A Hawk in the Woods Read online

  “Hey!” But she could do nothing with the hawk’s mind. Finally, in spite, she picked up a good-sized rock and chucked it into the pond, creating a geyser of water and mud. The hawk flapped away, duck in talons.

  Her second clear memory, then, is of Mom and Grandfather fighting. She tried to tell them not to, push them apart, but it didn’t work. She thought she remembered being surprised, although that didn’t make sense—Mom and Grandfather would have been too much for her, just like the hawk was. Had she known, at that age, that distraction and flared tempers should have made them more vulnerable? When would she have learned that?

  Anyway, she remembered Mom throwing a can at Grandfather, hitting him in the shoulder. She can picture the label on the can, the yellow and orange of store-brand soup. She remembered Grandfather turning and raising his hand to hit Mom in turn—he was a bit taller than her, still, before the osteoporosis fully set in. She remembered tensing up as though she was the one who was about to be hit. But she doesn’t remember him actually hitting her.

  Was it just the normal fuzziness of a little kid’s memory? Or did Martha fold that part away?

  CHAPTER THREE

  After the sundae, a banana split with nuts, and after their traditional spoon-duel for the last few bites of hot fudge, which Abby won as always, most of her rage had evaporated with the adrenaline let-down. She hated to have to rely on Martha, even accidentally, but in some ways this was better than how she’d planned it. Abby could keep more of her own reserves for the end of the trip. Of course she wasn’t going to tell Martha that. And it was annoying to realize that she could have used her own car after all.

  At the Batavia shopping center, while Martha stocked up on new clothes and little necessities at a consignment shop, Abby ducked into the liquor store and picked out a bottle of Barefoot Pink Moscato. Basic in every sense of the word, but something they could both enjoy. Tonight they would toast her sister’s freedom. Also it might help if Martha was a little tipsy when Abby broke the news about her cancer—in fact, on second thought Abby put down the bottle and selected a magnum. Then she headed out to wait by the car.

  Heat waves made the parking lot shimmer and distorted the gulls around the McDonald’s dumpster into bulbous grotesques. It didn’t help the smell much, either. She slid into the Cherokee and turned the AC up full blast.

  A moment later she looked up and Martha was loading the back seat of the Cherokee with bags. She’d changed into a new outfit already—a cotton sundress with a yellow and green fish print, brown sandals with turquoise chips along the straps. She was still too thin and her long dark hair was still frizzy with split ends, but the green of the fish echoed her eyes, made her look less sallow and worn out. For a moment Abby imagined a life that might have been, the country twin and the city twin on a road trip. In the prime of life, in the prime of summer, no shadows over them at all. Maybe Abby was making a miniseries, discovering America for one of the networks—the networks seemed to need to discover America every couple of years—or maybe Martha was moving to California to start a new job and had some time off in between, or maybe they’d decided to buy a farm and raise organic goats in Colorado, or maybe…

  Abby shook her head. No point regretting what wasn’t. What was would be fine, once they got to Minnesota. It would have to be.

  “You look good,” she said to Martha as she started the car. “A couple of weeks of decent moisturizer and a new haircut, it’ll be like you never went away.” That wasn’t one hundred percent true, but Abby thought that most of the damage would be reversible.

  “Thanks,” Martha said, but she was distracted, twisted into the back seat and searching through her bags. Abby felt oddly unsatisfied and she picked up her phone out of habit. When she planned this she’d expected that half the county would be thinking about her by now, enthralled by the news of the jailbreak, feeding her their attention. Or at least that Martha would be a bit more excited to see her.

  “Turn on some music,” she said just to make Martha do something, and Martha, still run by old habits, dropped the bags. She turned on the radio and immediately landed on the folk station again, and after a few seconds Abby realized that she was listening to the same zithery, chanting song. The same lyric, Seven years a hawk in the woods. The DJ was obsessed. Or maybe it was some kind of marathon or a contest or something. She could tweet about it. She could use the juice, and the station would probably be glad of her attention.

