Nightingale

Chapter 1 Into the Desert

Bron Jones wasn't afraid when Jenny called him in to speak with his foster mother. He hadn't done anything wrong. Still, sometimes people will knock you down even if you don't deserve it.

"Bron," Jenny said loudly enough to be heard over the roar of the lawnmower, in a tone of both care and warning, "mom wants you."

At eleven years old, Jenny Stillman was savvier than other kids. With a mom like hers, she had to be. Jenny could smell trouble coming a week in advance.

Bron cut the gas to the mower, wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand, and tried to steel himself for whatever might come.

With his foster mother, Melvina Stillman, you could never tell what it might be. He imagined that she would gripe about his mowing. Bron had begun at eight in order to beat the heat of the day. Here in Alpine, Utah, it might get into the hundreds in late August, and the huge lawn needed to be done by ten.

But Melvina suffered from aches and pains, and she didn't sleep well at night. Bron figured that she'd want him to put off the mowing for a couple more hours while she slept, but he could never tell what the crazy woman might want.

He gave Jenny a questioning look, and she whispered, "You're in serious trouble!" while holding her hand up to her mouth to signal that Melvina was on the phone.

Great, Bron thought, she's talking to social services. He'd been living in the system from the time he was an infant, getting bounced from home to home. He was used to being talked about, prodded, and torn apart.

What's the worst that could happen? he wondered. He knew the answer. They could send me to another home, somewhere terrible.

Bron had almost hit rock bottom. Melvina hated him. To her, he was just a paycheck worth $518 a month in "maintenance fees." If she controlled her costs, she could feed him for $150 per month and dress him in hand-me-downs from the neighbors. That left $368 in profit that she could use to feed her own seven kids, with the bonus that she could work Bron like a house servant, cooking dinners, mowing lawns, and changing diapers.

Melvina got paid to keep Bron as her slave.

Bron wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand and turned toward the house, a grand old yellow Victorian with a pair of turrets on each end and green gingerbread trim around the windows. It looked like a place that should be throwing parties, not a home so filled with poverty and despair.

He stopped for a moment, peering up. Crouched on the chimney was a crow, just watching him, its black feathers ruffled against an invisible wind. The crow cawed once, and then leapt into the sky, beating its midnight wings, feathers extended like fingers to rake the heavens.

Bron slipped off his shoes on the porch, brushed the grass clippings from his pant cuffs, then went through the door and down the bright hall to Melvina's bedroom. He opened her door softly. After being in the bright sunlight, the place was as oily dark as an octopus's den.

Melvina was a hoarder. She had boxes full of food stacked all around the bed, blocking the windows, forbidding all light. With a box of peaches ripening in the shadows, the place had an earthy odor, like an animal's cage.

Something flew out of the darkness, slapping Bron lightly. A red sandal dropped at his feet. He saw Melvina there now, a shapeless mass on the bed, a box of shoes at her side. She grabbed a second shoe and tossed it. Bron leaned away.

"You stop that!" Melvina screamed. "You stay right where you are." She growled and tossed a slipper, missing wildly. "You got into my peaches! I can't even get up to use the bathroom without you stealing something!"

"I didn't take your peaches, Melvina," Bron said softly, but she continued to glare. She was having one of her fits. Talking to her would be a waste of breath.

"You liar!" she screeched, and then hunted vainly in her box for a heavier shoe. She was too fat to get up and chase him. Every day she lay in bed, growing plump as a melon. In the past couple of months, shoe-throwing had become her favorite method of discipline.

She made a moaning noise, stopped rummaging, and grabbed her phone. For a moment, Bron thought she'd throw that, but she hit the speed dial and warned, "The welfare people are going to want to talk to you!"

She thought that would terrify him.

She spoke to Bron's caseworker for a moment, James Bell, and then shoved the phone toward Bron.

Here it comes, Bron thought: the vague accusations, the grilling questions. His heart pounded, and he fought his outrage by telling himself, I can handle it. I'm used to it.

Bell's tranquil voice came over the phone. "So, it seems that there is a problem...."

He waited for Bron to say something. So often, Bron found that adults tried to twist his words, so he hesitated, but then realized that it was Melvina who always twisted his words, not Mr. Bell.

