by Meg Donohue
“Nothing has changed,” I said, my eyes filling with tears, “but somehow everything has changed. I know I owe you so much better of an explanation than that. I’m truly sorry.”
He stared at me. After a beat, he stood. “I can’t believe you’re doing this, Merrow. There is so much love here. I can feel it. Can’t you?”
I stood, too. My body ached, from the long car rides back and forth to Horseshoe Cliff, from the exertion of pulling Bear from the cliff’s edge, from the fitful hours of sleep on the lounge chair, from the agony of hurting someone for whom I cared so deeply.
“Yes,” I said. “I can feel it.”
Will’s face twisted. “I gave you your house by the sea. I gave you space to write. I wanted you to have a beautiful life, free of all the awful things that happened to you during your childhood. I wanted to take care of you and make sure you never felt pain again. You’re choosing the hardest path when the one I’ve offered you is so easy. I gave you everything, and it’s not enough, is it?”
Years earlier, Rosalie had told me that sometimes you had to leave your home, and everything you loved, to discover who you really were. Over the years I had been away from Horseshoe Cliff, I had become an adult. There were things that I’d wanted as a child that I no longer wanted. I had traveled to many places and my love for Horseshoe Cliff had only deepened. As a child, my feelings for my home had confused me, but I was no longer confused. I knew who I was. I knew what I wanted.
“No,” I said quietly. “I’m sorry.”
He walked away from me and stood at the edge of the patio, his arms crossed over his chest. I wanted to walk to him, to comfort him, but I knew that I shouldn’t. “We never belonged to each other the way I thought we did.” He spoke without turning toward me. “I don’t think you ever loved me the way I loved you.”
His words made me feel limp with sorrow. “That’s not true,” I said, but the truth was he might have been right. The entire time that I had loved Will, I had also loved Amir. I had been wrong to promise to love Will forever.
“It is true.” When he turned to me, his face was hard.
“Oh, Will. I am so sorry. I hate hurting you.” I took a step toward him, but he stepped back.
“You should go. I’d like you to leave now.”
I swallowed, nodding. I wished that I could hug him, and say a real goodbye, but it was clear that he could not stand to look at me, and for this I could not blame him. I walked to the patio door. When my hand touched the handle, I turned. He stood at the edge of the patio with his back to me. The rising sun made his blond hair appear full of light.
“Goodbye, Will,” I said.
His gaze was set on the horizon. He didn’t move. “Goodbye,” he said.
IT WAS STILL early in the morning when I left our house. Will’s house. I walked through the city, squinting against the sun. Twenty blocks. Forty blocks. An hour later I realized that I had walked straight to the Langfords’ house. Rosalie was an early riser, and I knew she would be awake.
When I rang the bell, Rosalie’s dog, Midas, barked furiously. The sound carried me back in time to Osha, the shock of Tiger’s teeth sinking into my flesh. This new dog, Midas, knew me as a member of the family. He stopped barking and happily trotted toward me the moment Rosalie opened the door.
“Merrow! What on earth . . .” Rosalie peered into my face. “Come in, sweetheart. Come in.”
I shook my head. I could not let her comfort me, not after breaking her son’s heart. “I’m so sorry,” I said, wiping away the fresh tears that had sprung to my eyes the moment she’d said my name. “You have always been so kind to me. I don’t know what I would have done without you.”
Rosalie waved away the thought. “What’s all this? Why don’t you come inside and sit down? You’re upset.”
“I can’t. I really can’t. I just needed to see you, and to tell you that knowing you has meant so much to me. Your belief in me, the way you told me your story and you listened to mine . . . it changed my life. I’ve learned so much from you, Rosalie. I hope I can do the same for other children in need.”
Rosalie smiled. “But you already are. You’re making a difference in the lives of so many children at Learning Together.”
I swallowed. “I don’t think I’ll be working there any longer.”
“Really? Why not?”
I took a breath. Rosalie and Wayne had left our party before Amir had arrived. I asked her if she remembered him.
She blinked. “Amir.” She said his name slowly. “The boy who was rich of heart. Of course I remember him.”
“He’s here. He’s come back.”
The skin around Rosalie’s lips seemed to tighten. “And what does that have to do with anything?”
“I . . . I love him, Rosalie,” I said helplessly.
She sucked in her breath.
“I needed to tell you myself. I needed to tell you how sorry I am for the pain I’m causing your family. I want to thank you for everything you have done for me. I’m afraid that you will never know how much you mean to me. I’m afraid that you will only remember me as the girl who betrayed you. And I am so sorry for that.”
Rosalie stood very still. I had the sense that she was torn between slamming the door in my face and embracing me. I was relieved when she crossed her arms over her chest. She sighed deeply. It was not a hug, but it was not a closed door, either.
“I don’t know what to say. I’d like to talk to my son.”
I nodded. Rosalie put her hand on the door as though to close it, but then stopped. She drummed her fingers on the door, her brow furrowed with thought. I waited.
“There was a time,” she said at last, “when I advised you to leave the past behind. I fear now that I pushed you into a relationship with Will—”
“No, no. I loved Will, though I know he’ll never believe it now.”
