by Katrina Leno
My sister hadn’t killed Annabella.
Of course my sister hadn’t killed Annabella.
But I knew who did.
Evil man.
“What did he do to you?” I asked.
But I already knew.
And I was already climbing back down the tree.
And I was already back on the boat.
And I was already throwing myself at Peter, who looked suddenly terrified, caught, guilty.
I felt Harrison grab my arm and pull me back.
“Georgina?” he said. “What’s going on?”
I stopped fighting.
The four of us—Prue, Harrison, Vira, me—were at the bow of the boat.
Peter backed up and up until he was at the very back.
Harrison let go of my arm.
“Tell me what you did to my sister,” I whispered.
And the minute the words left my mouth—
The minute they touched the air—
The rain stopped.
Birthday
Everything suddenly felt very, very clear.
“Tell me what you did to my sister,” I repeated, and Peter put his hands up in front of him like I was threatening to shoot.
“What did she tell you?” Prue asked, moving to my side, slipping her hand in mine. “What did he do?”
“He has to say it. I want to hear him say it.”
Peter looked terrified.
I remembered Peter as a child, playing tag with Mary and me in the backyard of the inn. I remembered Peter red-faced and mumbling at the beginning of the season, asking me if Mary had gotten the letter he’d written to her, the sharp flicker of anger on his face that he’d quickly gotten under control. I remembered Peter stacking wood for countless summer fires in the backyard of the inn. There was no appropriate place in my mind for the version of Peter that was currently forming there.
Above us, a bolt of lightning streaked across the sky. Prue jumped and let go of my hand.
“Tell me, Peter,” I said.
“You better talk, asshole,” Vira chimed in. “It’s four against one.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Peter said. “Look, we went to the barn after the Fowl Fair. We fell asleep. When I woke up—she was standing over the bird, okay? She killed the bird; I saw her throw it against the beam. I’m the innocent one here. You should be interrogating her.”
I took one tiny step toward Peter.
Above us, a low rumble of thunder.
“I don’t believe you,” I said.
“I’m telling you the truth,” Peter insisted. “And there’s more. I saw her fly. Everything they say about your family is true, and I’m going to tell everyone. Who do you think they’ll believe? Me? Or a Fernweh.”
He said the word like it was a swear, like something dark and twisted. He said the word like it was a stone that fell out of his mouth and shattered into bloodred crystals on the floor. He said the word exactly like he was saying another word entirely. He said the word like he was actually saying the word—
Slut.
All of the pieces of that night were shifting and clicking into place inside my brain. My sister’s torn shirt. The bruise in the bathtub. My sister’s broken necklace. My sister’s nightmares. My sister’s terror.
Peter saw it.
Peter saw everything that I knew about him, and he was suddenly scared of it.
Good.
Let him be scared.
“Georgina,” he whispered. “You know me.”
“I know my sister,” I countered.
“I would never do anything to . . .”
But the lie was too big for him to even say.
Because he had hurt my sister.
I took another step toward him.
He held his hands up in front of him. Like he could stop me.
His face changed.
A shadow passed over his features, and I saw him how my sister must have seen him that night in the barn, that night when she said no and he said yes.
“Do you have any idea,” he began, his words dipped in acid, “what it’s felt like, all these years, watching your sister go out and . . .”
He put his hands over his face. His shoulders bounced in some silent, hate-filled laugh.
“I loved her,” he said. “I wrote her letters and brought her presents and walked her home in the dark and made her tea and left flowers on her bed. I did everything for her, and do you know how it’s felt to watch her pick every single guy on this island except me?”
His eyes were flashing now.
The sky had turned a deep, dark purple. The lightning split the clouds in half and set the whole world on fire. Someone put a hand on my arm, and when I tried to brush it off, whoever it was just held on tighter.
I turned around.
Mary.
Out of the tree and (thank God, thank God, thank God) still a girl.
“Let’s just go home,” she said. “It isn’t worth it.”
“Go home?”
“He’s right, Georgina. This is why I didn’t tell you. Nobody’s going to believe me. Everybody knows I’m a . . .”
Fernweh.
Bitch.
Slut.
“That’s bullshit,” I spat. Another crack of lightning, a flash so bright we all paused and looked upward.
When I looked back at Mary, her mouth was open just a little. She was staring at me.
“Oh my God,” she said.
“What?”
“This whole time,” she said.
“Mary, what?”
She grabbed my hand. She pointed up at the sky.
It had started to rain again. Tiny drops of ice-cold water.
Mary stopped pointing at the sky and pointed, instead, at my face.
“Georgina, you’re crying,” she said.
It felt like time was moving only for my sister and me. Everyone else on the boat stood silent and still, frozen, suspended.
“So?” I said, and wiped at my cheeks. “What’s your point? I always cry when it rains; you always say that.”
Mary smiled. “It’s the other way around,” she said. “It always rains when you cry.”
