Chapter Nine #4
Jamie laughed to hear her use crude language.
She was so beautiful that the two other men who were customers in the bar couldn’t take their eyes off her.
“And a well-known fucking narcissist,” Jamie said drily.
“Don’t forget that.” He put a hand on Ava’s arm as she was about to lift the glass to her mouth.
The heat of his hand went through her sweater and her blouse.
“Are you sure that’s what you want to drink? ”
Ava pulled away and shook her head. “You think you know me.”
“And you think you know me,” Jamie countered. He had been thinking of her constantly, wondering how the new information about his history would affect them. Could he work a spell, rise from the ashes, get whatever he wanted, change his life?
Ava took a sip and quickly placed the glass down, her mouth burning. “Maybe not this time.” She took the paper crow from her purse and set it onto the bar. “You sent this to me.”
“I did,” he admitted with a grin.
“Why?”
He said he would tell her the reason, but not at the bar, they’d have to go elsewhere to have some privacy. Ava glared at him, but Jamie shrugged and said, “If you don’t trust me enough to take a walk with me, then what are we doing here, Ava?”
He had a point, and she certainly didn’t want to slink away after having searched him out. “This one time,” she said.
They left O’Malley’s, walking in silence.
At last they found a small park at the end of Upland Road, where they lay in the grass.
The crows were perched above them, chattering in the trees.
Ava raised her arms into the air, and the crows fell silent.
They were always curious, and one had a ring in its beak that appeared to be a wedding band.
Ava laughed, knowing it was a message about love.
“Do they always follow you?” Jamie asked
“I fed them when they were babies,” she said. The crows had come with the woman in the cloak who had visited her at night throughout her childhood, calling to each by name, as if they were guardians there to watch over Ava.
“There was once a crow who had a wife on earth,” Jamie told her.
“Is that possible?” The crows in the trees were quiet now. Perhaps they were listening in.
“I’m telling you a story. One my mother told me. So please, no judgments.”
“Fine,” Ava said. “Anything is possible.”
Jamie reached for a piece of newspaper on the ground. As Ava watched, he turned it into a crow right before her eyes with quick origami folds. “She taught me how to do this as well,” he confided. “It takes twenty-seven folds.”
“Tell me the rest of the story.” She wanted to hear, but she felt a bit of a fool, not really knowing if he was trustworthy. “Unless you’ve already told it to a hundred other girls and you’re sick of it.”
“I haven’t told it to a single one. You’re the first.”
That was what she wanted to hear. “Go on, then.” Ava fitted her hand into his much larger one. She could feel the scar on his left hand, in the same place as her scar, where an eleventh finger had been removed.
The crow took the shape of a man, Jamie told her, but he still belonged in the sky.
It was in his nature to fly, and one night he did so.
When he disappeared, his wife on earth tied bells and ribbons to a tree to call him home, but he was in the shape of a crow, and when he did return, she didn’t recognize him.
He was there and she couldn’t see him, and he couldn’t say a word.
His wife waved him away into the highest branches, where he waited for her to recognize him, but she never saw him for who he was.
His feathers had turned white from grieving, but there was nothing more he could do.
As for his wife, she was skin and bones; she wouldn’t eat or drink and she vowed never to love again.
When she could no longer stand his betrayal, she hanged herself from that same tree, and from that day on, he had never left its branches.
“That is not a happy ending,” Ava said solemnly. “Your mother shouldn’t have told you that story.”
His mother wanted him to know that love could bring grief, for if you gave your heart to someone, it could easily be broken. She always ended the story with the words We never know what will happen until it does.
“I don’t know about that.” His mother was the only one in the family who always seemed to be on his side. She was quietly honest, and although she wanted him to fit in with his brothers, she loved him despite his flaws. “I think she just wanted me to understand that love is complicated.”
“Too complicated?”
“That’s for you to decide.”
They kissed for a very long time, so long that Ava forgot the rest of the world. She forgot the white crow who never again left his tree. This was all three fates that awaited them: the one they’d been born to, the one they would walk away from, and the one they would make for themselves.
When she left Jamie, she went to the library and approached the shelf where she’d found the first letter. If there was another one in the very same place, then she would know someone was trying to tell her the truth.
Tell me everything, Ava whispered. Tell me all I need to know.