by Katrina Leno
“The ferry’s broken,” Vira said.
“That was my mom.”
“I sort of guessed.” She turned so she was on her side, propping her head up with her hand. “Is she . . .”
“She’s doing something; I’m not sure what. She said she had to wait until the moon was good again.”
“Mysterious.”
I rolled onto my side too, so we were facing each other. “I think something is going on with Mary,” I said. “She seems . . . this is going to sound weird.”
“I’ve known your family my entire life; it sort of takes a lot to faze me now.”
“When I look at her I just get this feeling, like . . . I don’t know. She seems smaller. She wasn’t here the night Annabella was . . . the night she died. She told me not to tell anyone. I don’t know where she was.”
Vira fell onto her back again. She considered what I’d told her with a serious expression on her face, her forehead a mess of wrinkled lines.
“You don’t think she . . .”
“Of course not,” I said quickly.
We let the sound of the rain drown out the silence that filled the room.
Of course I didn’t think that.
I just didn’t know what I thought.
According to Fernweh legend, seven days after Mary and I were born, the rain finally stopped. The entire island was covered in water, five- and six-feet deep in parts. Aggie picked us up from the hospital in a small rowboat. My father and the rest of his crew were still missing; they’d searched the waters off the eastern coast of By-the-Sea every day for seven days and come up with not even a scrap of clothing.
Emery Grace put my mother into a wheelchair and wheeled her to the front door of the hospital, where Aggie waited in her little boat, one hand holding on to the wall of the hospital to keep the boat in place. My mother handed her babies to Aggie one at a time, and Aggie tucked my sister and me into a wicker basket stuffed with blankets. She rowed us all home with powerful, deep strokes.
Back then, our nursery was on the first floor, next to my parents’ bedroom. Aggie and my mother tucked us in our cribs and then went onto the porch.
“I’m so sorry, Penny,” Aggie said.
My mother’s face was stoic, unreadable.
I knew all this because Aggie had told me, because my mother had told me, because I’d dreamed it. Fernweh history belongs to every Fernweh woman. I knew what my great-grandmother ate for breakfast fifty years ago on a random Tuesday in March. I felt the tightness in my mother’s chest as she stood on the porch of the inn and looked out at an island drowned and soggy and colorless.
“I’ll have to build a widow’s walk,” she said, and then she looked at Aggie and smiled so Aggie knew that she could smile, too, that the rest of their lives wouldn’t be all sadness and loss.
And she did build a widow’s walk.
And she never once used it.
Until now.
My mother, sick of birdheads clogging up every room of the inn, procured a sizeable collection of umbrellas from who knew where and kept them in a row at the front and back doors. The birdheads made use of them at once; it was unnerving to stand at my bedroom window and look down at them over the lawn of the inn—dozens of little black umbrella spots of mourning. The entire place was quiet, eerie, still.
I went around and opened every single window in the inn, trying to let out the stench of grief.
But grief was stronger than rainwater, so I didn’t think it did much good after all.
I found my mother at the very top of the house, at that very widow’s walk she’d built almost eighteen years ago and never used.
The stairs were pulled down from the attic ceiling hallway. That’s how I knew where she was. I climbed up to meet her, emerging into the gray, wet morning. She was holding a large umbrella and drinking a cup of coffee. It was steaming hot, and she gave me a sip without asking. It warmed every inch of my skin. I pressed myself against her side and handed the mug back to her.
“I wouldn’t have thought I’d feel so sad,” she said. “With Annabella gone. But she was one of us, I suppose, even though we only knew her in a peculiar way.” She meant as a bird, and not as a woman who had learned how to grow feathers. “I’ve heard so many stories about her. From my great-grandmother,” she continued. “She lived to be one hundred and six, my great-grandmother. I was named after her.”
The original Penelope Fernweh, whose portrait hung in the library with every other Fernweh woman who had lived on the island and on Bottle Hill and in this house. That Penelope Fernweh had been a storyteller, and she’d left behind journals filled with the history of the Fernwehs—thick, heavy tomes that served as a reminder of the past.
“What was she like?” I asked. “Annabella?”
“She was just an ordinary girl,” my mother said, as if that meant anything at all. In a family full of girls, you realize quickly that no girls are ordinary. Whether or not they turn into birds, girls could fly and make magic all their own. But I knew what she was trying to say—that Annabella Fernweh, before she was the Annabella, our Annabella—was just a girl who, like my sister, sometimes floated an inch or two off the ground.
“Tell me about her,” I prompted. Unlike Penelope Fernweh the First, my own mother took a little prompting to open up. She sighed now, took a long sip of coffee, and began.
“Well, you know she was a twin. Annabella and Georgina. I had never planned on naming you after any of us, but I just loved that name so much. I thought there was something poetic about naming you Georgina, about being a better mother to you than Clarice was to her girls.”
All I knew about Clarice Fernweh, the mother of the twins, was that she was a dark smudge on the history of the Fernweh name. She kept her girls on leashes so short they were rarely allowed to leave Bottle Hill. They were homeschooled, locked in their bedrooms at night, and not allowed to have any friends.
No wonder Annabella turned into a bird.
