TWO
The doors of Sparrow High are flung open just before noon, and a raucous parade of students is set loose into the sticky midday air. Shouts and whoops of excitement echo across the school grounds, scattering the seagulls perched along the stone wall that borders the front lawn.
Only half the senior class even bothered to show up for the final day, but the ones who did tear out pages from their notebooks and let the wind carry them away—a tradition to mark their freedom from high school.
The sun sits lazy in the sky, having burned through the morning fog, and it now seems defeated and weary, unable to warm the ground or our chilled faces. Rose and I stomp down Canyon Street in our rain boots, jeans tucked inside to keep them dry, with our coats unzipped, hoping the day will brighten and warm the air before tonight’s all-night bash, which I am still not entirely thrilled to attend.
On Ocean Avenue we turn right and then stop at the next corner, where Rose’s mom owns a shop that sits like a little square cake with white-painted brick walls and pink eaves—and where Rose works every day after school. The sign above the glass door reads: ALBA’S FORGETFUL CAKES in pale pink frosting–swirled letters on a cream-colored background. Yet the wood sign has started to collect a greenish brine that will need to be scrubbed away. A constant battle against the salty, slimy air.
“I only have a two-hour shift,” Rose says, hoisting her book bag over to the other shoulder. “Meet at nine on the dock?”
“Sure.”
“You know, if you had a cell phone like a normal person, I could just text you later.”
“Cell phones don’t work on the island,” I point out for the hundredth time.
She blows out an exasperated breath. “Which is catastrophically inconvenient for me.” As if she were the one who has to endure the lack of cell service.
“You’ll survive,” I say with a smirk, and she smiles back, the freckles across her nose and upper cheeks catching the sunlight like constellations of golden sand.
The door behind her whips open with a fluttering of chimes and bells clanking against the glass. Her mom, Rosalie Alba, steps out into the sunlight, blocking her gaze with a hand as if she were seeing the sun for the first time since last summer.
“Penny,” Mrs. Alba says, dropping her hand. “How is your mother?”
“The same,” I admit. Mrs. Alba and my mom were friends once, in a very casual way. Sometimes they’d meet for tea on Saturday mornings, or Mrs. Alba would come out to Lumiere Island and she and my mom would bake biscuits or blackberry pie when the thorny blackberry bushes began to overtake the island and my dad would threaten to burn them all down.
Mrs. Alba is also one of the only people in town who still asks about my mom—who still cares. It’s been three years since my father disappeared, and it’s as if the town has forgotten about him entirely. Like he never lived here at all. But it’s far easier to endure their blank stares than it was to hear the rumors and speculation that spun through town in the days after he vanished. John Talbot never belonged here in the first place, people had whispered. He abandoned his wife and daughter; he always hated living in Sparrow; he ran away with another woman; he went mad living on the island and waded out into the sea.
He was an outsider, and he had never been fully accepted by the locals. They seemed relieved when he was gone. As if he deserved it. But Mom had grown up here, gone to Sparrow High, then met my father at college in Portland. They were in love, and I know he never would have abandoned us. We were happy. He was happy.
Something far stranger happened to him three years ago. One day he was here. The next he wasn’t.
“Will you give this to her?” Mrs. Alba asks, extending her palm where she’s holding a small pink box with white polka-dot ribbon.
I take it from her, running the ribbon through my fingertips. “What flavor?”
“Lemon and lavender. A new recipe I’ve been experimenting with.” Mrs. Alba does not bake ordinary cakes for ordinary cravings. Her tiny forgetful cakes are intended to make you forget the worst thing that’s ever happened to you—to wipe away bad memories. I’m not entirely convinced they actually work. But locals and summer tourists devour the tiny cakes as if they were a potent cure, a remedy for any unwanted thought. Mrs. Potts, who lives in a narrow house on Alabaster Street, claims that after eating a particularly decadent chocolate fig basil cake, she no longer could recall the day her neighbor Wayne Bailey’s dog bit her in the calf and made her bleed, leaving a scar that looks like a spire of lightning. And Mr. Rivera, the town postman, says he only vaguely recollects the day his wife left him for a plumber who lives in Chestnut Bay an hour’s drive north. Still, I suspect it might only be the heaping cups of sugar and peculiar flavors in Mrs. Alba’s cakes that for a brief moment allow a person to think of nothing else but the intermixing earthiness of lavender and the tartness of lemon, which not even their worst memories can rise above.
When my father vanished, Mrs. Alba began sending me home with every flavor of cake imaginable—raspberry lime tart, hazelnut espresso, seaweed coconut—in hopes they might help my mother forget what had happened. But nothing has broken through her grief: a stiff cloud not easily carried away with the wind.
“Thank you,” I say, and Mrs. Alba smiles her wide, toothy grin. Her eyes are like pools of warmth, of kindness. And I’ve always felt comforted by her. Mrs. Alba is Spanish, but Rose’s father is true-blooded Irish, born in Dublin, and Rose managed to get all her father’s features, much to her displeasure. “See you at nine,” I say to Rose, and she and her mom vanish into the shop to bake as many forgetful cakes as they can before the tourists arrive tomorrow morning by the busload.
* * *
The eve before the start of Swan season has always felt burdensome to me. It’s like a dark cloud I can’t shake.
The knowing of what’s coming, the death that creeps up over the town like fate clawing at the door of every shop and home. I can feel it in the air, in the spray of the sea, in the hollow spaces between raindrops. The sisters are coming.
