Chapter 13 #2
I glance around as the trail leads us through a bit of flat land.
The trees are old and thick here, reminding me of where I’d spent eight long years.
That’s one place I haven’t gone back to yet, that ancient, hollowed oak where Sage and Nadia found me.
Again, I don’t know why. But I have a feeling it’s got something to do with ghosts.
“Nadia says all human lineages can be traced to something not quite human. Plant, animal, mineral.” I sidestep some Spanish moss, long and rough as an old man’s beard.
“Cloud. Lightning. Stone. This explains…well, do you know the feeling of doing something or being near something and it feels like you lose yourself in a sense of belonging?”
Adam’s quiet for a few minutes, and then he laughs. “Yeah. Knitting.”
I’m so surprised by his response that I stop short before continuing on. “Knitting?”
“I took it up after I stopped drinking. I’m fucking terrible at it, Sky.”
He laughs again, the strands of sunlight coming through the canopy making it look like his eyes have stars in them. I lower my eyes to his dimples and imagine very briefly how it would feel to kiss them. I shake my head and look away.
“But while I’m knitting, I lose myself and find myself at the same time. It’s hard to explain, but I feel as though I become more and less than human when I’m clicking my grandmother’s old knitting needles.”
I smile. “That explains it really well, actually. That’s kind of what our gifts feel like. Or at least mine does. I feel like I belong to the World of Criaturas, and that belonging somehow makes me more and less human at the same time.”
“So I belong to knitting, then. The world of knitting.” He scoffs like he’s making a light joke.
I smile. “The worlds were made from weaving and knitting, Adam. How many creation stories include the fiber arts? Including spiderwebs?”
Adam stops as I speak, and so I stop, too.
He swallows, his eyelashes lowering, and I’m alarmed to note that he is watching my lips again.
Like before, he seems to notice it after I do.
He clears his throat, coughs, and looks away.
“So…you could, like, make an animal come to you if you want? Like you could…show me how your gift works?”
I frown and turn ahead, walking away from him.
I don’t respond as we both climb over some rocks jutting out into the path.
I’m not sure how. Finally, after we’ve made it past the boulders, I dust my hands against the front of my clothes and say, “You’ve already seen how my gift works, though.
Remember? The pigeons and the chipmunks? ”
“Right. I was just wondering if you could do it again.” Adam flashes me a smile that is too wide and friendly. It’s his fake journalist smile, is my guess.
I don’t smile in return. I keep my head down and catch my breath. “Like, what were you thinking?”
Adam shrugs. “I don’t know. A hawk…?”
It doesn’t feel right. Proving to him by using the animals—my friends—as though they were puppets. I don’t doubt they would come to me if I asked. But they would only do that because I’ve proven that I don’t ask without good reason. “I don’t want to.”
He turns away, shielding his face from the sunshine with his hand as he glances up. “Uh-huh. Not a problem.”
His tone makes my hackles rise. He doesn’t think I can do it, when it’s not about “can” or “can’t” at all. I roll my eyes. Freaking colonizer mindset, always wanting proof of things, always thinking a thing must be seen in order to be known.
We reach the cliff quickly after that, and he says, placing his hands on the wooden part of the new rail, “How do you feel?”
I shake my head. I don’t want to say the truth—that I’m annoyed specifically with him. “Uh. You know. This feels completely normal, I guess.”
He quirks his head at me. “You told the police that you woke up in the woods. But you then implied with me, at Gramps’s, that there was more to the story.”
I nod and shrug. I kind of don’t want to tell him this precious truth right now.
But he and I made a deal. I inhale slowly.
“Remember the old gods I told you about? According to Nadia, they were who took my body into an oak tree that way.” I point down, deep in the woods.
“And they took care of me. During that time, I didn’t know I was in the woods, of course. I thought I was dead. A ghost.”
“A ghost,” Adam repeats slowly.
“Yes. I wandered around Cranberry. As a ghost. After eight years, my sister and grandmother took me to my body and I returned to it with their help.”
“A…ghost.” If he repeats the phrase one more time, he might fall off the cliff this time.
I don’t mean it. I don’t want to actually hurt Adam.
But I’m so frustrated, I want to at least kick some really big rocks down the ledge.
This conversation has nothing of the other night’s magic and connection.
When it felt like he was sincerely listening to me.
Instead, I feel like all he’s doing is considering that I might seriously be crazy, after I begged for him not to at the beginning of this arrangement.
“If the old gods are powerful enough to take your body and care for it while your, ah, spirit is elsewhere…why didn’t they just save you whole? Spirit and all?”
I sigh. “Very few things the old gods do make sense in the Land of the Living.”
Adam pauses. “I see.” It’s that tone again. Disbelieving along with…a trace of arrogance. Isn’t it a part of his profession to make his interviewees not feel like liars?
“Don’t do that,” I snap.
He looks at me quickly, needing to turn around to do so. It’s only now that I realize I’m against the wall of dirt lining the trail, as far away from the edge of the cliff as possible. Rocks are piercing my back painfully but I don’t want to move. I don’t feel safe.
“Do what, Sky?” he asks, his voice warm.
“You know what, Adam. You’re acting like I’m delusional or something. I’m telling you the truth. I and the truth deserve to be treated with respect.”
Adam shakes his head. “You’ve just unloaded a lot of…controversial information. It’s just—”
“Oh, that’s what we’re calling the things that Western science is too up its own ass to understand? ‘Controversial information’?” I shake my head. “Whatever, man.” I turn around and begin to go back to where we’d come from, Adam fast on my heels.
“Sky. There’s been…a misunderstanding—”
“Has there?” I turn around fast and he almost trips. I grab his arms and hold him steady. “Seems to me that I’ve understood this perfectly. You’re completely closed off to my story. To my life. Shouldn’t the person who hears it first actually try to believe what happened to me?”
Adam blinks. “That’s not how journalism works, Sky.”
That tells me all I need to know. I breathe out a big sigh. “Got it.” I look down briefly and say, “I just wanna go home now.”
He nods. “Okay. Let’s head back.”
Adam tries to talk to me on the hike back, about simple things like the weather and the birds. I don’t respond. What is there to say?
Just before we reach the parking lot, I’m startled when something sharp hits my shoulder. “Oh gods,” I shriek, but then freeze when I see it’s…well. It’s a hawk. A gorgeous, red-tailed hawk with eyes so black, they look like they contain two entirely new universes.
Adam jumps back when he sees. “Jesus Christ.”
I don’t know why a hawk landed on me in front of Adam.
It’s almost like a sign, to keep doing what I’m doing with him.
Keep telling him the truth. But right now, I just want to be as far away from this man as possible.
I stroke the hawk’s beautiful burnt sienna feathers lightly.
They somehow feel soft and sharp at the same time.
“Why hello. Go on and have a good day, would you?”
And then he flies away, his big wide wings as graceful as blown glass made alive.
Adam’s eyes are wide as well. I anticipate him going into an intense conversation about the “coincidence” of that hawk “randomly” landing on me.
But instead, he doesn’t say a word. We drive home in silence.
The only thing he tells me is to have a good evening when I turn toward Nadia’s. I say nothing in response.
The only thing I can think when I’m inside is What a waste of a perfectly good hike.