Summer of Salt

by Katrina Leno

  I raised my hands and closed them around her wrists, gently prying her fingers from her face. Her eyelids were squeezed tight. She needed sleep. I could feel the exhaustion coming off her in waves.

  And because she had crossed all of that distance, because she had come so close, I thought I could at least be the one to do the rest of the work, and so I kissed her. Lightly. Like how I imagined a bird would kiss another bird.

  And she kissed me back. Like how a bird might ask for more.

  When we pulled away, I was light-headed from holding my breath and Prue was smiling.

  And I think—I think—she would have kissed me again, had Harrison Lowry not chosen that moment to come jogging across the back lawn of the inn, binoculars bumping against his chest and a complicated camera in one hand.

  “I’ve been looking for you everywhere!” he said. “Are you coming or not? Hi, Georgina.”

  “Hi, Harrison.”

  “Oh no—Harrison, I completely forgot,” Prue said, her smile disappearing. “Georgina, I’m so sorry, I promised Harrison I’d go out with him again after the festival.”

  “Looking for Annabella,” Harrison explained a little impatiently. “I thought all the lights and sounds might attract her. Plus the fried dough. Hep Shackman told me she loves fried dough, but he also talks to his binoculars, so I was taking that with a grain of salt.”

  “I’m sorry,” Prue told me. “I promised.”

  “It’s totally fine,” I assured her. “Honestly. I should get some sleep, anyway. Long day.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow?” she asked, as Harrison sort of hopped up and down on the balls of his feet, looking like he was contemplating whether it would be okay to take her hand and pull her away.

  “Definitely. See you tomorrow,” I said.

  I waited until they had walked back up to the house and veered off down the side of Bottle Hill before I went inside. The inn was empty and so was my sister’s room, her bed made sloppily and her pajamas thrown in a pile on top. I collapsed in my own bed, feeling the edges of sleep already pulling me down, the gentle yelling like some sort of lullaby.

  The gentle yelling?

  I opened my eyes to pale sunlight filtering in through the roses vining past my windows.

  It was morning already? I must have fallen asleep more quickly than I thought.

  And it was quiet now so the yelling must have come from my dreams—

  Except, no, there it was again. Someone in the inn was yelling. Multiple someones, a clash of voices that reached all the way up to my attic bedroom.

  I got myself out of bed and pulled on jeans and a T-shirt and, rubbing sleep from my eyes, I walked down the short hallway and pushed Mary’s door open.

  Her bed hadn’t been slept in. It was exactly as I’d left it last night.

  I felt a thrill of fear as my brain struggled to put the two things together: the many rising voices downstairs and my sister’s empty bed. Had something happened to Mary?

  I ran down three flights of stairs and found myself in a lobby filled with people—birdheads, Aggie, my mom, and—

  Relief flooded through me as my sister appeared out of nowhere, grabbed my hand firmly, and pulled me around the corner and into the library.

  “What’s going on in there?” I asked, but she just kept pulling me, into the dining room and around the back of the house to the back porch, down the stairs and onto the grass. She was wearing the same outfit she’d worn to the Fowl Fair. There was a small tear in her shirt. She hadn’t slept, and her eyes were big and wide. Her hair was escaping her braids and falling down around her face. “Mary, what is it?”

  “I was here last night. Got it? I had too much to drink, and I fell asleep like this,” she whispered hurriedly.

  “What? What are all those people—”

  “Georgie, got it? Do you understand?”

  “Fine, yes, obviously I’ll cover for you, can you just tell me—”

  “She’s dead,” Mary said.

  “What—who?” I asked, and all of these faces cycled through my head, all of the girls and women of the island, starting with Vira and Eloise and Shelby and Abigail and Prue and—

  “Annabella,” Mary said. “They found her, and she’s dead.”

  “No,” I said. “That’s not true, Mary, she’s not even here yet, she’s not even here. Why would you say that?”