  “There’s something wrong with your radio.” Martha poked at the button, but the song went on, lilting across nearly an entire verse despite the numbers on the LED display skipping downward.

  Great, Abby thought, half distracted. This would happen when I can’t get a refund.

  She reached across and hit the button herself, and the radio turned obedient and tuned in a car dealership commercial. She tried again. Cellino and Barnes, The Injury Attorneys. 888-8888. Normally she hated that fucking jingle—it was impossible to stop humming to yourself—but it was better than having that weird, creepy folk song stuck in both their heads.

  “It must be you,” she told Martha, half-teasing. “You must be giving off electromagnetic rays or something.”

  “Hmph.” The commercial ended and a man with an overworked voice discussed next season’s hockey prospects, and Martha switched it off without any problem.

  Back to the tweet. Was there some kind of pun she could make on the word ‘folk’? Nothing jumped to the top of her mind, and sarcasm was just as effective anyway. “WGCC is really rockin’ out on the cutting edge today,” she typed, and scanned quickly for autocorrect stupidity before she hit send.

  She looked up from the phone to find Martha staring at her. “What are you doing?”

  “Tweeting. Come on, you had to at least have heard of Twitter. Even in there.”

  “Girls mentioned it, yeah, but I didn’t really get it.” She kept staring, her attention thoroughly wrapped around the iPhone in its custom dark-green leather case, with the tiny scuff on one corner that irritated Abby to death every time she saw it. “Can I get my own phone now that I’m out?”

  “Can you? You’d be like an Amish person without one. I’ll get you one as soon as I can.” Abby rubbed the scuff with her thumb—it didn’t help, any more than the last five times she did it—and put the phone back in her purse.

  The replacement case she’d ordered last week—she’d never get that now. Goddammit. She’d forgotten all about it.

  “You want to swing by the old homestead before dinner?” she said, trying to sound as if she might take no for an answer.

  Martha turned her stare out the window and didn’t answer right away. The shadows of the trees were starting to eat the fields.

  “I suppose I should,” she said slowly, at war with every word. “I mean, I guess I kind of have to at least see Mom, or she’ll be mad…”

  She caught herself, bit off the clause, but it was too late. Abby, without taking her eyes off the road, pounced on the opportunity.

  “See Mom?” She arched her right eyebrow so high it hurt. She could hear Martha turn to look at her and suck in air.

  “It just doesn’t seem real, that’s all, I haven’t absorbed it yet…”

  “It’s been five years. And it’s not like it was a big surprise when it happened.”

  “But I haven’t been home, I didn’t even get to go to the funeral, and…”

  “I’d have thought you’d throw a party.” She paused before cutting to the heart of it. “You’ve been folding time again, haven’t you?”

  Martha gave way immediately. “I didn’t mean to. Sometimes it just happens. I’m not thinking, and then without realizing it I’ve done it. Like scratching my nose. You know.”

  “Sure. But almost two decades?” She thought she managed to make that sound more angry than impressed.

  “No, there really was some time off for good behavior too. I don’t think it can have been more than ten years… twelve tops.”

  Okay, good
, she was on the back foot. Abby put on a face partway between pissed off and concerned. ”I don’t care if it’s twelve days. Once it unfolds, they’re going to want to know where the hell you’re at. And here I am walking around with you with my bare face hanging out—we’re probably on half a dozen security cameras between the Dairy Queen and plaza. By this time tomorrow I’ll be a fugitive.”

  “It’s not going to unfold.”

  It wasn’t like Martha to be overly confident, and Abby plowed over it to her predetermined conclusion. “We’ll have to lay low for a bit, is all. And then pop up somewhere else with new identities, make new lives. We both should have left here years ago anyway.” They drove in silence for the rest of the five minutes it took to reach their childhood home.

