Summer of Salt

by Katrina Leno

  “Absolutely they do, no doubt in my mind. You just have to shift his priorities a tiny bit.”

  “Oh, what, now that you have a date you think you’re the dating expert? Are you going to open up a match-maker’s business on the island? You’re so weird.”

  “Look—Annabella isn’t even here yet; he can’t spend all of his time out looking for her.”

  “He can,” Mary said mournfully. “Trust me, he can.”

  “Well, then, maybe you need to shift your priorities.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning maybe it’s time for you to get a little more interested in Annabella.”

  “Ah,” Mary said, doing the chin-stroking thing again. “Intriguing idea.”

  “You know practically everything about her: where she likes to nest, what her favorite color is—”

  “It’s lilac, duh, that’s why Liesel only wears purple.”

  “See how much you have to offer Harrison? Now you just have to show him that.”

  I could tell she was thinking about it.

  “Are you actually a dating expert?” she asked after a few seconds. “Oh, maybe that’s your thing, Georgie! Maybe your”—she looked around and lowered her voice for dramatic effect—“magical power is being a dating expert!”

  “Being a dating expert is not my thing,” I said, rolling my eyes.

  “Maybe rolling your eyes is your thing.”

  “I thought we agreed that we weren’t going to talk about this anymore.”

  “If you don’t get yours, I’m going to renounce mine. I’ve already decided,” Mary said, suddenly serious, ditching her comic and pulling herself up to a sitting position.

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “I’ve already looked up the spell; it’s in Mom’s book. It’s not hard, I can do it.”

  “Mom would kill you. And that’s not even what I want.”

  “It’s not fair. I can’t do that to you. Mine is useless anyway; I’ve never even gotten more than ten feet off the ground.”

  “It will grow over time, and you’re not renouncing it. Absolutely not.”

  “The night of our birthday. If you don’t have yours by then, that’s it for me. No more. Renounced. A return to normalcy. You can’t stop me.”

  “You can’t return to normalcy if you’ve never been normal.”

  When Mary was finally born, five hours after I was, the doctor had a hard time holding on to her. She kept floating out of his grasp, slippery and wet. Luckily the doctor was already eighty-four at that point and chalked the whole thing up to his budding case of dementia. My mom, overjoyed at Mary’s immediate displays of power, became increasingly underjoyed when she realized I was just sitting there like a lump of baby fat. But whatever, she eventually decided that one floating baby was enough. She was already dragging stepladders around the house to pry Mary off ceiling fans and light fixtures; it was nice that I generally stayed where she plopped me.

  “You can’t renounce yours,” I said firmly. “And there are still two months left. Anything can happen.”

  Mary shrugged. She didn’t like being told what to do, and I didn’t like the determination I saw in her eyes. It was a little scary.

  I didn’t have time to dwell on it, though—we both heard our mother’s footsteps on the attic stairs at the same time. Our attempt to dive under the bed didn’t work; there wasn’t room for both of us.

  “Mary, put some pants on. Georgina, stop encouraging her. I need you both downstairs,” Mom snapped.

  “Figure out how to turn invisible,” Mary said as soon as Mom had gone. “That would actually be something useful.”

  Prue found me around eight, as I was dusting and winding countless grandfather clocks in the foyer of the inn.

  “Cute apron,” she said before I saw her, and I whirled around so quickly I lost my balance and fell sideways into a Howard Miller. It chimed loudly in defiance, and I picked myself up again, red-faced and unbelievably happy.

  “Prue!”

  “Fancy meeting you here,” she said.

  “Is it nice outside?” I asked.

  She had a pair of tiny binoculars looped around her neck, and she wore a wide, stiff sunhat.

  “It’s beautiful out,” she said. “I thought we could go down by the water?”

  Eighteen years minus two months of living on an island and I had never wanted more to go and look at the waves.

