Summer of Salt

by Katrina Leno

  “Just flat dab in the middle of the mainland,” Harrison said, adding “kind of person who says flat dab” to my short list of things I knew about him.

  “Oh, well, that’s nice you’re able to travel together. Are you two . . .”

  “Brother and sister,” Harrison finished, confirming my suspicions.

  “Georgina! I’m sure our guests want to get inside and see their rooms,” Mary said, bounding up next to me. I hadn’t even heard the front door open. She was sneaky, my sister. She linked her arm through mine, and her smile was so bright I could feel the heat coming off her face. “I’m Mary,” she continued, detaching herself from me and sticking a hand out to Harrison, then Prue.

  “Harrison,” he said. “My sister, Prudence.”

  “Perfect,” Mary purred (there really isn’t a more accurate word for it). “I’ll get you guys all settled into your room. It’s one of our nicest ones; excellent view of the sea.”

  Wishful thinking, maybe, but I almost swore that Prue met my eye for just the tiniest fraction of a second and smiled just the tiniest fraction of a smile.

  There was a big dinner that night to celebrate the birdheads’ arrival (and the, like, four inn guests who weren’t birdheads but who were very confused and kept looking around like they had gotten off at the wrong island). Aggie went all out in the way she always did the first night of the season. We had it in the backyard and practically the entire population of By-the-Sea showed up.

  Mary and I ate at a table with Vira, Abigail, Eloise, and Shelby. We were exactly two tables away from Harrison and Prue, and my sister’s eyes were trained on the former in a not-at-all-serial-killer way, thankyouverymuch, Georgina, and also mind your own damn business.

  “You are my business,” I said. “We’re twins, so people automatically lump us together. When you do asinine things, they just naturally get associated with me.”

  “Luckily for you I’ve never done an asinine thing in my life,” she said, and winked, because not even Mary could say that with a straight face. Then, more serious, settling back in her chair and using a garlic breadstick as a pointer, she said, “Do you think he’s cute?”

  I grabbed the breadstick from her before anybody saw the direction in which she was waggling it. “He’s a guest,” I said.

  “What are you, the one-man human resource department of the Fernweh Inn?” She plucked the breadstick out of my hand and threw it across the table. “Yo, Shelbs. Hot or not?” She jerked her finger in Harrison’s direction.

  Shelby, picking up the breadstick from where it had ricocheted off her forehead, took a thoughtful bite and considered. “Hot,” she decided after a moment. “Really hot. He’s not a birdhead, is he?”

  I nodded. “He’s new.”

  “And the girl?” Abigail asked. All conversation at the table had ceased, and now seven eager pairs of eyes were staring openly at the Lowrys’ table.

  “Sister,” Mary said.

  “The girl’s pretty too,” Eloise said, in her usual thoughtful manner. “What’s her name?”

  “Prudence,” Mary said.

  “Prue,” I corrected, perhaps a bit too quickly.

  “Ohhh,” Vira said, nodding.

  “What oh? Oh what?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” she replied quickly, filling her mouth with mashed potatoes so she wouldn’t have to answer.

  “Ohhh,” Shelby echoed. She nodded appreciatively. “Yeah, that makes sense. She’s definitely your type. She looks like she belongs on a picnic blanket under the Eiffel Tower, eating a baguette or something.”

  “You guys are being assholes,” I said.

  “You’re being a hypocrite,” Mary countered, and stole a carrot from my plate.

  Eloise, angel that she was, changed the subject then to something no one could resist gossiping about for the rest of dinner: was Joel Howard, owner and proprietor of Joel’s Diner, actually going to do as he’d been threatening for years and stop having free fries on Friday?

  “But it’s called Free Fries Friday,” Abigail said, horrified, and they were off, a mile a minute about how Joel was on pretty thin ice with all of them, if the rumors were true.

  “Thanks for changing the subject,” I said to Eloise later, when the dinner was over and Aggie and Peter were setting up the dessert table.

  “Honestly, they’re too nosy sometimes,” she replied.

