Chapter 5: I Can See Clearly Now

Kingsley Manor

January 10, 2005

The rain had finally moved off and the sky had that taste—heavy and metallic, like wet stones and broken bark. It would come. But for now, the wind had died, and the trees were still.

Pa-Ho stood on the high branch just outside the grove, the air quiet around his feathers.

Below him, the murder worked.

Crows dragged twigs through mud, snapped wind-frayed grass from the fence line, pulled tattered plastic from the edge of the big road. The nests were coming back, slowly. Not the same shapes—never the same shapes—but the same purpose.

The murder had made it through the storms.

But only just.

Three nights ago, when the biggest wind passed and everything was broken and hungry, he had flown to Kay-Dee. Not to the railing. Not for music. It had been too early. The sun was still high and the world smelled of chaos.

She had been outside, near the side path. Her red head feathers wild, cheeks bright, eyes watchful.

He landed near her and called her name, the name she had taught him through sheer repetition.

She held out her hand.

White berries.

He had taken three, one after the other, flying fast and low to the grove. Not to eat. To deliver.

The younger ones—flight capable but still nestlings, still stupid with wind-panic—had no food. Their caches were gone. Trash was gone. The worms were hidden or drowned. The blackberries didn’t grow during the cold season. But the white berries were soft and warm and perfect. They filled the emptiness just long enough.

He returned again. And again. Until Kay-Dee’s hand was empty. And then he asked her for more, thinking she would not understand him—humans were a little bit simple he had found—but somehow, she had. She returned twice more with additional handfuls and he delivered those as well.

Then he gave up the rest of his stash.

The blackberries he’d hidden in the attic vent. The oily chip crumbs. A whole sandwich crust he’d found on the deck table where the humans perched outside (the hatchling, called ‘Cap’, had dropped that one and the fire-feathered mother human had neglected to collect it). He dropped them all at the feet of the murder’s neediest.

And everything changed.

They stopped mocking him for living outside the grove. They stopped scoffing at his silence. Even the mid-perch males made way when he flew near. He had given up his stores, shared his secret food, and the murder took note.

His status had been gradually rising since he had befriended the human nestling and the human hatchling. He had found two new food sources for the murder, good ones. The first was the purple berry bushes near the stream he had found on the day he first encountered Cap the hatchling. Though it was only seasonal, it was rich with high energy fruit in the summer months and a good portion of the bounty had made up their storage for the winter—the storage that had been wiped out by the worst storm in murder oral history.

The next source was over in a place that overlapped with the gulls’ territory.

He had discovered this by accident, but as a direct result of his relationship with Kay-Dee.

One morning, a few moons before the storm, Pa-Ho had watched Kay-Dee leave the nest.

She always left at the same time—after the hatchling was fed, after the two mother humans exchanged their slow calls and the tall father human consumed his steam drink. She wore the same carry-wrap. Carried the same bag. And always entered the same smaller moving nest with the long blue nose. The black-feathered not-quite-mother, Yami, (she must be an older sibling from an earlier clutch, Pa-Ho figured) would take her away in it.

That morning, Pa-Ho had decided to follow.

Not for food. Not for territory.

Just to see. The kind of curiosity that overpowered instinct. The thing that set him apart.

He followed the blue-nose nest when it rolled from the cliff nest. He flapped hard, tried to keep the speed. But the wind against his wings grew thick. The nest was too fast.

He lost them near the bend where the hills turned to brush.

When he landed, the air tasted like salt and burning rubber.

He had crossed the edge of the known world.

He was in the dunes.

The gulls ruled here.

Big birds. Loud birds. Winged eating machines with no interest in dominance displays or air etiquette. They had no real hatred for crows—none Pa-Ho had ever known or been told about—but they could kill if they wanted to. They were bigger. Sharper. Hungrier. Faster on the drop. Murder oral history claimed no crow had ever been killed by a gull—but the warning passed from egg to egg: Do not linger in dune territory.

But Pa-Ho lingered.

He landed near a collection of immobile moving nests—ten or fifteen of them, side by side in loops and rows. The humans had abandoned them, walking off into the sand with their head coverings and their long steps. Most wouldn’t return for hours.

