by Shea Ernshaw
“I only have a two-hour shift,” Rose says, hoisting her book bag over to the other shoulder. “Meet at nine on the dock?”
“Sure.”
“You know, if you had a cell phone like a normal person, I could just text you later.”
“Cell phones don’t work on the island,” I point out for the hundredth time.
She blows out an exasperated breath. “Which is catastrophically inconvenient for me.” As if she were the one who has to endure the lack of cell service.
“You’ll survive,” I say with a smirk, and she smiles back, the freckles across her nose and upper cheeks catching the sunlight like constellations of golden sand.
The door behind her whips open with a fluttering of chimes and bells clanking against the glass. Her mom, Rosalie Alba, steps out into the sunlight, blocking her gaze with a hand as if she were seeing the sun for the first time since last summer.
“Penny,” Mrs. Alba says, dropping her hand. “How is your mother?”
“The same,” I admit. Mrs. Alba and my mom were friends once, in a very casual way. Sometimes they’d meet for tea on Saturday mornings, or Mrs. Alba would come out to Lumiere Island and she and my mom would bake biscuits or blackberry pie when the thorny blackberry bushes began to overtake the island and my dad would threaten to burn them all down.
Mrs. Alba is also one of the only people in town who still asks about my mom—who still cares. It’s been three years since my father disappeared, and it’s as if the town has forgotten about him entirely. Like he never lived here at all. But it’s far easier to endure their blank stares than it was to hear the rumors and speculation that spun through town in the days after he vanished. John Talbot never belonged here in the first place, people had whispered. He abandoned his wife and daughter; he always hated living in Sparrow; he ran away with another woman; he went mad living on the island and waded out into the sea.
He was an outsider, and he had never been fully accepted by the locals. They seemed relieved when he was gone. As if he deserved it. But Mom had grown up here, gone to Sparrow High, then met my father at college in Portland. They were in love, and I know he never would have abandoned us. We were happy. He was happy.
Something far stranger happened to him three years ago. One day he was here. The next he wasn’t.
“Will you give this to her?” Mrs. Alba asks, extending her palm where she’s holding a small pink box with white polka-dot ribbon.
I take it from her, running the ribbon through my fingertips. “What flavor?”
“Lemon and lavender. A new recipe I’ve been experimenting with.” Mrs. Alba does not bake ordinary cakes for ordinary cravings. Her tiny forgetful cakes are intended to make you forget the worst thing that’s ever happened to you—to wipe away bad memories. I’m not entirely convinced they actually work. But locals and summer tourists devour the tiny cakes as if they were a potent cure, a remedy for any unwanted thought. Mrs. Potts, who lives in a narrow house on Alabaster Street, claims that after eating a particularly decadent chocolate fig basil cake, she no longer could recall the day her neighbor Wayne Bailey’s dog bit her in the calf and made her bleed, leaving a scar that looks like a spire of lightning. And Mr. Rivera, the town postman, says he only vaguely recollects the day his wife left him for a plumber who lives in Chestnut Bay an hour’s drive north. Still, I suspect it might only be the heaping cups of sugar and peculiar flavors in Mrs. Alba’s cakes that for a brief moment allow a person to think of nothing else but the intermixing earthiness of lavender and the tartness of lemon, which not even their worst memories can rise above.
When my father vanished, Mrs. Alba began sending me home with every flavor of cake imaginable—raspberry lime tart, hazelnut espresso, seaweed coconut—in hopes they might help my mother forget what had happened. But nothing has broken through her grief: a stiff cloud not easily carried away with the wind.
“Thank you,” I say, and Mrs. Alba smiles her wide, toothy grin. Her eyes are like pools of warmth, of kindness. And I’ve always felt comforted by her. Mrs. Alba is Spanish, but Rose’s father is true-blooded Irish, born in Dublin, and Rose managed to get all her father’s features, much to her displeasure. “See you at nine,” I say to Rose, and she and her mom vanish into the shop to bake as many forgetful cakes as they can before the tourists arrive tomorrow morning by the busload.
