Stork (21 page)

Somehow I made it through the day. Just as I was about to leave, a group of girls caught my eye. They shifted, forming more of a horseshoe than a ring, and I got a good view of the person being consoled. It was Monique. I stopped, taking even my shadow by surprise. She looked haggard. Forget wind; the girl had had the sails themselves knocked from her mast. One of the girls placed a hand on Monique’s arm, and I heard her say, “I was late last month and it turned out OK.” I don’t know how long I stood there thinking about that remark, but I must have made some sort of spectacle of myself. Next thing I knew, Monique was heading my way. My brain said go, but my legs, darn them, stayed put.

“Can I talk to you a moment?” Monique asked.

“I guess,” I said, trying to prepare snappy comebacks in my head for what was sure to be an ugly confrontation.

“I owe you an apology.”

To that I had no response, none — nothing in my upbringing, or formal education, or hours spent watching
The Hills
had prepared me for the haunted look in her eyes.

“I’ve been a bitch and I’m sorry.” She fiddled with the buttons of her coat. “I heard you turned Wade down at the Asking Fire. Smart girl.”

In my mind, I kept thinking that this was my chance to bring Miss Uppity down a rung. But I just couldn’t do it; the nice bits of me won out. “I heard you did the same.”

“Yeah, well, it took me a lot longer to figure him out.”

“Come on, Monique,” someone called.

“I guess I’ll see you around.” She hurried after her friends.

I walked to my car juggling so many thoughts and questions regarding the events of the past few days that I’m sure I dropped one. Seriously. I heard something splat. My first-ever Stork recommendation was only hours away; I was already nervous. As if the entire concept wasn’t confusing enough, I now had one of the vessels changing her spots on me.

I’d had to pull together a really good excuse not to see my dad. He’d seemed pretty floored when I said I had an assignment due and had hours and hours of work ahead of me. It wasn’t like me to be unprepared. Besides, I’d been begging him to visit for weeks. Even though he’d arrived unexpectedly, I could still hear the hurt in his voice when he responded to my library alibi. We made plans for the following day. I also asked him to the football game on Friday. My mom had been easier. She was, in general, a big fan of libraries. To me, it seemed as good a place as any to hide for a few hours — and start scratching.

I drove to Pinewood. I heard they had a nice library, and at least I didn’t know anyone, so I couldn’t make too big a fool of myself. The town was larger than Norse Falls, with newer buildings, but I couldn’t help thinking that our downtown did a better job on the little things: hanging flowerpots, brick sidewalks, and bay-window storefronts. I settled into a dark corner on the second floor of the modern building with notebooks and papers spread around me, all of them completed assignments. I took a good bracing gulp of air and started scratching, as inconspicuously as possible. I felt like an idiot. Where to start? Under the bangs? Top of the crown? I seemed to remember the area above my ears being particularly bothersome, so I started there. Within moments, my head was crawling. It was awful, but once I’d begun, it had a mind — an evil one at that — of its own. Pain radiated from every follicle on my head. How did I not remember the extent of this misery? And how was I ever going to make it to nine p.m.?

I pulled Jack’s mud-stained cap from my backpack and brought it to my cheek. It smelled musky and male. I enjoyed the diversion, no matter how brief. I pulled it over my head, liking its fit, though it did nothing to relieve the discomfort. It took me an hour to read a simple English assignment, the epidermis playing, apparently, an important role in the processing of language.

An older man settled at the table next to mine. He must have thought I had some sort of nervous disorder, or was in the process of an emotional breakdown. It took everything in me not to stop, drop, and roll across the wood floor.

I pulled a birthday card and envelope from my backpack and began a letter to my grams in Santa Monica. She didn’t know e-mail from eBay, could handle a landline conversation, but considered the cell phone for 911 purposes only. She was definitely the snail-mail type and would be thrilled to get a note with her card. I don’t remember what I wrote. All I could think about was the live wire of pain snaking across my head. In an effort to keep my mind off the slash-and-burn at work on my scalp, I tapped my toes. The old guy next to me shook his head like I was everything that was wrong with today’s youth. I stuffed the card into the envelope, wrote out the address, and pushed away from the library table, quickly stuffing books and papers into my backpack.

Outside the library, a breezy evening offered a little relief. I remembered seeing a post office on the main highway only a short walk from the library, and hoped the exercise would be a small distraction. The building was dark, long past closed, but an old blue collection box sat at the corner. I saw a big logging truck coming down the road. It would be familiar to someone like Jaelle’s husband, Russ, but to me it was new and wondrous. A pile of logs, at least twenty feet long, was stacked on the trailer of a big rig. They looked like fallen giants, those massive tree trunks, and it filled me with a sort of melancholy. I dropped my letter down the chute and stood, with my elbows propped on the blue box, thinking about Jaelle. She’d be a good mom. A baby was what she and Russ needed to get past this rough spot. It would force them both to grow up a little, settle down.

Then a series of events happened so quickly, I had a hard time processing it all. A very large and swiftly descending black bird smashed into the big rig’s windshield — its wings crumpling like paper. There was a deafening screech of brakes, long and shrill and foreboding. Simultaneously, a breeze blew up from nowhere. In an instant, it lifted Jack’s cap off my head. I watched as the hat skittered first at my feet and then with another gust was airborne, flying out of my sight, back toward the parking lot of the post office. As I turned to run after the cap, my attention was drawn across the highway, where I thought I saw — it couldn’t be — Grim, flapping her arms like a madwoman.

