Kate Bush's Arc

Chapter 13 of 21

Kate unfolded the swallow drawing on the flat top of the stone. Will's pencil lines were soft now, smudged from her pocket. A bird cut across a night sky. Two words underneath. Night flight. She stared at it and felt nothing move in her head. Will's eyes tracked her from where he lay. He had drawn this before he lost his hands to stillness. He had known then what he could not tell her now. "It's a name," Kate said. "It has to be a name. But it's just a bird." Mr. Echo crouched beside her. He turned the paper toward the moon and held his brass device flat above it. The needle did not move. "Paper doesn't hold sound," he said. "But he chose these words. Not others." He tapped the two words with one finger. "He drew what he could say without saying." At the roots of the fourth oak the pale woman had not moved. The moonlight on the grass had shifted a hand's width. Kate could see the salt line dimming where the shadow of the oak crossed it. The collie stood up. The black cat lifted its head from Will's chest and looked at the drawing, not at the woman. Lily was watching the cat. "He wants you to say it out loud," Lily said. "The words. Not the name yet. The words." Kate said them. "Night flight." Nothing happened. She said them again, louder. The pale woman's mouth opened a little, hungry. Kate's throat went dry. Then Lily leaned close to Will's chest again and came up fast. "He says it's the song," she said. "The one your mother sang. He says you know it." Kate did know it. Her mother had sung it over the sink when they were small. A song about a bird that flew at night and would not land. The bird had a name in the song. Kate had not thought of it in years. She said the name under her breath first, testing it, and the shape of it fit the drawing the way a key fits a lock. She looked at Will. He blinked once, slow. Yes. The salt line went dark under the oak's shadow. The pale woman stepped forward, one white foot inside the ring. Kate stood up. She filled her chest the way her mother had taught her to fill it for singing. She said the name loud, straight at the white face, and it left her mouth like a struck bell. The pale woman's throat closed on it. She staggered. Sound came out of her, a wet cough, and Will's stolen voice fell out of her mouth in pieces and scattered across the grass. She did not fall. She turned and walked back past the fourth oak into the dark, one hand at her neck, and the ring held again behind her.