“It will just make people wonder about you,” she declared. “It will make them think you are a bit strange. Because you can see the feeders and they can’t. Think of the feeders as a secret that only you and I know about. Can you do that, Nest?”
Pretty much, she found she could. But the lack of a more thorough explanation on the matter was troubling and frustrating, and eventually Nest tested her grandmother’s theory about other people’s attitudes on a couple of her friends. The results were exactly as her grandmother had predicted. Her friends first teased her and then ran to their parents with the tale. Their parents called her grandmother, and her grandmother was forced to allay their concerns with an overly convoluted explanation centered around the effects of fairy tales and make-believe on a child’s imagination. Nest was very thoroughly dressed down. She was made to go back to her friends and their parents and to apologize for scaring them. She was five years old when that happened. It was the last time she told anyone about the feeders.
Of course, that was just the first of a number of secrets she learned to conceal about the creatures who lived in the park. Don’t talk about the feeders, her grandmother had warned, and in the end she did not. But there were a lot of other things she couldn’t talk about either, and for a while it seemed there was something new every time she turned around.
“Do you think the feeders would ever hurt me, Gran?” she asked once, disturbed by something she had seen in one of her picture books that reminded her of the furtiveness of their movements in the shadows of summer twilight and the dismal gloom of midday whiter. “If they had the chance, I mean?”
They were alone, sitting at the kitchen table playing dominoes on a cold midwinter Sunday, her grandfather ensconced in his den, listening to a debate over foreign aid.
Her grandmother looked up at her, her bright, darkly luminescent bird’s eyes fixed and staring. “If they had the chance, yes. But that will never happen.”
Nest frowned. “Why not?”
“Because you are my granddaughter.”
Nest frowned some more. “What difference does that make?”
“All the difference” was the reply. “You and I have magic, Nest. Didn’t you know?”
“Magic?” Nest had breathed the word in disbelief. “Why? Why do we have magic, Gran?”
Her grandmother smiled secretively. “We just do, child. But you can’t tell anyone. You have to keep it to yourself.”
“Why?”
“You know why. Now, go on, it’s your turn, make your play. Don’t talk about it anymore.”
That was the end of the matter as far as her grandmother was concerned, and she didn’t mention it again. Nest tried to bring it up once or twice, but her grandmother always made light of, the matter, as if having magic was nothing, as if it were the same as being brown-eyed or right-handed. She never explained what she meant by it, and she never provided any evidence that it was so. Nest thought she was making it up, the same way she made up fairy tales now and then to amuse the little girl. She was doing it to keep Nest from worrying about the feeders. Magic, indeed, Nest would think, then point her fingers at the wall and try unsuccessfully to make something happen.
But then she discovered Wraith, and the subject of magic suddenly took on a whole new meaning. It was when she was still five, shortly after her attempt at telling her friends about the feeders and almost a year before she met Pick. She was playing in her backyard on the swing set, pretending at flying as she rose and fell at the end of the creaking chains, comfortably settled in the cradle of the broad canvas strap. It was a late-spring day, the air cool yet with winter’s fading breath, the grass new and dappled with jack-in-the-pulpit and bleeding heart, the leaves on the oaks and elms beginning to bud. Heavy clouds scudded across the Midwest skies, bringing rain out of the western plains, and the sunlight was pale and thin. Her grandparents were busy inside, and since she was forbidden to leave the yard without them and had never done so before, there was no reason for them to believe she would do so now.