  “That sounds perfect,” I said. I ditched the feather duster and the apron behind the concierge desk, and we walked out into the evening, which yes, was beautiful: warm and quiet and filled with the scent of the roses I usually hated, but right now adored beyond measure.

  I led the way, not to the Beach but to Grey’s Beach, which was just north of the inn, where the cliffs dwindled off. Long ago someone had carved steps into the rock face leading down to the sand; it felt a little like descending into a fairy tale. Where tourists avoided the Beach because of the shark attack warnings, they simply didn’t know how to get to Grey’s, so it was usually equally deserted.

  The steps were long and winding and a little claustrophobic. I glanced back at Prue, and she flashed me a smile so wide I swear the moon got a little brighter.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “Never better,” she said.

  I felt rusty and out of practice. Verity Osmond and I had dated for almost five months, but that was a year ago. She’d been the only girl I’d ever dated. I suddenly wished I had paid better attention, taken notes, done something to prepare myself for whatever this night was.

  Prue and I reached the bottom of the staircase and emerged abruptly onto Grey’s Beach, moonlit and loud with waves crashing against the cliffs. She took a deep breath and said, “I think I could get used to living by the water.”

  We were on the east side of the island; there was no land to see off the coast here, just an endless expanse of ocean.

  “It’s nice,” I agreed, but it would have been more accurate to say, I don’t know anything else.

  When I thought of other places, other cities, they were shadowy and blurred. There were two places you could be in this world: on By-the-Sea or off of it. Like every almost-eighteen-year-old who’d grown up here, I was leaving to go to college. Would I be among those who promptly returned from my rumspringa, or would I be among the far lesser number who created a new life, learned how to live outside of this tiny place?

  Prue sat down in the sand, her dress pooling around her, and I lowered myself beside her. “Do you regret traveling so much?” I asked. “I mean—do you wish you had somewhere you could say was home?”

  “I’ve always had my brother,” Prue said thoughtfully. “I think a person can be a home, sometimes, just as much as a place or a house can. Even though he’s a few years older than I am, we’ve always been close. He looks out for me, you know?” She paused, picked up a handful of sand, let it sift between her fingers. “Do you feel that way about your sister?”

  “Yes,” I said automatically. I felt that way about her even though she was a bit of a vapid, self-absorbed princess. I felt that way about her even though she could fly (okay, hover) and I could not. I felt that way about her even though she put herself first in every situation and I was so often left behind to pick up the pieces of whatever terrible decision she’d made.

  It was the way of the Fernweh women; Mary was certainly not the first Fernweh to be born a little bit nasty. My mother had been an only child, but her mother had been one of three sisters. My grandma Berry hadn’t gotten her powers until the day before her eighteenth birthday, and my mother told me that her sisters, Samantha and Matilda, brutalized her for it.

  “Why would they be so mean?” I’d almost asked, but then I’d remembered Mary, and how you never really knew what you were going to get: the nice, thoughtful, kind Mary, or the raging evil bitch.

  “She’s trying very hard to sleep with my brother,” she said.

  “To be fair, she tries very hard to sleep with a
lot of people.”

  “Good for her,” Prue said. “She should do what she wants.”

  “She does exactly what she wants.”

  “And you? What do you want?”

  What did I want? So many things, an impossible number of things. I wanted this beach and this moment to last forever, to never fade away into memory. I wanted to peek inside Prue’s brain to find out the answers to questions I didn’t know how to put into words. I wanted to kiss a pretty girl on a beach and not have to worry about whether eighteen would come and go and I’d be the first Fernweh woman since my great-great-great-great-great-great-namesake to remain as normal as I currently was. I wanted a hundred million things, but I knew how to ask for zero of them.

  I pointed east, across the water, my arm indicting the entire world, the entire known planet.

  “What more could I want?” I said.

  But I think we both knew the answer to that question was:

  Lots lots lots lots lots.