  “I haven’t really liked anyone since Verity,” I said. “I think my sister is just thrilled at the prospect. Especially if she wants to go after a guest. Strength in numbers, I guess.”

  “You don’t have to explain yourself to me,” Eloise insisted. “It’s a small island. I think it’s important to keep some sort of privacy.”

  I waited until the guests had had the first pickings of the dessert table and then grabbed a plate for myself. Aggie’s cinnamon cheesecake was unreal and aside from that she’d made four different kinds of brownies, twelve types of cookies, an assortment of mini pies, and a cake made as the exact replica of the inn. I took a little bit of everything.

  It was cooler out now, but Peter had gotten the fire pit going, and the fire caught on the wind and blew warm air all over the yard. I brought my plate over to one of the benches that dotted the lawn, looking out over the southern tip of the island and the dark ocean beyond. I’d been avoiding Mary and the others pretty deftly so was both annoyed and discouraged when I heard footsteps behind me—and then immediately terrified and thrilled when Prue asked if she could sit with me.

  “Yes! I mean, sure. I mean, if you want to,” I said, sliding over, hating myself for how hard words could be.

  “If you don’t mind,” she said. She sat down and showed me some fluorescent-colored liquid in a paper cup. “Do you know what this is? It was in that enormous, car-sized bowl,” she said.

  “Ah, that’s Albert’s Postal Punch. Be careful with it; it’s sort of disgusting and also unrealistically strong.”

  “Unrealistically strong, I like that,” she said, smiling. The moon was out and high in the sky, and that, coupled with the lights from the lanterns that were scattered around the lawn, made Prue look ethereal, almost too pretty to focus on. Then she took a sip of punch and immediately spit it out in an impressive arc onto the grass, and I couldn’t help it, I burst out laughing, just barely managing not to snort.

  “God, what is that?” she said, coughing.

  “I warned you.”

  “I’ve learned my lesson; I’ll listen to you from now on.” She spit again, then poured the rest of the punch onto the grass. I offered her my dessert plate.

  “To get the taste out of your mouth.”

  “This is a liberal spread you have here,” she said.

  “I haven’t had Aggie’s cooking since last August, so I’m just remembering how good it is.”

  Prue picked a peanut butter brownie off the plate and took a big bite. “Oh wow,” she said through a mouthful of chocolate. “Oh geez.”

  “I know, right?” I set the plate on the bench between us. “Be my guest.”

  “Technically, I am your guest,” she said, swallowing. “You live here, right? At the inn?”

  “Since we were born.”

  “Oh, yeah. Mary . . . she’s your twin, right?”

  “In everything but looks and personality.”

  “Yeah, you don’t look alike. Is it cool, living here? It’s kind of . . .”

  “Creepy?”

  “No, I like the inn. I mean the island. Does it ever seem . . . small?”

  Did it ever seem small, this island I had spent every minute of my waking life on, this island I knew like I knew my own body, this island where every tree was named and everyone knew each other and every person played some intimate, vital role in making sure it functioned smoothly, day after day after day until the day I left, until the day we all would leave, to seek our fortunes elsewhere.

  “Do you know how the Amish leave home and spend a year just sort of doing whatever they’ve always wanted to do?
” I asked.

  “Rumspringa,” she responded.

  “And you know how almost all of them return home after that and never leave again? That’s kind of like this island.”

  “Heavy.”

  “Yeah. But that’s how it is everywhere, right? It’s hard to leave the place you grew up.”

  “I wouldn’t really know; we’ve always traveled around a lot. My father’s an archaeologist and my mother’s a linguistic anthropologist. Harrison and I were homeschooled, dragged all over the place. Our parents have settled down now, retired, but I still feel kind of . . . untethered.”

  “How did you end up here?”

  “My brother. He’s in graduate school for ornithology; this is part of his research. It was either tagging along with him, official sister-cum-lab-assistant, or stay with my parents until college. They’re great, don’t get me wrong, but I’m used to traveling. So I picked the lesser of two familial evils, and here I am.” She paused, took a bite of cookie. “It’s kind of charming, this island. I hope that didn’t come across like I didn’t like it.”

