TWENTY-TWO
The bonfire outside the greenhouse is a smoldering heap of coals, unable to survive in this downpour. And everyone who had come to the island for the summer solstice is now gone. A party cut short by the return of Gigi Kline.
The shadow of Bo is already headed down the path to the dock, and the wind and rain between us makes it seem like he’s miles away, a mirage on a desert highway. I open my mouth to yell down to him but then clamp my lips closed. He won’t stop anyway. He’s determined to leave this island . . . and me. For good.
So I start to run.
At the dock, the cluster of boats and dinghies that had been clotted together only a few hours earlier are now all gone. Only the skiff and the sailboat remain, thumping against the sides of the dock, the wind battering down on them like an angry fist.
Out on the water, several lights sweep through the dark, still searching for Gigi, unable to locate her, while the others must have given up and returned to the marina. She might still be out there somewhere, hidden. Midnight inching closer. Or maybe she’s already gone beneath the waves, Aurora dissolving back into the deepest dark of the harbor. But if I know my sister, she will find a way back to shore so she can wait out the last few minutes until midnight. Savor these fleeting moments until she has to return to the brutal sea. And Marguerite will do the same. Maybe she will stay atop the lighthouse, staring out over the island, watching the storm push inland over the Pacific, until she’s forced down to the water’s edge in the final seconds.
Bo is not in the skiff, so I scan the sailboat. He appears near the front starboard side, throwing the moor lines.
“Where are you going?” I shout up at him, just as he tosses the last bowline. But he doesn’t answer me. “Don’t leave like this,” I plead. “I want to tell you the truth—tell you everything.”
“It’s too late,” he replies. The auxiliary motor rumbles softly, and he walks to the steering wheel at the stern of the sailboat. It sounds just like I remember from three years ago—a gentle sputter, the wind aching to push against the sails once the boat reaches the open ocean and can grasp the Pacific winds.
“Please,” I beg, but the boat begins to drift forward from the dock.
I follow it until there is no more dock, and then I don’t have a choice. Two feet separate me from the stern of the sailboat where the blue script letters painted on the back read WINGSONG. Three feet. Four. I jump, my legs catapulting me forward, but I fall just short. My chest slams against the side, pain lancing across my ribs, and my hands scramble for something to keep from falling into the water. I find a metal cleat and wrap my fingers around it. But it’s slick, and my fingers start to give way. Seawater splashes up against the backs of my legs.
Then Bo’s hands tighten around my arms and pull me upward onto the boat. I gasp, touching my left side with my palm, pain shooting through my ribs with each deep breath. Bo is only inches away, still holding on to my right arm. And I look up into his eyes, hoping he sees me, the girl inside. The girl he’s known these last few weeks. But then he releases my arm and turns away, back to the helm of the sailboat. “You shouldn’t have done that,” he says.
“I just need to talk to you.”
“There’s nothing else you can say.”
He steers the boat not toward the marina, but out to sea, straight into the storm.
“You’re not going to town?”
“No.”
“You’re stealing a sailboat?”
“Borrowing it. Just until I get to the next harbor up the coast. I don’t want to see that cursed fucking town ever again.”
I press my fingers to my ribs again and wince. They’re bruised. Maybe cracked.
The sailboat heaves to the side, the wind fighting us, but I shuffle to where Bo is holding tight to the steering wheel, maneuvering us right out into the heart of the storm. The tide swells; waves crash over the bow then spill out the sides. We shouldn’t be out in this.
“Bo,” I say, and he actually looks at me. “I need you to know. . . .” My body shakes from the cold, from the knowing that I’m about to lose everything I thought I had. “I didn’t force you to care about me. I didn’t trick you into loving me. Whatever you felt for me was real.” I say it in the past tense, knowing that whatever he felt is probably now gone. “I’m not the monster you think I am.”
“You killed my brother.” His gaze peels me open, severs me in half, crushes me down to nothing. “You fucking killed him. And you lied to me.”
This I can’t make right. There’s nothing that can change it. It’s unforgivable.
“I know.”
Another wave slams into us, and I grab on to Bo instinctively then let him go just as quickly. “Why did you do it?” he asks. I’m not sure if he’s asking about his brother or asking why I lied about who I am. Probably both.
