A Hawk in the Woods Read online

Water gurgled in the sink. Martha had chosen a Yogi Bear jam-jar glass, one of her old favorites, and for a moment Abby considered asking if her twin couldn’t just fold them both all the way back to sixteen, or farther, hell. Get them a do-over, knowing then what they know now, like the saying went. But she couldn’t. If she could, surely she would have done it by now. And it would unfold eventually. Martha couldn’t be that strong.

  “The grass grows there just fine,” Martha said, looking out the window into the back yard.

  “Of course it does.” Abby walked over by her, and looked out, and sure enough, the grass was uniformly thick and green. Overgrown, for that matter. Bonetrager had been letting that part slide a little. “People talk a lot of crap.”

  Martha rinsed the empty jar in the sink and stood it alone in the dishrack. “So where are we going for dinner?” she asked as she picked the bag back up.

  “I was thinking Angelo’s. Does that work for you?”

  “Sure!”

  They headed out into what was now serious dusk to the car. Abby toyed with the idea of pulling out the matches and burning the house down behind them, but finally she decided that it would be crueler to just leave it stand. The open door would be enough.

  After a little while longer it turned out that Martha took after Grandma the way Abby took after Grandfather and Mom, and so she studied with the older woman, spent evenings and weekends with her while Abby was with Grandfather. It might have come between them if Martha had been stronger-willed, because Abby took her cues from Grandfather and made fun of Grandma behind her back for being persnickety. Grandma was from Massachusetts, and never let anyone forget it. She always called it Mass, as in, “Back in Mass we always…” or “When I take you to Mass you’d better not…” Being from Mass was somehow better than being from Rhode Island like Grandfather. He never defended Rhode Island, he just struck back by accusing Grandma of being too stuck up to work with dead raccoons scraped off the side of the road or kids who had lowered their own resistance with beer or weed or, later, meth and opiates. Grandma couldn’t have even if she wanted to, just like Martha, but she would never admit that, and her pride was something Grandfather felt he needed to poke at.

  Of course, Grandfather equally couldn’t do what Grandma did, pressing time ahead on its course or dragging it back to the past. Or doing something that was a little of both and wasn’t quite either, so that the tax man, say, thought it was April 14 while the weather and the school calendar and the fact that Grandfather had finally, muttering and cursing, gotten around to mailing in their forms all said it was mid-June. This particular trick always, in Grandma’s words, “unfolded” eventually, but if the check had already been cashed it no longer mattered, no one was going to follow up. She did this only when she had to and took long naps afterwards, and sometimes even threw up quietly into an old mixing bowl that she kept under the bed. This was another sign of weakness in Grandfather’s reckoning. Abby had long since learned to keep her own headaches to herself, and sometimes she even forgot that her head didn’t normally feel that way.

  Grandfather never hesitated to demand Grandma use her powers when he stood to benefit but that didn’t mean he admitted that they were any patch on his. And when Martha began to use her powers on her own, sliding away a rainy recess or giving herself twice as long as everyone else on a math drill, his pride was muted and grudging compared to the big deal he and Mom had made over Abby’s troll invitation. He constantly warned Martha that he didn’t want to see her folding her way out of every bit of unpleasantness she had to deal with. That was the road to weakness, not strength, despite Martha’s protest that it would mean practicing her skills. There was something about the way he watched out for her manipulating time, a wary quality to his attention that Abby, at the time, just found confusing. Because Martha’s skills were nothing compared to theirs. He’d said so.

  At first Abby felt a bit bad, teasing and provoking Martha until she’d fold away long school days for them both and then get all the blame when they’d come home early. But it was worth it, every time. And she’d do favors for Martha every now and then, despite the headaches, to buy forgiveness. By the time they hit the fourth grade they had it worked out to where they were a pretty good team most days.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Sometime over the last year and a half Angelo’s finally got their liquor license back, so the Moscato stayed corked in Abby’s handbag through dinner. Abby had a glass of the house red, and Martha ordered a Genny Light.

  “That crap? You’re going to give yourself a hangover.”

