So I told her. I began with my father’s suicide, how I was furious all the time after, mad at him for leaving us, mad at my mother for drinking more once he was gone, mad at the whole world. I told her about taking Ben’s BB gun and shooting the blue jay, not having the guts to actually kill it and put the poor thing out of its misery.
“I dumped it into an old well. I just left it there and walked away. It was screeching. Just hopping around in circles, flapping its shattered wing along with the good one, desperately trying to fly. I swear I could hear that bird the whole way home, even once I got back inside the house.”
I hear it still, I almost told her.I’ve never stopped hearing it.
Penny was looking at me through the haze of pot smoke, not saying anything. I couldn’t read her expression at all, and it made me nervous.
“Do you think I’m a terrible person?” I asked.
“No, Ali. Of course not.” She took my hand and gave it a squeeze. “I think you were an eight-year-old kid in a lot of pain. A kid who’d been through an unspeakable loss, a kid suffering abuse and keeping it all a secret.”
I nodded at her, swallowed the lump in my throat.
“Did you ever kill anything else? More animals?”
“God, no!”
“Then not only are you not a terrible person, but we can rule out possible psychopath too.” She smiled.
I didn’t feel very comforted.
“But I haven’t told you the weirdest part yet,” I said.
“Okay,” Penny said, nodding. “You know I love weird.”
“This afternoon, my mother brought it up. The bird in the well. She knew all about it—right down to what kind of bird it was. But that’s impossible. Because I was alone that day. And I never told a soul about it. Until now.”
Penny exhaled, watched the smoke drift up, then looked at me. “Are you sure you never told her? Or mentioned it to your brother?”
“Positive. It’s one of those secrets you never tell anyone, you know? That you spend your whole life knowing is yours and yours alone.” I bit my lip. “My mother knowing about the bird… it just feels… impossible. I’ve been going over it again and again. How could she know?”
Penny tucked a curl that had come out of her ponytail back behind her ear. “Well, maybe she was there in the woods, watching. Maybe she followed you.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell myself, because there really isn’t any other explanation, but I don’t really believe it. I mean, why would she do that?”
I remembered how thick the woods were, dark and full of shadows. My mother was not an outdoorsy, nature-loving sort of person. Her idea of an adventure was a trip into town, or taking the train into the city. Except for outings like those, she rarely ventured beyond the house, or even out into the yard. And the paths I followed to get to the old cellar hole were unmarked and rough, hard to navigate. It was difficult to imagine her creeping along drunkenly, staggering her way through the woods without my noticing.
That old abandoned house site in the woods was mine and mine alone. I’d never taken Ben there or told him about it. It was my secret place. Where I went to escape my mother on the days she was drinking; the afternoons I arrived home from school and she warned me that she was not herself. The idea that she might have followed me into those woods, might have been there, watching like a shadow, felt all wrong, like the worst sort of trespassing.
“Maybe she was worried about you?” Penny suggested.
I laughed. “Not very likely.”
“Well, her following you seems more likely than her being psychic,” Penny said.
“True.” I looked down at my drawings: the bees, the fly with its thick hairy body and compound eyes staring back up at me. “Do you think there are people like that? People who just know things. Psychics?”
I thought of Izzy. Of the book and tarot cards in her room. Of the wishful thinking that it might be possible to have some sense of what the future held, to know things it was impossible to know.
Penny smiled. “I’m open to the possibility. But do I think your mother is one? Probably not. No more so than any other mother. Wouldn’t you say you pick up on things about your own kids? You can tell when something’s off? Sense things without them telling you?”
“Sure,” I said. I knew when my girls were lying. Knew when something was troubling them. But did I get clear visions of things that happened to them when they were away from me? Certainly not.
I looked at Penny. “You should come meet my mother.”
She quirked a brow. “So I can tell you if I think she’s got otherworldly gifts?”
I rolled my eyes. “No. Just so you can meet her. You should stop in for coffee. What about tomorrow morning?”
