Summer of Salt

by Katrina Leno

  It took ages to wash the endless pile of silverware (endless largely in part because Mom kept finding more of it and bringing it over to me with an evil, joyous smirk plastered on her face), and when I was done I set up a station in the dining room where I could polish and shine.

  For not the first time in my life as a Fernweh woman, I wished magic was more like it was in the movies. On TV, people snapped their fingers and piles of silverware obligingly sprang to life and washed themselves. On By-the-Sea, not so much.

  Sure, we all had our specialties (except me, who had none): My mother could make any potion she set her mind to. My great-grandmother Roberta had controlled fire; her mother before her could walk on water and breathe underneath it. My sister, with absolutely no practice or seemingly much interest at all, had mastered the act of jumping out her bedroom window, and here I was, stuck washing silver by hand.

  It wasn’t that I hadn’t tried to make my powers come. I had. Especially when I was younger.

  I used to put myself in the weirdest situations, just to see if anything would happen.

  I’d stuck my head in the full bathtub and taken a tentative breath.

  I’d placed my hand over an open flame to see if it maybe wouldn’t hurt, if maybe fire was my thing.

  I’d tried to talk to animals.

  I’d tried a hundred things over the years, and then I’d given up, resigning myself to the fact that it would either happen or it wouldn’t, and I probably had no say either way.

  It was only just getting light outside when I started polishing; I was on my fourth cup of coffee (to be fair, Aggie’s coffee was notoriously weak), and I had only caught glimpses of my sister as she jumped from one task to another, never in one place for very long, always with an extreme eye roll for me as Mom followed closely behind her, barking instructions. I had just managed to find a way to fall half-asleep while still mechanically polishing forks when I finished. Almost immediately, my mother was upon me with the next thing I had to do.

  Hours later—years later—I was somehow done washing and polishing the silverware, ironing and hanging a hundred million curtains, dusting off the room keys (seriously), sweeping the front porch, beating out the cushions on the wicker furniture on said porch, and making sure Fernweh Inn’s twelve grandfather clocks were all wound and set to the correct time. By then it was eleven-thirty and time for a quick lunch before the guests started arriving.

  I’d checked the register earlier; of the inn’s sixteen rooms (floors two and three held the guest rooms, eight apiece), I knew all but six of today’s arrivals. That was to be expected: our crowd was mostly repeat birdheads, mixed in with a few random tourists who usually stayed a weekend or a week and left disappointed and confused about our priorities. The birdheads would be here until August. You’d be surprised at how easily these birdheads afforded my mother’s not-shy room rates. I knew one guy—Tank Smith—who routinely sold photos of Annabella’s Woodpecker to the Geographic Times for more money than most people make in a year. He spent the rest of the year doing God knows what, came to By-the-Sea for two months, snapped a picture, and made a cool hundred Gs.

  I met Aggie, Mom, and Mary in the kitchen for lunch. Mom handed me a gray, curiously smoking drink. I looked into the glass skeptically. It smelled like a match the moment you blow out the flame. Acidic and bitter and hot.

  “It will make you feel better,” she said, winking. The wink meant that the stuff in my hand wasn’t your run-of-the-mill smoothie.

  Although people on the island didn’t go around openly acknowledging the general magicness of my family, it was common knowledge that if you wanted something done, Penelope Fernweh could sometimes, with the right greasing of the wheels, do it for you. You didn’t ask questions. You didn’t make assumptions. You’d just slip her a little cash for her trouble and let her do her thing: bury this or that under a full moon, throw some shady ingredients into a big copper pot (you wouldn’t call it a cauldron, obviously), boil a frog alive and drink the marrow from its bones (just kidding; she never hurt animals). And then you’d sit back and wait. In this case, you’d wait for it to cure your hangover.

  “Wait—why wouldn’t you have given this to me at seven in the morning?” I whined.

  “I thought I should make you suffer a little. You did drink the rest of my good cinnamon whiskey. Do you know how long I’d been infusing that?”

