FIVE
I wake with the choking sense of seawater in my throat. I sit upright, fisting my white sheet in both hands. The feeling of drowning claws at my lungs, but it was only a nightmare.
My head throbs, temples pulse, the lingering taste of whiskey still on my tongue.
It takes a moment to orient myself, last night still whirling through my head. I push back the sheet and stretch my toes over the hardwood floor, feeling stiff and achy and like a hammer is cracking against my skull from the inside. Sunlight peeks through the daffodil-yellow curtains, reflecting off the white walls and the white dresser and the high white ceiling—blinding me.
I press my fingers to my eyes and yawn. In the full-length mirror mounted to the closet door, I catch my reflection. Dark circles rim both eyes, and my ponytail has slid partway free so that strands of coffee-brown hair drift across my face. I look horrible.
The floor is cold, but I plod to one of the massive windows overlooking the choppy sea and slide the window upward in its frame.
In the wind I can still hear it: the faint cry of a song.
* * *
The scent of powdered sugar and maple syrup hangs in the air like a soft winter snowfall. I find her in the kitchen standing at the stove—Mom—her dark hair tied in a braid down her back, a serpent of brown, folded and coiled. And I feel like I’m still caught in a dream, my head swirling, my body rocking side to side like it’s being pushed inland by an invisible tide.
“Are you hungry?” she asks without turning around. I absorb her movements, the sedated way she slides the spatula under a doughy pancake and flips it in the pan. She doesn’t normally make breakfast—not anymore—so this is a rare occurrence. Something’s up. For a moment I let a memory materialize in my mind: her making waffles with homemade blackberry jam, her cheeks flushed from the heat of the stove, her eyes and lips smiling, the morning sun on her face. She was happy once.
I touch my stomach, clenched and queasy. “Not really,” I answer. There’s no way I could eat right now. And keep it down. I move past her to the counter, where a row of identical silver tins sit perfectly spaced. They are unmarked, but I know the contents of each one: Lavender Chamomile, Rose Earl Grey, Cardamom Chai, Moroccan Mint, and Jasmine Dragon Pearl. I boil water then set my tea to steep—Rose Earl Grey—and lean against the counter breathing in the rustic, sweet scent.
“We have guests,” she says suddenly, sliding the lightly browned pancakes onto a white plate.
I glance around the kitchen then back at her. The house is silent. “Who?”
She looks over at me, examining the creases around my eyes from lack of sleep; the queasiness that comes in waves when I pinch my lips tightly together to keep from vomiting. She stares for a moment, eyes pinched like she doesn’t quite recognize me. Then she drops her gaze. “That boy you brought to the island last night,” she says. The memory pours back through me: the beach, Bo, and my offering him a job on the island. Again I press my palms to my eyes.
“Is he a local boy?” she asks.
“No.” I recall the moment on the dock when he said he was looking for work. “He came into town yesterday.”
“For the Swan season?” she asks, setting the skillet back on the stove and turning off the burner.
“No. He’s not a tourist.”
“Can we trust him?”
“I don’t know,” I answer honestly—I don’t actually know anything about him.
“Well,” she says, turning around to face me and sliding her hands down into the pockets of her thick black robe, “he’s just waking up. Take him some breakfast. I don’t want a stranger inside the house.” This is one of her gifts: She knows when people are near, when they’re coming to the island—she senses their arrival like a nagging in the pit of her stomach. And this explains why she decided to cook breakfast—what drove her from bed just after the sun rose, compelled her into the kitchen to turn on the stove and pull out her good skillet. She might not want a stranger in the house, she might not trust him, but she won’t allow him to starve. It’s just her nature. Even her grief can’t keep her from kindness.
She pours maple syrup over the stack of warm pancakes then hands me the plate. “And take him some blankets,” she adds. “Or he’ll freeze out there.” She doesn’t ask why he’s here, why I brought him to the island—for what purpose. Maybe she just doesn’t care.
I tug on the green rubber boots beside the front door and a black raincoat, then grab a set of sheets and a thick wool blanket from the hall closet. Holding a palm over the plate of pancakes to keep the rain from turning them into a soggy heap of sugar and flour, I step outside.
Pools of water collect in divots and holes beside the walkway, and sometimes the rain seems to rise up from the ground instead of from overhead—a snow globe effect, but with water. A swift wind crashes against my face as I make my way down to the cottage.
The sturdy wood door rattles when I knock, and Bo opens it almost instantly, as if he had been just about to step outside.
“Morning,” I say. He’s standing in jeans and a charcoal-gray raincoat. A fire crackles in the fireplace behind him. And he looks rested, showered, and new. Nothing like how I feel. “How’d you sleep?”
