THE HARBOR
Some places are bound in by magic. Ensnared by it.
The town of Sparrow may have possessed slivers of magic long before the Swan sisters arrived in 1822. Or maybe the three sisters brought it with them across the Pacific. No one would ever know for sure. Their beauty and unluckiness may have been its own kind of spell, spun together in a rugged place like Sparrow, Oregon, where gold washed down from the mountains and the sea pulled ships under when the moon was full and the tide vengeful.
Magic is a tricky thing. Not easily measured or metered or weighed.
Even though the Swan sisters will never again return to torment the small town, their enchantment still resides in the sodden streets and the angry winter winds.
The morning after the summer solstice, a local fisherman steered his boat out into the harbor in search of crabs rolling along the seafloor. The tourists had begun their exodus from the bed-and-breakfasts, loading into cars and boarding buses. Returning home.
The Swan season had ended. But what the tourists and locals didn’t yet know was that there would never again be another drowning in the town of Sparrow.
Olivia Greene would wake the following morning atop the lighthouse on Lumiere Island. She would recall only fragments of the party the night before and assume she drank too much and passed out on the cold stone floor, her friends having abandoned her.
Gigi Kline, who had been missing for several weeks but reappeared unexpectedly at the summer solstice party, would wake up on the rocky shore of Lumiere Island, her feet halfway submerged in the water and three toes swollen and frostbitten, unable to be saved. After having fled into the harbor the night before, Aurora circled back around to the shore, easily evading capture from the mob of mostly drunk Sparrow High students. She was watching the boats drift farther away, her arms hugging her chest, soaking wet, about to slip back into the water and relinquish the body she had stolen, when she collapsed right there on the rocks.
Neither Aurora nor Marguerite Swan ever made it back into the water. Because at eleven fifty-four, their sister Hazel Swan dove into the sea and drowned herself, severing the two-centuries-long curse in a single act of sacrifice.
Aurora and Marguerite vanished from their stolen bodies like a wisp of sea air, a rivulet of smoke finally extinguished for good.
But still, unknowingly, the following morning a local fisherman navigated his boat among the wreckage of sunken ships, drifting over the very spot where the three Swan sisters had been drowned two hundred years ago. And in that place, bubbles rose up to the surface. Usually caused by crabs knotted together, moving among the silty bottom. But not this time, not on this morning.
What he saw was something else.
Three bodies, dressed in gossamer-white gowns that clung to their ashen skin, drifted together with the current. He pulled them aboard his boat, unaware of what he had just discovered. They were not skeletons, not chewed apart by fish and salt water; it was as if they had been drowned that very morning.
The Swan sisters’ bodies had finally been recovered.
And when they were carried ashore and laid on the dock in Sparrow, people gasped. Children cried and women cut off locks of the sisters’ hair for good luck. They were beautiful. More stunning than anyone had ever imagined. More angelic than any portrait or story had ever described.
The curse of the Swan sisters had been broken.
It took several days for the locals to decide what should be done with the perfectly preserved bodies. But eventually they were buried in Sparrow Cemetery atop Alder Hill, overlooking the bay. It was only fitting.
People still come to take pictures beside their gravestones, even though the Swan season has never returned. No songs whispered from the deep waters of the harbor. No bodies stolen for a brief few weeks in June.
But there is one who comes to the cemetery every week, a boy who lost a brother, who fell in love and then let her slip into the sea. Bo Carter kneels down beside the grave of Hazel Swan, he brings flowers, he tells her stories about the island and the tide and the life they never had. He waits for the sun to set before he stands and walks back down Ocean Avenue to the docks.
He still lives in the cottage on Lumiere Island. He is the keeper of the lighthouse. In the summer, he harvests apples and pears, bringing crates into town to sell. And during a storm, he takes the sailboat out alone past the cape to the open sea, battling the wind and the waves until the morning sunlight breaks over the horizon.
But he is not alone on the island. Penny Talbot wanders the orchard rows with him, her memories slowly returned in the days after the summer solstice—memories that were plucked just for her, only the good ones. On calm, sunny days, Bo teaches her how to sail. She eats forgetful cakes in the afternoons—gooseberry and cinnamon spice—brought to the island by Rose, who worries about her more than Penny can understand.
Her mom bakes apple pies and fresh pear tarts; she hums while she works; she makes cups of tea and invites locals out to the island to foretell their futures. She watches her daughter—who is herself once again—and she knows she’s lost many things, but she didn’t lose Penny. Her mind settles; her grief eases. She stacks smooth rocks beside the cliff overlooking the sea. A marker, a grave for the husband she lost. He belongs to the Pacific now—like so many others.
In the evenings, Penny reads tea leaves at the kitchen table, blinking down at her future and her past, recalling something she once saw in their smudged remains: a boy blowing in from the sea. And she thinks that maybe her life has been predestined from the start.
But even when they kiss between the apple trees, Bo seems caught in a memory, carried away to another time she can’t see. And late at night when he folds her in his arms beside the crackling fire and kisses the space just behind her ear, she knows he’s falling in love with her. And maybe he’s loved her long before this, long before he pulled her from the water on the night of the summer solstice—the night that is a blur in her memory. But she doesn’t ask. She doesn’t want to know about the before.
Because she loves him now, with the wind seeping through the cracks in the cottage windows, Otis and Olga curled up at their feet, the world stretched out before them.
They have eternity. Or even if it’s just one life, one long, singular life—that’s enough.