by Katrina Leno
His defense—she deserved it because she had already had sex with so many people—made the judge, the Honorable Eleanora Avery, laugh the fuck out loud.
As if out of a fairy tale, nobody asked:
What was my sister wearing the night she was raped?
How much had my sister had to drink the night she was raped?
How many guys had my sister previously had sex with?
Because—again, out of a fairy tale—they realized that none of those things mattered.
Because there was nothing in a girl’s history that might negate her right to choose what happens to her body.
The last days of summer settled into a quiet rhythm.
The island was hot and humid and somber.
I spent the days washing the sheets and pillowcases and towels of the inn, preparing for the end of the season, getting ready for fall. I spent my evenings with Prue—pushing ourselves out into nothingness on a tire swing or running full speed into the ocean or lying on the cool grass of dusk, flicking mosquitoes from our skin and letting our hair tangle up together.
I woke up every morning and went into the kitchen and poured myself a cup of coffee.
Aggie laughed again. The inn became a place I recognized.
I let the birdheads apologize, one by one, a steady stream of humiliated people I had known my entire life.
I forgave everyone who asked me to.
I said to good-bye to them, one by one, these people who had dedicated their lives to a thing that had been so violently taken from them.
I watched them lay their hands on the top of Annabella’s grave.
I watched them pull the grave marker out of the earth—the one Peter had made—and fling it into the sea.
The rule of the cliffs did not apply to grave markers carved by rapists.
Our good-byes were short and perfunctory (Hep Shackman) or long and drawn out (Lucille Arden) depending on who was leaving.
Liesel Channing gave me a sweater she had knit out of truly hideous purple yarn. On the front was a rather sloppily rendered crest of the university I was slated to attend so soon that it took my breath away when I thought too much about it. She hugged me for a very long time and whispered in my ear, “I’ll be back next year. Annabella or no Annabella, this is my home too.”
Every morning I went into my sister’s empty, quiet room and checked on the eggs.
The nest, magically rendered and pulled from the flooded ground under a full moon, kept them warm and safe under the floorboards.
We took turns watching over them: Harrison, Prue, Vira, me. We stacked books and magazines on Mary’s bed and read stories and watched Annabella’s babies.
I thought it was too late for them.
Vira told me that they had a magic nest to help them along, and I should have a little hope.
When I missed my sister, I held her necklace in the palm of my hand. The broken clasp told an entirely different story now.
I wondered if I should have seen it earlier.
I listed all the reasons a girl might have to keep something like that a secret, even from her own sister.
I went through the motions of leaving.
I packed my things into three steamer trunks.
I got a letter in the mail with my future roommate’s name and address.
Hattie M. Hipperson.
I sent her a letter.
Excited to meet you.
Excited for school.
Excited.
(The word excited falls flatter and flatter the more times you write it.)
And then—through some trick of time, a slow bleeding of hours—it was the day before I was supposed to leave.
I woke up and poured myself a cup of coffee and brought it up to Mary’s room.
Vira was already there.
Vira, too, was getting ready to leave By-the-Sea for her own rumspringa. She was going to a big city on the opposite coast, the western coast, a city full of sun and palm trees and surfer boys and long-haired girls she could care two shits about. When I pictured Vira in a midnight-black bikini standing with her feet in sand almost too hot to bear, I wanted to cry tears of absolute joy. Like Vira in a candy-striped apron scooping ice cream the color of rusted nails, like Vira at the wheel of a tugboat in a yellow raincoat, like Vira, my best friend, whose house was covered in roadkill taxidermy—it just made so much sense.
I suspected that Vira, of the vampire name and the no-fucks-given attitude, had it all figured out in a way I could only one day hope to.
I sat on my sister’s bed and threw my arms around Vira’s shoulders. She put her hands on my forearms and said, “I’m going to miss you so much. But you can be from my school to your school in five hours. Flying through the air! What will they think of next?”
We stayed like that for a while, me hugging her, her patting my arms, the eggs out of their cubby hole, resting on the floor of Mary’s closet.
After a few minutes I realized that Vira was humming. And then her humming turned into words: a familiar eerie tune that filled the room with its simple, somber melody.
On By-the-Sea, you and me will go sailing by
On waves of green, softly singing too.
On By-the-Sea, you and me will be forever young
And live together on waves of blue.
I thought I saw the eggs twitch, but when I looked closer, they were still.
“We’re leaving tomorrow too,” Prue told me that evening.
There was one ferry off the island per day (ever since it had miraculously recovered from its mysterious ailment) and the very idea of getting onto it with Prue by my side made things seem suddenly a million times more bearable.
But still.
When I tried to actually picture myself leaving By-the-Sea, I couldn’t.
All the signs pointed to me leaving.
The packed steamer trunks.
The envelope of money my mother had tucked into my hands that morning, for me to open my very own bank account once I reached the mainland. (“The By-the-Sea Bank doesn’t count for much off these shores,” she’d said.)