  “It’s just one beer. Anyway, besides the ice cream sundae, that’s what I missed most the entire time I was inside. A cold beer on a hot day.” Martha drew a little circle on her plate with her fork; it made a repulsive squealing scrape, and she smiled sheepishly. “You know what’s funny?”

  “You?”

  Martha stuck her tongue out, the correct traditional response. “This will be my very first legal alcoholic beverage.”

  That set Abby back for a moment. “Wow. Yeah, I guess it would be…”

  “They don’t throw very good twenty-first birthday parties at Wende.”

  The bread arrived, and despite the carbs and the fact that she knew it wouldn’t be any good Abby tore a piece off at once and dragged cold butter over the surface, glad of the distraction. Her own twenty-first birthday she’d spent in Manhattan. She’d gone to Lucky Cheng’s with a handful of sorority sisters and seen the drag show, ridden on the subway and given five dollars to a guy with an ocarina playing “My Heart Will Go On”, bought a cannoli at two in the morning. It still amazed her that all that had happened on the same planet as the place where she was sitting now. And Martha had never seen any of that.

  “To be fair, I hardly even noticed that it was my birthday. Every day is exactly the same. That’s what made it so easy to… I didn’t mean to. I promise. When I went in, I thought I’d just shave off a few days here and a few days there.”

  She was starting to quiver, and Abby didn’t want that particular kind of scene, not before the entrees even arrived. Abby should be the understanding big sister now, thirty minutes older and so much more mature. “Who wouldn’t?”

  Their drinks showed up, the beer foamy and picture-perfect, the wine like a garnet. Abby sipped it. It was maybe an hour from being salad dressing. She took a picture with her cell phone and posted it with a quip about appearances being deceiving. Martha cocked her head at this, but didn’t say anything.

  Their waiter didn’t seem to recognize them, and that irritated Abby a little. Then she was embarrassed for being irritated. The boy was at best nineteen—young kids these days, getting their news from Twitter and their opinions from YouTube when they paid attention at all, she’d had that conversation with her former co-workers so often she could recite everybody’s lines, back to the days when the complaint was about Comedy Central. Most of her ex-co-workers were fossilizing, stuck in a minor market tarpit, reporting on shootings and arsons and rising home prices and city council members’ drunk driving convictions. The closest any of them would ever come to a national story was Craig, who covered sports—at least he could hope for the Bills to reach the playoffs again in his lifetime, or the Sabers in a Stanley Cup chase. Abby had been the only rising star among them, the one who could afford to enjoy the blogs and laugh at Stephen Colbert and tweet and use Tumblr because she was going to burst free of the tar and soar, who might someday stand on the rock where Connie Chung or Dan Rather stood. And then she realized that that rock was sinking too and grabbed onto something better, Internet celebrity. Ever upward, no matter what.

  Until she went to the damn doctor.

  “You believe me, right?” Martha said when the waiter was out of earshot. “You’ve got to, because it’s true.” She was flustered. Most of the time when she got flustered she looked to Abby, let her make decisions.

  “Of course I believe you. I’m sure it’s easy to make a mistake like that.”

>   They sat in silence for a bit. Martha picked up the bread and topped it with her own slab of still-cold butter, then shoved half of it into her mouth at one go. Abby bit back the remark Grandma would have made about manners and the one she herself hypocritically wanted to make about empty calories.

  An older woman a few tables over was staring at them. Abby felt the familiar warm caress of power like a breeze across her face, first, and when she glanced over the lines of attention were streaming in her direction. She caught the woman’s gaze and smiled at her, drawing in the energy. But the woman looked nervous, her eyebrows slightly knitted, and then her attention browned out and it seemed to Abby that it recoiled a little—was it Martha she recognized? Or was she just embarrassed to be caught staring? She dropped her eyes and turned away, to Abby’s disappointment.

  The entrees arrived and Abby decided that an unpleasant conversation was better than none at all.

  “Was it awful?”

  “Of course it was. That’s sort of the point of prison.”

