I
On my way to meet Beckham this morning I stopped at the mirror in the hall,
took a long look at myself, and realized I shouldn’t have.
Most people would still have guessed I was ten years younger than I was—in
my fifties rather than near retirement—but what I saw in the mirror was something
closer to the truth. The grey was now noticeable at my temples. There were crows’
feet where there hadn’t been any, and my eyes looked more tired than I’d ever seen
them. The rest of me looked respectable enough, though I could only take
consolation in that for a moment. In the next moment, a memory sparked of the first
words between the surgeon and me the morning after my operation.
“You really shouldn’t be here,” he said, looking up from his clipboard.
“You got that right,” I told him “You should see my schedule. I…”
He politely interrupted. “Sorry. I didn’t mean you shouldn’t be here, as ‘in the
hospital’. I meant you shouldn’t be here, as in ‘among the living.’ Do you know what a
widow maker is?”
“Yes. The kind of heart attack most people don’t survive,” I answered,
straightening up in the hospital bed. “But it doesn’t make any sense. None of this
makes sense. I eat right. I exercise. There’s no family history. How could it happen?”
He looked up as he finished flipping through the pages on his clipboard.
“Your left anterior descending artery was almost totally blocked. You survived
because you’re fit, because you eat right and exercise. But you had a heart attack
because you’re not well.”
“Fit but not well? What on earth does that mean?”
“It usually means there’s something going on up here,” he said, tapping on his
temple, “doing harm to what’s going on in here.” Then he pointed to his chest.
“Relationships.” he continued. “Work. Lifestyle issues. Could be any one of
those things, or a combination.”
I wasn’t going to tell him he was right on almost every count, except for the
part he couldn’t possibly have known—the part about the demon. I wasn’t ready to
bring that up to a medical doctor. I wasn’t even ready to bring it up to my new
therapist, the one I was now sitting across the desk from, some three months after
getting released from the hospital.
Mark Beckham looked as much like a college professor as a therapist. In his
late forties, with salt-and-pepper hair and a tight, grey beard, he even sported the
requisite brown tweed jacket that stretched a bit across his stomach.
Mark was technically a Specialist in Clinical Social Work, not a psychiatrist.
But since I’d left the hospital three months ago, he was better than anyone else I’d
seen, although you wouldn’t get that impression from his office. It was not-
Hollywood small, about 12 feet by 14 feet. The paneling was faux mahogany and the
furniture was modern Ikea. A bookcase stretched across the wall behind him,
crammed with so many titles you’d need a crowbar to pull one out.
Beckham, on the other hand, had a knack for pulling things out. He’d start
each session with a few basic questions that would gradually and almost unnoticeably
get deeper. Before I knew it, I was telling him things about myself I didn’t even know
I knew.
This morning he began by simply asking how I was doing since the last visit. I
answered with a question of my own.
“Have you heard this saying,: ‘There’s a way that seems right to a man, but in
the end, it leads to death.’?”
“I’ve heard the saying,” he answered. “And yet, we both know you’re still
alive.” His response could easily have sounded condescending, but he somehow made
it sound matter-of-fact.
“You’re right, but there’s a part of me that isn’t—alive, that is–a part of me
that didn’t survive the heart attack.”
He knew I wasn’t talking just about an MRI, but we both knew his job was to
ask the next question.
“What part do you think that was?”
“I’d never claim to be a saint, Mark, but a big part of my innocence. That’s the
part that didn’t make it.”
“We’ll come back to that for sure,” Beckham said. He rubbed his eyes which,
depending on the light, could look more brown than green, but they were always kind,
so I didn’t feel like he was putting me off. “First, though, let’s pick up where we left off last week,” he continued “You were telling me how you decided to buy the house in Canaan.”
I took a breath and let it out slowly.
“I lost my wife, Julia, to cancer a little over three years ago. She was a fighter,
went in and out of remission more than once, but in the end there was nothing more
anyone could do. That left me in the house where we’d raised our twin daughters and
were supposed to live out the rest of our lives.
“I don’t know if I mentioned it, but I also have an identical twin, my brother,
David. He lived in Canaan, just a couple of hours from me at the time. Houses in the
neighborhood were always hard to come by. So I couldn’t believe my luck when this
one went on the market, for what it listed and with an in-law apartment no less. If I’d
known then how much it was really going to cost me, though, I would never have
paid the price.”
