The Next Full Moon (8 page)

Helen wrapped her hand around Ava's. A jolt went through Ava, and an array of images flashed before her eyes: her mother's inky eyes in the photograph by Ava's bed, the swan in the backyard, its wings spreading in the air.

“So you're saying my mother . . . is alive?”

“Yes,” Helen said.

Ava looked at Helen more closely. “If my mother is alive,” she said, “why didn't she come herself? And why did she go away in the first place?”

“She had to leave. She never should have been here at all, but she loved your father and so she stayed much, much longer than she should have. And she cannot come here now, Ava. You will understand why, in time.”

“Will you take me to her?”

Helen hesitated. Behind her, the leaves ruffled in the breeze. “I can't, yet. But I know what is happening to you. I'm here to help you. If you come with me, I can explain everything.”

Ava studied her. What if it was true? The thought was so huge Ava couldn't even really grasp it. The idea that her mother could be alive? Was it possible she really was?

Something told her she needed to go with the woman, even though the woman was a stranger and everything about this seemed strange and wrong and dangerous. Except of course for the woman's kind face, her lovely, melting eyes, her soft voice. But Ava had read the old myths and knew that underneath all that beauty the woman could well be an evil old witch or devil.

“Where do you want to take me?” she asked, narrowing her eyes again.

“Into the woods, where the others are waiting.” Helen released Ava's hand and stepped back.

“You're not kidnapping me, right? You can't kidnap me. I have a test tomorrow and if I don't pass it I will totally fail the seventh grade. And there's this boy I like . . . ”

Helen laughed. “No. You will be back here before you know it. I promise.”

Ava waited a second, so as not to give in too easily—but of course she would go, how could she not?—and then nodded. “Okay, fine, I'll come. Just give me a minute.”

Leaving Helen at the front door, she ran back to her room and grabbed her keys and her cell phone, just in case. Her phone was flashing with messages, no doubt from Morgan, who was probably imagining Ava flying her around like Superman. Ava shoved the phone and keys into her jeans pocket. Monique was at her heels, yowling at her.

“Shoo!” Ava said.

Monique swiped at her feet.

“You're not coming!”

Helen was waiting, and Ava breathed out in relief that she was still there. Despite herself, her heart was all clenched up, and she'd been terrified the woman would disappear as quickly and mysteriously as she'd come. Her mother! Maybe she would really finally have a mother, after all this time. It seemed impossible, but then, she was probably dreaming all this anyway, and even a dream mother was better than no mother at all. She shut the door on Monique's glowering face.

“I'm ready,” Ava said.

“Let's go.”

They walked around the house and cut through the backyard to the woods. It was as if Helen had taken this path many times before, but Ava was certain she would have noticed a woman like her if she'd ever been in the vicinity. Helen was even more beautiful up close and had that same gentle,
delicate quality her mother had had. Ava resisted the urge to reach out and take her hand as they walked.

Helen led Ava into the woods. Their feet crunched under them. Ava glanced back at their little house with the moon shining down on it. She hoped her father wouldn't get back before she did. He didn't need to worry about her any more than he did already.

“I used to live with your mother, Ava,” Helen said, glancing back. “My sisters and I. I remember when she met your father.”

“You did?” Ava had never heard anything about her mother's life before she had met her father. It was as if her mother had only begun to exist when she'd met him. Hearing this, now, was amazing. “What . . . What was she like? Where was that?”

“A place I'll take you to one day. We lived there with many of our friends. Your mother and I used to love to visit the creek here together, in these woods, and go swimming.”

“The creek here? Where my dad goes fishing?”

“Yes.” Helen smiled.

Ava had to walk quickly to keep up with her. Helen seemed to walk unnaturally fast, without putting forth any real effort. And she seemed to have no problem navigating the woods in the places where the twisting branches overhead blocked out the moonlight. If it weren't for Helen's graceful white shape next to her, Ava surely would have been lost. In
some spots she could barely see in front of her.