The week’s worth of food Aggie had packed carefully into a wicker picnic basket. (“For the journey,” she’d said, although there was more than enough food for one ferry ride and one train ride.)
My ferry ticket.
My train ticket.
The response from my roommate, Hattie M. Hipperson, who somehow managed to seem much more sincere every time she wrote the word excited in her letter back to me. (Which was seventeen times in four neatly printed pages.)
The thick black knitted hat Julia Montgomery had made for me and delivered that afternoon, with matching gloves and scarf for good measure. (“The winters get so cold in that city, Georgina,” she’d said, and hugged me for so long that it began to feel less like a hug and more like an extended apology.)
The feather I found on my pillow that night, the beautiful pale-brown feather placed perfectly where I would later lay my head.
The magical nest in my sister’s room that somehow, between watches of its diligent guardians, had gone empty. Not a piece of egg nor fluff of feather left to be found.
I put the nest in Mary’s nightstand drawer.
I didn’t worry about the eggs; I knew they were in good hands.
I woke up that night to my sister hovering over me.
She clamped her hand down over my mouth before I could scream and then she fell, laughing, to the bed.
“You should have seen your face,” she squealed.
“Am I dreaming?”
“Don’t be a doofus. Did you really think I turned into a bird?”
“Sort of, yeah,” I admitted.
“Well, yeah, I sort of did,” she admitted back.
“You took the eggs?”
“Yeah. Don’t worry. They’re safe.” She snuggled under the blankets with me. “I heard about Peter.”
“He got what he deserved.”
“You should have killed hi
m,” she said. Then, worried she’d hurt my feelings, she added, “Just kidding, of course. He wouldn’t have been worth the extra energy.”
“Mary, why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.
Her face darkened, and she wiggled herself deeper under the blankets, pulling them over our heads so we were totally covered.
“I was afraid nobody would believe me,” she whispered, her voice soft and muffled by wool.
“I would have believed you. I will always believe you.”
“This island, Georgie . . . ,” she began. “This island is so small. People talk. I hear what they say about me. The whispers. I’ve heard them call me things. They would have said I was asking for it.”
In the darkness, I reached out for her and put my index finger on the tip of her nose.
“I’m sorry this happened to you. And I’m sorry I didn’t figure it out before,” I said.
“You don’t have to be sorry for anything. You saved my life, remember? You pulled a lightning bolt down from the sky like fucking Zeus.”
“I think that was mostly an accident.”
“You blew Peter to kingdom come! Honestly, who cares if it was an accident or not.”
“I should have known. Mary, I’m so sorry I didn’t know.”
“I thought about telling you,” she said, her voice a whisper again. “Maybe I should have. I just felt so lost, so confused. I felt like I didn’t know which way was up anymore, which way was right. Whether I had done something. To deserve it.”
“I love you. I’m sorry. I hope you know now that you didn’t do anything.”
“I know,” she said quickly. “You have to stop apologizing to me; it’s not your fault. And you need to snap out of this mood, because the island’s been gray as shit the past couple of days, and I know it’s because you’ve been moping around.”
“I’m leaving tomorrow.”
“I know that too. I know everything. I can fit into really small places now. I can just listen.”
“So you are a bird?”
“Details are unimportant.” She paused, lifted the blankets a little so we could breathe, so a sliver of light found its way into the bed. She looked sad and small with the covers pulled up over her head and our faces inches apart. Her breath smelled like tea and rain. “I heard something,” she said. “A secret.”
“What kind of secret?”
“Did you know,” she said, fiddling with the collar of my pajama shirt, “that no Fernweh woman has ever left the island before?”
“What? Where did you hear that?”
“I was hiding in the eaves. I was literally eavesdropping.”
“And?”
“It’s true. Mom and Aggie were talking. I knew Mom had never left the island, and Grandma, but I didn’t realize none of us . . .”
“Well, I guess that’s going to change. Because I’m leaving the island tomorrow. And you.”
Again, in the darkness, Mary was quiet.
“Poor Mildred Miller,” she whispered. “Robbed of the distinct pleasure of sharing a very small cinder block dorm room with me.”
“You’re not going? Because of what Mom and Aggie said?”
“It feels like I was never going,” Mary whispered. “And it doesn’t have anything to do with . . . Peter or what happened or . . . There are just some things I need to do now. Here.”
“Like what?”
“Like, I dunno. Could you actually picture me at college? Could you picture me away from this weird little island? Plus, it looks like I’m going to have to raise some babies.”
“You aren’t talking about the eggs, are you?”
“Of course I am. Although if those little fuckers think I’m going to chew worms and then vomit them back up, they’re sadly misinformed about how far I’ll take my maternal hen duties.”
“Disgusting.”
“Yeah, well. Somebody’s gotta do it.”
She stretched herself out on the bed, taking up all the room. I kissed the side of her face, and she pretended to barf.
“I’m going to miss you so much,” I said.
“Don’t worry. I can fly. I’ll come and visit.”
Mary was gone in the morning.
I thought I might actually scream if I found one more feather in my bed, but . . .
Nothing.
