The Lost Coast

by Amy Rose Capetta

  Haven looks up at me, her dark eyes unnaturally calm. When I stare too long, I unbury the feelings she’s hiding from everyone. The turmoil of losing someone she’s known all her life, the loneliness of going through it with those parents. The guilt of not being able to fix things. I want to tell her I’m feeling the same guilt, but I’m afraid she’ll run, like a deer scared off by the touch of headlights.

  “You were nice to me,” Haven says. “So I’ll tell you the truth.”

  “About what happened to Imogen?” I ask, my chest filling with hopeful static. Maybe that’s why the dowsing rod led me here. Maybe Haven knows where her sister is. Maybe she really did run away.

  “No.” Haven narrows her eyes. Even her freckles pinch. “You don’t know her.”

  “I’m learning fast,” I say.

  Haven hunches her shoulders so hard, it looks like she might fold in half. “You believe what the Grays tell you,” she says. “But I’m her sister.”

  Sitting on the bank of the Eel River, Haven felt as uncomfortable as if a hornet were buzzing around her, refusing to go away, refusing to sting.

  “I’m a witch, I’m a witch,” Imogen sang.

  “Stop it,” Haven said, curling her knees tight to her chest.

  “Why should I?” Imogen asked, kicking through the water in a slow circle. “It’s who I am. You can’t just stop being who you are.”

  Haven very, very much wanted to disagree. She also didn’t want to start a fight. So she stared down at the pale-mint water. She stared up at a canyon of sky between the treetops on both sides of the Eel River.

  She looked everywhere but at her sister.

  They swam for a while, or Imogen swam and Haven watched. Imogen’s legs were strong, and she didn’t seem to feel the cold.

  Haven sunned on the river’s margin, made of all kinds of pebbles. Dark and pale pebbles. Scratchy and smooth. Broken from glass or chipped from cement or made when the earth pushed down on itself for thousands and thousands of years.

  Imogen looked over with her dark eyes, fighting to keep them wide when the sun was blaring. “You can be a witch, too.”

  “Maybe I don’t want to be one,” Haven said. Even though she really, really did. But she also wanted to be normal like her parents. Imogen had everything easy. She couldn’t stop herself from doing what she wanted.

  “You should try it,” Imogen said. “It’s fun.” She smirked at the water, and it flicked onto Haven’s feet, getting her icy and wet.

  Haven snatched her toes back. “Hey! You did that!”

  “You can’t prove anything,” Imogen said, but a second later, water that had been totally calm slapped at the shore and then broke over Haven in a cold, glassy sheet. She shrieked. Imogen laughed as she bobbed in the water.

  “Stop,” Haven said.

  “Okay,” Imogen said. She swam in a little, found her footing, and stood up. The water was building, slapping Haven over and over.

  “Stop!” Haven screamed. Her voice rose, but it was their special swimming hole and there was no one around to hear except Imogen.

  Haven started to cry.

  “I’m trying,” Imogen said, looking upset but not actually stopping the water. “Everything was fine until I tried to control it.”

  “Shut up,” Haven said. “You’re lying. You’re doing it on purpose.”

  “Why don’t you believe me?” Imogen asked as the water rose and rose, as she swirled her hands in strange shapes, and the water swirled, too, until it was a hand grabbing for Haven’s throat.

  Haven screamed, and the sky went white.

  Iwonder how long she’s been keeping that story in. Haven has a shocked look on her face, eyes hard with shine and chin jutted so her mouth is still open an inch.

  “Do your parents know about that?” I ask.

  “Seriously?” Haven asks. “If I told them, they would have had Imogen taken away.” She looks down at her fingers, twisting them into a pale knot. Then she looks back up at me and does damage control. “I woke up and everything was fine. We told Mom and Dad that I got heatstroke. I didn’t get to go outside for the rest of the summer.”

  “That sounds bad,” I say. “And not really fair.”

  Haven looks at me like I single-handedly turned night to day. “That’s what I thought.”

  I take a step closer to Haven. Just one. I don’t want to scare her. But I need to know more about the Imogen that only she knows. “Did she ever use her magic on you again?”

