Summer of Salt

by Katrina Leno

  Dedication

  to Shane

  who has his own magic

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part I.

  Summer Solstice

  Check-In

  Days Late

  Weeks Late

  Fowl Fair

  Part II.

  Days After

  Flood

  Suspicions

  Feathers

  Part III.

  Evil Man

  Birthday

  After

  Bird

  Leaving

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Katrina Leno

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  I.

  It was many and many a year ago,

  In a kingdom by the sea.

  from “Annabel Lee”

  by Edgar Allan Poe

  Summer Solstice

  On the island of By-the-Sea you could always smell two things: salt and magic.

  The first was obvious. It came crashing ashore in the blue waves; it sat heavy and thick in our hair and our clothes; it stained our bedsheets and made our pillows damp.

  The second—the scent of magic—was harder to pin down.

  It floated behind my mother as she carried a woven basket out to the herb garden in the middle of the night (when picked under moonlight, rosemary became so much more than just something that goes well with eggs).

  It gathered up in the corners of the Fernweh Inn, mixed with the dust and the cobwebs that collected in the guest rooms during the nine months the inn sat (mostly) empty.

  And it poured off my sister on the night of the summer solstice, when she stepped up onto the ledge of my attic bedroom window and unceremoniously pushed herself away, jumping into the night air with all the grace of a poorly trained ballerina.

  Oh—don’t worry.

  She’ll be fine.

  Of all the stories about my family, the Fernweh women on the island of By-the-Sea, there are two that no one will ever forget. One is the story of how my sister, Mary, and I were born. And the other is the story of the summer we turned eighteen. This summer.

  You would never know by looking at my sister that she was the type of girl who could jump from a fourth-story window and float gently to the ground on a warm and windless summer night, landing perfectly between two of my mother’s enormous, prized-possession bleeding hearts, trampling not a single blade of grass beneath her bare feet. And yet here we were: A warm and windless summer night. My sister’s dress floating around her like a ghost made out of cotton and lace. A fall that should have killed her. A fall that would have, if she weren’t a Fernweh. My mother’s bleeding hearts, untouched, and my sister dropping her sandals on the grass and sliding into them while looking back up at me, an obnoxiously pleased expression on her face, the scent of magic so strong and sharp (like ashes, like shadows, like dirt) that I actually sneezed.

  “Bless you!” she called up merrily.

  From above, leaning out of the window, I rolled my eyes.

  “You’re so fucking dramatic,” I said.

  Mary kissed the air in my general direction.

  It took me a few minutes longer to make it down to the grass; we couldn’t all float through the summer air. I had to crawl down the lattice that ran up the side of the house, avoiding the thorns of the roses that vined skyward and always made my bedroom smell so sickly sweet. When I finally jumped the last few feet and landed beside her, she had lain down in the grass. She was pretending to be asleep.

  “Asshole,” I said, and kicked her with the toe of my sandaled foot.

  “Jealous,” she replied.

  “Joke’s on you when you get a grass stain on your ass.”

  “Mom has grass-stain potion,” Mary said, and held her hand out to me. I grabbed it hard and pulled her up. She smelled like cinnamon as she smiled at me. “Doesn’t this just feel like a night of limitless possibility?” she said, suddenly serious, holding her arms open to the night like she could embrace it.

  “Sure, Mary. Whatever you say.”

  She laughed and pushed me away, and I followed her as she turned and darted across the lawn. I paused at the edge of our property, turning only once to see how creepy the Fernweh Inn looked at night. It was all shadows and things that caught the corner of your eye. Real stuff of ghost stories. I’d always loved it.

  “Keep up, Georgina,” Mary called as we made our way down Bottle Hill and away from the ocean, toward the center of our island.

  Oh, By-the-Sea, our home: just a handful of people with their own presumably good reasons for wanting to live on the grayest and rainiest and arguably most depressing island this side of our great mainland. (This side was east. I imagine if this side were west it would be all sunshine and palm trees and tan, muscular boys with wet suits rolled down to their waists, carrying surfboards on their shoulders as they walked barefoot down the sides of small coastal highways.)

  “This is pointless. Everything is pointless,” I said. I wore shorts, and my legs were already being eaten alive by mosquitoes. “Did you bring a citronella candle?”

  “Oh yes, I’m keeping it in my bra,” Mary said. She stopped and waited for me. “Why are you being such a grump?”

  “Bonfires are pointless.”

  “You’ve already established that everything is pointless. I assumed bonfires fell under that umbrella.”

  “They do.”

  “What’s really bothering you, my poor little grumpy sister?”

  We’d reached Main Street, the longest street in By-the-Sea. It ran north to south and cut the island in half down the middle. You could get all the way from Bottle Hill to the ferry dock on this road. I stood in the middle of it, staring down into the darkness that was punctuated every hundred feet or so by a streetlamp.