  “Oh, no. It is small. I think I’m just used to it.”

  Behind us the birdheads were loud and rambunctious, stretching their legs after a full year of doing whatever they did when they weren’t looking for Annabella.

  As if she could read my mind, Prue asked, “So what’s the deal with the bird? My brother wouldn’t stop talking about it for the entire trip over here, but honestly, I get a little sick on boats, so I think I missed most of it. She only shows up during the summer, right? Where does she go for the rest of the year?”

  Where did Annabella go? Somewhere far, far away, if she knew what was good for her. Somewhere where the rumspringa never ended. Somewhere where she didn’t have to deal with birdheads documenting her every turn, photographing every tiny movement of her head, singing songs to her at night before they left her to get some sleep. Somewhere where she didn’t have to worry about eggs that didn’t hatch and summers that kept feeling shorter and shorter. Somewhere where you couldn’t smell the ocean, somewhere where the ocean was the faintest memory. A rumor heard from a friend of a friend of a friend. Somewhere where the color blue did not exist.

  “Georgina?” Prue asked.

  “Sorry. What was the question?”

  “Forget the question,” she said with a wave of her hand. She forked a bite of Fernweh Inn–shaped cake and handed it to me. “Questions later. Cake now.”

  I took the fork obediently.

  The sound of crashing waves—never really absent on By-the-Sea but only sometimes, for a few minutes, faded enough into the background that you didn’t really notice them—swelled up and momentarily overwhelmed the night. I ate the cake. Prue took another cookie.

  Mary could fly. I wished I could stop time.

  “I saw you talking to that girl,” Mary said later in the bathroom we shared, a long piece of floss woven through her fingers. It was past midnight, and it felt like I’d been up for a hundred years. I sat on the edge of the claw-foot bathtub and waited my turn at the sink.

  “Prue. She seems nice.”

  “You li-i-i-ike her,” Mary said. She lifted herself onto the vanity and sat facing me, not flossing with the floss, just playing with it.

  “I only just met her.”

  “You can like people you just met. You can even like people you haven’t even met yet. You can even like people—”

  “Did you talk to her brother?”

  “What, am I allowed? You told me he was a guest. Which, by the way, I thought was pretty rich since you flirted with Prue all night.”

  “It was twenty minutes, it wasn’t all night, and I’ve come to accept the inevitability of you sleeping with Harrison this summer. Despite the fact that he’s a birdhead, which sort of goes against all laws of logic.”

  “I dunno, his birdheadedness just somehow adds to his charm,” she said, winking. “Is Prue nice?”

  “She seems nice.”

  “How come she’s here? She’s not a birdhead too, is she? She doesn’t seem like a birdhead.”

  “She’s just tagging along with her brother.”

  “Poor girl. She probably has no friends.”

  “You’re an asshole.”

  “No judgment! Who needs friends?” She hopped off the vanity, threw the floss in the trash, and spread a line of toothpaste on her brush.

  “You have friends, Mary.”

  “I have you, Georgie. I don’t need anybody else.”

  “Well, you won’t have me at college, so you’ll have to make some new friends.”

  “Ugh. That sounds exhausting. They should assign you friends like they assign you a roommate. By the way, have you gotten yours yet? I’m with someone named Mildred Miller. That’s a truly unfortunate name. I hope she’s, like, unreal hot. For her sake, you know.”

  “I wouldn’t lead with that in your introductions.”

  “God, you think I’m such a jerk,” she said, rolling her eyes and brushing her teeth.

  “I don’t think you’re a jerk.”

  Mary spit, rinsed, and turned to look at me again. “Are you nervous?” she asked, suddenly serious.

  I knew exactly what she was talking about, of course, and it wasn’t college. But I had no desire to get into it at the current moment. I gave a noncommittal shrug and pushed her out of the way so I could wash my face.

  “I mean, I’d be nervous. If I were you. I’d be just a little nervous,” she continued, moving to the toilet, sitting down on the closed lid, and crossing her legs. “I’m not saying you should be nervous, but I would be nervous.”

