Copyright Notice

The author and publisher have provided this ebook to you for your personal use only. You may not make this ebook publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this ebook you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at:

us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

Dedication

To my parents, Norma and Jas,

who made us a home despite missing theirs

BEFORE

Nora Wilder was supposed to be a bird. At least that’s what she thought when she looked at herself in the mirror and saw arms where wings should be. The closest she actually came to flying was when her younger daughter, Finn, slipped from her grasp and sprinted toward a busy street. Nora swooped down on the toddler, and Finn’s tiny body began to tremble in her arms. As her daughter anxiously kneaded her chest, Nora stroked her soft-spun curls and wished she didn’t have to scare her baby to keep her safe.

Although her wings were imaginary, Nora felt an almost continuous desire to stretch them, to unclench the knot in her back that tied them down and with one powerful flap, lift off into a cloudless sky. Their being imaginary also didn’t mean that her wings weren’t so blue they were almost black, the kind of blue you wade into and disappear. That’s what Nora saw when she walked out her front door for the last time: the tips of two ink-blue wings fanning her peripherals, one for each of the daughters she would leave behind.

Nora’s elder daughter, Zadie, must have been part bird because she knew how to squawk. When Zadie was a baby, Nora was convinced that she must have swallowed bagpipes filled with broken glass, because that was the sound that came out of her mouth every time she cried. It sometimes lasted for hours at a time, and Nora did everything she could think of to get her to stop. She would try rocking her, feeding her, changing her. When all else failed, she’d play one of her favorite cassettes in hopes it would soothe her daughter to sleep.

It wouldn’t. Zadie would only wail harder. Nora would look at the phone on the wall and wish she had someone she could call, someone who’d rush over and recommend a kooky home remedy like rubbing smashed bananas on her baby’s chest while counting to one hundred. That wouldn’t work, either, but at least she’d have someone to talk to and hug when she started crying, too.

She was alone in a town she barely knew with a screaming baby who had terrible taste in music, but something outside of herself was telling her this was the place she was supposed to be.

One morning, after a sleepless night and four Tom Waits albums, Zadie was particularly ornery. “Hey! I don’t make fun of your music,” Nora joked feebly and stopped the tape.

Out of ideas, Nora crossed the room and opened a window to let in some fresh air. “Feel that breeze?” she said to the writhing, red-faced creature in her arms. “Isn’t it nice?” Zadie’s bleating abated a little and she cautiously cracked open a pair of eyelids that until now appeared to have been swollen shut. Nora tracked her child’s gaze to something in the walnut tree outside the window: a thrush. It puffed out its spotted chest, tilted its head back, and sang four lilting notes with a trill at the end, and just like that, Zadie’s crying stopped. Nora was so relieved she started laughing. “So you like birds, too, huh? Well, at least we have something in common.”

That afternoon Nora bought a bird feeder at the hardware store, filled it with birdseed, and hung it on the tree outside Zadie’s bedroom window. When it was time to put her down for the night, Nora opened the window, and the room filled with the sounds of whippoorwills, mockingbirds, robins, and thrushes. Zadie’s eyes opened wide; then slowly they began to loll. As the birdsong turned to crickets, the arms that cradled Nora’s baby grew feathers the color of the night sky, and Nora sang a song about a little bird who was both very near and very far from home.

AFTER

ONE THOUGHTS ON SUN HATS

Zadie Wilder owned six sweaters, four pairs of leggings, and one extra-large beach towel. The reason she knew she had exactly six sweaters, four pairs of leggings, and one extra-large beach towel was that she was attempting to cram all of them inside an already bursting suitcase. She had to work fast. Her ex, Dustin, would be clocking out in a few minutes, and she hadn’t even packed any of her cassettes yet. Out of all her worldly possessions, her cassette collection was the one thing she couldn’t bear seeing smashed on the pavement below their—okay, his third-story apartment window.

Dustin was never quite able to grasp why she cared so much about them. “They were my mom’s,” Zadie had said.

