Summer of Salt

by Katrina Leno

  “Georgina! Did you know this was here?” She shrieked, and then she laughed and said, “Wait, duh, of course you knew this was here. This is unreal.”

  The tree was pretty impressive, even to me, and I’d grown up with it. I had seen it and climbed it and hugged it and carved my initials into it and hid behind it. It looked like a tree straight out of a Southern gothic romance; all it was missing was the Spanish moss.

  Prue unslung the camera from her shoulder and set it gently on the ground, and then she threaded her legs through the center of the tire swing. I wondered if she would ask me to push her, but she didn’t, just backed up slowly on tiptoes and kicked her feet up in front of her, flying forward and back, pumping her legs, gaining speed quickly.

  To our right, the sun was just dipping into the ocean. Everything was bathed in orange, peach fuzz, candy apple-y colors that made By-the-Sea seem like something out of a storybook.

  “Georgina, come on!” Prue said. She’d dragged her toes into the grass to stop herself, and she was currently waiting impatiently for me to join her. There was not enough room for us both to sit, and so I climbed carefully to the top of the swing, standing straight up on the tire with my hands wrapped around the rope for balance.

  And the sun blinked its final glow, and Prue reached a hand up and touched my left ankle briefly, and this, too, must be what flying felt like: stomach-dropping, indeed.

  Fowl Fair

  The day of the Fowl Fair dawned to a low buzz of disappointment. There was nothing to celebrate. Annabella still hadn’t turned up. She had never been this late before. The island was in disarray, and the inn was the epicenter of its specific breed of chaos. Everywhere you turned there were birdheads in various states of mental unraveling. The energy was cluttered, confused, frantic. It seemed absolutely absurd that the Fowl Fair would continue despite Annabella’s absence, but everything had been planned, and we were an island of routine and tradition. It was impossible that we would forgo something as steadfast as the festival.

  Willard Jacoby came to the inn to see my mother. He was the mayor of By-the-Sea, the first selectman of By-the-Sea, the town chairman of By-the-Sea, and basically the elected official of everything you could be an elected official of.

  I knew what he would ask even before he reached the front door.

  He wanted to see if Penelope Fernweh knew how to fix this. If she could throw some things together in a big black pot and magically pull Annabella out of it. “Truth be told,” he said, standing nervously on the front porch, “I was hoping maybe your mother . . . well, maybe there’s something she could do?”

  I had to think that if my mother could have done something to find Annabella, she’d have done it by now, but nevertheless I led Willard into the house and brought him into the kitchen, where my mom was polishing silver (was my mom obsessed with polishing silver? I would have to look into this later). She looked up when we walked in, and I knew she’d figured out what Willard was going to say before he even opened his mouth, just like I had. She made a shooing motion with her hands, an indication that she wanted me to leave, but I hung back toward the door and watched. It was always fascinating to me, seeing the people of By-the-Sea trip over their words in an attempt to ask Penelope Fernweh for a favor. It was almost better than a movie.

  “Penny, dear,” Willard began. “You know I wouldn’t come to you unless it was an emergency.”

  I actually knew for a fact that Willard had come to my mother last year when he’d noticed his hair was starting to thin, which could hardly be considered an emergency, and the faintest smirk on my mother’s face told me she did too.

  “What’s on your mind, Willard?” she asked, because she wasn’t the sort of woman who just handed things to people. She liked to make them work for it.

  “Penny, the people are panicking. Annabella is so late, and . . . well, you know. I thought there might be something you could . . . do.”

  “You don’t think I would have done it already, if there were?”

  “I don’t know how all this works,” Willard said quickly, holding his hands up in front of his chest, like he hadn’t meant to offend her. “Maybe I can help?”