  In a little over two months, Mary and I would take this road all the way to the docks. We’d board the ferry for the first time in our lives and take it to the mainland. I was going to a small college just far enough from the ocean that for the first time in my life I wouldn’t be able to smell salt. Mary would get on a plane and fly south. Her school was on the very tip of the mainland, right on the water. She was tied to the water, my sister. Moods like tides, temper like a hungry shark.

  “Georgie?” Mary asked, when a few moments had passed and I still hadn’t moved from the middle of the road. Not like there was any reason to. We’d counted once; there were fewer than forty cars on By-the-Sea, and we were almost guaranteed to run into none of them at this time of night.

  “Just thinking,” I said.

  “About . . . ?”

  “College, I guess.”

  Mary made a noise in the back of her throat that meant something like “Really? This again?” and at the same time conveyed how unlikely it was that we had come from the same place, the same womb. At the same time, even.

  Sometimes I wondered about that myself. I mean, we looked nothing alike. Mary was a blond, and I was a brunette. Mary had brown eyes, and I had green. Mary liked bonfires, and I thought they were pointless. Mary was going far away to a college on the water, and I was having heart palpitations in the middle of the road thinking about a simple little ferry ride.

  “Are you still worried about that?” Mary asked. “Georgina, you’re going to be fine. You’re the smartest person in our class, everyone loves you, and there are bound to be more girls who like girls over there than there are here. It’s a simple numbers game.”

  “Well, at least you have your priorities straight,” I said.

  “Kissing is important. You’ve only kissed one person in your entire life. That’s weird.”


  “I think it’s weirder that you’re methodically making your way through every boy on this very small island.”

  “God, you are a grump,” Mary said.

  As we spoke, Mary had gradually floated higher and higher into the air. She was a solid five inches off the ground now, and I didn’t think she even realized it. My sister had always been lazy about her powers—she went through week-long periods where she practiced diligently, trying to figure out how to control them, learning how to direct her body through the air, but more often than not, she couldn’t be bothered.

  It worried me. It was one thing trying to keep my sister’s powers a secret from a tiny island, but what would it be like for her to try and hide them from the entire mainland? From her university? From her new roommate?

  “Mary,” I said sternly, pointing at her feet.

  She rolled her eyes and gradually sank back to earth. “There’s no one around.”

  “That’s not the point. You know you’re supposed to be trying to control it.”

  “I can’t think about it every second of every day,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest.

  “Let’s just get this over with,” I said.

  I pushed past her, sure of my footing even in the darkness, because I knew the way by heart, because I knew every single way on this island, every single rock or fallen branch that might trip me up. You could walk from one end to the other in two hours, and that’s if you were really taking your time.

  We weren’t going far. The Beach was a fifteen-minute walk from our house. That was the official, in-the-tourist-book name for where we were going, one of six beaches on By-the-Sea. (Yes, there was a tourist book for our tiny island. It was made and printed by Willard Jacoby, and I don’t think he’d ever sold a single copy.) The Beach was the smallest of the six, a little cove popular with the locals and unpopular with the tourists because of a series of signs warning of frequent shark attacks. The signs, while a blatant lie designed to keep the Beach tourist-free, were incredibly effective; they featured sunblock-nosed stick figures in bathing suits missing arms or legs or huge chunks of their torsos.

  The bonfire was held on the Beach every year on the summer solstice. School had been out for a month already, but this was the official start of summer and By-the-Sea’s singularly minded two-month tourist season.

  The island’s population of young people, including the thirty-six of us who made up that year’s graduating class, collected on the Beach, drank summer punch, vomited into the waves, and skinny-dipped. I had gone every year since I was thirteen, and this would be my last one. We were done now, Mary and I. Graduated. Elevated. Voilà.

  I was only here because of her. She loved this sort of thing. She was born for oceanside bonfires, long gauzy dresses and uncombed hair, the scent of salt like a blanket you can’t peel off your skin. She was born for the smell of water, for the way it sank into your bones, stained your skin, dyed your blood a deep, salty blue.

  Me, I could never see waves again and be perfectly fine with that.

  Mary linked her arm through mine and pulled me against her side, trapping me. “Just so I can adequately prepare myself, how long is your little mood going to last?”

  “We’ve just been to so many of these. I don’t really see the point in one more. Especially when we have to be up at the crack of dawn tomorrow.”

  “Georgie, can’t you just live a little? I mean—this is the first night of the rest of your life!”

  “But . . . you could say that about every night. Like, every night is the first night of the rest of your life. Because the present is always the present and the only thing in front of us is the rest of our lives.”

  “Here, I brought this for you because I knew you’d be like this,” she said, pulling a small silver flask from her bra.

  “Wait, so do you actually have a citronella candle in there?”

  “It’s the cinnamon stuff you like. You’re welcome.”

  She took a big swig and then handed it to me, shaking her head from side to side like a dog, with her tongue hanging out and everything.

  “Georgie, just think about it,” she continued. One sip of cinnamon whiskey and her eyes had already gotten all glossy. “In a couple months we’ll just be gone, you know? This is really it. One last summer on By-the-Sea. One last summer together.”