"I don't know what's going on," Bron said. "Melvina's mad. She thinks I stole a peach or something."

There was a long silence, and Bell said, "Nine peaches. She thinks you ate nine. Oh, and some chocolate is missing. She can't admit that any of her own kids might sneak in and take them."

The little ones would have done it, Bron knew. Melvina kept her favorite foods in her bedroom, where she could guard them—fresh peaches, Cap'n Crunch cereal, Hershey's Symphony bars, Mountain Dew. The children rarely got such fare, unless she was in a generous mood. But the peaches had been filling the house with their sweet aroma for days. The temptation must have become too much.

"Pack your bags, Bron," the caseworker said. "It's time to get you out of there. I'll be by to pick you up in a few minutes."

"Okay," Bron said, feeling like he'd been punched.

It wasn't fair, but then getting shuffled from home to home never had been fair.

How am I going to break the news to the little ones? he wondered. Caleb and Sarah won't understand.

At three and four, the little ones had relied upon Bron most of their lives. Their father worked driving long-haul trucks across the country, while their mother hid in her room.

Bron didn't have time to think about it. He needed every minute to pack. He pushed the off button on the phone.

"Did he tell you?" Melvina demanded. "You're out of here." She waited a moment, as if hoping that he would start to sob and beg her to let him stay. There was a tone of triumph in her voice, tinged by contempt. He wasn't going to give her any satisfaction.

"I can't tell you how glad I am, either," Melvina gloated. "Ever since you got here, you've just drained the joy out of this family."

He could see her better in the shadows, now that his eyes had adjusted. His eyes were good in the dark. She was a sickly thing, pale and blubbery and sad, with frizzled hair going gray. But right now there was a gleam in her eyes, a gleam of conquest and retribution.

"I'm sorry that you're not happy, Melvina," Bron said. "Maybe you'll like your next foster child better."

Bron went to his bedroom and quickly emptied his dresser, shoving his worn clothes into the old backpack that he'd gotten for school.

Now it starts all over, he thought. The state would look for a new home, and he'd get all of the questions: "What's wrong with him? Is he a crack baby? Does he steal? What's his criminal history? Is it safe to have him near our daughter?"

People had a right to ask those questions, Bron knew, but the answers hurt. There was nothing wrong with him. He was just unwanted.

When the backpack was fall, he took the pillowcase from his bed and began to stuff clothes into it, but Melvina plodded into the room, the floorboards creaking beneath her weight. Bron was surprised to see her up. Melvina said, "Don't you steal my pillowcases!"

The children all began watching now, the little ones peeking out from between Melvina's legs, sobbing, while the older ones paced at her back. Melvina blocked the door, as if to keep any of the children from coming to hug him or say goodbye.

Bron wondered if he should tell her the truth: that her own kids had taken the food, that even a child knew it was wrong for a woman to make her kids go hungry, but he decided to let it go. He wouldn't gain anything by placing the blame where it belonged. In his mind, the children had done nothing wrong. They shouldn't be punished for Melvina's mental illness.

He put his clothes on the floor, used a t-shirt like a sack and filled it. Melvina glared at him the whole time. He went to the bathroom and threw in his toothbrush and shaving kit. Melvina wouldn't let him take the toothpaste.

"You think you can get by in life just on your good looks," she complained. "Well not anymore, buster! I hope they send you to jail!"

Bron shook his head. Her ranting hardly made sense. He'd never considered himself to be good-looking, and it wasn't as if he tried to skate through life. Nobody worked harder on his studies, and Bron was constantly toiling once he got home from school, fixing meals for the kids, cleaning house, settling disputes.

When he was all finished, he looked around his room. He had some cheap movie posters on the wall: Harry Potter and Transformers, but he knew that he'd just rip them if he tried to take them down. He left them for Melvina's next slave.

He grabbed his guitar, an old one that he'd had for a year. He'd hardly had time to learn to play it, between school and housework.

"Leave the guitar," Melvina demanded.

Now it was his turn to glare. Being mentally ill didn't give Melvina the right to be cruel and petty. "I bought it with my own money," he reminded her. He'd gotten it second-hand last spring for $400, which he'd made by helping the neighbors build a water fountain in their yard.

Melvina growled, "You owe me for the peaches!"