  Weeks Late

  A week passed, and then another, and Annabella still didn’t show up. The entire island descended into an acute kind of panic. The birdheads organized groups to diligently comb every inch of By-the-Sea, searching well outside Annabella’s usual nesting areas, tearing frantically through places she had never once been spotted in. They went door-to-door asking to check people’s attics, people’s cellars, people’s spare bedrooms and linen closets. I saw little of Prue, as Harrison had employed her as his personal bird-hunting assistant, and the two of them were gone from early morning until late at night, when I sometimes spotted them in the dining hall, raiding whatever leftovers they could find. I was too embarrassed to approach her; part of me worried that she was spending so much time with her brother because she didn’t want to spend that time with me.

  “That’s just silly,” Mary said when I told her, late one afternoon as we sat on the porch drinking lemonade mules (Aggie’s answer to virgin Moscow mules and what to do with my mother’s out-of-control ginger plants). The last non-birdhead guests had departed that morning; we had a party of two due to check in soon.

  “You don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe she didn’t have a good time. Maybe she figured out I’m gay and she’s staying as far away as she can.” I shivered; the weather had turned colder recently and that morning had dawned rather gray and misty and had only gotten more miserable as the day wore on.

  “She clearly digs you. Obviously her brother is a serial killer psychopathic meanie face who won’t let her have any fun.”

  Harrison still hadn’t shown the least bit of interest in making out with her, despite her best attempts. (Her best attempts: stealing a pair of binoculars from Liesel and prancing around the inn wondering loudly if anyone wanted to go Annabella hunting with her. Harrison had been the only one in the dining room at the time. He hadn’t looked up from his cup of tea.)

  “She probably doesn’t want to lead me on. Ugh, it sucks even more that she’s a decent person,” I said.

  “Look, Georgina, if Annabella had actually shown up when she was supposed to, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation, because you wouldn’t be able to talk, because you would currently have another mouth on top of your mouth.”

  “When you put it that way it sounds really gross.”

  “Kissing is gross,” Mary said. “Think of all the germs.”

  Two things I didn’t really want to think about: mouth germs and the fact that Annabella still wasn’t here. The island felt incomplete without her. My mind thought of all the terrible things that could have happened to her on her journey. Maybe she had hit her head and damaged the part of her brain that contained the instinctual knowledge of migration? Maybe she was flying around aimlessly, looking for land, eventually succumbing to exhaustion and drowning in the waters below?

  “Are you fucking thinking about Annabella again?” Mary asked.

  “You’re telling me that you’re not the least bit concerned about where she is?”

  “She’s a bird, Georgie. I am not concerned about where a bird is, no. She’ll show up or she won’t.”

  “She’s not just a bird, Mary, Jesus, even you can’t be that cruel.”

  “You don’t really believe that, do you?”

  “Of course I believe it. It’s the only rational explanation.”

  “Rational? That one of our weird old relatives turned into a bird? Honestly, sometimes I think hanging out with a birdhead’s sister has rubbed off on you in terrifying, unprecedented ways. You’re one step away from changing your major to birdologist.”

  “Ornithologist,” I corrected her.

  “Eww, see?” she said. She had finished her drink; she took mine and sipped deeply.

  “She’s probably dead. She’s never been this late. You wouldn’t care if she were dead?” I asked.

  “Don’t be an asshole, Georgina, of course I’d care if she was dead.”

  “Every year. Since we were born, Mary. Every single year.”

  “Fuck. Is it raining? That’s just great. Everything is great.”

  Mary went inside, leaving me alone on the porch with two empty glasses. The rational part of me knew that I didn’t need to be so bothered about Annabella’s absence; she was bound to show up sooner or later, she always did. And the birdheads would calm down, and Prue would have more time to spend with me, and Harrison would relax a little bit, and Mary would finally talk him into making out with her, and maybe everything would go back to normal.

