Ava was intrigued, but impatient. The Bird Lady’s speech felt rehearsed. Perhaps it was. If, as the Bird Lady said, there was a task that her sisters had started, and that Ava needed to finish, maybe the Bird Lady had put together a few words for the occasion.
The Bird Lady dabbed at her eyes. “Mothers. Can’t live with them; can’t live without them. Am I right?”
“No,” Ava said, her tone leaving no room for doubt. There was a middle road, and Ava planned on finding it. “So, what did you wish for, on your Wishing Day?”
“Oh, well . . . things,” said the Bird Lady. She gave Ava a meaningful look.
“Things?”
“One thing, really. For my first wish, I wished for one specific thing. Do you want to know what it was?”
“Um, yes. Please.”
“Then ask!”
“Seriously? I already did.”
“You have to ask me specifically, about the one specific thing.”
Ava felt as if she were in a mixed-up version of Rumpelstiltskin or some other upside-down fairy tale. “Ok-a-a-a-y. What was the one specific thing you wished for on your Wishing Day?”
“Not like that. You have to ask . . . better,” the Bird Lady said. She gave Ava another meaningful look. She waggled her eyebrows up and down.
“Better how?”
“Oh dear. You’re not the brightest lightbulb in the lightbulb shop, are you?”
“You’re not the brightest . . . question asker!” Ava retorted.
“We do the best with what we have,” the Bird Lady muttered to herself. She took a breath. “When you look through a window, what do you see?”
“Whatever’s past the windowpane,” Ava said.
“Yes! But, humans. Do humans have windows?”
“In their houses, they do.”
“Yes, I suppose. But do humans themselves have windows? Hmm?”
Ava held her hands up. “No. Humans do not have windows.”
“Oh, for pity’s sake. True, humans don’t have windows, not literally. But a poetic sort of person might say that a certain part of a human is similar to a window.”
“A person’s eyes, then,” Ava said, mystified. “‘Eyes are the window to the soul.’ So?”
“Yes! Good girl!” The Bird Lady clapped. “Now, ask again—what I wished for!”
“For eyes that were windows to your soul?”
“Don’t be obtuse!” the Bird Lady said. “I didn’t want people to see my soul. I had no interest in that. What I wanted was to see . . .” She rolled her hand, encouraging Ava to finish the thought.
Ava felt as if she’d been thrust onto a game show without being told the rules. “Other people’s souls? By looking into their eyes?”
The Bird Lady turned pink. “Close, so very close! Ask me one more time what I wished for, darling girl! And use a full sentence. Start with, ‘For your first wish, your impossible wish, did you wish for . . . ?’ And go on from there.”
Ava didn’t like it, but she went along with it. “Fine. For your first wish, your impossible wish, did you wish that you could look into people’s eyes and”—she pushed through—“see their souls?”
The Bird Lady seemed incapable of speech, but she grabbed Ava’s hands and squeezed them, nodding rapidly.
“You wished to look into a person’s eyes and see her soul?” Ava repeated. “Why? And what would that even mean?”
The Bird Lady cleared her throat. It took several attempts before she could answer. “Within a girl’s soul lives everything that makes her her. Her fears, her dreams, her secrets. What makes her happy. What makes her sad.”
“So, basically, you wanted total omniscience,” Ava said.
“I wanted it all, yes.”
Ava’s skin crawled. “And how’d that work out for you?”
Now the Bird Lady spoke rapidly, almost manically, about how the magic had played out. Her wish had come true, but not precisely as she’d anticipated. “Magic can be fluky,” she cautioned. “Remember that.”
“You bet,” Ava said.
First of all, the Bird Lady explained, the magic only worked with certain people. As in, the Bird Lady only saw the hopes and dreams of thirteen-year-old girls. Also, sometimes the Bird Lady interpreted things incorrectly. Other times, she looked into someone’s eyes and saw nothing.
“What was your second wish, the wish you could make come true yourself?”
The Bird Lady looked ruefully at her hands. “That I would admit to what I’d done, but only if someone specifically asked.”
Ava snort-laughed. “As in, someone would have to say, ‘Hey, did you happen to wish for the ability to look into someone’s eyes and see their soul?’”
The Bird Lady smiled and hitched her shoulders. Ave felt sucker punched. She felt embarrassed, and angry for feeling embarrassed, but she tried not to give the Bird Lady the satisfaction of showing it.
“Actually, I bound my wish more tightly to myself than that,” the Bird Lady said. “If someone specifically asked, I would tell the truth. But I couldn’t tell the truth unless someone asked. Couldn’t, not wouldn’t. Do you understand the difference?”
“I understand that you made a crazy wish,” Ava said.
“I suppose I knew I was crossing a line, in a way,” the Bird Lady mused.
In fits and starts, she told Ava what she’d told herself at the time: that yes, she made her first wish knowing that wasn’t how the magic was supposed to be used. But she convinced herself that her second wish made it okay. She wouldn’t lie about it, after all.
“I’m older now, and hopefully wiser,” the Bird Lady said. “I accept accountability for my foolishness, but—those were the wishes I made.”
“And your third wish?” Ava asked. “The deepest wish of your secret heart?”
“I would prefer not to comment on that,” she said in a peculiar tone. Ava thought she saw her chin wobble, but it might have been a trick of the light.
“So what happened?” Ava asked. “You made your impossible wish in order to become popular. Did it work?”
“It did not. Even with my new ability . . .” She trickled off. “I suppose I was still too awkward. I blurted things out. I made everyone uncomfortable, more so than I had before. Oh, pet, those were sad times.”
The Bird Lady reached over and patted Ava’s
