Summer of Salt

by Katrina Leno

  “Fly?” Harrison exclaimed.

  “She might use the word fly; the word float is a tad more accurate,” I clarified.

  “Wow,” Prue said. “So she does have a history of jumping out of trees.”

  “No. I mean, not really. This is new. She knows . . . we don’t use our powers . . . I mean, she doesn’t use her powers in front of other people. It’s not how it works.”

  “What can you do?” Prue asked.

  “I’m a dud,” I said quickly, in the vein of pulling a sticky bandage off a wound in one unthinking breath. It felt like I was admitting something not only to them, but to myself. We were almost eighteen, and it was time I came to terms with it: I wasn’t getting any powers.

  “What do you mean?” Harrison asked.

  “I’m just normal. I’m just a sidekick.”

  I started running again, forgoing the relative dryness of Prue’s umbrella for the chance to move faster. As a result, I reached the tree before either of them. And I also reached the tree soaking wet.

  The impressive canopy did provide fairly adequate cover from the storm. I found Mary immediately, looking strange and languid, sitting far up in the tree with her back against the trunk and her legs spread out on a branch and crossed at the ankles.

  “Mary?” I called up to her.

  She didn’t look like herself. Her dress was too big, her hair was too messy. When she looked down at me, I could have sworn her eyes flashed black.

  “Hi, Georgie,” she said.

  “Can you come down?”

  “I kind of like it up here.”

  “You told Harrison you were going to jump.”

  “I don’t think I’m ready to jump quite yet.”

  “You know I don’t love heights.”

  “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”

  But alas, the rules of sisterhood: if your sister took residence in the boughs of a tree, you were obligated to go and visit.

  I rubbed my palms against my clothes, drying them.

  “I’m not great at climbing trees,” I said to Prue, who’d appeared beside me.

  “And just to be clear, if you fall, you won’t float?” she asked.

  “Sink like a stone,” I confirmed.

  “Be careful,” she said.

  I started to climb. A few feet up I realized I’d blown a perfectly good opportunity for a tearful farewell kiss, but it was too late to go back and rectify that. I concentrated on the task at hand.

  Mary watched me with some interest, but she didn’t offer any tree-climbing tips. It was just as well. I didn’t think I could listen to tips while at the same time not plummeting to my death.

  Luckily, the tree was fairly easy to climb, offering many sturdy branches at very manageable intervals. I was on level with Mary after only a few minutes. I immediately made the mistake of looking down.

  She put a hand on my arm to steady me.

  Her fingers felt like feathers, but when I looked at them, they were just fingers.

  “What the fuck are you doing up here?” I asked.

  “I woke up this morning and I thought to myself, I suppose I’ll go climb a tree,” Mary said, shrugging, like it was perhaps the most normal thing in the world for young women to spend their free time in the branches of big trees.

  “‘I suppose I’ll go climb a tree’? Nobody talks like that, Mary.”

  “My legs hurt. From walking.”

  “So you thought you’d give them a rest in a tree?”

  “It’s not as weird as you’re making it sound.”

  “It feels pretty weird. Harrison and Prue think it’s pretty weird.”

  Suddenly nervous, Mary asked, “They didn’t tell anyone else where I was, right?”

  “I don’t think so. I mean, no—Harrison came to get me.”

  “Okay. You’re sure?”

  “Who else would he tell?”

  “I just don’t want anybody to know where I am.” She frowned and rubbed her fingers against her temples, like she had a headache. Her eyes, her mouth, her jaw, her shoulders . . . everything looked smaller. Was something wrong with my eyes?

  “Are you hiding from someone?” I asked.

  “Evil man,” she said, and I tried to remember if I’d told my sister what the Ouija board had said.

  And then something clicked.

  “You were in the barn with him,” I said. “You didn’t kill Annabella, but you know you did.”

  “It’s not fair to read minds,” Mary said, squinting. “Is that your thing?”

  “No, it’s not my thing, I—I found your necklace. In the loft.”

  Mary’s face clouded over and for just a moment I saw something dark and broken there.

  “Mary, what were you doing in the barn?”

  “Gathering eggs,” she said after a long minute. Then she smiled. “Do you want to know where they are? I’ll tell you, but you have to promise not to tell anyone else where I am, okay? I’m safe here.”

  “Eggs? You have her eggs?”

  She nodded and ran a hand through her hair, sending a small cascade of feathers down over the bough of the tree, down to where Harrison and Prue waited patiently below.

  “I took them,” she said. “To keep them safe.”

  “To keep them safe? From what?”

  “If a man is angry enough to break a bird into a million pieces, what do you think he could do with her eggs?”

  “Where are they?”

  “In my bedroom. Under that floorboard in my closet.” She wiped at her cheeks as if she were crying, but her eyes were dry. “Eggs are so fragile, Georgina.”

  Around us the tree swayed gently in the breeze and a few drops of rain were blown into Mary’s safe haven. She put her hand in her hair and pulled out one feather. It wasn’t white anymore. They were getting darker.

  “Who killed her?” I asked.

  She made a motion, and I held my hands out flat as she placed a feather in my palm.

