She nodded her head, her red eyes showing the first glimmer of hope.
“Would you mind taking Henry outside and finding two yellow flowers and one white one while I tend to your friend? Make sure there are no missing petals and the stems are good and long.”
She nodded again and grabbed Henry by the hand, nearly pulling him over in her excitement. He scrambled to his feet, a dubious expression on his face as Rebecca tugged him from the room.
Not knowing exactly how long it would take them to find the flowers, I immediately lifted the bird from the basket and set to work. Within seconds I had isolated the break and begun mending the bones.
“The wing is definitely broken,” Ben said a few feet from my side. “You should have let Henry kill it.”
“Don’t be so sure,” I replied. The bird remained calm, cradled securely in one hand as I pretended to examine the wing. “Feels like it’s only been tweaked a bit.”
Ben laughed at my diagnosis. “That’s just what your mother would say whenever a critter needed help.” He looked a little closer at the bird. “Perhaps you’re right, and it’s just been twisted.”
I smiled at the memory of my mother, knowing his words to be justified. Not that I could ever blame her for such a weakness. After working so much with people, animals presented a rare joy, allowing me to work freely without fear of discovery.
In fact, thirteen years ago it had been through an animal that I first learned of my gift. One rainy afternoon, Nora and I had tried to carry her new kitten into the hayloft to play. Nora lost her footing on the ladder and fell to the ground, crushing the poor thing beneath her. The kitten was in a bad way, and Nora left it in my lap while she ran to get her mother. As I sat crying, softly stroking its fur, I had never wanted anything so badly than to have the poor creature better again. Hoping for a miracle, I started to pray when a surge of warmth swelled in my chest and then flowed down my arms into the kitten. Lacking any formal medical training, it was by sheer determination and good luck that I stopped the internal bleeding and mended the many broken bones.
By the time Nora returned, the creature was up and playing like nothing had happened. Fearful of being discovered, I kept quiet while Lucy Goodwin looked the kitten over from top to bottom, finally declaring the animal out of mortal danger before giving us each a peck on the head and returning to the house. Nora had always been too smart for her own good, even at the tender age of five, and knew I had done something special. Throwing her arms around me, she proclaimed I was an angel and promised to love me forever. Terrified, I squirmed free of her arms and fled from the barn.
Back at home my mother listened patiently while I spilled everything from my young heart. She then lifted me onto her lap and told me of a history that began in Ireland more than three thousand years before. I listened attentively to her soft lilting voice, my brow crinkling over Brigid, Tuatha dé, and the Otherworld in the long story that led up to my birth on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.
At the time it had been no easy thing to comprehend just how different I was from my friends and neighbors, as many of them had also come from another world, having left Europe to start anew in the Colonies. Often times they arrived in Hopewell dressed in strange clothing and speaking languages that sounded funny to my ears. But despite these peculiarities, everyone got along well together, and my Tuatha dé blood seemed inconsequential when Katrina’s parents were from Germany and Nora’s pirate grandfather had once visited an island where all the people were the size of children.
Even so, as my mother continued to speak that day, two things locked firmly into my young mind—through my first mother, I possessed the power to heal, and if anyone outside of my family learned the truth, I would be taken away and killed. For the first five years of my life, I’d never been trusted with a secret worth keeping before. That day, I was given enough to last a lifetime.
The door suddenly swung open, banging against the wall and pulling me from my thoughts. “We found them, Selah.” Rebecca rushed over with the three flowers. “Now will my bird get better?”
I placed the bird back in the basket and covered the top. “Why don’t we go outside and see,” I said, trading the bird for the flowers.
Rebecca set the basket in the grass. After slowly pulling off the cloth, she tiptoed back several steps to wait. I walked over to the doorway, followed by Ben and Henry, where we watched the bird flutter up and land on the rim of the basket. It looked at us for a moment before taking off into the darkly clouded sky.
“You did it!” Rebecca threw her arms around my waist. “Thank you for fixing my bird.”
“You’re welcome,” I laughed, a little short of breath from the force of her hug.