* * *
The eve before the start of Swan season has always felt burdensome to me. It’s like a dark cloud I can’t shake.
The knowing of what’s coming, the death that creeps up over the town like fate clawing at the door of every shop and home. I can feel it in the air, in the spray of the sea, in the hollow spaces between raindrops. The sisters are coming.
Every room at the three bed-and-breakfasts along the bay front is booked solid for the next three weeks until the end of Swan season—which will come on midnight of the summer solstice. Rooms facing the sea go for twice what can be charged for the rooms facing inland. People like to push open their windows and step out onto their balconies to hear the beckoning call of the Swan sisters singing from the deep harbor.
A handful of early tourists have already found their way into Sparrow, dragging their luggage into lobbies or snapping photos of the harbor. Asking where to get the best coffee or hot cup of soup because their first day in town usually feels the coldest—a chill that settles between the bones and won’t go away.
I hate this time of year, as do most locals. But it’s not the influx of tourists that bothers me; it’s the exploitation, the spectacle of a season that is a curse on this town.
At the dock, I toss my book bag onto one of the bench seats inside the skiff. All along the starboard side, dotted into the white paint are scrapes and dings like Morse code. My dad used to repaint the skiff every spring, but it’s been neglected for the last three years. Sometimes I feel just like that hull: scarred and dented and left to rust since he vanished somewhere out at sea.
I place the small cake box onto the seat beside my bag, and then walk around to the bow, about to untie the front line when I hear the hollow clomp of footsteps moving down the dock behind me.
I’m still holding the bowline when I notice a boy standing several feet back, holding what looks like a crumpled piece of paper in his left hand. His face is partly obscured by the hood of his sweatshirt, and a backpack hangs heavy from his shoulders. “I’m looking for Penny Talbot,” he says, his voice like cold water from the tap, his jaw a hardened line. “I was told I could find her down here.”
I stand up fully, trying to see his eyes, but there is a shadow cutting over the top half of his face. “Why are you looking for her?” I ask, not entirely certain I want to tell him that I am Penny Talbot just yet.
“I found this up at the diner . . . the Chowder,” he says with an edge of uncertainty, like he’s not sure he’s remembered the name right. The Chowder is a small diner at the end of Shipley Pier that extends out over the water, and has been voted Sparrow’s “Best Diner” for the last ten years in the local Catch newspaper—a small print paper that employs a total of two people, one of which is Thor Grantson because his father owns the paper. Thor is in the same class as me. During the school year, local kids overtake the Chowder, but in the summer months we have to share the worn stools along the bar and the tables on the outdoor deck with the horde of tourists. “I’m looking for work,” he adds, holding out the limp piece of paper for me to see, and then I realize what it is. I posted a note on the cork bulletin board inside the Chowder nearly a year ago, asking for help maintaining the lighthouse out on Lumiere Island, since my mom had become nearly incapable of doing anything and I couldn’t manage on my own. I had forgotten about posting it, and when no one ever came looking to fill the position, and the scribbled, handwritten note was eventually buried beneath other flyers and business cards, I made do.
But now, somehow this outsider has found it among the clutter of papers tacked to the bulletin board. “I don’t need the help anymore,” I s
ay flatly, tossing the bowline into the boat—and also inadvertently revealing that I am indeed Penny Talbot. I don’t want an outsider working on the island—someone who I know nothing about. Who I can’t trust. When I had posted the listing, I had hoped a laid-off fisherman or maybe someone from my school might have responded. But no one did.
“You found someone else?” he asks.
“No. I just don’t need anyone now.”
He scrubs a hand over his head, pushing back the hood that had shrouded his face, revealing stark, deep green eyes the color of the forest after it rains. He doesn’t look like a drifter: grimy or like he’s been showering in gas station bathrooms. He’s my age, maybe a year or two older. But he still has the distinct look of an outsider: guarded and wary of his surroundings. He clenches his jaw and bites his lower lip, looking back over his shoulder to the shoreline, the town twinkling beneath the afternoon sun like it’s been sprinkled with glitter.