  But just like the other feather on the widow’s walk, this one only rested for a moment before it caught on a sudden gust—

  And blew away.

  And Mary leaned forward and whispered in my ear—

  In a voice that sounded exactly like a birdsong—

  In a voice that made it unavoidable, that thing I’d known for so long already—

  My sister was turning into a bird.

  And just like my namesake—the Georgina who came before me—there would be no magic I could use to save her.

  III.

  But our love it was stronger by far than the love

  Of those who were older than we—

  Of many far wiser than we—

  once more from “Annabel Lee”

  by Edgar Allan Poe

  Evil Man

  I realized halfway down the tree that our birthday was tomorrow.

  In that post-Annabella world, it was hard to keep track of time. Days seemed to melt together. It could have been weeks that Mary and I were stuck up in that tree, weeks more before I reached the bottom and started walking back to the inn with Harrison and Prue.

  The waters were so high that we were forced to overturn Prue’s beach umbrella and use it as a makeshift boat. We paddled with our hands, ineffective scoops of water that propelled us forward at a snail’s pace. The island was covered in water. The cliffs to our right had become a waterfall to the ocean. We steered clear of them; I didn’t know if the magic would hold now or if we would plummet to our deaths below.

  I told them about Mary.

  “This is a strange island,” Harrison said, dipping his hand into the new freshwater sea, as if to illustrate that not only was my sister turning into a bird, but we also had this flood to deal with.

  “It’s never been quite this strange,” I said. “You missed many, many years of no floods and boring birdwatching and movie nights on the town green and uneventful summer solstices where hardly anyone even got naked.”

  “Yeah, but . . . the
re was still magic and stuff, right?” Prue pointed out.

  “Super-boring magic. Honestly. We don’t even own wands. Or pointy hats. It’s nothing like it is in the movies. It’s way more . . . normal.”

  “Normalcy is underrated,” Harrison said.

  When we got back to the inn, it smelled like vanilla and cinnamon; Aggie’s island-famous birthday cake. The three of us—under better circumstances I might have called us something cute, like the three musketeers or the three amigos or the three stooges, but under these circumstances I couldn’t bring myself to do so—stood in the kitchen and peered into the oven and watched an overlarge yellow circle rising to perfect golden perfection inside it.

  “What’s this for?” Prue asked.

  “Tomorrow’s our birthday,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “Yup.”

  “Well, happy early birthday,” Harrison said weakly.

  We decided to break for a few minutes to change into dry clothes. It seemed like a losing battle; as soon as we stepped outside again we’d be waist-deep in water and any cute thoughts of being warm and not soaking would be far behind us. But still, for now, it felt nice to peel off my underwear and bra and pull on warmer clothes: jeans and a turtleneck I hadn’t worn in five years at least, a heavy sweatshirt I used to wear to help my mother harvest herbs in the moonlight. I found thick wool socks and put them on under my rainboots. I piled my hair up into a bun on the top of my head. I wrapped a scarf around my neck and then I met the Lowrys outside Mary’s room. We wanted to see the eggs, to make sure they were safe. Safe from what, I couldn’t say.

  Prue had pulled her hair into a wet ponytail; the back of her clean shirt was already damp where the end hit it.

  The inn was strangely quiet. We hadn’t run into a single birdhead on our way to the attic.

  The door to Mary’s bedroom was closed.

  I wanted to know why my sister didn’t feel safe and who she was hiding from up in that tree. When I’d asked her, when she’d leaned in to whisper to me, all she had said, all she’d repeated, was evil man.

  “Well,” Harrison said. “Should you do the honors?”

  I reached out and gripped the doorknob with a hand that hopefully looked a lot sturdier than I felt, and then I twisted and pushed the door open.

  It creaked a little, an appropriately creepy creak that made Prue cross her arms over her chest and made Harrison take a tiny, imperceptible step back. I took a big, steadying breath that didn’t actually do anything to steady myself, and I stepped into the room and flicked the light switch on.

  And of course nothing happened.

  And of course then the hall lights winked out, and we were plunged into sudden, blinding darkness.

  Prue grabbed my arm. Harrison shrieked. I reached back into Harrison’s trench coat pocket (him wearing that trench coat indoors seemed very Harrison-appropriate) and pulled out the flashlight I knew would be there. I flicked it on just as a low rumble of thunder echoed through the house.

  “It’s the storm,” I said. “It must have knocked out the power lines.”

  “It chose a most inconvenient moment to do so,” Harrison pointed out.

  My sister had candles scattered throughout her room. I found a book of matches in her nightstand drawer and went around lighting them. A massive bolt of lightning pierced the sky and lit up our faces in severe yellow. The roof was alive with the sound of rain. Harrison shut the door and locked it, then, after a moment’s consideration, he pushed Mary’s bureau in front of it.

  “Can’t really be too careful, can we?” he asked.

  The candlelight caused a hundred different shadows to come alive and dance across the walls of my sister’s bedroom. I placed the flashlight on the bed and pointed it toward the closet. The door was shut.

  I thought of the floorboard that lay within it, the one Mary had pried loose years ago; in its long history, it had hidden other such treasures as jewelry stolen from me, cookies stolen from Aggie, cinnamon whiskey stolen from our mother.