Pa-Ho wasn’t sure what drew him forward. His eyes saw nothing of value. But his nostrils—primitive though they were—caught something hot, sharp, and delicious.

He hopped forward, cautious. The gulls circled high above but did not descend.

Then he found it.

At the front of every moving nest, just below the clear shell the humans sat behind, there was a kind of slotted fence. A loose metal grill. Behind it, lodged in mesh or plastic curves, were corpses.

Bugs.

Butterflies, dragonflies, bees, flying stink-bugs, little green wings, big brown thoraxes—splattered, pressed, cooked.

It was a banquet.

Each one was slightly different. Each nest had a different kill. Some still warm from travel. Some dried crisp and salty.

And new nests came constantly.

Pa-Ho watched from a rooftop as fresh ones rolled in, pausing in loops, humans tumbling out with towels and drinks. The nests sat, cooling. Aging. Cooking the bugs beneath their faces. Ready for him.

He could not carry the bugs home. They were too delicate. Too easily crushed. Too tasty to ignore.

It was not storage food. But it was bounty.

He had eaten until his belly bulged. Then flown back along the coast, hugging the updrafts to stay high and wide of the gulls.

He told his father that night.

A place of nests. Human moving nests. Bugs stuck on the faces. New ones arrive all day.

His father had tilted his head. Thoughtful.

Not all food had to be kept.

Some could be enjoyed.

And that place—whatever it was—was some serious gourmet shit (as Jake Kingsley would have said if he had been a crow in Pa-Ho’s murder).

That alone had increased his status in the hierarchy. It entitled him to higher branches. Better trees.

His sharing of the beautiful noise that Kay-Dee made with her beak and her wings manipulating the noise box had increased his status as well. Kay-Dee’s music (that seemed to be the human word for it, if he was making the connections correctly) was a gift that he felt he absolutely had to share. There was a power there, something outside of the crow’s collective experience.

He told his father about it.

Crows were not humans and they did not communicate on the same level as humans, but they could talk some shit. They could share basic ideas—any crow could. He had explained to his father: Nestling. Human. Makes sound. Every sunset. Not danger. Beautiful.

His father had been skeptical. Humans were loud, unpredictable, dangerous. No crow in the murder had ever willingly approached the nest on the hill.

But Pa-Ho had insisted.

And so his father came.

They sat together on the upper ridge, cloaked in the dusk shadows of the pines, watching.

Kay-Dee came out with her string-box, sat on the deck, and began to play.

Not noise. Not shriek. Not warning.

Something else.

It hummed like warm feathers. It moved like soft wind. It felt like night coming peacefully instead of crashing in.

Pa-Ho’s father said nothing until the music ended.

Then he looked at his son and gave a slow, shallow click.

Astonished.

Word spread.

Not as caws, but as clicks and gestures. Shared experiences. Truths.

More came the next night. A few at first. Then more. They perched in the safety of a tree that almost touched the human nest. Out of danger from the humans, but close enough to hear and to see. Only Pa-Ho dared land on the rail.

And every bird that listened said the same thing:

They slept better.

The dreams were less sharp.

Their background fears went quiet.

And when they woke, they felt rested in a way they could not describe.

No one else approached the house. No one else fed from the nestling’s hand. That was still Pa-Ho’s secret. Not that any of the others would have tried it. Too dangerous.

But they listened to the music.

Except now ... the music was missing.

Two sunsets had passed without it.

The first night, wind had made flying nearly impossible. That was expected. But the second night, the air was still—and yet Kay-Dee did not come.

He had flown to the tree. Waited. Scanned the windows. Called her name. By this point, most of the crows who listened to the music regularly knew Kay-Dee’s name as well.

He saw the tall male who cleaned and moved like prey. He saw the fuzzy-headed hatchling, Cap, crawling toward the noise-box. But no Kay-Dee. No Father. No Mother.

And no music.

He had returned again tonight, unsure what he would find.

The wind was soft now, the air smooth. The world was ready again.

He waited.

And then—

She came.

Barefoot, guitar in hand, eyes soft with tiredness. But smiling when she saw him.

