Lili got a kite for her birthday. It was red, with a long tail made of yellow ribbons, and it was still folded in its paper bag when she carried it to the park behind the bakery.
Saturday brought wind. The kind of wind that pulls at coats and makes the washing dance on the line.
Bence was already in the park with his own kite, a blue one his father had built out of a bin bag and two thin sticks.
“Ready?” he called.
“Ready,” said Lili.
They ran. Bence’s kite went up first. Then Lili’s went up, past the lamp post, past the chestnut tree at the corner, and the yellow tail wrote small loops in the sky.
Lili laughed so hard that she let the string slip through both hands.
The kite pulled, turned over once, and sailed away over the wall at the end of the park.
That wall belonged to the last house on the street. Behind it stood an old apple tree with one crooked branch, and the kite settled in that branch like a red bird that had decided to rest.
Bence ran to the wall and stood on his toes. He could not see over it.
“Whose house is that?” he asked.
“Mr Simon’s,” said Lili. “He goes shopping on Tuesdays. My mother says he has lived here longer than the tree.”
There was a gate in the wall, painted green, with a chain on it and a small sign.
The sign said: PLEASE KNOCK. WAIT. I WILL COME.
Lili knocked. The sound was small in the wide afternoon. They waited. Nothing moved in the house, except a curtain, once, in an upstairs window.
So they knocked again.
The door opened. Mr Simon was not tall and not short, he wore a brown coat indoors, and he looked at them the way people look at a bill they were not expecting.
“Yes?”
“Our kite is in your apple tree,” said Lili. “May we get it, please?”
Mr Simon looked at the apple tree. He looked at the kite hanging there, and at the yellow tail shifting in the wind.
“I don’t climb trees,” he said, and shut the door.
Bence kicked the wall, which hurt his foot. They sat on the pavement with their backs against the green gate. Lili thought about the kite getting rained on. Then she thought about the kite getting dark. Then she thought about it staying up there all winter, with the leaves falling around it.
The gate opened behind them, and they had to stand up quickly.
Mr Simon had put on boots. In his hands he carried a long bamboo pole with a hook at the end, the kind used for pulling down apples.
“Move,” he said.
The pole reached the branch, but not the kite. Ten centimetres short, maybe more. Mr Simon tried from the other side of the tree. The hook touched the tail, and the tail slid away.
He said something under his breath.
Then he walked to his shed and came back with a ladder. He set it against the trunk and began to climb. He climbed slowly: one rung, then a pause, then the next rung. Lili held the bottom of the ladder with both hands, without being asked.
Halfway up, he stopped.
“There’s a nest,” he said.
Lili looked. High on the crooked branch, right above her kite, sat a small cup of mud and grass. Something grey and white was sitting inside it, very still.
“Eggs,” said Mr Simon. “Swallows. They came back this year.”
So he could not shake the branch. He had to climb into the tree itself, which he did, slowly, until he could put one hand around the frame of the kite and lift it out of the leaves, careful as a plate. The nest did not move at all.
He came down. He handed the kite to Lili. One stick was split, and the red paper had a hole in it.
“It will fly again,” he said. “Not today.”
“I can mend it,” said Lili.
Mr Simon looked up at the apple tree for a while.
“Keep it away from the tree until the eggs are open,” he said. “Three weeks. Maybe four.”
“I promise,” said Lili.
“After that the young ones need six weeks to learn the sky,” he said. “Then you can fly wherever you like.”
He took his ladder and his pole and went back inside. The gate closed with a click that was not unfriendly.
Bence and Lili carried the kite home. They taped the split stick. They cut a new tail from old wrapping paper, longer than the first one.
Every Saturday after that, they flew their kites over the park, near the wall but never across it. Lili counted the weeks and told Bence each time: one, two, three.
On the fourth Saturday, three swallows came out over the apple tree. They were quick and dark against the clouds, and they did not stay up long, but they did fly, and Lili held her string and watched them.
At the green gate, Mr Simon stood with his hands in his pockets. When he saw her looking, he lifted one hand, and Lili lifted hers.
Then she ran back to Bence and the kites, and the wind took them up.