  But she couldn’t reply. I saw her words catch in her throat and I saw her swallow them back down and I saw the tears begin to fall down her face.

  I pulled her toward me and felt her heart beat against my chest, a broken beat, something shattered and taped back together.

  And as we stood there—

  Just like on the day of our births—

  The skies opened up.

  And it began to pour.

  II.

  I was a child and she was a child,

  In this kingdom by the sea.

  also from “Annabel Lee”

  by Edgar Allan Poe

  Days After

  If Annabella’s absence had brought with it a building sense of panic, her death brought with it a terrifying crash, a cacophony of noise that descended over the island and made our ears ring. I dragged Mary home, leading her up the back stairway and into her bedroom.

  “You need to lie down,” I told her, helping her into the bed, pulling her shoes off her feet, and letting them fall to the floor.

  “I was here all night, okay?” she whispered.

  “Fine, Mary, fine. Just don’t worry about it, okay?”

  I pulled the blankets over her and went downstairs again. The crowd of birdheads had dispersed; I intercepted my mother as she pulled on high, black boots in the kitchen.

  “Is it true?” I asked her.

  “I know as much as you know,” she said.

  “But Annabella’s dead?”

  “I know as much as you,” she repeated. She looked up at me then, finally finished with her boots, and I saw that she looked sad, and worried, and maybe a little scared. “They said she’s dead, yes. I’m going now.”

  “Who said she’s dead?” I asked.

  “Frank and Nancy Elmhurst,” she replied. “They found her in their barn.”

  Peter’s parents. They lived near the cemetery.

  “I’m coming with you,” I said.

  “Hurry up and get your shoes on.”

  We were soaked by the time we reached the Elmhursts’ farm. The birdheads had beat us to it; some of them held umbrellas, some of them had rain jackets, but most of them just stood in the open and let the water rush over them.

  I should have anticipated what a shitshow it would be. Birdheads were dramatic under the most benign of circumstances; now that they had something to actually be upset about, every single one of them had forgotten how to conduct themselves as adults. There was open, messy weeping, long hugs with no end in sight, low keening moans that started and ended as if from everywhere and nowhere at once, and more yelling—Liesel, her purple dress soaked to the bone, was arguing loudly with Henrietta as the latter fought a losing battle of keeping her thick eyeglasses dry. Horace paced nervously by their feet, ducking in between their ankles and over Liesl’s purple rainboots.

  “What happened?” I asked Tank, who was sitting outside the barn, under the overhang of the roof. He had his camera in his lap and his hands wrapped around it like it was the heaviest thing he’d ever had to carry.

  “Georgina?” he said, looking up at me slowly. “Please don’t go in there. It’s terrible in there. I couldn’t bear it if you saw.”

  Hep Shackman, who was just a few feet away from Tank, mumbled something then, and I almost went to him before I realized he was just talking softly to his binoculars, holding them in his lap like he’d gotten confused and thought they were Annabella. When he looked up and saw me, he acted like I’d startled him, like for just a moment he was afraid of me. But then he returned his attention to his binoculars.

  “Should somebody call the
police?” I asked to no one in particular, because wasn’t that what you did when someone died? I tried to remember the practicalities involved in death, and that was the only thing I came up with: somebody should call the police.

  “Harrison did,” Prue said, suddenly beside me, looking even more exhausted than she had last night and soaking wet. I suddenly remembered the bird-lightness of her lips on mine and felt a pang of anger that that memory was being interrupted by something so sad. “It’s really terrible,” she continued, lowering her voice, taking me by the hand and pulling me away from Tank. “We were one of the first ones here.”

  “I have to see,” I said.

  “Are you sure you want to?” Prue protested.

  “I have to.”

  I walked slowly into the barn, letting my eyes adjust to the dimness. There were three overhead lights, large industrial-looking things that gave out just the faintest whisper of a glow, humming with the effort. There was only one person in here, standing directly in the center of the space, eyes trained on the floor.

  My mother.

