Summer of Salt Read online

  Vira like Elvira. My best friend, of the non-twin variety. Shoulder-length hair the color of coal and slate-gray eyes. If you actually called her Elvira, she was known to mix crushed-up sleeping pills into your milkshake at Ice Cream Parlor, where she worked. When you woke up, you had Sharpied penises on your cheeks.

  “We missed you today,” Vira said.

  Book club. Consisting of me, Vira, Eloise, Shelby, and Abigail. We met in the back corner of Used Books, which was owned by Eloise’s mother.

  “Wuthering Heights is a terrible book,” I said.

  “You got to pick the last one.”

  “Right, and who doesn’t love a good Bell Jar?”

  “You have to stop picking Sylvia Plath. It’s making everyone cry.”

  “It wasn’t all Wuthering Heights, anyway. I had to help my mom get the inn ready,” I explained.

  “Ah, the massive influx. All booked?”

  “All booked. Check-in’s at twelve tomorrow. You’re welcome to come and help, Mom said the more the merrier.”

  “I have to be at the parlor,” Vira said. “You know how those birdheads like their ice cream.”

  Ah, did I know a thing or two about those birdheads.

  Behind us a bunch of our drunken peers fell gently into song. It was a sort of island staple, a dark and moody tune that had been around forever. Nobody knew its origins, but everybody knew it. It was what you hummed to yourself on the walk home from school, in the shower, right before you fell asleep. It was one of those songs that entered your brain and never let you forget it.

  On By-the-Sea, you and me will go sailing by

  On waves of green, softly singing too.

  On By-the-Sea, you and me will be forever young

  And live together on waves of blue.

  It went on like that for many verses, dozens of voices all singing low and slow. The effect, I had to admit, was rather somber. I got goose bumps down my arms that I tried to hide from Vira. Neither of us was singing, but both of us were listening intently. The bonfire warmed the already warm night, and we took a step deeper into the freezing water to even out our body temperature.

  We were joined after a minute by Eloise and Shelby, drunk and giggly, and then by Abigail, stoned and serious. The cinnamon whiskey was gone, and we all looked out at the sky, where the clouds were parting to reveal a big, heavy moon.

  Abigail took a step deeper into the water, held her hands up to the sky, and said, “I can’t feel my skin anymore.”

  Shelby laughed and said, “Jesus, Abs, how much did you smoke?”

  This side of the island faced west, and I looked out as far as I could, straining my eyes against the inky darkness, trying to see the mainland.

  It was no use, of course. Even on the clearest of days, the sunniest of mornings, you could only just make out the shore. In this darkness, I could see only the dots of stars, the shadowy outline of bodies. The bonfire was bright, yes, but it also made the rest of the night somehow darker.

  I felt hands around my waist and knew it was my sister by the dark smell of impossibility.

  “Are you having fun?” she asked.

  Nobody was paying attention; everyone was in their own little world, and that’s why I didn’t worry much when I felt her arms start to tug upward, sensed her feet leaving the sand behind me. I turned around to face her and placed my hands heavily on her shoulders.

  “Get a grip,” I whispered.

  “Oh, shoot,” she said, and splashed back into the water. “I didn’t mean to.”

  “Are you ready to go home?”

  “Are you kidding me? Nobody’s even gotten naked yet. We have to dance naked under the solstice moon, Georgina, it’s tradition.”

  “Well, you can get naked without me,” I said.

  “Just give it another half hour or so and I’ll go with you. Please? Don’t make me walk home by myself.”

  “Ugh, fine.”

  Vira turned around. “Hi, Mary.”

  “Hi, Vira.”

  “Are you getting naked?”

  “Yeah. You?”

  “I guess so. I wore my good underwear.”

  “I wore a bathing suit,” Eloise chimed in, lifting her dress to reveal a dark-green one-piece with a skirt.

  Abigail took a blanket out of an enormous straw bag she’d brought with her and spread it out. Squeezing, all six of us managed to fit.

