Wake Up Missing by Kate Messner Page A

seeing another osprey would make it easier when I picked up my clay again.
    I clutched the railing and focused on each step, one at a time, all the way up.
    It wasn’t even noon yet, but a wave of hot-tar smell blasted my face as soon as I opened the door at the top of the stairs. Heatwaves rose from the rooftop and blurred the scrubby pine trees in the distance.
    The surface burned through my flip-flop soles as I started toward the far railing near the nest. It was high, and my heart was beating in my throat.
Keep walking; it’s perfectly safe.
    If I was ever going to do anything fun again without being scared of falling, I had to start sometime. And the small tastes of life-without-headaches that I was getting with my new meds made me want my old life back more than ever.
    I watched my feet—one step at a time, slowly, one foot in front of the other—and didn’t look up until I reached the railing.
    My knees wobbled, but I took a deep breath and willed myself to look up.
    Up at the nest. Not down.
    It was higher than the roof, higher than I could really see, but I held on to the railing, my heart shivering in my chest, and watched. I could hear the mother osprey rustling around. I shifted my weight from foot to foot, but the heat and the tar smell got to be too much. My head was starting to hurt, and my breakfast felt sour in my stomach. I’d have to look for hatchlings some other time, when I felt better, when the sun wasn’t so hot.
    As I was turning for the door, there was a high-pitched “
Eep! Eep! Eeeep!
” The mama bird was standing right up in that nest, yelling.
At me?
    I turned back and watched her watch me, and somehow, that slowed my heart, soothed my stomach and my nerves. After a few minutes, two little heads popped up at the side of the nest.
    Slowly—I didn’t want to upset her again—I raised my binoculars to see the babies more clearly. I was expecting soft and cuddly,but what I saw through the lenses were hooked-beak, yellow-eyed, yeeping creatures that looked more like scrawny baby dinosaurs than birds. Their feathers weren’t fluffy; they were matted and stuck to their heads, and the babies were shrieking, “
Eep! Eeep!
”
    I stepped forward to the railing and glanced down for a second.
    I shouldn’t have. The ground was so far away it made my stomach twist and my head spin. The air felt so hot, so smothering, I thought I might pass out.
    I held the railing tight and looked for a place to get out of the sun. There was only a tiny column of shade cast by one of the exhaust pipes rising up from the kitchen, so I shuffled over to it and crouched down in the relative cool.
    The birds were still screaming at me, but I tried to block everything out.
Breathe. Breathe. You’re okay. Just breathe.
    It’s a wonder I could hear it over the osprey chorus, but I did. The door to the roof creaked, and then came a man’s voice. “Yeah . . . I’m here. Hang on.” It was Dr. Ames. The door slammed. “Okay, now what?”
    I peeked around the edge of the exhaust pipe and saw the back of Dr. Ames’s head, cell phone pressed to his ear as he tipped back and forth from his heels to his toes, looking out over the swamp. They told us our cell phones wouldn’t work here; we had to make all our calls from the offices. But
his
phone seemed fine—he’d used it out by the pool, too, on the day we arrived. Did he have some kind of special satellite connection?
    I knew I should come out from the shadows and say hi, let him know I was there, but it already felt weird . . . like he’d think I was hiding. Spying on him. So I stayed where I was and listened.
    â€œI don’t know how long we can keep it quiet. I talked to Gunther, and he . . . yeah. I know.”
    A breeze ruffled the pine tree, and the mama osprey flew off.
    â€œI told him what we decided a long time ago. This project gets finished. No matter