  She took one step to the side and held her hand out to me.

  It was worse than I could have imagined.

  Annabella was lying next to a thick wooden support beam, broken and small in death. Her wings were spread limply open, as if she had died in an eternal flight. There were clumps of straw and feathers and twigs around her, and it took a moment for my brain to understand what it was—her nest. Her nest was lying in pieces all around her, as if someone had taken it in their hands and ripped it apart.

  “Mom,” I said. “Did somebody . . . ?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It certainly looks that way.”

  “Her nest . . .”

  “I know.”

  “Harrison called for the police.”

  “I know.”

  She knelt down on the dirt floor of the barn and held her hand over the broken body of the bird, as if she could feel something I couldn’t. She plucked a thin straw of hay from the dirt and held it, considering.

  “It was an accident,” I insisted. “It had to have been an accident. Birds fly into windows all the time, right?”

  “I think we both know Annabella was no ordinary bird,” she replied softly. She let the hay drop to the floor, and then she stood up and took my hand. “Somebody did this to her.”

  But I didn’t want to believe it. The thought that somebody could have hurt Annabella was so sharp and toxic it made my stomach curl.

  I felt something brush against my side, and Charlene Brooks stepped around to the other side of Annabella. She was By-the-Sea’s sheriff, a woman about my mother’s age with dark-brown skin and short curly hair mostly covered by a baseball hat.

  “I didn’t want to believe it,” she said.

  By-the-Sea’s one deputy, Whitey, had followed her into the barn. He put his hand over his heart. The four of us stood there looking at Annabella.

  “What do you make of it?” Whitey finally said. He was talking more to my mom than to Charlene.

  “I don’t think this was an accident,” my mom answered softly.

  Charlene nodded. “The ripped nest. That break there, in her wing.” She crouched down and pointed to Annabella’s left wing, twisted and stretched at an unnatural angle. “She couldn’t have done this much damage herself.”

  We were silent again.

  There was no crime to speak of on By-the-Sea. We were all quiet here; we all liked minding our own businesses and doing our jobs. There was no theft, no assault, no abuse. Until that day, the most Charlene and Whitey had had to do was write out parking ticket after parking ticket, which nobody ever bothered to pay and they likewise never bothered to follow up on. The one jail cell was used by Whitey to take his midafternoon naps. They were utterly out of their element now, moving uncertainly around the corpse, taking notes, taking photographs, and they both looked a little sick. The barn was stuffy, and I imagined that Annabella was starting to smell, the sharp tang of decomposition, even though it was too early for that.

  Finally it became too much for Whitey—he clicked the lens cap onto his camera, bowed his head to us and to Annabella, and left the barn.

  Charlene took a shallow inhale and turned to us, shrugging. “I have no idea what to do.”

  “Let me think about it,” my mom said quietly. “I may be able to come up with something.”

  “I don’t know about all that,” Charlene said, “but I’ll take all the help I can get.”

  Don’t ask questions. Don’t pry too hard. It was the By-the-Sea way.

  Charlene left us alone. My mother inclined her head slightly toward me. “Are you okay, Georgina?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what I am,” I said.

  She took my hand again. My mother’s hands had always been firm and cool, but there was something different about them now.

  Now, they were shaking.

  I hope it doesn’t seem strange, the bird funeral that took place the next night, the way the entire island met once again in the backyard of the inn to bury Annabella near the cliff. So she would be close to the water, people said, as if the entire island wasn’t close enough to the water. But I knew it was really so she’d be close to us, to her once-home of the Fernweh Inn, to her living relatives, to the girl who shared her dead sister’s name.

  I hope we don’t seem silly, the people of By-the-Sea and the birdheads (even though I have made fun of them plenty of times, but I’m allowed), everyone arriving with bowed heads and somber expressions.

  I hope I have accurately described the island and all its eccentricities. I hope I have accurately detailed what Annabella meant to all of us: our tiny claim to fame, but even more so than that—she had been one of us.