In a few quick strides, I reached the cap. As I bent to retrieve it, nestled up against the brick building, I looked up in horror to see the truck skid sideways and jackknife, the cables holding the logs break, and the monstrous trunks scatter across the highway. At the corner, where I had just stood, the spill of logs buried the blue mailbox, as well as a parked car, and snapped a streetlight and street sign like toothpicks. I looked across to where Grim had been, but she was gone.

Horns blared and traffic stopped. Drivers got out of their cars. Shop owners and customers came out of the stores. The intersection was impassable. I walked shakily toward the confusion. Nothing that had been there a moment ago was left of the corner. I watched as the truck driver was pulled from his cab, apparently uninjured.

I pointed to the mound of fallen logs, addressing a woman holding a barking dog by its leash. “I was standing right there.” My voice was hoarse.

“Me, too,” she said. “We both would have been crushed!”

“Did you see that old lady across the road?” I asked, trying to control the trembling that rattled my molars.

The woman looked to where I pointed, but shook her head no. “I was watching the truck, and next thing I knew it was skidding out of control. If it hadn’t been for that young man . . .” She looked around in confusion. “Where did he go? I thought he was being rude, but he did push me out of the way.”

“What young man?” I asked.

“He looked around your age. Big, with short brown hair. Or was he blond? It all happened so fast.”

A police car, siren blaring and lights flashing, pulled up in front of the toppled truck, followed quickly by an ambulance. The lady and her dog moved back from the accident; I did, too, not wanting to get caught up in police reports or eyewitness accounts. Wringing Jack’s hat like a sponge, I walked to my car.

I sat in the driver’s seat for a long, long time, unable even to pull the keys from my pocket. I almost died five years ago in a frozen lake. By all accounts, I should have. This past weekend I blundered onto an unprotected bear cub, provoking its mother — charge-and-kill a common enough outcome of such a scenario. Now I had watched as the place where I’d stood, moments ago, was brutally swept away in a thunder of falling timber and twisting metal. I tugged Jack’s cap over my aching head, thinking I really couldn’t handle any more strange happenings — particularly those of a life-threatening nature.

I drove back to Norse Falls and parked in the alley behind Hulda’s store. I don’t know how I made it to nine. I felt like I was having an out-of-body experience, with just a shell of me rocking back and forth, while some spirit form of me watched from up above as that little blue mailbox was crushed, again and again. I thought about calling Penny — I sure needed a friend — but where would I even begin?
Hey, Penny. It’s me. Had another near-death experience
. I toughed it out until, finally, my watch took a last begrudging lunge and I was out of my car seat with what felt like fireworks shooting out the top of my head. I used the back entrance. Not a soul was in sight, but as I opened the door, someone was at my elbow. Fru Birta. Where did she come from? And then immediately another entered behind her. And then another. Had my head not been about ready to launch, I would have gone back outside to have another look. I vaulted down the steps, probably too fast, and probably too furious, though that Pelican really should watch that cane of hers. I scrambled into the Robin’s chair and immediately plunged my nose into the awaiting bowl of herbs, glorious nose-numbing, head-healing herbs. Relief.

I didn’t lift my head for anything. A greeting’s a greeting from any vantage point, right? The last to arrive was Hulda. I got the sense that this was customary. As she took her spot at the Owl’s chair, the old women rose.

“In honor of the autumnal equinox,” Hulda said, “it seems fitting to begin in praise of Sifa, Protector of the Harvest.” She raised her hands in a gesture of offering.

I couldn’t help but cock my head from left to right. What the? Harvest Tide? Winter’s mantle?

“My sister Storks,” Hulda continued, “tonight we gather on a day of symmetry, moon and sun in harmony. And thanks be that another summer solstice is behind us.”

Huh? Wasn’t there a soul to be delivered? Having just escaped being pressed into paper, I wasn’t in the mood to muse over the change of seasons. And was nobody else’s head on fire?

“And more to celebrate this evening — is our newest Stork Katla’s first bestowal.” Hulda motioned for us to be seated. “Fru Birta, roll call if you will.”

I lifted the bowl up and fanned its scent toward my nose as attendance was called. If I was to be a part of this hush-hush, ages-old tribe, I decided I should learn a few of their names. I scanned the group. Besides Hulda, there was suck-up Dorit. Birta, the horned-wimple-wearing Lark, was our bookkeeper. Marta, sporter of the Jackie Kennedy pillbox and brandisher of the cane, had the Pelican chair next to mine. And rounding things out was Svana, the Swan. Talk about typecasting: her hair and skin were parchment white, her neck was long and thin, and even her hand movements were fluid and graceful.

“Fru Grimilla,” Birta called for a second time.

I looked across the table. Grim’s seat was empty. Weird.

Hulda looked at her watch.

Fru Dorit said, “It’s not like Fru Grimilla to be late. I wonder if she’s sick.”

I was torn. Everything had happened so fast. It had looked like her, but she was gone so quickly. “Uh. Fru Hulda,” I said, “I think I saw Fru Grimilla in Pinewood a little while ago.” I described the incident, the big black bird careening into the truck’s windshield, and the old woman, who I thought was Grim, at the scene.