Spells for Forgetting(15)

He was really there, behind that door.

The night of the orchard fire, a rogue wind blew in from the sea, rolling over the island in a furious gust. And in that single moment, time split like a fraying rope into a before and an after. The snap of an old apple branch dropped a kerosene lamp into the hay beside the barn and within minutes, the fire had engulfed an entire row of trees.

Looking back, people said that the fire was an ominous warning. A kind of harbinger of what Nixie would find in the woods only an hour later, when every soul on Saoirse was fighting the blaze. The next day, Jake stood in the chapel to tell the whole town that young Lily Morgan was dead.

The cold danced over my skin, rushing beneath the collar of my shirt and making me tremble. The windows of the Salt cottage were lit for the first time since August disappeared, like eyes watching from the woods. There were times when I wondered if I’d dreamed it. If he’d ever been real or if he was a fragmented piece of my imagination, buried deep and painful within me like a splinter under the skin. But those nights in the woods were some of the clearest memories I had from before the fire. They were still painted in saturated colors, filled with breath even now.

I closed my eyes, trying to replace the images with new ones. The view of the sea on windy days or the boats in the harbor. But everything skipped back to August, as if he was intrinsically tied to everything. For so long, he was.





Eight


    DUTCH


The road to the orchard was one I’d driven thousands of times.

The truck rocked from side to side as I made the last turn, coming to a stop beneath the sign that hung over the gate. I waited with the engine rumbling as the crowd from the first ferry crossed the road beneath it. The old, scratched letters on the wood read Salt Orchards.

It had been repainted after the fire, but years in the rain had made it nearly illegible again. That was how things were on the island. Always dying.

A little boy smiled at me as his father pulled him across the road, and I lifted two stiff fingers from the wheel in a wave.

I’d probably been about his age the first time I’d walked to the orchard on my own, looking for my dad when he didn’t show up at the house for a couple of days. I’d found him passed out drunk in the barn and had to get someone to throw him in the back of their truck and drive us home.

He was just a farmhand with hotheaded aspirations of running the place one day, but he was the only person on the island who didn’t see himself for what he was: a nobody. He worked at the orchard for most of his life until he was found dead in one of the rows. A heart attack. One he wouldn’t have survived the trip to Seattle for, even if anyone had found him alive. I was twenty-two at the time and I remember thinking that all things considered, that was a pretty good death for him.

Now I was sitting in the chair he’d always wanted but had never been good enough for.

The job of running the orchard hadn’t been meant for me. And no one was more surprised when the town council asked me to take the manager’s office than I was. August Salt was the only son of Saoirse Island who’d ever had a claim to the farm, except he’d never wanted it. That had always been my place, I thought, taking the scraps that August Salt left on the table. It still was.

I raked my rain-dampened hair back with one hand and propped my elbow on the open window, catching my reflection in the side mirror. The hours I’d laid awake in the dark showed on my face, and I’d had to talk myself out of getting up and driving to Emery’s. I knew her better than she wished I did, and that’s exactly why I hadn’t gone. The harder I tried to draw her in, the further she drifted.

My eyes went to the closed glove box, where the leather was peeling back from the edge of the handle. The ring I’d bought her had been sitting in there for almost six years, since the day I’d bought it in Seattle. It was a simple gold band, the only thing I could imagine she’d be willing to wear, though Emery Blackwood was anything but simple.

The last few stragglers made it across the road and I coaxed the reluctant shift back into place, veering onto the narrow drive that led to the orchard house. I could feel the eyes on me when I pulled into my usual parking spot beside the barn. I’d felt them before I’d even gotten out of bed that morning.

“Hey, Dutch.”

On the other side of the door, Kate was already working. Her coveralls were zipped up over her thermals to keep her warm on the first truly cold morning we’d had. She stood from the stack of crates on the ground, a drill in one hand, and her gaze had that look. The one that held questions no one had the balls to ask out loud.

“Morning.” I slid out of the truck, careful not to meet her eyes.

“Morning.”

It didn’t matter if I was the boss here now or what pitiful shreds of respect I’d managed to gain. I’d known sitting in the chapel last night that August showing his face on Saoirse again shrank me back fourteen years in the eyes of this town.

Once, my entire world had been August, Emery, and Lily. If there was one of us, the others weren’t far behind. But I tried not to think about those days. That road led to only one place.

It had taken years to go back to normal, but as the new apple trees grew year by year, so did the distance between all of us and that night. Sometimes, it felt like Lily had been all but erased from the island.

I wove through the crowded barn and unlocked the manager’s office at the back corner, letting the door swing open. Inside, the stall-like room was crammed with a desk, a filing cabinet, and a corkboard on the back wall. Stacks of paper covered nearly every surface and I hit one key of the computer, summoning the ancient monitor to life.