“How could you have known that?” Beckham asked. He was really suggesting I
couldn’t have and being much easier on me than I was on myself.
“I’m not sure. But it shouldn’t have taken me forever to figure it out. Now I
don’t know how I could have let so much go on as long as I did. Or how I could have
been so blind.”
Beckham had been writing in his notebook while we talked. He put his pen
down. “Do you know what a scotoma is, Elijah?”
“Some kind of vision problem, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Basically, it’s a blind spot. We have blind spot monitors in our vehicles to
help us when driving. Unfortunately, that feature doesn’t come standard with people.
It’s an add-on that only gets installed if a person manages to survive an emotional
crisis.”
Beckham flipped back through the pages of his notebook. He stopped when he
apparently found what he was looking for. “I’m not a medical doctor, but it seems to me you survived a blind spot experience most people wouldn’t have. You told me you feel the wiser for it though.
There’s something to be said for that.”
He sounded more like a friend than a therapist then, which made me wonder if
he’d forgotten who he was supposed to be. I didn’t say anything about it though. I
figured I’d forgotten who I was supposed to be often enough myself.
When I got back from Beckham’s it was later than usual for my morning walk.
I wasn’t going to skip it, though. As I headed down the driveway, I knew this would
be one of the last times I’d leave the house before leaving it for good. If I needed a
reminder of why, there it was, street-side of the stone wall: the ‘For Sale’ sign, with a
‘Sold’ banner angled across it.
I’d expected my place to sell quickly, and it did. What I didn’t expect was how
differently it felt to sell the house, compared to how it felt to buy it. Back
then—almost ten years ago—I thought it was one of the best decisions I’d ever made.
Now I was left with an unsettling mix of regret and relief. The relief came from
knowing my ordeal was finally over. The regret came from knowing there wouldn’t
have been an ordeal had I faced the truth sooner.
Part of that truth was admitting, like everyone else, I had blind spots. I already
knew that Beckham was right about that. What I learned, eventually and painfully, was
one of mine was a tendency to see only what I wanted to see. And the worst situation
was not only that I could be a poor judge of other people’s character, but my own as
well. Trouble always followed when the two intersected.
The situation with Cassie was a perfect example. Cassie was renting the
apartment in the Canaan place when I bought it. She was a middle-aged divorcee who
claimed to have sworn off marriage. With three exes, she said, she obviously wasn’t
good at it.
That she hadn’t sworn off men entirely was obvious because she had male
visitors. Not at an outlandish number of them,and I tried not to be judgmental. If
nothing else, that would have been hypocritical. After I lost Julia I suffered a string of
failed relationships. Beckham helped me understand that, whatever their faults were,
those women weren’t entirely to blame, just simply not right for me. Even in my
darkest moments I had to admit none of them ever held a gun to my head.
Cassie largely fit the profile of the kind of woman I tended to fall for—flirty,
intelligent, and easy on the eyes. She also had that fatal quality the other women in my
loss column had. She wasn’t interested in marriage.
It was bad enough that made her even more attractive, but the condition of her
apartment added more waves to this already perfect storm. The apartment was an
add-on that passed inspection years ago when building codes weren’t as strict. But by
today’s standards a lot of the work was slapdash. There were walls that weren’t plumb,
wiring that was subpar, and more than one plumbing connection that wasn’t quite
tight or quite right. Cassie would regularly be on the phone or at my door about a
leaky faucet, a defective light switch, or a door not closing properly.
Most of these jobs were too small to have any technician beating a path to the
door. What I knew that meant was I’d have to haul a load of tools downstairs where
Cassie and I would be in close quarters. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t trust her, but
that I didn’t trust myself, so I did my best to arrange to do the work while she was
gone.
What I also knew was I needed a Plan B in the event I couldn’t. That would
mean calling on my twin brother, David. He was at least as handy as I was, and I
thought it safer to send him in than me. He and his wife Michaela seemed to have a
perfect marriage. Rock solid. He’d never be affected by Cassie, I thought, especially if
I gave him fair warning.
There was a problem with my way of thinking though, rooted in another of my
blind spots. As perfect as their relationship might once have been, I didn’t
understand—or want to—that David and Micki had been wrestling with multiple
issues. Not the least of those was that they’d become empty nesters. I was blind to
whatever the signs may have been, blind and deaf to them all. So I never suspected
when I gave it to her, Cassie would end up with David’s number in more ways than
one.