  Maybe it was not fair to call those last two clear memories at all. Maybe her real first clear memory was the day in kindergarten when she made Nicole Parsons give her a birthday party invitation. Of course the teacher, who was young and eager and not a local, had helped by telling Nicole that she couldn’t hand out the invitations in class if she didn’t invite everyone. Still, it was a good memory, and she had every bit of it, the look on Nicole’s face melting from disdain into misery, the teacher looming over them both, the stiff die-cut invitation in her hand. It was shaped like a troll doll, with purple hair and a small rhinestone glued on where the belly button would be, and it was actually addressed to Dawn DeVoto. It was probably still up in her room somewhere, in one of the boxes of things she’d put away when they got too childish but couldn’t quite bring herself to part with.

  Mom had been proud of her; Grandfather too. So not only had she gotten to go to the party, where Nicole’s mother had hovered over her fearfully and disguised it by constantly handing her more Pepsi and cake, but the very next week she’d started lessons with the big leather-bound books that she’d always been forbidden to touch, the ones that Grandfather kept in his bedroom. Grandfather teased Mom a little, because she hadn’t been able to start learning that stuff until she was seven.

  Abby knew she hadn’t been meant to overhear that. Grandfather’s mind was all on Mom, no tentacles sneaking away to show that he knew she’d frozen just the other side of the door frame.

  Martha had hung around as she studied, jealous and annoyed, and tried to peek over Abby’s shoulder until Grandfather sent her out of the room. She tried to make the kids in her class give her their ice cream money or toys like Abby did, but she just couldn’t. For Abby, it was the dawn of the notion that she and her sister were different people. Abby was a person who could see the lines radiating out of another person, marking where they focused their attention, their energy, their thoughts and intentions. Abby was a person who could grasp those lines and bend them into a new shape, clumsily at first and then better and better, like learning to tie her shoes. Abby, like Mom and like Grandfather, was a person who could make other people do what she wanted, which was the best kind of person to be. And Martha was not.

  This realization made her feel so darn magnanimous (a word she’d learned from one of the leather-bound books) that when their classes were out together on the playground she made people do things for Martha, just for the pleasure of it. Sometimes she got a headache later in the afternoon, but it was worth it. She was usually bored by then anyway, and she could always get sent to the nurse by the sympathetic young teacher and from there get sent home, at least until the parent-teacher conference when Mom was ordered to take her in for an eye test. She managed to squeak by without glasses, but she did get a lecture about how to behave around outsiders. Martha was left on her own to deal with the snubs and the balls tossed at her head by classmates who already knew they hated the Waite girls, but not why.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Since Mom died, Abby had paid their old neighbor James Bonetrager—the man who owned the ducks—to come by the house every so often and keep everything in order, plus extra in winter to get the leaves out of the gutter before it snowed and see to it that the pipes weren’t allowed to freeze. So it wasn’t a decrepit house. What was wrong with it went much deeper than that.

  It had the appropriate setting, well back from the road and shadowed by ancient pines on the western side so that it got twilight before anyone else. It had enough heft to be menacing. It had the original gingerbread trim on the upstairs windows, grayed and chipped by time until the patterns were mere suggestive whispers. It had blackberry canes growing thick and feral around the front porch and wild roses outlining where the fence used to be in the back. Further back, it had the foundation of a collapsed, burnt-out Civil War-era barn. And, of course, it had a claim to a notorious—brutal was the word the prosecutor and the reporters had always used—murder.

  But there were gothic old farm houses all over Western New York. Murders too. There were houses with reputations as haunted, houses that carloads of kids drove past hooting for Satan on midnights when they were full of booze and courage and boredom, houses that the network would send Abby to stand outside on Halloween if there happened to be no actual news to cover, back when she was just a local news girl.

  Never this one.