  I was going to argue with her, clarify that it had actually been Mary who’d stolen the whiskey, but I decided against it. She who giveth could easily taketh away, and besides, I was used to being blamed for the trouble my sister got herself into. It was just sort of the way of the world. Mary did something rash; I inevitably helped her wiggle out of trouble.

  I sipped at the smoothie and instantly felt better. Magic, I mouthed at Mary, who rolled her eyes and held out her hand for a taste.

  “Finally, the sun!” Aggie exclaimed, peering out the window. “It’s been so gloomy all morning.”

  “You couldn’t have added some strawberries to this, Ma?” Mary said, pretending to gag. “It tastes awful.”

  “The beggars and the choosers,” Mom said.

  Aggie dished out quiche to the table; I was just finishing my second piece when the door to the kitchen opened and Peter Elmhurst, bellboy/groundskeeper/jack-of-all-trades, poked his head in.

  “Ms. Fernweh,” he said, “the first guests are arriving.”

  Aggie held up a Bloody Mary I hadn’t even noticed she was drinking. (If Aggie’s coffee was weak, her Bloody Marys were the opposite.) “To another season,” she said brightly.

  “To Annabella,” Mom added. “May this finally be her year.”

  She meant the eggs. Poor Annabella, perpetually childless. She laid eggs every summer, but they never hatched, no matter how diligently she tended to them. It was a big ornithological mystery, the will-she/won’t-she back-and-forth and the letdown when, one August morning, inevitably, she would be gone, and the eggs would remain behind, useless and cold. (Every year they were carefully collected and brought back to the mainland and autopsied. Every year they could find nothing obvious pointing to why they hadn’t survived incubation.)

  We Fernwehs knew, of course, that Annabella wasn’t strictly your average bird, and that her eggs probably weren’t hatching because of that.

  “To Annabella,” I echoed, raising my glass.

  And, fully embracing our long-held status as the biggest weirdos this side of the mainland, we toasted to a little bird and her fertility problems: Aggie and Mom with Bloody Marys, Mary and me with a sip of legit magic potion.

  It had turned out to be a beautiful day. By-the-Sea weather had always been a little unpredictable (the rainstorms of our birth come to mind), but it had only seemed to get worse lately: it would be summer and warm one minute, rainy and miserable the next, blizzard conditions the day after that. And the island paid no attention at all to conventional seasons. It had once snowed in July (the birdheads built a little lean-to around Annabella’s chosen tree). It had once been a blazing 110 degrees in January (we all went to the Beach and decided not to question things). By now we were all used to it. It wasn’t unusual for the birdheads to show up with both swimming trunks and skis packed into their enormous traveling trunks.

  I watched the first few of them walking up the front path now, all familiar faces: Liesel Channing and Hep Shackman, Henrietta Lee behind him followed by Tank Smith, the photographer. I’d seen these people every summer since I was born, and weird as they were, they were almost like family.

  Liesel reached me first. She wore pale-purple chinos with a pale-purple oxford shirt and pale-purple sneakers. And pale-purple-rimmed glasses. The only thing on her person that was not purple (luggage: purple; hair tie: purple) was her dutiful birdcat (like a birddog, but an exceptionally grumpy orange Maine coon named Horace, complete with heart-shaped birthmark on its forehead). She gasped when she finally made it up the porch steps. “It cannot be, it is impossible! You’re a woman now! Where
has my little Georgina gone to!”

  “Liesel, it’s so nice to see you!” I said, giving her a hug. By then the others had reached us (Hep, Henrietta, and Tank were significantly older than Liesel and had slowed down considerably over the years), and I made sure to hug and kiss every one of them. I was the front porch welcoming committee; Mary was just inside the front doors. The lucky thing was that there was only one taxi on By-the-Sea (driven by Seymore Stanners, Shelby’s dad, complete with a little flatbed wagon he pulled behind it for all the luggage), and so the arrivals would be limited to groups of four. Small doses of birdheads were better.

  Once this group disappeared inside I collapsed on a wicker armchair and closed my eyes, enjoying the sunshine and the warmth of the day.

  I didn’t have much time to myself, though. Half a minute later I heard a small cough and opened my eyes to see Peter Elmhurst standing uncomfortably close to me, smelling of firewood and smoke.