  “Can you shut up?”

  “Do you not want to talk about it?”

  “The queen of deduction.”

  “Our birthday is two months away.”

  “Thank you, Mary, I remembered.”

  “And you still haven’t shown any signs of—”

  “Grandma Berry was seventeen years and three hundred and sixty-four days old before she showed any signs of—”

  “Lower your voice! Do you want to wake a birdhead?”

  “Grandma Berry,” I repeated, hissing, “did not show any signs of magic until the day before her eighteenth birthday.”

  “And I bet she was nervous,” Mary said thoughtfully. I wanted to grab the nearest hairbrush and beat her over the head with it, but I settled for brushing my teeth so hard my gums turned bright red.

  When I finished, Mary was staring intently at me, her forehead knitted up in lines.

  “But what about the twin thing?” she asked quietly.

  “What twin thing?” I asked, although I knew exactly what she was talking about, of course I did.

  “The first Georgina. She never got powers, but her sister Annabella did. Her twin. There haven’t been twins in our family since.”

  “Our great-great-aunt’s daughter never got powers either, and she was an only child. It’s not like I’ll die, Mary, I’ll just go on living like every other person in the history of the world who isn’t in our family. Being able to float three inches off the ground isn’t the fucking miracle you make it out to be.”

  Mary’s shoulders lowered a fraction of an inch, the only sign to indicate that I’d struck a nerve.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have brought it up again.”

  “Look, it’s okay. Of course I keep thinking about it. Of course I’m nervous, or . . . not nervous, really, but just . . . curious. But I do mean that; it’s not the end of the world if I’m not a . . .”

  We didn’t say the word out loud—that little word assigned to the women in our family—there was rarely a need. Mary reached her hand out and squeezed my fingers, squeezed every knuckle.

  “I’m tired,” she said.

  “A long day of annoying me, I don’t blame you,” I said, but softly, so she’d know I was joking. She got up and hugged me quickly, then slipped out of the bathroom. I shut the door and took her place on the toilet, next to the open wi
ndow. And fuck, although I didn’t want to, although I really didn’t want to, I started crying.

  Outside, a massive crack of thunder and the unmistakable patter of rain.

  Like a sign from the heavens. We feel you, girl. We got your back. We’ll like you no matter if you get your powers or not. We could really care less.

  Me too, Sky. I could care less too.

  Days Late

  Annabella didn’t show up the next day or the day after that. I was busy at the inn, my mother constantly had me shuffling between housekeeping duties, cooking duties, concierge duties (those were the best, our four non-birdhead guests asked easy questions and had seemed to accept that their weeklong summer vacation was being shared with a bunch of weirdo bird enthusiasts).

  Wherever Annabella was, she was making the birdheads antsy, even though her absence wasn’t that unheard of. Yeah, she usually showed up promptly on the day after the summer solstice, but she was also just a bird. You couldn’t count on birds.

  “The record lateness is one week,” Lucille Arden said at breakfast, three days since the solstice. Lucille was the youngest birdhead—besides Harrison now—and celebrating her tenth summer on the island. She accepted a muffin from Aggie, who was walking around with a tray of them. “So three days isn’t anything to panic about. You can’t give a bird a datebook.”

  I thought You Can’t Give a Bird a Datebook would be a good name for a really boring romantic comedy. I liked Lucille—she was about as normal as a birdhead could be, and talking to her helped alleviate some of my own anxieties about where Annabella was. I remembered the year she was a week late; Mary and I had been thirteen and the entire island had dissolved into near-hysteria levels of panic. I had never thought that much about Annabella before, and so I surprised even myself when her lateness affected me to such a degree: I had insomnia, nightmares when I did manage to sleep, and I felt anxious all the time.

  My mother had crept into my bedroom in the middle of the fifth or sixth night of waiting and sat down on my bed with her jasmine-and-lavender sleeping draft.

  “I could practically hear you tossing and turning from the first floor,” she’d said, sitting on the edge of my bed and handing me the mug.