  “You want to help?” she asked. “Hmm. Well, that’s a different story.” She replaced the fork she was currently polishing back into its case and wiped her hands free of some invisible dust. She walked over to the coffeepot and poured a mug of coffee. With her back turned, so neither Willard nor I could see what she was doing to it, she fumbled around in a cabinet. She took out small, colored bottles of different things, moved them to the counter, placed them back. When she turned around, she was holding the mug in her hands. Her face had settled into an expression of compassion.

  “There’s nothing I can do to help find Annabella. She has always been above my abilities,” she said sadly. “But there’s something you can do. Taste this, and it will reveal the right answer of whether or not the Fowl Fair should continue.”

  Willard adjusted himself to his fullest height, standing straight and looking important as he took the mug from my mother. He looked into its depths, took a tentative swallow—then a deeper one—and then nodded once.

  “Well?” my mother said, holding her hands in front of her like she was eager to hear what he’d learned. “What do we do?”

  “The show must go on,” Willard announced confidently. He set the mug on the counter. “Penny, I thank you for your help, but there is much work to do!”

  He turned and practically ran me over on his way out of the kitchen.

  I walked over to the mug, picked it up, sniffed it, and took a cautious taste.

  “Cinnamon and vanilla?” I guessed.

  “And a bit of myrrh. People love myrrh,” Mom said.

  “How did you know what he was going to say? What if he canceled the fair?”

  “It’s Willard. He’s not going to pass up the chance for an islandwide shindig. This way, he feels important, I didn’t have to cook anything up, everybody’s happy. Besides, I see no reason to cancel the fair. I think it might be nice. People need a little distraction. Tensions are high.”

  Tensions are high qualified for the understatement of the year; just that morning, Liesel Channing had started crying so hard that her contacts washed right out of her eyes.

  My mother sighed loudly and dumped the rest of the unmagical coffee down the drain.

  “Are you all right?” I asked her.

  “There’s a lot on my mind, Georgie,” she admitted.

  “Like what?”

  “Like how long these birdheads are willing to wait before they ask for their money back and get the hell off this birdless island.”

  “Do you think that might actually happen?”

  “I couldn’t begin to guess,” she said. “It’s not easy reading minds. Complicated recipe. Takes too much energy. And besides that, people don’t always think the truth.”

  “But would we be okay? If they did that, would we have enough . . .” It was hard to say the word money aloud at the end of a sentence like that.

  “Let’s just say it was your grandmother who could spin hay into gold, not me. And her gift had its limits too. We have a bit saved up, but not enough to last forever.” She paused, put her arm around my shoulders. “Tell me, you haven’t been feeling any tingling in your fingertips lately when you see hay?”

  “Sorry, Mom,” I said.

  “I thought not. Ah well. We better pray for a bird-shaped miracle, my love.”

  Mary and I rode our bikes to the town green a little before six. The sight of the town square transformed—food tents, a small area of carnival rides, a little midway with games impossible to win—made me strangely calm. See, we could still function as an island, as a town, sans Annabella. We did not need some magical bird to make us interesting. We were unique all on our own! Look, a festival! An actual, proper, midsummer celebration of life! How very quaint and lovely of us!

  Mary and I were on ride duty; our kingdom consisted of a thi
rty-foot-tall Ferris wheel, a bouncy castle mid-inflation, a little merry-go-round made up of a mermaid, a brightly colored fish, and a blue whale.

  “Is this how we die?” Mary mused. “Of boredom?”

  “I don’t think we’re that lucky,” I whispered back to her.

  Vira showed up soon after with her ice cream cart. She gave us both cups and spoons, and we dug out the flavors we wanted ourselves, praising her good name.

  As expected, just about every living soul on By-the-Sea showed up to the festival, anxious and hopeful that something, anything, might happen—that Annabella might swoop down from the sky and alight on the gazebo, maybe.

  The time passed quickly.

  The same few kids rode the rides and bounced in the bouncy castle for hours. Then Jimmy Frankfurter stuffed himself with cotton candy and jumped immediately on the Ferris wheel and puked at the very top, an impressive spray of sick that landed on the two unfortunate souls in the cars underneath him.