  “Hi, Peter.”

  “Hi, Georgie,” he said, then stopped.

  Peter lived down the road, on a farm near the cemetery. We’d all grown up together and used to be closer as kids, but we’d sort of drifted apart over the years. I blamed that on him—he’d been tragically in love with my sister since we were seven, and he really didn’t know how to take no thanks for an answer.

  “I brought the firewood,” Peter said. “In case your mom asks. It’s already out back.”

  “I’ll tell her.” He shuffled his feet but didn’t make a move to leave. “Anything else?”

  “I was just wondering if I could talk to you for a second?”

  I already knew what was coming; if I had a dollar for every boy on this island that asked me why my sister hadn’t fallen madly in love with him, I’d have enough for a ticket to the mainland. And first month’s rent on a new apartment. And a brand-new car. And so on.

  “Sure, Peter. What’s going on?”

  “I’m sorry if this is inappropriate. I know technically we work together, you know? I was actually just curious if maybe your sister had mentioned . . . Well, I wrote her a letter. And she hasn’t said anything. So I’m sort of worried now that maybe I forgot a stamp? Or maybe I got the address wrong? One Bottle Hill Lane, right?”

  The island was so small that you honestly didn’t need addresses. If I wrote “Elvira Montgomery” on an envelope, with nothing else but a lipstick kiss for directions, it would reach her in two hours. Our postman, Albert Craws, was very good. And he was also very generous; I never used stamps. I sometimes wrote him nice things where a stamp should go—Hope you’re well, Albert! Don’t work too hard, Albert!—but I had never once actually paid to send a letter. Peter could have messed up every single step of mailing that letter to my sister and it still would have gotten here. Which meant of course she’d received it, of course she’d showed it to me, and of course she had no intention of writing him back.

  “I don’t think she mentioned anything about a letter,” I said, hating to lie to him, hating my sister for making it necessary for me to lie to him, hating my sister for always managing to drag me into her problems. “You know my mom. She’s so absentminded, she probably checked the mail and ended up burying the letter in her rose garden.”

  My mother was anything but absentminded, but it seemed like a good excuse; she did occasionally bury non-rose things in the rose garden.

  I couldn’t tell if Peter bought it. His face flushed a quick red, and he took a visible breath. Then in a small, even voice he said, “I just think if someone takes the time to write you a letter, you should respond to them.”

  “Maybe you should write another one and hand deliver it?”

  Even my sister would have a hard time pretending she hadn’t gotten a hand-delivered letter.

  “Sure,” Peter said, shrugging, relaxing, smiling a little. “Yeah, I could do that. Thanks, Georgina. I guess I’ll see you around.”

  He disappeared around the back of the house.

  Mary joined me a second later, like she’d been staring out the window, waiting for him to leave.

  “Why does it feel like I’m always apologizing for you?” I asked her. She sat on the arm of the chair I was in and played with my hair. We both had long hair, all the way down our backs, but that was mostly because the island’s one hairdresser, Shirley Braves, was impossible to track down and also, inexplicably, hated cutting hair.

  “I never asked you to lie for me. And I’ve never promised Peter anything,” Mary countered.

  “So if you don’t like him, you need to cut him loose. Once and for all. Snip, snip, snip.”

  “You’re being a real nosy Rosey, you know that?” she said, getting off the arm of the chair, wheeling around to face me. “I can hang out with whoever the fuck I want and I can fuck whoever I want to hang out with. . . .” She squinted, as if trying to figure out if that made sense.

  “Truce. It’s too hot to fight,” I said.

  “Yeah, what’s up with that?” she asked, instantly distracted. “I thought I saw snow flurries this morning, but it’s beautiful now. Oh, great. Another taxi. I’ll see you later.”

  She went back inside.

  It was like that all day, taxi after taxi bringing birdhead after birdhead to the inn.

  The light was starting to change by the time my mom came out onto the front porch. “We’re only waiting for a few more guests,” she said. “Great turnout this year, huh? How are you feeling, Georgie?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. Above us, a cloud hid the sun and I shivered.