“When I was pregnant with you, I used to read Penelope’s journals over and over again,” my mother continued. “There’s a story, about the three of them—Clarice was like me, you know, she could make things, except she wasn’t very good at it. She got her concoctions wrong all the time, it got to the point where, if you knew better, you wouldn’t even accept a cup of coffee from her. One night, she forgot to lock her daughters in their room, and they took their chance and escaped for the night. They were just teenage girls; they wanted to go explore their island and have some fun and see the ocean at night.”
She paused. Her eyes burned with anger at this woman who’d lived so long before her. “Clarice was waiting for them when they got back. She had two cups in her hand, filled with some terrible, smoking liquid. It’s a very tricky mixture, to get people to tell the truth. Even I have trouble with it. But for someone like Clarice, it was a disaster waiting to happen.”
My stomach felt tight; I had never heard this story before. “She made them drink it?”
She nodded, her mouth tight. “Every drop.”
“And what happened?”
“Annabella’s drink had come out all right. She told her mother exactly where they had gone that night, exactly who they had seen. But Georgina . . . something in her drink turned against her. She grew gravely ill. She was only sixteen, and people say it almost killed her. People say . . . that maybe if it hadn’t been for that night, she would have found her powers.”
My heart felt like it had shrunk to half its size. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard this story before. Clarice had been a monster.
“That’s terrible,” I said.
“Magic is never guaranteed in this world, not even for a Fernweh,” she replied. “I think Clarice wanted to protect her children so much that she ended up ruining them. One of them flew away, and the other . . . Well, if you a stifle a child, you stifle every part of them. Who knows what Georgina could have been if she’d been given the chance to shine. Who knows. She could have been as amazing as you
are.”
She put her hand on my cheek, and even as she smiled at me, a little voice in the back of my head reminded me that I hadn’t found my powers either. I was no better than the original Georgina.
Well—at least I didn’t have Clarice for a mother. Magic wasn’t everything, not even for a Fernweh.
“I’m so happy you’re normal,” I told her.
She laughed. “I think that’s the first time in history a teenager has ever called her mother normal. I’ll take it.”
“What about this?” I asked, gesturing out at the rain, my head still reeling from everything she’d told me. “What do you think is causing this?”
She thought for a moment, letting her coffee cool, staring out over Bottle Hill. “The first Penelope could control time. Nothing too severe. She could pause things for a few minutes, maybe speed up a day if she felt like it. But my mother told me that whenever she did it, things got a little wonky on the island. Using magic always has consequences. It rained frogs once. All the roses bloomed in winter. That reminds me a little of this.”
“Are you saying all this rain is a consequence of using magic?”
“A consequence, a result . . . I’m not sure yet. But it smells like magic, doesn’t it?”
She turned to face the backyard of the inn, which had been transformed into a memorial for Annabella. Her grave was marked with a little flat piece of wood sanded smooth by Peter, and although the islanders of By-the-Sea were not, as a rule, religious, there were still offerings left: old coins and pots full of seawater and small mounds of beach sand.
My mother had tolerated these gifts until they became too cumbersome, until half the backyard was taken up by trinkets and tchotchkes, and then she went out and collected the items in a cardboard box, which she left on the front porch. When people complained, she said, “I don’t dance naked in your backyard,” which made them a little confused and a little uncomfortable but also a little less likely to leave their old junk at the inn.
Still, it did not escape me: how strange it was to sit by the grave of a bird who had been so much a part of your identity as a Fernweh woman, and as an islander, that her sudden absence felt like a loss so sharp and profound that it took the place of even your father, of even your grandmother, of even every Fernweh woman who’d come before you and every Fernweh woman who might come after.
Except Clarice.
I don’t think I could count Clarice in my mental list of ancestors anymore.
“I’ll find who did this,” I said.
My voice sounded more confident than I felt. My mother handed me her umbrella and kissed me on the side of my head. She left me alone on the widow’s walk; I looked down at the backyard and the smattering of people taking turns crying by Annabella’s grave.
Peter had carved into the wood of the grave marker: A.W.
Annabella’s Woodpecker.
Secretly I thought he probably should have made it A.F.
Annabella Fernweh.
Once a Fernweh, always a Fernweh, no matter how far you flew.
Suspicions
I started to notice something unexpected.
It began as a whisper in the inn, a low murmur that followed me through the halls and crept around corners and slunk in between the sheets of my bed, waiting for me. It began with Shelby leaving Annabella’s funeral and casting distrusting looks at my sister. Then Hep Shackman, sitting outside the barn, looking scared when he saw me. I would enter a room and it would fall silent. I would sneeze and everyone nearby would jump. I would cough into the crook of my elbow, and if someone was sitting at the table next to me, they would get up and move.
I thought I was being paranoid at first.
But then I saw Lucille sitting alone in the library of the inn, reading a book about the stages of grief, and when I sat next to her and said hi, she smiled politely, placed the book on an end table without marking her place, and left the room.
My sister wandered in shortly after. She took Lucille’s place, crossing her legs under her body, looking like a small child in the overstuffed chair.