  My sister indeed got naked not long after that, and together with Vira (in her underwear), Eloise (in her bathing suit), and Shelby and Abigail (both also naked), she went charging into the great blue sea. Most of the Beach had, actually, except for me and a few other people too far away to identify.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t like swimming. I just preferred the warm blanket, the bonfire blazing nearby, the inky darkness of the sky.

  I guarded our blanket, my sister’s clothes, and Abigail’s glass pipe. (“This belonged to my great-aunt Dee, okay, so be careful with it and help yourself.”)

  I watched the teenagers of By-the-Sea run and jump into the freezing-cold water and thought about how many of them would be leaving for the very first time in September. After a few minutes, Colin Osmond folded his exceptionally long legs into pretzels and sat down next to me, deftly maneuvering his way around the many bras and undies and shoes that littered the blanket. We’d gotten to know each other when I’d dated his sister, Verity, last year, and we’d remained friendly after we’d broken up.

  “Never understood this,” Colin said. “That water is cold.”

  “Freezing,” I agreed.

  “Two more months, though,” he said. “Can you believe it? It’ll be my first time off.”

  Off the island. Away from By-the-Sea. Another small contingent of freshly graduated By-the-Sea teenagers stepping onto the ferry and leaving home for the first time in their entire lives.

  It actually wasn’t as weird as it sounded. Most kids didn’t leave until college. Although small, the island had everything you might need: a four-lane bowling alley; a high school, middle school, and grade school; and one grocery store (that admittedly did sometimes run out of food, but we had learned to stock up and also cultivate little gardens).

  “It doesn’t seem possible,” I answered finally. And it didn’t. In that moment, the entire world was just By-the-Sea, just the Beach, just my sister dancing in the ice-cold water.

  “I know what you mean,” Colin agreed. “Like we’ve been waiting our whole lives and now it’s just around the corner.” He knocked his knee into mine. “All right, we should at least get our feet wet.”

  So we waded out up to our ankles in the water, and I tried to decide what laughing, soaking-wet shape was my sister, or Vira, or anyone.

  Mary found me quickly enough, running past me like a bullet to get to her dress on the blanket. She pulled it over her head and then came back to where I was standing.

  “Every year,” she said. “Every year I forget a towel. Hi, Colin.”

  “Hi, Mary,” he said.

  One by one our peers emerged from the water, running back to wherever they’d stashed their clothes, wrapping themselves in blankets and towels if they’d been smart enough to think ahead.

  Colin wandered away, and Mary and I picked our way back to the blanket and settled around it in a lazy circle. Shelby lay down in the middle, looking up at the stars.

  Abigail packed a fresh bowl and passed it around our small group. I took only one very small hit, because Abigail’s stuff was homegrown and strong and I was a lightweight and didn’t want to get lost on the way home. Mary skipped it altogether, probably because the last time she’d smoked weed she’d drifted lazily upward and almost decapitated herself on a ceiling fan. “This is nice,” Shelby said, prone to the sentimental when she’d had a little of Abigail’s stash. “This is like the first night of the rest of our lives.”

  “That’s exactly what I said!” Mary said.

  “Every night is the first night of the rest of our lives,” Vira retorted.
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br />   “That’s exactly what I said,” I said, and then I hugged Vira because she was the most perfect princess in the world.

  Oh shit. See? That was the weed.

  After a long stretch of quiet, I nudged Mary and asked, “Ready? You’ve danced and swum naked. Swimming wasn’t even part of the deal.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m ready. Has anybody seen my shoes?”

  Someone tossed them to her, and after a lot of hugging (dancing naked really endears you to people, and we were a huggy group anyway), Mary and I set off back up the Beach, back toward Bottle Hill and Fernweh Inn and our attic home and our nice warm beds.