And the answers are tied up in each other. “This town took everything from me,” I say, blinking away the water on my lashes. “My life. The person I once loved. I was angry . . . no, I was more than angry, and I wanted them to pay for what they did to me. I took your brother into the harbor like I’ve taken so many boys over the years. I was numb. I didn’t care whose life I stole. Or how many people suffered.”
I grip the wood helm beside the steering wheel to keep from being thrown sideways by another wave. This storm is going to kill us both. But I keep talking—this might be the last chance I get to make Bo understand. “This summer, when I took Penny’s body for the third time, I awoke in her bed just like the last two years, but this time a new memory rested in her mind: a memory of you from the night before. She was already falling for you. She saw something that made her trust you. But I was in her body now. And you were on the island—the boy she brought across the harbor and let stay in the cottage. And for some reason I trusted you too. It was the first time I’ve trusted anyone in two hundred years.” I brush away a stream of tears with the back of my hand. “I could have killed you. I could have drowned you that first day. But for some reason I wanted to protect you. Keep you safe. I wanted to feel something again for someone—for you. I needed to know that my heart wasn’t completely dead, that a part of me was still human . . . could still fall in love.”
Rain and seawater spill over the hard features of his face. He’s listening, even if he doesn’t want to.
“No one should exist for as long as I have,” I say. “Only getting small glimpses of a real life each summer, tormented by dark waking dreams the rest of the time. I’ve spent most of my two hundred years down there, at the bottom of the sea, a spook . . . an apparition moving with the tide, waiting to breathe air again. I can’t go back there.”
Not alive—not dead. A phantom trapped as the months tick by, every hour, every second.
“So you’d keep this body forever?” he asks, squinting into the storm as we near the end of the cape and chug out into open water.
“I’m not sure what I want now.”
“But you stole it,” he answers sharply. “It’s not yours.”
“I know.” There is no justification for wanting to keep this body. It’s selfish, and it’s murder. I would be killing the real Penny Talbot, tamping her down as if she never existed at all. I wanted to believe I was a different person because of Bo, because I haven’t killed this summer. But I’m no different from who I’ve been for the last two hundred years. I want something I can’t have. I am a thief of souls and bodies. But when will I stop? When will my torment on this town be enough? My revenge satiated?
Penny deserves a full life—doesn’t she? The life I never got to have. And in a burst of realization, I know: I can’t take it from her.
All my thoughts surface at once. A deluge of memories.
They snap like little firecrackers in my mind. Explosions along every nerve ending. I can fix this. Remedy the injustices. Give Bo what he wants.
“I’ve only been on this sailboat once before,” I tell him. He frowns at me, not sure what I’m talking about. “The first summer that I took Penny’s body, her father was suspicious of me. He figured out what I was. I think that’s why he collected all those books in your cottage: He was trying to find a way to get rid of me without killing his daughter—the same thing you were searching for. Except he found a way.” Bo turns the boat south down the coastline, and the wind shifts direction too, hitting us from the starboard side. “That summer,” I continue, “he left the house one night after dinner and walked down to the dock. I followed him. He said he was taking the sailboat out and asked if I wanted to go along. Something didn’t seem right. He seemed off—anxious—but I went because that’s what Penny would have done. And I was pretending to be her for the first time. We didn’t get very far out, just past the cape, when he told me the truth. He said that he knew what I was—a Swan sister—and that he was giving me a choice. He had found a way to kill me without destroying the body I inhabited—Penny’s body. He had discovered it in one of his books. But it involved sacrifice. I draw in a shallow breath, locating the words lodged at the base of my throat. If I jumped into the sea,” I say, trying to steady my voice, “and drowned again, like I did two hundred years ago, I would die, but Penny would not. I had to repeat my death. And he believed it would also kill my sisters, effectively breaking our curse. We would never return to the town of Sparrow again.”
Bo tilts his head to look at me, his hands white-knuckled and braced around the steering wheel, fighting to keep us from being blown to shore or capsized completely. “But you didn’t do it?”
I shake my head.
And then he asks what I knew was coming. “What happened to Penny’s father?”
