Chapter 2: Moths at the Window
The first moth came on Sunday night, and Wren nearly missed it entirely, because it landed on the outside of her window so softly that she mistook the sound for a leaf.
It was not, on close inspection, like any moth she had ever seen. It was the size of her spread hand, silvery all over, with markings on its wings that looked less like the usual moth-blotches and more like careful, deliberate lines, almost as if someone had drawn them on with a very fine brush. When it moved, the edges of its wings left a faint trail of light in the air, the way a sparkler does when you wave it too fast for your eyes to follow, except this trail did not fade for several seconds, hanging there in soft silver smudges before it dissolved.
Wren watched it from her bed for a long time before she dared to move. It walked in small, careful circles on the glass, and every so often it paused and pressed itself flat against the pane, as if it were listening for something on the other side.
"Hello," she whispered, because it seemed rude not to.
The moth's wings flickered — not fluttered, flickered, the way a candle flame does in a draft — and Wren could have sworn, though she would never have said so aloud to anyone, that it flickered in a pattern. Once, twice, a pause, three times.
She sat up properly and pressed her own palm flat against the glass, opposite where the moth stood. It did not fly away. It walked, unhurried, until its small silver body was directly across from her hand, separated only by the thickness of the window, and there it stayed until the sky began to lighten and it lifted off, in no apparent hurry, and vanished over the hedge.
By Wednesday there were four of them, and by Friday there were what Wren estimated to be somewhere around a dozen, clustered on the glass in overlapping circles like a very strange sort of flower, and it was on Friday that Aunt Mildred finally noticed.
"WREN TANNER." The voice came up through the floorboards with such force that Wren nearly fell out of bed. "What in heaven's name have you done to attract an entire plague of moths to this house?"
"I haven't done anything," Wren called back, which by now was such a familiar sentence in that household that it had practically worn a groove in the air.
Aunt Mildred appeared in the doorway in her dressing gown and curlers, took one look at the silver cluster on the window, made a sound like a kettle herself — a thin, outraged whistle — and marched across the room to fling the window open and swat at them with a rolled-up copy of the Puddleton Gazette.
"Shoo! Shoo, you horrible things!"
The moths did not shoo. They lifted, scattered, circled the room twice in a soft silver blizzard while Aunt Mildred shrieked and ducked, and then, with what Wren could only describe as patient good manners, they resettled themselves right back on the glass the moment the window was shut again.
"I want them gone by morning," Aunt Mildred said, breathing hard, straightening her curlers. "I don't know what you've done, or what you are, but I want it stopped."
What you are. The words landed somewhere in Wren's chest and stayed there long after her aunt had gone back downstairs, muttering about pest control and the neighbors and what people would say.
What was she? She had never once, in eleven years, heard anyone put the question quite that way — not what have you done, which she was used to, but what are you, as if there were a name for it, as if somewhere there existed a whole category of person that Wren might belong to, the way some people belonged to the church choir or the bowls club.
She lay awake a long while considering this, and did not notice, until she was nearly asleep, that one of the moths on the window had detached itself from the cluster and was pressing something small and pale against the glass with what looked, absurdly, like effort — as if it were trying to post a letter through a slot that wasn't there.
Wren sat up. The pale thing was a scrap of paper, no bigger than a postage stamp, curled tight and held fast in the moth's silver legs.
She unlatched the window — carefully, so as not to spook it — and the moth did not fly off this time. It walked directly onto her open palm, weightless as a held breath, and deposited the little curl of paper before lifting away to rejoin the others.
The paper was so small that Wren had to unroll it with the very tips of her fingernails. On it, in handwriting so tiny it might have been written with a single hair, were four words:
You are not alone.
That was all. No name, no explanation, nothing to say who had sent it or from where or why a moth had been chosen as the postal service. Wren read it eleven times, which felt like an appropriate number of times, and then folded it as small as she could and tucked it inside the leather cord of her mother's bell, where it sat against her collarbone like a second, smaller heartbeat.
She did not sleep very much that night, but for once it was not because the room felt too large and too quiet. It was because, for the first time she could remember, it didn't.
On Saturday morning Aunt Mildred discovered the moths were, if anything, more numerous than before, and declared — over a breakfast of burnt toast that nobody dared mention was burnt — that she would be writing to the council about vermin.
"They're not vermin," Wren said, before she could stop herself.
Every head at the table turned. Uncle Selwyn lowered his newspaper an inch. Percy, mid-chew, actually stopped chewing, which was, for Percy, a genuine feat of self-control.
"I beg your pardon?" said Aunt Mildred.
"They're not hurting anything," Wren said, more carefully this time, because she had learned that carefulness bought her a few extra seconds before the ceiling fell in. "They just sit on the glass. They don't even come inside unless you open the window."
"And how would you know that, unless you've been encouraging them?"
There was no answer to this that would not make things worse, so Wren said nothing, which Aunt Mildred took, as she took most silences, as an admission of guilt.
"I want that window shut and the curtains drawn from now until they've gone," she said. "And if I hear one more word about it, you'll be doing the ironing for a month on top of your usual chores."
Wren did as she was told, mostly. She drew the curtains, because it was easier than arguing, but she left a gap no wider than her finger at the bottom of the window frame, and every night that week she heard the soft papery tap of small silver bodies gathering just beyond it, patient as tides, waiting to be let back in.
She did not get another note. She began to wonder if she had imagined the first one, except that she still had it, folded into a square smaller than a fingernail, tucked into the cord of her bell, and paper did not, as far as Wren knew, imagine itself into existence.
On the ninth night, she woke to the sound of Aunt Mildred's voice below her window — not shouting this time, but low and urgent, the particular hushed sharpness of a grown-up trying to have an argument quietly enough that the neighbors wouldn't hear it.
Wren crept to the gap in the curtains and looked down into the back garden.
Aunt Mildred stood on the step in her dressing gown, arms wrapped tight around herself against the cold, facing a shape at the garden gate that Wren could not, in the darkness, make out clearly — except that it was very large, and very still, and seemed, even from two stories up, to be waiting with the unhurried patience of someone who has waited a long time before and doesn't mind waiting a little longer.
"She is not going anywhere," Aunt Mildred was saying, in the voice she used for door-to-door salesmen and unwanted opinions. "I don't care what letters you've sent or what you think she is. She's an ordinary girl living an ordinary life and I intend to keep it that way."
The shape at the gate said something Wren couldn't hear, low and even, like a voice trying very hard not to startle anybody.
"I don't want to hear it," said Aunt Mildred. "Good night."
She turned and came back inside, and a moment later Wren heard the front door bolt, twice, which it was never usually bolted, being Puddleton, where nothing interesting enough to require bolting had happened in living memory.
Wren pressed her face to the gap in the curtains and watched the shape at the gate a long while longer. It did not leave. It simply stood there, patient as a lamppost, looking up — she was almost sure of it, though the dark made everything uncertain — directly at her window.
Then it lifted one hand, in what might have been a wave, or might have been nothing at all, and walked away up the lane and out of sight, and the last of the silver moths on the glass lifted off together, all at once, like a held breath finally let go, and followed it into the dark.