“But if I hadn’t encouraged you, you might have waited for Amir.”
“Rosalie, I loved Will,” I said again. “You have no blame in this.”
“Hmm. Maybe.” She straightened taller. “I need to call Will.”
I nodded. As I turned away, I felt her hand on my shoulder.
“You know, Merrow,” she said, “somehow, at some point, it’s going to be okay.”
They were simple words, but they were the same ones I’d heard my mother say the night before. They made me think of the push and pull of the surf against the sand.
“Thank you,” I told her, and then we said goodbye.
Chapter Twenty-Two
That evening, the first thing I noticed when Amir and I turned onto Horseshoe Cliff’s driveway was that Bear’s truck and trailer were gone. Amir slowed to a stop. We stared at the patch of dirt where my brother had recently lived.
“Where do you think he went?” I asked.
Amir shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“He doesn’t have any money.”
“He does, actually. I wrote a check for his share of our inheritance from Rei before we left yesterday. I put it under his door.”
I stared at him. “Oh, Amir.”
He looked away. I knew how hard it must have been for him to do something kind for Bear. I put my hand on his, tucking away my worry for Bear for the moment. I could not deny the relief I felt that my brother was not nearby. Even though I had a sense now why he had become the person he had become, and even though I’d forgiven him for much of his cruelty, I knew that neither Amir nor I would ever feel at ease with him nearby. He had caused us too much pain.
We drove toward the ruined cottage. It was just the two of us for miles in any direction, surrounded by land and sea. When I stepped out of the truck, I felt the possibility of the earth below my feet, just as my father had said he’d felt all those years ago.
I looked over at Amir and grinned. The glow of the sunset was luminous on his skin. I held his hand, and we began to walk toward the cliffs.
The sun hovered at the horizon, moments from dipping into the
sea. Up and down the coast, the cliffs were bathed in a glaze of honeyed light, glistening and majestic. I was sure that Horseshoe Cliff had never looked as beautiful as it did then. Standing there with Amir’s hand in mine, on the edge of our new life together, I felt the shame that I’d felt for so long about my feelings for him finally crumble. We had met each other when we were eight years old; we had grown up together; we had fallen in love.
Amir turned to me, his gaze flooded with desire. When I kissed him, my mind emptied of everything but the urgent press of my lips to his at last, the taste of his mouth, the electricity of his hands moving through my hair and then down to the small of my back, pulling me ever closer to him. Eventually, I led him by the hand along the path that cut down to the beach. Rocks scuttled out from under our feet. On the sand, his kisses moved from my ear to my neck to my collarbone. The pleasure of feeling his skin below my hands traveled through me like a pulse of light. I reached below his shirt and lifted it off him, and then mine was off, too, and we were pressed against the shield of that golden cliff, lost entirely in each other, our sounds buoyed for a moment on the air above us before tumbling out to join the sounds of the sea.
AFTERWARD, WE DRESSED slowly, reluctantly, our hands continually seeking out the touch of the other. We leaned against the cliff, Amir’s arms around me. I kissed his neck, inhaling his scent. Our attraction for each other was so strong that it felt like an animal pacing the beach, slinking breathlessly between us.
When I opened my eyes, I saw the cave. Amir followed my gaze.
“Do you think they’re still there?” he asked.
After we stopped sleeping in the shed, we’d moved the red birds that Amir had carved and I had painted to a high ledge deep within the cave where we knew Bear would not find them. The shape of the cliff had changed since then, and with it the cave: the mouth was smaller now, more a whistle than a wail.
The birds were still in the cave, or they weren’t. It did not matter. They were everywhere.
“Yes,” I said. “They’re here.”
It was then that we began to talk about our future.
Amir thought that we should use Rei’s money to build a new house for ourselves on Horseshoe Cliff, along with a bunkhouse so that we could establish a teaching farm.
I thought that in the summer we could run a camp for kids who were involved in programs like Learning Together, kids without a place to spend their days when school let out.
“It would mean so much to those kids to have room to run and explore,” I said. “And to dig in the dirt and learn to work together to grow things. To learn that some plants that look fragile actually aren’t at all; they can grow with little water, in places no one would believe that they could.”
“Think of the stories you’ll tell them,” Amir said, his arm still around me.
“And the ones they’ll tell the kids back home.” The stories would be, as they had always been, like stones that, warmed by one hand, are passed on to warm another.
Nine years had passed since Amir and I had last been on that beach together. In some ways it felt like a much longer span of time than that, and in other ways it felt like we had never left. The tide was pulling away from us, revealing a larger swath of beach and rocks covered in seaweed, as if reminding us how much more there was to discover, and how much we had to share. I rested my head against Amir’s shoulder and thought of children running on that sand, children who would sink their small heels into the vast land, making their joyful mark in the precious moments before the sea returned.
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, an enormous and everlasting thank-you to my readers.