“I thought he was going to push me overboard, force me to do it. He came toward me, so I grabbed the mooring hook and I . . . I struck him with it. He wobbled for a minute. Off balance as the boat rolled with each wave.” I choke back the memory. I still wish I could go back and undo what happened that night. Because Penny lost her father, and her mom lost her husband. “He went over the side. And he never came back up to the surface again.” I look out at the sea, midnight blue, churning and pockmarked with rain, and I picture him sucking in water, drowning just like I did so many years ago. “There was a book sitting on the deck of the boat, the one where he had read how to break our curse, so I threw it overboard. I didn’t want anyone else finding out how to kill us.” I had watched it sink into the dark, having no idea that there was an entire cottage filled with books he had collected. “The boat had slowly been drifting toward shore,” I explain. “The sails were down, thankfully, and the motor still running. So I steered it away from the rocks and somehow made it back to the island. I tied it to the dock and crept back up to the house. And there it has sat, until now.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Bo asks.
“Because I know what I need to do now. I should have done it that night. I should have changed the course of everything. Then your brother would still be alive, and you never would have come here. I was selfish then, and a coward. But I’m not anymore.”
“What are you talking about?” He releases one hand from the steering wheel.
“I’m going to give you what you want—your revenge.”
I turn away from him and walk to the starboard side of the sailboat, facing out to sea. My grave—the place where I belong. Lives have been lost. Deaths counted. It started with my sisters and me when we were drowned in the harbor all those years ago, but we have caused more suffering than can ever be measured.
“What are you doing?” Bo’s voice is still hard, but I sense a hint of uncertainty in it.
“I wanted to stay in this body and live this life . . . with you. But now I know that I can’t . . . for so many reasons. You will never be able to love me knowing what I’ve done, who I am. I’m sorry for your brother. I wish I could take it back. I wish I could take back most of the things I’ve done. But at least now I can end it. Make right this wrong.” I close my eyes briefly, drawing gulps of air into my lungs.
“Penny,” he says, a name that isn’t mine. He steps away from the wheel, the motor still rumbling, the sailboat crashing through the waves without a captain to pilot it. He doesn’t touch me. But he stands in front of me, rocking side to side with the heaving sailboat. “Hazel,” he tries instead, but there is still the burning of anger in his voice. “You ruined my life; you took my brother from me. And then I fell in love with you—I fell in love with the person who killed him. How am I supposed to deal with that? What do you want me to say? That I forgive you? Because I can’t.” His eyes waver away from me. He can’t forgive. He never will. I can see the struggle in him. He feels like he should try to stop me, but a part of him, a bitter, vengeful part of him, also wants me dead.
“I know you can’t forgive me,” I say. “I know I hurt you—I ruined everything. I wish it were different. I wish I were different. But . . .” I choke down on the words I need to say. “But I did love you. That was real; everything between us was real. I love you still.”
I hope to see a glimmer of something in his eyes, recognition that a part of him still loves me too. But he can’t see through what he now knows I am. I am only the girl who drowned his brother—that’s all.
When he doesn’t speak, I glance over to the steering wheel, where a small clock is mounted to the dash. Eleven forty-eight. Only twelve minutes left until midnight, and then it’ll be too late. I can’t stay in this body, not now. I can’t steal another life. But if I plunge into the icy sea, if I don’t allow my soul to escape but instead let this body drown with me inside, I will be the one to die. Not Penny. I will drown just like I did two centuries ago. And hopefully, if Penny’s father was right, she will survive.
“In years past, when we’ve returned to the sea,” I explain, the wind blowing my hair straight out behind me, “we leave the bodies we’ve stolen before the clock reaches midnight. But I think, for this to work, Penny’s body has to drown with me inside it. I will die, but she can be brought back. You will have to save her. I will be gone, but she can live.”
He looks through me, like he doesn’t want to believe what I’m saying.
I turn toward the railing. The sea spraying my face, the dark sky like a funeral. This will be my last breath. My last glimpse of the life I could have had. I close my eyes, knowing I can’t turn back.
But then Bo’s hands grab me, spinning me around to face him. “No,” he says. His eyebrows are tugged together, lips cut flat. There is torment in him. He doesn’t know what to feel, what to do. And this is why I’m taking the decision away from him. I’m ending this once and for all so he doesn’t have to. He speaks anyway, says what he thinks he should: “It doesn’t have to end like this.”
I smile a little, shaking my head. “You know there’s no other way. My sisters will just keep on killing. And I don’t want to go back into the sea for another two hundred years. I can’t. It’s not a life. And I’m tired.”
He slides his hands up to my cheeks and into my soaking-wet hair. And even though there is love in his eyes, a pain that I recognize, there is also hate. Deep, undeniable, entrenched hate. I took his brother from him. And there’s no going back from that.
