by Shea Ernshaw
“You can’t protect me,” I tell him. “Just like I can’t protect you.”
Olga hops down from the couch and trots between us to the front door, stretching up on her hind legs to scratch at the wood. She begins to mew, and it wakes Otis.
“I can try,” Bo says, moving closer, and in his eyes I see the ocean, and it draws me into him like the tide against the sand.
His hands find me in the firelight, grazing my wrists, my arms, then his palms slide up to my jaw, through my hair, fingerprints on my skin, and for a moment I believe him. Maybe he can keep me safe; maybe this thing threading between us is enough to keep all the terrors at bay. I suck in a breath and try to steady the two halves of my heart, but when his lips brush against mine, I lose all rooting to the earth. My heart turns wild. His fingers pull me closer, and I press myself against him, needing the steadiness of his heartbeat inside his chest and the balance of his arms. My own fingers slide up beneath his shirt: feeling the firmness of his torso, air filling his lungs. He is strong, stronger than most. Maybe he can survive this town, survive Marguerite. Survive me. I dig my fingers into his skin, his shoulders, losing myself to him. He feels like everything—all that’s left. The world has been shredded around me. But this, this, might be enough to smooth the brittle edges of my once-beating heart.
The fire makes the heat between us almost unbearable. But we fold ourselves together among the pages of books and the blankets scattered across the floor. The wind roars outside. His fingers trace the moons of my hip bones, my thighs, my shivering heartbeat. He kisses down my throat, the place where my secrets are kept. He kisses my collarbone, where the skin is thin and delicate, patterns of freckles like a sailor’s map. He kisses so softly it feels like wings or a whisper. He kisses and I slip, slip, slip beneath his touch. Crumbling. His lips inch beneath my shirt, along the curves of my body. Valleys and hills. Breathing promises he’ll keep against my skin. My clothes feel burdensome and heavy—clothes that belong to him, boxers and a T-shirt—so I peel them away.
My mind spins, my breathing catches then rises again. My skin crackles, set alight, and his touch feels infinite, fathomless, a wave that rolls ashore but never ends. He is gentle and sweet, and I never want his hands, his lips, to be anywhere else but against me. The morning sunlight is just starting to break above the horizon, soft pinks sifting through the windows, but I am breaking here on the floor, shattering into pieces as he whispers my name and I see only flecks of light shivering across my vision. And after, he holds his lips above mine, breathing the same air, my skin shimmering from the heat. Sweat dewing the curves of my body. He kisses my nose, my forehead, my earlobes.
I have doomed him, kept him here, made him the prey of Marguerite Swan. He is caught in the tempest of a season that could kill him. He needs to leave Sparrow, escape this wretched place. Yet I need him to stay. I need him.
JOHN TALBOT
On June fifth, a week before he vanished, John Talbot entered the Olive Street Tea & Bookhouse. He had special ordered four books a week earlier, titles he had researched online that contained real-life accounts of hexes and curses that had been documented in other unfortunate towns.
It was not unusual for locals in Sparrow to take an interest in the Swan sisters. They often collected newspaper clippings and old photographs of the town from when the sisters were still alive. They shared stories at the Silver Dollar Pub over too many beers, and then stumbled down to the docks and shouted into the night about their sons and brothers who they’ve lost. And sometimes they even became obsessed. Sorrow and desperation can make cracks along the mind.
But John Talbot never shared his theories. He never got drunk and lamented the tragedy of Sparrow over a pint. He never told anyone about the collection of books he kept stashed in Anchor Cottage. Not even his wife.
And on that bright, warm afternoon, as he left the bookstore, there was frenzy in his shadowed eyes, lines of worry carved along his forehead. His gaze darted side to side, as if the sunlight were unbearable, and he pushed through the horde of tourists back down to the skiff waiting at the dock.
Those who saw him that day would later say he had the look of someone overcome with sea madness. The island had been known to drive people insane. The salt air, the isolation. It had finally gotten to him.
John Talbot had lost his mind.