I got dressed and left the house early. The ferry left at noon, but I had one little thing left to do.
The island was quiet and warm in the soft morning light. I filled a thermos with coffee and set out down Bottle Hill wearing my rainboots, even though the ground was dry and hard by now. The island was back to its usual self, heavy with the thick heat of another summer’s end, a mugginess that could be picked up in your palms and saved for a later day. I filled my pockets with it and kept walking.
Oh, By-the-Sea—how the place you grew up could feel at once so safe and so much like a trap. I had never wanted to leave it, but here I was, my bags packed and my good-byes all ready and waiting in the back of my throat.
“I’m not abandoning you,” I whispered to the island, my island, but of course it didn’t respond. Islands were like that. Always listening. Never replying.
The graveyard was orange and crisp and autumn as usual. I slipped a fleece button-down on and wandered through the graves. It was the place I’d miss most, I knew. The always-autumn graveyard.
And although I knew now that I must have been the one controlling the weather, I had no idea how I might reverse the effects.
Not that I wanted to.
It had always been perfect, this graveyard. It had always been empty and autumn and mine.
And now I was leaving it.
Who knew how long this rumspringa might last? I guess that was the point, sort of. A jump into the unknown with your hands pressed over your eyes.
I settled myself down in between the graves, crossing my legs and cupping my hands around the thermos to warm them. I thought of rain, of wind, of sunshine, of rainbows. All these things that suddenly felt like they might actually be a part of me in a way that felt huge, unfathomable.
I had brought a flood to By-the-Sea—
But had it been the first time?
The Fernweh mausoleum was the largest in the graveyard. The outside was carved in Annabellas, a tribute to Annabella Fernweh and her sister, Georgina, my great-great-great-great-whatever-grandmother who had been among the first people to inhabit By-the-Sea. I bent down and found the loose stone near the door and removed the little key we kept hidden there.
When Mary and I were younger, we’d play in here. A morbid setting for our dolls to have teatime, but we had liked the stone floors and the way the light turned into rainbows from the stained-glass windows.
I found my father’s empty tomb. There was nothing inside this stone container, no earthly remains of Locke Caravelle. His name wasn’t even etched into the door. My mother wouldn’t allow it. But this is where my father would go, should anyone ever find his body. This is where all the Fernweh women and the men who loved them were buried.
I put my palm against the cool stone.
I had heard the story a hundred times. The story of our birth. Of the final push that delivered me into the world, the push that coincided with the skies opening up. An island flooding around my mother and me as we waited for my sister to show up.
The great storm of our births—the one that had sunk my father’s ship.
It had started the moment I was born.
And now I knew that my father’s ship had gone down because of me.
My father’s tomb was empty because of me.
I would never know my father because I was born with a power I didn’t even want, one I didn’t even know about for eighteen years.
And now I had it, and there was no sending it back. There was only going forward, and living with the knowledge that the newborn tears of baby Georgina had done so much more damage than anyone had realized at the time.
I wouldn’t forget that. This power had blood
on its hands.
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered to his empty tomb.
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered to all the women who had come before me.
And then I left them alone and promised I’d return one day.
The dead loved promises; the living loved promising.
I returned home and stood in my bedroom and turned in a slow circle, looking.
The day had turned bright and sunny.
I guess that meant I was in a good mood.
I had almost no clue how my powers worked. That little knot of warmth in my gut—when I’d Zeused-out on Peter—that was gone.
If I stood at my window—
And looked up at the sky—
And concentrated very, very hard . . .
I could almost make a cloud appear.
“You’ll figure it out,” my mom said at the door to my bedroom. She was dressed less conspicuously now that all the birdheads were gone. Jeans and sneakers, a Smashing Pumpkins T-shirt. Her hair was in a long, straight ponytail and she held a cup of coffee, which she offered to me.
“Just coffee?” I asked, taking it.
“You’re leaving me for nine months. You think I’m not going to make you a little protection spell?” she responded. We sat on my bed, facing each other.
“Mary came to see me last night.”
“Me too,” she said.
“She was a human.”
My mom nodded. “She’s not leaving.”
“She told me.”
“But I’m glad you are,” Mom continued. “If it was going to be anyone . . .”
“Am I really the first? Out of all the Fernweh women?”
Mom nodded again.
Then: “You’ll be great, Georgina. You’ve always been great. Since the minute you were born, sending floods after your enemies.” She stared off into space, as if savoring the memory: her and Aggie and my sister and me in a wooden rowboat, making our way safely home.
Without my dad.
I couldn’t imagine leaving her.
I couldn’t imagine leaving this place.
And yet.
I went to say good-bye to Annabella.
My mother had made her a new grave marker. A flat little rock worn smooth from the ocean. Magically engraved words read: We loved with a love that was more than love.
And I thought—
In a million years, if some archaeologists unearthed the remains of By-the-Sea from the bottom of the seafloor (an Atlantis for a distant generation!), and found this rock with these words guarding these tiny, fragile bird bones, they would have no fucking idea what to make of us.