But even with loathing in his dark green eyes—which still remind me of the place where the sea meets the sky after a storm—he pulls me to him, pressing his warm lips to mine as the rain continues to fall between us. He kisses me like he won’t let me go, even though I know he will. Desperate and angry. Loving me and hating me. And his fingers pull against my hair, drawing me even closer. My fingernails dig into his chest, trying to hold tight to this moment. This feeling. I could take him with me, like both Olivia and Aurora suggested. I could drown him now, and he would be trapped in the sea with me for eternity. But I don’t want him like that—confined to a watery prison. It isn’t real. And he doesn’t deserve it.
His lips lift only an inch away from mine, and I draw in a tight breath of air.
“Thank you for giving me these days with you,” I say. Tears push forward, and I don’t try to stop them.
I close my eyes and rest my forehead against his chest, breathing him in, wanting to remember his scent forever. But right now he just smells like the sea. A boy drifted in on the tide. Like a dream, like a memory I hope I’ll never forget.
I drop my hands from his chest, turning to look out at the ocean. Wild and turbulent. The bottomless black Pacific beckoning me into its cold interior. It’s nearly midnight, and lightning spiders against the clouds in the distance, drawing closer. “When I jump in,” I say to Bo over the crashing waves and wind, “after I’ve drowned, you need to pull her body back out.”
He doesn’t nod. No response. He can’t comprehend what’s happening. But he knows he has to let me go.
I meet his forest-green eyes for the last time, seeing myself reflected back in them. “Don’t tell her what happened to her father,” I say. “Don’t tell her about me. I think it’s better if she doesn’t know.”
Thunder snaps down from the sky. He nods.
I will leave the good memories inside Penny’s mind, and I will take the bad ones with me. She will remember images of Bo, of his warmth beside her in the cottage, of his hands on her skin, his lips on hers. She will remember days when her heart felt about to burst with love for him. She won’t recall going to the cemetery to say good-bye to Owen; she won’t remember speaking to Marguerite in front of the old perfumery. She won’t remember talking to Gigi Kline as if she were her sister. She will only recall that she provided sanctuary for Gigi from the boys who had been hunting her. She will live the life I wish I could have. She will miss her father, but sometimes missing is better than knowing. I will give her the gift of good memories. The gift of Bo—the last boy I loved.
The boy I love still.
I step over the wire railing. The deck is slippery, and I almost lose my footing. My heart begins to pound, fear and doubt seizing me. My fingers grip so tightly to the railing that they begin to throb.
I don’t take my gaze off him. “I told you that love is like falling, like drowning. This will be the same. I just have to let go.” My lips quiver. “Don’t forget me.”
“Never,” he answers. And his face is the last thing I see before I jump over the side and hit the water. And everything turns black.
* * *
The world is instantly made silent. The storm churns and crashes above the waterline, but down here, everything is calm and quiet.
I swim hard. I pull myself into the deep, closer to the bottom of the sea. The cold turns my hands and feet numb almost immediately—the cold that will slow my heart and preserve Penny’s body. The darkness is absolute, blotting out the surface of the ocean so that I can’t tell which way is up. But I don’t want to change my mind—I don’t want any chance of swimming back up and sucking in a breath of air.
I plummet like a coin sinking down to the pirate wreckage in the harbor. I think about the penny I tossed into the water the night with Bo and Rose and Heath. We each made wishes. Some tangible. Some likely not. My wish was to be human again. To live a normal life. But it didn’t come true. I fall deeper, darker, colder. But maybe this, what I’m doing right now, is the most human I’ve ever been. To die. To sacrifice yourself so others don’t have to. To make a choice.
And I fell in love. What’s more human than that?
The cold seizes my extremities so that I can no longer move my fingers and toes, arms and legs. And the dark makes shapes that I know aren’t really there. Death plays tricks on me.
I think I see my reflection in the water, which is impossible. But there are two images: Penny’s face and mine, masked deep beneath her skin, the real reflection of me—Hazel Swan. Dark hair, wide green eyes, lost. Alone. But not really alone. I’ve known love—deep, foolish love. And that has made it all worth it.
I squeeze my eyes closed.
I open my mouth, gulping down the sea. It tastes like salt and absolution. Like letting go. And then, drawing inward from the cold, is massive warmth. My body is no longer numb. It feels like I’m lying in a hollow of beach grass under an afternoon sun, watching clouds bounce lazily across the sky. The warmth is so real that I open my eyes again, and then I’m swallowed by it.