Every room at the three bed-and-breakfasts along the bay front is booked solid for the next three weeks until the end of Swan season—which will come on midnight of the summer solstice. Rooms facing the sea go for twice what can be charged for the rooms facing inland. People like to push open their windows and step out onto their balconies to hear the beckoning call of the Swan sisters singing from the deep harbor.
A handful of early tourists have already found their way into Sparrow, dragging their luggage into lobbies or snapping photos of the harbor. Asking where to get the best coffee or hot cup of soup because their first day in town usually feels the coldest—a chill that settles between the bones and won’t go away.
I hate this time of year, as do most locals. But it’s not the influx of tourists that bothers me; it’s the exploitation, the spectacle of a season that is a curse on this town.
At the dock, I toss my book bag onto one of the bench seats inside the skiff. All along the starboard side, dotted into the white paint are scrapes and dings like Morse code. My dad used to repaint the skiff every spring, but it’s been neglected for the last three years. Sometimes I feel just like that hull: scarred and dented and left to rust since he vanished somewhere out at sea.
I place the small cake box onto the seat beside my bag, and then walk around to the bow, about to untie the front line when I hear the hollow clomp of footsteps moving down the dock behind me.
I’m still holding the bowline when I notice a boy standing several feet back, holding what looks like a crumpled piece of paper in his left hand. His face is partly obscured by the hood of his sweatshirt, and a backpack hangs heavy from his shoulders. “I’m looking for Penny Talbot,” he says, his voice like cold water from the tap, his jaw a hardened line. “I was told I could find her down here.”
I stand up fully, trying to see his eyes, but there is a shadow cutting over the top half of his face. “Why are you looking for her?” I ask, not entirely certain I want to tell him that I am Penny Talbot just yet.
“I found this up at the diner . . . the Chowder,” he says with an edge of uncertainty, like he’s not sure he’s remembered the name right. The Chowder is a small diner at the end of Shipley Pier that extends out over the water, and has been voted Sparrow’s “Best Diner” for the last ten years in the local Catch newspaper—a small print paper that employs a total of two people, one of which is Thor Grantson because his father owns the paper. Thor is in the same class as me. During the school year, local kids overtake the Chowder, but in the summer months we have to share the worn stools along the bar and the tables on the outdoor deck with the horde of tourists. “I’m looking for work,” he adds, holding out the limp piece of paper for me to see, and then I realize what it is. I posted a note on the cork bulletin board inside the Chowder nearly a year ago, asking for help maintaining the lighthouse out on Lumiere Island, since my mom had become nearly incapable of doing anything and I couldn’t manage on my own. I had forgotten about posting it, and when no one ever came looking to fill the position, and the scribbled, handwritten note was eventually buried beneath other flyers and business cards, I made do.
But now, somehow this outsider has found it among the clutter of papers tacked to the bulletin board. “I don’t need the help anymore,” I say flatly, tossing the bowline into the boat—and also inadvertently revealing that I am indeed Penny Talbot. I don’t want an outsider working on the island—someone who I know nothing about. Who I can’t trust. When I had posted the listing, I had hoped a laid-off fisherman or maybe someone from my school might have responded. But no one did.
“You found someone else?” he asks.
“No. I just don’t need anyone now.”
He scrubs a hand over his head, pushing back the hood that had shrouded his face, revealing stark, deep green eyes the color of the forest after it rains. He doesn’t look like a drifter: grimy or like he’s been showering in gas station bathrooms. He’s my age, maybe a year or two older. But he still has the distinct look of an outsider: guarded and wary of his surroundings. He clenches his jaw and bites his lower lip, looking back over his shoulder to the shoreline, the town twinkling beneath the afternoon sun like it’s been sprinkled with glitter.
“Are you here for the Swan season?” I ask, flattening my gaze on him.
“The what?” He looks back at me, a measure of hardness in every move he makes: the twitch of an eyelash, the shifting of his lips before he speaks.
“Then why are you here?” He obviously has no idea what the Swan season is.
“It was the last town on the bus line.” This is true. Sparrow is the final stop on a bus route that meanders up the coast of Oregon, stopping in several quaint seaside villages until it meets a dead end in Sparrow. The rocky ridgeline blocks any roads from continuing up the shore, so traffic has to be diverted inland for several miles.
“You picked a bad time to end up in Sparrow,” I say, unhooking the last rope but holding on to it to keep the skiff from drifting back from the dock.
He pushes his hands into his jean pockets. “Why’s that?”
“Tomorrow is June first.”
By his stiff, unaltered expression, I can tell he really has no idea what he’s just stumbled into.
“Sorry I can’t help you,” I say, instead of trying to explain all the reasons why he’d be better off just catching tomorrow’s bus back out of here. “You can look for work at the cannery or on one of the fishing boats, but they usually don’t hire outsiders.”
He nods, biting his lip again and looking past me to the ocean, to the island in the distance. “What about a place to stay?”
“You can try one of the bed-and-breakfasts, but they’re usually booked this time of year. Tourist season starts tomorrow.”
“June first?” he echoes, as if clarifying this mysterious date that obviously means something to me but nothing to him.
“Yeah.” I step inside the boat and pull the engine cord. “Good luck.” And I leave him standing on the dock as I motor across the bay toward the island. I look back several times and he’s still there, watching the water as if unsure what to do next, until the final time I glance back and he’s gone.