by Meg Donohue
“You and Amir? Just the two of you?”
“Yes.”
I could practically hear Ronnie’s sharp mind ticking away like a timer winnowing down on a set moment. I supposed this was why I had called her.
“And Will isn’t bothered by this?” she asked. “You going away with the guy who it turns out didn’t do the awful thing? Who didn’t actually mean to break your heart? Who was looking at you last night like the Prince of Troy catching his first glimpse of Helen?”
“Will offered to come with me.”
“But he didn’t insist? When the Prince of Troy took Helen, her husband launched a thousand ships and started a war.”
“Ronnie, no one is taking me—”
“I know, I know. But don’t you think it’s strange that Will doesn’t seem to think it’s possible to lose you? That he didn’t even notice how you were looking at Amir?”
My face grew warm as we both fell silent.
After a moment, Ronnie said, “Oh, Merrow. What are you going to do?”
A hand on my shoulder made me jump. When I looked up, I saw Emma. She wore large sunglasses and a wan smile. Can we talk? she mouthed.
“Emma’s here,” I told Ronnie, promising that I would call her again soon.
Emma sank down to the sand beside me. “I’ve been calling you! Will said I’d find you here. I’ve been so embarrassed all day.” She touched her fingers to her forehead and moaned. “I drank too much last night. Did I make a fool of myself? Did you see Amir this morning? What did he say? I hope he doesn’t think too poorly of me! Does he?”
I felt a rush of sympathy for Emma, who had always been more interested in her studies than in boys, and who had now, by all appearances, fallen in love with Amir overnight. “Of course not. You were fine. It was a party. Everyone had too much to drink.”
She cocked her head. “Amir did say something, didn’t he?” Her cheeks grew pink. “It’s okay. You don’t have to tell me what he said.”
“Really,” I said softly. “He didn’t say anything about you.” I realized I had not thought of Emma even once while I had sat with Amir on the beach that morning. Any twinges of jealousy had fled my mind the moment I’d looked at him and felt how he looked at me. Now, I wished only to put my friend out of her misery as gently as possible.
“Oh.” She took off her sunglasses and fiddled with them for a moment before putting them back on. “Was he always so handsome? I really only met him that one time we stayed in Osha, didn’t I? I don’t remember him looking like that.” Her face twisted. I could not tell if she was embarrassed or distraught. She attempted to laugh. “I’m sorry. Is that gross for you to think about? I wouldn’t like to think about my brother as hot, either. He’s just Will.”
“Amir isn’t my brother.”
There was a pause.
“What do you call him?”
“He’s—” I realized with a start that I had been about to snap: He’s mine. “We grew up together.”
Emma stopped smiling. “Are you . . . upset with me, Merrow? Did I do something wrong?”
“No.” I tried to smooth the edges from my voice and could not. “I’m sorry. It was a late night.”
“Oh.” She pushed the sand around with her feet. “Sometimes I wonder if you still think of me as just a little girl.”
I could not tell her that Amir and I would always belong more to each other than to anyone else. That I loved Will, but we were not welded together in the way that Amir and I were. That the thought of Amir being with another woman, even someone whom I liked as much as I liked Emma, was unbearable.
“I’m sorry,” I said again. The cool feeling of the sea on my skin had dissipated. A queer sensation had overtaken me since Amir had returned. It was as though my blood were moving faster, its rush an insistent thrum in my ears. I stood and held out my hand to help Emma to her feet. “I’m sorry.”
Chapter Twenty
I did not sleep well that night. I awoke in the middle of the night with Bear’s voice in my ear and my fingers balled into tight, sweat-filled fists. After that, sleep eluded me.
I was anxious, too, to see my home. In my memory, Horseshoe Cliff glowed as though in amber, a place of powerful and ethereal beauty. The ocean there was larger and more soulful, its crash more in rhythm with my own heart, than any other ocean. But now that I had seen the beauty that could be found in so many other parts of the world, and now that I had my own house by the sea in San Francisco, would Horseshoe Cliff still offer the same enchantment? I was not entirely sure I was ready to find out.