  “What were the people like? The guards, the other prisoners?”

  “Did I have any hot lesbian affairs, do you mean?”

  Abby pointed her fork, laden with salmon, at her sister. “You are a wicked, perverse little creature, Martha Waite, and don’t think I don’t know it.” The imitation of their grandmother was good enough that Martha laughed and took another swig of beer.

  “Anyway, they were just people. Some of them would give me a hard time because of what I did. Especially the girls who thought they were so romantic because they stuck a knife in some other girl over some guy, or stuck a knife in the guy, or set fire to his house while he was sleeping. Personally, I think you have to be way more fucked up to kill someone you actually know, right?”

  “I bet that theory was popular.”

  “Oh, I didn’t tell them that to their faces.”

  “So smart. You always took after me.”

  “Yeah. Well. But I figured out who to avoid after a while. There was only this one guard… Mostly I just kept to myself or talked to the other women in my reading group, and I was fine.”

  “You were in a reading group?”

  “Like I said, it gets pretty boring in there.”

  “What did you read?”

  “Books with reading guides in the back so we didn’t have to come up with our own questions. Stuff about moms and daughters, mostly. And stuff about sisters.” Martha raised the beer again. It seemed to be getting to her. “None of them were as cool as us.”

  The older woman was staring at them again, and now her husband was too. Maybe they’d recognized Martha after all—or maybe they heard her talking about prison, and put two and two together. Abby smiled. This was probably the most exciting thing that would happen to a couple of small-town coots like that for the rest of their lives. Oh, when the crimp Martha put in time unfolded they’d watch the news and call the cops—they were exactly the sort who always did, eventually, even if you’d shoved them in the other direction. But that would be later, much later. Right now, they were paying attention.

  Abby directed her smile at them again, turning up the wattage just a hair, coaxing the strands of mental energy away from Martha and towards herself. Their attention was thin because they were thin-minded people, but it was better than the salmon.

  “Still the same old Abby, I see.” There was a touch of sulk in Martha’s voice and Abby abandoned the old couple reluctantly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Anything for a fix, look at you. And you were lecturing me about doing a little time-folding.”

  “I wasn’t lecturing you. Anyway, they were listening to you babble about prison. I had to distract them.”

  “I say you were just doing it for fun.”

  “Was not.” She forked her salmon viciously. It crumbled, chalky and pale-pink.

  Martha shrugged and swept another bite of linguine into her mouth, then slugged some beer. She’d almost finished the beer. Abby wasn’t quite sure how her sister ended up having the better evening, here. Maybe she was sicker than she thought.

  Martha made no attempt to get the conversation going again. She suggested ordering dessert, though.

  “We had ice cream this afternoon,” Abby said.

  “Aw, come on.”

  “Fine. But we have to get it to go. I need to open that Moscato soon or I’m going to dry out.”

  “I just want some tiramisu. I don’t care where we eat it.”

  “Have you ever even had tiramisu?” She regretted saying it instantly. There was keeping Martha off-balance and there was just being mean, and she wasn’t going for the latter.

  “Nah,” Martha said, unoffended, “but I heard it’s good.”

  “Tiramisu it is.”

  Their tiramisu arrived in two small polystyrene coffins, one of which Martha opened and sniffed. “I thought there would be more chocolate.”

  Abby shrugged and picked up her purse. She barely even had to push the waiter to get the wine taken off the bill—she just waved it under his nose. A bit more effort got the salmon comped as well, but it wasn’t worth bothering to have Martha’s meal taken care of—it had been polished off.

  On their way out of the restaurant, she passed close to the older couple’s table, close enough that if she’d been wearing a skirt it might have brushed the woman’s elbow. But she’d figured that a skirt wasn’t appropriate jailbreak wear. Oh well. She could feel them both examining her face, and that was enough for right then.

  Their grandmother died just before Abby and Martha’s tenth birthday. She got up early one morning, made toast, and then fell forward onto it at the table.