How many ‘repairs’ it would take for David and Cassie’s affair to start I’m not
sure. But it’s clear when everything came to a head: the afternoon I’d made the two
hour drive to Brattleboro for a weekend conference. Midafternoon I got a text from
Cassie asking me to call her as soon as I could. I had to make my way through the
crowded ballroom to do so.
“One of the front burners on the oven is overheating,” she said. “I’m worried
it’ll catch fire.”
“Can’t you just turn it off till I get back?”
“No. I’m having someone over for dinner. I need all four burners.”
Something in her voice told me she was lying. Something in my head told me
she knew I knew. But I was two hours away and I felt in no position to call her on it,
even though I knew what she would say next. “Do you think it’d be okay if I asked David to take a look at it?”
At the time I didn’t think there was any way around it, but I’ll forever regret
how I answered her. “Go ahead,” I told her. “Make the call.”
After hanging up I made my way back to the ballroom, but for the rest of the
evening was only physically present. All I could think about was what should’ve been
obvious before and was painfully obvious now–how so many of Cassie’s emergencies
would conveniently arise when I was away. How the family gatherings where David
and Michaela were once joined at the hip now had them practically in different zip
codes. Everything was adding up like the reels of some garish slot machine.
I had no more blind spots about Cassie or David. Or myself.
I excused myself as politely as I could from the group at my table, and made
what seemed like a mile walk to my room. I got undressed and ready for bed, then
turned the lights out. I didn’t think I’d be getting any rest that night. But in less than
an hour I was asleep.
According to the night stand clock, it was 3:05 AM when I woke. Except for
what emanated from the clock there was no other light in the room. There was a hum,
though, like that of electricity, coming down the hall leading to my bed. In seconds I
realized why the hum seemed to be getting louder when I saw a human form, or at
least something with four limbs and a head, coming toward me. The form was even
darker than the darkness. and I knew instinctively it wasn’t human, that it was a
demon.
What I may never know, as startled as I was, was why I wasn’t afraid, or why I
was ready, not just to defend myself, but to do battle. I threw off the blankets and
leapt from the bed, and started calling out in a language I didn’t know, with words I
didn’t understand. It was clear, though, there was power in every syllable, because the
figure looked as if it were getting riddled by bullets. After each strike it spasmed, and
wisps of smoke curled up from its body.
The louder and faster I spoke, the more damage the demon seemed to sustain..
It turned to escape but fell forward, then began to dissolve on its way down. Finally, it
disappeared completely.
I didn’t know if I’d destroyed the demon or just dispatched it. Whatever
happened, though, left me drained and barely able to stand. I sat back on the bed, laid
down, and quickly fell asleep.
My alarm went off at 5:30 AM, and I woke feeling like I had a hangover. At
first I wasn’t sure where I was, or if what had happened in the middle of the night was
just an incredibly vivid nightmare. But when I finally dragged myself out of bed
towards the bathroom, I looked down and saw a trail of blood that ended in the
middle of the hallway.
I knew I had to leave immediately. I was certain there was trouble back home
even if I didn’t know exactly what it was. I quickly got into my street clothes and
threw my other belongings into my suitcase. Then I grabbed my laptop bag and
headed hastily out the door towards the hotel lobby.
An older woman was at the front desk. She was the caricature of a librarian:
grey-haired, bun in the back, cheeks rouged, deep red lipstick. She wore a white long
sleeve blouse with ruffles in the front.
“I cut myself in my room,” I stopped to tell her.
She peered over her glasses and looked concerned and confused at the same
time. I understood why. I didn’t seem to be hurt.
“Do you want me to…call an ambulance?” she asked nervously.
“No. But whatever it costs to clean the carpet, add it to my bill.”
I hit the remote buttons to start and unlock my truck as I raced through the
automatic doors of the hotel. Then I threw my gear into the back of the pick-up and
was on the road to Canaan.
The demon hadn’t hurt me, hadn’t even touched me. But every minute of the
drive back home I gave myself the worst beating of my life. How could I be so selfish?
How could I be so blind? How could I be so stupid?
I got off the highway an exit early to avoid the construction I knew would slow
me down, and came the back way into Canaan. As I pulled up to the side of my
house, through the hedges I spotted David’s truck in the lower driveway. I saw him
and Cassie standing on the back deck. Cassie was bandaged on both forearms and
leaning on a crutch. I watched them gingerly embrace and kiss, then saw David get
into his truck and drive away.