In the morning, Amir picked me up in a truck that was the same color as the stones we used to stack on the beach. The city looked different from its cab. The buildings seemed thin and huddled, the people small. Amir turned out to be a confident driver, but he took his time. There was something gallant in the way he halted for dawdling pedestrians who approached the curb, making eye contact and nodding politely to the elderly and to the young mothers with toddlers in tow.
I looked at his profile, the cut of his cheekbone, the beautiful shape of his dark-lashed eyes. Nine years had changed him, but in his eyes I would always find the boy he had been. It was a relief just to be near him again, like a wrong had at last been righted.
“You have a new admirer,” I told him. “Emma.”
Amir steered the truck onto the Golden Gate Bridge. I sensed the water far below us, churning where bay met sea. He glanced at me with a sidelong smile. “Are you jealous?”
“No. She’s nineteen.”
“That’s practically ancient compared to how old you were when you met Will.”
“Will and I didn’t start dating for years after we met.”
Amir raised an eyebrow but did not shift his gaze from the road ahead. “She’s not my type,” he said after a moment.
I could not help smiling at this. “No? She’s beautiful.”
“I’m sure a lot of people think that. But the woman I’m meant to be with has a different sort of beauty. She’s not like anyone else.”
I could not pull my eyes from his face. The corner of his mouth settled into a small smile as he continued. “The woman I’m meant to be with is a strong swimmer, and she can ride a horse without reins. She’s moved by how the needs of children are as simple as they are profound. She’s happiest by the sea. She loves, and knows how to tell, a good story. Oh,” he said, his eyes flicking over my face for too short a spell of time, “and she has a sixth sense for unlocked windows.”
I swallowed. “That’s very specific. She might be hard to find.”
“Finding her,” Amir said, “has never been the problem.”
I studied him. “You know, in these years that we’ve been apart, there have been moments when I’ve felt like someone was watching me.”
“Your mother? You used to sense her watching you when you were on the beach.”
“It wasn’t you? You haven’t followed me?”
He shook his head. “Do you think I could have seen you and not said anything? It took everything in my power to keep my distance from you. I thought it was what you wanted. When I heard you tell Rei that you were leaving, it didn’t sound like you planned to look back.”
“Then why seek me out now?”
“Your engagement. There was something about it in a magazine.”
I was confused for a moment before remembering that a local magazine had published a piece about Rosalie’s philanthropic work, and she’d insisted that I be included in the family photograph that ran with the profile. I was listed as Merrow Shawe, fiancée of William Langford.
I looked through the window. Suburban neighborhoods gave way to cow pastures and rolling hills.
“I was always good at finding an open window, wasn’t I?”
Amir’s smile lit his entire face in the way the light from the rising sun used to burst through the cracks of the shed. “You needed to see how other people lived. You needed to know.”
It had been Amir who had led me
into that first house, knowing how it would distract me from the grief I experienced when Pal died, the rage I felt for my brother, the swirl of darkness that had risen within me.
“I don’t think I understood just how little we had until I walked around those homes,” I said.
Amir’s smile faded. “I don’t think I ever understood how much I had until I saw how mesmerized you were by those houses. I realized then what the stakes were, and what exactly I had to lose. Breaking into those houses never felt harmless to me. Even before we wound up at the Langfords’, I sensed where things were headed.”
His words worried me. “I hope you don’t think I’m marrying Will just because he’s rich.”
Amir shrugged. “He makes you feel safe. You lived your entire childhood not knowing what the next minute would hold, and with him you can see your whole future. Who could blame you for wanting that? He’s giving you everything you think you want.”
“Will is smart and curious and kind, Amir. He’s a good person.”
His jaw hardened as he stared at the road ahead of us. After some time had passed, he said, in a voice more gentle than I expected, “Will is a good person. His entire family has looked after you—I see that now. But you can be grateful to the Langfords without owing them the rest of your life.”
