Free The Hidden Summer by Gin Phillips Page B

window too tall for me to reach. If there was ever glass in it, it’s long gone now. I hear Lydia’s voice calling me, and when I reach her, she’s holding a weathered piece of plywood propped against the wall. She grins and slides the wood back, and I can see that there’s a hole behind it. A hole wider than my shoulders and nearly as high as my waist.
    “This sort of counts as a door,” says Lydia.
    There’s something about squeezing through a small space that makes whatever’s on the other side seem more exciting somehow. Like how if you walk through an open gate into someone’s yard, it’s just a normal yard. But if you squeeze through a little hole in a fence, turning and twisting and trying not to cut yourself or rip your clothes, by the time you pop out the other side, you just
expect
to find something worth all that effort.
    At first, though, as I stand up inside the stone walls, it seems like I might be disappointed. There’s a concrete floor and empty shelves on the walls. Grass is growing through the cracks in the concrete. And there’s a narrow wooden staircase that leads up to what was maybe a storage space. Now the storage space opens up to the sky. The roof of the building is totally gone.
    Sunlight and shadows dance across the ground as I look up at the staircase. I look back at Lydia, who’s brushing a spiderweb out of her hair.
    “Let’s go,” she says.
    We’re careful as we go up the stairs. They creak and groan under our feet. Some of the railing is missing, and the wood is cracking like the old paint in our apartment. I wonder when the last pair of feet stepped on these stairs. But we get to the top stair without any catastrophes. Not only is the roof gone, but the walls are only a couple of feet high, with plenty of stones missing. The whole place is damp and dirty and sprinkled with bird poop.
    Then we look over the edge of the walls, and it’s suddenly worth climbing the stairs. We’re looking onto a fat, smallish tree. It’s got pointy wide leaves, so maybe it’s a maple. And in the tree I can see at least a dozen birds’ nests. Some have white eggs, some have brown eggs, and some have blue speckled eggs. Some have grown-up birds perched in them, and a few of them look up and squawk at us. In one small nest near the top of the tree, I can see two baby birds, almost translucent, hardly any feathers at all. They stretch open their beaks and scream to be fed. The eggs, though, are peaceful and quiet. It’s like we’ve found a bird day-care center.
    “It’s a whole city of nests,” I say.
    “Maybe we can get a baby,” says Lydia.
    “No way,” I say. “Not unless we have to. We are not doing that again.”
    We found a baby bird in Lydia’s backyard once, and Marvin—the stepdad, not the dinosaur—told us to feed him milk with a medicine dropper. We made a little nest in a shoebox and tried to feed him twice a day. He never seemed to care for the milk much, so we dug for worms and grubs and tried those. But he just got weaker. Eventually he died and we had to bury him out by the honeysuckle tree. Mom told me that we should never have picked him up because his mother probably would have found him. She said you should never touch a baby bird because if you make the baby smell like a human, his mother won’t want him anymore. I think that’s lousy parenting. But I guess even a hard-to-please mother bird would have done a better job of raising that baby bird than we did. I still feel guilty when I remember how light it was in that shoebox, no more weight than the bow off a birthday present. How pale its skin was and how its heart pounded in its rib cage. He was ours to take care of, and we let him down.
    I don’t want another baby bird. They weigh too heavy on me.
    It’s only as we’re leaving that I notice the wall right at the edge of the staircase. I had my back turned to it as we were coming up to the turret. But I suddenly realize that maybe another pair of feet have