit hopped onto the road to the left of the car. In a flash, Nora knew she would swerve off the road. She could see the car sailing right and into the boulders bordering them. She could see it all so clearly, as if it were already happening. She would swerve right and Charlie would die.
She turned the steering wheel left.
The rabbit leapt to the right and hopped off towards the forest beyond the boulders as the car skidded off the road and onto the grass, crashing through a stake of wood, the street sign it held flying up onto the windshield and over the car as the impact forced them to a stop. Airbags tossed Nora’s head back and threw her hands off the steering wheel. By the time the dust had settled, the front hood was smashed and steaming, the car unwilling to start. Nora quickly gave Charlie a once-over. His nose was bleeding from the airbag, but he seemed otherwise unharmed. For the second time that night, he didn’t die. For her part, Nora’swrist was throbbing, but there was no time to think about that now.
“We need to get out of the car in case the engine catches fire.”
Charlie held one hand over his nose, attempting to stop the bleeding with a pinch, and grabbed his duffel bag and Jessica’s cage with the other. They exited the smoking car, and Nora promptly burst into tears.
8
The world had never been a safe place. Nora learned that on her first day of second grade, when Lizzie Tompkins snuck into her lunch box and ate her tuna sandwich ten minutes before lunch. Unfortunately for Lizzie Tompkins, whatshelearned that day was the reason her parents never packed her tuna sandwiches, which was only partially due to the smell and mostly due to a severe seafood allergy. The paramedics who showed up to deflate Lizzie Tompkins had to stab her with a needle, which Nora always felt was very much a salt-in-the-wound situation. It wasn’t something she’d thought about again until a year later when her parents died, and then, for a week straight, it was all she could think about. Lizzie had an accident and lived; her parents had an accident and died. It didn’t make any sense, and that was a painful revelation. Bad things were going to happen, and the universe or fate or whatever you wanted to call it didn’t need a single reason for it.
Just now, Nora was sitting somewhere under a stack of roughly a dozen accumulated bad things, and she was nearly finished crying about it.
