She had a pair of tiny binoculars looped around her neck, and she wore a wide, stiff sunhat.
“It’s beautiful out,” she said. “I thought we could go down by the water?”
Eighteen years minus two months of living on an island and I had never wanted more to go and look at the waves.
“That sounds perfect,” I said. I ditched the feather duster and the apron behind the concierge desk, and we walked out into the evening, which yes, was beautiful: warm and quiet and filled with the scent of the roses I usually hated, but right now adored beyond measure.
I led the way, not to the Beach but to Grey’s Beach, which was just north of the inn, where the cliffs dwindled off. Long ago someone had carved steps into the rock face leading down to the sand; it felt a little like descending into a fairy tale. Where tourists avoided the Beach because of the shark attack warnings, they simply didn’t know how to get to Grey’s, so it was usually equally deserted.
The steps were long and winding and a little claustrophobic. I glanced back at Prue, and she flashed me a smile so wide I swear the moon got a little brighter.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“Never better,” she said.
I felt rusty and out of practice. Verity Osmond and I had dated for almost five months, but that was a year ago. She’d been the only girl I’d ever dated. I suddenly wished I had paid better attention, taken notes, donesomethingto prepare myself for whatever this night was.
Prue and I reached the bottom of the staircase and emerged abruptly onto Grey’s Beach, moonlit and loud with waves crashing against the cliffs. She took a deep breath and said, “I think I could get used to living by the water.”
We were on the east side of the island; there was no land to see off the coast here, just an endless expanse of ocean.
“It’s nice,” I agreed, but it would have been more accurate to say,I don’t know anything else.
When I thought of other places, other cities, they were shadowy and blurred. There were two places you could be in this world: on By-the-Sea or off of it. Like every almost-eighteen-year-old who’d grown up here, I was leaving to go to college. Would I be among those who promptly returned from my rumspringa, or would I be among the far lesser number who created a new life, learned how to live outside of this tiny place?
Prue sat down in the sand, her dress pooling around her, and I lowered myself beside her. “Do you regret traveling so much?” I asked. “I mean—do you wish you hadsomewhere you could say washome?”
“I’ve always had my brother,” Prue said thoughtfully. “I think a person can be a home, sometimes, just as much as a place or a house can. Even though he’s a few years older than I am, we’ve always been close. He looks out for me, you know?” She paused, picked up a handful of sand, let it sift between her fingers. “Do you feel that way about your sister?”
“Yes,” I said automatically. I felt that way about her even though she was a bit of a vapid, self-absorbed princess. I felt that way about her even though she could fly (okay, hover) and I could not. I felt that way about her even though she put herself first in every situation and I was so often left behind to pick up the pieces of whatever terrible decision she’d made.
It was the way of the Fernweh women; Mary was certainly not the first Fernweh to be born a little bit nasty. My mother had been an only child, but her mother had been one of three sisters. My grandma Berry hadn’t gotten her powers until the day before her eighteenth birthday, and my mother told me that her sisters, Samantha and Matilda, brutalized her for it.
“Why would they be so mean?” I’d almost asked, but then I’d remembered Mary, and how you never really knew what you were going to get: the nice, thoughtful, kind Mary, or the raging evil bitch.
“She’s trying very hard to sleep with my brother,” she said.
“To be fair, she tries very hard to sleep with a lot of people.”
“Good for her,” Prue said. “She should do what she wants.”
“She doesexactlywhat she wants.”
“And you? What do you want?”
What did I want? So many things, an impossible number of things. I wanted this beach and this moment to last forever, to never fade away into memory. I wanted to peek inside Prue’s brain to find out the answers to questions I didn’t know how to put into words. I wanted to kiss a pretty girl on a beach and not have to worry about whether eighteen would come and go and I’d be the first Fernweh woman since my great-great-great-great-great-great-namesake to remain as normal as I currently was. I wanted a hundred million things, but I knew how to ask for zero of them.
I pointed east, across the water, my arm indicting the entire world, the entire known planet.
“What more could I want?” I said.
But I think we both knew the answer to that question was:
Lots lots lots lots lots.
Weeks Late
Aweek passed, and then another, and Annabella still didn’t show up. The entire island descended into an acute kind of panic. The birdheads organized groups to diligently comb every inch of By-the-Sea, searching well outside Annabella’s usual nesting areas, tearing frantically through places she had never once been spotted in. They went door-to-door asking to check people’s attics, people’s cellars, people’s spare bedrooms and linen closets. I saw little of Prue, as Harrison had employed her as his personal bird-hunting assistant, and the two of them were gone from early morning until late at night, when I sometimes spotted them in the dining hall, raiding whatever leftovers they could find. I was too embarrassed to approach her; part of me worried that she was spending so much time with her brother because she didn’t want to spend that time with me.