  Haven stares down the length of the open hallway, toward the woods beyond the school. “No.”

  I think about Neil. Did he steal me away from my bed, steer me through the woods, to tell me who had killed him? Imogen’s words there in the bark. His actual death, the voice in that memory, the one that said I’m sorry, Neil.

  But I’ve never heard Imogen’s voice. Only memories translated through a dozen different minds, pouring out of a dozen mouths. I’ve seen the versions of her that other people remember, and none of them match up.

  “Can I go?” Haven asks, as if I’m keeping her there by force.

  “Of course you can,” I say.

  She runs off, a scared animal. When I get back to Tempest Gardens, I trap myself in cottage nine for the afternoon, doing homework for a class about California’s history and geography. It’s stuffed with facts about redwoods. They drink fog. That’s why they love the valleys of the Lost Coast, which always seem to be filled with it. They’re fickle about climate. They like to be near salt water but not too near. They send each other messages, keep each other safe. And they only thrive with other redwoods around.

  The Grays are like that. Hawthorn, June, Lelia, and Rush need each other to thrive. I’ve seen the way they help each other stand tall. Because they have each other, they can be who they are in the largest, most complete sense. But I don’t know what happens if I don’t find Imogen. Does the whole forest come down?

  I rush to the end and open my math notebook. I flip into the depths of the pages and scribble questions.

  Where is Imogen now?

  Is she alone?

  Do her parents even care?

  If she ran away, where did she go?

  There’s a knock on the door. I climb over the little table where I’ve set my dowsing rod next to my homework and open it.

  It’s Rush, wearing the Tempest Gardens apron over shorts and a fluttery tank top. Her hair, dark as wet earth, spills down past her pockets. The dowsing rod on the table is pointing straight at her. Apparently I’m going to keep finding Rush no matter what.

  I step aside so she can come in. She gets right to work, making herself industrious.

  “I thought you were working at Coffee Gods today,” she says.

  “Veronica needed to switch. She said I could take her Saturday morning; it’s the shift with the best tips. And we definitely need the money, so . . .” My sentence trickles out to nothing.

  “Veronica,” she says slowly. “Her name even tastes like coffee.”

  I can’t help but fall into the beautiful trap of it. “What do I taste like?”

  It must be nice, because Rush’s lips loosen into a smile. It’s new to me, but somehow this looks like her natural state. I wonder if this is the girl Rush was before Imogen went missing.

  “Danny.” I watch her rolling my name around in her mouth. Tasting it. Then she opens her eyes fast, wiping dust from the windowsill as she recites, “Strawberry and lemon and fresh mint leaves.”

  “What about Imogen?” I ask.

  “Licorice and cream,” she says automatically.

  I get what I asked for — a hard pebble of jealousy lodged in my throat. But I notice that she doesn’t say Imogen’s name.

  Rush cleans the knobs on the gas stove, opens the oven, and wipes down the inside until her cloth is oily black. She works through every area in the cottage until there’s only one left — the love seat where I’m sitting. I keep my feet bolted to the ground. I’m not leaving this time.

&nbs
p; She considers me carefully. Then she goes back to her cart, picks up her spray, and thickens the air with it.

  “That stuff is unbreathable,” I say.

  “Then come outside,” she says. “There’s real air and October.”

  “You know I can’t leave.”

  She comes right over and sits down with me, hip pushing at mine until there’s room for both of us. Barely. I can’t imagine Mom would let me bring a girl into the cottage when she’s gone, while I’m being punished. But this is a different kind of punishment: sitting this close, my thoughts turned to glue, my skin informing me how close her skin is.

  “The wards are broken,” I say. “Aren’t you afraid that we’ll get hurt if we go out there? If we attract the attention of . . . whatever Imogen was trying to protect you from?”

  Rush draws spirals in the margin of my homework. “Sometimes hurt is better than nothing.”

  I don’t think we’re talking about magic. Or maybe we are. A different kind. Just as dangerous. Just as likely to have rules that make you feel like you’re safe until you’re fumbling around in the dark, chanting breathy words, more potent then you’ve ever felt, with no idea how you got there, no way of knowing if you’re going to be the one who hurts or gets hurt. The one who leaves or gets left behind.