  “Holy mother of shit,” Mary said when she noticed a few minutes later (having been occupied with a small technical glitch over at the carousel). I was trying to clean up vomit with some paper towels stuck to the end of a broom, because if I got too close to the mess I felt like I was going to puke myself.

  “Jimmy Frankfurter,” I mumbled. At the last islandwide Halloween party he’d bobbed for and ate so many apples that he puked a brilliant pile of red. I hated that kid.

  “Why did you let him on here?”

  “I wasn’t paying attention,” I said.

  In truth, I’d been diligently scanning the crowd for Prue; I was ready at the drop of a hat to very casually ditch my post and bump into her.

  “Well, I can do the rest of this if you want,” Mary offered, which was uncharacteristically generous of her.

  “That is uncharacteristically generous of you,” I said.

  “I could change my mind at any moment,” she said, and I thrust the broom into her hand without another word.

  I wandered over to the bouncy castle and found it filled with more drunk adults than bouncy kids, which is how I knew it must be after nine, the unofficial time when the festival dissolved from a place of good, clean family fun (at least in theory) to one of debauchery.

  “If Willard sees you guys, you’re gonna get kicked out,” I said to the unidentifiable jumble of limbs and feet in the castle. At least they’d taken their shoes off.

  I figured now was as good a time as any to turn off the rides for the night (there was something very satisfying about the idea of the bouncy castle deflating around the group of drunk adults now residing within it), and I did so quickly, turning the last few kid stragglers away with the musings of a seventy-year-old woman (“Shouldn’t you be in bed? Where are your parents?”). I found Willard by the cotton candy cart and gave him the keys for the Ferris wheel and carousel.

  “Another successful turnout!” he said, beaming, clutching the keys in his hands as if they were the keys not only to the kiddie rides, but to the entire world.

  I decided not to tell him about the vomit.

  As the night grew darker, more lanterns were lit, including fairy lights that strung back and forth overhead. This was By-the-Sea in a nutshell: a weird little island with a festival dedicated to a bird who was late to her own party.

  When I got back to the rides, the castle was fully deflated, the people within seemed not to have noticed, the vomit was mostly cleaned up, and my sister was gone.

  I found Vira with her shoes off, sitting on the grass with her back against the ice cream cart and her legs spread out in front of her.

  “We’re all out, girl scout,” she said, patting the cart.

  I sat down beside her. “I don’t want your ice cream; I want your company.”

  Vira put her hand on her chest. “Be still my heart.”

  “How are you?”

  “Tired. Stained with Frozen Blood.” An ice cream flavor; she held out her arms to demonstrate.

  “Why don’t you go home?”

  “To be honest, I was just saving up my energy for the trip. I am tired.”

  “I’m tired too. Have you seen my sister?”

  “Not for a while,” Vira said, shrugging. “I think she was talking to Peter earlier.” She put her head on my shoulder and actually started snoring. I resigned myself to being her pillow for at least a few minutes.

  And then, there in front of us—not there one moment, there and beautiful the next, was—

  “Prue,” I said. This single name was meant to convey a lot of things: Prue, I am so happy to see you and Prue, you look so beautiful tonight and Prue, if you keep looking at me like that I will have to kiss your entire face, societal etiquette be damned!

  “Hi, Georgina,” she said, and I couldn’t even begin to translate that into anything more than exactly what it was. A simple greeting? A declaration of love? A hello, a good-bye? The secret of the universe and our purpose here on Earth?

  Vira lifted her head and blinked sleepily. “I’m Vira,” she said, sticking her hand out. Prue shook it, still smiling, ever smiling.

  “Prue. Nice to meet you. That’s an interesting name.”

  “It’s short for Elvira. My mom went through a pretty intense vampire phase.”

  “I was named after a song,” Prue said. “Not as fun a story.”