“Are you here for the Swan season?” I ask, flattening my gaze on him.
“The what?” He looks back at me, a measure of hardness in every move he makes: the twitch of an eyelash, the shifting of his lips before he speaks.
“Then why are you here?” He obviously has no idea what the Swan season is.
“It was the last town on the bus line.” This is true. Sparrow is the final stop on a bus route that meanders up the coast of Oregon, stopping in several quaint seaside villages until it meets a dead end in Sparrow. The rocky ridgeline blocks any roads from continuing up the shore, so traffic has to be diverted inland for several miles.
“You picked a bad time to end up in Sparrow,” I say, unhooking the last rope but holding on to it to keep the skiff from drifting back from the dock.
He pushes his hands into his jean pockets. “Why’s that?”
“Tomorrow is June first.”
By his stiff, unaltered expression, I can tell he really has no idea what he’s just stumbled into.
“Sorry I can’t help you,” I say, instead of trying to explain all the reasons why he’d be better off just catching tomorrow’s bus back out of here. “You can look for work at the cannery or on one of the fishing boats, but they usually don’t hire outsiders.”
He nods, biting his lip again and looking past me to the ocean, to the island in the distance. “What about a place to stay?”
“You can try one of the bed-and-breakfasts, but they’re usually booked this time of year. Tourist season starts tomorrow.”
“June first?” he echoes, as if clarifying this mysterious date that obviously means something to me but nothing to him.
“Yeah.” I step inside the boat and pull the engine cord. “Good luck.” And I leave him standing on the dock as I motor across the bay toward the island. I look back several times and he’s still there, watching the water as if unsure what to do next, until the final time I glance back and he’s gone.
THREE
The bonfire throws sparks up into the silvery night sky. Rose and I scramble down the uneven trail to Coppers Beach, the only stretch of shore in Sparrow that isn’t bound in by rocks and steep cliffs. It’s a narrow length of speckled white and black sand that ends at an underwater cave that only a few of the bravest—and stupidest—boys have ever attempted to swim into and then back out of.
“Did you give her the forgetful cake?” Rose asks, like a doctor who’s prescribed medication and wants to know if there were any ill side effects or positive results.
After returning to Lumiere Island, after showering in the drafty bathroom across the hall from my bedroom then staring at my small, rectangular closet, trying to decide what to wear to tonight’s event—finally settling on white jeans and a thick black sweater that will keep out the night’s chill—I went into the kitchen and presented my mom with Mrs. Alba’s forgetful cake. She had been sitting at the table staring into a cup of tea.
“Another one?” she asked drearily when I slid the cake in front of her. In Sparrow, superstition holds as much weight as the law of gravity or the predictability of the tide charts, and for most locals Mrs. Alba’s cakes have the same likelihood of helping Mom as would a doctor’s bottle of pills. So she obediently took small bites of the lavender and lemon petit four, careful to not spill a crumb onto her oversized tan sweater, the sleeves rolled halfway up her pale, bony forearms.
I don’t think she even realized today is the last day of school, that I just finished my junior year of high school, and that tomorrow is June first. It’s not like she’s completely lost all sense of reality, but the edges of her world have dulled. Like hitting mute on the remote control. You can still see the picture buzzing on the TV; the colors are all there, but there’s no sound.
“I thought I saw him today,” she muttered. “Standing on the shore below the cliff, looking up at me.” Her lips quivered slightly, her fingers dropping a few crumbs of cake onto the plate in front of her. “But it was just a shadow. A trick of the light,” she amended.
“I’m sorry,” I told her, touching her arm softly. I can still hear the sound of the screen door slamming shut the night my father left the house, recall the way he looked walking down the path toward the dock, his shoulders bent away from the spray of the sea, his gait weary. I watched him leave on that stormy night three years earlier, and he never came back.
He simply vanished from the island.