  And that was how it was: the start of every summer since Mary and I’d been old enough to figure out how to sneak out of the inn. The revelry and singing would grow louder and louder. Eventually the rest of the party (sans Mary and me, who would already be safely home) would be broken up by the sheriff or deputy, a lackluster police involvement that was more out of duty than any real passion for the laws we were breaking. (Beaches closed at dusk; underage drinking; lack of proper permits for a bonfire; indecent exposure.) We would not get enough sleep. The birdheads would arrive tomorrow, dozens of them, filling up every corner of the inn. They would bring us presents, the ones who’d known us since we were kids. They would hug us and tuck postcards and five-dollar bills into our pockets. We would get no damn rest or privacy for the next two months: the season of Annabella. Arriving like clockwork. All the fuss in the world over a silly little bird—who, I admit, I loved more than any of the birdheads, more than any of the islanders, because I felt somehow that she belonged to me, to all the Fernweh women, in a way, but especially to me.

  The moon drifted in and out of existence. My sister took my hand and squeezed, and I felt that squeeze on my fingers and somehow on my heart as the singing drifted across the sand to reach us:

  On By-the-Sea, you and me will be forever young . . .

  Oh, By-the-Sea, island of Fernwehs and everything I had ever known and loved. How I would miss you—every part of you—but especially the smell, always the smell: of salt, of brine, of water, of spells, of potions, of feathers, and of what it would mean to leave it all in just two months.

  Check-In

  Mary and I were born in a rainstorm that flooded the streets and overwhelmed the sewers and drowned the beaches of By-the-Sea and turned everything wet and gray for seven days.

  I’ve heard this story many times, enough times that it feels like I actually remember it.

  My mother was in the kitchen, cutting wedges of lime to squeeze into the virgin margaritas she’d been addicted to during her pregnancy. She felt off—nothing enormous, just a tiny headache, a sliver of fatigue, a faint unease in her abdomen.

  She made her drink and took it onto the front porch and sat down in a wicker rocking chair and sipped and rocked and sipped and rocked.

  Then one of the housekeepers saw her and said, “Mrs. Fernweh, you don’t look so hot. I think you may be about to have a couple babies.”

  “I had just figured that out myself,” my mother said, and raised her glass in a toast.

  She hadn’t wanted to rush her drink.

  My father worked as a fisherman; my mother sent word down to the docks that the babies were coming, and then she got into her pickup truck and drove herself to the small hospital, so small it wasn’t even named, so small there were only five parking spaces and four were free. She parked and went inside and filled out some forms and walked herself down to the birthing room, which was also the emergency room and the surgery room and the recovery room and, on Friday nights, the movie room.

  I came first, a full five hours before my sister. I came out easily, noisily, red-faced and screaming, hardly half an hour after my mother had lain down.

  I came out, and then the rains started, and then the doctor told my mother, Hold off on pushing again, at least for a while, this second one seems to be a little stubborn.

  “Has anybody heard from my husband?” my mother asked, smiling down at me, wrapped in that generic hospital baby blanket that not even By-the-Sea’s small hospital was lacking.

  Outside, the skies had unzipped themselves and the rain fell so thickly that all you could see were lines of gray against gray.

  But nobody had heard from my father.

  “The rain is heavy; it should drive the boats in,” the nurse, Emery Grace, said. “He’ll be here soon, maybe even in time for number two.”

  My mom patted her stomach gingerly. “This one’s called Mary.” She touched my forehead. “This one’s Georgina.”

  “Georgina, that’s beautiful.”

  “It’s a family name. Has somebody called the docks?”

  Emery shook her head sadly. “It’s the phone lines, Penny. The storm’s knocked them all down.”

  “Can I get up? If it’s going to be a while?”

  “You’re really not supposed to.”

  “I just want to sit by the window,” my mother said.

  So Emery raised the back of my mom’s hospital bed and undid the brakes and rolled the whole thing over to the window, with me still wrapped in that blanket, trying to figure out how to nurse.

  When I’d had enough milk, my mother turned me around and tucked my head under her chin, and we watched the rain come down while we waited for my sister, while we waited for my father.

  But only one of them would ever show up.

  Nobody ever saw my father again. His boat went down in the storm; the small crew was lost.

  Now I think of him whenever it rains. And sometimes—though I know it’s impossible—it rains whenever I think of him.

  That was what I was dreaming about—the storm, the flooded island, my mother with her two small babies in a rowboat—when Mary threw herself on my bed the morning after the bonfire, so early that the room was still dark. My head pounded—half from the cinnamon whiskey, half from the lack of sleep. I groaned and tried to hit her.