I was stunned. For as bad as I’d imagined it would be, it was far worse to
witness it with my own eyes. Cassie. My brother, David, of the perfect marriage.
When my cell phone rang I almost couldn’t answer it. But when I saw
Michaela’s number came up on the display I knew I had to.
“Is David there?” she demanded.
“He’s not.” I answered. I didn’t want to tell her he’d just left or any other
details. But I didn’t have to.
“He’s been having an affair with Cassie. Did you know about it?” Another
demand.
“No,” I answered. But in my head I finished my response, ‘Not for sure until just
now.’”
“I’ve suspected for a while,” she continued. “But I just found a receipt in his
jacket pocket for a restaurant we’ve never been to. I know he was there with her.”
“Are you sure, Micki?” I was reaching. “Maybe he was there with a friend?”
“There was a note from her in his pocket too. I don’t want to tell you what it
said!”
My head was pounding now. My brother had been having an affair and I was
the one who’d set it up. I was the one trashing his marriage.
I suddenly felt dizzy. Then came a sharp, stabbing pain in my left arm. I’d
never been shot before, but I had to believe that was what it was like. It rendered the
arm useless, so I had to take the phone into my right hand in order to talk into it.
“Micki, call 911, because I can’t, and I think I’m having a heart attack.
You can read all you want about a heart attack, but unless you experience one
yourself there are no words to explain how painful it can be. Even though the
ambulance ride to the small Canaan hospital took no more than 15 minutes; even
though that was only a pit stop to the big city hospital by helicopter—which couldn’t
have been much longer than that—the morphine was all that made any of it even
tolerable.
When I woke in the ICU the next morning, I was weak but lucid. I knew that
I’d had an angioplasty to clear the blockage in one of my main arteries. I knew I was
lucky to be alive. But I also knew I had to do anything I could to save Dave and
Mikki’s marriage, and I had to do it quickly.
I persuaded one of the nurses to let me use my phone and call Bill, a friend
who was an attorney.
“Bill, I need to evict my tenant.”
“What did they do? Wreck the place? Wild parties?”
“The tenant’s a she. And she’d done of that. She’s having an affair with Dave.
And Micki found out.” I explained as much he needed to know and as quickly as I could.
“Let me get back to you, Elijah.”
It seemed like forever, but within an hour he called back.
“It’s done,” Bill said.
“Thank you. Should I ask you how you did it?”
“No. I’ll tell you some other time. When are you getting out of the hospital?”
“A couple more days, they tell me.”
“Then don’t go home until you talk to me first.”
Whatever Bill did he did quickly. The next day the calls started coming in from
Cassie. I didn’t answer them of course, didn’t even listen till I was being checked out
of the hospital. Even then I only listened to her last message.
“By the time you get out ,” she said, “I should be gone. I want you to know I’m
not going to fight you this time. Or the eviction. But you should know something
about David.” She paused, not quite controlling her anger.
“He’s not the boy scout you think he is. Never once did I hold a gun to his
head.”
II
I learned after I left the hospital, as painful as the heart attack was, there was
some value in it. It briefly took Micki and David’s focus off the affair. There was still
a monumental road ahead of them, but at least there was hope for their marriage.
Against his protests—David felt he was to blame for my decision—I put the
house on the market. I felt almost immediately relieved in doing so, in spite of all the
other conflicting emotions.
I reached the end of the driveway and turned back to look at the house.
Though I’d worked on it extensively over the years, especially in getting it ready for
sale, I was never overly pleased with the results. That wasn’t the only reason I wasn’t
going to miss the place, but it was certainly a big part of it. All I would miss, honestly,
were a few neighbors, and not because I didn’t get along with the rest. It was simply
that Canaan was a small town and there weren’t many neighbors to get along with.
What I’d miss more than any of them, though, were the scenery. It was
gorgeous in any season, but more so in the fall. It was mid-October now, and though
the deciduous trees were turning, the few sugar maples there were really lit up the
landscape. They’d caught fire with color as their leaves turned from yellow to orange
to red.
There were also beautiful wild flowers that grew on the roadside. The only
ones I could name were those I especially liked: sedum, which turned rust-red this
time of year, and mullein, whose small, yellow flowers were densely grouped on their
tall stems.