  She never took them to Mass, never went back to visit her family herself. Grandfather wouldn’t have gone even if he’d been welcome, and Grandma couldn’t drive or manage a bus schedule on her own, let alone something as hectic and modern as an airport. In fact none of them ever traveled except their annual summer trip to the cabin in Minnesota, which hardly counted because they did basically what they did back home but with more mosquitoes. Until she went away to college, Abby had never been to New York City, to San Francisco, to New Orleans, to Chicago. Had never gone over the border into Canada to take advantage of the differences in exchange rate or drinking age. Not even a simple jaunt to goddamn Disney World like even the trailer park kids got once or twice in their miserable lives. Grandfather and Mom had been so turned inward, so focused on keeping their dumb little secrets. They’d passed up one of the great sources of power in life, hadn’t even known to look for it—although Mom at least must have had an inkling. It had hurt Abby to realize how stupid they were, but that was later.

  So Grandma had died without ever getting back to Mass and the sisters who’d warned her not to marry a Waite, even if she was looking to be doomed a spinster and he was ten years younger and blessed with money and charisma. Mom had gone to bed and not gotten up for almost a month except to go to the bathroom, leaving the lights off and the curtains closed, ignoring Grandfather when he yelled through the door that she was malingering. Martha wasn’t as bad as that but Abby could tell she was off. She wore the old locket that Grandma had given her every single day, tucked under her T-shirts as though no one could see the lump it made. She stared into space more than usual, wandered away just when they needed to get started cooking dinner or doing laundry or whatever, all their usual chores and Mom’s too.

  Martha’s teacher noticed the change as well, and a note came home saying that Martha needed to see the school counselor, again, and keep at it this time. Abby forged Mom’s signature on it, and Abby was the one who drilled Martha on what to say and what not to let slip. Neither Mom nor Grandfather seemed to notice what was going on, and it infuriated her, because back then she thought they were so smart, so powerful that they must be ignoring her and Martha on purpose. That they had their own drama and were at their limits was something that never occurred to her. Who knew they had limits?

  Still, Ab
by took her cue from them and pretended not to notice things either, like when Martha gave her an appraising look and asked whether she thought Grandfather might die soon too. It wasn’t like Martha to be that pointed, to want to hurt Abby just to make sure she shared the pain. It wasn’t like Martha to make ingenious arguments about why it wasn’t her turn to bring the clothes in off the line, not when Abby was staring her down. If Martha was going to sneak away, she’d have turned up in the old apple orchard reading Anne of Green Gables, not hunting for newts in the creek using Abby’s newt bucket and searching under Abby’s particular rocks. It was like she was trying to be a person who Grandma’s death wouldn’t hurt. Then she’d snap back to the old Martha an hour later and be bewildered and upset that her favorite shoes were muddy and act like she didn’t know why Abby was being so mean.

  Looking back, Mom could have taken their side. Or at least explained to Abby what was going on.

  CHAPTER SIX

  They drove a good bit out of town and checked into a Best Western near the Thruway. If this were a real escape, with Martha not folding up time behind them, that would be the smart thing to do. Lead the eventual searchers astray, make them think that the Waite girls headed east, bound for New York City or maybe the airport in Syracuse and a lovely, extradition-free life in Belize or something. Abby had planned it all out beforehand and Martha probably wouldn’t even notice the implied vote of no confidence. She was never the one to notice, to wonder, to suspect, not the way Abby did. And in the worst-case scenario, if Martha was badly overestimating herself, there was no harm in doing a little track-covering.

  By the time they got up to their room, Abby’s eyes were starting to get sandy and hot. The bed looked almost as appealing as the bottle. Only almost.

  As soon as they’d settled in and kicked off their shoes, she realized that of course she didn’t bring a corkscrew.

  The nearest Wal-Mart was largely deserted by this hour; a few wandering tweakers and bored teens, a few stockers piling merchandise into edifices, a few moms with colicky babies or a last-minute need for posterboard, a few cashiers propped against their registers. All dwarfed by the ceiling and shelves, they did little to stop the place from looking post-apocalyptic. There was plenty of stuff, though.