THIRTEEN
Two days slip by uncounted.
Bo’s fingers coil through my hair, he watches me sleep, and he keeps me warm when the wind tears through the cracks in the cottage windows in the early hours of morning. He slides himself beside me beneath the wool blanket and runs his fingertips down my arm. I’ve forgotten about everything else but this little room, this fireplace, this spot in my heart that aches to the point of bursting.
On the third day, we wake and walk down the rows of the newly revived orchard trees under a tepid afternoon sky; the leaves are beginning to unfurl and the flowers just starting to break open. This season’s apples and pears might still be stunted and hard and inedible. But by next year, hopefully our hard work will produce fat, sun-sweetened fruit.
“What were you like in school?” I ask, craning my head upward to soak up the sun. Little white spots dance across my closed eyelids.
“What do you mean?”
“Were you popular?”
He reaches out a hand and touches the craggy end of a branch, small green leaves sliding through his palm. “No.”
“But you had friends?”
“A few.” He glances at me, his jade-green eyes spearing a hole straight through my center.
“Did you play sports?” I’m trying to piece together the person he was, the person he is, and I find it hard to imagine him anywhere else but here in Sparrow, on this island with me.
He shakes his head, smiling a little, like he finds it funny that I would even ask this. “I worked for my parents every day after school, so I didn’t have much time for friends or group sports.”
“Your parents’ farm?”
“It’s actually a vineyard.”
I pause near the end of a row. “A vineyard?” I repeat. “Like grapes?”
“Yeah. It’s just a small family winery, but it does pretty well.” It’s not exactly the farm where I imagined him toiling: hands-in-the-earth, greasy, cow-manure type of farming. But I’m sure it was still hard work.
“It’s not what I pictured,” I tell him.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.” I examine him, eyeing his faded gray sweatshirt and jeans. “Do your parents know where you are?”
“No. They didn’t want me to come here. They said I just needed to let Kyle go. That’s how they coped with his death, by ignoring it. But I knew I had to come. So when I graduated this year, I hitchhiked down the coast. I never told them I was leaving.”
“Have you talked to them since you left?”
He shakes his head, pushing his hands into his jean pockets.
“They’re probably worried about you,” I say.
“I can’t call them. I don’t know what I’d say.” He looks at me. “How do I explain what’s going on here? That Kyle didn’t kill himself but was drowned by one of three sisters who died two centuries ago?”
“Maybe you don’t tell them that,” I offer. “But you should probably let them know you’re okay . . . tell them something. Even a lie.”
“Yeah.” His voice dips low. “Maybe.”
We reach the end of the orchard, where one of the dead apple trees is now gone, torched down to its roots.
“When this is all over,” I say, “after the summer solstice, will you go home?”
“No.” He pauses to look back down the rows of perfectly spaced fruit trees. A small gray bird bursts out from the limbs of one tree and lands on the branch of another. “I won’t go back there. Not now. Before Kyle died, I always thought I’d stay and work for my parents after high school. Take over the family business. It was what they expected of me. My brother would be the one t
o move away and live a different life, to escape. And I was okay with that. But after he died . . .” He draws in his lips and looks up through the limbs of an apple tree, buds pushing out from the green stalks. “I knew I wanted something different. Something that was mine. I had always been the one who would stay behind while Kyle saw the world. But not anymore.”
“So now what do you want?” I ask, my voice soft, not wanting to crack apart his thoughts.
“I want to be out there.” He nods to the western edge of the island. “On the water.” He looks back at me like he’s not sure I’ll understand. “When my dad taught me to sail, I knew I loved it, but I didn’t think I’d ever have the chance to really do it. Maybe now I can. I could buy a sailboat, leave—maybe I won’t ever come back.”
“Sounds like an escape plan. Like you want to start a whole new life.”
His eyes flicker, and he squares his shoulders to face me. “I do. I have money; I’ve been saving most of my life.” His stare turns cool and serious. “You could come with me.”
I draw in both my lips, holding back a betraying smile.