Bron suspected that at some level, she realized that he hadn't taken them. It was only pride that kept her making stupid accusations. Bron had never tried to make her angry before, but he didn't have much in this world, and he wasn't going to give up all he had.

"Are you sure that you didn't eat them in your sleep?" Bron asked. "Your butt is growing fatter by the day."

She gasped in astonishment, her mouth working like a fish's, her chins quivering. Melvina looked as if she was in the throes of preparing to say something monumentally devastating. "After all I've done for you—you little hoodlum!"

"Is that the best you can come up with?" he asked. "I've been called worse by better people than you." He shoved past her and headed for the front door.

Melvina lunged for the guitar, and he simply lifted it over her head. She went crashing against his dresser.

"You pushed me!" she screamed.

"I would never do that," he said gently. He worried. If she claimed that he'd hit her, she might get him arrested.

He hurried from the room. He found Jenny in the hall, and he felt a surge of relief. She'd seen what had happened.

"I love you," she mouthed.

Bron smiled sadly. He didn't want to encourage her, or hurt her feelings. He just wanted to leave. He didn't know where the state would send him next, but he was eager to get out of this place.

The little ones were crying, and Sarah, stricken, called at his back, "Where are you going, Bron? When will you come back?"

He knew the truth. Leaving a foster home was like dying. You never got to go back.

"You'll be all right, Sarah," he said. "I'll come visit you when I can." Most likely, he thought, that won't be for a couple of years, and by then you won't know who I am, or care.

He stepped out the front door. Here so close to the mountains, the land was still in shade, even at nine in the morning, and so he stood in the shadow of Mount Timpanogos, and waited until the social worker's dusty-green car pulled into the driveway.

Bron threw his things into the back, and then slid into the front passenger seat.

Mr. Bell was talking on the phone. He was a handsome black man with a voice as soothing as a massage.

He finished the phone call abruptly and went to the house to have Melvina sign some papers. Mr. Bell stood talking to her on the porch. All seven Stillman kids came and peeked over her shoulders or between her legs, watching Bron, but too afraid to approach. Doug, the oldest boy, was only fourteen. He'd have to be the man of the house. The other kids were too young to take care of themselves, much less anyone else. They all milled nervously, wanting to say goodbye, but they didn't dare try to pass Melvina's barricade of flesh and incur their mother's wrath.

Bron closed his eyes, trying to shut them all out. He wanted to feel nothing for Melvina. He fought back his hurt and his rage, until he felt able to stare at her as if she were an object, a chair or a melon. He felt nothing for her. It was that way with all of his foster parents. He'd learned to feel nothing long ago.

The children were different, though. Seeing the kids in pain, that hurt.

Mr. Bell finished talking and ambled back to the car, waving to the kids cheerfully, as if this was just another day's work. He was short, with a build that had once been athletic, but was now going soft.

There had been a time when Mr. Bell was just a naiive caseworker, but over the years, he'd grown wise. In the past dozen years he'd placed Bron with six different families. Now he acted casual as he put the key in the ignition, turned it, and the engine came alive. "You all right?"

"I'm fine."

"You're not fine. Your face is pale, breathing shallow. You feel like you been punched in the gut?"

"A little," Bron admitted.

Mr. Bell didn't put the car into gear, just let it run for a second. He gave Bron a gentle look. "You wave goodbye to them kids now. I know it's not a proper goodbye, but if you don't give them at least that, you'll regret it for the rest of your life."

Bron had been wondering about that. He'd never see the Stillman kids again. He wanted the little ones to forget him quickly. It's easier, he knew, to let go of your feelings, if someone leaves you with a little hurt.

Bron gritted his teeth. He waved and forced a smile, and Jenny lit up like she'd just been touched by a ray of sunshine. All of the sudden, the kids began shouting, "Goodbye," and waving like mad. Melvina grimaced and herded the kids inside. For an instant, four-year-old Sarah had a clear view. She blew Bron a kiss, as if he were just heading off to school.

Then the blue-gray door slammed shut, and they were gone.

Bron sat for a moment, clearing his mind, letting them all go away forever, purging his feelings. In a moment, he reached a comfortable, hollow state.