  The door didn’t creak—Bonetrager had one of those old-man work ethics that ruined lives, and as much as he hated the place he did what he was paid for. There were no cobwebs lowering the ceilings, no rodents living inside the furniture. They never did have problems with vermin, living here, even after Grandfather died. It was gloaming inside, of course, but when Abby flipped the switch by the door the light poured down.

  She almost turned to Martha and gestured around the room and said “Welcome home,” but what she was doing was unpleasant enough, she had no desire to hurt her sister for real, her only sister, her twin—the woman that she still considered her best friend, come to that. So instead she said, “This won’t take long,” and headed for the stairs.

  There was dust on the stairs, with Bonetrager’s tracks marked coming and going, proof that he was fastidious in checking the windows and making sure that the roof hadn’t sprung a leak. She could see by the drag marks what it cost him, how much he dreaded going up the stairs, getting further from the door. Abby was careful to step on each mark, twisting her feet slightly to grind him away.

  The master bedroom was on the twilight end of the house. Abby always suspected that the cold and dim helped Mom die as much as the pills and self-neglect and the fact that Abby left her all alone when she took off for college. But the climate was good for the books; some of them looked as though a single strong beam of sunlight could crumble them. It was a good thing she wasn’t after the oldest volumes. Those were mostly curiosities, collector’s items, Grandfather’s rebuttal to the idea that he was a younger son and an unimportant exile in a nothing town. No, what she needed should be robust enough to stand up to a little travel. She leaned in to examine the shelves, ran her fingers over cracked and flaking spines, careful to concentrate on her task and not let her eyes stray sideways and catch the mirror over the black walnut dresser or the shadows in the space behind the door.

  She should have bought herself some luggage back at the plaza, she realized as she started pulling volumes down, but it didn’t matter. There were a few sturdy shopping bags from Payless and Fashion Bug still half-unpacked in the corner of the room, things Mom had purchased for a teenage Martha who would never wear them; Abby tipped the contents out onto the bed and packed the books in their place.

  She filled a bag and half of a second; several of the books she wanted were massive, with their bulky leather bindings and plates of steel-cut engravings, and each only had a relevant page or two, a chapter at most. The authors, for all their starry wisdom, had an irritating habit of thinking in rambles and spirals; to a man, they would have fallen over in fits if they’d had to to write a decent press release, let alone condense their thoughts into a tweet. And then there were Grandfather’s notebooks—she probably didn’t need all of them, but she did need to not leave them behind for anyone who came looking. Ninety years of scratc
hy notes, from the first adolescent ramblings to the pages where he finally faced the fact that he might die like any other man, and he wrote at least a few lines every week. She’d read them all. They were hers now. No one else’s.

  She was hefting each bag, making sure that the handles were sound—she didn’t want them spilling all over the driveway of some bumfuck motel—when Martha said, “Need help with those?” from the doorway.

  “Nah, they’re not heavy.” Obviously the place didn’t bug Martha as much as Abby had thought it would. Well, that was good. That was healthy.

  Martha kept her hand stretched out, and after a minute Abby handed her the lighter bag and headed back downstairs. Martha lingered for a moment, and when Abby looked back at her she was still in the doorway, staring into the room so blankly that for a moment Abby worried that there was something in the mirror after all.

  “Come on!”

  “Sorry!” Martha hefted the bag, which she’d let sink to the floor, and followed her back down the hall.

  “I’m thirsty,” she said out of nowhere as they reached the foot of the stairs.

  “There’s nothing in the house but tap water. I’m done here, we can go to dinner right now if you want.”

  “Tap water’s fine.”

  They turned left into the kitchen, where Martha abandoned the bag on the table and started rummaging in the cupboard above the dishwasher.

  There was a book of matches on the counter, neat in its place alongside the candelabra that their grandmother and later their mother used to light at dinner during the winter, and Abby picked it up. Did matches get stale? She’d never heard that they did. She’d quit smoking three years ago—didn’t want to get cancer, haha—so she didn’t carry a lighter anymore. She should, really, though. Never know when you might need it.