  I sipped from the flask. Mary unhooked her vise grip on my arm and took my hand instead. She was swaying a little, which made me think she’d already had her fair share of cinnamon whiskey before she’d knocked on my bedroom door.

  “Are you happy at all?” she asked tentatively.

  “Of course I’m happy. Why wouldn’t I be happy?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Sometimes you just find reasons not to be.” She kissed the back of my hand. We’d reached the edge of the Beach. My sister slipped out of her sandals and held them with one finger over her shoulder.

  The bonfire’s flames were already dangerously high. The people around it were like little human-shaped spots of darkness against the fire. I tried not to let Mary’s words into my heart: sometimes you just find reasons not to be. If that were true, then Mary’s own vice was that she sometimes found the meanest observations and let them fall off her tongue like they were nothing.

  “I am happy,” I said, but I didn’t think she heard me. She was preening: running her hands through her hair and adjusting her dress.

  “Gimme,” she said, holding out her hand. I gave her the flask, and she took another massive sip. “Okay. Don’t go far.” And she handed the flask back to me and took off running.

  I was expecting that. I watched her go until I could no longer distinguish her from the other dark blobs of people.

  It occurred to me that I could leave, that I could go back home and sleep for a few hours and then come out again and find her as the sun was rising, lead her home while she floated like a balloon above my head, my hand wrapped tightly around her ankle so I wouldn’t lose her to the last few fading stars.

  That was the extent of her powers: my sister could float.

  She was, of course, hoping they evolved eventually, that one day she’d be able to get more than a few feet off the ground, but so far, no flying, just floating.

  It was a rare gift, but not unheard of among Fernweh women. We had a great-great-aunt who could fly on a God’s-honest broom. We had another aunt, farther back, who never actually touched the ground; her feet were always about an inch from the soil she glided on.

  And then there was Annabella.

  Every year, from late June to late August, By-the-Sea played host to the rarest bird in the entire world: the Eastern Seaborn Flicker.

  Although nobody actually called her that. They called her what my great-great-great-maybe-another-great-grandmother, Georgina Fernweh (my namesake, yes), the woman who’d discovered the new species, had called her: Annabella’s Woodpecker.

  Named after her twin sister, Annabella, who had gone missing around the same time the bird had shown up.

  Her twin sister, who had started out being able to float and had, after years of practice, perfected the art of flying.

  I’m sure stranger things have happened in my family than a woman possibly-maybe-probably turning into a bird.

  But how else could you explain it? The same bird showing up every year, for three hundred years or so, with the same markings and the same coloring and the same mannerisms. Coming back to visit its home. Coming back, perhaps, to say hi to its living relatives (and even the dead ones, buried in the Fernweh tomb on the island’s only cemetery).

  Of course, the ornithologists and enthusiasts that studied her insisted that a bird with a three-hundred-year lifespan was impossible, and that the more likely explanation was that there just wasn’t that much variation between individual units of the species.

  They said things like that, individual units of the species.

  They also said things like, You should probably at least call it Annabella’s Flicker, to which
my great-great-whatever-grandmother was like, You should probably let me name this rare bird anything I damn well want because she’s on my property and, if you piss me off, I’ll build a very tall fence.

  And just like every summer, the Fernweh Inn would open tomorrow, and the birdheads would flock to the island in droves. Oh, By-the-Sea, island of salt and sand and rain and magic and one single solitary bird that made our tiny little chunk of rock—which would have been otherwise entirely overlooked by the rest of the world—absolutely famous (at least in certain ornithological circles).

  I was rather fond of Annabella.

  Not everybody had their own personal island mascot, and she was ours.

  And she was a Fernweh, to boot. We Fernwehs had to stick together.

  Even those of us without any powers.

  Like me.

  It was a well-established thing in Fernweh history: that all Fernweh women found their particular gifts by their eighteenth birthday. I had a great-great-aunt who had discovered her powers of teleportation (she could zap herself to anywhere on the island, but she couldn’t zap her clothes, so it ended up being a very risqué gift) at the age of four, and she proceeded to use them gleefully, scaring her siblings and parents half to death by popping up in the strangest places. I had yet another great-great-aunt who hadn’t discovered her powers of telepathy until she was seventeen and a half.

  There seemed to be no rhyme or reason.

  Mary and I would be turning eighteen at the end of the summer, and here I was: still resolutely unmagical while Mary had been floating since birth.

  I slid my sandals off and walked down toward the water.

  I found Vira ankle-deep in ocean, holding her long skirt up around her knees.

  “Hi,” I said, joining her.

  “You smell like cinnamon.”

  I handed her the flask. At this rate, it would be gone before the midnight rush. (The midnight rush was all who had a mind to take off their clothes and run screaming into the water. I did not have a mind to. Mary was unpredictable; she could go either way.)

  Vira took a sip of the flask and smacked her lips exaggeratedly. She handed the flask back to me and I took the long, last sip.