  “That’s probably the last of them right now,” Mom said, pointing down the drive at Seymore’s cab just turning into view. She put her hand on my shoulder. “You can take a nap before dinner, Georgina. Put on a happy face for now, okay?”

  I smiled as big and fake as I could. She rolled her eyes and went back inside. Mary caught the door and slipped out onto the porch before it closed.

  “The lobby is filled with birdheads,” she whined. Then, seeing the taxi: “Oh thank God, is that the last of them?”

  “Who are we missing? Nobody we know, right?”

  “I looked at the register; these are newbs. A man and a woman. Two twin beds. So like, unhappily married, I’m guessing.”

  “Or friends.”

  “Right, because you take so many island vacations with your platonic male friends?”

  Mary was in one of her moods, when everything you said became fair game for a fight. She was probably just as tired as I was. I looked down at her feet: the soles of her shoes were a solid half inch above the porch. I yanked her down, and she mumbled an apology but then visibly brightened. I followed her gaze down to the driveway, where our last guests were just emerging from Seymore’s car.

  Where our last, very young and attractive guests were just emerging from Seymore’s car.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Oh shi-i-it,” Mary whispered. “What time is it, Georgie?”

  “I’m not saying.”

  “Georgieeeee.”

  “I’m not saying it.”

  “Georgie, what time is it?”

  “Cute o’clock,” I relented. “It’s cute o’clock, okay, you psychopath.”

  I stepped off the porch, waiting on the last step as Seymore helped our very young and attractive guests with their luggage. This was no married couple. The guy looked like he was a few years older than me—twenty-three or twenty-four—and the girl seemed about my age.

  Suddenly Mary’s mouth was right next to my ear. “There’s one for each of us,” she hissed, and when I turned around to smack her she leapt gracefully out of my reach. Winking, she retreated into the inn.

  I walked closer to the car. The guy was paying Sey-more, thanking him, laughing about something. The girl was blank-faced, unreadable, looking past me and up at the inn. She slid her red-framed sunglasses up onto her head and finally noticed me, holding my gaze for a long time, for as long as it took the guy to finish paying. When her traveling partner tapped her on the shoulder a
nd handed her a suitcase, she took it without complaint and shifted her focus from me to him. An unkind sort of look. A look of annoyance. If they were married, it was definitely not a happy union.

  I made the conscious shift from normal-Georgina to working-Georgina, checked that my smile was as genuine as possible, and met them on the driveway.

  “Hi, there! Welcome to Fernweh Inn. Is this your first time on By-the-Sea?”

  “It is!” the guy said, dropping one of his bags so he could shake my hand. “I’m Harrison Lowry. This is Prudence.”

  “Prue,” she corrected, extending her hand and giving a weak, but not unkind, smile. Then Harrison reached over to tousle her hair, and her eyes rolled back so far in her head that I knew instantly: oh, duh. Brother and sister.

  “I haven’t been able to get a signal since we left the mainland,” Harrison said, holding up his phone. “Is that normal?”

  “Welcome to By-the-Sea,” I said, sweeping my hand over the island. “That’s just kind of how it is.”

  He smiled and shrugged a bit. “Well, I guess that can’t be helped.”

  Harrison was cute, I had to give him that. He was tall and his hair was a messy brown and his eyes were bright and his smile was genuine. He wore long pants and actual suspenders with a short-sleeved button-up shirt. He had that nerdy-but-I’m-running-with-it thing. I wouldn’t have expected him to be a birdhead, but the evidence was there: oversized leather camera bag, small binoculars already slung around his neck, dingy suitcase practically covered in antique bird patches.

  Prue was more of a mystery. She wore high-waisted jean shorts that looked vintage, a blue-and-white-striped T-shirt that looked vintage and French, and faded red lipstick that just looked really, really good. Her hair was a darker brown than her brother’s and hit just above her shoulders. They looked alike in a vague sort of way, just how two people who’ve lived together their whole lives inevitably start to blend a little around the edges.

  “Where are you visiting from?” I asked.