“Yeah, but didn’t your mom, like, leave you?” Callous, maybe, but not untrue. To this day, Zadie still wondered why Nora hadn’t taken any of her cassettes with her. Her mom’s ’97 RAV4 might have had a hole in the floor and sounded like a go-kart when it accelerated, but at least it had had a working tape deck. The day Zadie got her driver’s license, Nora had tossed her the keys and they drove around town for hours listening to the tapes Nora kept in the glove compartment. That’s how Zadie discovered Blondie, the Indigo Girls, and Prince. When Nora left two years later, she took the car, but Blondie and the rest of her musical idols stayed behind. It’s not like her, Zadie, still in shock, had thought at the time. She never goes anywhere without her music. In a way, it was more surprising than the disappearance itself.

Now it was Zadie’s turn to disappear. Dustin had asked that she “leave no trace” of ever having been in his apartment. As Zadie rinsed a lipstick smudge off one of his glass tumblers, she felt more like she was covering up a crime scene than surrendering the title of Dustin’s part-time live-in girlfriend. Soon she would go back to her own apartment, unpack her things, and decide how sad she really was about the breakup. Right now she didn’t feel much of anything, except maybe a little nauseous.

It’s not like she was totally alone. If she got lonely, she could talk to the Ladybug. According to the various mommy blogs, Zadie’s baby was the size of a sweet pea, but she found the whole food-to-child analogy creepy. It made it sound like her baby was something to be harvested when ripe, then stuffed in a cornucopia on Thanksgiving with some gourds and ears of corn. So instead she decided to measure the size of her child against other living things. At six weeks, her baby was approximately a quarter of an inch long, the size of a ladybug. In two weeks, it would be the size of a honeybee. Eventually it would be big enough that she could start comparing it to cuter animals: a chipmunk, maybe, or a kitten, but for now she’d have to settle for ones with exoskeletons.

“You were kind of his idea, you know.” Zadie addressed her midsection as she placed the clean glass in the dish rack. Dustin had broached the subject of kids a few months earlier during a trip to the animal shelter. As they browsed crates of underexercised dogs, he said, “You know what would be even cooler than a dog?”

Zadie thought he was going to suggest they adopt a snake or an iguana, some gross bachelor-pad animal that would require keeping tubs of crickets in their freezer. She opened her mouth to protest when he blurted, “A kid!”

The next day, in true Dustin fashion, he forgot he had even made the suggestion. Then several months later, in an ironic twist of fate, Zadie found herself pregnant anyway—a fact that she had still not yet shared with anyone, including Dustin. She should have seen it coming, and not just because she had terrible luck, but because she could literally see things coming.

She was seven years old when she first realized there was something different about her. That day she was “helping” her mom in the yard by detonating the piles of leaves that Nora had spent all morning raking. Through the leaves that tumbled in front of her, she saw Clarence, Finn’s father, smiling at her from atop a ladder that was leaning against the side of the house. He pulled a wet bundle of leaves out of the gutter, held them up for her to see, and made a stink face. Zadie took this as a challenge. She reached into one of her mom’s piles, held up her own bundle of leaves, then tossed them into the air like confetti. Clarence tried tossing his leaves, too, but they clumped together and landed on the driveway with a splat. Zadie giggled.

As Clarence turned his attention back to the task at hand, Zadie was struck by an uneasy sensation. To her seven-year-old brain, it was much like the feeling she experienced when she went too high on the swings and her stomach felt like it was floating. It was soon followed by a single scary thought: Clarence is going to fall like the leaves. Confused and frightened, she turned to her mom, who was in the middle of bagging the leaves she’d collected. Before Zadie could utter a word, she heard a crashing sound behind her. She whipped around and saw Clarence on the ground, clutching his left leg. It looked funny, like her dolls’ legs did after she’d turned them around the wrong way.

Then the screaming started. Zadie had never heard a grown man make a noise like that before. It was the scariest thing she had ever heard. Nora rushed over to him as Zadie fled into the house and up the stairs to her bedroom. She hid under the covers and cried until she heard the wail of the ambulance.

It had taken Zadie several days to work up the courage to tell her mom what had happened to her that day. By that time, Clarence was camped out on the couch and using a wire clothes hanger to scratch under his cast. Zadie made sure the door to the living room was closed before she said, “It’s my fault.”

“What’s your fault, hon?” Nora’s tone was gentle, understanding. Zadie artfully dodged her mother’s gaze as she shared the phrase that had entered her head moments before Clarence fell. That was the day she learned what a psychic was and that maybe she was one. It was also the day she decided that a psychic was something she’d rather not be.