I did not respond. Was it so wrong to love someone because they made you feel safe? Because you were grateful for how they changed your life? And if it wasn’t love that I felt for Will, what was it? I remembered my panic when I’d awakened in Venice to find him gone. I remembered watching Will with his sister and mother in that house in Osha, the glow that seemed to surround them and how I wished that it would surround me, too. I remembered the first dress that Rosalie had given me, the delight I had felt when she’d said I could keep it. It had swirled around my knees and my heart had swelled in response. I kept that dress wrapped in tissue, and when I looked at it from time to time what struck me was how simple it was, and how I loved it, and how much I hoped it would never be taken from me.
AT FIRST GLANCE, it appeared little had changed in Osha. The co-op still had a box out front labeled FREE, but when I looked closer, I realized it was no longer a cardboard box but a sturdy-looking wooden crate. I felt a jolt of pleasure at the sight of Little Earth Schoolhouse, which had been a respite for me for too few years. It had the same pretty slanted roof and porch, the same tidy yard, but a new sign now with crisp blue lettering and an illustration of Earth in place of the o in house. I thought of the journal that Teacher Julie had handed me, my first, telling me that I was “nearly bursting” with stories.
As we neared Horseshoe Cliff, I felt myself leaning forward in my seat. Amir swung the truck off the road, and right there in the middle of the dirt driveway, Bear’s truck—my father’s truck, now stained with rust and pocked by broken headlights—glowered at us like an old blind watchdog. In a weedy plot of dirt just off the driveway hunkered a camper not much bigger than a one-horse trailer. I held my breath, waiting to see the door of the camper thrown open to reveal the looming silhouette of my brother. Behind the grimy window, the curtains did not move.
“Keep going,” I whispered.
Amir looked at me. “He can’t hurt us.” He put his hand on mine.
I laced my fingers through his and drew in a long breath. “Keep going,” I said again.
The truck dipped off the driveway into the scrub grasses as he maneuvered it around Bear’s truck. Immediately, the cottage came into view.
On the night I’d run away, the cottage had appeared to teeter on the edge of the world. Now, it looked sunken, less in danger of falling into the sea than of melting into the earth. Half of the porch had crumbled, leaving a dark pile of rotten wood that had not been cleared. Parts of the roof had crumbled, too, and what remained was covered in moss. Even in decrepitude, that cottage clung as stubbornly to the earth as the earth clung to the cottage. The sight made my heart clench.
I had never forgotten that when I was a child lying in my bed at night, the wilderness had seemed to creep closer in the darkness and howl against my windowpane. Nor had I forgotten that in the morning I would stand at that same window and look out at the land that had filled me with terror the night before, and my heart would swell with love for it.
Amir stopped the truck in front of the cottage. In the distance, the gray satin blanket of ocean rippled. I stepped outside. The air smelled of the sea and of the land, exactly as it always had. The breeze against my cheek felt like a kiss; I was overwhelmed with the sense that my father and my mother were beside me. I looked up, searching for a red bird, but saw only the white blue of the vast coastal sky. The constant murmur of the ocean offered an inhale and an exhale.
“I know,” Amir said, coming around the truck to join me. He wrapped me in a hug.
I laughed, wiping away the tears that pricked my eyes. “I haven’t cried in years but suddenly it’s all I do.”
Amir looked down at me but did not wipe the tears from my cheeks. “Bear hated when you cried, so you stopped.”
Should I have been ashamed to feel as relieved as I felt to be in Amir’s arms, to feel both at peace and deliriously adrift, to feel my heart beating toward his? Maybe, but I was suddenly, overwhelmingly, sick of shame. Amir knew me, and I knew him. We had been connected from the moment we had first held hands in the darkness of my bedroom on the night he arrived at Horseshoe Cliff, when he’d seemed equally dampened by grief and brightened by hope.
He put his hand under my chin, cupping it, and the touch of his fingers sent a charge down my spine. I moved toward him. My eyes, locked on his, began to close.