“Fine.” Yet his voice is weathered and deep, betraying perhaps a lack of sleep after all. His eyes stare unblinking, soaking me in, and my skin prickles with the intensity of it. He is not someone who looks through you, past you, like you’re not even there. His gaze is sharp, incisive, and an itch settles behind my eyes, making me want to look away.
He shuts the door behind me, and I set the plate of pancakes on the small square wood table in the kitchen then brush my palm down my jeans even though there is nothing to wipe off. The cottage feels different with him inside it, and the glow from the fireplace smooths over all the hard, rough edges so that everything feels muted and soft.
I place the sheets and wool blanket on the musty gray couch facing the fireplace, and he sits at the table. “Can you show me the lighthouse today?” he asks, taking a bite of the pancakes. In this light, in the scarlet hue of the fire, he reminds me of the boys who come into town aboard fishing boats, green and wild looking, like they’ve been cast off by the winds, set adrift.
He reminds me of someone who has left his past behind.
“Sure.” I bite the inside of my bottom lip. My eyes scan the cottage. The tall wood bookshelves beside the fireplace are crowded with books and old almanacs and tide-chart periodicals, all covered in a decade of dust. Lumps of aqua-blue sea glass, collected over the years from the island’s rocky shores, are piled into a small porcelain dish. On the top shelf sits a large wood clock that probably once lived on the deck of a ship. This cottage has served as the living quarters for a variety of staff and hired laborers, men who stayed a week and others years, but almost all left something behind. Trinkets and mementos, hints about their lives, but never the full story.
When Bo finishes breakfast—so quickly that I know he must have been starving—we leave the warmth of the cottage and are submerged by the drizzling rain. The ash-gray sky presses down against us—a weight that is tangible. Water trickles through my hair.
We pass the small greenhouse where herbs and tomato plants and leafy greens were once tended and grown, the glass walls now tarnished and smudged so that you can no longer see inside. The island has taken back most of the structures, decaying walls and rot seeping up from below. Moss covers every surface: a weed that feeds off the constant moisture and cannot be contained. Rust and mildew. Slop and mud. Death has found its way into everything.
“The singing hasn’t stopped,” Bo says when we’re halfway to the lighthouse, our feet making hollow clomping sounds that echo against the wood walkway. But in the wind, the voices are still there, sliding lazily in with the sea air. It’s so familiar that I hardly discern it from the other sounds of the island.
“Not yet,” I agree. I don’t glance back at him. I don’t let his eyes find mine again.
We reach the lighthouse, and I pull open the metal door, corroded at the hinges. Once inside the entryway, it takes a moment for our eyes to adjust to the dim. The air is stark and smells of moisture-soaked wood and stone. A rounded staircase serpents its way up the interior of the lighthouse, and I point out to Bo where not to step as we ascend—many steps have rotted away or broken—and at times I pause to catch my breath.
“Have you ever been taken?” Bo asks when we’re almost to the top of the stairway.
“I wouldn’t know if I had,” I say between gasps for breath.
“Do you really believe that? If your body was inhabited by something else, you don’t think you’d know?”
I stop on a solid step and look back at him. “I think it’s easier for the mind to forget. To sink into the background.” He doesn’t seem satisfied, his jaw shifting to the left. “If it makes you feel better,” I say with a partial grin, “if a Swan sister is ever inside me, I’ll let you know if I can tell.”
He raises an eyebrow and his eyes smile back at me. I turn and continue up the stairway.
The wind rattles the walls the higher we climb, and when we finally reach the upper lantern room, a howling gust screams through cracks in the exterior.
“The first lighthouse keeper was a Frenchman,” I explain. “He named the island Lumiere. It was a lot more work to keep the lighthouse running back then—maintaining the lanterns and the prisms. Now it’s mostly automated.”
“How did you learn all this?”
“My dad,” I answer automatically. “He studied lighthouses after my parents bought the island.” I swallow hard then continue. “We need to check the glass and the bulb each day. And everything needs to be cleaned a couple times a week to keep the salty air from building up. It’s not hard. But during a storm or a thick fog, this lighthouse can save the lives of fishermen out at sea. So we have to keep it running.”
He nods, walking to the windows to look out over the island.
I eye him, tracing the outline of his shoulders, the curve of his assured stance. Arms at his sides. Who is he? What brought him here? Fog has rolled in over the island, creating a sheer veil of gray so that we can’t make out any features of the terrain below. After a few minutes of staring through the glass, he follows me back through the doorway and down the winding staircase.