“We would go with another of our friends,” Helen continued. “The three of us were inseparable. We loved it, swimming together.”

“Is that how my mom and dad met, at the creek?”

“Yes,” Helen said.

Ava wracked her brain but could not remember her father ever saying anything about this. Nothing about how they'd met, at all. All her own little imaginings started shifting in her brain, and now she pictured the woman from the photos—her mother—swimming in the creek with her friends. A sunny day, in summer, the sunlight dappling the water through the leaves and branches. Her father fishing maybe, maybe swimming himself. He'd grown up here, around the creek. His father had fished the creek, too, and his father before him.

“Your father loved your mother right away. We could see that he did.”

“Did she love him right away, too?”

Helen paused. For a moment there was just the soft rustling of the woods, the padding of their feet on the earth, the snapping of twigs they stepped over. “I think she did. It was hard to tell with her sometimes. The thing was, though, Ava, they were never supposed to be together.”

“They weren't?”

“Oh no. It was forbidden. Where we come from . . . well,
we are not supposed to be with human men. Men like your father.”

“What do you mean, human men?”

And just then, they stepped into a clearing. One second the world was dark and hushed, the next the moon was bright overhead, its light pouring down on them.

“Oh!” Ava gasped. “I've never been here before.”

“We've wandered a bit from the main path,” Helen said, turning to her. She was smiling, her face radiant and her jewel eyes sparkling. Just the way Ava imagined her mother would look.

The air was warm, with a slight breeze pushing through, and everything smelled of grass and earth. Ava stepped into the clearing. In the moonlight, the grass was like a secret pool of water, shimmering and moving. Ava half expected to slip under.

“Is this where you're taking me?” Ava asked, seeing that Helen herself had stopped and seemed to be waiting for something.

“Yes,” Helen said, reaching out and grabbing Ava's hand, as if she'd read her mind earlier.

Helen's skin was smooth and cool. Ava clasped her hand back.

She thought, then, about her father, sitting along the side of the creek right now. How close was he? Ava had lost all sense of direction. But she stared up at the moon and
imagined him out in this same strange darkness, hearing the same hush of the forest at night, waiting for the dazzled fish to surface from the creek, staring up at the same moon and looking for her mother the way she was right now, the way she always did when the moon appeared bright and full over the earth. Ava thought, for the first time, that it might be nice to join her father sometime, even if it made absolutely no sense to catch the same fish over and over and throw them back in.

Suddenly a bird swooped in from overhead and landed in the clearing.

A swan.

Ava pointed, almost crying out. “That swan!” she said, turning to Helen, whom, to Ava's surprise, didn't seem at all taken aback. “I think I saw it before.”

And then another swan swooped down, and another and another, and Ava realized they all looked the same. They kept arriving from the air, and then they emerged from the forest, too, like white shadows, until the clearing was filled with them, appearing from every direction, from the woods and the air.

Ava's heart hammered in her chest. Part of her wanted to run; the other part wanted to stay and see everything, no matter what happened.

She didn't understand how Helen could be so calm. Helen just stood watching them, as if she'd been expecting
this to happen, as if she saw something this miraculous happen every day.

The swans were strangely still, the mass of their white feathers gleaming like ice, like freshly fallen snow, over the clearing.

“They have all come,” Helen said finally, “to meet you.”

“What do you mean?” Ava asked.

“Watch.”

And just as she said the word, something happened. The birds . . . transformed. In a movement so quick and surprising Ava could barely register it, the birds had arms and hands and their feathers became feathered robes and suddenly the clearing was filled with beautiful women, each of them holding a feathered robe in her hand.

Ava gasped.

“I have . . . ” She pointed, unable to finish her thought.

They were all holding feathered robes, like the one Ava had, shoved under the bed.

And they were naked, their hair streaming down and covering their breasts, their legs pressed together. All pale and blond in the moonlight. Beautiful, smiling, watching her with jewel eyes.