Countless hardworking people have helped this tale become a book. Thank you to my stellar agent and friend, Elisabeth Weed, dispenser of rock-solid advice, as well as to Hallie Schaeffer and everyone at the Book Group. Thank you to my editor, Emily Krump, for her insight, encouragement, and kindness. For being such hardworking and creative champions of the written word, I’m grateful to so many at William Morrow, including Liate Stehlik, Jen Hart, Julia Elliott, Bianca Flores, Amelia Wood, Rachel Meyers, Elsie Lyons, Diahann Sturge, and Amy Vreeland.
I am forever grateful to my loving parents, Carol Mager and James Donohue. For their support and affection, thank you also to Jackie Mager, Barbara and Charles Preuss, Brianna Andersen and Jay Donohue, Maritere and Charles Preuss, Jennifer and Tom Hudner, and the entire Donohue, Mager, and Preuss gang. A special note of love for my delightful nieces and nephew: Lily, TJ, Hailey, Clara, and Reese.
Thank you to my brilliant, book-loving friends Emily Elder, Issabella Shields Grantham, Jeanette Perez, Alex Wang, and Liza Zassenhaus for reading this novel at various stages and providing invaluable feedback, sugarcoated with friendship and delivered with cocktails.
Thank you also to my dear friend and soul sister Mary-Ellis Arnold for being an encouraging early reader as well as a subject-matter expert. Despite her attempt to set me straight, there are likely some poultry-related inaccuracies in this work.
An immeasurable thank-you to Emily Brontë for writing the extraordinarily strange and wonderful Wuthering Heights. Stories have shaped my life, and Brontë’s novel has left a particular and indelible mark. You, Me, and the Sea—and, really, all my work—is in her debt.
Finally, my eternal love and gratitude to Phil, Finley, Avey, Hayden, and our dogs, Cole and Wally. You are my home and my heart.
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Meet Meg Donohue
MEG DONOHUE is the USA Today bestselling author of Every Wild Heart, Dog Crazy, All the Summer Girls, and How to Eat a Cupcake. Born and raised in Philadelphia, she now lives in San Francisco with her husband, three daughters, and two dogs.
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About the Book
Wuthering Heights: The Novel That Haunts Me
“Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same. . . .”
—Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
Cathy: a headstrong, brave, complicated heroine. Heathcliff: a passionate, brooding hero . . . or is he an antihero? From my first reading of Wuthering Heights over twenty years ago, I have been fascinated by Emily Brontë’s infamous pair. The intensity of their relationship—and the dramatic setting that Brontë so evocatively depicts—cast an indelible mark on my memory. As Heathcliff found himself haunted by Cathy, I have found myself, and my own stories, haunted by Brontë’s novel.
I was mentally creating Wuthering Heights fan fiction long before I knew the genre existed. There is a particular plot point in Wuthering Heights that has always charged my imagination, spurring it to invent different paths for the characters than those carved by Brontë. When Heathcliff returns from a mysterious disappearance, Cathy is forced to choose between him and Edgar, the man she has recently married. Before Cathy can resolve this dilemma—spoiler alert!—she dies. The second half of Brontë’s novel recounts the ways that the children of these central characters become intertwined . . . and, well, reader, forgive me, but I have always found it difficult to care much about the offspring of Cathy, Heathcliff, and Edgar. I love the heightened drama of Wuthering Heights, its eccentricity and unconventionality . . . but on this one point (the love triangle), my mind yearns to imagine alternative futures for the characters.
What if Cathy had not fallen ill after Heathcliff’s return? I ask myself. If Cathy had lived, she would have been forced to choose between Edgar, the man who gave her the life she thought she always wanted, and Heathcliff, the great love from her childhood.
As a writer, you can wonder about these sor
ts of things for only so long before they become fodder for your next novel. And so—at the risk of provoking Brontë to howl from her grave—while writing You, Me, and the Sea, I set out to answer the question that has rattled around my mind for over twenty years: What if Cathy had lived?
I recast Cathy as Merrow, Heathcliff as Amir, and Edgar as Will. While Wuthering Heights is told largely from the perspective of a servant named Nelly, I wanted to explore Merrow’s point of view and decided her voice should carry the story.
My novels always have a strong sense of place. I’m sure I owe this tendency, in part, to my love of Brontë, who uses setting to reflect the inner lives of her characters and heighten her narrative’s drama. Instead of the mist-shrouded moors of England, I set You, Me, and the Sea on the coast of Northern California, which, in addition to being a wonderfully romantic setting for a novel, happens to be where I live. While writing, I began to think of the sea and the land as two parts of an eternal pair, constantly shifting, changing the shape of each other and their embrace over centuries—an apt metaphor for a story about love.
The more I wrote, the more I allowed myself the freedom to play loosely with the plot of Wuthering Heights, turning it into something new. While I hope readers familiar with the classic will enjoy spotting the threads of connection to that novel, there are places where I’ve made definite departures. I place my characters in (mostly) present day, at a point in history that affords Merrow opportunities a girl in the late 1700s would not have had. I cannot resist a bit of mystery, so I wove fresh intrigue into Merrow’s story. And since I am both a romantic and an optimist, I could not help but sprinkle a fair amount of hope, and even magic, onto these pages.
