“And what happened?”
“Annabella’s drink had come out all right. She told her mother exactly where they had gone that night, exactlywho they had seen. But Georgina... something in her drink turned against her. She grew gravely ill. She was only sixteen, and people say it almost killed her. People say... that maybe if it hadn’t been for that night, she would have found her powers.”
My heart felt like it had shrunk to half its size. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard this story before. Clarice had been amonster.
“That’s terrible,” I said.
“Magic is never guaranteed in this world, not even for a Fernweh,” she replied. “I think Clarice wanted to protect her children so much that she ended up ruining them. One of them flew away, and the other... Well, if you a stifle a child, you stifle every part of them. Who knows what Georgina could have been if she’d been given the chance to shine. Who knows. She could have been as amazing as you are.”
She put her hand on my cheek, and even as she smiled at me, a little voice in the back of my head reminded me that I hadn’t found my powers either. I was no better than the original Georgina.
Well—at least I didn’t have Clarice for a mother. Magic wasn’t everything, not even for a Fernweh.
“I’m so happy you’re normal,” I told her.
She laughed. “I think that’s the first time in history a teenager has ever called her mother normal. I’ll take it.”
“What about this?” I asked, gesturing out at the rain,my head still reeling from everything she’d told me. “What do you think is causing this?”
She thought for a moment, letting her coffee cool, staring out over Bottle Hill. “The first Penelope could control time. Nothing too severe. She could pause things for a few minutes, maybe speed up a day if she felt like it. But my mother told me that whenever she did it, things got a little wonky on the island. Using magic always has consequences. It rained frogs once. All the roses bloomed in winter. That reminds me a little of this.”
“Are you saying all this rain is a consequence of using magic?”
“A consequence, a result... I’m not sure yet. But it smells like magic, doesn’t it?”
She turned to face the backyard of the inn, which had been transformed into a memorial for Annabella. Her grave was marked with a little flat piece of wood sanded smooth by Peter, and although the islanders of By-the-Sea were not, as a rule, religious, there were still offerings left: old coins and pots full of seawater and small mounds of beach sand.
My mother had tolerated these gifts until they became too cumbersome, until half the backyard was taken up by trinkets and tchotchkes, and then she went out and collected the items in a cardboard box, which she left on the front porch. When people complained, she said, “I don’t dance naked in your backyard,” which made them a littleconfused and a little uncomfortable but also a little less likely to leave their old junk at the inn.
Still, it did not escape me: how strange it was to sit by the grave of a bird who had been so much a part of your identity as a Fernweh woman, and as an islander, that her sudden absence felt like a loss so sharp and profound that it took the place of even your father, of even your grandmother, of even every Fernweh woman who’d come before you and every Fernweh woman who might come after.
Except Clarice.
I don’t think I could count Clarice in my mental list of ancestors anymore.
“I’ll find who did this,” I said.
My voice sounded more confident than I felt. My mother handed me her umbrella and kissed me on the side of my head. She left me alone on the widow’s walk; I looked down at the backyard and the smattering of people taking turns crying by Annabella’s grave.
Peter had carved into the wood of the grave marker: A.W.
Annabella’s Woodpecker.
Secretly I thought he probably should have made it A.F.
Annabella Fernweh.
Once a Fernweh, always a Fernweh, no matter how far you flew.
Suspicions
Istarted to notice something unexpected.
It began as a whisper in the inn, a low murmur that followed me through the halls and crept around corners and slunk in between the sheets of my bed, waiting for me. It began with Shelby leaving Annabella’s funeral and casting distrusting looks at my sister. Then Hep Shackman, sitting outside the barn, looking scared when he saw me. I would enter a room and it would fall silent. I would sneeze and everyone nearby would jump. I would cough into the crook of my elbow, and if someone was sitting at the table next to me, they would get up and move.
I thought I was being paranoid at first.
But then I saw Lucille sitting alone in the library of the inn, reading a book about the stages of grief, and when I sat next to her and said hi, she smiled politely, placed thebook on an end table without marking her place, and left the room.
