Spells for Forgetting(55)

She waited another moment before she finally made up her mind to push the gate open, and she followed the winding path through the cemetery. Her long brown hair was loose and pulled over one shoulder instead of tied up in a knot or bound back in a braid.

When she reached me, it took every bit of my restraint to keep from touching her. I hadn’t expected that when I came back—the instinctive reflex I felt every time she was near me.

I looked down into her face, following the seven points of the green star that sparkled in the iris of her left eye. The last time I stood that close to her, I was memorizing the shape of it. Spinning the pattern into a single, unspoiled memory to take with me when I left. It was the last time I saw her, but I was the only one who’d known it was a goodbye.

“You didn’t have to come,” I said.

“Yes, I did.”

Her gaze lifted above our heads and I followed it to the low branches of the pines, where there were at least a dozen starlings perched in silence. Their feathers were puffed out against the cold wind, their yellow feet clutched around the spindly wood as they watched us.

Emery’s mouth flattened into a straight line.

Zach cleared his throat, making us both turn. He stood over the hole in the ground, a small, worn book in his big hands. “May I begin?”

I nodded and Emery took the place beside me without a word.

Zachariah opened the book, reading aloud in his crackling voice. “Eloise Amelia Salt was born under a waning crescent moon on July tenth, nineteen fifty-one. She was the daughter of Walt Carter and Serena Hubbard, an only child.”

I’d heard Zachariah speak over the open graves of others on Saoirse, but the words felt different, hearing them read over someone I loved.

“We now lay her to rest in the same ground on which she was born.”

I breathed through the ache in my throat as Zach carefully lowered himself to one knee and took up a fistful of dirt, scattering it over the urn. I followed, doing the same, and then Emery sank down, scooping a handful of earth into her palm. Her fingers closed over it for a moment and her lips moved over words I couldn’t hear before she opened them again. A gentle wind wove through the trees, blowing it from her hand and she let it fall into the grave.

A tear dripped from the tip of my nose as I stared at the ground, and her small feet reappeared beside my boots as Zach’s voice drawled on. It was lost in the sounds of the island, and from the corner of my eye, I could see Emery’s hand reaching toward me. I could hardly feel it as her touch traced over my knuckles, pulling my hand from where it was clasped with the other. Her fingers wove into mine, and the faint tingle of warmth bled through me, bringing the feeling back into my skin.

My eyes traveled up her arm to her shoulder, her throat, her face, where the cold wind had pulled a few strands of her hair across her forehead again, turning her cheeks pink.

She’d looked at me like she hated me as we stood in front of the burning truck, but there was also something comforting about it. It felt like before. When angry words between us had been like the waves that crashed around the island. It had never mattered what was said, because we always returned to each other. Like gravity.

For the tiniest sliver of a moment, I forgot the last fourteen years. The fire. The months that followed. The half-life I’d made when we left. For a moment, there was no after.





Thirty-Two


    NIXIE


The starlings and the sea had the same sound, almost exactly.

I stood on the rocky shore watching them, fishing pole in one hand, a pail in the other. It was Monday, and for once, the ferries would be empty. The orchard was officially closed and life would tuck into the much-needed rest that winter would bring before spring came to wake it. But the island wasn’t sleeping.

The birds moved like a thick, drifting smoke across the sky, taking shape and then instantly shifting. They floated up into the low-hanging clouds over the sea before plummeting down with a sound that reverberated in my bones. Then the edge of the mass almost touched the water, pulling up and bending its form again.

I’d lived my entire life on the island, and I’d never seen the starlings linger so long. Before the first frost, they were gone. But there were thousands of them, and the swarm was growing by the day.

My head tipped back as they roared overhead, nearly blacking out the light. In another breath, they disappeared altogether, vanishing beyond the trees.

The Saoirse Journal was on the porch when I returned to the house, lying on the second-to-bottom step. The cover story was folded over, but one word was visible in bold type, facing up: SALT.

I set down the pail of cod and crouched low, unbinding the paper and unfolding it before me.

FIRE AT SALT COTTAGE



The charred remains of a truck were pictured below the headline. Eloise’s truck. It had been Calvin’s before that, but no one thought of Calvin anymore. The few of us who did wished we hadn’t.

I hung out my waders and drank a full two cups of coffee before I finally walked the road with the Journal tucked under my arm. With Hannah gone, there were certain things that were left to me to handle. Emery was one of them. This was another.

Hannah, Eloise, and I had sworn ourselves to be sisters when we were ten years old. Hannah’s and my kin were long rooted, respected residents of Saoirse, but Eloise had been cursed with a drunk fisherman for a father.