  “Come with me,” Rush says, her fingers sliding lightly along the backs of mine.

  And I stand up, spilling homework everywhere. I look until I find the not-very-creative spot where Mom hid my phone in a drawer. I grab my bag and slip the dowsing rod inside. Rush doesn’t seem to care what happens to her cleaning cart. I leave a note for Mom.

  I’m alive.

  It’s never felt this true.

  I follow Rush, one stone at a time, down the path. She looks up at the trees, down at her feet, working them out of her sneakers, hanging those sneakers from one hand so she can feel the slate on her arches, the mulch between her toes, the hard kiss of the parking lot as she leads me toward her car. The Deathmobile. Her hair swings darkly, back and forth like a metronome, keeping its own time and not anyone else’s. The way she walks, at home in her skin, with all the doors open wide, is what I want. She turns back to me and smiles.

  Rush wants me with her, and she doesn’t have to cast a spell to convince me.

  She is the spell.

  Emma Hart loved the Grays, though she sometimes felt as if she were on one side of a thick-paned glass staring in at them. Outside in the cold as they talked and danced and chanted and kissed.

  Their kissing started out as innocent as anything else. It made Emma happy to see the Grays so free with one another, love flowing around them in eddies and swirls, never trapped in their hearts with nowhere to go.

  Then Rush and Imogen started looking at each other in a way that Emma knew painfully, perfectly — from the inside. She was the first to understand what was coming next. She saw it from a mile away, a storm on the horizon.

  The first time Rush and Imogen kissed in the woods, Emma vowed never to speak to Imogen again. It was best for both of them.

  “But that’s not what I want,” Imogen said, her stubbornness putting small cracks in Emma’s resolve.

  “What do you want?” Emma asked.

  “For you to be with me,” Imogen said. “Always.”

  Emma remembered someone else telling her they would always be together, a very long time ago.

  It hurt just as much the second time.

  Imogen visited Emma as much as ever — more, even — but sometimes she came fresh from kissing Rush, her lips swollen and cinnamon pink.

  It was the worst when Imogen tried to talk to her about kissing Rush. Imogen thought that Emma was only sad about the past. As if seeing her with Rush could fill the emptiness of what never happened with Ada.

  “It’s amazing, the way I can tell when she wants to kiss without her even saying it first,” Imogen gushed. “It’s like I can hear her entire body asking me.” Emma’s heart raged, an overfull river, but Imogen couldn’t see that. “Rush is always so quiet, but her body’s not quiet at all. It’s making music and talking to me and shouting. When I kiss her, all of that pours into me.”

  “Please don’t tell me more,” Emma said, a strained whisper.

  Imogen was free, and she was choosing someone else. Someone who could be with her in a way that Emma never could.

  Ihold my breath as Rush steers the Deathmobile one-handed through town, past the shops and the school and then a little farther, sliding us into the dirt tracks alongside the cemetery.

  When she stops the car, I get out. Fast.

  “What are we doing here?” I ask, pretending I haven’t already followed her to this exact place. It’s an old patch of graves, barely cared for. The wildness at the edges is gnawing inward, toward the center. A little fence pretends to be the boundary, but mostly it’s an excuse for wildflowers to grow along the posts. The headstones aren’t planted in rows, but wherever people thought to put them. Some are the old-fashioned kind with grimacing angels. In one corner is a little blocked-off section where the stones are tall and white and wafer-thin, all done in the same stark style.

  “I met Imogen here,” Rush says, her soft voice blanketing the cemetery.

  “Of course you did,” I mutter. It would never be something boring with Imogen.

  “And this,” Rush says, popping the trunk and letting it whine open, “is why I don’t let the Grays ride in my car. They would find what I keep in here.”

  “You mean the bodies?” I ask.

  It’s the worst possible thing to say, but somehow it earns me a quiet laugh.

  Rush pulls out a black cloth case by a handle. It’s as wide as a body, with curves even more dramatic than hers. When she sets it to the ground, it clunks in a distinctly wooden way.

  “Is that . . . ?”