It was twilight and there were heavy bags underneath her eyes. I realized I hadn’t seen her in days; she had been walking around the house from shadow to shadow, like something that didn’t want to be caught.
“Why do you look like you just saw a ghost?” she asked. Then, looking around, “There are ghosts here, you know. Vira told me once.”
“She was just trying to scare you.”
“I don’t know. I trust Vira when it comes to creepy things.”
“Hey, have you noticed . . . ,” I said, but stopped, because I couldn’t figure out how to phrase what it was I wanted to say.
Have you noticed people are avoiding us?
Have you noticed nobody will talk to us?
“I passed Lucille in the hallway,” Mary said. “She practically climbed the wall to get away from me. So yeah. I’ve noticed.”
“What do you think it is?”
“You know what it is, Georgina, you just don’t want to admit it to yourself, because it sucks too much,” she said. She pulled two cookies out of the pocket of her dress and handed me one.
“They think we’ve got magic,” I whispered.
“They’ve always thought that,” Mary corrected. “But now they think I’ve killed Annabella.”
This small crumb of knowledge had been sitting low in my stomach, wiggling around in my gut, trying to get my attention. To hear Mary say it out loud made it real. They thought—the birdheads, the islanders—that my sister killed Annabella.
“It’s not fair,” I said.
“You can ask me,” Mary offered. “I won’t be offended.”
“I never for one second—”
“Right, but it’s fine if you did. I can see how it makes sense. I’m a bitch. People love blaming bitches for things. And plus—you don’t know where I was that night.”
“You’re a bitch, Mary, but you’re not a murdering bitch.”
“Murdering Bitch will absolutely be the title of my memoir,” Mary said. She popped the last bit of her cookie into her mouth and chewed slowly.
“Well, where were you that night?” I asked.
“At the Fowl Fair. With you.”
“And afterward?”
“Here and there,” she said, and her expression clouded over. “Do you want to go out tonight? Colin Osmond is having a party.”
Even under the black stain of death, the island loved its parties.
I shrugged. “If you want to go, I’ll go with you.”
“I want to go,” she said. “Can you believe it’s almost our birthday?”
“Why won’t you tell me where you were?”
“I didn’t kill Annabella.”
“Mary, I would never think that.”
“I’ll meet you in an hour, okay?”
And she got up. And she floated across the room. And I knew I should go and yank her back to the ground, but instead, I just watched her leave.
Mary knocked on my door an hour later, and didn’t wait for me to respond before she let herself inside. She was holding an umbrella, and she’d changed into black, ripped jeans and a boxy T-shirt, heavy black boots that I thought she must have stolen from our mother’s closet. Her blond hair was braided into two long plaits that lay over each of her shoulders and she wore a dark plum lipstick that matched the circles underneath her eyes.
My sister always wore long, flowy dresses and not a stitch of makeup. I wasn’t sure who this was, but she looked more like Vira or my mother, twenty years ago.
“Is that what you’re wearing?” I asked.
“Is that what you’re wearing?” she shot back. I had on jean shorts, a flannel shirt. My hair was pulled into a bun, and I wore plain white sneakers, dirty now from years of use.
It had taken me the full hour to decide what to wear. What if Prue was there? I doubted the news of a party at Colin Osmond’s house would have reached her, but if it had, I didn’t want to look li
ke I’d gotten dressed up for her, but I didn’t want to look like a jerk either. Half my wardrobe was spread out across my bed, and I saw Mary sneak a glance at it.
I hadn’t told her about Prue and me kissing in the backyard, but in my defense, I hadn’t seen more of her lately than the back of her head disappearing around corners. And I would have told her then, but there was something so disconcerting about the way she was dressed, about the plum lipstick that colored her pout into something unrecognizable. Something a little creepy.
“Are you ready?” she asked, crossing to my window and lifting it open.
I thought of Clarice Fernweh barricading her children in their bedrooms. I thought of the original Georgina so sick with accidental poison that she almost died. I thought of Annabella, seizing her one opportunity to get away forever.
I didn’t blame her. Given the chance, I think we all would want wings.
“Georgie?” Mary said. She already had one leg out the window, and she was ducking her head to get outside. I thought I would always remember my sister like this: poised to jump.
And she did.
And she waited for me to climb down the latticing, and then we set off together across the island, huddling under one umbrella, just like we had the night of the summer solstice—minus the rain, minus the umbrella, minus my sister’s dark lipstick. That night felt like a lifetime ago; everything had changed since then. The island was a different place, my sister was a different girl. Even I was unrecognizable.
My sister pulled a little silver flask from her bra, just like the night of the solstice, but unlike the night of the solstice, she drank with a singular purpose: long, deep pulls without asking me if I wanted any. When she was finished, she handed it over as an afterthought. There was hardly a sip left.
“What’s going on with you?” I asked her.
“What do you mean?”
“This outfit? The amount of alcohol you just drank?”
“I’m getting ready to party. Can’t you tell?” she said, and then she slipped away from me, out from the protection of the umbrella, and she was running down the middle of Main Street, following the road to Colin Osmond’s house, which was just north of the Beach. I lost sight of her in between the streetlights, and I slipped the empty flask into my back pocket and tried to keep up.