You're birds for a while, after the woods. You're a hundred of them in a hundred different places, seeing a hundred different things. It's days before you remember how to have one shape, how to be just one thing again.
Once you do, you go to find Papa. It takes you weeks to find where he went. When you finally find him, he's across the ocean, and it's almost dark, and he's helping to build a castle. That doesn't surprise you. Papa's always building stuff: bird houses, squirrel feeders, a bridge across the creek behind your house so Mama would stop worrying you'll drown when you follow your friends into the trees.
It's nearing dusk, and there's a dog, being petted by some older kids. But you don't want to be a dog and so you find someone else, and it's on long dancer's legs that you come to him. You've never been able to sneak up on Papa, but he's not just pretending to let you this time, and when you nudge his hip with your nose he startles, then looks down and goes very still.
"Get away," he says, swatting at you, not quite connecting. His voice sounds funny and choked. You've never heard Papa sound like that, never seen him look at you the way he's looking at you now; he's never tried to strike you before, and if you were anything else you'd turn and run away. Instead, you freeze, long enough for Papa to change his mind, to offer you his hand, palm-up. He smells like salt, and tastes like it too. He used to smile at the softness of your doe friends' noses, but he's not smiling this time, there's something dark and almost frightening rolling beneath his voice. "She's not here."
Who's not? But you don't wonder about it for long, even though there's a bitter smell beneath the salt that you don't recognize, and you don't remember ever seeing Papa cry before. There are too many things to be, and although you want to stay, it's not long before you're someone else, somewhere else: a falcon diving toward the ground and the mouse he's aiming for, a rabbit returning to her nest and the five babies who are waiting for her, a squirrel stashing nuts away for the coming winter and his mate two trees over who'd doing the same thing.
***
The next time you remember to look for Papa, you find him at home. He smells even more strongly of the bitter thing as he kneels beside two piles of dirt in the backyard. He stays there for a long time, his head bowed. Then he staggers back onto his feet, and for a second you're sure he's going to fall down. You've never seen Papa fall, and you're glad when he doesn't.
You weave around his ankles on your way inside the house. It's dark and quiet and dusty, but if Papa notices how wrong it seems, he doesn't say anything. He opens the bag he's brought with him, and he starts to fill it, not with clothes and toothbrushes the way he used to when you were going on a trip to see Mama's parents, but with pictures. He takes every photograph down off the walls, grabs every picture from the mantel and his and Mama's bedside table. He stops at the bottom of the stairs for a long time, but then he goes up and sorts through your things.
Part of you wants to object to this, to tell him to leave everything where it is, or else to tell him what things you'll need the most—but you feel somehow too cold to try to say anything, and so you sit still in the doorway and watch, moving nothing except the tip of your tail. Papa knows the things that are most important, anyway—he takes the doll Mama gave you when you were born, who was your best friend until your other friends came; and he finds the presents from your friends you kept under the floorboard, not because you needed to hide them but because it pleased you to pretend it was a food cache or a nest. Last of all, he takes the quilt from your bed, the one he and Mama made together, and drapes it over his shoulder and goes back down the stairs.
By the time Papa leaves the house again, you're tired of being Whiskers, and so you fade away, this time to be a bat, emerging from your roost to chase moths through the dark.
***
Most of the time, you're happy, a dolphin sliding between water and air, a spider spinning your web between tree branches, a raccoon washing your food in a running stream. But every so often, you think,
—they're taking him away!—
and you rush to find Papa, wherever he is. Sometimes, you're a vulture spinning circles above some rubble, wondering why he's yelling at those people, and why he's wearing an outfit that always hurts your eyes no matter how many colors you can see. Other times, you're a mouse, coming out from the wall and wondering why he's hiding out in such a small or cold or dirty house when he could be at home instead. Less often than either of these but often enough that it stops surprising you after a while, you end up being a dog after all, lying at the foot of the bed and wondering why Papa has to share when there's a whole castle full of beds to choose from (but you don't exactly mind it. Papa only talked to you when you were the doe; ever since then he's always pretended not to see you. At least when you're the dog, the friend he shares with pats you on the head and gives you dog biscuits).
***
Nothing really changes until the day you can't find Papa in any of the usual places. You widen your search, then widen it again, flitting from one set of eyes to another, so fast it makes you dizzy. The longer you search, the more frantic you become, and if you could cry you would be by the time you finally do find him.
You pass it by the first few times, a huge concrete building in the middle of the desert. There's one floor above the ground, and many beneath, and it's deep down that you find the small dark room, and it's in the far cornerof that room that you find Papa. He's so still that at first you think he's asleep—but when you hop onto his lap, he opens his eyes and looks down at you with glassy eyes.
By now you know the other way he looks at you, the bitter, sad way. This is something else, something to make you squeak in distress as you realize that the blood-smell in your nose isn't someone else, it's him. And the sickly sweet-smell beneath it, that's him too, and it's bad.