“You don’t have to stay in this town—you could escape too, leave this place behind if it’s what you want.”
“I have school.”
“I’ll wait for you.” And he says it like he actually means it.
“But my mom,” I say. . . . Just another excuse.
His mouth hardens in place.
“It’s just not that easy for me,” I explain. I feel wrenched into halves, torn between the wanting and the prison that is this island. “It’s not a no. But I also can’t say yes.”
I can see the hurt in his eyes, that he doesn’t understand even if he wants to. But he slides his fingers around my waist, gently, like he’s afraid I’ll spook like one of the island birds, and he pulls me to him. “Someday you’ll find a worthy enough reason to leave this place,” he says.
I once read a poem about love being fragile, as thin as glass and easily broken.
But that is not the kind of love that survives in a place like this. It must be hardy and enduring. It must have grit.
He’s strong, I think, the same thought I had the other night. I blink up at him, the sunlight scattering through the trees, making the features of his face soft at the edges. Stronger than most boys. He could survive this place. He’s made of something different, his heart weathered and battered just like mine, forged of hard metals and earth. We’ve both lost things, lost people. We are broken but fighting to stay alive. Maybe that’s why I need him—he feels like I feel, wants like I want. He’s stirred loose something inside my chest, a cold center where blood now pumps, a hint of life, of green pushing up toward sunlight.
I might love him.
And it has tilted my universe off center, the frayed edges of my life starting to unravel. Loving someone is dangerous. It gives you something to lose.
I lift up to my tiptoes, his lips hovering over mine, and I know he’s looking for answers in the steady calm of my stare. But he won’t find them there, so he presses his mouth to mine, as if he might press some truth out of me. But I can only give him this moment, and I climb my fingers up his chest, breathing him in, tasting the salt air on his lips.
I wish suddenly that I could promise him forever, promise him me. But it would be a lie.
* * *
I try to call Rose. I leave messages on her phone. I tell her mom to have her call me back, but she never does.
Where is she? Why won’t she call me? But I can’t leave the island. I can’t risk leaving Bo alone—I’m afraid Olivia might try to lure him into the harbor again.
But after several days, I can’t take it anymore. The not knowing is making me edgy and nervous.
I wake up early, hoping to slip out of the cottage before Bo sees me. Olga trails me to the door; her eyes are watery from the cold, and she blinks, as if curious about what I’m doing awake at this hour.
I pull on my raincoat hanging from a metal hook beside the door then turn the knob; a swift breeze rips into the cottage, spraying raindrops over my face. Olga zips past my feet and trots up the boardwalk. But then she stops short, ears alert, tail swishing back and forth. Something has caught her attention.
It’s still an hour or so before sunrise, but the sky has turned aqueous and lucid, morning pressing down, breaking apart the night clouds and sheering the island terrain in a hue of blush pink. And in the distance, I see what Olga sees: A light is wavering across the water, and an engine is sputtering toward the island dock.
“What is it?” Bo asks, his voice a shock to my ears. I wasn’t expecting him to be awake. The door is partway open, and I glance back inside. He’s standing up, rubbing his face.
“Someone’s here,” I say.
FOURTEEN
A boat knocks loudly against the dock, motoring too fast across the water. It’s Heath’s boat; I recognize it as the same one we took out into the harbor to make wishes at the pirates’ ship when we found the first body.
But Heath is not driving it. It’s Rose.
And someone is with her: a girl.
Bo grabs my arm, stopping me from getting any closer to the boat as Rose struggles to tie a rope around one of the cleats on the dock. He recognizes the girl before I do. It’s Gigi Kline.
“Rose?” I ask. And she notices us for the first time.
“I didn’t have anywhere else to go,” she says frantically when her eyes meet mine. She looks scared, in a state of shock, and her red wavy hair is windblown like a person who’s recently escaped from an asylum.
“What did you do?” I ask.
“I had to help her. And I couldn’t hide her in town, they’d find her. So I brought her here. I thought she’d be safe. You could hide her in the lighthouse or the other cottage. I don’t know—I panicked. I didn’t know what else to do.” She’s speaking too fast, and her eyes keep flicking from Gigi back to me.
