Prologue #2
The woman was the first one to react. She stood, pushing back her chair with a soft scrape against the linoleum, and moved toward the counter.
“You’re awake,” she said, like Sarah might not have noticed.
“Do you want something to eat? There’s V8, and I can make you some sweet tomato waffles. They’re my own recipe.”
“They’re weird,” said the fairer-haired of the two girls among the children, leaning forward and speaking in a conspiratorial tone. “Grandma makes blueberry waffles too, and they’re lots better. Tell her you want blueberry.”
Sarah bit her lip. “I like tomatoes,” she said, voice quavering.
“I know you do,” said the woman. “It’s the solanine—a chemical found in tomatoes.
It’s in other things, too, but tomatoes are the easiest way for you to get it.
And my tomato waffles aren’t weird, Verity, they’re just not to your taste.
I candy cherry tomatoes, chop them up, and mix them with the batter the same way I would blueberries. I didn’t offer them to you.”
“Sorry, Grandma,” said Verity, shrinking down in her seat.
The new man moved then, rising from his chair and moving closer to Sarah, who flinched away. “She looks just like you, Mom,” he said.
“We’re a species with low personal variance,” said the woman. “We never needed it.”
“Can she see me? Sorry, that was rude—can you see me?” He shifted his attention to Sarah for his second question.
Sarah twitched but managed not to recoil. “I … Not very well? You’re sort of blurry, and my eyes don’t want to focus on you.”
“That’s because you don’t look at people with your eyes,” he said, and reached up, removing a chain from around his neck.
He suddenly snapped into perfect focus, becoming a normal man who looked a bit like the woman who was making her a waffle, and a bit like the man still sitting at the table with the kids.
He felt like the basement back at home, cool and safe and stable, a place she could go to hide from storms, where she could be safe among the spiders.
“My name is Andrew,” he said. “Most people call me ‘Drew.’ I’m a kind of person called a bogeyman, which means I don’t like bright lights, and I’m wearing a special necklace that blocks telepathy from reaching me, which is why you can’t see me very well.”
“I can see you just fine now,” said Sarah.
“I know,” said Drew, with a complicated ripple of discomfort. “Mom, I think this one’s yours.”
“I wanted to wait,” said the waffle lady.
“I know, but she was squinting at me like I was some invisible monster, and waiting isn’t always better than honesty.” He put the chain back on and went blurry again, the feeling of cellar-safety fading away.
At least now Sarah knew what he looked like, and while she couldn’t see him properly anymore, she could track him as he moved back to his seat.
The woman popped a waffle out of her waffle maker, shaking her head, and carried it over to the table. “I have butter, syrup, and ketchup, Sarah,” she said. “Come sit, and have breakfast. Did you want some V8?”
“Yes, please,” said Sarah, suddenly shy. She moved to sit, waiting until she was settled, the waffle smelling amazing in front of her, to ask, “Are you my kidnappers?”
“No, sweetheart,” said the woman. “We’re your helpers. I’m so sorry about what happened to your parents.”
“I’m sorry too.”
“Do you have any grandparents we could call?”
“No.”
That was typical of the kind of family cuckoos were generally attached to when it came time to hide their young.
They didn’t always have time to scout well enough to be sure—Angela herself had grown up with two sets of grandparents—but when they could, they left the babies with couples who had no strong familial ties outside each other.
It helped with questions like “Why didn’t you tell us you were pregnant” and “Why doesn’t the baby look anything like you in the pictures.
” Still, it stung to know that was the case for Sarah.
If she’d already had an existing family, they might have been able to help her reunite with them.
“I’m so sorry, Sarah. Did you want syrup? Or ketchup?”
Sarah hesitated. “Can I really have ketchup if I want it?” she asked.
“I always put ketchup on mine.”
“She does,” confirmed the man. “Has for as long as I’ve known her.”
“Then ketchup, please,” said Sarah, in a prim voice. “I like it better.”
“Most of us do,” said the woman, and reached for the ketchup. She exchanged a look with the man as she did. “There’s something I need to discuss with you, once you’re finished eating your breakfast, all right?”
“All right,” said Sarah. She took the bottle, squirting thick red paste onto her waffle like it was frosting, pausing, and then adding another layer. She set the ketchup aside, picking up her fork. “Is it about me not being human? I heard you last night.”
The woman flinched. “I’m sorry, Sarah. We thought you were asleep, but we still shouldn’t have been talking about you.”
“It’s okay.” Sarah shrugged. “But what’s a cuckoo?”
Silence settled over the kitchen table, heavy and uncomfortable, and for a long moment, no one seemed to know what to say. Then the younger of the two girls piped up:
“A cuckoo is our grandmother, Angela Baker, and she makes the best spaghetti sauce in the whole world, and likes to do math so much she made it her whole job, and our mother says she’s one of the best people ever to keep us from jumping off bridges during summer vacation, and so if you say anything mean about cuckoos, you’re saying it about our gramma and I hate you. ”
Angela radiated amusement. “Thank you, Antimony, but no one is saying anything mean about cuckoos right now. Sarah was only asking what we are. And Sarah, we’re just a different way of being people. We can be nice and kind or cruel and mean. We can be anything we want to be.”
“Gramma wanted to be an accountant,” said the boy, proudly.
“Yes, I did, Alex, and I’m a very good accountant, thank you.
We don’t see faces like humans do—we see minds.
That’s why Drew’s wearing the charm that keeps you from looking at his mind too hard, because sometimes when we look at people’s minds, we change them.
It usually happens when we’re scared, or when we’re talking to strangers.
We make them think they already know us, and then we change their memories so they remember knowing us.
That’s what happened to you when people started trying to take you home.
You were scared, and that just made it worse. ”
Sarah’s eyes were huge. “I don’t want to change people’s minds.”
“That’s good, because people can get hurt that way. A lot of cuckoos don’t care about hurting people, but I do. I care a great deal.”
“I don’t want to hurt people,” said Sarah. “How do I not do that?”
“I can help you,” said Angela. “But you’ll have to stay here if you want to learn.”
“I don’t live here anymore,” said Drew. “I was just back to housesit. So you won’t be putting me in any danger of having my mind changed.”
“You can’t change my mind,” said Martin.
“We’re going home next week,” said Alex.
“If I stay here, I can learn how to be a good cuckoo and no one’s going to take me away?” asked Sarah hesitantly.
Angela nodded.
“Yes,” she said.
Sarah looked around the room, then back to Angela, and nodded decisively.
“Then I’m staying here, and you’re going to teach me,” she said. “And I’m never going to hurt anybody.”