  But it was hard to let that rational part of me get too much airtime. Everything felt on edge now, buzzing and sharp to the touch. It couldn’t even stay hot on this weird island for more than a week; the weather was as inconsistent as my own moods. Ups and downs, sun and rain.

  I stayed on the porch until the new guests arrived, a young married couple on what they charmingly referred to as a “babymoon.” She looked almost ready to give birth, and I was tempted to tell her that babies born on By-the-Sea tended to always smell like salt, always crave the ocean on their skin, always look for the full moon or North Star to guide them home. But instead I said nothing, led them into the lobby, got them their room key, and brought them upstairs while they trailed behind me, arms interlocked, kissing and whispering things to each other that were just past the range of my hearing. I knew already that we would not see them for the entirety of their stay, that they would come down for breakfast, maybe, and sneak enough food back up to their room to last them until evening. I was happy for them, a brief moment of happiness that only increased as soon as I shut their door and turned around to find Prue, like a beautiful deer in headlights, standing outside her room, staring at me.

  “Hey,” she said, smiling. She looked tired. “New guests?”

  “They’re on a babymoon.”

  “Really? That’s sort of cute.”

  “I know.” I pointed to Prue’s binoculars. “Any sign of her?”

  “Nope, nothing.” She yawned loudly, covering her mouth with both hands. “Gosh, sorry; I think I’ve slept for about five hours this week. My brother has based his entire scholarly career on this trip. If he doesn’t see Annabella, he’s going to have a heart attack.”

  “She’ll show up,” I said, trying to sound convincing. “She always does.”

  “I hope so,” she said. “Hey—what are you doing now? Maybe we could take a walk.”

  The six most beautiful words that had ever been uttered in the English language. Maybe! We could! Take a walk!!!

  “I could do that, sure,” I said, trying desperately to find some appropriate balance between unmatched excitement and casual, cool indifference.

  “That’s great. Let me change quickly? I’ll meet you out front.”

  “Yeah, sure, of course,” I said. She slipped into her room, and I tried not to actually skip for joy as I walked back through the inn and took up a post on the porch.

  She joined me a few minutes later, wearing a dress with a full sailor’s collar complete with a little bow just belo
w the hollow of her neck. It would have looked absurd on anyone else, but on Prue it looked off-handed and sweet. She had one of those old cameras with her, a clunky box that you had to look down into to focus.

  “Has it stopped raining?” she asked, holding her hand flat to the sky. “That’s nice.”

  That’s because you brought the sun with you to By-the-Sea; it follows you like a doting celestial body, I wanted to say, but miracle of miracles, I managed to keep my mouth firmly shut, choosing instead to only nod and smile, the far, far, far wiser choice.

  “Where should we go?” Prue asked.

  “I know someplace,” I said, and we stepped off the porch together.

  The sun was low in the sky, just an inch or two off the horizon. We weren’t going far. The big oak tree was a short walk, sitting directly on the southern tip of the island, so close to the edge of the cliffs that some of its roots actually lurched out over the air, and the bravest of souls could climb carefully, carefully out, holding their breath while their friends snapped a picture. I thought it was hilarious, because what I knew that they didn’t know was that the cliffs held no danger for them. My mother’s grandmother had placed a protection spell on them after a birdhead with his nose in an ornithology magazine had walked straight over the edge to his death. “There are enough ways to die on this Earth,” my great-grandmother had famously declared, “let ‘distracted reading’ be one less thing to worry about.”

  For the less daredevilishly inclined, there was a tire swing attached to one of the tree’s largest branches. At full swinging power, your feet came almost to the edge without going over—if you looked straight ahead and angled your chin toward the sky, it was exactly like you were flying into nothingness, into air, into blue, into clouds. When I was younger I used to think that’s what Mary must have felt when her feet left the ground: the soaring, stomach-dropping punch of potential.

  When Prue saw the tree, she gasped a little, and then when she saw the tire swing, she gasped again, and she ran the rest of the way to it with her camera bouncing painfully on her hip.