“It will make you feel better,” she said, winking. The wink meant that the stuff in my hand wasn’t your run-of-the-mill smoothie.
Although people on the island didn’t go around openly acknowledging the general magicness of my family, it was common knowledge that if you wanted something done, Penelope Fernweh could sometimes, with the right greasingof the wheels, do it for you. You didn’t ask questions. You didn’t make assumptions. You’d just slip her a little cash for her trouble and let her do her thing: bury this or that under a full moon, throw some shady ingredients into a big copper pot (you wouldn’t call it a cauldron, obviously), boil a frog alive and drink the marrow from its bones (just kidding; she never hurt animals). And then you’d sit back and wait. In this case, you’d wait for it to cure your hangover.
“Wait—why wouldn’t you have given this to me atseven in the morning?” I whined.
“I thought I should make you suffer a little. Youdiddrink the rest of my good cinnamon whiskey. Do you know how long I’d been infusing that?”
I was going to argue with her, clarify that it had actually been Mary who’d stolen the whiskey, but I decided against it. She who giveth could easily taketh away, and besides, I was used to being blamed for the trouble my sister got herself into. It was just sort of the way of the world. Mary did something rash; I inevitably helped her wiggle out of trouble.
I sipped at the smoothie and instantly felt better.Magic, I mouthed at Mary, who rolled her eyes and held out her hand for a taste.
“Finally, the sun!” Aggie exclaimed, peering out the window. “It’s been so gloomy all morning.”
“You couldn’t have added some strawberries to this, Ma?” Mary said, pretending to gag. “It tastes awful.”
“The beggars and the choosers,” Mom said.
Aggie dished out quiche to the table; I was just finishing my second piece when the door to the kitchen opened and Peter Elmhurst, bellboy/groundskeeper/jack-of-all-trades, poked his head in.
“Ms. Fernweh,” he said, “the first guests are arriving.”
Aggie held up a Bloody Mary I hadn’t even noticed she was drinking. (If Aggie’s coffee was weak, her Bloody Marys were the opposite.) “To another season,” she said brightly.
“To Annabella,” Mom added. “May this finally be her year.”
She meant the eggs. Poor Annabella, perpetually childless. She laid eggs every summer, but they never hatched, no matter how diligently she tended to them. It was a big ornithological mystery, the will-she/won’t-she back-and-forth and the letdown when, one August morning, inevitably, she would be gone, and the eggs would remain behind, useless and cold. (Every year they were carefully collected and brought back to the mainland and autopsied. Every year they could find nothing obvious pointing to why they hadn’t survived incubation.)
We Fernwehs knew, of course, that Annabella wasn’t strictly your average bird, and that her eggs probably weren’t hatching because of that.
“To Annabella,” I echoed, raising my glass.
And, fully embracing our long-held status as the biggestweirdos this side of the mainland, we toasted to a little bird and her fertility problems: Aggie and Mom with Bloody Marys, Mary and me with a sip of legit magic potion.
It had turned out to be a beautiful day. By-the-Sea weather had always been a little unpredictable (the rainstorms of our birth come to mind), but it had only seemed to get worse lately: it would be summer and warm one minute, rainy and miserable the next, blizzard conditions the day after that. And the island paid no attention at all to conventional seasons. It had once snowed in July (the birdheads built a little lean-to around Annabella’s chosen tree). It had once been a blazing 110 degrees in January (we all went to the Beach and decided not to question things). By now we were all used to it. It wasn’t unusual for the birdheads to show up with both swimming trunks and skis packed into their enormous traveling trunks.
I watched the first few of them walking up the front path now, all familiar faces: Liesel Channing and Hep Shackman, Henrietta Lee behind him followed by Tank Smith, the photographer. I’d seen these people every summer since I was born, and weird as they were, they were almost like family.
Liesel reached me first. She wore pale-purple chinos with a pale-purple oxford shirt and pale-purple sneakers. And pale-purple-rimmed glasses. The only thing on her person that was not purple (luggage: purple; hairtie: purple) was her dutiful birdcat (like a birddog, but an exceptionally grumpy orange Maine coon named Horace, complete with heart-shaped birthmark on its forehead). She gasped when she finally made it up the porch steps. “It cannot be, it isimpossible! You’re a woman now! Where has my little Georgina gone to!”
“Liesel, it’s so nice to see you!” I said, giving her a hug. By then the others had reached us (Hep, Henrietta, and Tank were significantly older than Liesel and had slowed down considerably over the years), and I made sure to hug and kiss every one of them. I was the front porch welcoming committee; Mary was just inside the front doors. The lucky thing was that there was only one taxi on By-the-Sea (driven by Seymore Stanners, Shelby’s dad, complete with a little flatbed wagon he pulled behind it for all the luggage), and so the arrivals would be limited to groups of four. Small doses of birdheads were better.
Once this group disappeared inside I collapsed on a wicker armchair and closed my eyes, enjoying the sunshine and the warmth of the day.
I didn’t have much time to myself, though. Half a minute later I heard a small cough and opened my eyes to see Peter Elmhurst standing uncomfortably close to me, smelling of firewood and smoke.
“Hi, Peter.”
“Hi, Georgie,” he said, then stopped.
Peter lived down the road, on a farm near the cemetery.We’d all grown up together and used to be closer as kids, but we’d sort of drifted apart over the years. I blamed that on him—he’d been tragically in love with my sister since we were seven, and he really didn’t know how to takeno thanksfor an answer.
“I brought the firewood,” Peter said. “In case your mom asks. It’s already out back.”
“I’ll tell her.” He shuffled his feet but didn’t make a move to leave. “Anything else?”
“I was just wondering if I could talk to you for a second?”
I already knew what was coming; if I had a dollar for every boy on this island that asked me why my sister hadn’t fallen madly in love with him, I’d have enough for a ticket to the mainland. And first month’s rent on a new apartment. And a brand-new car. And so on.