Unfortunately for Zadie, she didn’t have much say in the matter. Like an outdoor cat, her premonitions came and went as they pleased, filling her head with strange and often cryptic phrases that she had no idea how to interpret. Thankfully, she never had visions. Her sight was her own. It was her mind that sometimes felt like it belonged to someone else.

If she felt one of these unwanted thoughts coming on, she’d stick her fingers in her ears, close her eyes, and hum a song. Sometimes that was enough to quiet her mind, at least for a while.

Her attitude shifted as she entered her teen years, however, and she taught herself how to harness her gift to her advantage. Her primary objective was no more complicated than that of other kids her age: to impress her friends. And it worked for the most part. When she won six free concert tickets from an unsuspecting DJ by predicting what song would come on the radio next, she invited the five cutest boys in her class to go with her. She got her first kiss that night.

But even as she cheated radio stations and dumped boys hours before they’d planned to dump her, she had one steadfast rule: never use her ability for anything of consequence. She preferred it that way. The last thing she wanted was to be that person in a disaster movie whom everyone thinks is crazy for predicting the apocalypse. Then when it turns out she was right all along, everyone looks to her to fix it. Zadie didn’t want that kind of responsibility. It was hard enough just getting to work on time every day without neighbors bugging you about when the rapture was coming.

Or at least that’s what she told herself to help her sleep at night. A half-baked practical argument was easier to stomach than the true reason she’d stopped using her gift completely: that one awful moment she’d spent a thousand wishes trying to undo.

Before her mind had time to go down that particular rabbit hole, Zadie heard a faint ding in the other room. Someone had texted her. Either it was a message from Dustin reminding her to remove “that slimy seed goo” (i.e., chia seed pudding) from his fridge, or it was her little sister, Finn. Her high school graduation party was tomorrow, and Zadie was dreading it. She would have to drive an hour each way from her apartment in Austin to the exurbs of San Antonio just to make awkward small talk with Finn’s foster family, the Andersons. They were nice enough, but Zadie got the distinct impression that they didn’t like her. She couldn’t blame them, really. For the entire first year Finn was living with them, Zadie, who was eighteen at the time, did whatever she could to get her sister back.

With Clarence long out of the picture—he’d left when Finn was three and was rumored to be living in South Africa with his new wife and baby—Zadie was Finn’s next of kin. The case officer at Child Protective Services told Zadie that she needed to provide proof of stable full-time employment before they would even consider granting her legal guardianship. “But she’s my sister!” Zadie had protested.

“I know,” the woman said patiently—or patronizingly, as Zadie remembered it—“but we have to think about what’s best for Finn.”

If Zadie had been a year younger when their mom left, someone would have helped her decide what was best for her, too, but because she was technically an adult, she had to figure that out on her own. Five years later, she was still working on it.

Zadie was on her way to the bedroom to get her phone when a wave of severe nausea overtook her. She sprinted to the bathroom and surrendered the contents of her stomach into the toilet bowl. This was just one of the many perks of her first trimester that Zadie wished she could predict on command. If only she could have premonitions that would allow her to slip away discreetly and arrive at the bathroom with time to spare, not crash into a stall like a college student on a bar crawl. Sadly, the premonitions that managed to sneak by the wall she’d put up were rarely that accommodating.

Her phone dinged again. Zadie gargled some mouthwash, then went to the living room and picked it up. She was surprised to find that both texts were from Finn (she usually forgot to text Zadie back). The first one read:

SWIMSUIT SHOPPING NOW. WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON SUN HATS?

LIKE, DO PEOPLE REALLY WEAR THEM OR ONLY IN MOVIES?

Then, three minutes later:

TOO LATE. I BOUGHT THE BIGGEST ONE IN THE STORE AND I LOVE IT.

Zadie had no strong feelings either way about sun hats, but she was looking forward to the trip Finn and she had planned. They were going to drive down to Galveston and spend a week drinking sweet tea and reading on the beach. Zadie had already gone to the library and checked out an embarrassingly large stack of romance novels.