“That’s the same thing.”
“It’s not the same thing at all. Don’t you see?” she said. “It’s your thing, Georgina. This is your thing. It’s always been your thing; it was just too big for any of us to see!”
Mary had both my hands in both her hands, and she was smiling for the first time in days, in weeks, in who could tell how long in this timeless, broken summer. I looked down at the floor; her feet were hovering an inch or two above the wooden planks of the tugboat. “Happy birthday,” she said.
And then Prue screamed.
And the world around Mary and me came unpaused and leapt into motion.
I turned around.
And Peter had a gun, an old and tarnished pistol that he held like a thing he did not know how to hold, gripped in two hands so tightly that his arms shook with the effort, the almost-imperceptible quivers that radiated up to his elbows, his shoulders, his chest. His lips had turned white. He looked almost as scared of the gun as we were.
“Peter, what are you doing?” I asked.
He tightened his grip. I imagined Peter sneaking into his parents’ room, taking this gun from his father’s nightstand, trying to figure out if it was loaded.
I wondered why Peter thought he might need a gun.
I wondered if he guessed I would find out eventually.
Behind me I heard Vira whisper, “Evil man.”
“Just put it down, Peter. Don’t be like this,” I said.
“No way. I don’t know what you two are capable of,” he said, almost frantically, gesturing between Mary and me like we were bombs instead of girls.
“Surely no more than what you were capable of,” I said.
“If you just let me go, if you just . . . I’ll go home, and I won’t even tell anyone what she did. I won’t even tell anybo
dy,” Peter said.
“What I did?” Mary repeated. “I didn’t do anything, Peter. All I did was say no.”
“You make yourself sound so innocent,” he snapped. “Did you tell them how you were the one who wanted to go to the barn in the first place? How you were the one to start it all?”
“And how you threw Annabella against the beam when I wouldn’t go further? And about how I started screaming, and how you put your hands over my mouth so I’d shut up, and about how you climbed on top of me? How you told me what you would do to me if I told anyone . . .”
Mary covered her face with her hands.
I imagined my sister, broken and violated, slipping Annabella’s eggs into her pocket so Peter wouldn’t hurt them. I imagined my sister saying the word no. I imagined my sister shrinking, shrinking . . .
Peter held the gun in his sweating, shaking hands.
Could guns fire after they’d been soaked in floodwater?
“Peter, just put the gun down,” I said.
“No. No way,” Peter said, and he tightened his grip.
For the first time in my life I felt the power of the Fernweh women, ready and waiting at my fingertips.
Exactly like my mother had said: a burning, tight feeling in my gut.
Next to me, my sister shrank. And shrank.
Prue and Vira and Harrison were completely silent and motionless behind me.
I had never really given much thought about what my eighteenth birthday might look like. There’d be cake, sure. There’d be a colorful banner strung across the dining room: Happy Birthday! There’d be Mary and my mother and a quiet dinner. A bonfire in the backyard maybe, a small pile of presents wrapped in brown paper and twine.
I’d never considered the possibility of that summer leading me here: standing on a boat, a gun aimed at my chest and my sister sprouting feathers next to me, long shiny feathers that erupted out of her skin at an alarming rate.
I made myself not look at her.
It seemed private, somehow, this moment of transformation. It seemed like my sister’s business.
I focused my attention on Peter.
I knew that he would use that gun, because that is what small, scared men did: they used things more powerful than themselves to make up the difference. They hid behind weapons of mass destruction: big guns and bigger bombs.
They were small, small, small—
Peter was small, but I could see him becoming bigger in his own mind as his finger inched toward the trigger.
“I’m giving you one last chance,” I said.
He laughed. “You’re giving me a last chance? I’m the one with the gun!”
And I watched as his finger wrapped around the trigger.
And I lifted my hand into the sky.
And I didn’t know quite how I did it, only that the tightness in my belly was moving upward. A tightness that demanded to be released.
And I raised my hand higher—
And the skies opened up—
And the skies poured down—
And I heard a loud crack—the loudest of cracks—the crack of an old evil gun held by a young evil man—
And the flash lit up the entire world—
And everything went white.
After
I woke up in my bed.
The world was dark.
There was a bandage wrapped around my head, covering my eyes.
I started to unwind it, but I felt my mother lay her hand on my wrist.
Call it a Fernweh thing or a daughter thing; I knew my mother’s hand even with bandages wrapped so thickly around my eyes that the light couldn’t even peek around the edges.
“Easy,” she said. “Close your eyes.”
I closed my eyes underneath the bandage. My mother’s hands started to unravel it for me. My mother’s hands were steady, cool things, and I could feel them trembling through the thin fabric.
When she slipped the bandage off, she put one palm over my eyes.
“Give it time,” she said.
Without the bandage, even with my eyes closed and my mother’s fingers blocking the sun, the world seemed so, so bright. My eyes ached with it.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Don’t you remember?”