Mr. Bell pulled out onto the road, driving through the picturesque neighborhood that made up Alpine, with its expansive yards and custom homes. Mr. Bell weighed his words. "Leaving those kids has got to be hard."

"Not really," Bron said. "You learn not to get attached. I could tell that it was time to go."

Mr. Bell gave him a long look, his nostrils flaring just a bit. "After three years, I'm sure that you love them."

"I was never part of their family. I never could be."

Mr. Bell's dark eyes bored into Bron. "You can't really be so cold."

Bron didn't dare speak his thoughts. If I am a monster, it is because you—and the world—have made me that way. He joked weakly, "Hey, it's a talent."

Mr. Bell waited for Bron to say more, but he just let the silence hold as they rolled past the Kencraft Candy Factory, the little town's only manufacturing plant.

Alpine was a pretty place, nestled between the folds of the Wasatch Mountains. Most of the storms blew in from the south, and when they butted up against the mountains, they hit an impenetrable wall and were forced to release their moisture.

So Alpine had a lushness to it that was perhaps unmatched for hundreds of miles in any direction, and it remained verdant most of the year, but the green zone was small—only about a dozen miles square. They began driving away from it now, along fenced pastures where golden grass graced the fields and cottonwoods lined the banks of the American Fork River.

Now, in mid-August, the black-eyed Susans grew wild in the fields on the outskirts of town, reaching heights of eight or ten feet, becoming huge bushes with hundreds of enormous golden sunflowers bobbing in the wind, the dark hearts at their center as deep brown as a doe's eyes.

Mr. Bell broke the silence and finally demanded, "Did you really tell Melvina that it looked like she was hiding those peaches in her butt?"

Bron admitted, "Something like that. It was kind of a ... metaphor." He waited for Mr. Bell to chew him out.

"Good one," Mr. Bell said after a second, and laughed.

As they drove west toward I-15, the number and size of the flowers dwindled, and the cottonwoods along the creek surrendered to fields of stubby tan salt grass that rolled on for miles.

"Most people are crazy, you know," Mr. Bell said absently. "I mean, most people are just a little bit crazy. The/11 admit it, if you ask." Bron nodded, suspecting where this was going. "But most crazy people are pretty harmless, you know? Like we have this one foster mother, she believes that crystals carry encoded messages left by the people of Atlantis. She'll hold them up to the light and meditate, and she'll 'read' all kinds of messages from them—things like 'Go buy celery today.' It doesn't matter if I dug up the crystal out of my backyard, she's convinced that all crystals have hidden messages in them, and that the Atlanteans just left them lying around for our benefit."

"But not all crazy people are harmless," Bron said. "Melvina is getting mean."

"That they are not," Mr. Bell agreed. "You and I have both seen this coming—Melvina hiding in her room with all of that food, getting fatter by the hour. Do you know what she told me?"

"What?" Bron asked, glad to hear him confide such secrets.

"She said that she was hiding from you. She said that from the day you moved into that house, you started sucking the energy out of her."

Bron shook his head, pained by the thought. He knew that the accusation would end up on his personal record, and such words—no matter how incoherent or crazed—could cost him dearly.

When he was a child, a preschool teacher had said that Bron was "dreamy," and one of his foster parents, Mr. Beardley, had demanded that the state run a battery of tests for schizophrenia. The tests had come up negative, but the Beardleys had given Bron back to social services. Because of their concerns, he'd had a hard time finding another home. That had been what? When he was four or five?

Bron didn't remember much from that time in his life. It was just another home where he hadn't been wanted. As an infant, he'd been dropped off at a hotel in Brigham City. A note pinned to his chest said, "If you want him, Bron is free!"

Often, Bron thought about that wistfully. He wondered where he came from, why his mother had abandoned him. He asked himself, When have I ever really been free?

Sometimes Bron used to pester Mr. Bell for news. Bron would ask if anyone had ever made an anonymous call, saying something like, "I just wondered if that baby that I abandoned sixteen years ago is okay?" But Bron had given up asking.

"You know what I think?" Mr. Bell went on. "I think that when you got to the Stillman's, you began doing dishes and helping out a lot...."

Bron remembered it well. He'd wanted so badly to make that home work, to live in a little gingerbread house with that big family. So he'd mopped floors and washed dishes that winter until his hands were raw. Even with all that, he'd never really felt connected to them.

