We let the sound of the rain drown out the silence that filled the room.
Of course I didn’t think that.
I just didn’t know what I thought.
According to Fernweh legend, seven days after Mary and I were born, the rain finally stopped. The entire island was covered in water, five- and six-feet deep in parts. Aggie picked us up from the hospital in a small rowboat. My father and the rest of his crew were still missing; they’d searched the waters off the eastern coast of By-the-Sea every day for seven days and come up with not even a scrap of clothing.
Emery Grace put my mother into a wheelchair and wheeled her to the front door of the hospital, where Aggie waited in her little boat, one hand holding on to the wall of the hospital to keep the boat in place. My mother handedher babies to Aggie one at a time, and Aggie tucked my sister and me into a wicker basket stuffed with blankets. She rowed us all home with powerful, deep strokes.
Back then, our nursery was on the first floor, next to my parents’ bedroom. Aggie and my mother tucked us in our cribs and then went onto the porch.
“I’m so sorry, Penny,” Aggie said.
My mother’s face was stoic, unreadable.
I knew all this because Aggie had told me, because my mother had told me, because I’d dreamed it. Fernweh history belongs to every Fernweh woman. I knew what my great-grandmother ate for breakfast fifty years ago on a random Tuesday in March. I felt the tightness in my mother’s chest as she stood on the porch of the inn and looked out at an island drowned and soggy and colorless.
“I’ll have to build a widow’s walk,” she said, and then she looked at Aggie and smiled so Aggie knew that she could smile, too, that the rest of their lives wouldn’t be all sadness and loss.
And she did build a widow’s walk.
And she never once used it.
Until now.
My mother, sick of birdheads clogging up every room of the inn, procured a sizeable collection of umbrellas from who knew where and kept them in a row at the front and back doors. The birdheads made use of them at once; itwas unnerving to stand at my bedroom window and look down at them over the lawn of the inn—dozens of little black umbrella spots of mourning. The entire place was quiet, eerie, still.
I went around and opened every single window in the inn, trying to let out the stench of grief.
But grief was stronger than rainwater, so I didn’t think it did much good after all.
I found my mother at the very top of the house, at that very widow’s walk she’d built almost eighteen years ago and never used.
The stairs were pulled down from the attic ceiling hallway. That’s how I knew where she was. I climbed up to meet her, emerging into the gray, wet morning. She was holding a large umbrella and drinking a cup of coffee. It was steaming hot, and she gave me a sip without asking. It warmed every inch of my skin. I pressed myself against her side and handed the mug back to her.
“I wouldn’t have thought I’d feel so sad,” she said. “With Annabella gone. But she was one of us, I suppose, even though we only knew her in a peculiar way.” She meant as a bird, and not as a woman who had learned how to grow feathers. “I’ve heard so many stories about her. From my great-grandmother,” she continued. “She lived to be one hundred and six, my great-grandmother. I was named after her.”
The original Penelope Fernweh, whose portrait hungin the library with every other Fernweh woman who had lived on the island and on Bottle Hill and in this house. That Penelope Fernweh had been a storyteller, and she’d left behind journals filled with the history of the Fernwehs—thick, heavy tomes that served as a reminder of the past.
“What was she like?” I asked. “Annabella?”
“She was just an ordinary girl,” my mother said, as if that meant anything at all. In a family full of girls, you realize quickly that no girls are ordinary. Whether or not they turn into birds, girls could fly and make magic all their own. But I knew what she was trying to say—that Annabella Fernweh, before she wastheAnnabella,ourAnnabella—was just a girl who, like my sister, sometimes floated an inch or two off the ground.
“Tell me about her,” I prompted. Unlike Penelope Fernweh the First, my own mother took a little prompting to open up. She sighed now, took a long sip of coffee, and began.
“Well, you know she was a twin. Annabella and Georgina. I had never planned on naming you after any of us, but I just loved that name so much. I thought there was something poetic about naming you Georgina, about being a better mother to you than Clarice was to her girls.”
All I knew about Clarice Fernweh, the mother of the twins, was that she was a dark smudge on the history of the Fernweh name. She kept her girls on leashes so short they were rarely allowed to leave Bottle Hill. They werehomeschooled, locked in their bedrooms at night, and not allowed to have any friends.
No wonder Annabella turned into a bird.
“When I was pregnant with you, I used to read Penelope’s journals over and over again,” my mother continued. “There’s a story, about the three of them—Clarice was like me, you know, she could make things, except she wasn’t very good at it. She got her concoctions wrong all the time, it got to the point where, if you knew better, you wouldn’t even accept a cup of coffee from her. One night, she forgot to lock her daughters in their room, and they took their chance and escaped for the night. They were just teenage girls; they wanted to go explore their island and have some fun and see the ocean at night.”
She paused. Her eyes burned with anger at this woman who’d lived so long before her. “Clarice was waiting for them when they got back. She had two cups in her hand, filled with some terrible, smoking liquid. It’s a very tricky mixture, to get people to tell the truth. Even I have trouble with it. But for someone like Clarice, it was a disaster waiting to happen.”
My stomach felt tight; I had never heard this story before. “She made themdrinkit?”
She nodded, her mouth tight. “Every drop.”