  “Well, it could have been worse for both of us,” Vira said cheerfully. She held her hand up to me, and I pulled her to her feet. She stretched and hugged me. “I better get this thing home.” She patted the ice cream cart. “Nice to meet you, Dear Prudence.” She winked and was on her way.

  “I like her,” Prue decided.

  “My best friend, of the non-sister variety,” I said. “I’m officially done with ride duty—should we go for a walk?”

  “That sounds great,” Prue said, and we started off across the town green as the Fowl Fair slowly packed up around us. “I wish I could have gotten here earlier, but my brother had me out all day again.” She sighed and looked at me. “Still no sign of her. Do you think something bad happened?”

  “I don’t know. It feels . . .”

  Like it.

  But I didn’t want to say that.

  Because saying things out loud imbued them with a certain kind of power, and I did not want to give power to the idea that something might have happened to Annabella.

  “The birdheads are all losing their minds,” Prue said. We reached the edge of the green and started walking south. In the moonlight Prue practically glowed. A trick of either the light or my heart, I couldn’t be sure.

  “She’ll show up,” I said. I was so used to reassuring people—the birdheads, various islanders who thought I might have some pull in the matter, myself—that my words ended up sounding hollow. Even though I wanted to believe them. I needed to believe them. What would it mean for the future Fernwehs if Annabella never arrived? What would it mean for the inn, for our livelihood? For the real human woman who had turned into a bird?

  “Either way, I’m glad I came here. Bird or no bird,” Prue said.

  “Oh?”

  A translation of the word oh:

  WHY TELL ME WHY TELL ME WHY TELL ME WHY TELL ME—

  “Because I met you,” she continued.

  “Oh.”

  A further analysis of the word oh:

  OHGODOHGODOHGODOHGOD.

  “Yeah,” Prue said, and she reached over and took my hand and held it, and every star in the night sky blinked brighter and brighter until the world was as lit up and bright as a midday in summer, a blazing wonder of incorrect light levels.

  “Is this okay?” she asked.

  “Yes!” I said. I shouted? I was talking too loud. I made a conscious effort to lower my voice. “Yes. It’s okay.”

  We kept walking.

  We kept walking WHILE HOLDING HANDS.

  It felt like a very specific sort of miracle, this hand holding. It felt good and necessary and gentle and real. Neither of us spoke, we just kept walking
and holding hands and then we’d reached the inn and we were still holding hands and then we walked around the back of the inn and we were still holding hands, holding hands, holding hands.

  We sat on the bench we’d sat on the night of the inn party; the first time we’d really spoken.

  And Prue

  still

  held

  my

  hand

  and the ocean had never looked so beautiful

  and the smell of salt had never seemed so warm and good

  and I thought:

  possibly this is the best night of my life.

  “It’s really beautiful here,” Prue said.

  “It is,” I said, but what I meant was you’re so beautiful here.

  “If she doesn’t show up soon, he’s going to want to leave,” she said.

  “Your brother?”

  “He’s already searching for the next place to go, the next rare bird he can study,” she said in way of an answer.

  That stock, empty, fake response again, because I didn’t know what else to say. “She’ll turn up.”

  “And if she doesn’t?”

  She has to.

  Prue lifted her feet onto the bench, pivoted, and leaned against me, her back against my chest.

  And we sat like that for a long time, long enough for my heart to slow down. And then Prue finally got up and walked closer to the cliffs, the magic cliffs you could not fall off, not even if you wanted to. I got up too, and went and stood a few feet away from her.

  And then she said:

  “I’ve been trying to get up the courage to do this for a few weeks now.”

  And then I said:

  “Do what?”

  Prue took one step toward me, another step toward me. The grass stretched on for a million miles; it would be years before she reached me. She covered her face in both her hands and took another step. I wanted to move, but I thought if I did that, I would explode. My whole entire body would erupt into stardust. Maybe we aren’t meant to be so happy, so warm, so absolutely, batshit joyful. Prue was right in front of me, I could smell her clothes, the lavender laundry detergent the inn provided to its guests.