In my pocket, my phone vibrated. I didn’t look at it, but the thought that it might have been Will calling made my eyes flick open.
“Let’s walk.” I stepped out of Amir’s arms and set off toward the ocean.
The garden had become a weedy tangle, too overgrown to see if the raised boxes that my father had built were still underneath. When we approached the shed, I was surprised to see that it had withstood the years of neglect better than the cottage and garden. The door creaked loudly when I opened it. The walls were bare, my father’s tools gone. A chunk of the ceiling in one corner had fallen, letting in a bright stream of dust-flecked light.
It was so small.
I stepped across the dirt floor, remembering how Amir and I had huddled together with Pal for warmth.
Amir looked around. When he spoke, his voice was laced with quiet anger. “I’ll never understand how he could have forced a kid to sleep out here.”
“We were always happier than he was. He couldn’t stand it.”
We left the shed and closed the door behind us. Where the chicken coop had once stood, there was a bare patch of earth. Amir said that Bear must have sold the coop, and I felt a stab of regret that another piece of my father was lost to us forever. The horse pasture fence and lean-to were still there, at least. On the side of the lean-to, my mother’s peace sign was so faint that at first I thought I imagined it. The ring of paint was warm below my palm. Someday someone is going to paint the peace sign that does the trick, my mother had said. And who is to say that person won’t be me?
I remembered my father bringing me to the lean-to on my fifth birthday, the delight of finding Pal there, waiting for me. When I took a deep breath, I could have sworn I smelled the dusty warmth of Old Mister and Guthrie.
“We should get horses again,” said Amir. I looked at him in surprise. I didn’t answer, but the sun caught my eye, and when it did I saw two horses in that pasture. I saw children, too, though they were not Amir and I. They were Marty and Keira and Assim and all the children from Learning Together. How they would love to spend a day at Horseshoe Cliff, exploring, losing themselves in the thrill of adventure that the wild expanse offered.
I opened my eyes and jogged a few steps to keep up with Amir. The air grew blustery, the sound of the waves crashing against the shore more distinct.
“Oh!” I said, stopping. W
here land had once been, it was no longer. The shape of the cliff had changed; the smooth horseshoe curve was now a jagged V with sudden ledges that made the cliff seem even more precarious than it had been during our childhood. I remembered running along that cliff, shouting into the wind, laughing whenever Rei told me it was dangerous to play so close to the edge.
“There must have been a storm.” Amir peered over the new line of the cliff, unafraid. The strip of sand below was wider than it had been in some places and narrower in others. The waves hurled themselves at the beach. Amir looked sadly back in the direction of the cottage. I knew, without him saying it, that he was wondering how long it would be until all of Horseshoe Cliff was gone.
“Do you remember,” I asked, “why Rei thought this property was named Horseshoe Cliff? ‘It’s the inside of a horseshoe that is lucky, not the horseshoe itself,’ she’d say. The horseshoe just holds the luck. If you hang a horseshoe upside down, the good stuff spills out like wine from an overturned cup. She thought that whoever named Horseshoe Cliff had believed that it was the ocean that was lucky, not the land. It was the ocean that would outlast everything else.
“‘This is why the ocean brings us peace,’ Rei said. When we are by the sea, we are in the presence of something eternal. There is strange comfort in feeling small beside the vast ocean. ‘In the face of Forever,’ Rei said, ‘we become more grateful for the vital heartbeat of Now.’”
The light turned Amir’s brown eyes a dark shade of honey. To look at him was to feel his love for me, and—always, always—my love for him.
“The one thing I don’t agree with,” I said, “is the idea that Horseshoe Cliff is unlucky. My father never believed that, and neither do I. Even when I was away, I felt the pull of this land, and of you. I have always felt you with me, Amir, even when you’re not.”
There was so much more I wanted to say, but Amir’s gaze flicked away from mine. His face tightened. Across the bluff, staggering toward us, half broken by the wind, was an old man.