The rain was past, and the air still had that silver-laced freshness only a Pacific storm could leave behind. Every window in Kingsley Manor was cracked open just enough to catch it. The house was quiet in the way only a post-storm evening could be—soft, rinsed, and waiting.

In the entertainment room, Jake stood in the open doorway, one hand on the frame, the other in the pocket of his jeans. He watched as his daughter—red-headed, barefoot, guitar slung like a birthright—stepped out onto the back deck.

“Kay-Dee! Kay-Dee! Kay-Dee!”

The chant came from the tree that leaned in over the southern part of the deck. Maybe two dozen crows were perched along its limbs, calling in sync, a weirdly musical clamor like a football chant rewritten for ornithology.

Jake chuckled. “Your fans grow restless,” he told his daughter.

“I had to postpone the last two dates because of travel and weather,” she said. “They missed me.”

Below the tree, Pa-Ho glided down from a higher branch and landed on the deck railing, wings folding in tight. He tilted his head once toward the door—acknowledging Jake, maybe, or just checking for movement—then settled in.

“Hey, Pa-Ho,” Jake said to the crow. “I don’t see your all-access pass around your neck. Who let you backstage?”

Pa-Ho cawed in reply. Jake caught the tone quite clearly. Chinga tu madre, cabrón, was the basic gist of it. Fuck your mother, asshole, for those who cawed in English.

Behind him, all was Kingsley winter weekday at sunset during an erupting scandal normal. Celia was scrolling absently through the guide on the large television screen, looking for something to watch when she was not in the mood to watch anything. Laura was on her laptop, likely keeping tabs on Jen Collins’ byline.

Outside, Caydee adjusted her stance. She didn’t nod to the birds or smile or say anything at all. She just planted her feet, checked the tuning, and started playing.

It was Never Going Back Again—Fleetwood Mac. One of the most technically complex acoustic guitar tunes of the last fifty years. Thumb-heavy fingerpicking with syncopated bass. Ridiculously hard for adult fingers. Insane for a seven-year-old.

Jake watched and listened with pride. She was getting it.

Not perfectly—Lindsey Buckingham himself probably fumbled with this one—but with intention. With form. With musical memory in her bones.

He stayed for the whole song. Then, quietly, he turned from the door and walked back inside.

Cap was on top of the entertainment center.

Jake didn’t react. None of them did anymore. It was bolted into the studs, twelve feet high, flat-topped, and built like a mid-century monolith. Cap had learned to shimmy up from the arm of the couch to the low chair to the subwoofer box to the tower shelf to the top. It was not so much a matter of if he’d climb it, but when. They’d given up trying to stop him weeks ago.

He was now eighteen months old and he climbed fucking everything. Cabinets. Ladders. Shower rods. Yami once caught him halfway up the pantry rack with two granola bars stuffed down the back of his diaper like contraband.

He was like a cat. A soft, round, grunting, bilingual cat who could open childproof locks and had no fear of falling. And, like a cat, very difficult, if not impossible, to stop. And they’d tried everything short of squirting him in the face with a water bottle before giving up and letting him climb free.

Jake exhaled softly. “Anyone want a pre-dinner cocktail?”

Both women made small noncommittal sounds that, in this house, meant yes.

Jake nodded. “Cool. Make me a bourbon on the rocks while you’re making yours.”

Both wives turned to glare at him—synchronized, pseudo-offended, and not even slightly surprised.

Laura turned to Celia and said, in that smooth, thoughtful voice she used when she was about to commit a domestic war crime, “You know, love, it’s been a long time since it was just you and me in the bedroom for sexy time.”

Celia tilted her head, considering. “Mmm. Way too long.”

Jake narrowed his eyes. “Okay, okay. I get the point. What kind of hooch do you want?”

“Bourbon on the rocks is acceptable,” Laura said airily.

“Same,” Celia agreed, then added with a slight smile, “We might need a boy part tonight after all.”

Jake turned toward the bar, muttering, “Weaponized sex. It’s not even subtle anymore.”

He returned a few minutes later with three bourbons on the rocks—two glasses balanced in one hand, the third clutched precariously in the other.

“You know,” Celia said, watching his fingers white-knuckle the base of one glass, “you could’ve used the tray.”