“You broke Gigi out of the boathouse?” Bo asks.
Gigi is sitting silently in the boat, meekly, innocently. Her façade is well practiced as she makes slow, measured movements. Each blink of an eyelash looks rehearsed.
“I . . . I had to.”
“No, you didn’t,” I snap. “This was a very bad idea, Rose.”
“I couldn’t just let them keep her locked up like that. It was cruel! And they could just as easily do it to anyone else. To me—to us.”
“And they probably will when they find out what you’ve done.”
“Penny, please,” she says, stepping from the boat, palms lifted in the air. “You have to help her.”
I didn’t realize Gigi’s imprisonment upset Rose this deeply, enough that she would break her out and bring her here. I know they were friends once, years ago, but I never imagined she’d do this. She couldn’t stand to see someone she once cared about tied up and suffering. Made to be a cruel spectacle. It didn’t seem right to Rose from the start. And I can’t fault her for that.
“This is dangerous, Rose. You shouldn’t have freed her.” I lock eyes with Gigi, and with Aurora tucked inside her—watching like an animal waiting until it’s safe to come out of its hiding place. She didn’t have to enchant Davis or Lon to save her, Rose did it out of the goodness of her heart. But she’s set loose a monster, and she doesn’t even realize it.
“Maybe it’s better that she’s here,” Bo whispers to me, out of earshot of Rose and Gigi.
I feel my eyebrows slant into a scowl. “What are you talking about?”
“We can keep an eye on her, lock her up, make sure she doesn’t kill anyone else.”
I know why he wants to do this: He wants to ask Gigi about his brother. And if he decides that it was Aurora—hidden inside of Gigi—who killed his brother, then what? Will he try to kill her? This is a mistake, I can feel it, but both Bo and Rose are staring at me, waiting for me to decide what to do.
This can’t be happening.
“Fine. Get her out of the boat. We’ll take her to Old Fisherman�
��s Cottage. Then we’ll decide what to do next.”
* * *
Sometimes I think this island is a magnet for bad things, the center of it all. Like a black hole pulling us toward a fate we can’t prevent. And other times I think this island is the only thing keeping me sane, the only familiar thing I have left.
Or maybe it’s me that’s the black hole. And everyone around me can’t help but be swallowed up, drowned and trapped in my orbit. But I also know that there’s nothing I can do to change it. The island and I are the same.
I lead the way to Old Fisherman’s Cottage, Rose trailing behind me, then Gigi, and Bo bringing up the back. He wants to make sure Gigi doesn’t make a run for it.
The door is unlocked, and the interior is darker and damper and colder than Bo’s cottage. I flip on a light switch, but nothing happens. I walk across the living room, furnished with a single wood rocking chair and a burgundy upholstered ottoman that doesn’t match anything else in the room. I find a floor lamp, kneel down to plug it in, and it immediately blinks on.
But the light does little to brighten the appearance of the cottage.
“It’s only temporary,” Rose assures Gigi. But I’m not sure what Rose thinks will happen to change the current circumstances. Kidnapping Gigi from the boathouse will only make Davis and Lon more suspicious. They will assume one of the Swan sisters broke her out, and now they’ll be looking for her. And Rose and I will likely be their first suspects since both she and I were caught sneaking into the boathouse—and now I know why Rose was there. She was planning this all along.
“We’ll bring you wood for the fireplace,” I say to Gigi, but her eyes don’t lift from the floor. She’s staring at a corner of the living room rug, the edges frayed—probably chewed up by mice.
“And I’ll find you some new clothes,” Rose offers, looking down at Gigi’s stained shirt and jeans.
I tug at the only two windows in the cottage, seeing if they’ll slide up in their casings, but they don’t even budge—both are rusted shut. This cottage is much older than the one Bo is staying in. And these windows probably haven’t been opened in two decades. I walk back to the door, not wanting to be in the same room as Gigi any longer than I have to.