For Zadie, it was a chance for her sister and her to reconnect. When Zadie still lived in their old neighborhood just north of San Antonio, she would take Finn out every Friday for frozen yogurt, but after she moved to Austin a year later, it wasn’t long before their weekly ritual became a monthly one. Now, if she was lucky, they saw each other a few times a year.

It’s not like either sister had overtly decided to cut ties with the other. Over time, they had just sort of drifted apart like unmanned canoes, or rather, Zadie had drifted while Finn stayed safely tied to the dock. Recently, Zadie had felt like she couldn’t even see the shore anymore. Her family was somewhere in the salty haze, so obscured that she sometimes doubted its very existence. It was during one of these moments of existential panic that she called up Finn and asked if she wanted to take a post-graduation trip with her.

In four days, she would have her family back (or what was left of it). They might not have been as close as they once were, but Finn belonged with her, not Steve or Kathy or anyone else.

Not even their mother.

Nora Wilder was a ghost to Zadie, and ghosts don’t exist.

Zadie unlocked her phone and texted Finn back:

HOW BIG ARE WE TALKING ON A SCALE OF FEDORA TO SOMBRERO?

Three typing bubbles came up on the screen, followed by a GIF of a shirtless, presumably inebriated man balancing a kiddie pool on his head.

CLASSY, she texted, then checked the time. It was almost five-thirty. Dustin would be home any minute. Zadie dragged her misshapen suitcase to the front door, then went back for her box of cassettes. As she picked it up, she felt a premonition rising in her gut. “Noooooo. Not now,” she groaned as the feeling intensified.

Zadie shut her eyes and hummed the first song that popped into her head: “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears. By the time she’d reached the second verse, the feeling had passed and she heaved a sigh of relief. The last thing she wanted to know about right now was the future. She needed to get through the present first.

Look on the bright side. People were always peddling silver linings to her, ever since she was a kid. She’d said, “But I don’t have a dad.”

They’d said, At least you have a mom.

After her mom left, she’d said, “I don’t have a mom.”

They’d said, At least you have a sister.

And when she told Dustin that she felt like Finn was slipping away, he just shrugged and said, “At least you have me.” That was the moment she knew she had to end things with him: because his expression of commitment, albeit flippant, was not enough to console her, and never could be.

Dustin’s cat, Gus, rubbed up against her leg. She gave him one last scratch under the chin before pulling Dustin’s house key off her key ring and setting it on the novelty notepad on the foyer table. She paused for a moment and wondered if she should leave him a note. She could think of only one thing she wanted to say to him, but that was too important to scribble on a piece of paper shaped like a Space Invader. She would tell him in person, but not today. Today she had to disappear.

Finn Wilder donned her new sun hat as she stepped barefoot into the soft spring grass. She loved being barefoot so much that she regularly left the house without shoes, even in the blazing Texas summers that baked the concrete and turned lawns to straw. Her foster dad, Steve, joked that the soles of her feet were thicker than his beagle, Milly’s, paws. Finn tested this theory once by walking Milly barefoot down the gravel driveway that led from the house to the barn. When Finn limped back into the house five minutes later, Steve chuckled and said, “I stand corrected.”

Finn jogged across the backyard, keeping one hand on her head to prevent her hat from flying off. Milly followed closely on her heels, nearly running into Finn as she came to an abrupt stop next to the bird loft. She and Steve had spent an entire weekend building it out of scrap wood and chicken wire. As they worked, they drank Crystal Light and listened to music and stopped only long enough to wipe the sweat off their brows with the backs of their arms. It was the kind of project she would have done with her own dad had he stuck around long enough to teach her how to hold a hammer. No, her mom had taught her that. Everything she knew came from her mom.

Finn lifted a bag of birdseed out of a wooden storage bin and opened the miniature screen door. “Here you go, Chris Five. Don’t eat it all at once or you’ll spoil your dinner,” Finn said as she filled the bird’s dish with feed. The white pigeon gawked at her with a vacant expression befitting his brain size, then proceeded to peck away at the mound of multicolored seeds with every intention of cleaning its plate.

The Story Continues on BooksBarbecue!

Enjoyed this preview? ❤️ Do not stop here!

Read the complete book free online → 🔗

Continue reading now on BooksBarbecue and discover every page!

Love reading? Bookmark BooksBarbecue.com for more amazing books!

Happy Reading!