Ava could feel her eyes filling with tears. Was one of them her mother? She had never, in her life, seen anything more astonishing or beautiful than this. And she felt herself fill with light. It was the only way to explain it: the happiness
that comes from feeling, even if you don't know why or how, that you've come home. But she was far from home, wasn't she? She had never seen this clearing before and yet she knew these woods, knew every bit of them.

She turned, once again, to Helen.

“We are swan maidens,” Helen said, before Ava could ask. “We change in the full moon.”

“Swan maidens,” Ava repeated. It seemed to her, all of a sudden, the most wonderful thing to be.

“When your mother met your father, it was during a full moon. We were swimming. We loved to swim in the creek in our human forms.”

“She was . . . she is a swan maiden?”

“Yes, she is one of us,” Helen answered. “She stayed here for a time, but then she had to return to us. She was never meant to live in your world. But she not only lived in your world, she had a child in it. And so you, Ava, you are like us.”

“Is that why . . . ”

“Yes,” Helen whispered, and there were tears sparkling in her eyes, too.

“I have a robe.”

“Yes, a feathered robe. Yours will let you transform, too. Put it on, and you will become a swan. Take it off, and you are human again.”

Ava felt herself staggering under this new information. Her head couldn't even really contain it. Could it be true?
Anything could be true right now, here, in this moonlit clearing, after what she'd just seen.

One of the maidens stepped forward and approached Ava. “Welcome,” she said, in a strange, singsong voice. “We have been waiting for this day. I am Lara.”

“Thank you,” Ava said. “I'm Ava.”

“We know.”

It hit her then, what they were saying. That she, Ava Lewis, was a part of this. This magical, wonderful world around her, where swans turned into women, under the full moon. She felt she would burst with the fullness of it. Even if it was a dream, it was the best dream she'd ever had, one she hoped she'd have again and again.

She laughed, then, with delight.

“I wish I had my robe here with me now!” She eyed Lara's robe, and Lara laughed, too.

“We can only transform using our own robes,” Lara said. “You should have had her bring hers, Helen.”

“I did not want to terrify the girl,” Helen said. And then, to Ava: “Lara was with me and your mother that day, long ago.”

“Is my mother here, too? Can I see her?”

Helen and Lara exchanged a look. “No,” Helen said. “In time you will see her again. But she wanted us to come to you, to explain to you what has been happening to your body. We haven't . . . well it has happened only very rarely,
a swan maiden mating with a human, and so we were not certain, but it has been told to us that you would experience a change around your thirteenth birthday. And so we have been watching you. She, too, has watched you.”

“My mother?”

“Yes.”

Ava thought of the moon, the woman sitting in it.
On the night of the full moon
, her grandmother had said,
you can see her, sometimes
.

“We knew how frightening it would be for you,” Lara said. “Your mother has been sick with worry, thinking of you. I hope you feel safe now, though. We are your family. All of us.”

Ava looked out at the lot of them. All the beautiful maidens, many of them facing the moon now, their faces tilted up, pressing their feet into the earth, lifting up their arms to the breeze.

Helen lifted her own silvery arms into the breeze. “It is a treat for us,” she said. “Being in this form. But you, my dear, you have much more human in you than we do. And yet you are still swan. We don't know exactly what to expect from you, but you will be capable of great things.”

“When you return home,” Lara said. “Use the robe. Transform. Feel what it is to be the other part of you. The world will become entirely different, when you are in your other form. But that is the world, too, and that is you. Part
of who you are.”

“So I just . . . put the robe on? It just came off of me tonight.” She shuddered, thinking of it. “It pulled off of me.”

“You shed it. Like a caterpillar growing a cocoon and then sloughing it off. You're lucky. There's a story of a girl many hundreds of years ago who spent years growing her robe and was only able to transform as an old woman. The moment she put her robe on and transformed, she was so happy, felt so complete, she died right then and there.”