I didn’t know yet where I’d be moving, only that I’d be moving, so I was
determined to take in as much of the scenery as I could. I turned at the end of the
driveway and headed towards a bend in the road that was bordered by a cluster of
oaks. As I approached the corn field on my right, the usual quiet of the morning was
interrupted by the cawing of crows.
When I rounded the bend and moved beyond the oaks, I saw the grey raised
ranch on the left less than a hundred feet away. Two ravens, one slightly larger than
the other, were perched on one end of the roof peak. A red-tailed hawk was a few feet
from them further down the peak.
After an exchange of calls from the ravens and cries from the hawk, there was a
sharp crackle, like electricity in a power line. The crackle made my ears ring. When the
ringing stopped, what I heard was not the birds squawking at each other as they had
been.
What I heard was them talking.
They were using words.
I couldn’t tell what they were saying at first. Then, as the ringing in my ears
faded, their words became clearer and their voices became amplified. It was as if they
were just a few feet away.
I could tell the larger of the two ravens was speaking because its beak was the
only one moving.
The raven spoke harshly and in a male voice. “Are you lost?” it asked the hawk.
“Lost? I’m not lost,” the hawk answered. Its voice was also male, and by its
tone, clearly irritated with the question. “Why would you say that?”
The smaller raven broke in quickly, in a female voice.
“Because you don’t belong here!”
“Why not?” the hawk fired back. “I have as much right to be here as you do.
Besides, I’m not causing any trouble.” He opened and closed his wings in a display of
bravado.
“Wrong on both counts,” the male raven countered. “Not only don’t you
belong here, you’re nothing but trouble.”
“That’s right,” the female raven said. “Today you attacked Betsy, the Watsons’
dog. She managed to get away but now only has half a tail. And all she was trying to
do was…”
“You’re wrong,” the hawk interrupted. “That wasn’t me.”
“It was you, “she insisted. “Look, Joshua. There’s still fur in his talons.”
Joshua? For God’s sake, the birds have names?
The hawk looked straight ahead, perhaps knowing better than to look down.
“I’m only going to say this once,” Joshua said. “We’re the law here, this is our
territory, and we’re ordering you to leave. Now.”
The hawk was quiet for a moment, then said, “Even if you are the law, even if what you’re accusing me of is true, you can’t make me leave. I’m a hawk. And you…” he added, with contempt, “…you’re just two
oversized crows.”
“Just two of us? Are you sure?” the she-raven asked. “Take a look around.”
As hawks can, he turned his head almost full circle and saw a line of ravens that
had settled silently along the roof peak of the house behind him. To the right and left
were a line of tall oaks that formed a hedge surrounding the property. The trees were
laden with what looked like dark fruit. There were ravens everywhere.
The hawk turned back around as the she-raven spoke again.
“Even if there were just two of us,” she continued, “we’d still have an edge.”
“And why would that be?” the hawk asked scornfully.
“You lack conviction. You might be able to take one of us out, but the one left
wouldn’t stop till you were finished.”
The hawk opened and closed his wings again. This time it could have been out
of frustration.
“Here’s what’s going to happen next,” Joshua began. “We’re going to escort
you out of here. You’re not going to try anything stupid along the way and you’re
never coming back. If you do–if there is a next time—it’ll be your last.”
A silence followed that left me wondering:
What’s next? Will they keep jawing? Will they fight?
Then I had another thought:
Have I completely lost my mind?
Joshua broke the silence: “All right, Deborah. Let’s do what we came to do.”
Deborah? What kind of name is that for a raven?
The two of them flew upward a few feet, and with about the same amount of
space between them. Joshua gave orders to the hawk as the ravens hovered in front of
him.
“You’re going between and head of us. We’ll stay with you till you’re far
enough away that you can’t do any more harm.” The hawk flew upward as well, then between the two ravens and slightly
ahead of them.
I watched them fly off, much the way I’d watched everything else, in silence
and in disbelief. As they disappeared I looked straight ahead–though at nothing in
particular–and my thoughts raced.
None of this can be real. Birds don’t talk, not with words anyway. Ravens will chase a hawk
out of their territory, but not like a posse would a rustler out of town!
I looked up again. Now there were no more ravens, no more hawk, just an
empty sky. And frankly, I was relieved, because now I was convinced I must have been
hallucinating all along. A lot going on, I thought. Stress finally catching up with me, I
thought. Just a dream.
