Me, I could never see waves again and be perfectly fine with that.
Mary linked her arm through mine and pulled me against her side, trapping me. “Just so I can adequately prepare myself, how long is your little mood going to last?”
“We’ve just been to so many of these. I don’t really see the point in one more. Especially when we have to be up at the crack of dawn tomorrow.”
“Georgie, can’t you just live a little? I mean—this is the first night of the rest of your life!”
“But... you could say that about every night. Like, every night is the first night of the rest of your life. Because the present is always the present and the only thing in front of us is the rest of our lives.”
“Here, I brought this for you because I knew you’d be like this,” she said, pulling a small silver flask from her bra.
“Wait, so do you actually have a citronella candle in there?”
“It’s the cinnamon stuff you like.You’re welcome.”
She took a big swig and then handed it to me, shaking her head from side to side like a dog, with her tongue hanging out and everything.
“Georgie, just think about it,” she continued. One sip of cinnamon whiskey and her eyes had already gotten all glossy. “In a couple months we’ll just begone, you know? This is really it. One last summer on By-the-Sea. One last summer together.”
I sipped from the flask. Mary unhooked her vise grip on my arm and took my hand instead. She was swaying a little, which made me think she’d already had her fair share of cinnamon whiskey before she’d knocked on my bedroom door.
“Are you happy at all?” she asked tentatively.
“Of course I’m happy. Why wouldn’t I be happy?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Sometimes you just find reasons notto be.” She kissed the back of my hand. We’d reached the edge of the Beach. My sister slipped out of her sandals and held them with one finger over her shoulder.
The bonfire’s flames were already dangerously high. The people around it were like little human-shaped spots of darkness against the fire. I tried not to let Mary’s words into my heart:sometimes you just find reasons not to be. If that were true, then Mary’s own vice was that she sometimes found the meanest observations and let them fall off her tongue like they were nothing.
“Iamhappy,” I said, but I didn’t think she heard me. She was preening: running her hands through her hair and adjusting her dress.
“Gimme,” she said, holding out her hand. I gave her the flask, and she took another massive sip. “Okay. Don’t go far.” And she handed the flask back to me and took off running.
I was expecting that. I watched her go until I could no longer distinguish her from the other dark blobs of people.
It occurred to me that I could leave, that I could go back home and sleep for a few hours and then come out again and find her as the sun was rising, lead her home while she floated like a balloon above my head, my hand wrapped tightly around her ankle so I wouldn’t lose her to the last few fading stars.
That was the extent of her powers: my sister could float.
She was, of course, hoping they evolved eventually, thatone day she’d be able to get more than a few feet off the ground, but so far, no flying, just floating.
It was a rare gift, but not unheard of among Fernweh women. We had a great-great-aunt who could fly on a God’s-honest broom. We had another aunt, farther back, who never actually touched the ground; her feet were always about an inch from the soil she glided on.
And then there was Annabella.
Every year, from late June to late August, By-the-Sea played host to the rarest bird in the entire world: the Eastern Seaborn Flicker.
Although nobody actually called her that. They called her what my great-great-great-maybe-another-great-grandmother, Georgina Fernweh (my namesake, yes), the woman who’d discovered the new species, had called her: Annabella’s Woodpecker.
Named after her twin sister, Annabella, who had gone missing around the same time the bird had shown up.
Her twin sister, who had started out being able to float and had, after years of practice, perfected the art of flying.
I’m sure stranger things have happened in my family than a woman possibly-maybe-probably turning into a bird.
But how else could you explain it? The same bird showing up every year, for three hundred years or so, with the same markings and the same coloring and the same mannerisms. Coming back to visit its home. Coming back,perhaps, to say hi to its living relatives (and even the dead ones, buried in the Fernweh tomb on the island’s only cemetery).
Of course, the ornithologists and enthusiasts that studied her insisted that a bird with a three-hundred-year lifespan was impossible, and that the more likely explanation was that there just wasn’t that much variation between individual units of the species.
