EIGHTEEN
Memories can settle into a place: fog that lingers long after it should have blown out to sea, voices from the past that take root in the foundation of a town, whispers and accusations that grow in the moss along the sidewalks and up the walls of old homes.
This town, this small cluster of houses and shops and boats clinging to the shoreline, has never escaped its past—the thing it did two hundred years ago. Ghosts remain. But sometimes, the past is the only thing keeping a place alive. Without it, this fragile town may have long ago been washed out with the tide, sunken into the harbor in defeat. But it persists, because it must. Penance is a long, unforgiving thing. It endures, for without it, the past is forgotten.
I stop in front of the old stone building that sits squat and low on a street corner facing the sea. Rain pings off my forehead and shoulders. The sign above the door reads: ALBA’S FORGETFUL CAKES. But it didn’t used to. A sign with bold black swirling letters hand-painted by Aurora once hung across the sidewalk, clattering with the afternoon breeze. This was once the Swan Perfumery. Although I’ve walked past it thousands of times in the summers since our death, seen countless businesses occupy it, and even watched in dismay during a fifteen-year period when it sat abandoned and crumbling before it was restored, sometimes, like today, it still strikes me that after all this time it has endured . . . just as we have.
A woman steps out through the glass door, her rain boots splashing through a shallow puddle as she walks to her red SUV holding a pink pastry box surely filled with tiny frosted cakes intended to wipe away some sticky memory caught in her mind.
I spent nearly every day inside that shop, concocting new scents made of rare herbs and flowers, my hair and fingers and skin always bursting with scents that couldn’t be washed away. The oils soaked into everything they touched. Marguerite was the saleswoman, and she was good at it, a natural peddler. Aurora was the bookkeeper; she paid bills and tallied profits from a small, wobbly wood desk behind the front counter. And I was the perfumist, working out of a windowless back room that should have been a storage closet—a place for brooms and metal buckets. But I loved my work. And in the evening my sisters and I shared a tiny home behind the shop.
“It doesn’t even look like the same place,” a voice says beside me. I flinch. Olivia Greene is standing next to me, a black umbrella held over her head to protect her sleek, charcoal-black hair from the rain. My eyes pass through her fair skin to Marguerite underneath.
“The windows are the same,” I say, looking back to the building.
“Replicas,” she answers, her voice more somber than usual. “Everything it used to be is now gone.”
“Just like us.”
“Nothing that lives this long can stay the same.”
“Nothing should live this long,” I point out.
“But we did,” she says, as if it were an accomplishment to be proud of.
“Maybe two hundred years is enough.”
She blows out a quick breath through her nostrils. “You want to give up eternal life?”
“It’s not eternal,” I say. Marguerite and I have never viewed our imprisonment the same way. She sees it as our good fortune, a lucky draw of the card that we should live on for centuries, indefinitely perhaps. But she didn’t lose anything the day we were drowned. I did. She wasn’t in love with a boy who loved her back—not real love, like what Owen and I had. With each passing year we spent beneath the waves, each summer we rose again to claim our revenge on the town by taking their boys and making them ours, we lost a part of who we once were. We lost our humanity. I watched my sisters’ cruelty grow, their ability to kill sharpen, until I barely recognized them.
My wickedness grew too, but not to a place I couldn’t come back from. Because there was a thread that bound me to who I used to be—that thread was Owen. The memory of him kept me from slipping completely into the dark. And now that thread ties me to Bo. To the real world, to the present.
“We’ve spent most of our lives trapped in the sea,” I say. “Cold and dark and miserable. That’s not a real life.”
“I block it out,” she rebukes swiftly. “You should too. It’s better to sleep, let your mind drift away until summer arrives.”
“It’s not that easy for me.”
“You’ve always made things harder for yourself.”
“What does that mean?”
“This thing you have with that boy, Bo. You’re only dragging out the inevitable. Just kill him and get it over with.”
“No.” I turn to look at her, a shadow settled over her face beneath the domed umbrella. “I know you tried to lure him into the harbor.”
Her eyes twinkle, as if delighted by the memory of almost drowning the boy I love. “I just wanted to help you finish what you started. If you like him so much, then take him into the sea, and you will have him for eternity.”
“I don’t want him like that. His soul trapped down there just like ours.”
“Then how do you want him?”
“Real. Here—on land.”
She laughs loud and full, and a man and woman strolling past us turn to look at her. “That’s absurd and not possible. Tonight’s the last night to make him yours.”
I shake my head. I won’t do it. “I’m not like you,” I say.
“You’re exactly like me. We’re sisters. And you’re just as cold-blooded as I am.”
“No, you’re wrong about that.”
“Have you forgotten about Owen? How he betrayed you? Maybe if he hadn’t spoken up about the mark on your skin, you wouldn’t have been found guilty. You wouldn’t have drowned with us. You might have lived a normal life. But no”—her lips curl up at the edges, a wolf baring her teeth—“boys cannot be trusted. They will always do whatever they can to save themselves. They are the cruel ones, not us.”
“Owen wasn’t cruel,” I snap. “He had to tell them about the mark.”
“Did he?”
I bite down on the rage building in my chest. “If he hadn’t, they would have believed he was one of us, helping us. They would have killed him.”
“And yet he died anyway.” One of her eyebrows arches upward.
I can’t stand here anymore, listening to Marguerite. She’s never known real love. Even her infatuations with men when we were alive were all about her: the attention, the pursuit, the satisfaction of winning something that wasn’t hers to start with. “Owen tried to save me that day, and he lost his life. He loved me,” I tell her. “And Bo loves me now. But you wouldn’t know what that’s like because you’re incapable of love.”
I turn away from her and start up the sidewalk.
“Did you hear?” she calls after me. “Our dear sister Aurora has been sprung from her jail in the boathouse. It seems someone decided she was innocent after all.”
I look back at her over my shoulder. “She’s not innocent,” I say. Marguerite squirms inside Olivia’s body. “None of us are.”
* * *
The dock is slick from the rain. Waves push into the marina at steady intervals, a ballet choreographed by the wind and tide. I climb into the skiff and start the motor. A few persistent rays of sun break through the dark clouds, spilling light over the bow of the boat.
Tonight, the summer solstice party will happen on Coppers Beach, marking the end of Swan season. But I won’t be there. I’m staying on the island with Bo. I’m staying in this body—whatever it takes, no matter how painful, I’m going to fight it.
Yet I have the acute, anxious feeling that something bad is stirring out on those waters, in that approaching storm, and none of us will be the same after tonight.