His sailboat was still at the dock, his wallet on the side table by the front door of the house. No trace. No note. No clues. “Sometimes I think I see him too,” I tried to console her, but she stared at the cake in front of her, the features of her face soft and distant as she silently finished the last few bites.
Sitting beside her at the kitchen table, I couldn’t help but see myself in her: the long straight brown hair, same liquid blue eyes and tragically pale skin that rarely sees the sun in this dreary place. But while she is polished and graceful with ballerina arms and gazelle legs, I have always felt knock-kneed and awkward. When I was younger, I used to walk bent forward, trying to appear shorter than the boys in my class. Even now, I often feel like a puppet whose master keeps pulling all the wrong strings so that I fumble and trip and hold my hands clumsily out in front of me.
“I don’t think cake is going to fix her,” I tell Rose as we walk single file down the path lined with dry grass and thorny bushes. “The memory of my dad’s disappearance is so solidified in her mind that no amount of local remedies will strip it out.”
“Well, I don’t think my mom has given up yet. Today she was talking about a new mixture of bee pollen and primrose that she thinks might help unsnag the worst of memories.” We finally reach the beach and Rose hooks her arm through mine, our feet kicking up sand as we make our way to the bonfire.
Most of the girls are wearing long, layered dresses with low necklines and ribbons tied in their hair. Even Rose has on a pale green gown made of lace and chiffon that sweeps across the sand when she moves, dragging bits of driftwood and shells along with her.
Olivia Greene and Lola Arthurs, best friends and the rulers of Sparrow’s social elite, are dancing on the other side of the bonfire when we enter the crowd, obviously already intoxicated, which is no surprise to anyone. Their hair is an identical shade of gothic black with short, severe bangs, dyed and trimmed just two weeks ago for the Swan season. Normally, their locks are bleached white—long and beachy. Which will probably return in a month, when the Swan season is over and they aren’t feeling the need to dress like death. But Olivia and Lola love the dramatic, love dressing up, love being the center of attention at any social gathering.
Last year they pierced each other’s noses in defiance of their parents—Olivia’s is a silver stud in her left nostril, Lola’s is a hoop through the right. And their nails are painted a matching macabre black, a perfect complement to the hair. They spin in circles beside the bonfire, waving their arms in the air and lolling their heads from side to side as if to mimic the embodiment of a Swam sister. Although I doubt the Swan sisters ever did
anything so idiotic-looking two hundred years ago.
Someone hands Rose a beer and she in turn hands it to me to take the first sip. On weekends, sometimes we’ll sneak beers or a half-finished bottle of white wine from her parents’ fridge then get buzzed while stretched out on her bedroom floor listening to music—lately it’s been country hits, our most recent obsession—and flipping through last year’s yearbook, speculating about who’s going to hook up this year and who might be inhabited by a Swan sister come summer.
I take a swig and look through the crowd at all the faces I recognize, at people who I’ve gone to school with since grade school, and I have the sharp thought that I hardly know any of them. Not really. I’ve had passing conversations with a few: Did you write down the chapters we’re supposed to read tonight in Mr. Sullivan’s third-period history? Can I borrow a pen? Do you have a cell phone charger I can use? But to call any of them friends wouldn’t just be a stretch, it would be an all-out lie. Maybe it’s partly because I know most of them will leave this town eventually—they will go off to college and have lives far more interesting than mine. We’re all just passing ships; no point forming friendships that won’t last.
And while Rose is not exactly climbing the social hierarchy at Sparrow High, she at least makes an effort to be friendly. She smiles at people in the halls, starts chatty conversations with her locker neighbors, and this year Gigi Kline, cheerleading captain for our struggling basketball team, even invited her to try out for the squad. They were friends once—Gigi and Rose—in elementary school. Best friends, in fact. But friendships are more fluid in grade school; nothing feels as permanent. And though they aren’t exactly close anymore, Rose and Gigi have remained friendly. A tribute to Rose’s kind nature.