"When Mrs. Stillman saw what you could do, she decided to take a break for a bit, let you do most of the work. After twelve years of spittin' out kid after kid, it probably felt good. She was always heavy, but the more she rested, the fatter she got, and getting up to work just took more and more energy—until now she can hardly climb out of bed."

"That sounds about right," Bron said, "though I never thought that much about it. Did you tell her what you think?"

Mr. Bell laughed. "I told her that I doubted that you had such powers."

"If I had a super power," Bron admitted, "I'd like the power to hear people's thoughts.

Not everyone's, just the thoughts of girls."

"Why's that?"

"Cause I'd really like to know what they're thinking."

Mr. Bell chuckled. He got into the HOV lane, and then headed south, but Bron had imagined that they'd go north, toward the group home in Salt Lake.

"Where are we going?" Bron asked.

"Where do you want to go?" Mr. Bell gave him a sidelong glance, and Bron knew that it wasn't a rhetorical question. "Look," Mr. Bell said, "I checked into this charter school that I heard about last year, one for kids who want to be singers and actors and artists...."

Bron's heart suddenly pounded. He'd never told Mr. Bell about his dreams. He hadn't wanted to sound stupid.

"It's called Tuacahn," Mr. Bell said, pronouncing it carefully so that Bron would learn it: Two-uh-con. "It's a Mayan word, and means 'Canyon of the Gods.'"

Bron had heard television commercials advertising musicals at Tuacahn, but it was hundreds of miles south of here, down in the hottest corner of the state. Bron fought back an irritating fear.

"Townsfolk down south," Mr. Bell added, "take a lot of students there on placement from around the whole country, so I checked to see if any of them are certified foster parents. I found a teacher at the school who has been certified for three years, though she's never taken a child. The Hernandez family. They're good folks: middle-aged, can't have kids of their own. For the past three months we've been phoning back and forth. I didn't tell you about them because I didn't want to hold out any false hopes, but the long and short of it is, I called her not half an hour ago, and she is willing to take you in."

Bron let out a breath that he hadn't realized he'd been holding. "I don't know these people. We haven't even met!"

"They know a little about you. They know you're an artist."

Bron's head was spinning. He loved art, but that didn't make him an artist. He worried that he wouldn't fit in at such a school. He imagined that Tuacahn would be filled with poor-little-rich-kids. Then there was the family name.

"Hernandez?" he asked. "She's a Mexican?" He worried that he might have to eat enchiladas all the time, or deal with weird cultural issues.

"Not that you could tell," Mr. Bell said. "Her husband might be third generation."

"What about the heat?" Bron said. "I heard that it gets up to 120 down there?"

"They have this thing called 'air conditioning' at the school," Mr. Bell said dryly.

The man was trying to put Bron at ease, but the truth was that the idea of going to a new area, to this special school, unnerved Bron, despite its attractions.

Bron desperately wanted to spend more time working on his art. But it all sounded too ... fortuitous. Bron had learned young that good luck never lasts. You can never let your hopes get too high. Something was bound to go wrong.

"What if I don't like it?" he wondered.

"There's two girls for every boy in that school," Mr. Bell said, as if offering a tempting dish, "and every one of them wants to be an actress or a supermodel. What's not to like?"

"How long do I have to think about it?" he asked. He figured that he'd be a couple of weeks in a group home down south before all of the paperwork was done. There would be phone calls with his potential foster parents, then maybe a personal "meet-and-greet."

Mr. Bell gave him a sideways smile as they rounded a bend. "Where do you think we're going now?"

"Today?" Bron asked.

"School starts on Monday. Mrs. Hernandez, Olivia, thought it would be best to get you settled in."

Bron didn't know how to respond. He'd seldom just been dumped into a new family. He usually had at least one meeting first, sometimes three or four.

So he merely stared out the window, aware that he might never come back to this place again.

Bron gazed off into fields of golden grass and golden flowers, and fought the urge to jump out of the car.

New city. New school. New family. He hadn't had even an hour to get ready for this.

I don't have to bail out here on the highway, he told himself. If I don't like the school, I'm old enough so that I could walk away from it—and the Hernandez's.

No one would ever miss me. No one would bother to come looking.