Chapter Sixty-Nine. Daye
Daye
Clinging to a branch at the top of the tree, Daye buried her face in the bark and tried to remain small and silent and still.
She could hear Rory tramping in the forest, about a mile away, too far to make out words. Mainly, she could hear the ripples his presence created: Birds falling silent, or cawing sharp warnings. The scramble of deer in the underbrush.
Even with the distance between them, it was hard to breathe until the eddies faded away, Rory’s presence moving to another part of the forest. She couldn’t even tell what it was she was scared of anymore, only that her fear grew so large that she could feel it pressing against her skin, like it filled every cavity inside her and was still searching for places to expand.
She wished that she could cry. That there would be some valve to release all the pressure building inside her, a balloon of airlessness that kept getting bigger and bigger until she couldn’t help but gasp.
“Food?” A tiny tug on her hair.
She lifted her head, feeling the ridges and whorls the bark left on her face, an unintended camouflage. A chickadee clung to the trunk beside her head, tilting its head inquisitively.
“Food? Food?” it chirped again.
“No food,” Daye chirped softly back.
“Looking for food?” the chickadee asked with interest, inspecting the bark next to Daye’s face. “Food here?”
Daye had to press her face to the trunk to smother the sound of laughter.
Even muffled, it sounded too loud, too sharp, closer to a sob than to a giggle.
It was immediately replaced with terror that somehow the sound would carry, leading Rory right to her tree.
But the forest remained quiet and still.
She took a deep breath, then trilled back, quietly, “No food. Danger.”
Immediately, the chickadee froze. “Danger? Danger? Danger where?” The trill of sound climbed and climbed, sending ripples in the foliage around them, leaving a wake of silence behind it. Dozens of feathered bodies growing still and quiet, listening.
Daye swallowed hard. “The … the person who lives in the house.” She trilled the sharp scattering of notes reserved for people. “The one with the dark head feathers.”
It felt wrong to talk about Rory like that. Even to the birds. Even while she was hiding from him. Even after everything he had done.
He went too far, she reminded herself. There was no way back from that.
Even so, guilt and shame sat on her tongue.
“Dark feather person is danger?” the chickadee trilled out, wings fluttering.
“Only to me,” Daye answered, the pressure inside her ratcheting up again, the urge to yell, to weep, to do anything to stop this incessant swelling almost overpowering.
The chickadee considered. “Dark head feathers is danger to you,” it trilled. Then, louder, “Dark head feathers is danger to her.”
A moment of silence, then the call started moving from branch to branch, like a forest fire, shifting and changing as it was tossed from one bird to the next.
Soon the whole forest was alive with it, calls overlapping one over the other until Daye could hear nothing but the thrum of danger, danger, danger echoing in time with her heart.
For the rest of the day, birds winged her way, telling her of Rory’s movements.
One told her when he had reached the fortress.
Another when he was back at the lake. A third charted his progress through the forest. When Rory got close, Daye slipped down the trunk and circled around him.
Found another tree to perch on. It felt safer off the ground, where no hands could clamp on her shoulders or close around her arms.
She curled between two branches as gloaming deepened into evening.
The birds kept feeding her a steady stream of information.
They discovered that the family of ravens that lived in the pine could reproduce the sounds Rory made so well that Daye could assemble them into words.
They spilled from their beaks, I’m sorrys and I love yous and Come backs.
The words had no hold on Daye like that, detached and transported.
But still, for a moment, her arms faltered.
The urge, the need, to go to Rory when he called was all-encompassing, a fist around her lungs.
Daye pressed her face hard into the bark and shook with the pressure that kept building and building in her, with no way to come out.
Too far, she chanted to herself. Too far, too far, too far. She kept shaking, deep into the night.
A little after dawn, the owl who lived above the fortress came to her, a frog clutched in its talons.
“He’s in the garden,” the owl told her. “Making noises by the strawberries. Scaring the mice.” The owl couldn’t or wouldn’t repeat the sounds Rory made.
Daye couldn’t help but feel grateful for the small mercy in that.
“There’s water on his face,” the owl added, just as it took flight, “a lot of it.”
Daye’s stomach sank.
Too far, she reminded herself. Too far.
Sunrise came and went. Rory kept looking for her between the trees, alternating between calling her name and shouting for her to come back.
“ ‘This is childish,’ ” the raven mimicked Rory’s words, stretching the unfamiliar sounds into little more than cadence, peaks and hollows that Daye had to piece back together.
“ ‘Why would you hide from me? What do you think I’m going to do?’ ”
Was she being childish? After all, it was Rory.
Her Rory. But then Daye remembered his tongue, snaking out to wet his lips.
The way his forehead smoothed with resolution.
The look in his eyes when he’d said, “I don’t know what you mean.
” The way he’d trapped her here. The way he kept trapping her with his words, long after they could no longer pretend that he didn’t know. The way he lied and lied and lied.
The next morning, Rory stood under their fortress, begging her to just tell him goodbye. “ ‘Please, Daye. I’m going for four months today,’ ” the raven repeated to her.
Daye wavered. Four months without Rory. Four months. That was unthinkable, incomprehensible, unencompassable. Her hand lifted from the branch, hesitating. Could it hurt just to say goodbye?
But, before she could decide, a starling winged by with the news that Rory was already halfway to the train station. Past the spring border line. Gone.
Daye couldn’t tell which feeling was stronger: the relief, or the regret.
“I love you,” she whispered, the wind picking her words and tossing them between the trees. “Goodbye.”