  My sister had avoided me since yesterday morning, emerging from her room only to pee and brush her teeth and find something to eat. She ignored me when I knocked on her door and even though our bedrooms didn’t have locks, I left her alone. It’s not good to disturb a Fernweh when she doesn’t want to be disturbed. Like vampires, you should wait until you’re invited in.

  Now she stood on the outskirts of the little group that had formed in the backyard of the inn. She wore a tattered, oversized black sweatshirt, and she pulled her hands into the sleeves and hugged her arms around herself.

  The funeral was not a huge production. It rained the entire time. The grass was spongy and soft. Everyone held umbrellas over themselves but came away wet anyway. Peter dug the small grave for Annabella. My mother had put the bird’s body into a wooden cigar box, and she placed it inside the hole with a tiny sprig of rosemary on top. Then Peter covered the box up with dirt and people just wandered away, unsure of what to do or where to go, unsure of how much grief was allowed when the person you were grieving wasn’t a person at all, at least not anymore, but just a little flicker of a bird.

  Pretty soon there was a small handful of us left, sitting in the grass in the twilight: Vira, Prue, Abigail, Eloise, and me. Shelby hadn’t stayed after the ceremony; she hated things like this, big showings of sadness. My sister had disappeared somewhere after the first fistful of dirt was dropped onto the grave.

  Abigail smoked a long skinny joint and passed it around our lopsided circle. Eloise cried silent tears, wiping at her cheeks every few seconds. Vira put her arm around Eloise’s shoulders and squeezed.

  Prue sat beside me, as close as she could manage. I didn’t know the last time she had slept; her head kept nodding forward. Finally I leaned close to her and said, “I think you need to get some sleep.”

  “I can’t sleep,” she said. “I don’t feel tired at all.”

  I stood up and helped her to her feet, and we walked together into the house. I found my mother in the kitchen while Prue waited in the dining room.

  “Can I have a cup of tea? For Prue?”

  “Tea tea or tea tea?” my mother asked.

  “The latter.”

  “Poor girl.” My mother poured a mug from a kettle alre
ady warmed on the stove. She handed it to me and said, “Make sure she drinks it all.”

  Harrison had joined Prue in the dining room; they were sitting at one of the tables together and looked more like twins in that moment than Mary and I ever had. Equal in sadness, equal in exhaustion.

  I set the mug in front of Prue and then pushed it closer to her when she didn’t immediately pick it up.

  “It’s good for you,” I said. “It will help you sleep.” It will knock you literally unconscious was closer to the truth.

  She took a tentative sip, and then another, and then finished the rest of the mug in one giant gulp.

  “Oh,” she said when she was done.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I have to lie down. No. I’m fine. Sleeping. Fine. Immediately.”

  “Do you need help upstairs?” I asked, but she stumbled out of the room without answering.

  Harrison watched her go, bemused.

  “I don’t think she’s gotten much sleep lately,” I said.

  “Nor have I,” he admitted. I realized this was the first time I had been alone with Harrison. He looked completely devastated and suddenly a lot younger than I knew he was. He put his face into his hands and sighed heavily, his shoulders rising and falling. Then he looked at me and rubbed his eyes. “What do you think happened to the eggs?” he asked quietly.

  “The eggs?” I thought back to the Elmhursts’ barn, to Annabella lying in the dirt with pieces of her nest strewn about her. “There weren’t any eggs.”

  “I know. But I also know that Annabella only builds her nest when she’s ready to lay. She’s never been found before she’s laid her eggs. Not once.”

  “So what are you saying? That somebody took them?”

  “Or broke them, I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m saying. I just think it’s weird they weren’t there.”

  “I don’t know who could have done this.”

  “It couldn’t have been a birdhead,” Harrison said. “They all love her too much.”

  “Hey, you’re a birdhead too,” I pointed out.

  Harrison smiled weakly. “Fine—we all love her too much.”