THIRTEEN
Two days slip by uncounted.
Bo’s fingers coil through my hair, he watches me sleep, and he keeps me warm when the wind tears through the cracks in the cottage windows in the early hours of morning. He slides himself beside me beneath the wool blanket and runs his fingertips down my arm. I’ve forgotten about everything else but this little room, this fireplace, this spot in my heart that aches to the point of bursting.
On the third day, we wake and walk down the rows of the newly revived orchard trees under a tepid afternoon sky; the leaves are beginning to unfurl and the flowers just starting to break open. This season’s apples and pears might still be stunted and hard and inedible. But by next year, hopefully our hard work will produce fat, sun-sweetened fruit.
“What were you like in school?” I ask, craning my head upward to soak up the sun. Little white spots dance across my closed eyelids.
“What do you mean?”
“Were you popular?”
He reaches out a hand and touches the craggy end of a branch, small green leaves sliding through his palm. “No.”
“But you had friends?”
“A few.” He glances at me, his jade-green eyes spearing a hole straight through my center.
“Did you play sports?” I’m trying to piece together the person he was, the person he is, and I find it hard to imagine him anywhere else but here in Sparrow, on this island with me.
He shakes his head, smiling a little, like he finds it funny that I would even ask this. “I worked for my parents every day after school, so I didn’t have much time for friends or group sports.”
“Your parents’ farm?”
“It’s actually a vineyard.”
I pause near the end of a row. “A vineyard?” I repeat. “Like grapes?”
“Yeah. It’s just a small family winery, but it does pretty well.” It’s not exactly the farm where I imagined him toiling: hands-in-the-earth, greasy, cow-manure type of farming. But I’m sure it was still hard work.
“It’s not what I pictured,” I tell him.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.” I examine him, eyeing his faded gray sweatshirt and jeans. “Do your parents know where you are?”
“No. They didn’t want me to come here. They said I just needed to let Kyle go. That’s how they coped with his death, by ignoring it. But I knew I had to come. So when I graduated this year, I hitchhiked down the coast. I never told them I was leaving.”
“Have you talked to them since you left?”
He shakes his head, pushing his hands into his jean pockets.
“They’re probably worried about you,” I say.
“I can’t call them. I don’t know what I’d say.” He looks at me. “How do I explain what’s going on here? That Kyle didn’t kill himself but was drowned by one of three sisters who died two centuries ago?”
“Maybe you don’t tell them that,” I offer. “But you should probably let them know you’re okay . . . tell them something. Even a lie.”
“Yeah.” His voice dips low. “Maybe.”
We reach the end of the orchard, where one of the dead apple trees is now gone, torched down to its roots.
“When this is all over,” I say, “after the summer solstice, will you go home?”
“No.” He pauses to look back down the rows of perfectly spaced fruit trees. A small gray bird bursts out from the limbs of one tree and lands on the branch of another. “I won’t go back there. Not now. Before Kyle died, I always thought I’d stay and work for my parents after high school. Take over the family business. It was what they expected of me. My brother would be the one to move away and live a different life, to escape. And I was okay with that. But after he died . . .” He draws in his lips and looks up through the limbs of an apple tree, buds pushing out from the green stalks. “I knew I wanted something different. Something that was mine. I had always been the one who would stay behind while Kyle saw the world. But not anymore.”
“So now what do you want?” I ask, my voice soft, not wanting to crack apart his thoughts.
“I want to be out there.” He nods to the western edge of the island. “On the water.” He looks back at me like he’s not sure I’ll understand. “When my dad taught me to sail, I knew I loved it, but I didn’t think I’d ever have the chance to really do it. Maybe now I can. I could buy a sailboat, leave—maybe I won’t ever come back.”
“Sounds like an escape plan. Like you want to start a whole new life.”
His eyes flicker, and he squares his shoulders to face me. “I do. I have money; I’ve been saving most of my life.” His stare turns cool and serious. “You could come with me.”
I draw in both my lips, holding back a betraying smile.
“You don’t have to stay in this town—you could escape too, leave this place behind if it’s what you want.”
“I have school.”
“I’ll wait for you.” And he says it like he actually means it.
“But my mom,” I say. . . . Just another excuse.
His mouth hardens in place.
“It’s just not that easy for me,” I explain. I feel wrenched into halves, torn between the wanting and the prison that is this island. “It’s not a no. But I also can’t say yes.”
I can see the hurt in his eyes, that he doesn’t understand even if he wants to. But he slides his fingers around my waist, gently, like he’s afraid I’ll spook like one of the island birds, and he pulls me to him. “Someday you’ll find a worthy enough reason to leave this place,” he says.
I once read a poem about love being fragile, as thin as glass and easily broken.
But that is not the kind of love that survives in a place like this. It must be hardy and enduring. It must have grit.
He’s strong, I think, the same thought I had the other night. I blink up at him, the sunlight scattering through the trees, making the features of his face soft at the edges. Stronger than most boys. He could survive this place. He’s made of something different, his heart weathered and battered just like mine, forged of hard metals and earth. We’ve both lost things, lost people. We are broken but fighting to stay alive. Maybe that’s why I need him—he feels like I feel, wants like I want. He’s stirred loose something inside my chest, a cold center where blood now pumps, a hint of life, of green pushing up toward sunlight.
I might love him.
And it has tilted my universe off center, the frayed edges of my life starting to unravel. Loving someone is dangerous. It gives you something to lose.
I lift up to my tiptoes, his lips hovering over mine, and I know he’s looking for answers in the steady calm of my stare. But he won’t find them there, so he presses his mouth to mine, as if he might press some truth out of me. But I can only give him this moment, and I climb my fingers up his chest, breathing him in, tasting the salt air on his lips.
I wish suddenly that I could promise him forever, promise him me. But it would be a lie.
* * *
I try to call Rose. I leave messages on her phone. I tell her mom to have her call me back, but she never does.
Where is she? Why won’t she call me? But I can’t leave the island. I can’t risk leaving Bo alone—I’m afraid Olivia might try to lure him into the harbor again.
But after several days, I can’t take it anymore. The not knowing is making me edgy and nervous.
I wake up early, hoping to slip out of the cottage before Bo sees me. Olga trails me to the door; her eyes are watery from the cold, and she blinks, as if curious about what I’m doing awake at this hour.
I pull on my raincoat hanging from a metal hook beside the door then turn the knob; a swift breeze rips into the cottage, spraying raindrops over my face. Olga zips past my feet and trots up the boardwalk. But then she stops short, ears alert, tail swishing back and forth. Something has caught her attention.
It’s still an hour or so before sunrise, but the sky has turned aqueous and lucid, morning pressing down, breaking apart the night clouds and sheering the island terrain in a hue of blush pink. And in the distance, I see what Olga sees: A light is wavering across the water, and an engine is sputtering toward the island dock.
“What is it?” Bo asks, his voice a shock to my ears. I wasn’t expecting him to be awake. The door is partway open, and I glance back inside. He’s standing up, rubbing his face.
“Someone’s here,” I say.