Ink and Bone(2)

“We’ll go back in a minute,” her brother said now. “Look at this.”

It was a log that had fallen and was laying beside the path. “Remember that book: Bug Hotel—or something?” he said.

Oh yeah, that book about how when a log falls down, insects move in and find a home and help the log to decompose. Cool.

Her brother peeled back a wet brown layer of bark to reveal a congregation of tiny black beetles; she leaned in close to watch them move and shimmer, burrow into these little holes they’d made. She wasn’t a girly girl. She didn’t shriek about bugs the way her friends did. She reached her finger down, and one of them crawled onto her hand.

“He likes me,” she said.

She turned her hand and let the tiny bug scuttle up her wrist and onto the cuff of her long-sleeve tee-shirt. Her favorite shirt, with the owl on it. She wore it all the time even though a hole had worn under the arm and the hem was coming down in the back.

Her brother was inspecting the log. There was already a deep, long hollow, and her brother was crouched down peering inside. While he was looking inside, she heard the birdcall she’d been hearing, this kind of sweet song, with lots of notes. She’d never heard one like it. Birds usually just sounded like they were cheeping to her, especially in the city. But this bird was saying something, something important.

Once when she’d been walking past the Alice in Wonderland statue in Central Park, she saw a man nearby with a monocular pointed up at a tall apartment building.

“What’s he looking at?” she asked her daddy. The man had a table set up with brochures and photographs for sale. Her mommy would have said I don’t know and that would have been the end of it, because they would have been running to this thing or that thing and there wouldn’t be time to stop. But Daddy didn’t ever care as much about being on time, so they wandered over.

The man had white hair and a plaid cap and a very nice blue coat. He reminded her of her grandpa, how quiet and careful he was. He talked about the hawks and other wildlife that nested right in New York City.

“Natural beauty is everywhere,” he said. “It finds a place for itself even right here. You just have to know where to look.”

He let her daddy lift her up to the monocular, and the man adjusted the lens until it came into focus and she saw two fuzzy gray baby hawks in their nest, their beaks open, surrounding their mama, who was red with white feathers on her chest and who had alert, bright eyes. Penny watched, mesmerized, until her daddy said it was time to go. When she moved away from the monocular, she saw only the building again—except now with the small cluster of brown up high on a ledge. She never would have seen it. After that, she started noticing birds in the trees and always tried to listen to their songs. The squirrels that danced across branches in the park. A woodpecker one day. Her daddy even showed her an article about someone who’d woken up to find a wild turkey sitting on his balcony. What the old man with the monocular said, about knowing where to look, it stayed with her. He was right.

Before they’d left for the hike, Daddy had downloaded an app on his iPhone that would help them identify birdcalls. He also had the binoculars. She looked around at the leafy tops of the trees, shielding her eyes against the bright yellow light (was it ever this buttery yellow in the city?). She tried to catch a glimpse of the bird that was singing, but she couldn’t. She glanced back down the path—she wanted to show her daddy the log, to use the binoculars. Where was he?

“Where’s Dad?” she asked her brother, a little whiny.

A single echoing crack came in answer. Then a kind of cry, a fluttering of leaves. She turned to her brother, who she could tell had heard it, too, because he was looking down the path toward where they had left their dad. The light shined on his white blond hair and turned the lenses of his round glasses weirdly golden.

“What was that?” she asked. He shook his head to say he didn’t know.

“Dad?” he called out. The birds had gone quiet. Louder: “Dad?”

When there was no answer, her brother said they should go back for him, so they did.

They walked back down the path, her brother taking the lead. She felt wobbly, a quiver in her stomach, tears threatening. She couldn’t even say why she was scared. What had they heard after all? Maybe nothing. They turned the corner to see the path empty. The rocky dirt surface was edged by trees that sloped down toward the river valley. “It’s not that steep,” her father had said. “But you could still fall a good ways and hurt yourself. So be careful.”

She was the first to hear the low moaning.

“Daddy!” she cried. “Daaaddddy!”

“Kids!” his voice was low and far away. He said something else, but she couldn’t hear what. They moved toward the sound, her brother edging toward the side of the path, looking down.

“Stay back,” her brother said. She pressed herself up against the trunk of a tree, feeling the rough bark through her shirt. Her father was still calling to them. It sounded like he was saying Get out of here! Run! But that couldn’t be right.

“I see him,” her brother said. “He must have fallen. Dad, what happened?”

Then another one of those strange echoing cracks. Her brother froze stiff, then grabbed his leg and started screaming, fell to the ground. It was a terrible sound, high-pitched and filled with fear. It connected to something deep and primal within her, and sheer terror rocketed through her, a lightning bolt. She heard herself shrieking, too, a sound that came from her and didn’t.