Otis is sitting on the wood walkway outside, waiting with eyes blinking against the rain, and I pull the lighthouse door closed. Olga is several yards up the path, licking her orange-striped tail. They’re both used to the relentless downpour, their cat instincts to escape wet weather have gone dormant.
We walk up the path to the high center of the island, through the old orchard, where rows of Braeburn apple and spindly Anjou pear trees grow in wild, unruly directions. People used to say that fruit trees couldn’t grow in the sea air, but they’ve always thrived on Lumiere Island. An anomaly.
“What about the orchard?” Bo asks, pausing at the end of a row.
“What about it?”
“These trees haven’t been trimmed in years.” I squint at him and he reaches up to touch one of the bony, leafless branches, as if he can sense the tree’s history just by touching it. “They need to be limbed and the dead ones cut down.”
“How do you know?” I ask, shoving my hands into the pockets of my raincoat. They’ve started to go numb.
“I grew up on a farm,” he answers vaguely.
“My mom doesn’t really care about the trees,” I say.
“Someone cared about them once.” He releases the spindly branch from his fingers and it springs back into place. He’s right; someone did care about this orchard once. And there used to be more rows and a variety of hardy apples and pears. But not anymore. The trees are overgrown and windswept, only producing small, often bitter fruit. “They could live another hundred years if someone maintains them,” he says.
“You could really bring them back to life?”
“Sure, it will just take some work.”
I smile a little, scanning the rows of trees. I’ve always loved the orchard, but it’s been years since it’s seen a real bloom. Just like the rest of the island, it’s fallen into decay. But if the trees could be saved, maybe the whole island could too. “Okay,” I say. “Let’s do it.”
He smiles faintly, and our eyes meet for an instant.
I show Bo the other buildings on the island, and we circle around the perimeter. He’s careful not to walk too close to me, keeping his arm from brushing mine when we walk side by side, his steps deliberate and measured over the stony landscape. But his eyes flick over to me when he thinks I’m not looking. I swallow. I tighten my jaw. I look away.
When we reach the cliffs facing west, the ocean slamming against the shoreline in violent waves that spray water and foam against the rocks, he stops.
This close to the sea, the song of the sisters feels like a whisper in our ears. As if they were standing beside us, breath against our necks.
“How many people have died?” he asks.
“Excuse me?”
“During the months when the Swan sisters return?”
I cross my arms, the wind brushing the hair over my eyes. “They each drown one boy . . . usually.”
“Usually?”
“More or less. It depends.”
“On?”
I shrug, thinking about the summers when five or six boys were found tumbling with the waves against the shore. Sand in their hair. Salt water in their lungs. “How vengeful they’re feeling . . . I suppose.”
“How do they choose?”
“Choose what?”
“Who they’re going to kill?”
A breath sticks in my throat, trapped like a hook in a fish’s mouth. “Probably the same way they chose lovers when they were alive.”
“So they love the boys they drown?” I think maybe he’s being sarcastic, but when I tilt my gaze to look at him, his dark eyes and punctuated full lips have stiffened.
“No. I don’t know. I doubt it. It’s not about love.”
“Revenge, then?” he asks, echoing my words from last night.
“Revenge.”
“The perfect justification for murder,” he adds, his stare slipping away from mine to look out over the hazy brume rising up from the sea like smoke.
“It’s not . . .” But I stop myself. Murder. That’s precisely what it is. Calling it a curse does not unmake the truth of what happens here each year: murder. Premeditated. Violent, cruel, barbaric. Monstrous even. Two hundred years’ worth of killing. A town reliving a past it can’t change, paying the price year after year. An eye for an eye. I swallow, feeling a pain in my chest, in my gut.
It’s as predictable as the tide and the moon. It ebbs and flows. Death comes and it goes.
Bo doesn’t press me to finish my thought. And I don’t offer to. My mind is now twisting like a snake into a deep dark hole. I lift my shoulders and shiver, the cold seething through me.
We peer out at the churning sea, and then I ask, “Why are you really here?”
“It was the last stop on the bus line,” he repeats. “I needed work.”
“And you’ve never heard of Sparrow before?”
His eyes slide to mine and the rain catches on his lashes, lingers on his chin, and spills from his dark hair. “No.”
Then something changes on the wind.
An abrupt hush breaks over the island and sends a quick chill across the nape of my neck.
The singing has stopped.
Bo takes a step closer to the edge of the cliff, like he’s straining to hear what is no longer there. “It’s gone,” he says.
“The sisters have all found bodies.” The words seem pulled from my throat. The quiet settles between each of my ribs, it expands my lungs, it reminds me of what’s to come. “They’ve all returned.” I close my eyes, focusing on the silence. It’s the fastest it’s ever happened before.
Now the drowning will begin.