Thank God.
Then in the distance I saw two birds flying toward me, and my heart sank.
I knew it had to be them.
It had to be the ravens.
I had been standing next to a dying pine that had several jagged branches, some
stretching my way. The ravens flew to one of the branches, fluttering as they landed,
then looked directly at me.
“You can come closer if you want,” Joshua said.
“That’s okay,” I told him. “I’m good right here. Thanks.”
“All right then. Stay put if you’d rather. But we need to talk.”
The absolute absurdity of that moment, and all the other moments leading up
to it, came crashing down around me.
“You’re right,” I said. “We’ve been drifting apart. How did we let that
happen?”
The ravens looked at each other.
“We know you have questions,” Deborah said.
“Right then! Let’s start with the obvious one, shall we? Is any of this real? Or
am I hooked up to some machine in a dream-state, like in a movie?”
“No. This is real. It’s all real.”
“Then how is it we’re talking? And what on earth just happened?!?”
“What happened was exactly what we thought would happen,” Joshua said.
“We knew the hawk would never stick with the plan. It wouldn’t have mattered who
he turned on, but once he turned on Deborah it was pretty much over.”
“Surprised he took as long as he did,” Deborah said.
“You both expected him to turn on you, out there with no back up…and you
weren’t afraid?”
“Are you kidding?” answered Joshua. “If I wore pants, I’d have changed them
twice by now. It was over quickly, but it was ugly. Probably good you didn’t see it.”
“Maybe it would’ve been better if he had,” said Deborah. “It might’ve helped
him make more sense of everything.”
“I’m talking to two ravens in a tree,” I told her. “What makes you think I’m
making sense of any of this—including why you’d drive the hawk out in the first
place. Wasn’t he just doing what hawks do?”
“You wouldn’t think that,” said, Deborah, “if you had whole story, the part the
hawk didn’t let me finish. He wasn’t going after the Watson’s dog. He was going after
the Watson’s toddler. The dog was trying to protect the child and got caught in the
middle.
“Hawk wasn’t doing what was natural,” Joshua said. “He was doing what was
evil. And not for the first time. That’s why we confronted him.”
I shook my head. Though part of me understood what they were talking about,
the greater question still remained:
“Why are you telling me all this?”
“You have a saying that goes something like this,” he said: ‘All evil needs to
succeed is for good people to do nothing.’ Once we found out what he was doing we
had to stop him. Not just from doing it in our backyard, but anywhere else.”
“The truth is,” Deborah said,” we gave him the chance to change, but he
chose not to take it. He sealed his own fate.”
“I still don’t understand what any of this has to do with me.”
“There was a time when you let evil have its way,” Joshua said. “At first because
you were being deceived. Later, it was because you deceived yourself. When you
finally realized what was happening, for all it cost you, it was almost too late.”
I felt like I’d been struck in the chest. I put my arm behind my back and
steadied myself against the pine.
“How could you possibly know that? How could you possibly know any of
that?”
“It may not make you feel any better,” Deborah interjected, “but what
happened with the hawk wasn’t an isolated incident. And what happened with you
wasn’t the first time someone unknowingly dug their own grave.”
“Wait. What are you saying?”
“You’ve heard the reports,” Joshua said, “of animals attacking people in their
backyards, even in their homes. The media spins it that it’s because humans are
encroaching on the animals’ habitats. But that doesn’t come close to explaining it all. The attacks have been too numerous and too aggressive. What’s behind those attacks
is the same thing that landed you in the hospital, and it won’t stop until good people
do something about it.”
“That’s why,” said Deborah, “as fortunate as you were to survive your event,
you can expect to be exposed to more of what caused it.”
Even after all this, even after all the drama, even I understood.
“So, what you’re saying is, now I have a target on my back?”
“Yes.”
“Wherever I go?”
“Yes. Wherever you go, from now on, you can no longer be a bystander.”
I couldn’t help but shake my head.
“God help me.”
“He is, Elijah. That’s why we’re here.”
I looked up at Joshua and Deborah, and for the first time saw what beautiful
birds they were. Their feathers shimmered iridescent, green, blue and purple. Their
eyes were the deepest black, but rather than frightening, seemed both kind and wise.
“And what you’re also saying is, from now on I should be wearing my big boy
pants?”
If a raven could smile, he did.
“If I were you, Elijah, I’d bring along a few pair.”