Papa looks at you for a long, long time, and his breathing is ragged in the dark, somehow so much worse than it's been when you've found him sobbing in the nights, and finally he says, "—Charles. Get Charles. Go."
You've never stopped being something as quickly as you stop being the rat, going-going as fast as you can until you find Papa's friend. He's driving full-speed on the highway, and there are no animals in the car except two little spiders and some mites, and you can't see how bugs are supposed to tell Papa's friend where he is.
But there are three other people in the car, and one of them is a girl you've seen before, at the castle. She's the one who helped Papa build it; she's the one who's always made you think of a bird. Not any bird you've ever known or been, but a bird all the same. So you go into the car, and you go into her, and for the first few moments, it's easy as anything. Then she sees you, she knows you're there, like none of them have ever known you're there before, and the thing that looks like a bird but really isn't begins to scream, and to grow, batting wings-that-aren't-wings at you, driving you out.
"My Papa—" you say, and then there's a roaring, a black nothingness that comes to take you even as you realize for the first time that nothing is something you should fear.
***
It takes a long time for you to come back after that.
***
It takes longer than that for you to remember that you used to be a person, that you used to have a Papa. After you remember, it takes even longer for you to remember that it matters, that you need to go find him if he's even there to be found.
The room under the desert is empty; the rest of the building is, too, though there were people there the other time you came, a lot of them in rooms just like Papa's.
You don't find Papa shouting anywhere, and when you check the houses where he used to stay, they're all empty, or else totally gone, with nicer or at least newer houses in their place.
He's not at the castle, either; you go there last, so certain that if he's not anywhere else, that's where he'll be for sure. You search high and low and don't find him, and almost no one there is anyone whose smell or face you remember. Even Papa's friend isn't there anymore.
Once, you'd have searched the entire world, but now you're just so tired. When the fox runs by at the edge of the yard, you don't fight the impulse to join him, to be him until you see someone else you'd rather be.
***
In the end, you find Papa by accident. You're dozing in a meadow, letting the sun warm you while the grass hides you while you wait for your mother to come back, when you hear voices. When you stand on trembly legs, you see them, an old man and a little girl. For a moment, you almost sink back down into the grass, to lie there with wide eyes, hoping they aren't here to find you; but then you recognize the old man's voice. It's the way he used to sound when he was talking to you, when you were just little and nothing bad had ever happened yet. So instead of freezing, you approach them on legs that aren't quite dancers', glad that their backs are to you so you can watch and listen to them without them knowing.
Papa's hair is white, where it used to be so dark. His hands are spotted and wrinkled, and he doesn't move as quickly as you're used to when he reaches in the picnic basket and brings out sandwiches for himself and the girl. When you're close enough, you can smell his friend on him, and although you weren't sure before now, now you know that what you did in the car was worth it. Maybe it was even the whole reason you stayed, even if you didn't know it until now.
You stand listening for the longest time, and then you step onto the blanket. That's when they see you, Papa and the girl both. The girl's eyes go very wide, while the wrinkles on Papa's face move and change, to make him look softer. He's never looked at you like that since before you were the birds, so long ago.
"Poppa, look!" says the girl. "It's a deer!"
"I can see that," Papa says, and after a moment he reaches down to stroke your head, to scratch you softly behind the ears. You sink down until you're lying on the blanket, content as you've ever been.
The girl reaches to pet you, too, and you let her.
"Be gentle."
"I am."
For a few minutes everything's quiet, you and the girl and Papa. Then Papa says, "Has your father ever told you about your Aunt Nina?"
"No, who's that?"
"She was my daughter," Papa says. The grief is still there, rolling in his voice, but it's softer than it's ever been before. "She died long before you were born." Somehow, it doesn't surprise you, doesn't shock you into being someone else; you've never before wondered how you came to be like this, but maybe that's because you've known how all along. Maybe there's a reason, after all, that you've never once wondered where Mama is. "She could talk to animals."
"I can talk to animals," says the girl, and proceeds to tell you a very long story about her dolls, pulling them out of the picnic basket one by one to demonstrate. You listen, your ears flicking back and forth, until she starts to yawn.
When she's asleep next to you, Papa says, "My granddaughter. Luna."
He doesn't say anything else. You stay until you see your mother, watching you anxiously from the tall grass. Then you stand up, and you face Papa, and when he leans toward you, you press your forehead against his. As you do, you remember a moment, long before your memory started, when you were a newborn baby and Papa did the same thing for you.
Then you turn, and you walk into the grass, and maybe later you'll be the quail to your left or the woodchuck to your right, but for now you're just a fawn, following your mother as she fades into the trees.
You can feel yourself fading, too. Already, you know that you won't be looking for Papa again—but only because the next time, he'll be the one who comes looking for you. It won't be long now, and you won't be bored in the waiting, for there are so many friends to play with, and so many of them to be.