Read The Forest Is Talking free: the opening chapter

The Empty Seat: The Drive

My dad forgot to call again, so I counted pigeons.

Thirteen on the telephone wire. Two on the gutter. One fat gray one doing a weird head-bob dance on the fire escape across the street, like he was grooving to music only pigeons could hear.

I drew him in my sketchbook. I gave him sunglasses. It made me feel better, sort of.

"Wren." Aunt Deb knocked on my door with her elbow because her hands were full of my stuff. "Are you packed? We have to leave by nine."

"I'm packed."

I was not packed. My suitcase was open on the floor with exactly one sock in it, and that sock did not have a friend. Packing felt like agreeing. And I did not agree to any of this.

Aunt Deb set the pile on my bed. Folded shirts. My rain jacket. The water bottle Mom bought me last winter, the one with the owl on it. She'd even put in my box of granola bars, which meant she'd been through my desk, which meant she knew about the stash.

"Three weeks," she said. "That's all. Maybe four. Just until school stuff gets sorted and your mom finishes the big account."

"I know."

"And your grandfather is really looking forward to it."

I looked up at her. Aunt Deb is not a good liar. Her mouth does this thing where one corner goes up and one corner goes down, like her face can't decide. I'd never even met Grandpa Abe. He called maybe twice a year, and when he did, Mom went into the other room and talked quiet and came back with red eyes. Great. What a summer. Send the kid nobody is talking to off to live with the man nobody talks about.

"Did he say that?" I asked. "Looking forward to it. Did he actually say those words."

The mouth thing happened. "He said, and I quote, 'Send her up.'"

"Wow. Poetry. I can tell where Mom got her warmth."

Aunt Deb sat down on the edge of my bed. The springs squeaked. She picked up my sketchbook, which was dangerous, because that thing was basically my diary with feathers.

"You drew the pigeons again."

"He's been staying out there all week. I named him Gerald."

"Gerald has good style." She turned the page. A hawk I'd seen at the park in March. A squirrel with its mouth full, labeled "SAME, BUDDY." She smiled for real that time, and then she closed the book and put it on top of the shirts like she was tucking it in.

"You know what though," she said. "This could be good. The mountains. Real wildlife. You could see, I don't know. Elk."

"Bears," I said, before I could stop myself. "Black bears. And cougars, but you basically never see cougars, they see you first. And pileated woodpeckers. The big ones with the red crests. They're like the size of crows. They're basically flying dinosaurs."

I shut up. Aunt Deb was grinning at me.

"What," I said.

"Nothing. Bring extra pencils."

Then she left me alone with one sock in a suitcase, and I had to actually do it. Actually pack. Which meant it was actually happening.

---

Here's the thing about my life. Four months ago it was normal. We had an apartment with a wobbly table and a sound the fridge made that Dad called "the whale." Mom worked too much. Dad worked too much. I drew animals and got decent grades and on Sundays Dad made pancakes shaped like animals, badly, so the fox looked like a blob and we'd argue about it.

Then the whale fridge was the loudest thing in the house, because nobody was talking at dinner anymore.

Then Dad moved to a building across town with a pull-out couch that was "mine," and I slept on it twice, and both times he spent the whole night on his phone in the kitchen, whisper-arguing with somebody.

Then the calls slowed down. Weekly became "sorry kitten, crazy week." Crazy week became crazy month. The last text from him was twenty-three days ago. A thumbs-up emoji. A thumbs-up. To a message where I'd told him I won the school art contest.

Mom cried in the bathroom when she thought the faucet covered the sound. I know things. I'm eleven, I'm not an amoeba.

And now the solution was me, in a car, going somewhere with no cell service, to live with a grandfather who answered I love you with "Send her up."

I put the sketchbook in my carry bag and shoved three pencils into the side pocket. Then four more. An artist needs options.

---

The whole way out of the city I sat in the back seat even though the front was empty, because the front felt too much like agreeing. Gerald the pigeon watched us pull away. I'm not joking. He turned his head and tracked the car down the whole block. Birds pay attention. People are always telling me to pay attention, and honestly, birds are the only ones who actually do.

"Your mom wanted to be here," Aunt Deb said at the third red light. "She has the pitch meeting. The one she moved twice already."

"Cool," I said.

"Wren."

"It's cool. It's fine. Everyone's busy."

"She's going to drive up in a few weeks. That's a promise." Aunt Deb looked at me in the mirror. Her eyes are the same brown as Mom's and mine, which felt unfair, like they were ganging up on me.

"Did you pack the inhaler?" she asked.

"I don't have asthma. That's literally not my body."

"Humor me."

"It's in my bag." Mom made me carry one after I had a coughing fit on a hike in second grade, which was one time, four years ago, but mothers have long memories and short reasons.

We stopped talking for a while after that. The apartment buildings got shorter. Then the buildings turned into houses, and the houses pulled apart from each other like they needed personal space, and the spaces between them got green.

I put my forehead against the window. The glass was warm and it buzzed against my skin. Outside, a billboard showed a smiling family eating yogurt. Inside, my chest felt like a drawer that wouldn't close all the way.

