Spells for Forgetting(54)

I reached between us, waiting for her to look at me. When she did, I pushed into her slowly, and her eyes closed. She held on to me, her head tipping back with her lips pinched between her teeth, and it was the first time I’d ever felt that pull—that soul-deep tide that drags you under until you can’t breathe. It was the only time I had ever felt it. And I don’t know if it was being young, or being stupid, or if it was just what first love feels like, but I didn’t want it to ever stop.

That night we learned to make love. Over time, we got good at it, and that tiny sliver of space between us vanished. There was no fraction of a second that I didn’t want to be with her.

It was the single best moment of my life. The color of her bare skin in the firelight. The feel of her. The sound she made as she moved against me. At times, I’d even felt like that one memory was the only thing that was keeping me breathing. And there were a million times after I left Saoirse that I wished to God it never happened.





Thirty-One


    AUGUST


Zachariah Behr had been burying people on Saoirse for most of his life. Now, it was my mother’s turn.

The cemetery sat in the middle of the woods, surrounded by a rusted iron gate that was pitched in an almost perfect square. Inside, the stones that marked the graves were covered in moss, some of the inscriptions only barely legible.

Every single member of the Salt family had been laid to rest in that ground except for my father. The newest headstone among them was Henry Salt’s. The granite was still shining in places, having spent only eight or nine years standing in the sea winds.

I hadn’t expected anyone on Saoirse to come to my mother’s burial, but I wondered who’d been there for his. The whole island, I guessed. He was the last Salt to live here, and though the man had never been called generous or kind, he’d somehow managed to find it in himself to leave the orchard to the town. That was something, I guessed.

His name stared back at me.

Henry Fitz Salt



It was a black rectangular stone that was polished so smooth that I could see myself in its reflection. The suit jacket was one I’d bought for a lecture I was chosen to give for the heads of the departments at the college. At the time, I’d been proud to wear it. Looking at it now, I suspected I’d never put it on again.

The gate to the cemetery opened with a screech, and Zach came up the path. His hair had been brushed and he’d shaved, revealing the severe jaw and dimpled chin that I remembered most about his face. But the limp he’d always had was more pronounced now, making him sag on the right side as he moved.

He gave me a simple nod as he reached me.

“Thanks for doing this,” I said.

Zach had never been one to care much what other people thought, but he also didn’t like complications. The town couldn’t be happy about him helping me.

He cleared his throat. “She’d have done the same for me, I suppose.”

She would have. That was true.

“Are you ready then?”

I glanced back to the closed gate on the other side of the cemetery, half-hoping that Emery would be there. It was covered in a thick carpet of Virginia creeper that had begun to turn gold. In another week, it would be orange, then red.

She wasn’t coming.

I hadn’t seen her since she walked back across the road with the glow of the fire at her back, and I guessed that I wouldn’t again. I’d known when I apologized there would be no forgiveness, but I’d done it because I owed her that. Still, the most pathetic part of me had hoped as I buttoned up my shirt and tightened my tie that she would come. It didn’t matter how grown I was or how hardened I’d become from what life had brought. I didn’t want to stand over my mother’s grave alone.

“I’m ready,” I answered.

My mother’s urn was suddenly heavier in my hands. The trees creaked as they bowed in the wind and the distant sound of the water crashing on the rocks wove through the woods, finding me. I looked at it one last time before I handed it to Zachariah.

He gently touched the engraving on its side. My mother’s name.

Zach’s thick white eyebrows lifted. “The more years I live, the harder it is to outlive the young.”

He was old enough to remember my mother as a child. He’d always seen her that way.

I watched as he placed the urn in the ground. The emerald green surface was the same color as my mother’s eyes. That’s why I’d picked it. They’d never dulled as she got older, and I always thought that was strange. But my mother was strange, like the island. She had never really belonged in the outside world.

I’d known the weight of what I’d done, even back then. That this island had been a piece of her she had to cut out. For me. And I don’t think she ever stopped bleeding. More than once, I’d thought maybe it had actually been the thing that made her sick, growing inside her over the years.

Zach’s gaze moved past me, suddenly refocusing, and I turned.

Emery stood on the other side of the rusted gate in a simple black dress with buttons down the front. She reached up, tucking her hair behind her ear nervously as she watched me with an expression I couldn’t decipher. Like maybe she was seconds from turning around and walking away.

I stilled, unable to hide the overwhelming relief of seeing her there.