“Is Mary okay?”
“Are you okay?”
“Are you going to answer every question with a question?” I said, and gently pulled her hand away.
The insides of my eyelids were a bright, painful red.
“Has the sun exploded?” I asked.
“I imagine if the sun had exploded, we wouldn’t be around to comment on it.”
“There was a bright flash.”
“Yes . . . ,” my mother answered, prodding for more.
“I thought that might have been what it was. The sun exploding.”
“Not quite.”
I still had my eyes squeezed shut. I tried opening them the tiniest crack. My bedroom was a blurry, bright mess through the crosshatched black lines of my eyelashes. I shut them again. My head throbbed.
“I don’t feel so great.”
“You’ve exerted a fair amount of energy. On your very first try. You’ve been asleep for a long time. It doesn’t surprise me that you don’t feel well.”
“I remember . . .”
“Yes?”
“He had a gun,” I said. Suddenly that was the only thing I could see: Peter holding a gun. What was Peter doing with a gun?
Peter saying the word Fernweh.
Peter meaning the word slut.
Prue screaming.
Vira, the captain of a tugboat.
Harrison pulling flashlight after flashlight from a trench coat with impossibly deep pockets.
It came back to me in fits and starts, flashes and snapshots.
I opened my eyes again. Slowly. The light felt like an invasive, heavy thing. My mother was blurry.
I had raised my hand up toward the sky and called a bolt of lightning down from the heavens.
“Just like fucking Zeus,” I whispered.
“Ah, so you’re remembering,” Mom said.
“Holy shit. Did I kill him?”
Peter had forced himself on my sister in a gross, dusty barn, and Peter had thrown a three-hundred-year-old bird against a wooden beam and snapped her wings and neck, and Peter had aimed a gun at my face, but—despite all that—I didn’t think I was prepared to add murderer to the list of attributes I used to describe myself.
“Not quite,” my mother said. Her face came slowly into focus, and I saw how sad she looked, how tired.
“I think I was trying to.”
“Oh, you were certainly trying to. But luckily you have three very eager witnesses who’ve all given testimony in your favor. Plus, the gun was found. Albeit a little worn for the wear.”
“Worn for the wear?”
“Your aim was very precise. Your . . . how did you put it? Your Zeus bolt hit the gun.”
“So he’s alive.”
“I said a little worn for the wear; I think I should amend that to a lot worn for the wear,” my mother said thoughtfully. “He was blown into next Tuesday. Really. I had to go and drag him back to the present. He smokes when he opens his mouth and he’s covered in burns, but he’ll live.”
“He fired the gun,” I said.
“Yes.”
“He tried to kill me.”
“You were very lucky.”
“You knew,” I said. “You must have. You knew I was making it rain.”
“I had a feeling it was you, yes.”
“When did you figure it out? Have you known all along?”
The storm when I was born. The snow in summer. The blazing heat in the dead of winter. The weather of By-the-Sea had always been laughably temperamental.
But no—not always.
Just for the last eighteen years. Because of me.
“Not all along,” my mother admitted. “Not for a while. No Fernweh woman has ever had this particular gift b
efore. I didn’t know what to look for.”
“And then? When you realized it? How come you didn’t tell me?”
But I already knew what she was going to say.
I had to come to it when I was ready.
As if she could read my mind (and who knows, stranger things had happened), she kissed me on the forehead and said, “Exactly.”
“What will happen to Peter?”
“You don’t have to worry about Peter. He’ll be going to jail for a long time.”
“There will be a trial?”
“Of course.”
“But who’s going to believe him over us? Who’s going to believe him over Mary?”
“Like I said, Georgina, you have witnesses. And that young Harrison Lowry has proved to be quite the advocate on your and Mary’s behalf. We’ll make sure Peter’s punishment matches his crimes.”
My mother’s eyes darkened.
We hadn’t said the word yet.
Words had power.
Just like the words—
Slut.
Magic.
Fernweh.
They had power.
So did the word—
Rape.
Bird
In the bright flash of a bolt of lightning called down from the sky by magic I never knew I possessed—
My sister had disappeared.
I remembered now.
The smell of burning flesh.
The light so bright it had washed the entire world away.
The tiny flutter on my shoulder.
Like the smallest, most delicate little body had landed there for just a moment—
Before flying away.
As if to say—
Thank you.
Leaving
The island drained of water as I lay recovering in my bed.
It ran off over the cliffs in dramatic waterfalls.
It drained into the sea.
The ground was soggy underfoot.
But we knew it would dry eventually.
Peter enjoyed a swift trial with a jury of his peers, who convicted his raping, bird-murdering, illegal-possession-of-a-firearm, attempted-murdering-of-a-human ass to fourteen years in prison. He also had to register as a sex offender. He was shipped to the mainland on the next ferry out.