  I thought back, but I didn’t think it had ever held anything quite so precious as the last eggs Annabella would ever lay.

  I opened the door.

  Harrison and Prue stood sentry on either side of me as I knelt down and felt along the floor.

  The loose board jiggled when my fingers ran across it. I forced my fingertips into the cracks between the boards and pulled upward. It popped up with ease.

  And there, bundled in many of my sister’s clean wool socks, were the eggs.

  They were perfectly white, not a blemish on any of them.

  I felt a rush of sadness for these eggs. They had no chance of hatching. A poor track record for their siblings combined with a lack of their mother’s brooding left them no chance at all. They were cool to the touch and most likely already dead. I wanted to gather the pair of them in my hands and bring them over to a candle, warm them up and sing them to them and whisper to them and tell them stories of their mother and the legacy she had left behind. I wanted to wrap them in my sister’s socks and tuck them into my pocket and walk around so, so carefully, as not to upset or disturb them in any way. I wanted to cuddle them and hide them and find out who’d killed their mom and do something terrible to him. Something to match the terribleness of what he’d done to Annabella.

  “Georgina?” Prue said.

  “They’re here,” I said.

  And I left them alone, undisturbed, and stepped back so Prue and Harrison could have a look. Harrison had come all this way to see Annabella, so it felt right that at least he was able to see these eggs, perfect and eternal, although, for all intents and purposes, useless.

  “They’re beautiful,” he said, and they honestly were. An entire lifeform self-contained in one smooth white sphere.

  Prue left her brother and went to look out the window. “The waters are rising,” she said.

  We had dragged our boat-umbrella onto the porch, but now the porch was under a foot of water and the boat-umbrella was drifting languidly away, passengerless, a spot of bright against the dark blue of the rainwater.

  “My sister was hiding from someone,” I said, watching Harrison put the loose board back in its place and move a pair of Mary’s shoes on top of it. If you didn’t know exactly where to look, you’d have no idea two of Annabella’s eggs were hidden there. “I think whoever killed Annabella might have done something to Mary.”

  “Done something?” Prue said. “Like what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  And when I didn’t know something—like what sort of thing could happen to a girl to make her shrink and shrink and then ultimately, potentially, turn into a bird—there was one person who might.

  Penelope Fernweh the Second.

  The ladder to the widow’s walk was folded into the ceiling, so I knew my mother wouldn’t be up there. I went down to the kitchen, where Aggie was carefully icing the birthday cake. She quickly moved her body in front of it when she heard me at the door.

  “I already saw,” I said, smiling.

  “Oh, the surprise is ruined,” she said, and she went back to icing.

  Aggie was a good cook, but she was an unreal cake maker. The yellow cake was completely covered by a smooth, creamy layer of buttery white frosting. She was working on the icing flowers now; there were at least twenty pastry bags spread around the counter, each holding a different shade of buttercream. There were delicate roses, vines that wound around the circumference of the cake, bright peonies, and yellow sunflowers.

  “Aggie, it’s beautiful,” I said.

  She set the icing bag on the counter and gathered me up in a hug. I realized it had been so long since I’d heard Aggie laugh. The kitchen felt empty without it.

  “Your birthday snuck up on me this year,” she whispered into my ear, then held me at arm’s length to look at me. “It’s been such a strange summer.”

  What would Aggie do now that Annabella was dead? If there were no birdheads to stay at the inn, if there
were no birdheads to cook for . . .

  I hugged her again, trying to imagine a summer where Aggie was not here, in this kitchen, every waking moment of the day. It felt impossible. When I finally pulled away from her, I could feel the tears in my eyes. She dabbed at my cheeks with her apron.

  “I know,” she said. “But everything is going to turn out all right.”

  I wanted to ask her how she knew that, how she could say that with even an ounce of conviction in her voice, but instead I shook my head, composing myself, and asked, “You haven’t seen my mother anywhere, have you?”

  “She’s out back. In the rowboat. Have you seen the moon? I don’t think I’ve ever seen the moon as full as it is tonight.”

  The back porch was under a foot of water, but my mother was waiting next to it in her rowboat, standing up, holding the railing for balance, like she had been waiting for me. Her hair was billowing all around her face in the breeze: long and brown and messy. I waded across the porch and stepped carefully into the rowboat. She sat down across from me and said, “This reminds me of the night you and your sister were born.”

  I had heard the story a million times, but I let her tell it to me again, and I listened like it was the very first time, because I loved to hear my mother speak.

  She told me about the birth. About how I’d been her only child for five hours. About how I’d waited patiently with her to meet my sister. About how the rains had started the first time I’d cried.

  “What are you doing out here?” I asked when she had finished talking.

  She rowed the boat out into the backyard, navigating the floods with a deft hand. Somewhere near where the flower beds used to be, she stopped rowing. She raised the paddle above her head and then plunged it into the water like a spear, so it stuck into the wet earth below.

  “Hold this, will you?” she said.

  I took hold of the oar. I could feel the current underneath the water and the boat struggling against it. I held on tighter.

  “What are you doing?” I asked again.

  “The moon is good again. See?”