Spells for Forgetting(18)

She stared at me, unblinking, and the color seemed to drain from her face, her lips parting. The wind pulled a strand of her dark hair across her cheek from a half-unraveled braid. The shape of her face was different now, missing the softness of youth, but she was somehow more beautiful.

She took what looked like an involuntary step backward and my fists tightened in my pockets as I searched frantically for something to say. But I couldn’t stop staring at her. It was a moment split down the seams, clumsily stitched closed by fourteen agonizing years.

The set of her mouth wavered for a fraction of a moment before she clumsily reached for the door of the truck, yanking it open. I watched, frozen, as she climbed inside and the engine roared to life. Before I’d even drawn another breath, she was disappearing down the road.

I’d hoped, I’d prayed even, that she wouldn’t be here. That she would have left long ago like we’d planned to. Before everything went to shit. But she hadn’t.

That feeling that had climbed between my bones when I stepped off the ferry wasn’t just the island or the orchard or the night that everything changed.

It was Emery Blackwood.





Ten


    EMERY


I wasn’t sure anymore which were memories and which were dreams. I’d lost track of that a long time ago.

The hours had ticked by slowly as I worked, keeping one eye on the window. It took most of the day for me to realize that I was waiting. Half-hoping, and at the same time, terrified that August would reappear. The tremor in my hands hadn’t left since I’d stood across the road from him, and once the shop was closed, I stayed, working late into the night on receipts and anything else I could find to do.

Knowing he was back was one thing. But seeing him, replacing the memory with something real, was another.

There were many nights I’d been so hungry for him. I’d imagine him coming back. Climbing through my window and into my bed. I would curl into a ball beneath the quilts in the dark with my eyes closed, because when they were closed, I could see him. Sometimes, I could feel his hands on me. As I drifted into sleep, I could hear his voice. The rasp it took on when he woke, his laugh, the way my name sounded on his tongue. I’d imagine him touching me, my face pressed into the pillow and the sound of my own breathing like the sea in a storm until I opened my eyes and remembered he was gone. That he was never coming back. And the sound of my cries would turn bitter and broken.

Sometimes I would wake and for just a moment, I’d believe that he’d really been there. Because I could still feel him on my skin. Smell him in my sheets. But the remembering always found me. It was in the charred remains of the orchard and the silent island. The scars that covered my father’s face. The emptiness in my life where Lily had once been. And then I’d close my eyes again, hot tears sliding down my temples, and turn back into the darkness.

It was nearly midnight when I showed up on my grandmother’s porch. If there was a key to the old house, I’d never seen it. No one on Saoirse locked their doors, even after Lily.

I crept down the pitch-black hallway, to the room I’d slept in as a little girl, and fell asleep on top of the made bed with my jacket still zipped and boots still on. Here, I’d only been Emery—Albertine’s granddaughter. Not the girl who’d loved the boy who killed Lily Morgan or the girl who lied to protect him.

I fell into a restless sleep, and that was when the nightmare returned.

A star-filled sky. A roaring black sea. The sound of screaming.

After Lily, the dream had found me every night without fail. But it had been years since I’d woken with the cold trail of tears stinging my skin.

I breathed, waiting for my vision to adjust to the warm light coming through the window. I could still taste cold salt water on my tongue, but the house was quiet. I sat up slowly, letting the vision recoil in my mind until it was no more than a tiny blot of black. I’d lived with it long enough to know it was never really gone.

I swung my legs over one side of the bed and blinked until my eyes cleared. The room had been my mom’s when she was young, and then mine when I stayed at my grandmother’s. After the fire, the four walls were a refuge, where I’d hidden from the world. It felt that way again now.

My grandmother was standing barefoot at the stove when I trudged into the kitchen, her cotton floral robe wrapped around her small frame. She stirred the wooden spoon in a small pot with one hand and flipped a brown griddle cake with the other. Her absent gaze drifted across the kitchen, but her ear was turned in my direction, acknowledging my entrance.

“Morning.” The word was innocent, but it was spoken in a careful tone. She’d been born without sight, but my grandmother always saw more than I wanted her to.

“Morning, Oma.” I said softly.

The butter smoked on the cast iron, making the morning light hazy, and I went to the window, shimmying it up and letting the sweet, rain-soaked air inside. The sun was already well above the trees, painting the woods in a dusty, warm hue despite the downpour. It made the rain sparkle in the air like fairy dust.

“Heard you come in last night. I have a pot of coffee with your name on it.” She pointed an elbow toward the corner of the stove, where the spout of the percolator was still steaming.

I poured us both a cup and set them on the table as she stacked the griddle cakes on the butcher block. It was a rhythm I knew. One I could predict. She poured the blueberry sauce into the green chipped beehive bowl on the shelf and I pulled the carafe of syrup from the fridge.