  “You overslept, and Mom is pi-i-issed,” Mary sang, catching my hand and forcing something into it. I cracked an eyelid: a banana muffin. I took a bite and chewed.

  “My alarm’s set,” I mumbled through muffin.

  “Yeah, I checked, and you actually set it for six tonight, which is very cute wishful thinking on your part. It’s almost seven now, and I’ve been ironing napkins for an hour.”

  I grabbed Mary’s arm with my free hand and pulled myself up to a sitting position. The room tilted dangerously. She held a mug of steaming coffee out to me, and I took it, gulping gratefully, not even caring about the inevitable mouth blisters I was giving myself. That little piece of skin right behind my top teeth was already shriveling up.

  “Did you sleep well? I slept really well,” Mary said, stretching her arms over her head luxuriantly.

  “Check-in isn’t till noon,” I whined.

  “Yes, well, those napkins aren’t going to iron themselves, my friend.” Mary hopped to her feet. “Take a shower, and I’ll tell Mom you’ll be down soon. I can buy you twenty minutes, maybe.”

  “Thirty?”

  “The wishful thinking again! I wish I could be as positive as you, Georgie, I really do. And so early in the morning!”

  She left me, thankfully, alone. I propped my pillow up behind me and leaned back against the bed so I could finish eating my muffin. Five hours until check-in and I needed about forty-seven showers and twelve more muffins. And another half-dozen cups of coffee too. I finished what I had, shoved the remaining bit of muffin in my mouth, and stumbled down the hall to the bathroom.

  It was just us up here: my bedroom, Mary’s bedroom, our bathroom, and a room of storage stuffed so full of boxes you couldn’t take more than two steps into it. The Fernweh Inn had four floors, including this one, and for ten months of the year they sat abandoned. By-the-Sea had a short tourist season, but it was also a busy one. We would make enough in two months to get by until next summer.

  In the bathroom I got naked and waited for the water to heat up, jumping
from foot to foot to help myself wake up. When it was hot enough, I stepped into the shower and stood directly under the stream, letting the water hit me in my face until I was sure that all the salt and sand from the night before was washed off my skin (although it would never be all washed off, not really). I felt better afterward, albeit marginally. I toweled off and then made my way back to my bedroom to get dressed.

  I took my coffee cup downstairs to the kitchen for a refill. Aggie, Mom’s best friend and the official cook of the Fernweh Inn, was prepping that day’s dinner in the kitchen. When she saw me, she burst out laughing. Aggie’s laugh was like a bus horn, loud and sharp. She was a tall woman who always wore a scarf wrapped around her long gray hair. She was like a second mother to me, especially during the summer months, when she practically lived at the inn. She laughed again now at the sight of me; Aggie was always either laughing or cooking, and often both at the same time.

  “Georgina, you look like something the cat dragged in,” she said. I poured more coffee and yawned.

  “It was the solstice last night. I didn’t want to go. Mary made me.”

  “Ah, it’s tradition. You’ll feel fine after you wake up a little. Do you want an omelet?”

  “I had a muffin.”

  “That’s a new recipe; you like ’em?”

  “Really good. Thanks, Aggie.”

  “Well, they won’t cure a hangover, but they might help a little.”

  “I sure hope you didn’t say ‘hangover’ in reference to my daughter, who is, last I checked, underage,” my mom said, bustling into the kitchen in her usual flurry of motion. She wore an ankle-length dress the color of midnight. Which is not exactly my cup of tea, but adds to the aesthetic. Old inn, old island, old scary dress, you get it, she’d once said. “Georgina, you’re late,” she added.

  “I’m sorry. I set my alarm wrong.”

  “Well, I need you on silverware duty for now, okay? Wash and polish, honey, that stuff hasn’t been touched since last August.” She pointed to the sink, next to which was a massive pile of the good silver forks and spoons and knives. I spent five seconds of freedom staring at the pile, unmoving, and then I went and filled the sink with water.