  “A cello,” she confirms. “I don’t really play much anymore, unless I’m upset. It’s like comfort food. I used to come here because I thought I wasn’t good enough for living audiences yet. I made dead people listen to me instead. They had to deal with a lot of Dvořák.”

  She finds a headstone to sit on, not setting her full weight against it but leaning so gently that I can’t imagine the person buried there minds at all. She unzips the cello from its case, peels away the cover, and centers it between her bare legs.

  I blush so hard that I’m competing with the sunset. Rush doesn’t seem to notice. She stares down at her hands, one of them pressing the strings, the other one working the bow. A chord slides out, bursting with unexpected harmonies. She grates the bow across the strings on purpose, then smooths the sound over. It brightens the air, wakes up the birds. They take to the sky. The wind picks up, shaking the flowers at the edges of the cemetery. Rush’s playing is a call to everything around us — living and dead. “Imogen wandered out of the woods one day.”

  The birds flock above us. Ravens and crows and smaller ones, starlings maybe. A dark swirl of birds.

  I close my eyes and listen as Rush plays herself into the past.

  Rush and Imogen were together. Pasted to each other’s sides, always kissing. Those weeks of wandering were the worst Emma had ever known, a doubled pain pressing down on her.

  She felt like crying, but she couldn’t cry. Instead, the world filled with a stinging-cold rain. When she was stupid enough to follow Imogen through the woods one day, she found Imogen and Rush pressed against a tree, untouchable. Every drop of rain that flowed around their skin was a reminder.

  They had what Emma never would.

  She left that clearing in a hurry, not wanting to see the rest. The inevitable, perfect moments of love. Emma waited for time to sweep this whole thing away like a rough broom. In a few years, Imogen would leave her behind. Someday she would die. There was no real comfort for this, only an inching away from pain.

  The next time Emma visited the mother tree, Imogen was waiting. She sat on the mossy center of the fallen trunk, wearing a loose creamy-white dress with an eyelet pattern
.

  “I missed you,” Imogen said the moment Emma came into the grove.

  “That doesn’t change anything,” Emma said, instead of what she meant. She meant, I missed you, too.

  “I can’t keep doing this,” Imogen said, and Emma waited for the moment when Imogen announced that she would leave forever, that she would never visit the woods again. Imogen looked down at the ground, then up at the blank space where Emma should be. “I need to see you. Really see you. I think I found a way.”

  The last note from Rush’s cello haunts the air, and then we’re sitting in the kind of tense, breakable silence that makes me realize how natural and calm the silence of cemeteries usually feels.

  “When did you stop playing?” I ask, pointing at the cello with my sneaker. “I mean, officially?”

  “When I met Hawthorn, she told me about chanting. I loved the idea. I’m not even a good singer, really.”

  “You are,” I say, the dark burn of my feelings leaving a mark on my voice. “Really.”

  “Thanks,” Rush says, looking embarrassed and pleased, her eyebrows scrunching in a way that I enjoy far too much.

  “Did your parents get mad?” I asked. “When you stopped playing?”

  “They don’t really do mad. They do disapproval. They thought that I was going through a phase.” Anger is coming off of Rush in sheets, and after a second of heat, I realize that I’m feeling it, too, for her parents — and mine. They didn’t ever use the word phase, but there were times when it seemed like they were waiting for parts of me to disappear. “When I quit orchestra and skipped all my private lessons and started spending my time with a bunch of queer witches, my parents weren’t exactly happy. My mother said that as long as I was living in their house, I would keep playing. So I stayed with the Grays, couch-surfed for a while. That’s when I learned how to ride motorcycles with Lelia.”

  There’s a delicate silence as I realize what Rush just told me: her parents kicked her out, and she would have been on her own if the Grays hadn’t taken her in. I’d thought leaving Michigan for California was a big deal, but I’d never had to leave Mom. She’d stood by me, even when she didn’t understand, well past the time when she had solid reasons to trust me. The anger from a minute ago vanishes, leaving an empty space that I want to fill by running back to cottage nine and finding Mom right there, waiting. But I also have Rush standing in front of me with her pain on full display as she toes the dark dirt under the rough cemetery grass.