"Do you want music?" Aunt Deb asked.

"Sure."

"What kind?"

"Whatever."

"That's not a kind."

"It's the kind where I don't have to choose anything else today."

She glanced at me in the mirror again, and for a second her mouth did a different thing, a soft thing. Then she put on old music, songs from when she and Mom were kids, and she sang along badly on purpose so I'd laugh. I did not laugh. But I almost did, and she knew it, which was annoying, which is what aunts are for.

---

At the gas station past the state line, everything changed smell. That's not a fancy way of saying it, that's just what happened. I got out of the car and the air was different. It smelled like gas, obviously, we were at a gas station, I'm observant, not poetic. But past the gas there was something green and cold. Trees. There were trees everywhere, a whole wall of them behind the pumps, dark and tall and going up the side of a hill like the hill was wearing spiky armor.

And there was a crow on the dumpster.

I froze. I love crows. I have filled eleven pages of my sketchbook with crows. They're smarter than most adults I know, and I say that with respect for exactly four adults.

This crow was young, I could tell by the scruffy feathers around his neck and the way he kept hopping from foot to foot like the dumpster lid was hot. He had a french fry. He was extremely proud of the french fry. He held it up in his beak and looked around like, does everyone see this.

"Yeah, buddy," I told him. "Good fry."

"Wren?" Aunt Deb called. "Do you want anything?"

The crow cocked his head at me. One black eye, shiny as a button. I swear he looked straight at me, and then he dropped the fry into his own foot, gripped it, and did a little hop-turn, like a quarterback.

"Show-off," I said.

He croaked at me. It sounded, and I know how this sounds, but it sounded like duh.

I stared at him. He stared at me. Then he grabbed the fry and flapped off over the tree line, and the noise of his wings was loud and close and real, like a jacket being shaken out.

"Wren!" Aunt Deb was holding the gas station door open. "Chips? Drinks? Opportunity of a lifetime?"

"Coming."

But I looked at the trees for one more second. The wall of them. Green and dark and so, so many. Cedar Hollow was nothing but those, if the map was right. Miles and miles of forest with one valley and one cabin and one grumpy old man in it.

Something in my chest did a small weird flip. Not a happy flip. Not a scared flip. Something in between, with feathers on it.

I bought sour gummy candy and we got back on the road.

---

The highway shrank. Four lanes to two. Then the road turned and the trees swallowed the sky on both sides, so we drove through a green tunnel with just a strip of gray above us. The radio station fuzzed out into static. Aunt Deb turned it off, and then it was just the engine and the wheels and my heartbeat, which was being dumb about everything.

"So," Aunt Deb said, in her brace-yourself voice. "I should tell you some stuff about Abe."

"You should have been telling me stuff about Abe for eleven years."

"Fair." She drove for a minute. "He's not good with people. He's good with the woods. He was a tracker, did you know that? Search and rescue, for years. When somebody got lost in those mountains, they called your grandfather, and he found them. Every time."

"Then why did he stop?"

Silence. The trees went by. A hawk turned over the road, slow, riding the air like it owned the whole sky, which it kind of did.

"He stopped after your grandmother died," Aunt Deb said finally. "It was her valley, really. Her people lived there for a long, long time. She knew that forest the way you know your sketchbook. Abe just married into it and tried to keep up."

I didn't know anything about my grandmother except a name. Ruth. Mom never talked about her either. See the pattern? Halloways are world champion not-talkers. I come by it honestly.

"What was she like?" I asked.

Aunt Deb's hands shifted on the wheel. "People used to say she could talk to animals."

I snorted. "Sure."

"I'm not saying it was true. I'm saying that's what people said. She always knew where the herds were. She knew when storms were coming before the sky did. Birds landed on her, Wren. Just landed on her, on her shoulders, her hands, like she was a fence post. Your mom saw it her whole childhood and it spooked her half to death."

A tickle went up the back of my neck. I thought about Gerald the pigeon tracking our car. I thought about the crow on the dumpster, staring right at me like I was the interesting one.

"That's just stories," I said.

"Probably," Aunt Deb said. "Your grandmother also used to say the forest talks. And that if your life ever got very, very quiet, quiet enough to hear it, you should be careful about listening."

She laughed, kind of, when she said it. Like it was a joke.

Neither of us was laughing about ten minutes later, though, when the cell signal bars on her phone blinked down to one, and then to nothing at all.

"Well," Aunt Deb said. "That's us off the map."

And up ahead, through a gap in the trees, I saw my first mountain. Not a picture of one. A real one, white on top, so big it didn't look real, and under it the whole green valley spread out like a held breath.

The trees on both sides of the road had gone very still.

I know how that sounds. Trees are always still. But I draw animals, which means I watch things, and I am telling you: everything out there had stopped moving at the same time. No birds crossing. No rustle in the branches. A deer at the tree line stood frozen with its head up, staring down the road at nothing.

Gerald would have noticed. Any bird would have noticed.

"Aunt Deb," I said slowly. "Why is the forest so quiet?"

She glanced sideways at the trees. "It's the woods, honey. It's supposed to be quiet."

But her foot pressed a little harder on the gas.

The sample ends here.